Who Watches Watchmakers?
Monitoring and Measurement of Workers in the Mountain City of Late Century Swiss Watchmaking Factory is the second feature film by Swiss director Cyril Schäublin Unrest core focus. Premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, where Shebring won Best Director, and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, this subversive little film is ostensibly a portrait of everyday life in a village, but the reflections it provokes are different. Subsequent to the nature of structured time and relentless capitalism, and how the two work together to create fiction that makes our lives tyrannical.
Don’t be fooled by the film’s muffled voices, brooding serenity, and unwavering politeness; as the title suggests, something is going on in this idyllic setting. The region was the brewing center of the late 200 international anarchist movement, at a time when Swiss watchmaking was already a global powerhouse.
We see the watch and stopwatch How the invention forever changed the notion of work, not just a fixed schedule, but the strict time discipline that comes with it. The turbulence, which happens to be the name of the balance wheel inside the watch, is part of the mechanism that makes the watch tick, and the factory workers (mostly women) who do it work on their time because of how quickly they assemble delicate machines. Middle management works tirelessly to optimize workers and determine the ideal travel routes within the factory compound.
Outside of the factory, the town itself is governed by municipal time, local time, factory time, and church time, all for mere minutes. A malfunction of the new telegram linking them to the outside world—at least one of the four times it was programmed in this way—provoked a small timing crisis. When the factory manager casually proposed to use the factory time, a townsman sniffed: “Adjust the meter according to the factory time? You are crazy.” Photos of the deceased. Photography—another novelty of the time—was also a timekeeper, capturing and preserving fleeting moments. A couple traveling to a neighboring town was asked to carry a stopwatch while walking a specific route, recording their walking speed and time as part of a project to determine the fastest walking route. For their trouble – if they return the watch untouched – they will be paid very little. Even the hour off work is still somehow on the clock.
