Over the past decade, the American filmmaker J. P. Sniadecki has been building a body of documentary work on China. His six films on the country show a society in motion from vastly disparate angles, often far from major cities. His latest work, “The Iron Ministry,” a feature-length documentary, is the most literal evocation of that, focusing on the world of Chinese train travel.
In an interview, Mr. Sniadecki, an assistant professor of radio/television/film at Northwestern University, discussed the making of the film, which had its premiere last year at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland and will have a one-week run starting on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as at theaters in Chicago, San Diego and Los Angeles.
Why did you make a film about Chinese trains?
Like most of my films, the impetus comes from my own life and daily experience. Ever since my first long-distance train journey in 1999, China’s railways were my primary classroom for learning Mandarin and, like the vast majority of Chinese people, the primary means to get around.
Before I even considered the longstanding relationship between trains, cinema and modernity, I knew countless films could be made from the encounters and experiences of rail travel. But it wasn’t until I was living in Beijing from 2010 to 2013 that I began to film on trains.
At the time, I would often travel to visit friends, to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation on Chinese independent documentaries and to make my own films, such as “People’s Park” (2012) and “Yumen” (2013). I had a compact manual camcorder that quickly became an extension of my body. I was taking different lines and different classes and different trains — from old collectivist-era trains to high-speed bullet trains — and I gradually realized that I was in fact making a film, or the film, that I had imagined over a decade earlier.
Passengers relaxing on a train journey in a trailer for “The Iron Ministry.”
I started to film on every train ride, and even took a few trains precisely for the purpose of filming, such as the train to Tibet and the train through Wenzhou, where the tragic accident of July 2011 [a train crash that killed 40 people] happened. But the majority of the filming was conducted on trains I was taking for personal reasons, for my dissertation research, or for my own filmmaking. Instead of wanting to tell one person’s story or investigate some social issue, I let the filming process guide the project, so the film is at once diaristic and ethnographic, a film about China’s railways and a film about filmmaking itself.
You spent a lot of time in enclosed spaces while in motion, under different conditions and with a huge variety of people. What were the logistics and challenges of shooting on the trains?
Each time you board a train, you enter a temporary community. And, within that community, each train car is a unique social space. One of the main challenges was learning how to inhabit these spaces, how to move among my fellow passengers and the train workers, how to position myself and the camera. Each social space was constantly changing, as passengers would get on and off the trains at various stations. So some exchanges were short-lived, others lasted the entire train ride, and I spent considerable time introducing myself — and the project — to each new person I worked with.
Another challenge was the difficulty in shooting without official permission. On every ride, the train workers and train chiefs would question me and often stop me from filming. They would sometimes be aggressive, other times polite and understanding. Sometimes, after speaking with me and getting to know my process, they would encourage my filming, though this was a rare occurrence.
Sound design is a big element in the film. Why are the sounds important?
In all my films, I try to uncover the often overlooked textures and rhythms of everyday life, and this includes sound. As a culture, and as film viewers and makers, we tend to privilege images, but I like to place equal emphasis on both sound and image.
In my experience, when a film does not rely on extradiegetic music or voice-over, whether from narration or an interview, audiences tend to be amazed at just how intricate, mysterious, provocative and illuminating the soundscape of our acoustic ecology really is. I would even say that artworks that foreground the sonic environment help attune us by opening our perception up to experience beyond language, beyond cognition.
What were the most striking aspects of the relationships among passengers on the trains, and of the relationships among workers and between workers and passengers?
On all the rides I took — some lasting three days, some in terrible heat without A.C., some packed so full there was no way to make it to the toilet — I only encountered one moment when two passengers almost came to blows. For the most part, people somehow find a way to get along together for the journey.
For example, the hard-seat sections are not a comfortable way to spend the night, yet complete strangers will end up sleeping on one another’s shoulders. The workers sometimes shouted and pushed, but they are also dealing with trains overloaded with passengers. They tend to be courteous and careful moving through the spaces between cars where those without seats huddle.
People often say that enclosed vehicular spaces can be a microcosm of society. Was this the case on these trains?
