Workers Leaving the Factory
1995 · 36m · Germany
Directed by Harun Farocki
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
A documentary essay that traces the motif of workers leaving factories throughout a century of cinema, from the Lumière brothers' 1895 original through Fritz Lang, Chaplin, and Pasolini, revealing how depictions of industrial labor encode ideology, surveillance, and social change.
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Farocki uses one image — workers exiting a factory — as a century-long autopsy of cinema and labor. The essay film as forensic toolkit, and he's the one who wrote the manual.
Farocki uses a single recurring shot to read a century of cinematic ideology, and the result is one of the most generative video-essays ever made. Vimeo hosts a clear upload by permission.
Farocki uses the single recurring image of the factory exit as a century-long archaeological dig through Lumière, Lang, Chaplin, Pasolini - 36:08 of cinema deconstructing its own labor politics. Vimeo confirms 132K views on the screening upload.
Reviews
Among Farocki's many virtues, his sense of humor is largely underrated: here, his carefully timed editing and faux-naïve descriptions turn a century of film (and labor) history into a kind of extended slapstick routine, albeit one whose flipside is a parade of human horrors.
Farocki treats the archives as concrete things and, with the finesse of his commentary and the scalpel of his disassembly, manages to make their underlying ideology readable by seeing the images again and again, comparing and dissociating the motives.