文 / Milena Maria Hoegsberg
Chen Chieh-jen grew up in Taiwan under martial law, in a time of censorship and cultural and artistic deprivation.1 He graduated from vocational high school in 1978, and received no formal art education. Through a small community of film critics and writers, with whom he would make informal artistic happenings, he was introduced to the writings of avant-garde literary figures such as Franz Kafka and left-wing writers such as Lu Xun. In the decade following the lifting of martial law in 1987, Chen went into a deliberate artistic hiatus, while witnessing his culture trying to come to terms with modernity and a new democracy, becoming what he defines a “self-dehistoricizing” consumer culture. Having witnessed the futility of artistic activism in the “postauthoritarian” period after the lifting of martial law, he realized the limitations of a “critical pose.” The poetics of the image allowed him to go beyond the “descriptive” language of mainstream images.
Rather than “bear witness to the visible,” a quality he associates with the documentary, Chen proposes instead an arrangement of “semiotic and visual elements” that allow for “(re) discussion” and “re-gazing” as a resistance to dominant history and the areas it marginalizes. The poetics of the image is for Chen a space of resistance that empowers the viewer to re-imagine reality. As Chen writes: “I began to seek a type of ‘narrative’ form that did not require too much speech yet could help me make sense of reality, our history and offer a means of establishing a dialogue with ‘the other.’ ”2 Chen’s film, Factory (2003), is characterized by its silence, a feature it shares with four of the six films the artist has made to date.3 Like his other films, Factory is concerned with the consequences of global economies for local workers.4 The film focuses on a group of women, all of whom had worked for more than twenty years in the space in which Factory was shot. The workers had lost their jobs seven years earlier, when the owner closed the plant and refused, under fierce protest, to pay retirement pensions and severance pay.5 The Lien Fu factory suffered the same fate as many others in the 1990s, when Taiwan’s manufacturing industry migrated to countries such as China that offered cheaper labor.6 In asking the women to return to the factory to demonstrate their work for the camera, Chen counters the progress and the course of history by which they had been forgotten.
Factory unfolds over the course of thirty minutes. Comprised almost entirely of long, static shots, its pace feels slowed-down, resistant to the speed of the imagesaturated world to which a viewer in the twenty-first century has grown accustomed. A visual preface before the opening credits sets the tone for the rest of the film. Unhurried, the camera moves across rows of linked, worn plastic chairs in what looks to be an empty waiting area, but is in fact a small Taiwanese stock exchange. Around the seating area, bulky black monitors are stacked in a grid from floor to ceiling, their screens filled with data. Columns of moving green ciphers, indicating stocks decreasing in value, shift subtly on the screens, remaining, however, unintelligible from a distance. Unpopulated, the room seems haunted by the ghostly presence of the people who no longer fill it. The image of the room fades to black to provide a visual pause and to signal the change of scenery. In the following image, Chen moves with the same unhurried pace across the interior of an old factory that appears a relic of the past. Rows of wooden folding chairs are placed in a semi circle. A white megaphone with a red handle lies on one of the chairs. As in the stock exchange, the empty seats evoke the absence of a human presence, that of the workers who once sat in them. In the background, a large pile of carelessly stacked wooden tables towers against the stained and chipped ceiling with a sculptural presence (Plate I). For a moment the image dissolves into darkness. When it reappears, two elderly Taiwanese women stand motionless staring with blank faces straight at us among the empty chairs. The screen fades to black before the movie’s title appears. The slow pace and stillness of the opening sequence also characterizes the remainder of the film. Chen takes time to dwell on the factory’s interior and the dated objects in it. Through the attention and time that he affords the scene, it gains a distinct physical presence that allows the viewer to perceptually enter it as a “lived” space. By dwelling on the factory interior and the objects that constituted the women’s reality for over two decades—worktables, chairs, manufacturing equipment, and an electric fan— Chen imbues these “relics” of the past with presence. While the film suggests the time frame of a workday, ending with the women leaving on a bus and the factory lying empty, the regulated “on-the-clock” time, tied to labor, appears suspended. Through the combination of long takes—uninterrupted shots or pans that extend the conventional editing pace—and short takes with very little movement, Chen creates an elastic sense of time. The long take stretches the duration of each image and thus the moment in which the viewer perceives it. In the long takes, the viewer is distinctly aware of the presence of time, as its unfolding is almost palpable. The objects possess, as the artist notes, the dual feeling – of time having stopped and time flowing.7 While each image in Factory evokes the passage of time, time seems to be “going nowhere.”
