(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Iron Ministry
Directed and photo: JP Sniadecki
Since the Lumière brothers The train arrives at the station (1895), trains have been a governing motif in movie history, and offered a moving, dynamic mise-en-scène. Both concrete and metaphorical, the train has been used as a visual figure and as a unique spatial environment.
In the so-called phantom rides, where filmmakers placed cameras on moving trains and allowed the audience to travel through exotic landscapes, the film as a documentary art was put in the context of this other technology of modernity. The train, like the movie, gave people new experiences of time and space, and allowed them to travel to new places.
In movies like The General (Buster Keaton, 1927) and The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952) uses the congestion of the train location to create spatial comedy and excitement. Keaton in particular saw the potential for one dynamic slapstick.
In a movie like Locomotive (Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, 2008) created a rhythmic split-screen-collage of moving trains from found footage, where the train's physical tracks are placed in a musical context with the film's audio-visual tracks.
Not least, the train has been utilized as an intense setting where people find themselves in physical and emotional crisis situations. Just think of movies like that La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938), Emperor of the North Pole (John Boorman, 1973), Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985), Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010) and Snowpiercer (Joon-ho Bong, 2013).
The documentary history is also filled with trains, as exemplified in outstanding works such as Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936), A Day Like Every Day (Kazimierz Karabasz, 1955), 89mm From Europe (Marcel Lozinski, 1993) and End (Artavazd Peleshyan, 1994).
In JP Sniadecki's The Iron Ministry (Tie Dao, 2014) we are on trains from start to finish. The pulsating sound of metal and iron is a dominant element throughout the film, while we are close to the Chinese who sleep, order snacks and talk politics. The soundscape and close-ups are almost as tactile, intrusive and troubling as George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); The cut rate, on the other hand, is calm, so that the movie gets a low heart rate overall.
Director and cameraman Sniadecki, who speaks Chinese, moves without problems through the train's narrow and crowded corridors, and comes on several occasions in conversation with passengers. That way, he seems at home in these surroundings.
Still, there is something alienating about the camera's gaze – as if it studies the surroundings as something unknown, something undiscovered. The film opens with a dark screen, and then gives us disorienting ultra-close-ups of the train's interior – it's as if the camera eye has just woken up in a whimsical world and has to orient itself in it for the first time.
Audiovisual ethnography. The film springs from the so-called Sensory Ethnographic Lab, an experimental laboratory at Harvard University that cultivates various forms of auditory and visual ethnography. The project is led by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who together with Véréna Paravel was behind the much talked about Leviathan (2012)
It is as if the camera eye has just woken up in a whimsical world and has to orientate itself in it for the first time
The Iron Ministry reminds of Leviathan in how we are anchored in a very bodily way to the means of transport we are on, and how the packed and chaotic surroundings structure the form of the film; you emphatically know what the pictures are like? to the spatial dimensions they are in, and how the soundscape is "attacked" and surprised by metallic and mechanical processes.
As such, this is a very stock form of ethnographic documentarism. Here you will find no narrator's voice, and there are very few analytical, associative or argumentative cutting patterns.
A few cases stand out. Towards the end of the film, it is abruptly cut into a very airy, almost empty train carriage with trend-clad passengers, which contrasts the overcrowded carriages of the working class. After a woman has spoken critically about a brutal modernization process, it is cut directly into apartment blocks that house people in a prison-like formation.
It is through a few short conversations with some of the passengers that the film includes political perspectives and puts the train in a mythological framework. "The railway has made a big difference," says one woman, "and Tibetans feel helpless." The railway is constantly expanding, transporting rich, powerful Chinese miners to the Tibetan capital Lhasa.
The woman talks about a Tibetan prophecy from the 600th century, which described a time when "iron birds" flew in the air, and where iron-clad horses galloped through the country. When this time came, Tibetans were to become like ants – ants who had to flee their homeland and travel in all directions. "Today, cars are like iron-clad horses," she says. When the Liberation Army moved into Tibet in the 1950s, Tibetans must have thought that the prophecy was fulfilled. Today's trains are "iron girders", she continues – "iron girders entering Tibet, unstoppable". It's like the indigenous people of America, she explains: Their prophecies were similar. Tricycles were replaced by whites' iron wheels, and their way of life and civilization were completely changed.
She replies that she has no dream job: "I just want to eat and sleep."
Leviathan threw a mythical veil over his observational, material documentaryism through his title alone. The Iron Ministry – «Iron Government» – also has a title that alludes to the mythical. The film's train is depicted as a material reality, a physical and tactile space, but through conversations with passengers, Sniadecki also opens up to see the train as a more abstract and symbolic figur which is part of a historical modernization process.
We never see these trains stop at any stops. Sniadecki repeatedly films out the window, where the world rages past, before pointing the camera at sleeping people. He notices a woman looking out the window and asks her what she considers her dream job. She replies that she has no dream job: "I just want to eat and sleep."
I The Iron Ministry we share her experience. Here we sit on trains that never sleep – sleepless iron girders that carry tired people to their next job. The Iron Government commands.
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