Seán Ó Cualáin / Ireland / 2012 / 84 min
Technological advancements mean that nowadays (in the Western world at least) every man and his dog appears to have some kind of photographic device on themselves at all times. But it wasn’t always the case. Seán Ó Cualáin’s investigative documentary Men at Lunch tries to put answers to some of the questions surrounding the iconic photograph, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper; who took the picture and who were it’s subjects?
Using interviews with New York photographers, photographic archive keepers and alleged relatives of the men depicted, Cualáin paints a picture of life in 1930s America. He shows that the photo holds such a resonance with so many people because it symbolises both the working class, migrant everyman who flocked to the United States in the tens of millions between 1883 and 1925, and the flourishing, post-war land of opportunity where the impossible was possible. The influx of foreign workers and the death defying feats they performed to build it is undoubtedly a fascinating subject but Cualáin doesn’t go into this in any satisfactory depth. Because the film centres around the photograph, he instead fills much of it’s run-time with admittedly charming but repetitive anecdotes of what the photo means to people and why they admire it.
Showing as part of the Glasgow Film Festival 2013
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