Sisyphean Unproductivity in Narrative Film

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between labour, productivity and film. The purpose of this intervention is to suggest that narrative film can show us the unproductive tendencies that humans carry within them but that cannot always make themselves known. These leisurely desires erupt as musicality, ecstasy, and the undoing of the self when we carry out the repetitive gestures of work. This article compares Camus's freedom and Georges Bataille's sovereignty as they share an interest in anti-futurity and anti-productivity and it uses these concepts to propose worker's ecstatic escapes from labour as Sisyphean unproductivity. Using this theoretical framework, I carry out a comparative and formal analysis of Sisyphus (Marcell Jankovics, 1974), Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), The Apartment (Billy Wilder,1960), Saut ma ville (Chantal Akerman, 1971) and Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000). While the field of film studies has highlighted the role of cinema as a tool for propagating ideologies of productivity, the scenes examined suggest that film also has a history of subverting ideologies of productivity through repetitive, Sisyphean unproductivity. By updating the plight of the Greek hero to 20^th and 21^st century capitalism, these directors uncover a fundamental, yet impossible, human desire for non-productive activities This re-centering of the unproductive could be useful in future academic re-categorizations of the working class through its desires to not work, that is, it provides preliminary materials for understanding class identities through their deformation, and not just their formation.

In the classic tale of Greek Mythology, Sisyphus is a man who has been punished by the gods of Mount Olympus to push a rock up a hill, only for it to fall back to the bottom every time he reaches the top. "And then, in his painful torment, I saw Sisyphus striving with both hands to raise a massive rock," writes Homer in the Odyssey. "He’d brace his arms and feet, then strain to push it uphill to the top. But just as he was going to get that stone across the crest, its overpowering weight would make it change direction. The cruel rock would roll back down again onto the plain. Then he’d strain once more to push it up the slope" (Homer, 2007, Book 11). There are differing explanations for the source of Sisyphus' plight. According to one account, the king and founder of the city of Ephyra was sentenced to his laborious toil because he divulged that Zeus had Aesopus' daughter and used the knowledge to convince the latter to give water to his citizens (Apollodorus, 1921, 1.9.3). According to others, he was punished for chaining Death, thereby preventing him from claiming souls. In another other explanation, Sisyphus was punished because he tried to stay amongst the living after Hades had given him permission to return to life, only temporarily, to chastise his wife. Angered by this rebellion, Hades sent his messenger Mercury to retrieve Sisyphus back to the underworld. All of these accounts share a depiction of Sisyphus as a vitalist, life-loving hero: his only sin was trying hold on to life. So, the gods devised a sentence that would befit his crime: the dreadful punishment of "futile and hopeless labour" (Camus, 1995, p.11). It is at the top of that hill, right before Sisyphus has to walk down to repeat his job, that Albert Camus takes an interest in him. While the French author recognizes the abjection of this punishment, he also believes that it could be the source of his victory too. Camus (1991) writes that Sisyphus

The absurd, then, refers to a relation between humans and the world in which the former come to accept that that latter is irrational and inescapable. The absurd is born from the "confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world" (Camus, 1991, p.28). What's more, he believes that the recognition of our irrational and arduous existence leads to freedom. Camus (1991) writes: "[t]he absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom (p. 20)." Diverging from liberal notions of freedom as political independence, Camus defines freedom as the autonomy from the deferral of life into the future. Since humans imagine a purpose or meaning to their life, they adapt their present actions to account for their future selves, they work in the present in the hopes of a better future. But once they become aware of the absurdity of their condition, they are free from the shackles of causality of our future-oriented existence. Camus' absurd freedom is not grounded on a metaphysical or idealist notion of the potentiality to act without constraints from a hypothetical state, sovereign, or commonwealth; instead, he turns to the actuality of the present. The absurd life is lived in a perpetual loop of present moments, without a path towards the future. And by rejecting the ability to hope, which is by definition grounded in a projection into the future, the absurd man becomes free.

Camus focuses on Sisyphus at the moment of his descent for rhetorical reasons. By concentrating on "the hour of consciousness," he underlines the importance of being aware and lucid because, for Camus, this is a prerequisite for absurd freedom. Being an absurd hero is a matter of facing the contradictions of existence while maintaining a keen awareness of it; it is a "matter of persisting." If one allows the mind to take a flight of fancy, if one loses sight of the absurd and tries to hope for transcendental meaning, one loses that freedom because the source of that liberty stems from consciousness itself. Camus finishes his essay once Sisyphus has descended the foot of the mountain where the damned man concludes that all is well, he claims that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" (Camus, 1991, p. 24). Sisyphus' repetitive and futile toil could be seen as an analogy for the contemporary human condition. It is a representation of work for its own sake. His labour does not produce anything; it is not the means to produce important goods with either use-value or exchange-value; it is not the way in which he feeds himself; it is merely a futile exercise in repetition.

