Based on one of the Lumière brothers’ historic first films, Harun Farocki has created a montage of scenes from 100 years of film history, all variations on the theme of “workers leaving the factory”. Farocki uses the pictures to reflect on the iconography and economy of a workers’ society, as well as that of cinema itself, which tends to acquire its audience at the gates of the factory and hijack them into the private sphere.

One of the earliest pieces of footage in the history of film shows workers leaving a factory. Called “La Sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière“, it was shot at the Lumière brothers’ factory - “Société Anonyme des Plaques et Papiers Photographiques A. Lumière et ses Fils” in Lyon. A throng of men and women streams out through the factory gates and quickly disperses, moving out of frame to the right and the left.

The film is about one minute long and, like most of the Lumière brothers’ films, it was shot from a fixed camera position in a single take. Yet this unassuming bit of film marks the birth of the cinématographe – the system of movie camera and projector developed by the French brothers – and is widely considered the first ever movie. For filmmaker Harun Farocki it’s also the point of departure for an examination of this iconographic scene. He has taken a series of variations on this “cinematic theme”, edited them together artfully and provided an off-camera narration. For the 100th birthday of the film medium, he lets the pictures speak for themselves. All are found footage, whether from narrative features, documentaries or newsreels. For instance, we see Marilyn Monroe being picked up after work in Fritz Lang’s “Clash by Night”, or an East German factory task force leaving the factory. There’s footage from the 1970s of a loudspeaker mounted on a vehicle sent by the union to play rousing music to try to motivate skeptical striking workers in front of a Volkswagen factory. From Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “Deserter” we see a strikebreaker collapse under the weight of the crates he unloads in Hamburg harbor, as the picketers watch suspiciously.

It’s no accident that Farocki chose the factory gates as his location. It represents the interface between profit-oriented manufacturing and public spaces. As a filmmaker he has an ongoing fascination with labor processes and their representation in images. Farocki asked himself why the factory has remained a secondary location in the history of film. He wanted to examine whether film – which relies on the visible to make its mark – arose too late to document labor processes, given that the visual/manual portion of those processes has noticeably fallen off, if not entirely disappeared, in the twentieth century.

The model for this kind of collected, systemized network of references is a dictionary, which records not only a word’s meaning and uses, but also its history. “Workers leaving the factory” is the first entry in Farocki’s “archive of cinematic expression”. In the 1990s, he added to the genre with “The Expression of Hands” (1997) and “Prison Pictures”.

In his film, Farocki returns again and again to the Lumières' film, which represents something like the first word in the vocabulary of film. With the hindsight of 100 years of the medium’s history, the 1895 film is a rich statement. The factory is unadorned and the film says very little about the power of industry and its workers. We are keenly aware of how fast the workers move to get away from work and back to their private lives.

But what really turns the transition spot in front of the factory into a dramatic location is the industrial action. Confrontations between workers and management, as well as between strikers and strike breakers make for recognizable lines of social and economic conflict that remain invisible in the workaday world. A film by D.W. Griffith gives us images of this that resemble civil war. In a performance of Brecht’s “Mother Courage” that Farocki presents without commentary, the choir delivers its demands in song: “Good, that’s a piece of bread, but where’s the whole loaf?”, and their foreman replies with “so we strike”.

“Workers Leaving the Factory” is a sequence of specific images that tell a story. Farocki extracts from the images a societal reality inherent in the exposures, but without imposing a forced interpretation on the story. In that respect, the film is exemplary of Farocki’s way of ascribing argumentative power to the images themselves. He allows the editing to be guided by what the images articulate, from marching formations used to discipline workers at Siemens in 1934 to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” with its rank and file formations; from arresting strike scenes to a commercial for safety barriers that deploy automatically to ensure factory security. In “Workers Leaving the Factory” Farocki lays the groundwork for his later film “Prison Pictures” with the similarities between factory gates and prison gates, and the secure architecture common to both. “Where once a single camera stood, today hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras hold the fort.”

The film was made in 1995 on the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema. Farocki also picked up the theme of “workers leaving the factory” for a 2006 exhibition in Vienna’s Generali Foundation, showing additional variations on the subject.
Volker Patenburg

GI Compilation Harun Farocki:
Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, Erkennen und verfolgen, Gefängnisbilder, Nicht löschbares Feuer, Nicht ohne Risiko, Stilleben, Videogramme einer Revolution, Wie man sieht, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1995

Production Year

1995

color

color + b/w

Aspect Ratio

1:1,33

Duration

Medium-Length Film (31 to 60 Min.)

Type

Documentary

Genre

Biography / Portrait, History Film

Topic

Work, Film History

Scope of Rights

Nichtexklusive nichtkommerzielle öffentliche Aufführung (nonexclusive, noncommercial public screening),Keine TV-Rechte (no TV rights)

Licence Period

31.12.2024

Permanently Restricted Areas

Germany (DE), Austria (AT), Switzerland (CH)

Available Media

DVD, DCP

Original Version

German (de), English (en), Spanish (es), French (fr)

DVD

Subtitles

German (de), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Russian (ru), Japanese (ja)

DCP

Subtitles

German (de), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Russian (ru), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl), Lithuanian (lt)

• Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik
• Harun Farocki