Salt of the Earth: Michael Glawogger on Workingman’s Death

By Christoph Huber and Olaf Möller

Despite the international festival success of his documentary Megacities (1998), Michael Glawogger so far has remained a maverick figure in the burgeoning Austrian film scene of the last decade, a fact that has probably less to do with his effortless back-and-forth between documentary and fiction than with his unique, free-spirited sensibility. Indeed, the fate of his last fiction film, Slugs (2004), a relaxed slacker comedy about a couple of students going for a fast buck by trying to produce cheap porn movies, may be emblematic of the situation: making good on the promise of Glawogger’s fiction feature debut, the very Viennese, blackly humourous ballad Ant Street (1996), it offered a comic sensibility decidedly different from the loud, but artistically totally negligible vehicles centred around Austrian stand-up comics that dominate the national “comedic” production. A considerable success at home, it was almost universally ignored elsewhere, very probably because it didn’t fit expectations. After all, the recent successes of Austrian cinema have, as in most other cases, produced certain clichés by association, and there seems hardly a film imaginable further from the depression and guilt hovering over the Haneke-Seidl spearheaded movement than Slugs, despite the fact that its plentiful humourous digressions hardly conceal a certain underlying sadness, compassionately revealing the deficiencies and delusions of its characters.

A similarly Glawoggerian spin will be put on the episodic urban drama, a mainstay of recent Austrian fiction, in Slumming (co-written with the inexhaustible Barbara Albert), which should hit the international festival circuit early next year. But first in a remarkable one-two punch that should finally and rightfully secure Glawogger’s standing is his outstanding new documentary Workingman’s Death, premiering in the Orizzonti competition at Venice before heading to Toronto, Vancouver, etc., with numerous other screenings undoubtedly to follow.

As in Megacities, Glawogger uses an episodic structure, here to explore five places where hard manual labour still exists. In Krasni Lutsch, Ukraine, men try to make ends meet by illegally digging in dangerous, abandoned coal mines, the only means of income left for the heirs of working heroes like Aleksei Stakhanov, still haunted by the shadows of proletkult past. (Glawogger pointedly opens the film with a montage of newsreel material describing Stakhanov’s legendary record.) In Indonesia’s East Java, sulphur gatherers make the long daily journey out of the volcanic smoke, down the hill, past nosy tourists, with some 150 pounds or more on their back. When pausing, their discussion topics range from friends recently having fallen into the crater to Bon Jovi (whose CDs they can’t afford). An open-air slaughterhouse in Port Harcourt, Nigeria is presented as a seemingly endless cycle of blood, death, and fire: cows and goats are killed, their cadavers and heads swiftly carried through the streets brimming with fires for immediate roasting. Shipbreakers in Gaddani, Pakistan dismantle a huge oil-tanker, with little else but welding guns in their hands to tackle the slowly disintegrating metal giant, the fall of an enormous piece of scrap only occasionally puncturing the silence surrounding the diligent, near-invisible process. (Soon after a huge piece of metal crashes down, a worker mentions that he is not afraid to die.). And in Anshan, China, steelworkers face an uncertain future, despite the official promises of a capitalist economic boom. The epilogue, set in Duisburg, Germany, where former smelting works serve as the basis of a 500-acre theme park with light shows gracing abandoned factory buildings, puts not only those promises into perspective.

Glawogger has pointed out that the invisibility of hard labour today—at least in Western society—was one of the main reasons to make the film: long gone are the iconized worker-heroes invoked by the opening newsreel footage. In contrast, Workingman’s Death achieves its power without resorting to the deliberate use of visibly staged scenes that led to charges of “aesthetication” in Megacities. It can be seen as a last hymn (thus, a John Zorn soundtrack) to the worker—Promethean allusions abound—but at the same time it is a chronicle of disappearance, not least of class consciousness, a moving and important contemporary document as well as another testament to its relentlessly globetrotting director’s universal curiosity.

CINEMA SCOPE: Your film opens with shots of Stakhanov working on his record, in the process becoming a proverbial hero of labour. What’s the source of this material?

