La sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895) by the Lumière brothers was the first film ever shown to a public audience. It depicts a group of workers exiting the gates of an industrial factory. This 50-second recording became a foundational image for filmmakers' enduring fascination with the question of how labour can be represented. Why do filmmakers so often return to the moment of departure, and so rarely to the act of working itself? What becomes visible (or concealed) at the factory gate?
Departing from the iconic image by the Lumières, this thematic block brings together contemporary essay films that question the (in)visibility of labour under global capitalism, as well as the cinematographic challenges this entails.
Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) serves as an anchor. In his analysis of the original Lumière film, Farocki points out that cinema rarely shows factories as workplaces, but more often as sites of arrival and departure. He demonstrates how the image of workers leaving has, over time, become increasingly stylised, repetitive, and staged, a visual cliché that reveals something about the uneasy relationship between film and labour.
The block also includes Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011) by Andrew Norman Wilson and Ho Rui An’s Twenty-Four Cinematic Points of View of a Factory Gate in China (2023).