Unrest
Unrest
New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine, a young factory worker, produces the unrest wheel, swinging in the heart of the mechanical watch. Exposed to new ways of organizing money, time and labour, she gets involved with the local movement of the anarchist watchmakers, where she meets Russian traveller Pyotr Kropotkin.
Varun reviewedOctober 19, 2024
I’ve always wanted to find out how a watch is made but instead of watching a short YouTube video, I decided to see this movie. The factory scenes with the sounds of the tools in the background mixed with the ticking of the watches created a kind of meditative atmosphere which I liked. Time feels quite oppressive in this film as everyone’s daily lives starts becoming dictated by it. The people become an automated machine just like a watch. The conversations felt soulless, and I’m not sure if that was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers to make us feel a certain way or if they just don’t know how to write dialogue. I liked the idea of anarchist maps focusing on real local places rather than drawing up fictional nationalistic borders. Also it’s interesting to see that when disadvantaged people couldn’t pay their taxes, they weren’t allowed to vote and therefore couldn’t exercise any power to change the systems that put them in those conditions in the first place. The 90 mins felt like 2 hours, there were a lot of scenes with long boring conversations. Overall I can’t say I enjoyed this film too much but I appreciate it’s uniqueness and making me feel and think about the nature of time in the modern world.