MICHAEL GLAWOGGER: That’s complex. A lady from the Kiev film archive told me she tried in vain to get the original footage of Stakhanov’s record from the KGB archives. This material is the stuff of legends. Just look at the way Stakhanov works: if you’ve ever shot in a mine, you know this footage wasn’t shot during a record attempt! If you try to mine 102 tons of coal in one shift then there’s absolutely no time for anything else—and filming in an actual mine was technically almost impossible in those days! Dziga Vertov has written about that, and if you look closely at his films like Enthusiasm (1931), you’ll notice that there aren’t many shots inside a mine, mainly because of lighting problems—which still exist, because of the gases. The Ukrainians were pretty cool about this, we even went down with a small power engine once! In Germany they took the tiny batteries out of my Nikon for fear of an explosion!

It’s interesting to compare work-record footage: the material of Chinese icon Wang Jinxi kicking open some frozen reservoirs, thus saving oil fields, looks like it was shot on a sound stage. I don’t think Stakhanov’s record was shot in a studio, but the way it’s carefully lit…well, the record attempt was a set-up. The original footage probably no longer exists, so we “reconstructed” it out of many different newsreels, and in one instance even included video material found in a cellar in the city of Stakhanov, which looks really blurred on film, but I just couldn’t resist: it shows they tallied the amount of coal mined with measuring tape! I was like a squirrel collecting Stakhanov footage, I wanted to have every record of that record in my film! One main reason for making it was to show the act of working, especially its sensuousness. You hardly see that in films about workers. There’s this whole cult of the worker, more or less the same regardless of which ideology it’s supposed to serve, but real working is hardly shown in the films, just glimpses. Work is simply asserted. In Workingman’s Death I reverse things: it’s people at work and little else.

The newsreel opening is capped by a heroic march from Leonid Lukov’s A Great Life, Part I (1940), followed by a celebratory march from A Great Life, Part 2 (1958): the workers come out of the shaft, they’re celebrated, showered with songs of praise. They are like rock stars.

SCOPE: Your first of “Five Pictures of Work in the 21st Century” (per the film’s subtitle) is set in the remnants of Stakhanov’s world. But the work has to be done illegally, as the mines are closed.

GLAWOGGER: We started researching in the Ukraine because my earliest memories of the cult of the worker are linked to the name Stakhanov. Growing up, people told me, “Easy, boy, you go at it like Stakhanov,” meaning, “Don’t work so hard and fast.” All Stakhanovian heroes—Wang Jinxi probably excepted—were regarded with suspicion, even contempt: they pushed the limits into unreal dimensions. Stakhanov could only set his record because the whole shift was working for him! We interviewed an old Stakhanovite, one of the nameless heroes of work who followed, and he sat there, decorated with medals, saying, “You know, Stakhanov’s hands were twice as big as mine!” Now, that’s what I call a myth! It’s still alive in Ukrainian workers today. I asked one guy to assume a Stakhanov pose, saying, “You’re a hero, too,” but he denied it, saying “Stakhanov was so great, you can’t compare us to him!” But at night, after a few drinks, things certainly sound differently, they start to voice doubts.

SCOPE: When did the project get off the ground?

GLAWOGGER: About two years ago, tracing the sources of the Stakhanov myth. We went to the Ukraine to visit the world’s biggest mining site, only to find what is probably the most devastated place in Europe. It’s all gone. There was a mine in every village, three in every town, ten in every major city, but they’re all fucked up, full of gas or just abandoned. Only two or three model mines are still in use. It’s a major catastrophe. People are so desperate, they work in the state-owned mines for wages never paid: money only comes from work in illegal mines! They even “protect” mines, tinkering with the gas alarm, so they won’t be closed. Their lives are in constant danger. To think how this place is filled with a sense of history—in the late 80s, I think, they still co-financed a strike of their comrades in England—and now they’re all simply forgotten, worthless. In China it’s similar, but the Chinese don’t mind too much, they’re slowly, deliberately forgetting. When I asked, they tacitly avoided the subject. They weren’t too keen on showing us memorials, only interested in the glorious future ahead. Like West Germans and Austrians after WWII: We can do it, we are Volkswagen. It will work, but the question is: For how long and for whom? After exploring the source of myths and icons, we looked for places and occupations that haven’t had much filmic exposure.

