What do Swiss clocks and anarchism have in common? What sounds like a joke is actually a largely forgotten historical connection: the Swiss clock industry in Bern‘s Jura Mountains was the center of an international anarchistic movement in the 19th century. The organization of workers was also a reaction to the increasingly precarious working conditions. The industrialization of production caused human labor to be badly paid and replaceable, the growing global competition lowered wages further. Despite this, the workers still managed to regularly collect money to support anarchist groups in North America, Spain and England. Anarchists from around the world, among them Bakunin and Kropotkin, visited their comrades in the Jura Valley.

Director Cyril Schäublin didn‘t want to make a historical drama or a biopic with UNRUH. The film moves between concrete history and associative criticism: it is also about Kropotkin‘s time in the Jura valley, about the revolution of the clock industry and about anarchist self-organization, but more abstractly, it‘s about the capitalist dictate of the era, photographic marketing, subtle oppression and quiet resistance. UNRUH questions the common concepts of time, work, memory, collective identity and not least the cinematic narrative, but these concepts are not in focus. The unprofessional actors populate the calm shots rather than dominate them. UNRUH itself seems like an anti-hierarchical project, a peaceful co-existence of ambient noises, historical characters and discursive references. Schäublin has created a gentle and atmospheric, but still critical, film here.

Yorick Berta

Translation: Elinor Lewy