In a world of what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" and of widespread "inessential" employment, the plight of our Ancient hero does not seem so distant. It seems that work is becoming less and less an essential for survival and instead it is used as an ideological and self-disciplinary tool of control. If workers are occupied constantly rolling a rock up a hill, if they are always submerged in a cycle of necessity and dependency on the labour market, and furthermore, if they are convinced that work is valuable in itself, they will not have the time, will or energy to rebel and change their conditions. But if workers realized that their work is futile perhaps they’d be more willing to engage in strikes, shutdowns and other political strategies based on the withholding of their labour. At first glance, then, it would seem that Camus' argues that workers should realize they will always be engaged in work that produces nothing of value and should thus simply resign themselves to that fate and put on a smile. But the freedom of the absurd is not a freedom of resignation, but one of affirmation. It is not about becoming subservient to one's conditions, but of understanding and accepting one's plight as a precondition for freedom. Once one recognizes the absurdity of one's relation to the world, one stops waiting for God or for transcendental suffering to magically transform reality.

To better understand Camus' vision of freedom, one can read it alongside George Bataille's notion of sovereignty. The contemporaneous French writers disagreed on many fronts, but in sovereignty, one finds another proposal of freedom in the present, a freedom that rejects the future. Bataille (2007) writes that "what is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view but this present time (p. 199)." "[T]he sovereignty that I speak of has little to do with the sovereignty of States…," he writes "I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate" (Bataille, 2007, p.197). The concept of sovereignty in Bataille, against the Hobbesian uses of the word, does not refer to agency of political power. Sovereignty is an immanent and sacred state of ecstasy in which one reaches complete communion with the world.

So how does one attain this sovereignty? Bataille (2007) writes:

Jeremy Biles (2007) argues that Bataille took up Hegel's master-slave dialectic, but instead of resolving it, the French writer pauses at the moment right before the synthesis. In Hegel's formulation, as rehearsed by Alexandre Kojève whose lectures influenced Bataille (Biles, 2007, p.5), the slave is condemned to work for the master because the latter imparts terror through the threat of death. When master and slave first face each other, the master becomes master because she is willing to face her fear of death. The slave, contrastingly, retreats from the duel; she is too scared of death and clings on to bare life. After this initial encounter, the slave goes on to convince herself that through her labour she can gain recognition from the master. If she transforms the unformed matter of the natural/animal world into objects of use and exchange, she will be able to gain self-consciousness and build a world in her image.

Bataille pauses at this moment, before the slave transforms the animal world into the human world, to highlight an unresolvable dualism between animal life and human life. Bataille writes that in the animal world, void of the sense of time wherein objects endure, there is also nothing

In order to identify with the wounded other, one must wound and sacrifice oneself. So Bataille's concept of sacrifice entails a destruction of the self as discrete subject who comes to be through labour. By sacrificing the tool within them, workers can reach this realm of the sacred. Free from the performative imperative of the productive world, unburdened by the command to act, the sacrificial hero forgets about the future and surrenders to the now. Bataille's ecstatic sovereignty thus differs from the liberal concept of freedom, which Frederic Lordon schematizes as "the idea that some are free to use others as means to an end, while others are free to allow themselves to be used in that manner" (Lordon, 2014, p.3). Bataille's sacrifice is the destruction of the thing and tool within the subject, where the worker becomes no longer the mere means for the capitalist's accumulation.

Bataille's sovereignty shares with Camus' absurd freedom a radical refusal of causality, futurity, and utility. But they have a major difference: whereas Camus' freedom is predicated on lucid consciousness, Bataille's sovereignty is only accessible through ecstatic intoxication, through moments of affective excess, rather than intellectual awareness. Yet, their divergence is not merely rooted in Camus' failure to consider emotion, because for Bataille consciousness itself is a futurist operation. He writes that

Through sacrifice, one reaches sovereignty, but to be certain these are always "fleeting experience of explosive affects," which is why the contradiction between profane and sacred can never be actually resolved; after all it is a dualism, not a dialectic. Since it rejects the operations of duration, Bataille's ecstatic and unproductive freedom is impossible to maintain. But it is this very impossibility that makes sovereignty so alluring. As Bataille writes,

In Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin's iconic character of The Tramp works in an assembly line screwing bolts a non-descript object over and over. But in his movement, there is something amiss, or rather, something in excess. The actor moves his arms to approach the objects that appear before him; over and over, he reaches forward. At the same time, he repeats circular motions with his wrists. Again and again, he screws some bolts, without an end in sight. Beneath his orderly and efficient movements, there is the sense that something is about to erupt. After the factory owner shows up on a screen demanding higher productivity, the assembly line starts moving faster and, in spite of his efforts, Chaplin's Tramp cannot keep up with the pace of the machine. In the chaos, he loses sight of a couple of objects and screams in desperation. Here, he runs to the other side of the assembly line and the camera follows him, tracking horizontally. Once when he reaches the end of the line, he jumps on it, still trying to finish his work, and is unexpectedly swallowed by the machine in an absurd and hilarious scene of slapstick.

