ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Behemoth productively visualizes a multivalent interplay of temporal registers that comprise the “slow violence”— to borrow the language of Rob Nixon— wrought upon coal miners in Inner Mongolia as they are conscripted to toil in toxic and dangerous conditions and to advance an empty myth of progress that leads to wasted materials and ruined landscapes. In Zhao Liang’s film Behemoth, the passage of time is registered in landscapes, bodies, and their movements through various circles of industrial hell. While Zhao has stated that he originally shot the film in a “conventional documentary style”— including conducting interviews with his subjects— he ultimately chose to remove the verbal and linguistic components of the film in order to rely solely on the visual components of the story. The necessary antidote to slow violence, if such a thing is possible: a sustained process of hope.
