In a 1998 piece for October, the former Cahiers du Cinema editor Jean-Louis Commolli (with translator Annette Michelson) wrote that work and cinema were fundamentally incompatible, though inextricably entwined. Citing the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) as the originary example of how doggedly film will avoid depictions of work even as it broaches sites where work takes place, Commolli all but argued that this turning-away-from-labor is filmic technology’s inaugural gesture. Like a factory’s wide threshold, film delimits the space between work and play. For him, this is a good thing. When films do attempt to depict labor, he argued, as in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), they end up making one thing look too much like the other. That is to say: in cinema’s soft hands, hard work too often becomes pleasurable, ludic, and easy.
Commolli went on to suggest that the best way of resolving this issue would be to privilege the work of filmmaking over the work being filmed. Only then, he wrote, might the “work of spectacle […] replace the impossible spectacle of work.” But the other option, to my mind, would be to remove some of the pleasure from the cinematic encounter entirely. Commolli and his ilk (apparatus theorists, generally) will say it can’t be done, but Commolli and company never spent six days in Cinema Village’s dim basement mainlining films focused on the dehumanization of migrant workers in Western Europe or the depletion of early childhood educators in California’s East Bay. I love to do this: sit in the dark, watch movies, prepare to write about them later. I don’t find it easy, per se, but nor do I find it hard. Still, sitting in the dark at the 13th season of Workers Unite! Film Festival last month, I never forgot, even for a moment, that I was working, too.
This realization—summed up by the old adage: if you work for a living, you’re a worker—is part of WUFF’s guiding ethos. It’s a credit to WUFF that its prodigious slate of shorts and features is not always enjoyable, though it is never without merit. Begun in 2012 by executive director Andrew Tilson, a Murphy Institute grad and entertainment industry worker with longtime ties to the labor movement, WUFF is committed to showcasing films that promote “global labor solidarity.” That objective is only half-met by making labor “visible” (whatever that might mean) on the silver screen. The festival, which is backed by a slew of union locals and runs online programs year-round to expand its reach, is as interested in galvanizing workers’ collective actions as it is in depicting them. “That’s really my whole goal,” Tilson said, “to get those people who are scared, nervous, unsure, for whatever reason, to the point of saying: ‘Let’s organize.’”
Still, though shadowed by the pall of the election, this year was defined more by pervasive optimism than by fear or anxiety. The program notes credit 2023’s “Hot Labor Summer” for paving the way for a “dramatic and positive Labor Year,” referring to the uptick in pro-union sentiment that followed on the heels of successful strikes across the entertainment, healthcare, and auto industries. At the end of the festival’s opening night feature, Barbara Kopple’s oddly toothless Gumbo Coalition (2022), civil rights leaders Marc Morial and Janet Murguía cite Martin Luther King Jr.'s assessment of the long arc of the moral universe: it bends toward justice. The majority of the documentaries included in WUFF’s roster offered slight revisions on this statement. For them, the long arc of both the moral universe and of narrative bend invariably toward unionism. White collar workers run an unexpectedly successful organizing campaign in Out of Office (2024); Starbucks workers come together, again and again, in The Empty Chair (2023); the heavyweight firemen’s union reconsolidates its power in the face of privatization in Fire Department, Inc. (2023). Many of these battles are narrated in hindsight, via straight talking heads, with little opportunity to see the work of organizing itself. Still, engaged Q&As, often attended by members of the unions on screen, prompted reflection on these tactics while welcoming insight into the filmmaker’s formal choices. A particularly strong showing from Canadian Union of Public Employee, the central focus of Bargaining Forward (2024), and New Labor New Jersey, the organization at the heart of No Somos Máquinas (2024), saw an impromptu New Brunswicks’ labor summit unfold at Cinema Village, which had its own successful union drive in April of this year. If the early childhood educators of Make a Circle (2024) hadn’t won a bold new contract with the state, someone wondered, how else might the directors have chosen to end the film? They were very lucky, was the essence of the reply. Who ‘they’ were, the workers or the filmmakers themselves, wasn’t entirely clear.
