James Quandt on Cyril Schäublin’s Troubles

HOW SWISS IS IT? Cyril Schäublin, who joins the Zürcher brothers as one of the leading authors of the first great wave of Swiss cinema since the heyday of Alain Tanner and Daniel Schmid half a century ago, appears determined in his first two features to demolish the myth of Swiss probity, particularly in the echt Schweizer fields of finance and industry. Schäublin made its brilliant debut with the ironically titled Those who are well (2017), about a young female call center worker in Zurich selling internet services to vulnerable elderly people – the ominous name of the provider is Everywhere in Switzerland – who, in her free time, extends her vocation to a more profitable business, posing on the phone as a relative in peril (or a friend of one) so that she can collect considerable sums from old dupes. The film equates the call center, buzzing with forced conviviality – “Selling with emotion! urges the team leader – with the pristine parks in which the unflappable woman performs her scams like analogous arenas of predatory capitalism. (A running joke about rampant forgetfulness, particularly among police, provides a metaphor for national amnesia.)

The film’s prelude, in which three characters converse in Arabic, one of which tells the story of the young woman’s fraudulent scheme, serves as a model for the pre-credits sequence of Schäublin’s even larger second film, Disorders (2022), set at the end of the 19th century. Here too, the characters converse in a non-Swiss language and draw the essential aspects of the main story, in which they will not play any role. Dressed in white dresses and elaborate bonnets, twirling parasols while drinking champagne from ever-filled crystal flutes, a group of Muscovite women discuss their cousin “poor Pyotr” – that is, Pyotr Kropotkin – who discovered anarchism (“like communism but without government”) during a trip to a Swiss valley. The opening sequences of both films feature equally striking compositions, the figures arranged at the bottom of the frame while the vast upper expanse of the image is given over to radiant nature, a swirling, sunny river in the first, a canopy of trees swaying in the latter. These strange configurations, which privilege the setting to the human, introduce one of the most distinctive visual styles of contemporary cinema.

“Are we in the picture here?” one of the russian women inquires about the photographers setting up their cumbersome equipment to capture an image of the group. All along Disorders, Schäublin used photography, which was widely used at the time, as a means of both resistance and control. Photographic portraits of famous anarchists, the more dangerous the better – “I like criminals”, exclaims a young admirer – sell like baseball cards, while the industry exerts its domination over local space by strictly supervising the production of images. When a bespectacled Kropotkin, a mild-mannered polymath and fledgling anarchist in a top hat and fancy suit, arrives in the Saint-Imier Valley in the Jura Mountains, his mission as a cartographer is to produce a radical new map of the region that “reflects the views of local people, unlike the administration and other authorities”, and includes places that have remained unnamed on official maps. Attempting to reach a site hitherto excluded from the plan standard, Kropotkin finds his passage blocked by two affable but unofficial gendarmes, who warn him: “Please don’t enter the picture. A promotional catalog for the watch manufacturer Centralines is in preparation, informs him and no one should encroach on his images; to do so, they imply, would amount to revolt. They escort a puzzled Kropotkin away from the company’s photographers and editors, one of whom proudly samples his latest pitch: “These days, you can’t imagine a man without a watch in his hand.” (Consider that selling with emotion.) The two highly polished policemen in their little black helmets, one tall and skinny, the other stocky and portly, might be cartoon characters, but are actually tools of control, tasked with keeping time on the city’s many clocks, another means by which the state wields power over daily life , taking into account in particular the four different time zones – municipal, local, factory and church – which delimit the sectors of authority in Saint-Imier. The duo also oversee elections, in which women and people with unpaid taxes or mental issues are not allowed to vote. More blatantly, the gendarmes serve as self-proclaimed propagandists for the company, informing Kropotkin that “we are in the midst of a sales crisis internationally, even globally. We have to fight against this. We must not let our foreign competitors win.

Schäublin’s visual style has no precedent and is unlikely to inspire imitators, so unique is his compositional singularity.

