documentary: manufactured landscapes (2006)

This movie depicts how Chinese workers are bound to repetitive chores, and stringent management in gigantic assembly factories.
The level of details are stunning. How each component are being manufactured and tested. How a wasteland is recycled by hand.
It brings me to the natural question of how to judge the value of a life or if that's possible at all.

Intensive physical labor are the largest export of China. There are various level of social stratification that exploit the value generated from this export. From management, business owners of OEM factories benefit from the revenue; local and state government benefit from the tax, foreign buyers benefit from the low cost utility of the products.

Even throughout the shooting of this movie, labor (film developing and processing, scene modeling) and material (cameras, tripods and rails) product generated from this flow are being used.

This maybe why the producer of the movie is not taking sides on the right or wrong of the fact. Instead, the producer, the director and the photographer all took a naturalist point of view, because that's the only way they can rationalize the fact every piece of modern civilization is built on top of exploiting the physical labor of those who have no better choice due to all the unfair disadvantages.

Nevertheless, this is a great movie! Just like all arts, it reflex the inherent irony in the modern society.        


 

BTW, on the note of exploitation using capital and violence (state is a violence machine).

The Hustler (1961) is a great movie about how professionals who love their work are exploited, too.