Of Ruins and Silence: Topographical Writing of Nature and Urban in Three Asian Documentaries

Abstract

In Asia, as well as other parts of the world, the link between eco-consciousness and documentary reflects a growing trend to tell the inconvenient truth in documentary style. Documentary becomes increasingly an effective medium in airing concerns regarding reckless development, the depletion of rural communities, and the hidden threat of nuclear power. This paper attempts to shed some light on the impact of modernization on nature, urban landscape, and everyday life by comparing three documentaries by Chinese and Japanese filmmakers. They are Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (Tiexi qu, 2000), Yu Jian’s Jade Green Station (Bise chezhan, 2003), and Toshi Fujiwara’s No Man’s Zone (2011). Works of Wang and Yu reflect a growing awareness of the combined social and economic consequences of China’s socialist experience. West of the Track portrays the ruining of one of the China’s longest-standing manufacturing centers and the withering of life under the unknown forces of global modernity. Yu’s work articulates the series of national ‘events’ that happened in the historical time-space of the small town Bise, namely the prosperity brought to the town by the French engineered rail connection in the first half of the 20th century and the disruptions wrought by the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. Fujiwara’s work confronts the powerful earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 which killed thousands and caused the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan. While West of the Tracks and Jade Green Station depict the presence of the wastelands as result of reckless industrialization and political disruption; No Man’s Zone reveals the waste products of natural disaster and man-made nuclear threats in Fukushima. Cinematic techniques such as tracking shot, static camera, and silence are used in all three documentaries to visually marginalize the eventfulness of history through accumulation of the towns’ quotidian moments. This paper aims to relate J Hillis Miller’s notion of “topography” and Martin Heidegger’s idea of “dwelling” to the urban landscapes of China and Japan and examine the manifestation of space as represented in the documentaries. The marginalized space of Shenyang, Bise, and Fukushima serves as resistant spaces against the grand narratives of social progress. The discussion also highlights the way documentaries question the rationality beneath the modern imagination of the capitalist cities by re-presenting the ghostly space of the northeast China, the uneventful moments of Bise, and the silence in/of Fukushima.