In the seminal essay “Observations on the Long Take” (1967), the late filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini reflects on the relationship between present and past tenses in cinema. Pasolini argues that the long take is the cinematic equivalent of a perceiving subject’s experience of reality in the present. Reality is always “seen and heard in the present tense” and the long take thus “reproduces the present.” Pasolini writes: “The substance of cinema is…an endless long take, as is reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (a long take that ends with the end of our lives)…”8 According to Pasolini, a filmed event represents reality as seen from a single point of view. There are as many versions of reality as there are subjects and thus “as many long takes as there are subjectivities,” each, according to Pasolini, “postulating the relativity of all others, their unreliability...”9 The many possible view-points or experiences of reality add up to nothing more than “a multiplication of ‘presents’,” all holding a small piece of the larger puzzle.10 It is montage (editing)—the “coordination” of the “significant moments of various long takes”—that turns these various visual accounts into one legible narrative, one reality. Using the hypothetical situation of a detective trying to understand the Kennedy assassination through several existing recordings of the events, Pasolini writes: Intuiting the truth from an attentive analysis of the various pieces, he [the detective] could gradually reconstruct it by choosing the truly significant moments of the various long takes, thereby finding their real order. One has, simply, a montage. In the wake of such work of choice and coordination, the various points of view would be dissolved and subjectivity would give way to objectivity; the pitiful eyes and ears (or cameras and recorders) which select and reproduce the fleeting and none too pleasant reality would be replaced by a narrator, who transforms present into past.11
Unlike the long take, which is always an incomplete vision of reality, which makes sense only subjectively, montage transforms all the multiple presents into a single “certain” past. For Pasolini a key characteristic of editing is its ability to transform or to render the present past, while keeping it present to the viewer: “But as soon as montage intervenes...the present becomes past: a past that...is always in the present mode (that is, it is a historic present).”12 Pasolini likens the clarity of editing to the clarity death brings to life, as it can suddenly be seen in the context of a broader reality.13
Death performs a lightening-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, convening our present, which is infinite, unstable and uncertain, and thus linguistically undecipherable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past…Montage thus accomplishes for the material of film (constituted…of as many long takes, as there are subjectivities) what death accomplishes for life.14
Pasolini’s notion of film as capable of archiving time in a way that still makes it present offers a way into the complicated relationship between past and present that Factory suggests. In Chen’s film, the two temporalities operate in a productive tension. The restaging of the women workers in the factory, in which they have not worked for seven years, serves to present a past moment in the “present mode.” Through the frequent use of long takes, Chen makes the women in the factory space seem utterly present. However, the movement created by the montage is not narrative. Rather than advance a plot, Chen privileges the moment of the individual shot. The frequent use of fade-outs between images too denies the sense of narrative progression. Ceasing momentarily the flow of visual information, the image fades to black, granting a moment of stillness in which past images can resonate in the mind’s eye.
Chen splices the present (his footage) with official archival footage, which documents Taiwanese factories in the 1960s, creating a montage that suggests not an historical continuity, but, as Walter Benjamin says, “brush[es] history against the grain.”15 Chen is, as Benjamin, aware of the problematic implications of archiving the present. Linear history (“historicism”) is, as Benjamin argues in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, problematically aligned with dominant history—what Jean Francois Lyotard has called the “grand narrative”—a history of victorious events written from the perspective of “the victor.” 16 The historicist, who sees history as a “sequence of events like the beads of a rosary,” has internalized, according to Benjamin, the idea of progress.17 In Benjamin’s evocative metaphor for the historicist’s view of history, the “angel of history” is facing the past, unable to move, as he is propelled backwards into a future that he does not know and cannot see. As a counterpoint to this, Benjamin proposes “historical materialism” that posits a notion of history, not as a continuum, but a series of “flows” and “arrests.”18 When Benjamin argues that historical materialism seeks to brush history against the grain, he is pointing to the way this concept of history allows one to write with “retroactive force” the miniscule moments and the oppressed into history.19 It is the historical materialist’s ability to cease the present—always in the process of becoming past—when it “has come to a stop” that allows him to actively engage with the past and to contemplate history. The historical materialist recognizes in the arrested moment, according to Benjamin, “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past to “blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.”20
Read in the light of Benjamin’s understanding of material history, Factory is an attempt to recover the omissions of the official course of history, to rewrite it with retroactive force. The disconnect between the reality presented in the archival footage, made by the Taiwanese government to document the development of a blooming industry, and the reality expressed in Chen's footage of the now elderly, unemployed women suggests a history of discontinuities. Like repressed memories rising to the surface, the four archival sequences appear interspersed in the film’s aesthetic flow. In the image, which precedes the first of four archival sequences, two women hold up an open suit jacket between them. The camera slowly zooms in on the former product of their labor and eventually disappears into the dark space of the lining of the jacket. After a moment, the darkness gives way to grainy black-and-white archival footage. Before the other found-footage images, the close-up of two women’s faces appear; starring directly at the viewer or out past the frame they seem to suggest that their off-screen memories are outside this present reality.
