"I hope you don't think this film is about hell on earth," Michael Glawogger told the audience before the screening of his 2005 documentary Workingman's Death. It's hard to see why not: his film -- easily the best I've seen so far at the San Francisco Film Festival -- is a headlong journey into the world of manual labor where, for the most part, workers' lives are irrevocably yoked with potentially fatal peril. It sure looks like hell, too, whether it's the unworldly yellow clouds of sulfur from a volcano in Indonesia, or a butcher's market awash with crimson in Nigeria.
The film has five different episodes: the first, on illegal coal miners in the Ukraine (where, lying flat on their backs in a space 16 inches high, they hammer out blocks of coal); the second, on sulfur miners in Indonesia (weightlifting is then exposed for the bourgeois activity that it is, in this segment that looks like a Sebastiao Salgado photograph come to life); the third, on cow and goat slaughterers in Nigeria ("Life is graphic," Glawogger explained. "You eat meat. Its preparation is just hidden from you."); the fourth, on Pashtun ship disassemblers in Pakistan (there's something simply majestic about the sight of 250-feet tall pieces of metal collapse to the sea); and the last, on Chinese foundry workers and a German foundry converted into a theme park. Except for the weaker final episode, all are equally compelling. Glawogger manages to capture the ordinary in succinct ways: Ukrainian miners talking about feeding their goats, a conversation between two miners about Bon Jovi in Indonesia, a souvenir photographer in the shipyard, taking pictures for the workers to send to their families.
There is real poetry to the images and sounds that Workingman's Death displays: the creaking sound of baskets with about 150 pounds of sulfur slabs, the ripple of cow skin pulled over rocks, the gravelly crunch of coal dragged through a shaft, the disturbingly childlike cries of goats as their necks are slit open, the dazzle of arc welder sparks hurtling down a shaft or to the ocean. For this alone the film achieves a gritty, sensual transcendence.
Like extreme sports, there is perhaps something of the "extreme" in what Glawogger documents. (One can imagine that capturing this on camera constituted a kind of "extreme filmmaking" as well, and there was more than a hint of romanticization in his answers at the Q&A session.) My initial reaction was that the deeply ordinary could be equally fraught with similar danger and/or nastiness, until I realized that these kinds of occupations in the film -- some without the benefit of machines, and all of which were surely barely regulated according to any safety standards -- were indeed "deeply ordinary" mostly outside of the First World (or willfully ignored here).
I'd like to think, though, that Glawogger meant more for the film than simply to portray the universal dignity of manual labor, even if, as he reiterated, it was not about "hell on earth." Speaking as an anthropologist, I would have loved to have seen more of a context: the salaries these workers are making and what these wages can buy, how they view their labor (or what it means exactly when the man who considers himself the fastest cleaner of the roasted goat carcasses says that he is proud of the skill that God has given him), who is making a profit off of it, the families (if any) who are being supported, what Glawogger means by "well off" when he says the Ukrainian miners were "well off," and so on.
His refusal to place the film in a larger cultural / economic context by providing some sort of a "narrative" somewhat defangs the documentary, as it were, by allowing the viewers to simply focus on the images. (Indeed, his response to someone asking this question at the Q&A session was something of a cop-out: "It's because I'm a filmmaker. If I wanted to do that, I would have written an essay.") But these criticisms are somewhat unfair. In some instances the workers themselves provide a critique of their own social conditions, though these are quickly smoothened over. In a couple of scenes where the interviewees talk about why they like their jobs, their answers are clearly meant to be sarcastic.
No matter: Claustrophobic, vertiginous, grim, and sometimes oddly exhilarating, Workingman's Death is a fantastic achievement. It's certainly the best film I've seen all year (and it's only May!).