Cinematic Tropes of Migration: Cruise and Train Ride in Contemporary China. Issue 1 (March 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Beus, Yifen T.
• Is Part Of: Working USA. Volume 17:Issue 1(2014)
• Page Start: 77
• Page End: 92
• Publication Date: 2014-03
• Subjects: Labor unions -- Periodicals; Labor -- Periodicals; Working class -- Periodicals; Labor unions -- United States -- Periodicals; Labor -- United States -- Periodicals; Working class -- United States -- Periodicals; 331
• DOI: 10.1111/wusa.12095
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1089-7011

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main"> <title> <x xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>This article examines in <italic>Up the Yangtze</italic> and <italic>Last Train Home</italic> how Chinese Canadian filmmakers Yung Chang and Lixin Fan positioned themselves, framed the migrant issues and their subjects, and utilized two visual motifs in documenting China's migrant workers' labor and (im)mobility—the cruise ship and the train that transport both tourists and migrant workers. Chang and Fan blend participatory or interactive filmmaking with cinéma vérité cinematography and embed these two imposing motifs in the mise‐en‐scène to foreground the human subjects as marginalized, <xref ref-type="link" rid="wusa12095-note-0001">1</xref> forgotten, and ignored masses against a highly territorialized economic landscape in contemporary China, an irony resulting from the so‐called "socialist market economy" that replaced the used‐to‐be egalitarian communist model. The author, while not intending to provide a full close reading of both films, bases the analysis of them on Bill Nichols' discussion on the modes of documentary and argues that the filmmakers' cinematography projects the train and the ship as means to mobilize human resources horizontally between the rural and the urban areas, but they failed thus far, within China's current economic structure and social hierarchy, to provide the migrant workers mobility to move upward and escape their stigmatized caste.</p> </abstract>