So far, the film has been shot fairly traditionally. The shots are structured by the perspective that characterizes most narrative filmmaking. But in the next shot, once the Tramp is trapped inside the machine, Chaplin shows a flattened world. Instead of the seemingly three-dimensional frame from before, we now see The Tramp's body contorting around the cogs of the machine in a flat image, replicating the two-dimensions of primitive pictorial traditions. In this shot, Chaplin sets up a tension between still and moving image: the background is almost immobile, like in a painting, while in the foreground, the Tramp moves around the circular cogs, curiously enough mimicking the motions of a film strip inside a projector. Almost like a tableau vivant, this shot plays with movement to show an image that tends towards, but does not fully reach complete immobility. And it all ends when the Tramp's angry co-worker reverses the direction of the cogs from the outside and brings him back to the three-dimensional world. Two types of filmic shot directly confronting one another: two possibilities of movement put in dialogue and opposition.

In his essay "Acinema" J.F. Lyotard argues that most, if not all, narrative cinema is constructed around productive movements, at the expense and exclusion of aberrant and useless gestures. He writes, "the film produced by an artist working in capitalist industry springs from the effort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless expenditures, differences of pure consumption" (Lyotard, 2017, p. 65). In the face of this nihilistic and tyrannical regime, Lyotard calls for a kind of filmmaking that is based on opposing, that is negative, tenets: the Acinema. He suggests two directions for a cinematographic practice that conforms to the "pyrotechnical imperative" (p.35) of cinema: complete immobility and excessive movement. This scene in Modern Times is particularly fascinating because these intensities of mobility take place in the industrial workplace, and they explicitly interrupt productive movements. Thus, one must read the oppositions and dualities in this scene using a method that does not just synthesize them, but also takes a leisurely pause before them. The scene requires an analysis that, like the Tramp, dances around for a few moments before resuming its forward motion.

Once the Tramp returns from the bowels of the machine he erupts into a kind of ecstatic reverie. He has lost his sanity and composure, as he begins interrupting the productivity of his factory co-workers. Taken over by bodily spasms he cannot control, the worker uselessly repeats the same screwing motions from before, but now they are not directed at work. He repeatedly and excessively screws a co-worker's nose, a woman's skirt's buttons, and even the air around him. The scene ends when he starts dancing around the factory, using the gestures of his work as the building blocks of an intricate ballet. The worker is no longer interested in trying to match the rhythm of the machine because he is now immersed in his own choreography; he exaggerates the repetitive motions of industrial labour to render them unproductive. Here, The Tramp carries out the right gesture at the wrong time, thereby isolating these productive movements and rendering them absurd by taking away their context. And this is not shocking, considering this is the same childish Tramp who used the most bourgeois and refined gestures to eat a boiled leather boot in The Gold Rush (1925). Beneath Chaplin's idiosyncratic bodily humour there lies a gestural critique of productivism.

Chaplin builds this scene through a dialectic. He places two dissimilar movements next to each other in order to create a confrontation, like when he contrasts the repetitive and jerky motions of the Tramp with the forward and steady pace of the machine. While the machine moves horizontally and persistently, he approaches it in waves, through peaks and valleys, always keeping up with its tempo but through a contrasting movement pattern. A musicality emerges from the repetitive interaction of two rhythms; the scene sings a song to the tune of industrial production. Walter Benjamin already noted how Chaplin endows his movements with a kind of visual musicality by appropriating the repetitive gesturality of industrial labour. He wrote that

The Tramp makes a difficult effort to approach this legato of the assembly line through his corporeal staccato, and this rhythmic dissonance is accentuated even further when the factory owner decides to accelerate the tempo of the machine to increase productivity. By adopting and subverting the repetitive nature of industrial labour, Chaplin extracts a musicality out of the structures of work, which is rather ironic considering that this silent film was made during the first decade of synchronous cinematic sound. Chaplin's worker takes productive actions and vacates them of their utility and linearity, and in their stead, he infuses them with a playful and unproductive dance. In this sovereign and acinematic scene, there is an immanent pleasure that arises from the alienating gestures of work. In a Lyotardian gesture, Chaplin exaggerates the productive motions of industrial capitalism and makes them useless by taking them towards the pole of excessive mobility. While the repetitive nature of industrial work is usually at the centre of critiques of capitalism, this scene takes that very structure to enact a sort of unproductive musicality. Deep from the rhythms of labour, there is an excessive force that leads Chaplin to dance around the factory. But how can work be defined by its insistence on productivity while simultaneously containing such immanent and musical escapes?

