Workers Leaving the Factory

The gates open and men and women pour out into the street. This exodus lasts 45 seconds and was the first film ever shown in public. It was made in 1895 by the Lumière brothers, and the factory from which the workers are streaming was their own. Since then, the scene has been repeated again and again in different ways. In Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang presents factory workers as zombies in a march of the dead. And in Modern Times (1936), as Charlie Chaplin leaves the factory he is dragged off by police after being mistaken for a brick-throwing protester.

In his film essay Workers Leaving the Factory, Harun Farocki argues that factory labor has changed considerably since that first example of cinematic film. The film industry, meanwhile, has developed in parallel with the capitalist production system into a storyteller of narratives that have more to do with the control of labor than with its celebration. In more than a hundred years of film history, prison bars appear more often than factory gates. Cinema may have begun with the image of a factory, but it has gradually drifted further and further away from it.