Harun Farocki’s Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik opens with the very first film ever made: the Lumière brothers’ shot of workers leaving a factory. From that foundational moment, the essay film traces a genealogy of labour’s representation in cinema. Across Hollywood, propaganda films, surveillance footage, and experimental works, Farocki examines how workers are depicted—often only in moments of transition, rarely in the act of working itself. These fragments are arranged into a visual essay that raises questions about productivity, alienation, and the ideological frameworks embedded in moving images.

Farocki’s calm, analytical voiceover functions not only as commentary but also as critique. He connects cinematic choices to wider social structures, asking what it means that work is so often hidden behind factory walls while exits and strikes become focal points. The essay form allows Farocki to explore the political economy of representation itself, suggesting that the factory gate is more than a physical threshold—it is a boundary between visibility and exclusion, between what society values and what it prefers not to see.