WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITED BY SWEAT, STRAIN AND FEW WORDS
Featured in The New York Times
By Stephen Holden
Published: February 24, 2006

The sardonic epigraph for “Workingman’s Death,” the Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s glamorized documentary examination of hard physical labor, comes from Faulkner: work is “the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.”

Maybe so. But as Chekhov observed, “Man must toil, he must work in the sweat of his brow, whoever he is, and in this alone is encompassed the sense and the aim of his life, his happiness, his raptures.”

The film seems to want to dispute Faulkner. As it observes laborers from around the world going to hell and back, day after day, year after year, to eke out subsistence livings, you are struck by their exuberance, vitality, teamwork and satisfaction in discharging backbreaking duties with a minimum of complaint. The simple act of doing the work, no matter how dangerous, gives their lives structure and purpose; triumphing over fear adds to their sense of accomplishment.

When you’re totally immersed in the physical moment, there is no room left for ennui. At least that’s the romantic way “Workingman’s Death” likes to imagine hard labor. But tell that to all the oppressed union workers over the decades who have gone on strike for better wages and working conditions.

A film of few words but plenty of indelible images of people (mostly men) risking their lives with hardly a second thought, “Workingman’s Death” hopscotches to various work sites around the world. It is divided into chapters with portentous titles like Heroes, Ghosts, Lions and Brothers that evoke the Herculean labors of Alexsei Stakhanov, a legendary coal miner in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930’s who was mythicized for his superhuman productivity and is remembered at the beginning of the film.

Jumping to the present, “Workingman’s Death” visits Stakhanov’s latter-day descendants extracting what coal remains in the Donbass region of Ukraine, where he toiled 70 years earlier.

Squeezing their bodies into narrow crevices known as mousetraps, many no higher than 16 inches, the miners use chisels and pickaxes to dig coal out of these depleted mines.

After separating coal from rock, they haul their meager spoils out of the pit by hand in small wagons, and divide it up. Most use it to heat their homes. The little bit left over is sold for food. Without the coal, one declares, they would freeze to death.

The film’s next stop is a mine at the edge of a volcanic crater in Kawah Ijen, Indonesia, where the earth spits out molten sulfur in hissing yellow fumes that quickly harden into slabs.

Men toting bamboo baskets balanced on their shoulders descend a perilous mountain path into the infernal mist and return bearing 200-pound loads for the three-mile trek back up the mountainside.

The most disturbing stop on the tour is an outdoor slaughterhouse in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where goats are killed, skinned, cut into portions, cleaned and roasted.

The camera’s unblinking views of the bleating animals’ throats being slit, sending geysers of blood gushing onto the street, suggest a dispassionate nature documentary in which humans are the alpha species in the natural pecking order.

Next up are the Pakistani workers in the port of Gaddani who have traveled hundreds of miles from their mountain villages to dismember giant ships, using blowtorches to split them apart and sending great hunks of metal crashing into the water. The pieces are cut up and sold as scrap.

Although the work is extremely dangerous, they toil in an atmosphere of calm. What little leisure they have is devoted to saying Islamic prayers and eating food they cook for themselves.

“Workingman’s Death” doesn’t go into detail in any of these scenes. It lets the images (underscored by John Zorn’s industrial music) speak for themselves.

The movie has the structure and tone of an epic historical poem that begins in the past, moves into the present and in two final sequences speculates on the future.

The first, set in a Chinese steelworks in Angang, parallels the optimistic communal spirit there with the exalting of collective labor in the days of Stakhanov.

The second, in Duisburg, Germany, visits a shuttered steelworks that produced more than 30 million of tons of steel from 1903 to 1985. With the blast furnaces turned into an outdoor light show, it is now literally a museum piece.

In the film’s production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, “Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?” In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.

Written and directed by Michael Glawogger; in Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, English, Ibu, Yoruba, Pashtu and Mandarin, with English subtitles; director of photography, Wolfgang Thaler; edited by Mona Willi and Ilse Buchelt; music by John Zorn; released by Seventh Art Releasing. Running time: 122 minutes. This film is not rated.

 

WORKINGMAN’S DEATH
Featured in the San Francisco Chronicle
By Walter Addiego
Published: May 5, 2006

This documentary about men and women performing brutal work tasks for next to no money is full of arresting and eloquent images. It has little dialogue, and little is needed.

Austrian director Michael Glawogger travels to five countries to focus on some of the worst jobs imaginable: Ukrainian miners crawl into tiny cracks in old coal pits to scratch out a few bags of winter fuel; Indonesian workers trudge long distances carrying baskets with hundreds of pounds of sulfur chunks extracted from a steaming mountain; Pakistanis risk explosions and burial under tons of scrap iron as they dismantle huge carrier ships.

The visuals are everything here. Despite the hardships depicted, many sequences have a dreamlike beauty. In addition, the director has a bone-dry sense of irony; during the Ukraine scenes, he frequently cuts away to a statue of Stakhanov, the “hero” lauded by the Soviets for his superhuman work habits. He also shows us an old German smelting works that’s been converted into a theme park.

The film’s message, implicit but unmistakable, is about the laborers’ dignity and the injustice of their compensation.

Credit for the gorgeous photography goes to Wolfgang Thaler, who also filmed Glawogger’s “Megacities” (1998), and there’s an original score by John Zorn.

– Advisory: Scenes at an open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria are intensely gory.

 

MEN AT WORK
Featured in The Village Voice
By Michael Atkinson
Published: February 14, 2006

A more challenging, narrative-free doc that dives to the roots of all politics, Michael Glawogger’s rather majestic Workingman’s Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe. Implicit in the journey is a stomach-churning critique of the New Globalism, even if this unmentioned position is better illustrated by the Indonesian sulfur haulers, working on the belly of an active volcano vividly jaundiced with chemicals, than the Ukrainian closed-coal-mine squatters, whose scrounging subsistence might not have been that different a century ago. The appallingly surreal sequence set in an open-air Nigerian slaughterhouse—imagine your favorite Francis Bacon nightmare times a thousand, with lakes of blood—might also have been little changed over the millennia.

Before twin codas set in a Chinese steel mill and a bizarre German theme park retrofitted from a massive metalworks, the final major sequence watches laborers in Pakistan gamble with their underpaid lives by cutting up gargantuan decommissioned freighters for scrap on the banks of the Arabian Sea. Glawogger’s film may be thematically loose-jointed, but Wolfgang Thaler’s cinematography is the glue; the signature move—a flowing Steadicam track before or following a subject—blooms into variations on a visceral theme, especially as it rhymes the Nigerian butchers stalking through acres of red mud dragging bull heads with the Indonesians carrying rocks down smoking, tourist-littered mountain paths. John Zorn’s pensive electro-score ramps up the disquiet.