austria

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)

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

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