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The Unstable Object II (Daniel Eisenberg, 2022)
🕑 Added 2022-07-18 04:56:35 +0000 UTC
Clocking in at just under 3 1/2 hours, The Unstable Object II bears the subtitle, "contributions to a future archive." And indeed, there is a comprehensiveness in Eisenberg's film that suggests an attempt at fully documenting a set of industrial procedures, from beginning to end. This is a film in three independent parts, and while each of those parts has its own organic structure, Eisenberg refrains from articulating the relationships between the three parts. This is left to the viewer, which is fine since those connections and divergences are fairly difficult to miss.
Each of the three segments consists of the tracing of a manufacturing process, from design through fabrication and finally to point of sale. But the objects under scrutiny are highly diverse. Part one focuses on the German firm Ottobock, who are global leaders in the production of advanced prosthetic limbs. Part two moves to France, where we observe the inner workings of Maison Fabre, a high-end producer of gloves. And finally, part three takes us to Turkey and a clothing factory owned by the Realkom corporation. This particular unit produces blue jeans.
Despite the fact that each part of UO2 is around an hour long, with no narration or onscreen text, the film is consistently intriguing, and sometimes hypnotic. This owes almost everything to Eisenberg's meticulous editing, which subtly shapes an immense amount of material into rhythmic and conceptual patterns. In each segment, we alternate between wide-angle views of the shop floor and close-ups of the handiwork that actually produces the commodity. In fact, Eisenberg often shows us some aspect of the production process -- say, a worker at a station -- and then relegates them to the background of the next shot, focusing our attention on someone else. This generates a Cubist sense of space, allowing Eisenberg to clearly articulate the relationships among the various employees, while also emphasizing the inevitable "alienation" that comes with the division of labor.
The "how it's made" film has become a subgenre in itself, but there are certain historical touchstones that Eisenberg may assume we are familiar with. The films of Harun Farocki (to whom UO2 is dedicated) are the most recent example of this Marxist-materialist tendency, but we could go back further, to the experimental documentaries of Joris Ivens, Alain Resnais, and especially Dziga Vertov (whose Kino-Eye runs in reverse to show us the unmaking of meat, from grocer back to the cow). But none of these projects is as aggressively thorough as UO2, which appears to show us every imaginable aspect of the making of these specific things.
Eventually UO2 does become a bit exhausting, but that may be by design. Part one is by far the most compelling section, largely because the Ottobock designers and engineers are specialists, working closely on very particular parts of what is, ultimately, a medical process. We see a woman painstakingly layering latex strips of skin onto a thumb, sculpting it and building it up until it achieves the desired weight and texture. Even the purely mechanical parts of the production, like the assembly and testing of metal knees, displays a team of skilled specialists whose labor is much more than merely manual.
This element shifts a bit at Maison Fabre, since some parts of the glove production are streamlined (e.g., the cutting-out of lining) while others involve the precise performance of seamstresses, engaged in close, artisanal piece-work. The least engaging segment is part three, which documents a fully mechanized production system, where each worker is one of dozens in their division, and all are contributing to a mass-produced object that, compared with the gloves and prosthetics, are of very little value.
Despite the fact that UO2 invites comparisons among the three sections -- artisans vs. factory labor, Europe vs. Anatolia, masculine vs. feminine activity -- the film is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. Eisenberg's attempt at a totalizing vision of contemporary labor practice results in a relatively objective portrait of three moments in the global economy. But what is missing is a point of view, some final perspective beyond "those processes operate in this way." As the title tells us, UO2 is indeed a sequel to a 2017 film that documented the production of three different commodities: Volkswagens, wall clocks, and cymbals. So clearly The Unstable Object is a film that could conceivably go on forever. And with that endlessness, I think, comes a lack of context, which in turn generates its own instability.
