Rivers and Dams
Award-winning Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang examines China's rapidly changing economy as seen through the experience of locals living through the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower facility in the world. For the government, the dam stands as a symbol of progress; but for at least a few of the 1.3 million displaced residents, the project has different meaning. Following local teenagers Chen Bo Yu and Yu Shi, who work on one of the Western cruise lines that sails up the Yangtze near the dam, the film presents dramatic changes to the landscape and the lives of citizens struggling with the realities of China’s new consumer capitalism. Preceded by excerpts from Pare Lorentz’s 1938 poetic paean to the mighty Mississippi River and the WPA era Tennessee Valley Authority dam project.
Program Notes:
Last week I suggested that this film series would present different ways to think about the definition of both the word “landscape” and the word “urban.” Last week I suggested a few ideas about landscape. This week, I want to talk about the word “urban.” Obviously in the most basic sense, the word urban refers to the characteristics of a city. And yet, as many geographers and urban studies theorists will point out, the urban can also be understood as a process of socio-ecological change, a “process whereby one kind of environment, namely the “natural” environment, is traded in for, or rather taken over by, a much more crude and unsavory “built” environment.” As the great urbanist Henri Lefebvre pointed out in the 1970s, describing our time as the “Urban Age,” we are rapidly approaching a global reality in which more humans are living in cities than not. In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre suggests that the total urbanization of society to be an inevitable process, recognizing the urban as a complex field of inquiry. And so, in answer to the question of what rivers and dams have to do with “urban landscape,” especially when they are often situated quite remotely from city centers, my answer is everything. David Nye is one historian who explores the intimate relationship between the development of various technologies and the development of urbanization. In his book Narratives and Spaces, Nye explores the development of the American West by looking at the role which electrification had on the “new frontier” and in particular on San Francisco and Denver which were enabled by their access to hydropower electricity. There are a number of recent documentary films which detail the kinds of wide-scale environmental transformation being wrought by the damming of rivers including Edward Burtynsky’s Watermark and an eye-opening film about the damming of the Colorado River called Watershed. But, in terms of the scale of economic, environmental and social impacts of a large scale hyrdro-electric dam project, the Three Gorges Dam in China has no equal. Yung Chang’s 2008 film Up The Yangtzee dramatically captures the enormous scale and human costs of the world’s largest dam project. But, first, I want to open tonightexcerpts from Pare Lorentz’s WPA film “The River” from 1938. I’m going to show you about 1/2 of this 31minute Depression-era documentary which poetically demonstrates the importance of the Mississippi River to the United States, while lamenting the environmental destruction committed in the name of progress and championing the Tennessee Valley Administration’s large scale hydro-electric dam projects, shown as triumphal measures to control the river, prevent flooding and bring prosperity to previously impoverished farm communities. I think of Lorentz’s film as an early model for environmental documentary filmmaking which have come to be quite familiar with today, asserting the poetic primacy of untouched nature, the exploitation by human society in the name of progress and the conclusion which presents a hopeful and even triumphant technological solution to the environmental problems faced earlier. I would also suggest that the insistence on the poetic nature of the film, its repetitive yet authoritative voice over and symphonic musical orchestration by American composer Virgil Thompson suggests a kind of power of nature which the film can only suggest by way of allusion and alliteration. In contrast to Lorentz’s celebratory view of dams, Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtzee takes a much more critical look at the role of governmental power in the service of technological and economic progress. Whereas Lorentz’s film constructs an American mythology about benevolent and paternalistic government who can right the wrongs of a environmental exploitation of the past by controlling nature and providing bountiful energy, Yung’s film highlights the enormous sacrifices on the part of the many, already disenfranchised people living in the shadow of China’s massive infrastructure project. Here both films assert the incredible power, not just of the river to shape and control human life, but also of the enormous power that humans have to shape and transform the river to serve human needs and desires.
— Jan. 11, 2016
