One of the most effect­ive and real­istic depic­tions of manual work in cinema is found in a scene in the avant-garde film Pravda (1970) by Jean-Luc God­ard (offi­cially by the Groupe Dziga Vertov), well-described in Monaco (1976). This is a short piece about the events in May 1968 in what was then Czechoslov­akia. Whereas most people in Bri­tain and the USA saw the upris­ing as gal­lant little Czechs mak­ing a bid for free­dom from the Soviet Empire, God­ard took a more crit­ical line, as did the French Com­mun­ist Party. For them, the upris­ing was a bour­geois human­ist one based on pro­mot­ing the illus­ory indi­vidual freedoms of cap­it­al­ism. A stern marx­ist (Maoist in places) com­ment­ary makes up the soundtrack while the cam­era shows a clandes­tine series of scenes of life in Czechoslov­akia. God­ard him­self later dis­missed the piece as ‘Len­in­ist garbage’.

The film also has a ped­ago­gic point to make. Most doc­u­ment­ar­ies of the time, includ­ing the ones we saw on Brit­ish TV on the Czech rebel­lion, worked really hard to make their depic­tions seem real­istic. In the pro­cess, they repro­duce an ideo­lo­gical ‘real­ity’, for marx­ists. One way to show this ideo­lo­gical effect is to break the usual con­ven­tions, which is what Pravda does in a determ­ined way. In the most-often quoted scene, some Czech work­ers appear on screen, speak­ing Czech. No sub­titling or dub­bing is provided for the viewer, unlike in the usual doc­u­ment­ary – ‘Vladi­mir’ tells ‘Rosa’ ‘If you don’t speak Czech, you had bet­ter learn fast!’

The work scene is also dis­turb­ingly unusual (for­ward to 46min 30 seconds in this ver­sion). We see a young man tend­ing a large rotary cut­ting machine in the Skoda fact­ory (which made weapons as well as cars, the com­ment­ary reminds us). The machine cut­ters move slowly up and down the piece they are work­ing on. We get extremely noisy nat­ural sound. There are no edits or shifts in cam­era pos­i­tion, and no other sound for 5 or 6 minutes(a very long time in cinema). The worker tends the machine, lub­ric­at­ing it occa­sion­ally, but largely just watch­ing it as it does its job. There are no ear defend­ers, no guard rails, and no other work­ers to talk to. After a couple of minutes, we are all long­ing for it to end.

My stu­dents often nom­in­ated this scene as the most annoy­ing and chal­len­ging in the whole of a very unen­joy­able film (but it did them good!). That was the whole point, of course. They found 5 minutes enough, so what of the poor guy who spent 8 hours a day doing that?

Ref­er­ences

  1. Monaco, J ( 1976) New Wave: Truffaut, God­ard, Chab­rol, Rohmer, Riv­ette Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press.