Schäublin has carefully studied Disorders, whose title refers both to the pendulum of a watch and to the working-class dissidence that shook the watch industry at the end of the 19th century. He draws on the academic histories of Saint-Imerian anarchism, as well as the memories of his grandmother and his great-aunts, who were once employed in watchmaking factories. The director was also inspired by Simone Weil’s film The working condition (1951), the French philosopher’s personal account of a year spent working in a steelworks, drawing inspiration in particular from Weil’s idea of ​​”cadence”, the rhythm of repetitive tasks which unites the body and the machine. However, as much as Disorders depicts the factory as oppressively watched, its hovering supervisors ominously timing employees, urging them to work faster to increase company profits, and asking them to measure transportation routes to improve efficiency, Schäublin’s depiction of the workplace almost contradicts Weil’s view of the factory as a dehumanizing environment where workers leave their souls at the door to suffer humiliation, “retraction of thought”, and feelings of worthlessness and of enslavement. On the contrary, mutual concern and camaraderie prevail among Swiss watchmakers, mostly women, and even those who resist their patron’s time and motion studies by slowing down manufacturing seem to take pride in their own precision. In this work of exultant humanism, Schäublin grants workers, gazing intently through magnifying glasses to assemble their complex machines, several ennobling close-ups.

Although Schäublin cited the silent films of Yasujiro Ozu and FW Murnau as cinematic influences, Pasolini comes more readily to mind in the Swiss director’s determination to employ non-professional cast, including, in Disordersreal watchmakers and “truckers, former criminals, architects, academics or carpenters”, and in the film’s beatifying galleries of their faces, recalling the “sacred framing” of the Italian master The Gospel According to Matthew (1964). One also thinks of the late choral films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, where political didacticism and neo-pantheist rapture merge miraculously; industrial films by Harun Farocki and his video installation Workers leaving the factory in 11 decades, 2006; and, occasionally, of Bresson in the intense close-ups of functional objects such as a primitive punch card machine. But Schäublin’s visual style, devised with cinematographer Silvan Hillmann, is unparalleled and unlikely to inspire imitators, so unique is its compositional quirkiness. In many exterior shots, Schäublin subjugates his figures to their setting, placing them deep in the frame, as in Kropotkin’s first picture, barely discernible in a mid-frame opening lined with eaves, a roof and a fireplace. Schäublin often locates figures at the far edge of the frame, bottom left or right, and tunes the vast remainder of the image to a wall, foliage, or street. In crowd scenes, it takes more than a moment to discern who is speaking, as the eye scans the image for a source. Less Brechtian than purely formal, Schäublin’s anomalous approach to composition, employed by a less intelligent director, could quickly degenerate into mannerism.

But Disordersthe rhythms seem pleasantly relaxed, even meandering, the film is symmetrically structured around Kropotkin’s arrival and departure and borders on the schematic in its contrast of groups and communities. Anarchist lottery in support of strikers in Baltimore and Barcelona offers prizes in the form of photo coupons and alarm clocks, while a lottery administered by an all-male mob of armed nationalists promises ten of the latest guns donated by the corrupt , always- smiling entrepreneur. Similar is the distinction between two opposing choirs, which provide the film’s only music: a patriotic anthem sung by armed men, hands over hearts, and a soulful anarchist plainsong performed by an all-female band that begins, “Bastard of the industry of the rich, the worker has neither hearth nor home”, and goes on to imagine “a republic of humanity”. While anarchists revere the memory of the Paris Commune and its emphasis on the equality of sexes, militarist nationalists are raising funds to re-enact the four hundred year old Battle of Murten, in which Switzerland conquered the Burgundians.

The moving finale of Disorders weaves its thematic motifs of photography, temporality and cartography, as Kropotkin and Josephine, a young agitator recently fired from the factory for belonging to the anarchist federation, walk through a forest together. (Although the two had previously stated, “I’m not a protagonist,” the two emerge from the large collective cast at the center of the film.) They are first stopped by a representative from “The City’s Pedestrian Traffic Management.” municipality” which measures time certain roads are taken by the film – another irony of the film on Swiss efficiency – and then by one of the gendarmes who, as he had already done when Kropotkin arrived in Saint-Imier, forbids them to go further: “Nobody can enter the frame” of the company’s photographers, he warns. This time, the pair rebel and continue, leaving the policeman whistling in helpless outrage. Suddenly, Disorders turns out to be the most oblique of love stories, as Kropotkin and Josephine travel through the forest and disappear into local legend. By the end of the film, their photographic portraits are among the most prized of any anarchist, their value rising rapidly from twenty centimes to one franc as a shrewd salesman appraises their value. Even the anarchists end up as objects of exchange on the cantonal market. not

Disorders opens May 6 at the Film at Lincoln Center in New York.

James Whent is a Toronto-based film critic and curator and editor of monographs on Robert Bresson, Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.