To answer this question, one must look back to Bataille. In The Accursed Share, he argues that there is a surplus of energies on Earth and that humans "ordinarily receive more energy than is necessary for maintaining life…" (2007, p. 21). He claims that this surplus energy is the source of all demographic expansion, but at some point, this growth reaches a limit because the mechanisms of production cannot incorporate all the surplus for utilitarian purposes. Bataille writes

Rather than providing an explicitly political program, this scene from Modern Times elucidates the experience of a worker who is attuned to the rhythms of excessive repetition; it shows how ecstasy, as a refusal of utility and the future, can be immanent within the repetitive rhythms of work and how this disruption of productivity is imbricated in the productive process. And centuries before Chaplin, and even capitalism itself, Sisyphus was also engaging in a kind of repetitive work with a byproduct of musicality. J. Sansonesse (2016) suggests that the name of Sisyphus could be an onomatopoetic rendering of the back and forth sound (siss phuss) that breathing makes in the nostrils, pointing to trance-inducing and meditative techniques of breath control. Since the energy between the worker and his rock cannot be claimed back fully into the labouring process, a melody is born out of the coming-and-going of his breath. Like certain meditative and yoga practices that promise a radical presence in the present through the grounding of repetitive breathing, Sisyphus' back and forth movement attunes his ears to the siren song of the now.

This article cannot account for all forms of labour without becoming an encyclopaedic account of the representation work in film. Thus, so far it has focused on industrial labour because it is the most akin to Sisyphus' toil but also because in this kind of physical work, the unproductive musicality in question erupts most dramatically. But since the mid-to-late 20^th century there has been a fundamental change the way the people work. Western economies have been shifting away from manufacturing towards service and information-based economies, as industrial and textile labour is outsourced to the Global South. In the age of technology and automation, the gestures of industrial productivity have been replaced by the typing and sitting of office work, by the smiling and fetching of service work and by the scrubbing and scraping of domestic work. Because while the work has become immaterial (that is informational and emotional), its execution is still dependent on the repetition of certain physical gestures. Work has taken on a new appearance, but productivity hasn’t fundamentally changed: the issues of repetition and stolen leisure time are still prevalent in capitalist economies. As long as the human species continues to be embodied, its work will be dependent on certain set of gestures carried, even if they get smaller every day. Still, work looks very different and certainly less toilsome than it used to do in 1936, therefore, this article must consider the filmic representation of post-Fordist forms of labour in order to apply its claims to service and informational heavy economies of the West.

Thankfully, a quarter of a century after Modern Times, director Billy Wilder directed a film that also poked fun at repetitive work, but he focused on the gestures of office work that would soon become prevalent all over the West. The Apartment (1960) opens with a non-diegetic voice-over by protagonist C.C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, who sets up the plot of the film: Baxter has been working for an insurance company called Consolidated for three years and ten months, on the nineteenth floor, section W, desk number 861. In the meantime, the film journeys through images of New York's skyline, the exterior facade of his building, the lobby, and then his office, filled with rows of workers at their desks, consumed by the same repetitive typing using mid-century office technology. When we reach his desk, Baxter is mechanically logging in numbers and pressing the buttons of his automatic calculator over and over. He stares at the back and forth movement of his calculator, with one hand on his chin trying to stave off sleep. Baxter is slowly becoming engrossed in the rhythm of his machine and here, the sounds of his machine become louder and louder while the non-diegetic narration goes silent and, in its stead, Wilder introduces a percussion-heavy non-diegetic musical melody that follows the rhythm of the machine, heightening the musicality of its repetitive sound. For a few seconds, Baxter plunges into a daze, and he nods along to the monotonous melody in a small cephalic dance that is not as elaborate as Chaplin's ballet but is equally comic in its ability to inject absurdity and leisure into work.

But Baxter is quickly brought back to reality when a bell rings to indicate the shift is over. As the other workers go home, he stays in his desk waiting for his boss to leave his apartment. Here, he is back to being a rather disciplined worker, willing to sacrifice everything for his boss, but this short dance is an indication of the torrent of emotions that is erupt later in the film. In the elevator across the hall from him, Fran Kubleik, played by Shirley Maclaine, is carrying out a similar dance with the tool of her work: elevator buttons and a forced smile. The two characters stand out amongst a sea of workers because they both engage in unproductive games; like Chaplin's Tramp, they comically use the productive action and transform it into unproductive.

