While the dearly departed are on their way out, this is what goes down in those final moments around them.
Once your coffin is lowered into the grave and all the people who came to mourn you have filed out of the chapel, your journey ends there. As the life departs from your body, it leaves it behind onto the busy highway of life for some unsung heroes to shove your limp corpse aside and move it out of the way of oncoming traffic. Alright I’m putting this rather degradingly here for you, let’s try that again.
Your journey may have ended but all around you, life still goes on. From the very moment of your death, your corpse is passed back and forth between people like a volley ball, workers of the funeral industry who handle your body to give it a little spruce up in time for your final public appearance. These people have an intimate role in spending time with you when no one else would want to - unless they’re a necrophiliac or a grave digger.
This documentary is about these great Samaritans.
Whatever your preference of route to the afterlife or the void may be, as what ethereally remains of you is on your way there, Meanwhile on Earth (2020) you’re in good hands of the funeral industry. This peaceful documentary is made up of vignettes of the lives of funeral workers; hearse drivers, morticians, chapel members, cemetery grounds keepers, capturing moments of their lives on the job while they transport what’s left of you from one place to another. They make mundane conversation to each other about their lives and what they’ve been getting up to lately, the usual workplace conversations you share with your colleagues. Apart from the banality of these conversations, what makes it so hilarious is that they’re surrounded by the dead, to whom this conversation is irrelevant. Some of them quietly get to work, whether it be moving the coffin around the chapel and making it presentable for the funeral or sending it in and out of the lift on its way to the crematorium, we feel the tranquillity of death ever-present in the air, made more intimate by the perfectionist nature of these people as they make sure every detail is just right.
The structure of the documentary is perfectly simple, a still shot where the only movement is within the frame, a moving image in limbo. Each shot is captured in such clean symmetry with a lot of depth within the frame, in some cases the camera would be placed in a different room looking into the one with the staff going about their work. Within his brilliant symmetry is a sense of order and unbreakable peace, with a lot of dead space in the frames within which the dead are resting. Their presence is just as salient and noticeable as the staff who are at work. They become a part of the action, sharing centre frame with the people who must work upon them. There’s only one instance of camera movement as the camera pans right as a coffin is pushed into the crematorium, but apart from that the camera is as cold and unmoving as the dead.
We are never addressed by the staff, they just go about their jobs, they never acknowledge the camera and they naturally assume their habitat. The way the filmmaking crew have gained access to such an environment without being an obtrusive presence makes sure these people are seen rather than watched.
People often see death as taboo, which I find ridiculous. Death is one of the things that unites us all, we all come hardwired with death and there’s no avoiding it so why not just embrace it and use it to live your life in whatever crazy way you want? What this documentary achieves is framing the funeral home and everything that leads to it as something normal, just like any other workplace inhabited by normal people. Although me and my girlfriend think that the documentary pushed its welcome over the last 10 minutes, it’s still a superb documentary that’s worth your attention. Our journeys may have come to an end with our deaths, but we are still moving and are a part of the movement of the people who have to take care of us. It’s on MUBI.
Comments