SCOPE: One episode is devoted to a kind of work that’s iconic in the so-called Third World, but hardly thought of here: carriers.

GLAWOGGER: At the volcano in Java, again I stumbled over a certain presence of the past, but there it’s a sound whole, the past still alive in the present, while in the Ukraine there’s a visible, much-mourned break between past and present, a gap, even an abyss. The Indonesian episode starts like a mystical National Geographic special: a goat’s throat gets slit, they carry the carcass down, bury the head—they believe in ghosts, they shoulder their load. But at their first stop, they sit down and talk about whores! Then they’re talking to tourists, having their pictures taken. And at the destination, where the loads are weighed, the young ones chat about Bon Jovi. After seeing this, I got really interested in the carriage trade, even if people here have forgotten about it. Our carriers have been replaced by forklifts and such, except for movers, because there is no other possibility. But in Java, when I asked “Why do you still have people carrying 70-100 kilos of sulphur down a path for seven miles?” and they just looked at me incredulously: “Because it’s the cheapest way!” There’s always a simple cost-benefit calculation.

SCOPE: The Nigeria episode is quite different.

GLAWOGGER: Nigeria just happened to me, but by now I feel like it’s the central episode. The idea of death has so many layers there, it features happy workers who actually enjoy what they’re doing, because they’ve achieved a certain social status, something one wouldn’t think at first: the sensuous aspect of work I was looking for is extremely pronounced. Yet it’s among the hardest work I’ve ever seen: the way they shoulder these quarter-cows and run to the cars, 20, 30 times a day—we’d be crushed after the first run. And I love the circular motion that animates the whole place. They start in the early morning, chopping of the goats’ heads, then the carcasses get roasted, washed, skinned; carrying them away, the workers pass the cows on their way to get slaughtered—after which they’re skinned, quartered up, the heads get roasted, the roasted heads get carried to the cars, like with the goats.

SCOPE: There’s an extraordinary drive in the way the camera moves in this sequence.

GLAWOGGER: Yes, following a cycle of work that functions like a cycle of life. Death has a near-abstract presence onscreen. I love this part, it’s so physical, it really gets to me. It’s difficult to talk about it on an intellectual level. I want to make a stand-alone film out of it, about 70 minutes, hardly any words, just the cyclic motions. I think we have enough footage.

SCOPE: How about Pakistan?

GLAWOGGER: Again that was something we actively looked for. I wanted to have a segment that deals with the relationship between the so-called First and Third World, Us and Them. We send our trash, in this case, our ships, to be wrecked in a place that lacks certain resources, in this case, iron ore, and can make use of our waste as raw material. This was the most difficult episode to shoot. Greenpeace puts a lot of pressure on the three main places in South Asia (Alang in India, Chittagong in Bangladesh, and Gaddani in Pakistan), so they’re not exactly hot on having Westerners with cameras there. At first we couldn’t get permits. There were strong hints of international gunrunning in Chittagong, so I didn’t want to touch that. It has nothing to do with the subject of my film, things like that just get in the way. Alang had often been filmed, it’s the biggest place, they tell you exactly what you’re allowed to shoot. But Gaddani was perfect: it’s dying, with seven dockyards still in use out of 100. And they were about to wreck the second-biggest tanker on earth, the “Sea Giant,” the biggest ship ever disassembled by hand! I witnessed it all, it took from September till July, but because of permit problems we could only shoot the second half. At least I took pictures of some awesome sights, for the book I hope to do. It was stunning when the migrant workers from Bangladesh scraped off oil residues in the hull—the empty hull is 80 metres high, the people looked so tiny. The dimensions are mind-boggling, and difficult to film. I hope with the shot of this massive piece of metal falling down one starts to wonder, “How big is this, exactly?” It took us months to understand exactly how all the work is structured in this massive space, how it has to move with the tides. At first, we just stood around and nothing seemed to happen, but suddenly a huge part of the ship was gone!