It is precisely this unproductive musicality that Chantal Akerman takes up in her short film, Sauter Ma Ville. In 1968, a young Akerman cast herself as the protagonist of her first cinematic effort, playing the role of a woman who carries out domestic work in a peculiar way. Like Chaplin's Tramp, Akerman's character approaches her workplace through seemingly productive gestures, only for her to deform them and render them useless. A shaky and unanchored camera follows Akerman around her kitchen while she carefully puts on her leather jacket and a bandana on her head, as if she was getting ready to go out to a party or a leisurely stroll. But when she's finally dressed up, she throws her pans and cooking utensils on the floor and starts cleaning the mess she just created. Given her bizarre behaviour, this cleaning is more of a mimicry of domestic labour than the productive act itself because, in reality, she has only created a messy swamp of pots and cleaning supplies that do not really help her in the goal of cleaning up. Akerman gets rid of the end (cleaning the floor) and there remains only the means (the motions of cleaning). She interrupts the productive action and she replaces it with an unproductive gesture that reveals the absurdity and futility of her work. In the final shot, we see her reflection in the mirror. Her body lies immobile on her stove while the flame sizzles, and then, the director cuts to black. We hear a bang.

Akerman's character spends her final minutes working, or rather, playing with the gestures of work, which might remind one of Giorgio Agamben's seminal concept of the gesture, which he defines as "the exhibition of a mediality," or as "the process of making a means visible as such" (2008, p.58). Dance is an example of a gesture because "it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements" (p.57). The Tramp and Akerman technically carry out the laborious movements of their work, but at some point, the absurd repetition turns the productive process into a dance and game of make-believe. They keep enacting the same productive movements, the means, but since they are no longer producing a good or service, there is no end – much like the futile effort of Sisyphus who pushes a rock with no end. Therefore, the gesture can be described as unproductive, especially considering that Agamben writes, "what characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported" (p.56). Agamben's concept of gesture has been very influential in film philosophy and it has been used in the past discussions of labour, gesturality and film.

Yet, while gesture can be seen as a complement of the Sisyphean unproductivity suggested here, it cannot wholly replace it. Because even if the gesture can be read as unproductive, it is not necessarily so. In "Gestural Study" Sven Lütticken identifies "a partial reversal of the modern decline of gesture in post-Fordist networked culture, arguing that value extraction has moved from standardization to specificity" (2019, p.89). In other words, Lütticken believes that gestural idiosyncrasy like Chaplin's can and has been used for productive purposes: in its transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, that is from industrial to immaterial labour, productivity has shifted away from quantitative to qualitative exploitation. "Movements come to function as contemporary raw material to be mined algorithmically in a neoliberal attention economy that derives surplus from the ineffable" (p.92). As such, the gesture differs from Sisyphean unproductivity because it refers to performative movements that qualify a quantified production, whereas Sisyphean unproductivity refers to the brief moments where both quantitative and qualitative production break down. If the gesture escapes repetitive work through virtuosic performativity, Sisyphean unproductivity tries to escape by refusing to work and taking a break even when one is not allowed to. Still, as we shall see, this does not mean that Sisyphean unproductivity can fully escape work. Like the gesture, it is subsumed into the totalitarian logic of capitalism, but this does not mean one cannot this small break to expose the futility of work and to expand our leisure time as much as possible.

Camus' and Bataille's anti-futurist concepts of freedom and sovereign offer a great theoretical backbone for seeking moments of unproductive musicality in the cinematic representation of work, but this article argument owes much to previous efforts within the field of film studies. For example, Lyotard's concept of Acinema was crucial in developing this analysis because it astutely articulates a notion that cinema is built through productive actions. The unproductive emerges as aberrations that the economic system of cinematic movements only permits in controlled and small doses. In Lyotard's phenomenological framework, these three films tend toward the pole of excessive mobility and are thus examples of Acinematic disruption. While Lyotard's concept offers a guide to do cinematic formal analysis that considers productivity, since the concept is negational by definition, it requires another set of concepts to supplement it, absurd freedom and sovereign ecstasy can fill the void created by the a in Acinema.

Recently, there has been a resurgence in the study of film and labour, as seen in the work of Jonathan Beller, John David Rhodes and Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky. In The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Jonathan Beller argues that that cinema is not only an art form but also a mode of production in itself; in fact, it is the reigning mode of production in post-Fordist capitalism. For Beller, the basic economic processes of capitalism – that is production, circulation, and accumulation – are accomplished through cinema, a term he uses (perhaps reductively) to describe not only film but also television, computers, and internet. Rhodes has written a persuasive argument for aesthetic theory to center labour in their understanding of artistic style as it "could offer a desublimated account of artworks as laborious, but in a way that does not (pace Adorno) merely make a mockery of the hard work of "actual" labour (industrial, affective, intellectual, and so forth)" (2012, p. 61) Finally, Aguilera Skvirsky delineates the "process genre" as a category of cultural objects that feature processual representations, most often forms of labour. The book argues that viewers find the spectacle of labour to be entrancing because it shows human activity as a display of technique and skill, making the labour look good rather than toilsome. While Svirsky's recognizes that processual representation effaces hardship, dead time, and sweat to present a magical and hypnotizing chain of causality, she ultimately argues that in favor of the metaphysics of labour, or the principle that "flourishing human life has labour – capaciously understood – at its centre" (p. 121). But what if flourishing human life can be attained without recourse labour?

