Calendar – Past Event

GHOSTSCAPES
Ghosted places. Lost cities. Haunted topographics. Landscapes pocked, transformed, destroyed - by deindustrialization, environmental catastrophe, military attack, capitalism. The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture's sixth season presents a series of avant-documentaries and psychogeographical cine-essays that explore the poetics of dislocation.

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WORKINGMAN'S DEATH (dir. Michael Glawogger, 2005), 122 mins.

WHEN: 6.30pm, Wednesday 18 November 2009
WHERE: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square (Bowery and East 5th)
ALL WELCOME. Refreshments provided.

WORKINGMAN'S DEATH is a retina-scalding panorama of the wretched of the earth. It is an infernal travelogue though a lonely planet populated by gangs of workers, Promethean in their heroism and sorrow, whose manual graft is invisible to modern society.

In the Ukraine, men crawl for hundreds of yards through freezing and abandoned mines, to hack and scrape for shards of coal. Lilliputian shipbreakers in Gaddani, Pakistan, try to dismantle the world's second-biggest oil tanker armed with little more than welding guns. In East Java, matchstick-thin men descend into volcanic craters to retrieve shoulder-crushing sulphur loads that they then lug down stony paths for several miles. The outdoor slaughter houses of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, recreate the sanguinary inferno of a Bosch painting. Meanwhile, in Anshan, China, steelworkers tremble as they wait for news about their uncertain futures.
Michael Glawogger is part of a group of Austrian film-makers, others include Ulrich Seidl and Nikolaus Geyrhalter, who between them have produced some of the most fierce, forensic and shocking anthropologies of late modernity. WORKINGMAN'S DEATH, a document about obduracy and disappearance, is as mesmerizingly beautiful as it appalling. An emotional stun gun, replete with score by avant-jazz pioneer John Zorn, it is a modern masterpiece.

WORKINGMAN'S DEATH will be presented by Angela Zito. She writes, teaches and curates at NYU where she is a member of the Anthropology Department and the Religious Studies Program. She co-founded and co-directs the Center for Religion and Media and has co-produced the biennial documentary film festival Reel China for several years. She writes about media and mediation, starting with embodied gesture which has led her through footbinding and Chinese imperial ritual, to theology in TV series. Her current project is an ethnography and documentary called ‘Writing in Water', produced in Beijing and featuring calligraphy in public places.
http://www.angelazito.com/