Youth (Spring)

Cut: the longest cuts are the sequences in the textile labs, the most surprising are their unexpected interruptions, which give us the impression of a filmic flow that could continue indefinitely, almost forever. The cuts also give us the illusion of having the chance to breathe and escape the tiny spaces where working seems to saturate the lives of several groups of young people. It is an illusion because, even outside the labs of Zhili (Huzhou), their lives are physically and psychologically trapped within a concentration system comprised of precisely scheduled timetables and just one decrepit building.

In Zhili there are 18.000 labs and 300.000 workers who manufacture tons of clothes: these are the gigantic quantities of the “made in China”, and the 212 minutes of immersion in the daily life of these young Chinese people can be hard on the viewer but are certainly a sort of minimum dose in order to get a realistic picture of their living conditions. Wang Bing is known for his long, sometime slow filmic immersions, a style that fits perfectly to the quantitative disproportion of work that is the subject of Youth (Spring). Repetitiveness in film is proportionate to the reality of the portraited youth, and enhances our understanding of quantity and its being a burden for the young protagonists. Youth (Spring) transforms the often abstract, massive proportions of Chinese life into a concrete experience.

The film is neither slow nor really repetitive though. The explosive vitality of the young workers is energizing and contagious, an entertaining ingredient that balances the otherwise highly claustrophobic atmosphere of the film. Their hopes and career dreams provide the filmic narration with a horizon, which will but appear to the viewer to be further and further away. The reasons for this are not only the material conditions of an economy of exploitation but also the lack of maturity of said portraited youth. Even in their twenties, they behave as children, thereby revealing one of the most important and original contribution of Wang Bing’s filmic journey: the infantilisation of youth, a universal phenomenon that serves the needs of dictatorships and weak democracies.

Moreover, in this Chinese world of manufacturing, we remark on the special feature of not having a physical patriarchal counterbalance. The “fathers” that should guide and develop the children are weak bosses under the pressure of a national and international market that is clearly bigger, and more abstract, than them. Also through the long and exhausting scenes of negotiation of work prices, Wang Bing’s documentary depiction of a situation where everyone is a victim, and of the typical group dynamics related to it, leaves us with a feeling of impotence and despair. Not only sympathy but also pity is the almost necessary outcome for the viewer of Youth (Spring).

Another interesting aspect that emerges in a film that is definitely richer and more complex than it could appear is the great difficulty that the young Chinese generation has in expressing tenderness and affection, or considering the other human being as an end and not as a mean. The youth we’re confronted with therefore becomes the genuine symptom of a society whose systematic exploitation prevents it from letting humanist values blossom. The obsession with money emerges as the absolute value, which is nothing more than the expression of the individual(ist) desire for emancipation in a collectivist society. Few films are able to show this contradiction in its paroxysm in such a direct way. The young workers experience affection and probably love, but still without being able to really trust anyone, so the human bond cannot compensate for the frustrations in their struggle for money and emancipation. When the moment has come to enjoy and show off the little money they arduously earned, they realise that an entirely new grammar of relationship and emotions has yet to be invented.