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.
Tout Va Bien (1972) by Jean-Luc Godard
Godard said: ‘Cameras are forbidden in factories, in the workplace. For me, an informer, a filmmaker, there is hardly anywhere I am allowed to shoot. I’m not even allowed in so-called state-owned businesses. I do not have the right to film in the subway or in a museum, a factory, an airport. I do not have the right to film in any of the places that represent 80% of productive activity in France. The exploiter never shows the exploited how he’s exploiting them’.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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3 Jun 2011 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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