Michael Glawogger. Portrait by Fabrizio Maltese for europeanfilms.net

Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger (Graz, Austria, 1959) gave the documentary world a new jumpstart in 1998's Megacities, a twelve-part look at life in the world's biggest metropolis.His new documentary Workingman's Death, a five-part look at manual labourers around the world, premiered at the 2005 Venice Film Festival to great acclaim and soon after started making the rounds of cinemas around the world. It is currently playing in Italy and Germany. Lensed with panache, the documentary looks at mine workers who dig out coal in an officially closed mine in the Ukraine, sulphur carriers on an Indonesian volcano, labourers at an open-air abattoir in Nigeria, workers who dismantle a ship into heaps of scrap metal in Pakistan, employees at a steel plant in China, and an almost post-apocalytic epilogue set in a converted steel factory in Germany. Boyd van Hoeij sat down with the director to discuss his new film.

How did the idea of Workingman’s Death come about and how was it scripted?
That is always a tough question because there never is that one moment that you wake up one morning and think: I will make a documentary about workers. It is a much longer process. When I grew up, I was always watching movies and they were often about workers, and they were the heroes. My parents would tell me things like “honour the worker” and we would watch them on television. One day I realised we did not see them anymore. Where had they gone? Was everybody just selling everything to everybody, or how else does the world work today? Like in the 1970s, all the foreigners would come to Austria to do the shitty jobs because no-one would do them, and you knew that many big companies would go to the third world to get the shitty jobs done, but what interested me where the workers like the miners who go underground, the slaughterers and the steelworkers. Maybe because I lost them from my vision; from the movies and from television, I got curious about what had happened to those people.

How did you decide on the five specific types of workers you portray: the illegal miners, the sulphur carriers, the slaughterers, the steelworkers?
Actually, I didn’t answer your last question about the script fully. You have an idea; I wanted to start with Aleksei Stakhanov, the big hero from Stalinist times. So you go to this place, and there you will find what you never expected. Everything you wrote beforehand, before you wrote your proposals and got your money, you could throw that away. And when you start filming, the film starts dictating its own form; you planned to go from place one to place two, three, but when you have filmed something at place one you know you will have to cancel place three. I went to Nigeria to research oil workers, but I ended up at the slaughterhouse, so the script does not develop like a fiction film at all. Perhaps the process started when I was in high school and did a student job, and it ended only when the film was finished. Documentaries are a very much a living thing. You could start with a specific idea and go out and film in the world anything that proves it, but that is not really my style. I prefer to let myself go, with the theme, with the people and the places.

How did you organise the work with the crew on the various “sets”?
Well, that depended heavily on the location. Working on the volcano [in Indonesia], it was pretty clear that the voyage would go from point A, where they get the sulphur, to B, where they weigh the sulphur. Everything that happens to them happens along this path. The talking, and the tourists that came and took pictures of them, the weighing itself. So the path was clearly set out, and the shoot was likewise very structured. When you compare it to Nigeria, that was a completely wild shoot. You had all this motion: the goats and cows would come in the morning, the goats would be killed, the cows would be killed, the goats would be roasted… And you could never ask anyone to do anything again because they have so much work to do. But since the work is always the same, we tried to shoot it from different angles on different days. So every shoot had different problems. In Pakistan, you had to be at the right place at the right time. These ships disappear, but no-one really knows where and how. The crew was not so big: five to seven people I brought to the country [were we would be filming] and some I hired in the country [itself]. The shoot in Pakistan [where the hull of the ship is separated from the back], we shot with three cameras, but normally we shot with two, one normal and a small camera, though we did not use them together all the time.

The aesthetics of the film are very cured and well thought-out, which is a big contrast with the subjects you are showing.
I don’t actually think so. Beauty or something you would call beauty or aesthetics would not come out of itself. Something is not beautiful because of nothing. Sometimes people are scared of beauty in strange things; beauty in death, beauty in horror. Things like that are also beautiful and that is sometimes disturbing. But I did not “make” anything beautiful. It is just that the world looks like that and I work in terms of cinematography, with which I am very comfortable. So if there is beauty in this blood, in dying animals, then it is because there is beauty in death and in the setting and surrounding people. The strange thing is when you are in Nigeria, it may look like a Hieronymus Bosch painting but the people there are really happy; they have a good job and Nigerians are quite a happy people.

