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Take your camera to work day
A documentary filmmaker finds poetry in the American workplace.
From the earliest Lumière brothers actualités, movies have, in a sense, always been about the interest of watching people at work. With his Work Series—three installments of which will show this week at the Siskel—Chicago-based filmmaker Daniel Kraus aims to restore that kind of fascination to the ordinary.
Inspired both by Frederick Wiseman’s unobtrusive documentaries and Studs Terkel’s oral histories, Kraus has embarked on a project to record Americans from all regions and walks of life going about their daily routines. The exercise isn’t as dry or avant-garde as it might sound. Like Wiseman, Kraus doesn’t intrude on his subjects, but his films are shaped in ways that subtly editorialize and subvert our expectations. Since each episode focuses on a different person, this is a mission whose depth and significance necessarily deepen with each segment—and that could, like Terkel’s recordings or Wiseman’s investigations of the American institution, continue indefinitely.
To get an inkling of the breadth of the project, it helps to see more than one episode. The first is Sheriff, a portrait of Brunswick, North Carolina, lawman Ronald E. Hewett, the most camera-conscious of Kraus’s profilees. As likely to twang on about the nature of turkey droppings as he is to expound on the importance of the thin blue line, Hewett is also devoted to deflating the ostensible glamour of law enforcement. The first big crime bust we see finds Hewett taking down an illegal video-poker operation (“This is not a situation where we’re expecting to run into machine guns”). Later, he pauses an outdoor murder investigation to make sure his team has enough insect repellent. Does the camera conceal as much as it reveals? In 2008, four years after the documentary was finished, Hewett was convicted of obstruction of justice.
Less rich with incident, Kraus’s Musician observes Chicago jazz saxophonist Ken Vandermark as he composes, performs and travels, documenting everything from the inspiration that leads to the addition of a few notes to the trouble Vandermark has moving a bass amp outside of Schubas. In part because Kraus is unable to follow Vandermark farther than Canada (his world tour is cannily relayed in title cards), and in part because it’s difficult to depict what’s going on inside a musician’s head, this installment is less illuminating. The most engaging parts of the film are content to simply watch Vandermark rehearsing and riffing, enjoying the pleasures of his music.
The Work films also rise and fall on the charisma of the individuals they chronicle. It’s hardly a coincidence that the best of the movies showing, Professor, follows the person with the most specialized profession, as well as the most outsized personality. A rabbi with a Ph.D. (and a gun), Jay Holstein teaches Jewish studies at the University of Iowa. Both his students and his TAs are overwhelmingly non-Jewish and in some cases hostile to Jews—a challenge he discusses early on.
A paragon of tough-love run amok whose softest volume is shouting, Holstein is also the Kraus character least likely to pull his punches; talking with a student who dreams of entering the priesthood, he even risks offense. The film affords the pleasures of a good college course, but part of what makes it compelling is that, camera or no camera, Holstein (who will appear in person at the Saturday 15 show) has already rehearsed his performance for decades of students. “If left to our own devices, I would not be here,” he tells a new class on the first day. “This is how I make a living. If left to your own devices, you would not be here.” Thanks to the archival power of cinema, we will.
The Work films show through May 20. Buy tickets in tandem for a discount.