Chinese society is so complex, so in flux and shot through with regional and global influences, it seems folly to claim that through one particular infrastructure or work of art, a microcosm of a society can be rendered. Yet trains do offer many insights. They alter space-time relations. They grant greater mobility to the masses. They serve as proto-cinema as landscapes whip past train windows. They connect far-flung corners of the nation with city centers. They host ephemeral encounters which often enable heightened candidness and intimacy between passengers. And they form constantly shifting social spaces where humans have no choice but to deal with one another’s existence in order to survive the length of the journey. In all of that, I guess we do get some sense of Chinese society, though it is a limited one, and always shaped by my presence and perception as the filmmaker.
The Chinese name of the film is “Tie Dao” (铁道), which translates as “The Iron Road.” The English name is “The Iron Ministry,” which places the film in a more political context.
The title has a fairly wide range of meanings. “Iron” refers, on one level, to the railways, the trains, etc. On another level it refers to notions of development, progress and modernity. On yet another, more indirect, level, it refers to the governmentality of the Chinese Communist Party at various stages of its development and economic structure: the “iron bowl” of collectivism (which supposedly provided food for everyone) and the continued “iron fist” of social control, despite its efforts to develop soft power.
“Ministry,” on one level, refers to a department of government, specifically the Ministry of Railways, which was considered a secretive yet expansive “kingdom onto itself” within a government known for its opacity. The ministry had its own schools, courts, housing, factories, police force, etc. But that is all over now. It seems fitting that the three years spent shooting this film also coincided with the last three years of the ministry’s reign as a separate world. In March 2013, after cases of high-level corruption, it was officially dissolved and transformed into a new semiprivate entity, the China Railway Corporation. Control over the corporation is said to be divided among China’s high elites, and how this transformation will change the railways is still an open question, though there has been ongoing privatization and expansion.
Drawing from all this and returning to the title, on another level “Ministry” refers to belief, religion and ideology, a kind of encompassing moral world. And thus, finally, it also refers to the “mission” of spreading an ideology, a scientism, and an instrumental logic and morality throughout the land.
Your training in filmmaking came at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard. What elements of the program’s training or philosophy came to bear on the making of “The Iron Ministry”?
For me, there is no overriding philosophy espoused by the Sensory Ethnography Lab, though there is a shared interest among us all to experiment with form, question conventions and reject the formulaic. This seems to create interesting and provocative challenges to nonfiction cinema and anthropology.
You’ve made a film about People’s Park in Chengdu and one about Chinese railways. What other subjects in China are of interest to you for this kind of visual anthropological study?
Although I employ the ethnographic method in my work, I see my films first in the light of artistic production, with all the ambiguities and idiosyncrasies involved in that process. They are indeed “studies” in the sense of sketches and experiments that emerge from the encounter between myself and the world, and I am less concerned about whatever ethnographic value my films may be said to contain.
In addition to “The Iron Ministry” and “People’s Park,” I’ve made two other features and two shorts in China: “Songhua” (2007), a short film, which examines the relationship between Harbin residents and their mother river, “Demolition” (2008), which focuses on the urban landscape and the experience of migrant workers, city dwellers and the filmmaker in this era of rapid urban change, “The Yellow Bank” (2010), another short which portrays Shanghai from the bow of a commuter ferry during a total solar eclipse, and “Yumen,” a psycho-collage film about a once-booming oil town that has now become a site for ruins, ghosts and performance.
I am currently developing several new projects in China: a hybrid film about unlawful imprisonment in China, a narrative film inspired by the classic novel “Water Margin” and a more personal film about social responsibility and everyday violence in Beijing. Up to now, I’ve only made one film in the United States [“Foreign Parts” (2010)], but there are also projects in Michigan I am currently working on as well.
J. P. Sniadecki’s “The Iron Ministry” (Distributed in the United States by Icarus Films; in Mandarin, with English subtitles; 82 min.) will be shown on Aug. 21-27 at MoMA, as well as at theaters in Chicago, San Diego and Los Angeles. More information about these and other screenings is available here.
Follow Edward Wong on Twitter @comradewong.