Sunday, September 18, 2005

The Last Hangman

by James McNally on September 18, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

The Last Hangman

The Last Hangman (UK, dir­ector Adrian Shergold): Between 1933 and 1955, Albert Pierrepoint was Britain’s Chief Executioner, respons­ible for more than 600 hangings. Timothy Spall gives a dev­ast­ating per­form­ance as a decent man engaged in the lone­liest of pro­fes­sions. The title is some­what mis­leading. Hangings were car­ried out until 1964, but Pierrepoint was the last man to hold the offi­cial office of Chief Executioner.

As the film begins, Pierrepoint is proud to be offered a job as a hangman, fol­lowing in his father’s and uncle’s foot­steps. Since he’s only needed every few months, he main­tains his job as a grocer’s deliv­eryman and keeps his moon­lighting a secret from his friends and even his wife (Juliet Stevenson). He is very good at his new pro­fes­sion, and is determ­ined to com­plete each job as quickly and humanely as pos­sible. It’s a bit odd seeing him trying to shave seconds off the time required for each exe­cu­tion, much like a pro­fes­sional ath­lete trying for a world record. That is, until you realize that his desire is for the pris­oner to have as little time as pos­sible to be afraid. After each exe­cu­tion, it falls to Pierrepoint to cut down the body and pre­pare it for burial, and it’s touching to see the ten­der­ness he dis­plays. After the exe­cu­tion of one woman, he tells his assistant, “She’s paid the price, now she’s innocent.”

Pierrepoint’s repu­ta­tion grows and after the war, he’s flown to Germany by the British Army and placed in charge of executing scores of Nazi war crim­inals. As a result, his secret is leaked to the press, who now broad­cast his iden­tity as the finest hangman in the land. With his earn­ings from these jobs, he and his wife decide to open a pub(!), which does a booming busi­ness, thanks in part to his notoriety.

But the job begins to take a ter­rible toll. Even after he tells his wife about his second pro­fes­sion, she doesn’t want to hear about it. Nobody really wants to hear about it. When protestors start demon­strating against cap­ital pun­ish­ment, Pierrepoint finds him­self the target of their ire. Doubts begin to creep in to des­troy his pre­vi­ously unshak­able faith in what he does. By the mid-1950s, Albert Pierrepoint resigns his pos­i­tion (ostens­ibly over unpaid fees) and com­pletely reverses his own pos­i­tion on cap­ital pun­ish­ment, though he ini­tially keeps his opin­ions to him­self. In his 1974 auto­bi­o­graphy, how­ever, he finally con­fesses that the whole exper­i­ence had left a bitter after­taste for him and that he felt that cap­ital pun­ish­ment had “achieved nothing but revenge.”

Though this is a fairly standard biopic and “issue film,” the per­form­ances of Juliet Stevenson and espe­cially Timothy Spall are remark­able. Pierrepoint’s determ­in­a­tion to remain detached takes a ter­rible toll on his life and is bound to fail even­tu­ally. The obvious con­clu­sion is that killing cor­rodes our humanity, whether the killer is a mur­derer or an exe­cu­tioner on the state’s payroll.

Note: This film was retitled Pierrepoint upon its release.

More on Albert Pierrepoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pierrepoint

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: TIFF, uk

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Workingman’s Death

by James McNally on September 18, 2005

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

Workingman's Death

Workingman’s Death (Austria/Germany, dir­ector Michael Glawogger): After you see this film, you’ll never com­plain about your job again. Subtitled some­thing like “Five Portraits of Work in the Twenty-First Century,” Glawogger’s doc­u­mentary fea­tures some of the most dan­gerous, dif­fi­cult, or just plain unpleasant work in the world.

Each seg­ment except the last one is about twenty-five minutes long, and is shot without any voi­ceover nar­ra­tion and very little edit­or­i­al­izing. We are simply presented with people working and talking about their work. The dir­ector pos­sesses a very paint­erly sense of com­pos­i­tion, and we’re often presented with shots of workers posing as if they were in front of a still camera. The cam­er­a­work is even more impressive when it is moving, and I often found myself won­dering how they were able to film in some of these conditions.

The seg­ments follow, in order, a group of miners in Ukraine who have dug their own coal shafts, a group of men in Indonesia who col­lect sulfur from an active vol­cano and haul it down the moun­tain­side, butchers at an open-air slaughter­house in Nigeria, men who break apart rusting ships for scrap metal in Pakistan, and steel­workers in China. Although all of these workers are merely sur­viving, the thing that struck me most was how con­tented, even happy, most of them were.

That being said, three of the five seg­ments fea­tured Islamic soci­eties, and I found myself won­dering about the con­nec­tions between the con­di­tions these men were working in and the rise of Islamic rad­ic­alism. Among the ship­breakers in Pakistan, for instance, there was an inter­esting seg­ment which fol­lowed a pho­to­grapher who cir­cu­lated among the men char­ging them a fee to take pic­tures of them holding an assault rifle. There was no voi­ceover, but I got the impres­sion that these men wanted to be seen as revolu­tion­aries instead of just sub­sist­ence scrap workers.

The most intense seg­ment had to be among the butchers, and there was quite a lot of blood and gore evident as we watched the men work. But strangely, I found this a more honest approach to the pro­duc­tion of food than I saw in the factory farms in We Feed The World. These butchers are “hands-on,” literally.

The final seg­ment, filmed among steel­workers in China, was the shortest, and the least inter­esting, but the dir­ector was trying to end with the optimism of the Chinese workers for the steel industry, which he con­trasts with shots of a defunct steel mill in Germany that’s been turned into an art install­a­tion. His point was slightly unclear, but overall, his unflinching eye for detail, even in some har­rowing work envir­on­ments, makes this doc­u­mentary a must-see.

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: austria, Documentaries, germany, globalization, TIFF

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