Factories and workers in motion, an essay — IndieLisboa

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2024

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2024

An essay about workers and factories. One of the first films in the history of cinema La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon by the Lumière brothers immediately evokes this relationship. This session is an essay-play between that film and a set of other works that dialogue with it and evoke a space of resistance and change. Curiously and ironically, the session ends with the inverse sense of the movement of the workers, who return to the factory after the conquests made by the unions, but who find a resistant worker, because the struggle is a continuous act.

Factories and workers in motion, an essay

April 28, Friday, 21:45 (97')

Culturgest, Small Auditorium • C.142

Workers Leaving the Factory

The German director is dedicated to creating a film in which he collects images of “factory exits” over the course of many films that expand many decades and travel across multiple countries. Whether staged or documentary, Farocki looks at how cinema sees this moment of limbo.

1995, 36'

Workers Leaving the Factory (again)

The power of a mass of workers, the vast majority women, when they leave a factory, and which slowly but inevitably, resembles a resistance movement. They’re leaving at night; will they go safely? What bargaining power could this human mass have?

Katharina Gruzei

2012, 11'

Obreras saliendo de la fábrica

Four women in a monotonous factory job where any individual expression is in the way of extreme efficiency. But there are things capable of flourishing within these walls, like friendships. If the point is to get out of the factory, we also see what they do next.

José Luis Torres Leiva

2005, 21'

Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai)

The factory being left is a construction site populated by a huge number of Southeast Asian laborers who build skyscrapers with the mechanical precision that befits a neo-Fordist ideology.

2008, 8'

Workers Leaving the Googleplex

A damning critique of the social stratification at Google workers and the layers of privilege offered to some but not others.

Andrew Norman Wilson

2011, 11'

Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory

Amid a sour return to work, which does not feel like a workers’ victory, a quiet voice of disruption tries to shake the passive return to the status quo.

Pierre Bonneau, Liane Estiez-Willemont, Jacques Willemont

1968, 10'

Silvestre Focus

An essay about workers and factories. One of the first films in the history of cinema La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon by the Lumière brothers immediately evokes this relationship. This session is an essay-play between that film and a set of other works that dialogue with it and evoke a space of resistance and change. Curiously and ironically, the session ends with the inverse sense of the movement of the workers, who return to the factory after the conquests made by the unions, but who find a resistant worker, because the struggle is a continuous act.

SHARE