Materialist Cinema: Workers Leaving the Factory
Fuse, Sept. 2009, v. 32, no. 4, pp. 14-16
Workers Leaving the Factory, a co-presentation by the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Media City International Festival of Experimental Film and Video Art, brings together works by three contemporary artists and filmmakers who take as their common point of departure Louis Lumiere's 1895 La sortie des usines Lumiere. The first film ever screened publicly, its 47 seconds of footage depict a group of workers exiting Lumieres family-owned factory on the outskirts of Lyon. In context the exhibition's title seems wincingly apt, a plausible motto for Windsor's crumbling manufacturing economy -- an increasingly allegorical construct onto which civic identity continues to hang. Given the town's uniquely volatile atmosphere this spring, it's all the more unsettling. Distinguished by its silence, its jittery, hand cranked pacing, exaggerated contrast and pronounced grain, the Lumiere film projected near the elevator, signals an immediate temporal shift, a dissociative resistance similarly evident in the accompanying contemporary works
ITEM 2009.131 – available for viewing in the Research Centre
Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited
Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) – Harun Farocki
Exit (2008) – Sharon Lockhart
Workers (leaving the factory) (2008) – Nancy Davenport