A worker assembling a watch in Unrest (KimStim)

Time is money, and we know it all too well (and suffer from it). But in a valley of the Swiss Jura Mountains in 1872, time is a resource directly mediated by political forces. Unrest focuses on a community whose economic and labor power depend on the daily manufacturing of time—watches.

The film also examines the inherent dynamics between entrepreneurs who provide the capital, the local workforce that works tirelessly to fulfill orders, and the government apparatus that ensures a social structure functioning as precisely as the watches produced. Written and directed by Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin, the historical re-creation is mostly shot with a distant and omniscient gaze that never loses sight of the social inequalities represented. Loosely based on the diaries of Russian cartographer and anarchist proponent Pyotr Kropotkin (played here by Alexei Evstratov), the film takes his visit to this particular Swiss locality as a starting point, portraying his intention to create an “anarchist map” and spread his ideas among the working class, without exclusively focusing on him. Later on, we hear him declare that the revolution has no protagonists, and Schäublin takes this statement to heart.

Unrest is a precise and purposeful film when it comes to addressing the watchmaking business and the local craftsmanship involved. Occasional explanations about the process of creating a watch (the title refers to the balance wheel that regulates its internal oscillations) are few compared with the scenes of the creative labor within factories, where both men and women participate directly in the local economy, even though they don’t have the same rights: Women cannot vote, and if they are unmarried, they cannot receive medical insurance.

At the same time, Schäublin offers a political observation of history: Workers are seduced by revolutionary ideas as a palliative to an oppressive system that seems to work against their well-being and interests. It’s not surprising that women are most interested in being part of the anarchist movement; it offers them the utopian alternative of having a voice and a vote, and even access to health insurance if they contribute three percent of their daily pay. Anarchists like Kropotkin are young, attractive outsiders with good intentions, but you can also see them as travelers who have nothing to lose in places where they do not permanently live. At the same time, he and other anarchists are fetishized in sold photographs (another nascent technology and business). Prices of their images increase as their association with the movement becomes more prominent. Capitalism devours everybody equally.

The difference between anarchism and communism is discussed in a curious prologue depicting bourgeois women from Russian high society gossiping about the whereabouts of Kropotkin. The banter is ingenious and provocative. (According to one informed young woman, anarchism believes in self-governing and decentralized communes.) Schäublin’s film is distended, focusing indiscriminately on characters, or rather groups, that allow us to get an idea of the day-to-day life in the Swiss village. We learn, for example, that the community has four simultaneous, different measures of time (for the municipality, the factory, the church, and the telegraph office), but when it comes to private lives, emotions, or any other individualizing characteristics, the express intention of the filmmakers is to overlook them.

It could be said the film achieves an ironic, formal execution of Kropotkin’s anarchist ideas, where the individual matters little compared to the communal strength. Much of the dialogue is heard off-camera while a passive interlocutor listens. In wide shots, the exterior landscape (both natural and architectural) practically swallows up those who inhabit it. In moments of indignation, such as when a group of women is fired for participating in anarchist meetings, the camera remains impassive without relieving the frustration with empathetic reaction’s shots. The decision is intentional, forcing you to confront the film intellectually.

Unrest is the rare political film that dares to criticize everything that falls under its gaze with a double-edged sword while resisting the temptation to provide emotional guidance that leads to comfort or outrage. Its sophisticated coldness is a warning in itself about the gap between the poetry behind certain ideologies and the ineffectiveness of their practice. Unlike the watches created with rigor to be meticulous machines, ideas can easily fail in estimations.