In a central scene in Christian von Borries’ latest film, IPHONECHINA, a column of young Chinese works traverses the image, their faces expressionless, resolutely heading to their goal. At first, you almost don’t notice the subdued mood, for their forward march is underpinned by a bouncy pop melody. “Run, run, it’s a new day. Run, run, it’s time to embrace”, the catchy lyrics from the iPhone ad extol. In the accompanying film clip Apple shows the mass euphoria outside its stores worldwide. “Good morning, iPhone 5 is here!” – the words that trigger the onslaught on the shops. Showing not the eager shoppers, but instead the Foxconn workforce in Shenzhen pretty much takes the wind out of the sails of this euphoric announcement. These workers assemble the iPhone on a piecework basis for the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic and computer components, yet it is only the product that is feted. Contrasting with its largely associative logic, the film portrays their disastrous working conditions explicitly at various points. One of the workers interviewed is, revealingly, not familiar with the term exploitation, yet describes precisely that state of affairs. Accommodation with safety nets fitted beneath the windows reveals the strategy found to tackle recurring spates of suicides, and a performance scene reproduces the nature of the 12-hour shifts at the conveyor belt.
“Believe in Capitalism” a banner urges the performers beavering away at the conveyor belt. The slogan is a heightened expression of the reform course that China has been pursuing since Deng Xiaoping – radical economic liberalisation and participation in globalisation. On the digital billboards of the People’s Republic, commercials for products appear alongside slogans underscoring the country’s economic objectives. IPHONECHINA takes a critical look at transnational high-tech capitalism and poses the rhetorical question: “If Apple was a state, would you rather live in Apple or in China?” What form do the parallels between nation states and globally active firms assume? What would it mean if a US technology firm were to rule the world?
Von Borries’ film tackles these kinds of questions through deft montage, often using analogies to link images, to leap from one end of the world to the other. The change of location is sometimes scarcely noticeable in Apple’s case, for example when switching from a New York store to its Chinese counterparts. Outside both stores you find the same chairs in public space that has long ceased to be public, for on this terrain the rules of the private “Apple state” apply. At times von Borries’ correspondences also generate rather provocative juxtapositions, for example when people who have just bought iPhones hold up their smart phones as triumphantly as the Red Guard brandishing their Mao bibles. The work evokes echoes of the personality cult around both Mao Tse-tung and Steve Jobs, whose biographies are displayed in close proximity in the shop at the National Museum on Tiananmen Square. What do these two narratives signify for today’s China?
The iPhone is popular not just in the USA, but also among the Chinese middle class with their newly acquired purchasing power. In more general terms too, through the figure of Steve Jobs the Apple brand embodies an individualism that is often described as the “Californian ideology” – an absolute belief in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies, which in the 1990s combined the free spirit of the hippies with the entrepreneurial drive of the yuppies. A particularly acutely pointed scene reveals where unlimited faith in technology can lead: the official ad for the “Touch ID” sensor in the iPhone 5s is grafted almost imperceptibly with excerpts from a flagrant satire, which proclaims that Apple is proud to have produced a surveillance device. What Gilles Deleuze called the transition from a disciplinarian society to a control-based society is of course not just relevant for Apple, but is more of a meta-text for the dire straits in which we seem to find ourselves nowadays.
“Autonomous search: being told what you want before you know you need it”: the text above the crowd waiting outside the Apple Store. That actually references Google’s personalised, autonomous Internet. Yet the sentence is also a marvellous commentary on how most people seem to jump on the trend bandwagon as soon as they pick up on the slightest hint that a crucial trend is doing the rounds. Rather than dishing up rapidly digestible information, IPHONECHINA offers up a multi-layered associative space in which incoming statements call for a careful reading, as the origin of the commentaries in von Borries’ film is for the most part not made explicit.

IPHONECHINA can be streamed from January 2014 at www.arte.tv/de.

 

Translated by Julia Gwendolyn Schneider

 

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