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Metal Petals: a fountainhead on the West Side bikepath near Pier 45, New York City: photo by tauntingpanda (ben britten), 9 February 2005
Things made by iron and handled by steel
are born dead, they are shrouds, they soak life out of us.
Till after a long time, when they are old and have steeped in our life
they begin to be soothed and soothing: then we throw them away.
The decline and demolition of the age of things made by iron is the subject of a monumental, heroic nine-hour non-narrative film shot in the layered ruins of the northeastern Chinese industrial city of Shenyang.
ReplyDeleteI saw this film ten years ago, and have seen no cinematic work since then of anything like its historical magnitude.
You can check out the first part here.
10 years ago on a train-ride to Chicago
ReplyDeletethings just about everywhere along the way looked much like this in the film.
one needs only to turn on the tv or go visit a museum
to see how things "really" are:
pristine and beautiful and everybody producing beautiful art and poetry
where deer freely roam spreading Deer Ticks and Lyme Disease
maybe I could get one of those buildings and turn it into a $5 million loft ?
The clip is incredible. It's as if there are no fences between the railway and the factories and the homes and the streets.
ReplyDeletePeople look so frail, walking against the snow. The single last figure at that brute of a table, ready to be chewed up...
The rise in industrial accidents in China is horrifying.
Living and dead tools. The lifelessness, done up as life itself, of the machine I'm using to type up these words - a new species of shroud.
Rust is eternal, ever-vigilant,
ReplyDeleterust is that which sleepeth not—
so sayeth the ad man
That long train ride that opens Wang Bing’s film has a melancholy sense of leaving rather than arriving—until the last few minutes of the clip. As the train enters the copper smelter, one wonders suddenly, What circle of Hell is this?
What a beautiful bouquet of turquoise. Iron and steel under that form, I see them as a legacy from the past. Things made by iron / things made of iron. Is iron making us? In a certain way it is. Iron made all those who worked in an iron factory. And they made iron.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, this turquoise is so beautifully soothing..
And then, on the other hand (so to speak):
ReplyDeleteD. H. Lawrence: Things Men Have Made
Wooden Boy
ReplyDeleteyou ought to take a slow train ride through Detroit !
now Cadillac is building a plant in China.... must be a reason, eh ?
the people in the film looked less frail than the folks living in Appalachia.... or on the streets of EVERY city and town in the U.S.A.