E-Mail This Article to a Friend Eyes of Li Yang Blind Shaft at the MFA, plus Pat O’Neill BY GERALD PEARY

Labor unions are forbidden by our favored-nation trade partner China, and Communist officials make deep trouble for those who whistle-blow in a country where thousands perish each year on the job. In October 2003, the Chinese government revealed, according to the New York Times, that 11,449 workers had died through September of that year. Of these, 4620 were coal miners.

Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003; 92 minutes; February 20-28 at the MFA) was secretly filmed in China at illegal mine sites along the border between Hebei and Shaanxi Provinces. Li and his courageous actors and crew shot dangerous hours down in the actual mine shafts and also above ground: dusty, treeless, pitiless labor camps where migrants flock, desperate for bare-bones pay.

How do they stay operative, these forbidden, never-inspected mines? Blind Shaft pulls no punches: with bribes to Communist officials. This is the New China, Marxism reconfigured. In the film’s most telling scene, a Maoist hymn, "Long Live Socialism," celebrating "the overthrow of reactionaries" is discovered among the karaoke choices in a prostitutes’ den. "That song is old-fashioned," a character declares; then he supplies his own cynical sing-along words: "The reactionaries were never overthrown/They came back with capitalist US dollars."

It’s not surprising that Blind Shaft was banned in mainland China, though not just for its muckraking mining exposŽ. There’s also the depraved character of the two protagonists. Writer/director Li, who won a Silver Bear at last year’s Berlinale for "artistic contribution," could have gone the easy way of similar tracts, including John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, and given us righteous-thinking proletariat heroes. Instead, he saddles us with a couple of human lice feeding greedily off the corruption.

Tang Zhaoyang (Wang Shuangbao) and Song Jinming (Li Qiang) are whoring, filthy-mouthed scam artists whose game plan includes the murder of innocents. The movie begins down in a mine shaft where Zhaoyang and Jinming beat in the head of a fellow worker and throw his body into an underground stream. Above ground, they run to the mine owner screaming and whining that the poor man was killed by an underground landslide. They claim that the deceased is Zhaoyang’s brother (a lie) and threaten to tell officials if they’re not paid off. "What was that guy’s name?" they ask, and then shrug, when they’ve gone to town with a load of cash. They’ve done this before: homicide and blackmail.

Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not for Zhaoyang, who’s a hardened blackguard. But Jinming, we discover, has a son, and he feels guilty about not sending the boy money for school. He himself had to drop out because education costs in China are prohibitive. At one point in the film, a high-schooler stands along the road begging for funds. Jinming puts money in the youngster’s hat.

The second half of Blind Shaft brings in a third character, Yuan Fengming (Wang Baoqiang), a squeaky-clean 16-year-old boy with a pubescent voice whom Zhaoyang finds in a marketplace searching for work. Fengming is persuaded to follow Zhaoyang and Jinming to a coal mine, where the plan is to make him their newest victim. But not so fast: Jinming sees a symbolic son in this nice kid, who wants money to send a sister to school. Zhaoyang thinks only of bumping him off and cashing in.

Is there a humanist ending in store from this fine, tough-minded Chinese first feature by the very talented Li? He studied filmmaking in Berlin and Munich, and there’s an undeniable Western feel to his picture in the deft hand-held camerawork of director of photography Liu Yonghong and the three-way male story that (a coincidence?) recalls two American classics, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973).

PAT O’NEILL’S The Decay of Fiction, which screens this Tuesday at noon at the MFA with the filmmaker in attendance, is a wry, marvelous, experimental ghost "noir." O’Neill, through optical printing and time-lapse cinematography, peoples LA’s long-shut Ambassador Hotel with 1940s apparitions (actually, superimposed actors in period outfits) who walk about prattling on about things you catch on the fly and barely understand, snippets of possible "B" detective films and gaudy melodramas ("It’s Pauline! She wants me to kill myself!"). You get that spooky feeling of inhabiting a Raymond Chandler tale in your sleep.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com