Film Review/Ed Rampell

Ironies Abound in Obama-Produced Documentary, 'American Factory'

A Chinese billionaire reopens a shuttered Ohio GM plant, hiring 2,000 Americans to work with imported Chinese workers. Culture clash or cultural revolution?

Tinseltown’s latest power couple is the Obamas. And while Barack’s political style was known for its “no drama Obama” vibe, the former First Family’s first film from their new company, Higher Ground Productions, is actually full of conflict.

“American Factory,” produced by Participant Media and being brought to Netflix by the Obamas (the duo’s production company is listed in the credits with Participant Media), is an almost two-hour documentary by three-time Oscar nominee Julia Reichert and Emmy co-award-winner with Reichert, Steven Bognar. It centers around a General Motors plant in Moraine, Ohio, that manufactured SUVs and trucks. The plant closed in 2008, laying off hundreds (Reichert and Bognar’s 2009 HBO short “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” about the facility’s plight, was Academy Award-nominated).

In 2014, we learn in the documentary, Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang bought the plant and reopens it as Fuyao Glass America, becoming one of the world’s largest auto glass manufacturers. About 2,000 US employees were hired to work side-by-side with imported Chinese workers, under mostly Chinese management, to produce automotive glass.

It’s East meets West, as a culture clash looms like a sort of second Cultural Revolution, pitting Asians against white and black Americans.

At first, the laid-off Ohio proletarians are happy to be back at work. But it’s East meets West, as a culture clash looms like a sort of second Cultural Revolution, pitting Asians against white and black Americans.

The Chinese transplants appear to be more regimented and subject to groupthink than their US counterparts, working longer hours with fewer days off per month. Evincing greater discipline, the Chinese employees are explicitly told at one Asians-only staff meeting that they’re “superior” to Americans. The Chinese view Yanks as overly confident, individualistic people who love being flattered.

Although some Ohioans befriend their Asian colleagues, inviting them to barbecues and target practice (a novelty for Chinese civilians forbidden from owning firearms back in the People’s Republic), there are palpable tensions.

Lenin wrote, “Imperialism is the export of capital,” but here the foreign investor, from a supposedly less developed nation, is sinking around $1 billion into a supposedly advanced capitalist country. Now the shoe is on the other foot, as Westerners get a taste of their own imperial medicine. And they almost choke on it. In American Factory, the bosses are from a reputedly communist country but working conditions are below those in the free market USA.

Safety standards at the plant near Dayton allegedly don’t meet OSHA regulations and a number of industrial workers are injured on the job. Wages are much lower than when the Yanks worked for GM; they have fewer and shorter breaks and are often exhorted to work harder. Matters become so dire that workers at Fuyao Glass America try to organize a United Auto Workers union, singing “Solidarity Forever” on a picket line.

Cao, chairman of Fuyao, threatens to abandon the Ohio plant if it unionizes and is incensed when US Sen. Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, makes a speech explicitly in favor of unionization at a plant ceremony. Brown is banned from the factory, pro-UAW proletarians are fired from the assembly line, and anti-union propagandists give one-sided lectures that the workers are obliged to attend.

Further compounding the blurring of the lines is the fact that the PRC government subsidizes Fuyao Group’s activities, while the state of Ohio also provides incentives including tax breaks to the China-based multinational. Is this state of affairs a “Great Leap Forward”? The incongruities and ironies abound, calling to mind Chairman Mao’s many quotations on “contradictions.”

All of this ideological cognitive dissonance would be enough to make Karl Marx scratch his noggin, but co-director Reichert is no stranger to political economy theories. The independent filmmaker based in Yellow Springs, Ohio, co-directed the 1983 Oscar-nominated documentary “Seeing Red,” a film about Americans who were card-carrying, dues-paying members and/or fellow travelers of the Communist Party USA, including folksinger Pete Seeger and party leader Dorothy Healey, who was charged under the Smith Act.

Reichert also co-made the aforementioned “The Last Truck” (2009), about an Ohio community’s reaction to the closing of its GM plant, and “Union Maids” (1976), about female organizers during the Depression. Her 2019 film “Raises Not Roses—The Story of the 9 to 5 Movement” is about female white collar workers. A retrospective of Reichert’s oeuvre was launched May 30 at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and will be screened at venues such as UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, Cinematheque at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

The complex jigsaw puzzle that emerges in “American Factory” is that the People’s Republic does not have a socialist or a free enterprise economy per se, but combines features of both as a form of state capitalism. One wonders what will happen to the Fuyao plant, as the Chinese owners from a purportedly communist society secretly conspire to replace production line proletarians with automation in order to maximize — you guessed it! — profit.

“American Factory”’s finale calls to mind the end of George Orwell’s classic parable of the revolution betrayed, “Animal Farm,” when the beasts of burden can no longer distinguish between the pigs and the human oppressors. “Some animals are more equal than others” indeed.

The Obamas are kicking off their film career with a thought-provoking, complex, compelling debut about labor rights, class struggle, cross-cultural relations, globalization, and more.

“American Factory” opened in theaters and on Netflix Aug. 21.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2019

Populist.com