Slavoj Žižek once argued to the effect that capitalism can only truly be actualized in a communist state like China. In Ascension (2020), nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, American filmmaker Jessica Kingdon travels to the country that she has roots in to test this hypothesis, as it were. Amassing footage from factories, markets, corporate offices, training seminars, recycling plants, business conferences and theme parks, Kingdon builds an experimental documentary that seeks to illustrate the march of the free market, Chinese style.
The film opens in a literal labour market where head-hunters from various companies recruit blue collar workers like hawkers selling wares. They announce the nature of the job (standing/sitting), wages offered, allowances and other curious requirements: no tattoos, no prison record, perfect vision, no metal implants in the body and maximum allowed height. Once the quorum is achieved, company buses ferry the new recruits to their respective dormitories and workplaces.
Shortly after this, we see vignettes of Taylorized labour from the food, textile and packaging industries: workers sort roasted ducks, jeans pants, plastic bottles or syringes, while elsewhere, they segregate incoming trash for recycling. The job is repetitive, but the procession of commodities on conveyor belts makes for alluring patterns. Soundbites present employees’ complaints with their bosses and their pay.
This section also contains the most extraordinary find of the film: a nearly all-woman shop floor that manufactures life-size sex dolls. The women are absorbed in work, either designing the dolls or instructing trainees on finer details. Their precision and skill make them look like gynaecologists or coroners; they measure the size of nipples, craft private parts, glaze the skin and fill cavities. They handle chemicals and high-temperature tools without gloves, and this scene of women exposing their real bodies to hazard in order to produce fantasy bodies makes for some uncanny images.
Half-an-hour into the film, the attention turns to the service industry, where neophytes in different domains are put through arduous, even inhuman training regimes. This is evident in the episode set in a company that supplies security personnel. Indistinguishable from an army boot camp, the firm’s induction programme humiliates recruits for their mistakes, makes them slap each other until they are sore and has them perform dangerous car stunts. But equally rigorous are the preparatory classes in the field of hospitality, where candidates are instructed on how many teeth to show when smiling or how high to raise the arms when going for a hug.
How is capitalism à la chinoise different from capitalism elsewhere? For one, it is complicated by forces external to the market, but not inimical to it. Ascension traces how the Chinese state’s emphasis on civic virtues combines with free market values to inculcate an economic morale in the citizens. Trainees pledge their “loyalty” to the company: “I will behave myself! I will follow orders!” they declare marching. The Chinese dream — hard work guarantees success — is only the American dream in garb, but when laced with a dose of wounded nationalism, it can become a moral imperative.
Ascension, however, has greater ambitions and makes forays into the informal economy of freelancers and influencers — the subject of Shengze Zhu’s fine documentary Present.Perfect (2019). Streaming their lessons or everyday life simultaneously on different online portals using multiple smartphones, these young entrepreneurs use the same predatory language of their corporate counterparts: “knowledge that is monetized is useless” avows one personal branding guru; “influence or be influenced,” states another.
The film trains its guns finally on the consumers themselves: hordes of young college goers enjoying theme park rides, kiddies on a day out at the water world, gamers sealed to their seats playing Dota in internet cafes. We accompany an affluent family that at an upscale restaurant, served by the waiters we have just seen in training. They discuss European table manners, cutlery design, ski resorts and the trade war with US. It would seem that the elites are in some kind of self-training too, modifying their manners to imitate old world bourgeoisie.
Ascension contains some on-screen text and snatches of conversations between factory workers. But there are no voiceovers or talking head interviews with authorities to guide us through its narrative. It is indeed admirable that the film expects the audience to do the intellectual labour of accessing its meaning. But this comes at the cost of rigour.
Ascension is characterized by the bloat that often accompanies an overabundance of research material. Like American documentarian Lauren Greenfield, Kingdon has enviable access to scores of factory floors, corporate training programs and consumer forums — access whose details she does not care to reveal. Her film seems gripped by the anxiety of leaving anything out from the wealth of footage that must have come from this outing.
