In 2003, the Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, then an unknown graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, debuted a durational colossus: West of the Tracks, a nine-hour document of industrial decline in the Tiexi factory district of Shenyang Province. Amassed over four years with little more than an amateur video camera and faith in the instructive texture of reality, West of the Tracks found a new form for the chasmic infrastructural changes of post-Socialist China.
Immense run times and handheld spontaneity have (2008), the carceral optics of a psychiatric institution in Yunnan Province with (2013), and, in (2017), the conditions of migrant workers at a children’s garment factory in Zhejiang Province.