This inquiry differs from previous efforts in the field because it argues that a fulfilling human life cannot be attained without unproductive ecstasy. None of these writers has focused on the representation of unproductivity nor on its potentials for a struggle for leisure time or an "sovereign" way of life outside of labour. To be sure, work comes its own feelings of satisfaction, achievement and self-worth, but perhaps these benefits are attainable through other human activities that are not in the category of wage labour. A young Marx wrote in German Ideology that in a communist society, people would "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic" (p. 53). This quote shows a rather utopian vision of the world where people choose how to spend their accursed share and leisure time, a society that is hardly imaginable today.

In that sense, this article also falls within the tradition of anti-work politics pioneered by autonomist Marxists and recently revived by Kathi Weeks. But the arguments put forth here are more aesthetic than they are political: this article follows the ideological commitments of anti-work theories, without necessarily agreeing entirely with their views, and applies them to cinema in order to propose another reason work must be contested. By restricting human movements to the linear flow of production, the strictures of productive labour also take away a worker's choice on the expenditure of their own accursed share. In other words, they cannot spend the surplus energies of their life and labour through glorious consumption and they are forced to endure their catastrophic eruption. If Georges Bataille is right in suggesting that workers cannot choose if the accursed share erupts, but they can choose how it erupts, it becomes clear that the ideologies of productivity take away this primordial choice. When this choice is taken away, the worker has no option but to succumb to the tragic eruption of the accursed share. In this way, these moments of musicality offer a utopian vision of a world in which workers regain this choice and sovereignty on how to spend the energy of the world. They take matters into their hands and they choose to spend it gloriously and ecstatically.

Herein lies the fundamental difference between Bataille and Camus: their divergence on the concepts of happiness and ecstasy, which Camus himself recognized. When he was asked to compare his "Apollonian Nietzscheanism" with Bataille's "Dionysian Nietzscheanism," he responded: "I argue for happiness, not ecstasy, and that's the difference [between Bataille and me]" (Kendall, 2009, p.51). Camus' conceptualization of happiness in The Myth of Sisyphus requires uninterrupted consciousness while Bataille's ecstasy requires the opposite. Since it is firmly outside the realm of discourse, ecstasy and inner experience are accessed through intoxication. Thus, the concept of Sisyphean unproductivity not only follows the 20^th century tradition of anti-work thought, it also goes all the way back to Nietzsche's conception formulation of the Dionysian, which makes sense when one considers that he was one of the biggest intellectual influences on Bataille.

In the "Dionysiac World View," Friedrich Nietzsche (1992) writes that in Dionysian art

So, while the thinking around Sisyphean unproductivity is not entirely novel, the delineation of the concept and the academic exercise of discerning unproductive energies in film is mostly uncharted. But, as previously suggested, this inquiry must immediately contend with its own limit, because like taxes and death, work and productive processes at large are usually inevitable. In the physical world we inhabit, where full automation is not yet real, human labour is still necessary. Complete and eternal unproductivity might impossible to attain, but that hasn’t stopped storytellers and filmmakers from trying. In fact, it is this very impossibility that makes unproductivity so aesthetically alluring. These expressions of leisurely ecstasy are crucial because, while humans cannot ask for a life of pure leisure, the contemporary worker can absolutely ask for more leisure time. Given our state of affairs, a world where wealth, power and leisure are so inequitably distributed, it is only natural for workers to seek respite, even if it only lasts a few seconds.

No one is more attuned to the harmonies of Sisyphean unproductivity than a musician-turned-worker like Icelandic actress and recording artist Björk. In Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000), Björk engages in a laborious choreography of her own. The film tells the tragic story of Selma Jezkova (Björk), a Checzh immigrant who moves to America in 1964. Selma is the quintessential Von Trier female character: she is treated terribly and lives her life like it is a Hollywood musical, even when faced by cruel adversity and suffering. While Von Trier is rightly criticized for his overreliance on tropes of feminine submissiveness, characters like Selma also help us re-examine the value of such traits. Rather than a matter of servile self-effacement, the concept of Sisyphean unproductivity serves to mine instances of self-sacrifice as potentials for non-utilitarian freedom and sovereignty. Thus, this effort cannot shy away from Von Trier's oeuvre, especially considering the conspicuous homologies between Modern Times and Dancing in the Dark. The film begins with different tableaux set into motion: painterly images composed of abstract forms, lines and colorful stains that move around slowly in the frame. Accompanied by orchestral music composed by Björk, these shapes start overlaying over one another, competing for the foreground, and melting away into each other. This creates a kind of painting with several layers or even an abstract, non-figurative tableau vivant. Thanks to these superimpositions, blurred transitions, and changes in illumination, these static images gain a small degree of movement. This opening scene ends with a blue background, and over it, the painterly lines slowly soften and arrange themselves in figurative shapes. Like a child staring at clouds, the viewer tries to make sense of the images, but they refuse to give an answer; instead, they ask us to enjoy the directionless movements and not worry about what they are trying to produce.