The result is a highly unwieldy film that goes everywhere and nowhere in particular. It isn’t that Ascension has no discursive framework, but that its material is so wide-ranging and scattershot that the film’s argument is generalized and its focus spread thin. Kingdon jumps not just across industries, factories, work sites and job descriptions, but also across economic activities and modes of being. The film’s vignettes are all connected by the single fact that the participants in them are embedded in the capitalist machinery. But then, who isn’t? Filmmakers perhaps. That Ascension is produced by MTV, a network known for shaping late-capitalist visual culture, is an irony that the film lets pass by.
It is to Kingdon’s credit that the film does not devolve into a freak show like Greenfield’s Generation Wealth (2018) or Sascha Schoeberl’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (2020), although the shot here of an automatic piano playing the Addams Family theme doesn’t exactly feel out of place. The filmmaker is also able to capture workers during their “down time”, breaking for lunch, taking a nap or watching videos at work.
These embellishments aside, the dominant note of Ascension, amplified by a nervous-making score, will only serve to reinforce the viewer’s prejudices: factories are dehumanizing places, the rich are fake and shallow, the service industry is a put-on, and the planet is drowning in our greed and glut. The film’s formal gambit, which has precedents in non-narrative works such as Godfrey Reggio Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1992), means that we barely get to know the opinions of the participants themselves on work, money and good living.
The concern that Ascension exhibits about the malaise of our times is obviously justified. But its diagnosis lacks the discipline and precision needed to advance the debate. There is a shot of a caged ostrich late in the film, sandwiched between sequences about video gamers and theme park visitors. Its purpose or emotional logic is unclear, and like much else in the film, it is washed away in the excess on display. Kingdon’s film needed just what its subjects do: a little bit of minimalism and abstinence.
March 22, 2022 at 9:51 am
Dear Sir
I admire your writing on the cinema – but find fault with your comment on Ascension
The film maker has presented a number of humanist anecdotes about industrial and consumer developements in China, some of which are pertinent, but most of which deal with semi artisanal workshops or standard issue service regimentation
But hardly address the subject ‘what is Chinese capitalism’, or ‘how is capitalism à la chinoise different ‘
The short answer is that it is not – the notion that capitalism can be resumed by ‘the market’ (called ‘the free market’) is a late period essentially US variant, more puff than practice
As is the notion that capitalism can be shown directly in it’s workings or acts : filming the factory is either impossible or merely surveillance
It would be more interesting to discuss, but harder to film, the issue in terms of surveillance social credit and automation – in all of which China seems to excel to the point at which a kind of equilibrium is reached between efficency of wealth production, the maintenance of nationalism and security, and the distribution of adequate consumerist indulgences
This has parallels in other countries, but is of a scale and so far in advance of those older fashioned economies currently occupied with attempts to demonise this success that it may be called a re invention
My taste goes to Jia Zhangke for a depiction of what is happening
Sincerely Gerrard White
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March 22, 2022 at 7:49 pm
Hello Mr. White,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments.
I hear you on the nuances of the term capitalism. But never did I get the impression from the film that it was making these finer distinctions or working with pre- or a para-capitalist entities. To my eyes, the film was indeed about large-scale industrial production in the way one would understand it in the west.
You are correct about the important role the social credit system plays. As you would know, ASCENSION begins to delve into this aspect of public life, but merges with the broader emphasis on national pride and civic virtues.
I’m not sure in what sense you invoke Jia Zhangke here, but his film USELESS was on my mind while watching ASCENSION.
