In the Pit

Once, in Chicago, I deposed an Irish immigrant who had worked for thirty years on construction crews that built skyscrapers. He had been badly burned in an accident and was disabled. In his testimony, the man told me that what he missed most about his lost job was “the fellowship, being one of a group of men who are going to build something really big and wonderful.” “There’s nothing like it,” the man told me. Juan Carlos Rulfo's exuberant documentary, “In the Pit,” conveys something of this sentiment: the film is about construction workers laboring on an enormous project, an elevated freeway built to girdle Mexico City. Shot between March 2003 and December 2005, the picture depicts a half-dozen men and a single woman -- she’s a night guard assigned duty setting up barricades around the construction sites -- involved in the project. Shorty and a big braggart, nicknamed El Grande, work in pits next to the roaring freeway and, later, are shown clambering around eighty feet above the traffic, dangling from huge pylons of concrete prickly with lethal-looking re-rod. Some of the aerial sequences are hair-raising -- the men hop from concrete beam to beam and use the re-rod for handholds and no one seems properly tied-off. Cyclopean wedges of concrete and girder are hauled at night over the adjacent freeways -- it’s too busy to move these vast wing-shaped piers of concrete during the day -- and, then, yanked into place by big cranes. We ride with one of the truckdrivers through the dark streets. Sometimes, motorists lose their way, crash through the barricades, and smash their vehicles. Ambulances take away the corpses and there is blood all over the gravel. The night watchwoman says that she has visions of God and the Devil wrestling over the job site and that the gargantuan construction project is the result of a Faustian bargain -- it is the Devil’s highway that the men are building and the price of work is paid in human lives. She stands among her barricades gesturing portentously at the big columns overhead. Rulfo shows us a handsome young worker who wastes his wages betting on horse-races. We see a ranch in the country where one of the men works. Some of the laborers doubt that they will ever see the project completed. Most of them are too poor to own cars -- one says he can’t even afford a bicycle -- and so none of them expect to use the elevated freeway that they are building. Somehow a man is rescued from a deep cylindrical hole (probably 60 feet deep) into which he has fallen. A car bursts into flames that are put out by dumptrucks pouring sand and dirt onto the flaming vehicle and there are astounding traffic jams. Most of the men seem to think that the project is hellish, a purgatory through which they must pass in order to earn their daily bread. The iron workers high above the freeway wave at the girls and try to get them to show their underpants through their windshields. There is talk about politics and religion and marriage -- mostly about what you would expect from construction workers. Shorty doesn’t think he will ever be married and says that he despises the institution. At the end of the film, during the closing credits, we see him going somewhere on the subway -- a tiny dapper man with a melancholy face. El Grande says that he was once a gangster and carried thick wads of 500 peso notes -- now, he seems to be a drunk and beats his wife. Nothing is explained -- we don’t really get much of sense for the sociology of the project or the anthropology of the workmen. The film is primarily visual -- fast-motion images of men crawling like ants all over the big cross-beams of concrete, traffic speeded-up to ribbons of red and amber light pouring through endless complex interchanges, clouds and storms gathering in the sky, cranes jockeying big sections of roadway into place. There’s nothing in the film that you couldn’t surmise, nothing really astounding or informative, but the sheer scale of the project is impressive and the workers are engaging, mostly merry -- although in one scene, poor little Shorty seems about to cry when his comrades bring him a birthday cake and arrange for him to be serenaded by a mariachi band. The last ten minutes of the film are a visual tour de force -- the camera glides over miles of the elevated highway, first following cars on a completed section and, then, tracking over the pylons and re-rod covered decking, jumping across areas where only the supports have been built to other sections where armies of men are sanding and finishing the road way, thousands of men laboring to pour concrete or build forms or fit the re-rod studded junctions of the big slabs of concrete together -- the camera’s motion is interminable, eerily smooth, a cast of thousands, tens of thousands, it seems, arrayed at their tasks on the endlessly linear construction site.