Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy took up a chunk of my watching/thinking time last week. I streamed Spring at home, then saw Hard Times and Homecoming at the Siskel on a Friday. Ten hours in all. Could’ve easily been longer.

Wang shot young people migrating from far-flung villages to Zhili for work in private garment shops from 2014 to 2019. They assemble, cut, and sew thousands of jackets, pants, and jackets over months laboring morning to night, six or seven days a week. The pay is paltry and seems to be less and less year over year. Sometimes the boss disappears without paying anything; other times there are fist fights over money that end with nights in jail.

The workrooms are hot and littered with cuttings and trash. The outside passageways that lead to the upstairs dormitories are piled with food wrappers, newspaper, and refuse. They’re like ants in an anthill. But they make the things that make our entire world go.

Despite the horrific conditions, there’s a strange beauty to the way Wang presents these lives. They flirt, fight, fall in love. It’s remarkable how people just do people things, no matter the circumstances.

Spring doesn’t have too much of a narrative. It’s an immersive plunge into the day-to-day. In Hard Times and Homecoming, there’s more time spent on individual stories. The footage of the workers’ home villages makes the portrait of their lives three-dimensional.

The cumulative effect is kind of literary. It feels like an epic novel but done entirely with visual means. This isn’t a documentary in the traditional sense. No voice-over or talking heads or infographics or dramatic reenactments.

Wang does a Q & A after Homecoming that adds nothing to my appreciation of his achievement. I love interviews on their own but they mostly feel unnecessary directly after experiencing the thing itself. He seems like a pretty patient guy from the way he handles the moderator’s and audience’s dumb questions but looks like he’d rather be taking a nap.

I don’t know how many people will see Youth. It’s completely foreign to the fantasy/reality fast-food that’s most popular in filmed entertainment now. But if you care for art about how we live now, you’ll seek it out.

Don’t feel daunted by the ten-hour running time. It’s only half as long as the garbage most people binge off the streamers every weekend.

Wrote about the new hang at the Smart.

RIP Harry Snyder, who taught me that an artist could also be a real person.