Workingman's Death
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets
Austria/Germany, 2005, 35mm, color, 122 min.
Pashtu, Yoruba, German, English, Ibo, Indonesian, Mandarin and Russian with English subtitles.
As the title suggests, Workingman's Death watches people working at difficult, even dangerous jobs, from illegal Ukrainian mines to Indonesian volcanoes to Nigerian slaughter yards. Each of the five chapters takes us on an extensive tour of a different work site. The use of long takes, virtuosic camerawork, ravishing cinematography and a striking John Zorn score all serve to monumentalize the labor depicted on screen – in some ways, resembling the work of Sebastião Salgado. The film's title also projects an ominous cloud over the future of labor. Will the future bring more arduous and more dangerous work, performed for less pay in out-of-the-way sites – a development pointed to by a coda set at a German smelting plant now become a playground? What does that mean for workers here and around the world? – DP