SCOPE: You also tried to shoot in Austria’s VOEST steelworks?

GLAWOGGER: Yes, but again there were permit problems. As time went by, I said to myself, “Either Austria or China.” VOEST and the Anchan, where we finally filmed, are cooperating on some level anyway. In the end we were rejected because the Austrian steelworks wants to get rid of the heavy labour image, which is certainly telling, but a story for another film—something for Harun Farocki, maybe, heavy labour in search of a new image. And the Duisburg epilogue seemed enough in that direction. The leisure park in Duisburg is not as absurd as it may look in the film. It’s free of charge, a nice place to hang around and have a few beers. What’s disgusting there is this whole event culture: diving in a gas tank, guided tours with torches. I already hated shooting the Java tourists but that was necessary, and I even found a way. But a torchlight parade I just couldn’t shoot!

SCOPE: Although images of fire and celebrations seem to be a core of the film. There’s something heroically Promethean to it all.

GLAWOGGER: The worker as hero was a point of departure. There is still something undeniably heroic there, but nobody cares about it anymore. Now Beckham is that kind of hero, that’s the way things change. So be it, the construction of the worker icon was dubious, too. So I wanted to compose a hymn to the worker, but I didn’t want anything from him. We selected places where the images would be resonant enough: sulphur mists, giant, dying ships torn apart with tools of fire. I want people to feel the blow of a pick, the knife that cuts into the living flesh, the weight of the carcass carried away. Things just started to click. When they were burning tires, that was brilliant, I loved that the moment I saw it. Like Hieronymus Bosch. You have a red fire and a yellow fire. My DP always said that it’s a drama of colours: black-and-white Ukraine, basically devoid of colours although it was shot on colour stock; yellow-green Indonesia; red-black Nigeria; brown-blue Pakistan; orange China; and ending in an overkill of colours in the German present.

SCOPE: You shot two episodes very quickly, but the other three took time.

GLAWOGGER: Especially Pakistan. When we arrived to shoot we had to come to terms with the fact that the world had changed, including the way white men are regarded. A few years ago, busloads of tourists came to Chittagong or Gaddani, but by then, the Iraq War was in full swing. Ships were kept and pumped full of oil because nobody knew what to do with it, leading to a lot of cancelled wrecking contracts. We weren’t exactly welcome, and we had to persuade people that we weren’t Americans, and meant them no harm. Originally the segment was to be called “Farmers,” starting in a village, and only gradually it would have become clear that the farmers actually are shipyard workers.

We shot in the Northern Territory, where everybody thought Osama bin Laden was hiding! So we got a permit easily, but no protection. No police, no army, everybody was afraid of going there. We arrived in an ultra-fundamentalist area. It was impossible to film a single authentic image. When we wanted to shoot in somebody’s house, the guy was gone for five hours, veiling his family and hiding them behind a tree in some neighbour’s garden. We’d enter an empty house, be smiled at, and asked, “What do you want to film?” I could only reply, “Well, that’s what I would like to know!” So much for my concept. Additionally, the rumour was spread that we’d filmed a woman, so we literally had to run, and fast! Some of the stuff we managed to get was in earlier cuts. But it all looked so idyllic, it’s really one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about the way the women are treated there. They aren’t even allowed to have a passport picture taken, instead their man gives their finger print! So I couldn’t bring myself to have those idyllic images in the film.

SCOPE: The last episode in China is rather short.

GLAWOGGER: Intentionally, I wanted to have a buffer between Gaddani and Duisburg—jumping straight there from Pakistan felt too weird. There was more Duisburg material, girls talking about making-out and relationships, but in the end we constructed the two parts as a “split episode” about the future—the one to be seen in Duisburg the Chinese have no idea of yet!

Also, the Chinese are world champions of passive as well as active resistance, always telling you to go ahead, but when you’re about to start, they try to delay. Also, everybody’s told exactly what to say. I mean, nobody would complain, there’s no reason, economically speaking everything’s quite fine—but also cutthroat to the core. People are working like mad, at the same time thousands are laid off. Huge factories get razed.