For Tilson, the hope telegraphed by many of this year's happy endings still feels fresh. “When we started out,” he told me, “the old joke was ‘Who wants to go to this festival? It’s depressing. They always lose.’” But for this viewer, the collapse of hard-fought battles into pat resolutions began to grate as much or more than the losses did. Far be it from me—a labor organizer’s daughter—to complain of a world in which the Union feels inevitable, but a story like Starbucks Workers United’s, for example, feels unsuited to any cheery packaging; the work simply isn’t done yet. (Case in point: in the documentary, committed young workers detail the success of their store-by-store organizing efforts while continuing to refer to each other by the backhanded corporate nomenclature, “partners.”) I understood Commolli best when it felt like the toil of organizing was being reduced to more anodyne standards of cinematic satisfaction.
Still, for every tired upbeat beat, there was a glimmer of some wily ingenuity, the kind that’s born when fed-up people are of a mind to just do something. WUFF is as much an incubator as it is an exhibition-space (its annual activist filmmaker’s boot camp begins Saturday, November 9th), and Saturday night’s shorts slate featured a slew of early-career directors exploring their chosen medium both as and in relation to work. Ella Harmon’s How May I Help You? (2023) coiled real call center workers’ stories into fictional episodes without losing their original voices, which were strung between scenes by images of telephone wires (Ludovico Ferro’s 2023 feature, Interview at Sea , which I had to miss due to my own work schedule, reportedly featured a similar balancing act). Russell Goldman’s Burn Out (2024), for its part, told an absurdist body-horror tale of breakneck corporate overachievement, filmed—where else?—in the empty offices of the now defunct short-form streaming platform, Quibi.
Elsewhere, the documentaries, too, moved away from rote talking-head recitations to sustain investigations into the labor of their own making. Lucile Coda’s Qu’est-ce Qu’on Va Penser de Nous? (2024), which screened on Monday, October 28, is a gimlet-eyed examination of how its young director’s blue-collar parents dealt with her choice to abandon a stable career in business for a shot at making art. Filmed with a delicate affection for rural France’s good light and better vistas, it features an early scene in which pointing a camera at the world is framed as a counterpoint to carrying out, or even supporting, the labor done within it. “Can you stop that,” Coda’s father asks, as she shoots him and her mother loading up heavy wooden timber in a sun-dappled clearing, “and come help us instead?” An inverse aesthetic impulse is at work in Apolena Rychliková’s Limits of Europe (2024), as journalist Saša Uhlová carries out the cinematic version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001), recast in Western Europe’s precarious migrant labor market. Critiques of Ehrenreich's earlier project still apply here, but they’re all but forgotten as that work of voyeuristic journalism is translated into a deranging cinematic grammar, courtesy of the hidden camera tucked into the glasses Uhlová wore while working fruit farms, cleaning hotel bathrooms, and caring for the elderly. The result is literally jarring—labor realized as unstable, relentless movement—and perhaps the best rejoinder yet to Commolli’s fear of the apparatus imparting grace unto the working gesture.
Near the end of his ‘98 piece for October, Commolli wrote that “cinema breathes new life into the exhausted world.” He meant that, under certain circumstances, cinematic representation can take over from reality—or, maybe more optimistically, come to reshape it. One of Saturday night’s shorts, Adidas Owns the Reality (2024), understood this well. The micro-doc covers a PR stunt pulled by the Yes Men and the Clean Clothes Campaign at the Berlin Fashion Week in 2023, which was meant to force Adidas to acknowledge their abuse of Cambodian garment workers. The film is part of that project—one aspect of an ongoing effort to humiliate the company into paying its workers the backpay they’re owed. An audience member asked director Keil Troisi how they’d managed to prank a mega-corporation without getting sued. “Easy,” Troisi replied, “they know it would make a really great sequel.” At its best, then, this is a festival that knows organizing is hardly ever the end of anything, even after the cameras stop rolling. More than any one film or single union vote, it’s the sense of slow, nonlinear progression across movements, countries, and stories that argues for returning to WUFF, year after year, online or in person. It does us good to be reminded, weary as we may be, that the work, inexhaustibly, continues.
Workers Unite! Film Festival 2024 ran from October 18-24. An encore screening of Gumbo Coalition takes place this evening, November 4, at Cinema Village. Director Barbara Kopple will be in attendance for a Q&A, along with civil rights leaders Marc Morial and Janet Murguía.
