In his celebrated 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, existentialist Albert Camus dissected the fate of the titular absurdist hero. Tasked with rolling a boulder to the top of a steep hill only to have it continually roll back on him and return to the bottom, Sisyphus is doomed to a banal eternity; an existence in which any chance at purpose is denied.
Naturally, the troubling moment that most inspires Camus is the instant during which Sisyphus must realize the absurdity of his situation as he consciously descends the slope, returning yet again to the boulder at the foot of the hill, preparing to repeat a mission he knows he will fail:
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.
Set in a recovering, bomb-scarred Beirut, Ziad Kalthoum’s 2017 documentary Taste of Cement offers a devastating modern take on the Sisyphean myth. By chronicling the daily struggle of refugee construction workers who have left war-ravaged Syria to rebuild the destroyed tower blocks of a foreign city, the film empathizes with the men who have ultimately become prisoners within the high-rises they are building.
Bound by curfew, the builders are forced to live in the unfinished structures, never escaping the space of their labor as they worriedly consume news reports of Lebanese airstrikes back home. Powerless to return to Syria and fearing for the safety of their families, the workers’ living hell is simultaneously uncertain and excruciatingly monotonous.
Anyone familiar with Camus’s essay of course knows the proverbial solution: one must rebel against the gods by accepting—even embracing—the absurdity of life; by creating his own meaning in even the most soul-crushing scenarios to reclaim his identity and seek liberation through mindful happiness.
Yet, the story Taste of Cement tells and the nameless characters it presents all seem to occupy the threshold of Sisyphus’ “becoming conscious,” as opposed to the transcendence of oppressive tedium through subversive contentment. The film itself acts as a cinematic interpretation of Sisyphus’ descent, expressed through the account of a situation perhaps much too tragic and persistent for even a stoic Sisyphean figure to accept. Director Kalthoum himself relates the laborers’ plight to that of Sisyphus, both in a literal and metaphorical sense:
…every morning these people climb up with a huge basket of cement, they put it on the roof and they go down again to do the same thing again the next morning. What is changing inside the circle is just that it’s a new floor, every two weeks or so they have a new storey. So we are talking about a capitalist version of it, where we go up and up and up.
Taunted by the seductive rhythm of the glistening Mediterranean Sea visible from the empty high-rises, the workers can only admire this forbidden landscape through distant views from their towers. In comparison to the vigorous breaking waves, the perpetually sluggish flow of liquid cement appears mocking as it is poured, assaulting the laborers’ senses until the material’s taste and the smell permeates every fiber of their being.
And as the refugees are (figuratively) smothered by the cement with which they build, so devastating air raids trap their loved ones and neighbors in Syria under the rubble of their own cement homes. Footage of traumatized civilians sifting through debris in the bombing’s aftermath is an abrupt change of pace for the documentary. Yet, the swift (albeit seamless) return to pensive, stationary shots of the refugees in Lebanon reflects the wicked cycle in which the Syrians are trapped. One city gets rebuilt as the other is getting destroyed, and thus our Sisyphean tale comes full-circle.
Kalthoum’s style in Taste of Cement is brooding and reflective, presenting a dark twist on the aesthetic of the “slow television” phenomenon that rose to prominence in Scandinavia during the last decade. Extended shots of high-rise scaffolding and utilitarian construction sites—often framed within and punctuated by the motorized pulse of soulless machinery—comprise the majority of the documentary, endowing it with a penetrating quietness even amid the industrial din of welding and hammering.
Taste of Cement’s meditative visual commentary calls on the audience to contemplate for themselves the austerity of the images in the context of its daunting existence. Deceptive in their simplicity, these lengthy stagnant shots are the moments in which Sisyphus’ consciousness is cinematically realized, amplified onscreen through coolly impending force. Kalthoum’s slow pace and artistic framing encourage a deep emotional investment on the part of the viewer who is to make no mistake of the tragedy of the situation once he is invited to share in the existential dread.
Poignantly dedicated to “all workers in exile,” Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement is a poetically innovative anti-war film in the spirit of revolutionary cinema—a visual condemnation of the evils brought on by conflict and an unforgiving system in which there is no escape for the working man.