Synopsis
The workers leave the Lumière factory. The first film in history frames the industry itself and tells us in its modest language: “Look, we can record our image in motion”. This first document gives us an outline of what, from then on, will be made possible thanks to cinema. Telling this story, Workers Leaving the Factory shows similar sequences shot in a hundred years of cinema.
A word from Tënk
Harun Farocki analyzes the cinematic representation of the working class. The camera remains at the threshold of the factory and the narration always begins before or after work. Struggles, strikes and working masses are always filmed at the factory gates (or at the prison gates). Farocki treats the archives - fiction and documentary films - as concrete things and, with the finesse of his commentary and the scalpel of his disassembly, he manages to make their underlying ideology readable. Seeing the images again and again, comparing and dissociating the motives, becomes then operations to unmask the system of signs that has always slipped on surveillance, violence and alienation. The invisible of a century of cinema is finally revealed.
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
