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.
A Bientôt J’Espère (Be Seeing You Soon, 1968) by Chris Marker and Mario Marret
In 1967 Marker and Marret film the strike that broke out at Rhodiaceta, a textile plant owned by the Rhone-Poulenc trust in the city of Besançon, France. This film sympathetic to the strikers was passionatley rejected by the workers. The rejection signalled the beginning of a closer collaboration between filmmakers and workers and the constitution of the film collectives called Medvedkine Groups.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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13 May 2011 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
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