However, before we can reach complete absorption and unproductive contemplation, the overture ends and Von Trier sends us back into the realm of narration. Soon after, we see one of the most iconic scenes of Von Trier's filmography, in which dozens of workers engage in a fantastical yet grim musical number inside this factory. It begins with Selma at work, repeating the same gesture over and over: she is placing a metal sheet inside a machine and handing it over to the next cog in the assembly line. But as in Modern Times, the machinic lullaby of factory sounds sends the worker into a trance. The dreamy musical sequence starts with a melody composed by the repetitive sounds of the factory, like the loud pull of a lever and the coming and going of metal sheets on the assembly line, which Bjork then assembles into a conventional pop song called "Cvalda", after Selma's nickname for her friend and coworker Kathy (Catherine Deneuve). Selma then sings and points to the workers around her, as if she were conducting an orchestra, and they all start joining her in a surrealist choreography animated by the repetitive tune of the machinery. Using more than one hundred digital cameras, Von Trier rapidly edits several shots together, mimicking the rhythm of Bjork's song (Goddard, 2012, p.180). Once more, the gestures and sounds of labour become the raw materials for a musical moment, but while Chaplin used the repeated gesture of his Tramp to make his character dance, Von Trier sutures the gestures of different actors to make the film itself dance to the rhythms of industrial work.

Selma then grabs Kathy and the two women dance around the factory. Meanwhile, the rest of the workers pick up brooms, hammers, and other tools of their labour and incorporate them into the choreography, thereby rendering them useless. Bataille's de-toolification process is made literal in this scene because the workers take their tools out of their original context, erasing the component that makes them productive and transforming them into props for a wasteful and anti-productive dream. Selma approaches the productive action as if following the scripts of the Hollywood musical numbers she loves, where people stop whatever they are doing to sing and dance. The scene climaxes when all the workers-dancers gather around a big machine and grasp each other by the arm, becoming one composite body, and mimicking the repetitive clock-wise movement of its engine. Once more, the forward and future-oriented flow of productivity is interrupted by a radical sense of presence in the present that lies within the repetitive gestures of work. Immanent within the realm of production there is another world of ecstatic and excessive energy. In the same factory where she was originally transformed into a tool, Selma had a taste of the intoxicating and ecstatic sacrifice of her own toolness.

At this point, Von Trier makes use of a subtle chromatic change to insinuate we are leaving Selma's dream, and the music is replaced by the shrieks of a machine's emergency alarm. Selma has broken the machine. Her boss sees what has happened and fires her, which sets her character into a catastrophic chain of events: she struggles to find money for her son's eye surgery, her shady landlord steals from her, and finally, she accidentally shoots him after he begs her to kill him. Additionally, perhaps it is her rhythmic attunement to repetition which leads Selma to her own self-sacrifice at the end of the film. After being accused of murdering her landlord, Selma is sentenced to death by hanging, but rather than using the money of her son's operation or confessing the truth about her landlord to save herself, she yields to her unjust death sentence. Just as she surrendered to the lullaby of the factory, Selma sings her way to death, as she is dragged through prison corridors to the room where she is hung in front of an audience, before she is even able to finish her last song. Like the other workers explored in this article, Selma takes the movements of her repetitive work and makes them excessive, aberrant and useless. These workers are not the self-effacing martyrs of the Protestant work ethic, nor the workaholic entrepreneurs of neoliberalism. They are Sisyphean figures who are in tune with the deafening, polyphonic sounds of their inner uselessness. When Björk's character moves her feet to the pace of her industrial tools, she evokes a sense of playful distraction but, more radically, she is testing the boundaries of productivity; she is exploring the useless but ecstatic potentials of her labouring body. In an ephemeral instant, The Tramp, C.C. Baxter and Selma pull apart the part of their selves that had ossified into a tool and they transform it into a toy.

If Nietzsche is right in affirming that "in the actor we recognize the Dionysiac man… as he is played" (1992, p.130) then one could easily see how Björk embodies the Dionysian modern woman in Dancer in The Dark. But Greek culture was characterized by the co-existence of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. As Nietzsche's expounds, the actor plays with intoxication in order to discharge her own and the spectators' intoxication, but by virtue of consciously articulating this Dionysian world view, the actor is already negating it by carrying out an Apollonian taming of their own drives. Because whenever the Greek citizen faces the reality of their situation, whenever Dionysian ecstasy reveals to them the full extent of nature and the fundamental futility and irrationality of the world, they would come back with repulsive thoughts about reality. Thus, as Nietzsche (1992) writes, "Apollo, the true god of healing and expiation, saved the Greeks from clear-sighted, prophetic ecstasy and revulsion at existence – through the work of art which embodied tragi-comical thought" (p. 131). The Apollonian tames the realization of absurdity that the Dionysian brought about, and thus Greek culture became characterized by a fraught marriage of Apollo and Dionysus, which resulted in the birth of the Greek tragedy as an art form. The dualism had to be resolved; it had to be transformed into a dialectic that allowed for a synthesis. Just like the unproductive always must return to the productive, the Dionysian cannot exist without the Apollonian unless one is ready to face full annihilation.

