Anarchic in spirit but formally composed, Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest operates in the dialectical fashion fitting of its era, arriving at an unsuspecting synthesis between such notionally oppositional forces. Indeed, its radical gesture may lie in the refusal to situate them as mutually incompatible. A portrait of the small Swiss town of Saint-Imier, where watchmaking had become industrialized as factory labour, the film charts the consequent rise of anti-authoritarian sentiment that took hold in the region in the latter half of the 19th century. Schäublin consolidates such a sweeping historical purview within the far narrower confines of the factory itself, observing the labour of loupe-sighted workers—mostly women—bent fastidiously over the mechanical marvel that is horlogerie.
The film homes in with exacting detail on the intricate fabrication of watches, identifying the eponymous piece known as the unrueh (unrest, or balance wheel), the regulating device at the heart of the timepiece. The film’s protagonist, a role far less precisely defined, is a young fitter named Josephine (Clara Gostynski), who has grown weary from the devaluation of her labour (the clink of fewer centimes meted out in buttoned envelopes) and is predisposed towards an increasingly organized anarchist union among watchmakers, which offers healthcare to unwed women. The movement has likewise sparked the sympathies of a young Russian cartographer, Pyotr (Alexei Evstratov), newly arrived in the village to ostensibly map the shifting political territories. The film occasions the chance encounter between these two strangers, drawn together in a political and possibly romantic alliance, which is delineated with a tender restraint unbecoming of its milieu.
That Pyotr, subject of much speculation among a coterie of female cousins back in Moscow in the film’s prelude, is modelled on the Russian nobleman-turned-anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin grounds the film in historical precedent, but Schäublin eschews mere hagiography. Kropotkin the man was a far-ranging polymath and traveller (whom Oscar Wilde once dubbed the “white Christ”) whose work in evolutionary biology had profound implications on the social sciences, and thus politics. This derived mainly from his observation in nature of a common and persistent form of mutual aid in all species: cooperation, rather than conflict, was key to survival. In this context, the
