Harun Farocki
Workers Leaving the Factory (1995)

Horsebridge Arts & Community Centre, Gallery 1
10:00-18:00 Tuesday - Sunday

Among the first films ever produced is Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Factory. As Harun Farocki writes: ‘Chaplin played a worker, and Marilyn Monroe once exited the gate of a fish factory....’ But the workers' film has not become a central genre in film history. The space in front of the factory gate is far from being a preferred cinematic location; most films begin when the work is over. For this video Farocki collected images from several countries and many decades expressing the idea ‘exiting the factory’, both staged and documentary – as if, says the artist, ‘the time has come to collect film-sequences, in the way words are brought together in a dictionary.