This 2015 movie by Chinese director Liang Zhao is filled with great cinematography and sounds. It trades back and forth between scenes of enormous horizon gulping coal mines, under ground mines, iron making, and ends with scenes of a ghost city filled with enormous apartment blocks in a newly developed but vacant city West of Beijing. But, the most arresting part of the movie is its focus on the workers, men and women, in this relentlessly grim, polluted environment. The only narration is text read over scenes with a nude figure huddled on the ground in front of this devastation. It alludes to Dante’s Inferno.
Behemoth is a refresher course on why capitalism, whether in its American or Chinese variant, needs government regulation, strong regulation to prevent this egregious exploitation of the earth and mankind. Of course this presumes the government is in the hands of the people and nota tool of the rich and corporations. Therein lies the crisis.
The movie runs at TSL over this weekend and the two following. Here is TSL’s calendar.
Also playing at TSL is I Am Not Your Negro, the wonderful, challenging movie about James Baldwin.
Paul Gennis and Janet Moline, friends of Harvey and Betsy, showed up in gallery. Sat and talked for a bit. Then Emily Chameides and Michael showed up with a rather bubbly young women known to them from Poughkeepsie who is visiting from her home country Haiti.