Complete unproductivity – whether Sisyphean, Bataillean or Dionysian – remains an ideal, obtainable only in death. Modern Times, The Apartment, Saut ma ville and Dancer in the Dark reveal an underlying desire for unproductivity that informs and guides artistic creation, especially in the actor-dependent form of narrative filmmaking. They disclose the Dionysian drives that Western civilization has always tried to control in order to sustain its founding myths of linearity, teleology, unrestricted economic growth, and productivism. But ultimately, these directors fail to maintain these sovereign scenes of unproductivity: Chaplin returns to sanity and is imprisoned, Baxter goes back to typing, Akerman goes out in a bang and Björk wakes up from her daydreaming. Even Bataille recognizes the fleeting nature of his unproductive return to immanence: it is based on an intoxicating ecstasy that does not occur in duration but in brief instances of unthought feeling, or complete and non-linguistic communion with the world of matter. In the end, these films must return to the future-oriented telos of their narrative structures or they simply wouldn’t exist. But in their very efforts to escape it, they reveal a fundamental desire for complete leisure. Not quite the same as the Freudian death drive, but certainly a similar pull to self-sacrifice and unproductivity, a thirst for that impossible event where causal action is completely interrupted.

The Sisyphean workers examined in this article reveal that these self-sacrificial incantations have animated our lives and deaths since ancient times, and they will likely continue to do so. As instruments of production, workers are tuned by their masters to intone a repetitive drone every workday. When the leftover energies of the world erupt as ecstatic musicality through the echoes of our daily work, in those brief moments of absolute present, the tool within us is destroyed and we are rendered useless. The official history of the class struggle tells the story of a fight against the alienation of labour: it describes a crucial struggle for workers to own the means of production, so they can fulfil their own productive drives without constraints. But these Sisyphean figures reveal a second, complementary struggle for the workers of the world: the unjust allocation of leisure time and the full range of libidinal opportunities that the world has to offer. The category of Sisyphean unproductivity hopes to illuminate another history of class struggle, a fight for the sovereign ability to choose how to consume the world's excessive energies, or the accursed share. A struggle to fulfil our unproductive dries without constraint. These Sisyphean figures are merely the beginning, there is more work to be done in examining the cinematic representation of wider range of types of labour.

This article was written in a rather exceptional historical moment, one that upended everything we know about work, leisure and life. While work and productivity have normally been necessary to attain food, shelter and other resources for survival, the COVID-19 led to an unprecedented situation in which people were encouraged to stop working to halt the spread of disease. Overnight, workers had no choice but to rest, and although it would seem like Sisyphuses all over the world would rejoice, the loss of a steady income and physical safety proved to be a nightmare. This modern-day pestilence show that the fantasies of unproductivity imagined in this article can only be enacted if there is political and economic support for vulnerable populations and workers at large. If anything, the pandemic showed that this kind of assistance is materially possible, it just doesn’t have the political support of the ruling class; it showed that the world can still turn – albeit not as efficiently – if we all worked less; it showed that many jobs are as "non-essential" as Sisyphus' task. So, in the end, this period of rest didn’t last long. As capitalist governments prioritized the health of their GDPs over that of their inhabitants, workplaces reopened as soon as possible and many workers were not lucky enough to be able to afford the safety of quarantine. For every upper middle-class person working from home in the professional, managerial, and academic industries, there was a lower-class worker delivering meals, stocking grocery stores, or working repetitively at the assembly lines of Amazon fulfilment centres. When the world is faced with a crisis, it becomes painfully evident that only some possess the right to not work.

In capitalist societies, complete unproductivity, total inaction and unrestrained leisure are impossible. But it is precisely this impossibility that makes it so appealing. Because of its rareness, the non-productive action shows us the world as it really is; it shows us matter, pleasure, ecstasy, and above all, the full experience of being human. When the ruling classes hoard leisure time to themselves, when they deny workers the possibility of living without producing, they are denying workers a fundamental choice in how to spend their energy. So, this article leaves Sisyphus on his ascent, rather than his descent, because when he pushes the rock up the hill, he is on the verge of an ecstatic experience of sovereignty. Caught in a loop of repetition, Sisyphus abandons the time of the project and experiences the present, he rejects the futurity and productivity of labour, and he is able to gloriously consume his energy. But for every step that he takes going up that hill, Sisyphus risks stepping too far into the void. Yet, his would not be a tragic fall because in those few seconds, one must imagine Sisyphus ecstatic.