Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death is a horrifying journey through the dregs of postindustrial globalization. Subtitled "5 Portraits of Work in the 21st Century," it presents several vignettes about working conditions around the world: men in the Ukraine slide on their bellies in abandoned coal mines–cum–death traps, chipping away at what remains of the Soviet experiment; men in Indonesia carry tons of sulfur down the side of a live volcano swathed in billowing yellow smoke, while tourists ask them to pose for photos; hell appears on earth in the middle of a Nigerian open-air slaughterhouse filled with greasy black smoke and the cries of the damned; and Pashtun men in Pakistan risk their lives cutting apart the rusted hulks of British freighters while a photographer charges them 20 rupees to pose with his AK-47.

Glawogger's film intends to remind us of the invisibility of hard labor in the 21st century: with everything so computerized and service-oriented, we might forget that somewhere, people are doing manual labor. Visually, technically, the film is undeniably a work of art, with all aspects—sound, editing, cinematography, music—coming together in a stunning symphony. Wolfgang Thaler's cinematography is humblingly beautiful. The seemingly endless steadicam shots seem to flow through their settings, be it a leisurely stroll down the volcano in Indonesia in pursuit of the hunched form of a worker carrying sulfur in wicker baskets, or a floating trip through the slaughterhouse, incredibly red blood splashing in gouts onto the ground as the halal butchers attempt to drain the goats and cows completely. John Zorn's propulsive score, heavy on echoing drums, and the sound mix immerse you even when you'd probably rather not hear so clearly.

These episodes feel like four of Dante's circles of hell, but the men—always men; where are the women? oh, they're in the kitchen (the people I saw this with insist that there are as many as three women among the miners, but I didn't see them)—seem reasonably happy. They're glad they can find work, they reminisce about their honeymoons, they celebrate retirement and marriage; they find time to sit and discuss Bon Jovi; they take pride in their work and their companions. They're mostly silent, because they're busy working, and the little dialog in the film is unobtrusive, as if the filmmaker didn't want to bother them too much with questions. There are no cuts to well-dressed experts in comfortable offices explaining what's going on, because we can see what's going on. Glawogger might have an agenda, but he chooses to let it be voiced by the situations he chooses, rather than by people in suits.

But that lack of an agenda was one of the problems for me. The filmmakers didn't try to get people to talk much about how they thought they fit into the global economy they were existing on the edge of, so we don't know what they think about it. Having experts in suits fill in the gaps would have detracted from the film, true, but there had to be another way of making that point. Without it you run the risk of fetishizing the squalor. All of that gorgeous cinematography and perfect editing lend more than a little support to the idea that that's what the film is doing. Parts of the film gave me the same uneasy feeling I get when I see gorgeous photographs of homeless people for sale in art galleries. I'm not fully convinced either way—I don't think the film was supposed to be just about arty shots of dirty faces, but there's a danger of it turning into that.

The lack of women, whether there were actually female miners, is troubling, and it lends some support to the idea that Glawogger was more interested in stark cinematography than in really exploring his topic. An honest portrayal of the killing fields of globalized labor would necessarily include women, and lots of them, working. I don't know what the numbers would be, but I'm pretty sure that around half of the world's workers are women, and many women probably do manual labor. But even without female laborers, you still have female sweatshop workers and female sex workers, just to name two groups. The fact that Glawogger was only interested in actual muscle-straining physical toil (as if those other kinds of work don't include muscle-straining physical toil) might mean that he wanted to limit the scope of his inquiry, but again, it might mean that he was only interested in work that photographed well. An interview with Glawogger in Cinema Scope doesn't really clear up this issue: Glawogger seems to ride the fence on it both in the film and away from it.

Despite its lack of a spoken agenda, there's a lot going on philosophically in this film, and I'm still trying to work through it. It was pretty brutal—like I said, four circles of hell. But then a sort of coda in China really baffled me. It features workers at a blast furnace mouthing platitudes about how much better things have gotten, but they were still working in a flaming hell of sparks and smoke. But that's not exactly true—they talk about how their kids wouldn't have to do what they are doing, and that seems to be supported by the two schoolkids dressed like Americans, talking about how they think statues celebrating the Chinese worker are neat, and sometimes they imitate the poses. Thus, is China's model the hope for the industrial world? Or is it just the best we can hope for? Even if you think those workers were deluding themselves, they were still in the least hellish of the five situations. A second coda, set in a Duisburg, Germany steel mill that has been converted into an amusement park, is even more ambiguous. Throngs of teenagers smoke, drink, and make out as a neon light show designed by "British light artist" Jonathan Park glows around them. A voiceover, apparently from a recording about the history of the park, asks us "Have we left anyone in the dark?" Is it just a joke, or is it saying something about the other five locations, which capitalist industrialization (or postindustrialization) have left in the dark metaphorically?

—March 6, 2006