Richelieu

I haven't read a Royal Commission on the current state of labour relations in Canada, but I do imagine there are businesses that treat their workers well.

People fought hard to create labour laws and continue to fight hard to strengthen them.

Such laws should apply to migrant workers as well.

Hiring labourers from foreign countries shouldn't equal brutal lawlessness. 

If your profit margins are so slim or the people you work for seek outrageous quotas, quotas that can't be legitimately reached without brutalizing your workforce, the management structure needs to be reorganized, with the well-being of you workers empathetically factored in.

The foreign labourers I worked with were hardcore they got the job amazingly well-done, going far beyond what was required of them, it was crazy impressive working with them.

To see them mistreated is an insult to their integrity.

They worked extremely hard and were entirely self-starting.

The job wasn't brutal and the expectations weren't unreasonable though, like they are on both accounts in Richelieu, an extremely difficult case.

The spirit of Québec that I've read about and experienced first hand steps in to help them, their translator going to great lengths to assist them while her mom patiently explains what to do.

There are some powerful scenes in the film passionately directed by Pier-Philippe Chevigny, notably the operating room sequence along with the heartwarming ending.

How could everyone involved be immersed in such hostile relations (the managers are brutalized by the people representing the shareholders as well [what the hell kind of environment do such hostilities cultivate])?

If this film is focused on industry standards, there's no doubt that things need to change.

If you run a legitimate business that gives workers a fair shake and treats them well, you're not only creating a safer work environment, you're also contributing to humanistic profit.

Humanistic profits lead to peaceful communities and much less stress for cultures in general.

Much less crime, much better books and films.

It's a win-win scenario.

That creates dreams and hope.

*Strong performance from Ariane Castellanos.

**People are people, no matter where they're from.   

The Man in the White Suit

There's a timeless quality to Alexander Mackendrick's The Man in the White Suit(1951).

Its examination of capital and labour faced with the advance of progress has transferrable applications for any historical epoch.

It's fun to watch too.

A scientist within, Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness), takes constant risks to develop an indestructible cloth that can't be stained, thereby revolutionizing the textile industry.

The owner of the company he works for is initially impressed, until his competitors note that Stratton's breakthrough will put them out of business, costing the British economy thousands of jobs.

It's a control issue.

Labour hears the news as well and recognizes their precarious position within the new marketable leap forward.

Heads contentiously clash until labour and capital realize they seek the same ends, proceeding thereafter to suppress Mr. Stratton as he tries to move forward with his discovery.

He doesn't realize the impacts of what he's doing until he accidentally bumps into an elderly person in the street, as he's on the run, laundry, the subject of conversation.

It's a compelling study of beginnings, of panic, in this instance, mixed with diverse voices from multiple stakeholders, and several unexpected serendipitous scintillations, the naive and the nepotists, the powerful, and the hungry.

Made me think of the Who Killed the Electric Car? film.

And baby steps.

I always thought that if you were making trillions of dollars from a non-renewable resource, you would spend some of that money on creating independent infrastructures to sustain local economies, if the resource happened to run out.

Future minded thinking.

You see this in the ways infrastructures are developing at the métro stations in Laval anyways, which are equipped with spots where you can park and rejuice your electric car.

Perhaps, as sales of electric cars (which are making a comeback), or hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, increase, petrol service stations will begin to proportionally offer a variety of services for them in order to manage profit fluctuations and keep their workforces employed.

Factories which manufacture cars fuelled by gasoline can switch to harnessing the power of electricity.

Slow moving change, linked directly to increased demand.

Rather than exclusively searching for new oil deposits, the focus could partially switch to finding new sources of electric power, in remote regions, while respecting local traditions, to supply the necessary increases in hydro-electric energy.

If the independent infrastructures are in place, the panic is slowly mitigated over time, and if you have 100 years and ample capital and labour to create them, civil unrest could be minimized.

A lot of people will still be mighty pissed-off however.

They may be upset if they find out they have cancer too.

This option could lead to a much cleaner environment.

A much healthier planet, more sustainable, in the fortunes of time.

Samsara

Ron Fricke's Samsara takes upon itself the modest task of pictorially presenting an interdimensional panoramic account of a synthesized set of (free)ranging semantic variables, a fluid rhetorically viable atemporal mosaic whose effervescent movements are acoustically interwoven according (perhaps) to the harmonics of three itinerant factotums, who practically reverberate throughout the humanistic theoretical continuum, giving birth to hope, sculpting immobility, and choreographing the infinite.

The paradox discovered by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things . . . offers a tool through which to begin cultivating interpretive comprehensions, although in Samsara said paradox seems to be critically oscillating in a cyclical undulation, in order to craft, what Fredric Jameson might describe as, an ontology of the present.

The only other film I've seen recently whose form, in varying degrees, produces similar affects, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and the two films arguably create a matrix through which to compare the means by which two distinct historical periods use/d their cultural clay to mold multidimensional discursive globalized narratives.

I don't recommend watching The Holy Mountain unless you're into alternative cinema.

But to return to Samsara, I would contend that it suggests that the wisest thought-systems/ethical outlooks simultaneously celebrate the production of structured delicate intricate symmetrical collective masterpieces and their peaceful destruction (the Mandala), thereby humbly attempting to temporalize the eternal.

At other points, it presents incredible naturalistic syntheses of truth and illusion, concretely stylizes exhilaration, offers an absurd example of unfettered patriarchal ambition, interdisciplinarily collocates ancient forms with contemporary contents, patiently juxtaposes opulent and impoverished extremes, counterbalances manifold individuals with sundry groups, alternates the crushing affects of monosyllabic monstrosities with those of incarcerated liberation, conducts the best variation of a lament for the loss of an integrated prolonged cultural artistic fusion I've ever seen, and brilliantly equates both the means of mass production and its 'unforeseen' and mind boggling consequences/circumstances.

Without saying a word.

The apotheosis of philosophical realism metaphorically materialized? An emission/admission of im/mortality? Ostentation saturated with social justice?  Pinpointed timeless reciprocal constructivism?

It takes the cinematography from The Tree of Life to a whole new level (cinematography by Ron Fricke, shot on 70mm film).

Best film I've seen in a long time.