From Austria and Germany, Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death is divided into segments showing people, mostly men, banded together in performing almost incredibly harsh and unpleasant work in different places in the current world: Ukraine, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, China. There is (thankfully) no voiceover narration, only the sounds of labor, and conversations among the workers and their families. I did not get much past the first segment, not because I did not like it—actually, I thought it quite wonderful—but because the second, revolving around men who collect sulphur from an active volcano, begins by showing some of them cutting off, in real time, the head of a goat because someone dreamt that this must be done to appease the volcano, helping to ensure the safe outcome of their labor. Since we learn that they do this (and in fact I wondered what would have happened had the dreamer dreamt of a human sacrifice instead), there is no need to show the barbaric act itself, and I lost all interest in proceeding with the film, especially as I knew that the next segment took up laborers at a Nigerian slaughterhouse. It is nowhere written that I must see a film in its entirety when I have had a taste of its gratuitous cruelty and sensationalism.
That said, the first segment, “Heroes,” is indeed remarkable—and bereft of violence. The hero whom the coal miners emulate is the 1930s Soviet miner Aleksei Stakhanov, whose massive statue guards their village in the Dombass region—ironically, given its substantiality, a monument to change and to national as well as individual frailty and transience. The current miners are denied the myth of national adventure by which the Soviet Union back in Stakhanov’s day encouraged labor; working illegally, they scrape together scraps of coal from the long-since depleted mine to warm their homes and to sell for food. “There is no other way we can survive,” one miner remarks as his wife behaves with selfconscious heartiness in front of the camera.
Cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler helps Glawogger achieve gorgeous results; in this first segment at least, this includes blending color and black and white, to be precise, mostly wintry gray, sometimes within the same frame. The latter acts as a bridge between an independent Ukrainian present and archival black-and-white inserts indicating the Soviet past.
“Heroes” ends with two ceremonies and celebrations: a wedding (hope for the future); a worker’s retirement, with such hope largely behind him and his future dwindling, poised to become dust—coal dust. The final image is both melancholy and chilling: the statue of Stakhanov, with the bridal bouquet in its grip.
The whole film won the Grierson Award from the British Film Institute and the German Film Award for best documentary.
June 29, 2009 at 9:37 am |
It’s too bad that you didn’t get through the entire film. Yes, it’s graphic depiction of the way people in other parts of the world is at times hard to take, but it does provide us — the people enjoying incredibly comfy lives by comparison — with a better understanding of the way so many others must live. It is not exploiting these people, but revealing a world that we all too often avoid. Just because we stick our heads in the sand, doesn’t mean the problems go away.
Thanks, though, for discussing the film on your blog.
June 29, 2009 at 12:51 pm |
Of course, I did not say that Glawogger’s film “is . . . exploiting [the workers],” although others may have done so. My own reason for not watching the film further is that it is gratuitously cheap and violent. (Reread my first paragraph.) It is indeed exploitative; Glawogger’s film is exploiting us.