The Startled Faction (a sensitivity training)

Directed by Catherine Sullivan

During a sensitivity training held in Chicago, nine characters with varying degrees of aptitude and motivation rehearse symptoms of and methods for avoiding ambiguous labor (work outside one’s job description). The prevailing question for the characters is whether to ‘lean in’ or to resist through strategies of withdrawal, redaction, and retreat. The curriculum is complicated by scenes drawn from the 1954 film Salt of the Earth, a semi-fictional account of a strike at a New Mexico zinc mine wherein the status of the women’s domestic labor is viewed through the strike’s racial and economic urgencies. The group is drawn into this contestation by the film’s soundtrack and a woman attempting to escape becoming its protagonist. Ambiguous labor leaks between the nine characters as they confront the social instruments for the expression of complaint, anger, and suffering. Some learn to feign surprise and incompetence and to conspicuously demonstrate fatigue.