The first archival sequence, interspersed in Chen's present day footage, blends two different time periods. The first few images depict a military orchestra of soldiers in green uniforms performing on a small stage, and the second shows Chinese marines disembarking a large ship. These images were taken in 1949-50 when KMT (The Chinese Nationalist Party) withdrew to Taiwan from Mainland China. In subsequent images, which document the take-off of the manufacturing industry of Taiwan in the 1960s, smiling and waiving westerners disembark a plane as on an official visit. While the images do little more than hint at Taiwan’s fraught political past, they make clear the discrepancy between a historical moment of optimism that frames the women factory workers’ youth and the reality of their present situation. Subsequent images depict mostly the country’s bustling manufacturing industry in the 1960s. Propagandist in nature, they express a belief in the collective potential of the workers’ contributions to the country’s thriving export economy. In one sequence, a group of well-dressed Taiwanese men and women walk down isles between spinning textile machines, operated by young women in uniforms. A woman in a silk dress and sunglasses holds a handkerchief to her nose as if to protect herself from chemical smells while she and others survey the production: their investment. Other images depict young women working side-by-side on sewing machines, on break in a lively cafeteria, and gathering and laughing together at the end of the day, outside the factory gate or on bunk beds in their shared quarters. In another image, which Chen repeats in a later sequence, a large mass of young people bike down the street on their way to work (Plate II).21
By inserting the past of the grainy black-and-white footage into the “presentness” of the high-resolution color images, Chen deliberately disrupts a temporal flow. Unlike the slowness and stillness that pervades in the artist’s vision of the abandoned factory, the archival footage cuts abruptly from image to image of rotating machines and bodies that move efficiently and purposefully. When Chen cuts from the past to the present, time seems to have sped ahead and come to a halt along with the machines. The images of young, able female workers stand in stark contrast to the solemn and melancholic images of aging women sitting by outdated sewing machines in the derelict factory space (Plate III & IV). From one image to the next, the young women have grown old. The camera dwells on the tired faces and wrinkled and callused hands of the women, who have silently picked up their work. They seem themselves avatars of the passage of time. The juxtaposition of historical moments three decades apart points to the disconnect between the value placed on the able workers in the 1960s and their current status as unemployed, deprived of their earning potential. Put in the present context, the historical image’s status as an archival record of the past is called into question. By editing the time periods together, the artist re-contextualizes the history expressed in the archival footage and questions the ideological vantage point from which it was written.
Fusing the “presentness” of his own footage with the past evoked by archival footage, Chen points to the oversights of official history and its collusion with a capitalist notion of progress. The juxtaposition of images of the thriving factory and productive workers with images of the derelict and abandoned factory interior and its former workers, creates a powerful visual metaphor of the exploitation that lies at the core of capitalism’s relentless strive for infinite growth and profit through technological advancement and the perpetual search for cheaper labor.
In the 21st century, the notion of progress is inseparable from the notion of economic growth. As Karl Marx already pointed out in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto, global production perpetually picks up and moves on in search of cheaper labor, leaving workers behind. In the logic of capitalism, the women have, like the machinery they work on, become obsolete. In Capital, Marx accounts for the worker’s alienation in the capitalist machine and captures in a powerful image how capital feeds on the living labor:
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.22
Capitalism, Marx argues, turns human beings and their social relations into a relationship between objects—commodities—thereby erasing the humanity of those who produce them. Reified and turned into commodities, the workers become invisible—green ciphers on the monitors of the stock exchange.
