So often in commercial cinema, work, especially manual labor, and poverty are carefully repressed, banished offscreen. A bracing tonic is offered by the  breathtaking trilogy of bravura documentaries by Michael Glawogger (b. 1959) that locates these issues emphatically center screen. An Austrian director working simultaneously in fiction and non-fiction, Glawogger’s latest film, Whores’ Glory completes a trilogy begun several years ago with Megacities and Workingman’s Death. Together the three films span the globe to portray the life and labor of workers struggling on the perilous margins of the transnational era.

Joining fellow Austrians Ulrich Seidl and Nikolaus Geyrhalter as leaders of an emerging wave of adventurous documentary, Glawogger also belongs to a tradition of documentarians who have traveled far and wide to find images that reveal the way the world works—from the Soviet Union’s Dziga Vertov to the Netherlands’ Joris Ivens and Johan van der Keuken to the American Godfrey Reggio. He mixes an observational style of shooting that eschews explanatory voiceover with a willingness to engage in cinema verité acts of incitement and reenactment. The films’ visual style combines long takes, bravura camera work, rich, saturated colors and a fascination with the edgy and the extreme. The striking nature of the images that result is reinforced by Glawogger’s choice of dramatic music from the likes of PJ Harvey and John Zorn.

Despite their aesthetic veneer, Glawogger’s films neither romanticize nor trivialize the lives of his subjects. On the contrary, his trilogy is nothing less than a quest to reveal their lives as difficult and complex, yet containing resonant moments of what Glawogger calls “human beauty” that humanize and enrich the films.

It is an inordinate pleasure to welcome Michael Glawogger to the Harvard Film Archive to present his extraordinary trilogy. – David Pendleton