Cheers
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March 23, 2022 at 9:23 am
23 March 2023 Ascension
Thank you for your courteous reply
By large scale capitalism one may mean Foxconn, or giant pig farms in their high rise blocks – rather than hand made sex dolls- even if one may understand that dolls film better than pigs or infrastructure no matter how massive
I have not seen Useless – I was thinking of 24 City : after a generation or two the old factories, even the armaments, manifest as a comforting collective of hardscrape stories and fables, compared to that which replaces them– pertinent as for scale, À l’ouest des rails
It is probable that no owner of any very large system is going to allow any cameras other than surveillance, until they scrap it
The very large systems install/condition modes of behaviour which can not be accessed nor apprehended at the time for the purposes of representation, yet which retrospectively are treated with nostalgia– it is curious to imagine that one day Foxconn or the distribution centre may be filmed as do Zhangke or Karel Reisz
If the film industry is a generation behind the times with regards to the means of production…..it might be that film can not scale, but if not film then what representation can be made
The Chinese system of social credit seems, from a distance of course, to be as efficient as in sync with patterns of productivity as the rustbucket US version is divisive and decaying, to be the chosen form of representation
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March 23, 2022 at 10:19 am
Hello Mr. White,
Thank you once again for your enriching comments. Much to reflect on here.
The question of access (and whether filming work in such facilities truthfully is possible at all, as you said) is indeed worth meditating on. The filmmakers speak about how welcoming the factories were.
“We didn’t set out to make an investigative film. We really wanted to just show things as they were,” Simon-Kennedy said. “A lot of places were very eager to have this kind of cross-cultural dialogue and welcoming in film crews. And a lot of them are selling products that they’re excited to show what they’re up to. … We said, ‘We’re an American film crew. This is Jessica’s first feature documentary about the economy and what the Chinese Dream looks like.’ People were really welcoming.” – from an interview with the filmmakers
Whether the factories were naïve or thought this as an opportunity at free publicity, I don’t know. Per Kingdon, their only concern was that they should not be billed for it! This suggests that the factories couldn’t conceive the presence of a filmmaking crew as anything other than a marketing project.
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March 24, 2022 at 8:47 am
Thank you for the interview quotes – ‘just show things as they were’ is the standard issue documentarian ‘dream’ ; exagerations are common when attempting to put dreams on display, notoriously more difficult to film than factories, even
My point is the factories in the film are, evidently, small or small ish, in traditional industry – no access here to up to date hi tech very large scale, no Huawei Tencent or China Railways : it is these that shape the face of capitalism
Do you know of any film, in China or elsewhere, which has gained significant access to such ?
Rencently there was an incident in which the company handed out a dismal fate to the employee foolish enough to film the Googleplex entrance gate : must have had the Lumières turning in their graves
Other US factory films are advertising or propaganda, e.g. the Obama film ‘American Factory’, and All light everywhere’ – this film seems more balanced and sane than the country norm, and is a considerable achievement
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March 24, 2022 at 10:16 am
Hi Mr. White,
I can’t recall any film that center on behemoths like those you mention. I wonder if such a film would be cinematically viable, even assuming one had unlimited access to these. Perhaps a Frederick Wiseman could do justice to such an undertaking, but it would still be a partial view.
I’m aware of the Googleplex incident and I wrote about it in relation to the Lumières here: https://theseventhart.info/2021/05/01/labour-and-cinema-workers-leaving-the-factory/
I’ve not seen AMERICAN FACTORY, but ALL LIGHT ELSEWHERE did seem to be a border case, with the factory being shown around by the bosses themselves. But assuming he were granted full access, I wonder if he could have produced anything better. After all, things don’t just reveal themselves to the untrained eye.
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March 25, 2022 at 4:29 pm
25 March 2022 Ascension
I’ll no take up any more of your time, and thank you for engaging in discussion
What I am aiming at is to wonder how large scale industry may/must escape representation by film, as we seem to agree, without concluding that an artform or in fact industry which was the invention of previous stage of capitalism is now superannuated
On the other hand film production is also scaling up : Perhaps the blockbuster can develope into a oversized equivalent of the gigantic factoryplex, likewise immune to scrutiny or taste – to be endured as the factory floor must be endured ; everyone to be disenchanted with both, pace Commoli in your Lumière article
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