For Man Must Work or The End of Work
2000 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Jean-Claude Bürger
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Experts including Viviane Forrester, Jeremy Rifkin, and Jacques Attali debate whether technology and globalization are ending mass industrial employment. The film asks what work will mean when human labour is increasingly replaced.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 52-minute essay film from 2000 that *still* looks like it's asking the only questions worth asking—but it commits the cardinal sin of inviting experts to debate rather than provoke, which means it'll feel like public radio to anyone who wanted provocation.
Bürger situates this squarely in the essay-film tradition while the premise itself becomes a time capsule: watching Forrester and Attali grapple with technological displacement *as* displacement happens is exactly the kind of formally rigorous archival act that defines curatorial cinema.
The decision to let the debate breathe without editorial manipulation—no cutting for conflict, no manufactured drama—is what makes this work: it trusts the viewer to sit with genuine intellectual uncertainty, which takes more discipline than any flashy craft choice.