Yet what Chen highlights is not the exploitation of workers, but their humanity. Instead of reinforcing this notion of the women as a nondescript body of devalued labor, he humanizes them, and gives invisible labor a face. In Factory, the vision of female workers as a collective, industrious force is countered with a vision that humanizes them as individuals. It is, in Chen’s own words, “precisely [in the]…still expression and subdued motion [that] another facet of the internal being can materialize.”23 In several close-ups, Chen slows the image down “into contemplation of the human face” (Plate V).24 In an almost painfully slow close-up, Chen captures a woman behind her sewing machine, as she attempts to rethread a needle. Her wrinkled eyes squint as her hands, marked by years of manual work, try to lead the end of the red thread through the narrow needle hole. The visual details of chipped nail polish, yellow callus, and grey hair, which sways slightly, are potently “haptic-visual,” to borrow Laura Mark’s expression, so visually present we seem to touch her with our eyes.25
Utilizing the women’s labor towards making a work of art, Chen presents the women in a way that highlights their dignity and individuality, thereby counteracting the process of dematerialization and abstraction that characterizes a capitalist economy. Dwelling often on close-ups of faces or hands or monumentalized shots of static bodies, Chen creates a visual metaphor for stopping production and pausing time. While the archival footage seems driven by the movement of the able bodies and machines it depicts, Factory moves at a pace that mirrors that of the old bodies that inhabit the factory space.
Like their request to remain silent, a silence that Chen acknowledges by extending it to the whole film, the women’s immobility is presented as an act of agency. As if to suggest the return of the repressed, Chen repeats several symbolic images in which the women appear staged in a series of theatrically symbolic poses. When they are not sitting, concentrating on their work on the sewing machines, they stand still in pairs, either staring straight at the viewer or turning their heads almost imperceptibly. Chen repeats the image of the two women, who stand in demonstrative stillness, holding the jacket, the product of their former labor, between them. In a symbolic act of re-gazing, their unexpressive eyes look directly out at the viewer, seemingly asking to be acknowledged. In a strange twist, it is silence and immobility, features of passivity, which become an act of resistance against the unrelenting forward movement of capitalism. As if acknowledging the futility of their words, which were silenced during their protest, the women stand still in the space. The leitmotif of the red megaphone appears again in the end of the film, encapsulating the women’s muted protest (Plate VI). In the film’s elegiac mood the viewer senses a loss. However, through their presence, the women reanimate the derelict space and the objects that bear witness to their disuse (Plate VII). In Factory, the women’s labor is transformed into a meaningful act of aesthetic “doing and making.” Their silence becomes speech.
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1. Unless specified otherwise, the source of all facts and quotes is: Chen Chieh-jen, interview by author, email December, 2007-February, 2008.
2. Unpublished interview, Gonzalez.
3. I include in this also Lingchi (2002) that is silent for the most part. An exception is his recent film, Military Court and Prison, (2007-2008), premiering at the Reina Sofia, Madrid on April 03 through May 12, 2008.
4. Although Chen’s films to this date all deal with Taiwan specifically, he insists on the universal aspect of his work. As he points out the labor conditions in Taiwan are part of the cycle of global economies: “At exactly the same time we were jumping for joy because of our economic development, the local workers of Europe were experiencing the pain of unemployment due to industry relocating overseas.” Chema Gonzalez, interview.
5. Chen Chieh-jen, “Artist’s Statement: Factory,” trans. by Brent Heinrich, provided by artist.
6. Chen Chieh-jen’s other films about local conditions are Bade Area (2005), On Going (2006) and The Route (2006). All four films were shot in various abandoned factories in Taiwan without the owners’ permission.
7. “Artist’s Statement: Factory.”
8. Pasolini, 86.
9. Ibid., 87 and 84.
10. Ibid., 84-85.
11. Ibid., 86-87.
12. Ibid., 86.
13. Ibid., 87.
14. Ibid.
15. Walter Benjamin. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.
16. Ibid., 256, 261.
17. Ibid., 263.
18. Ibid., 262.
19. Ibid., 254.
20. Ibid., 262-63.
21. Ibid., 262-63.
22. Karl Marx, “Chapter 10” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I., trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Group, 1990), 925-926.
23. Interview, unpublished Gonzalez.
24. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second,163-64. I borrow this expression from Laura Mulvey, who writes: “The close-up always provided a mechanism of delay, slowing cinema down into contemplation of the human face, allowing for a moment of possession in which the image is extracted, whatever the narrative realization may be, from the flow of the story. Furthermore the close-up necessarily limits movement, due to the constricted space of framing.”
25. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
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