Consequence (Thomas Heise, 2012) (Patreon)

One of Heise's more purely observational films, Consequence is a 65-minute study of a crematorium. It is almost wordless. There are a few brief conversations in the background, but comprehending them is in no way necessary to following what is essentially an examination of a work environment. The film has certain family resemblances to other such around-the-factory documentaries, such as Tacita Dean's Kodak, Ben Rivers' Sack Barrow, and a number of films by Austrian docu-minimalist Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

But what separates Consequence from these other films is the facticity of human demise. While films such as Dean's and Rivers' are, in essence, operating as elegies for industrial processes that are on the wane, Heise's film is about, shall we say, a recession-proof industry. While not every shot contains human bodies, they are present even in their absence. Early on, a worker climbs down a shaft to repair some masonry. Only later do we realize that this is part of an oven. Workers tend various machines and gauges, as though they were involved in forging steel or molding plastic, and it seems that part of Heise's point is that the destruction of human remains is another industrial process, one that evolves with the times despite whatever spiritual meanings we may attach to it.

Only at a few points do we see actual bodies. In one early, ambiguous shot, Heise peers through the peephole of a cremation oven, and we see an object engulfed in flames. Only seconds later do we register the form of a body, in particular a skull. A kind of obverse to Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Consequence is about the rendering process that abstracts the body from itself, not its irreducibility.

For the most part, we only see lines of nearly identical pine caskets. They are trapezoidal forms that serve as indexical metonyms for the unseen corpses, as the workers  move them around, either by hand or with rollers and lifts. The fact that this is a German crematorium, of course, is hardly lost on Heise, and this infuses Consequence with inevitably haunted significations. We are watching the state-of-the-art removal of human bodies from the earth, a mechanized process that harks back to the murder machine of the Third Reich, even though there is virtually no connection to what we are witnessing. 

The management of bodies is, after all, just a job. That was the case before 1939 and after 1945. But in its near silence, Consequence emphasizes the dispassionate labor process that palpably abjures any special regard for the "objects" being rendered. The human ability to perceive the dead as mere material, then, seems to suggest a more sinister potential, to perceive the living in the same way.

You can watch Consequence here.