Death Will Be Strenuous: Drudgery and The End

By deploying the apparatus of classical and contemporary film theory, this article analyses the observational documentary The End (Konec, 2017), Slovenian director Vid Hajnšek’s feature-length debut. Following a short photographic interpretation of the opening sequence, the essay turns to a discussion of the French theoretician André Bazin, specifically his text “Death Every Afternoon”, which then serves as the springboard for our central thesis: Hajnšek’s documentary employs a neutral, disinterested observation to stage the presence of three different (yet nevertheless thoroughly interlinked) forms of human labour – emotional, intellectual, and physical. In The End, the tasks of the three protagonists are endlessly replicated and repeated, which leads the article to the philosophical conclusion that, as a phenomenon, death is cinematically representable only in the form of an endless, tireless, and extremely exhausting process

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!