Miracles and Mirages

This article by Otília Arantes for the 6th Ecofalante Film Festival, devoted to films on the theme of cities, may be read, in a sense, as an appendix to many of her other studies, as it continues her reflections on the most recent processes of urbanisation, especially in China. In the author’s own words, “in the opening shots of the five films brought together in this sequence, what predominates are the images and sounds characteristic of the so-called urban growth machine [...] Alongside the familiar stylised skylines used to promote the image of cities for sale in the market of global liquidity, we find demolition-construction landscapes traversed by a profusion of cranes, overpasses, expressways, underground systems, towers in cities that are now gleaming, now phantasmagorical, housing complexes of dubious viability, and the overwhelming presence of infrastructures of every kind, from transport systems to energy generation and transmission plants, etc. In a word, the very image of the colossal acceleration of the ‘urbanising’ process that has taken hold of the planet in recent decades [...]; Chinese cities alone will accommodate well over one billion people. It is therefore unsurprising that, of the five films selected, three are set in China.”

What seems important here is that Champs des possibles, Dream Empire, My Land, The Land of Many Palaces — the final chapter of a project whose initial conception is recorded in Ordos 100, a documentary briefly referred to in parallel — and, finally, Delicate Balance — which follows, through truly striking images, Pepe Mujica’s reflections on the dystopian world in which we live — are films about a new and alarming rupture in the known history of human settlements. Here, however, this rupture is narrated especially through the filter of personal experience in the metropolis under unprecedented inhuman conditions — according to Otília herself, and in this respect somewhat shifting the focus of her earlier analyses — from Montreal to Tokyo, passing through Spain, with the added drama of workers in these major centres as well as of refugees arriving from Africa, and culminating in China with its extreme urban forms, a theme addressed in two other works by Otília, Chai-na and Ruins of the Future: Extreme Urban Forms, both reproduced on this website.

Keywords: Catastrophe; China; Chongqing; Immigration; Fantasy Empire; Madrid; Chinese miracle; My Land; Modernisation; Montreal; Real estate business; Ordos; Palaces; Pepe Mujica; Small farmers; Beijing; Tokyo; Labour.