Okay, so… it’s been a minute here on the S&S list. I actually started watching this movie roughly a year ago. Why did it take so long to watch? Well, because as the movie starts:

  1. It is showing us documentary footage of smelting plants in China. There is no particular action happening here, there aren’t really any notable characters. It’s just… a smelting plant. Lots of hot metal, lots of tanks of things. Workers walking around and banging on things and having lunch in the breakroom, etc. Not really super-compelling, you know?
  2. The video quality is terrible. The movie was, I think, filmed on video cameras (it’s a documentary from the turn of the century), and the only place it’s available is on YouTube[1], where it’s a rip of a French DVD with English subtitles. The rip is awful, with lots of combing artifacts from de-interlacing, even leaving aside the lousy video quality inherent to the video medium.
  3. It is over nine hours long.

So every time I would sit down for a stint of watching it, I’d get 15-30 minutes in, watching ugly images of raw tedium, and realize that I still had like 8+ hours to go. It’s hard to keep going in that situation, and it’s even harder to make yourself get back to it. Or maybe it’s easy for you, but it was hard for me. And so for a long time I just didn’t. Without ever quite admitting it’s what I was doing, I put this whole project of watching through the S&S list on hold, and watched a bunch of other stuff — a half dozen movies out of that Ingmar Bergman boxed set, for instance.

But when I was looking back at 2025 and realized that I’d been procrastinating on this movie for literally a whole year, well, come on. That’s ridiculous. Time to get ‘er done. And turns out once I committed to it, I was annoyed that I’d put it off that long.

Not because that factory footage suddenly transmuted into being fascinating, to be clear. I am still annoyed by all the factory footage. But because at some point, the movie starts being about people, and it’s not just nine hours of factories. The movie is actually structured, it turns out, as three parts.

The first part (“Rust”) is the part where I was stuck for a year. It’s all about the factories: They’re going to be closing down soon. We don’t actually know this as the movie opens, but there are continual rumors about it, and workers aren’t getting their pay, and so forth. So this part of the movie is all about the last days of these plants, as increasingly desperate workers suffer through increasingly bad conditions, with no future for their jobs.

It’s four hours long, and does not earn its run time. Yes, the movie wants us to be absorbed into this atmosphere and to feel what it’s like in these places, I get it. But still: It could have told this story effectively — more effectively, I’d argue — in two hours.

Even this part of the movie has some good stuff, though. At one point after they’ve closed the lead smelting factory, we follow all the workers to a hospital where they are having their blood chelated to help fix all the lead poisoning they’ve gotten, and here we get to see the workers as people, rather than just as objects of desperation. They play games, they joke around, they tell bawdy stories, they try fishing in the pond behind the hospital (to unfortunate effect in one case), etc. This is maybe the last hour of “Rust” and was the first time that I wasn’t tempted to just set the thing to 2x to get it over with.

The second part is “Remnants,” and this is the part where I could actually understand why someone would put this on a list of great movies. Because now the plants are closed, and we’re following the people who live in a nearby town, which is due to be razed. The government is going to relocate all of them, and if you understand how people work, you’ll know that nobody is super-thrilled at this idea.

And yet… their current living situation totally sucks. They are living in terrible, awful, no-good buildings. The idea of being resettled into newer buildings doesn’t seem like it’ll be a totally bad thing — but it’s going to uproot these people’s lives, mess with their community and their relationships and all that stuff.

And so we spend three hours (spanning months of real time) hanging here at the end of this place, mostly with young people. And… they’re just extremely normal, extremely young people. They’re dumbasses, they play pranks on each other, they tease each other. One of the guys has a crush on a girl who’s not interested in him and he has his friends review a love letter he writes her. They hang out in a store and talk about what kind of jobs they might get. But then also, around this and suffusing everything, is the reality that their town is going to be razed to the ground and they’re all going to have to move, despite all the “they can’t make me!” tough talk that so many of them spout at first.

This part is so fascinating, both as a portrait of this time and place, seeing China evolving from this kind of industrial poverty into what it will become, and how even that kind of positive change can be discomfiting and unpleasant for those living through it. (I also think seeing how a communist society deals with this kind of change, and how much human misery and suffering still falls out of the system, makes it clear that all the world’s ills cannot actually be blamed on capitalism.)

It’s also just incredible as a documentary. This is filmed with a handheld camera, and the director is just there in all these places — in people’s homes as they hang out with friends, in the store as they’re hanging out, on the streets as they’re walking around and getting into shit — and yet everyone is behaving incredibly naturally and as if the camera were invisible. I don’t know what he did to make his subjects feel so at ease, but it’s remarkable.

And then we come to the last third of the film, “Rails,” and it’s more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is a human story here, of an old man who has tried to stay behind with his two adult sons after everyone else has left the condemned homes. He’s here because of his job with the railroad — which seems not to be entirely official, but nevertheless has made him a known and respected local quantity, and seems to be core to his sense of worth. The idea of just leaving for a totally new place where he won’t be anyone at all clearly frightens him.

Still, the efforts to pressure him out ramp up, and at one point he’s arrested for stealing coal from the closed-down plants (which he uses to heat his house, in a little coal stove that’s also used for cooking). This really fucks up his eldest son, who is clearly not entirely well mentally, and who ends up having a public meltdown about his dad having been gone for a week.

So we’ve got their story to follow, to see what will happen here and how they’ll deal with it. (I know nobody is going to watch this, so I’ll go ahead and spoil it: He does eventually relocate, and it seems to go well; he has friends there and we see him enjoying himself at dinner with them in more pleasant surroundings than those he left.)

But we also get in this section a ton of train footage that’s doing the same stuff as the factory footage from the first part. It’s not as interminable here — we’ve only got two hours, and it is interspersed with the human story a lot more — but it’s still longer than would be ideal.

So in the end, I’m glad I didn’t just skip past this one; as you’d expect from a movie that people put in their personal top ten, there’s something genuinely interesting here. But if you’re not in it for completism, I tbh think you could just watch “Remnants” and get 90% of the great stuff in a third of the time.

Mostly, though, I’m just glad to get this out of the way, so I can get back to going through this list. This was the last of a zillion-way tie at #157 (aka: on 18 people’s top ten lists), and next up is an even larger tie at #169 (movies that are on 17 people’s lists).

  1. There was a brief window where it was available on Kanopy, in slightly better quality. In retrospect, I should have hunkered down and watched it while it was there, but it didn’t occur to me that they’d remove it. ↩︎