But certainly you are composing your images, thinking about how to frame it, from where to shoot it, rather than just pointing the camera at your subject “Dogme” style?
Nobody works Dogme style, or if they say they do they are either sloppy or lying. [Laughs.] You know, that is the work of a filmmaker; that is what you do. You see something and then you say: “Well, let’s shoot it like that, because then the guy is really in the frame, then we see what he talks about, then we see the head that he is carrying”. That is my work, and I cannot neglect it. If I ignore it I can call it Dogme or whatever but then I am just not doing my work. Sometimes I also get the notion that people think this is an aesthetic film because for so long they have not seen a film that was shot on film. You have all these video images nowadays in documentary filmmaking that have been blown up to cinema size and people got used to this quality. When you see something on film again, it has a warm, old-fashioned feeling, and a type of quality that perhaps you are not used to anymore.

For many people, the Nigerian section is the hardest to watch, with all the slaughtering, the blood and dying. Your previous documentary Megacities also had elements that did not shy away from this brutal aspect of society, though to a lesser extent. Why did you consciously choose to include this?
The slaughtering business is one of the really old, almost mythological hearts of the workers’ history. The whole American nation was based on real hard workers that mostly came from Poland, who were slaughterers. Like the big slaughterhouses in Chicago. LikeUpton Sinclair, who wrote his first socialist novel about slaughter workers in Chicago [called] The Jungle. Because of this history, I had the idea to film the slaughtering sequence in the United States, but I did not succeed to visit the slaughterhouses, most of them in Kansas now, for research reasons, let alone film there. I almost gave up on this slaughtering idea until I found these places in Nigeria and to be honest, I would have filmed them even if I were making a film about astronauts! [Laughs.] It is something that tells a lot about humankind and the eating of fellow creatures, but that being something completely normal. When people get offended by it, just because they have become alienated from the normal processes of life and what we are about, then that is not my problem.

This revulsion would of course be from a Western point of view. In fact, you have finally not shot anything in the West except for the ending, but in every section you can sense the presence of the West, as if it were the elephant in the room that no-one dares to talk about.
When Nigerian people see the Nigerian section, they only complain if someone does not do a killing right, or if a recipe that someone gives is not correct from their point of view. You know, for them [all the rest] is so normal that they wonder why I even film this. It is an interesting observation about the presence of the West always being there. I had never thought about it to that extreme, but it is true.

Did you show the various segments to the people featured in those segments?
Yes; the sulphur workers saw their section at a film festival in Jakarta, for which I flew them in and Nigerian co-workers saw the film in Austria when we were working on it. The reactions were very different than from the Western audiences; like the recipe mentioned earlier, the subjects that came up were things the Western audience would never talk about.

What do you think of the Austrian documentary boom? In films such as Erwin Wagenhofer’s We Feed the World, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread), Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare and your own work, there seems to be a great interest in the effects of globalisation and food?
I don’t know. Mainly the Austrian documentary film tradition has really taken off since the 1980s, when people started to go to the cinema again and television started leaving documentary formats aside, or only doing them in mind-blowingly stupid 20- or 40-minute formats, so the audience had a need to see other images. Why my colleagues treat the subjects they treat I don’t know; sometimes something is in the air; this is probably the case here. 

You have stated that you want your documentaries to reach the “normal” crowds beyond the festival-goers, yet you have opted for a format which does not include a more traditional voice over narration or commentary. 
I don’t think that having a commentary is a traditional tool. I don’t think I am leaving a commentary away, but simply that I have chosen not to put one in. If it works what you do and you can catch the audience, even when it is difficult, you either succeed or you don’t. It is not a question of the commentary. When a 20-year-old goes into this film and even when he sleeps for 20 minutes during the film, I still think he will come out of it with some images that he has never seen before and that he will not forget. I am not going to comfort him with a commentary that makes him forget the film as soon as he leaves the cinema. My film is not a leaflet and will never be one; they are something else. I am relying on the basic tools of filmmaking and editing: making images. I would never in a documentary insinuate something or say something that I cannot show.

How would you define your filmmaking philosophy?
I’m a person who is very curious about life and goes everywhere. My films are about looking. It is as if you walked through a city and you were actually looking around you rather than in your guidebook. I am not interested in preaching or having a slogan like “go out and save the world” or something like that. They are just about looking and I think that if you will look closely at my films, you will see some things differently.

 The DVD of Workingman's Death is available from distributor Paul Thiltges Distribution.