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And yet Rails, the   Brainetics    final part of the trilogy, is harder  nike air max 90   still thematically and emotionally. The shortest  air Max 90   instalment (Rust totals four hours, Remnants three, Rails two) it follows the same goods train from  ugg classic tall boots   which Wang took the  air max 90 pas cher   very first long shots in the film. Even after Tie Xi has been left mostly wasteland the train is still running. The director trails nike billig   the small, tightly-knit crew from some time near the end (they discuss the ongoing demolition seen in Remnants), riding in the cabin as they pass long, monotonous journeys round and round the district with amiable wisecracks and endless card games.

Two of the scavengers who now roam the district travel with the train; the wiry, one-eyed Old Du and his teenage son. Like the workers in Rust and Remnants walking off with their own tools, the crew are quite blasé about the two men claiming what little they can risk pilfering from the supply sheds. They may talk down to the old man at times, yet they're not shy about praising his dedication - 'Him and his son are the only people who know how to get things done around here any more', one of the crew remarks.

Old Du proves voluble enough once Wang focuses on him, happy to explain what led him to Tie Xi - he turns out to be one of the 'sent down generation' banished to work camps in the country at the tail-end of the 1960s, hopping between menial jobs before working security for the railroad ('All the police know me... otherwise I'd be arrested. I've got connections', he claims). He's clearly smart and resourceful for all his meagre existence, but a scavenger's guile can only accomplish so much. Hard-working or not, Old Du and his son are still squatters carrying off government property, and Rails' inevitable climax is utterly gruelling stuff, not least after spending so much time in the old man's company.

There's no agenda here, at least no more than standing witness implies. West of the Tracks doesn't outright condemn either capitalism or communism, it just notes - calmly, impassively - that progress carries a terrible cost for all those left behind, a haunting pragmatism that evokes fifth and sixth generation filmmakers' approaches to dramatising social upheaval and the plight of minorities or the dispossessed.

Is nine hours really necessary? The film could be cut, but Wang Bing's patient editing is a marvel - nothing stands out as superfluous and again, the individual sequences are phenomenal. There is a definite sense of working through a unified whole and a narrative arc, despite the slow, meandering progression and the way the film goes against conventional pacing in many respects. The problems come more from the sheer length of the thing - nine hours is far more than the vast majority of people (prospective viewers or not) could ever reasonably be expected to give up in one go.

Yet West of the Tracks is a masterpiece regardless. It's slow going, but it grips, in its own way; few if any features, narrative or documentary, have managed to immerse the viewer so completely in a vanished place and time, to say nothing of giving such an enterprise devastating contemporary relevance. Perhaps you know the things it's trying to say - again, Wang Bing's messages are fairly simple - but unless you've followed in the director's footsteps you haven't seen them presented like this, delivered with such jaw-dropping craft and devotion the film goes completely beyond any idea of grades, success or failure.

Any distributor would be taking a staggering risk picking it up, yet arguably the film would be best suited to a wider release on home video. While it is fantastically self-contained considering its length, it still works taken an hour or so at a time, almost as if it were shot for television. Bear in mind Wang Bing is obviously aware of the demands he's making on his audience; his most recent documentary The Journey of Crude Oil runs a colossal fourteen hours (he has two films that qualify for entry on Wikipedia's list of longest films ever released) and when screened at festivals it ran more as an art installation than an actual cinema viewing, with patrons free to wander in and out at will.

For anyone with the slightest interest in sitting through West of the Tracks who gets the chance it simply has to be seen. Of course it doesn't compel the viewer's attention for nine hours straight - that's arguably not physically possible. Does it elicit boredom? Very likely, if someone watches too much of it in one go, but that doesn't imply the film is boring. Given patience and commitment it is both every bit as captivating and as aesthetically outstanding as any top-tier blockbuster. Few people will ever see this, as it stands, yet more people definitely deserve to.