97 min | NR | October 8, 2021 | MTV Documentary Films
A factory worker assembles sex dolls. A trainee learns to smile for the rich. A model holds a pose for hours. Jessica Kingdon films the Chinese Dream from the bottom of the supply chain up, and lets the images do the indicting.
Ascension is a documentary about labor in modern China, and it never tells you what to think about it. Jessica Kingdon builds the film as a vertical climb. She starts on the factory floor where workers assemble goods for wages, moves to the service economy of butlers and bodyguards being trained to wait on the wealthy, and ends among the people who own the results. There is no narration. There are no interviews. The film argues that the Chinese Dream is a machine, and that the machine runs on the bodies of the people at the bottom.
The film has no actors and no characters in the conventional sense. The people on screen are workers, instructors, and managers doing their actual jobs. A recruiter pitches assembly-line work through a megaphone and lists the rules about phones and bathroom breaks like scripture. An etiquette instructor teaches young women the precise angle to hold a smile and how to stand for a client without collapsing. A factory worker paints the eyelashes onto a silicone sex doll with the same flat focus another worker brings to bottling water. Kingdon holds on these faces long enough that the labor stops being background and becomes the subject.
Kingdon directs and writes the film as a wordless argument structured entirely through juxtaposition. She and editor Kingdon arrange the footage so that each rung up the economic ladder comments on the one below it. The cinematography frames factory rows as repeating geometric patterns that turn human beings into components of a larger design. Dan Deacon’s score swells under the imagery of consumption and luxury, and the sound design lets the grind of machinery dominate the working scenes with no music at all. The contrast between the silence of labor and the noise of wealth is the whole thesis delivered without a single spoken word of commentary.
Ascension trusts its audience to assemble the meaning that it deliberately refuses to state. The film could lecture about inequality and class. Instead it shows you the seminar where strivers learn to perform happiness and lets you watch the performance fail in real time. Kingdon understands that the most damning thing she can do is point the camera at the work and refuse to look away. The result is a portrait of a country selling its own people the dream that grinds them down.