![]() ![]() 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.īound 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. Set in a recovering, bomb-scarred Beirut, Ziad Kalthoum’s 2017 documentary Taste of Cement offers a devastating modern take on the Sisyphean myth. 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. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes 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. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. ![]() ![]() 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: 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. In his celebrated 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, existentialist Albert Camus dissected the fate of the titular absurdist hero. ![]()
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