Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, is a city caught up in the country’s economic boom, the result of the ongoing transformation from a centrally planned to market economy. On what was once the outskirts of the city is Factory 420. Founded in the late 1950s to produce components for the aerospace industry in the wake of the Korean War, its purpose was a state secret. It was thus built to be a city-in-and-of-itself, apart from Chengdu, having its own schools, restaurants, cinemas, its workers brought in from all over the country. In the post-Cold War period Factory 420 was retooled for peacetime products, white goods. This, however, was the beginning of its end, a slow decline leading to the current events of the film. Factory 420 is to be demolished and its remaining workers laid off. In its place will rise 24 City, a premier development of state-of-the-art apartments, a complex for the middle classes in ascension. The film itself consists predominately of face-to-cameras, static long takes of interviews with the workers and their families...
[However]... some of the interviews are fake. Fake in the sense that they are ‘acted’ by ‘actors’ speaking ‘lines’ composed out of interviews with ‘real’ people. But only some, some interviews are with ‘real life’ people. In a particularly fascinating move, Little Flower’s story tells of how she was named such after a movie starring Joan Chen. Little Flower herself is played by that actress... To understand this cinematic process more fully we can turn to Deleuze his cinematic concept of ‘powers of the false’ (C2: 131)...
To read the full exploration of
24 City through the Deleuze's sign of 'powers of the false,' see
Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...
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