The Iron Ministry

J.P. Sniadecki’s latest film The Iron Ministry is an immersive exploration of culture, history, and a distinctive mode of transport. Shot with a consumer-grade camera over three years of train journeys across China, Sniadecki’s film introduces us to the people who travel and work in the various trains that cross that vast nation. We see everything from old mercantile locomotives (no longer in service) where freshly killed meat is transported and cut up by cigarette-smoking workers crammed into every corner of each car; to the cramped but clean sleeping quarters of long-haul commuter trains; to the luxury compartments of new bullet trains where Sniadecki and his camera are not welcome. Much like the non-narrative documentaries produced by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University--Manakamana (2013), Leviathan (2012), and Sniadecki’s own People’s Park (2012) and Foreign Parts (2010)--or the cinéma vérité films of Frederick Wiseman--High School (1968), Racetrack (1985), Public Housing (1997)--The Iron Ministry examines a seemingly ordinary institution from the inside out.

Sniadecki uses no voice-over or titles to explain what we’re seeing. He simply wanders from car to car striking up conversations with fellow passengers or watching them talk with each other, work, sleep, and eat from a close-up but non-invasive distance. Little by little, a picture forms of the people who ride these rails and their views about their lives, their country, their families, their politics, their joys and concerns. Working with sound designer Ernst Karel, Sniadecki gives the surreal impression of the film’s journey taking place over a single trip on one long train of divergent cars. He avoids most of the expected shots we think of when we look back on the rich history of films set on trains, in favor of minute explorations of the commonplace textures of the interiors and the potentially humdrum conversations of the ordinary passengers. The Iron Ministry creates the claustrophobic sensations of riding the rails far better than this year’s more prominent train picture, Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, and it is far more fascinating than most neo-vérité documentaries I’ve seen because its perspective goes beyond a pure fly-on-the-wall glimpse. Though not a film that pushes or challenges a specific ideology, it’s not afraid to pose political ideas or to act as a metaphor for a society. The film is an expressionistic work of cinematic anthropology.