SCOPE: As witnessed by Wang Bing in Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003).

GLAWOGGER: That’s all gone. Wang had the major advantage of being Chinese, so nobody would really stop him from shooting, He didn’t even bother with permits. Our Chinese photographer also walked around freely. During pre-production we learned that we could also get away with almost anything if we were persistent. It was tough to get these five minutes! But I got stuff like the blast furnaces from the 20s or 30s, made by the Japanese. The Chinese are trying to hide them, embarrassed by what they see as their backwardness! These furnaces and the Nigerian segment: I’m sure nobody has ever filmed this. Even if I’d made a film about space travel, I’d have put those images in!

SCOPE: How would you describe your documentary method?

GLAWOGGER: It depends on the place and the story I want to tell. For instance in Indonesia the structure is very precise, but each element needed a different approach. The sacrifice we shot pretty straight-on. Then, in “The Kitchen,” as the sulphur place is called, we again took a no-nonsense approach, we’re close behind the guy and running with the Steadicam—which is usually not a documentary tool, but the only way to make the sense of walking tangible. You wouldn’t hear those squeaks if the camera wouldn’t glide, nor that particular rhythm, the inner choreography of this work. Next, the dialogues: I jotted down what the workers were talking about during their breaks, then asked the foreman who would be most suited to talk about whores. They talked about whores all the time! Next, we got 20 men for the big scenes where all are running, our local advisor coordinating their movements, telling them to just sing the way they always do. I have no idea why they gave us these 20 men for a whole week; the guys themselves were happy because they got five rupees more from us. Anyway, in essence they do exactly what they’d do if we weren’t there. At last we filmed the tourists, vérité-style.

Nigeria was the opposite, with no control possible. If you bring a camera, all hell breaks lose, people ask for money. The first three weeks we simply ran around, mostly hearing, “Ha, white man, what do you want?” After many arguments we were accepted, but on the first day of shooting we realized that the work happens way too fast—it starts at five in the morning and at one p.m. it’s all over. Nobody would stop for a different angle, let alone an interview; after all, they’re paid per head roasted or quarter-cow carried. So we relied on the fact that every day things happened exactly the same way: some guy put a goat on this spot, he’d put another there tomorrow. We worked our way through that cycle, basically filming the same things again and again for 12 days. And whenever someone took a rest we’d get him for an interview.

Workingman’s Death is more classical than Megacities. The scene in Megacities with the street hustler selling air pussy—you could never film that for real, even if the hustler was willing, nobody would stop for him. So, after I’d found a hustler, I did a casting and had actors with him and improvised. That really stretches the idea of documentary filmmaking to its limits, but it’s as close an approximation to what would actually happen as possible.

SCOPE: Originally, you tried to work with original music.

GLAWOGGER: Yes, and for quite some time I tried out modernist classical music; Stockhausen worked very well, “Kreuzspiel,” and another piece. But Stockhausen seems to think he is God, so I couldn’t afford that. Nor the wonderful end credits with lots of material from Joris Ivens’ Song of the Rivers (1954) cut to the Rolling Stones’ “Salt of the Earth”; when I asked, the reply email just read: “We are not interested in having this song in your movie.” Too bad, it was like it was written for my film.

SCOPE: What else got lost on the way?

GLAWOGGER: We had a list of places and occupations, from Tanzanian mining to tunnel construction in Switzerland, a very “modern” kind of work. The Brazilian mines from Koyaanisqatsi (1983). That I didn’t mind—the sulphur mines were shown in several films, but certainly not the way I did. I responded to something there, I didn’t find that in Brazil. The Tanzanian mines would have yielded similar results to Ukraine, with less historical resonance, and so on. One place I absolutely wanted was a canning ship in the Bering Sea: 800 women on one ship, fishing and canning, this unity intrigues me. But I wasn’t sure about having another segment in the former USSR, and filming on these boats is a logistical nightmare. Just getting there: either you leave with the workers before the freeze or get lowered from a chopper. Well, next time!

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