Visions of Grim beauty in Behemoth (2015) and Eco-traumas

Abstract

“Visions of grim beauty in Behemoth (2015) and eco-traumas” Abstract Esther Yau, University of Hong Kong Independent Chinese documentaries have depicted life in urbanizing China in contrast to mediatized images of communal harmony. With emphasis on immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty, digital documentaries of the past decade have taken the vantage point of the marginalized of the city and the borderlands to push back against restrictions imposed by the official system and the film market. Documentarist Zhao Liang, whose Petition (2009) uses a combination of observational approach, interviews, and hidden cameras, has taken sides with the powerless petitioners whose stories of untried incarceration, police beating, and horrific losses did not get resolved through the state petition system. A framing approach that recurs in the film is the foregrounding of displaced persons seeking justice and a livelihood on the street and in shanty shelters, either around Beijing’s everyday commotion, or with high-rises in a distance. This makes a spatial analogy of state violence and urban apathy against which the petitioners as well as the documentary stands in contestation. In Behemoth (2015), the ravaging of the Mongolian steppes with mountaintop mining connects the region to a “global industry chain”. A comparable spatial analogy in this documentary shows inhabitants grazing sheep, not far from the unending noise of mining trucks and coalmining blasts that continue to strip down the land. Without identifying any mining companies or authorities for obvious reasons, Behemoth pursued a poetic and contemplative approach using borrowed figures of inferno, purgatory, and paradise from Dante’s Divine Comedy to depict a “global industry chain” driven by universal greed. By referring to festival interviews, reviews, and selected aspects of the film, this paper attends to the adoption of artistic, poetic, and digital practices in the remaking of non-fiction mode in Behemoth. It engages the discussions of ecocide, bioregion, and anthropocene to consider the paradox and limitations in visualizing eco-traumas and in film ecocriticism. (305 words)