Review: Wisconsin Film Festival
The Iron Ministry | J. P. Sniadecki | USA | 2014 | 82 min
Wisconsin Film Festival, UW Chazen, Friday, April 10, 5:00pm»
Wisconsin Film Festival, UW Chazen, Sunday, April 12, 6:30pm»
The good news is, if this title attracted your eye because of an inborn interest in modern China, or train travel, or just square-shooting direct-cinema documentary filmmaking, The Iron Ministry provides those things satisfactorily.
For those whose curiosity about the movie is spurred by the galvanic Leviathan (WFF 2013), however, then The Iron Ministry, which also comes from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, may be a letdown.
Someone playing a game where they mash up two polysyllabic words and ask whether their new phrase is or is not a department at Harvard could convince many that “sensory ethnography” is meaningless hokum, but the experience of watching Leviathan gives it meaning very plainly. That movie stuck a camera in various corners of a trawler and let it run; between its impossibly bulging nets, increasingly chummy floors, and upside-down seagulls, it assembled a character study of the ship itself, fraught with implications about ecology, labor, about global foodways, but told in a way that was all sensation, no narration.
The Iron Ministry doesn’t achieve the parallel task of making the Chinese rail network into a character—but, OK, that may just mean that “sensory ethnography” deserves a broader definition. Embedded in the passenger cars of a train, it can’t hope to achieve (the largely depopulated) Leviathan‘s illusion of the unnoticed camera—although it’s at its best when it tries, such as when it captures tableaux of sleeping passengers that give you time to contemplate what you’re seeing.
Much more frequently, however, it leans in, to the point of the director J. P. Sniadecki kickstarting a conversation about Islam among four passengers from behind the camera. It’s a good scene—but it exemplifies the distinctly different approach.
Another killer scene has a kid delivering an extemporaneous, cracked monologue imagining the train’s dire fate; you could package it with the Alison Pill scene in Snowpiercer, the subway scene from Stigmata and the climax of The General and title the polyptych Four Loco.
But a lot of the rest—porters in sleeping cars checking tickets and IDs; stark contrasts between the luxury cars and the cattle class; merchants and salesfolk and vendors jostling for space, attention and ideally some instant noodles—is stuff you’ve seen before.
As the movie progresses, it accretes details that pin it to current moment in China—the striving hopes-and-dreams conversations, the crush of nationalism versus a bootstrapping willingness to emigrate if need be using “my own two feet”—and as it does you’re grateful to get to be a fly on those walls. (The bootstrappers put environmental concerns near the top of their reasons-to-leave list.) The Iron Ministry is legit; it just has a very conventional sensation-to-narration ratio.