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
Trop Tôt, Trop Tard (Too Soon, Too Late, 1982) by Huillet-Straub (film tbc)
Serge Daney wrote about the film: ‘The Straubs accord much importance to not disturb the people filmed. One therefore has to see the second part of Too Soon, Too Late as an odd performance, made up of approaches and retreats, where the filmmakers, less meteorologists than acupuncturists, search for the spot - the only spot. Two dangers immediately present themselves: exotic tourism and the invisible camera. Too close, too far. The camera is planted in front of a factory gate and allows one to see Egyptian workers who pass, enter and leave. Too close for them not to see the camera, too far away for them to be tempted to go towards it. To find this point is at this moment the entire act of the Straubs’.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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27 May 2011 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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