Event overview
FACTORY TROUBLE - a film programme curated by Manuel Ramos for InC, Goldsmiths, University of London
ABOUT
‘All contemporary politics has the factory as its place’.
What is the relation of cinema to the factory today? According to Harun Farocki cinema is repelled by the factory. Straub and Huillet understand that the cine-camera is either too early or too late when it comes to film the factory. For Wang Bing to film an industrial complex is to experience an exile. This film programme explores the thwarted relation between the cinema and the factory: the distressing inadequacies of representation, the uncertainties of filmmakers with this space, the dissatisfaction of workers with the audio-visual media.
The programmed documentaries, essay-films and fictions develop inventive experiments with this frustration. In this sense the intention of this programme is not to confirm the powerlessness of cinema in regards to the realities of the factory. It is neither to simply denounce cinema’s ignominious connivance with the social order; a connivance eloquently phrased by Godard in his maxim ‘the exploiter doesn’t show the exploitation of the exploited’. Differently the programmed films make operational their thwarted relation to the factory, manufacturing singular articulations of dissent. These films visualize the capacity of cinema to intervene in how the factory (re)figures today. By looking at the singularity of these articulations, this programme provides a forum to discuss the contemporaneity of the cinema-factory pair and to re-think the sense(s) of cinema’s efficacy.
The programme includes films rarely seen (if ever) in the UK.
Der VW-Komplex (The VW Complex, 1990) by Hartmut Bitomsky (film tbc)
Bitomsky said: ‘I think that every film is a map on which a way has been marked out. In a good film a clever way has been chosen, which leads us past a number of places that invite us to cast a look aside. That is why I look for subjects that mark out this path for us, like the production lines in The VW Complex. When the subject has this sort of extending movement, then the film sets, so to speak, itself in motion. It’s like a river that passes by the camera
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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6 May 2011 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
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