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ABSTRACT
The understanding of the factory as a key cinematic site is predicated on the promise of a future able to inherit the possibilities of the past, what Harum Farocki has called “a future library for moving images” able to assemble assorted footage of factories into a veritable “work force” of images. Taking these insights as my starting point, I focus on Joaquim Jordà’s collaboration with Numax factory workers in Numax presenta (1980). At the request of the workers, the film documented the occupation of the Numax factory in Barcelona from 1977 to 1979, at the peak of the dismantling of the militant Left in the name of a peaceful Transition to Democracy after almost 40 years of Francoist rule. Once it was clear that the factory occupation could no longer be maintained, the Asamblea de Trabajadores de Numax decided to invest their remaining capital in the re-enactment and historicization of their exercise in self-management. Thus, the film is at once urgent and late, caught in the anachronisms that defined the militant images of the last century. My analysis will concentrate on the historical experience contained in Jordà’s “work force of images” and attempt to demonstrate that anachronism is not an accident but rather the precondition for the production of the factory as a cinematic site that can, in turn, engage in the production of the political.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sara Nadal-Melsió has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and New York University and is now a collaborator at the art residency SOMA in Mexico City. Her essays have appeared in Diacritics, RHM, JSCS and Avenç, as well as in various edited volumes. She is also the coauthor of Alrededor de/Around, a book on the photography and architecture of the last turn of the century. She is currently working on a manuscript, titled Europe and the Wolf, on the transmission of dissent in Europe’s musical legacy through a reading of contemporary art and experimental cinema. In February 2018, she will co-curate (with Carles Guerra) an exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona.
Notes
1. In many ways, Farocki’s diagnosis of the factory as a cinematic site is the impulse behind his long-standing exploration of the labor of images. His archive of visual concepts proposes a critical extraction of the effort behind cinematic images. Farocki has been instrumental in keeping the legacy of militant cinema alive, often by transposing it to gallery space or the museum.
2. Tom Gunning has pointed out the dialectical nature of the development of the classical style in film. He highlights its discontinuities and anomalies as traces of the historical dimension of the genre rather than anecdotal mistakes that somehow made it into the final cut.
3. The same goes for the protocols of documentary fiction. As Joaquim Jordà explained in an interview with Marc Recha:
The scene in Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory in Lyon (La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon) was shot various times to make the ending coincide with the moment when the door closes, and the characters were organized according to their height, i.e., the physical things they had in common or didn’t have in common. The scene was arranged in a way that somewhat contradicts the idea that a documentary involves simply putting something in front of the camera. If there was something put on camera (and it is very bold to define the limit between putting something on camera and arranging the scene) the borders were also very imprecise.
4. For a concise and brilliant analysis of the history of militant film in a global context, see Brenez. For an introduction to the militant film culture of Spain in the 1970s, see Fernández Labayen and Prieto Souto. For a more in-depth analysis of the same milieu, see Prieto Souto.
5. Of course, the most sophisticated formal analogy between cinematic montage and the factory assembly line can be found in Dziga Vertov, notably in and A Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Enthusiasm (1931).
6. For a succinct summary of the protocols of the militant image, see the introduction to this special issue.
7. For a more detailed account of the tensions between the political and the aesthetic in the Barcelona School, see Nadal-Melsió, “Editor’s Preface”.
8. The film historian and scholar Luis E. Parés was responsible for the discovery and has since been screening the film in a variety of museums and cinematheques across Spain.
9. Jordà was certainly aware of the criticism Chris Marker faced at the Besançon factory in 1968, at the height of French militant film production. After the screening of the film Marker had shot at a watch factory, the workers demanded that they take charge of their cinematic representation and seize the means of production. Thus the cinéma ouvrier of the Medvedkin Group began as a collaboration between filmmakers and workers. The 1968 film Classe de lutte, as well as a number of productions during the following five years, became a model for horizontal and collaborative filmmaking. (Incidentally, the Medvedkin Group was named after the renowned Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin and his 1932 ciné-train, despite the fact that at that time his films remained unknown and it was even unclear whether he was alive. I mention this because it resonates deeply with the role of chronological precedence and anachronism developed by another essay in this issue, “Turning the camera into a weapon: Juan Piqueras’s radical noncommercial film projects and their afterlives (1930s–1970s)”.)
10. Mari Paz Balibrea makes a very compelling case for reading the factory in Numax presenta as a space of obsolescence. While Balibrea locates Numax’s spatio-temporal obsolescence in the space of the factory, as well as in the type of labor it produces, I situate the anachronism of the film in the factory as a cinematographic space. In my reading, through the film’s transit from the representational to the transformational, the cinematographic space of the factory comes full circle as the imaginary for both reified labor and the resistance to it.
11. The disappearance of class consciousness, often considered an obsolete remainder from a more politicized recent past, has already proved to have nefarious consequences. The last U.S. election and Brexit are sad reminders of what happens when class misidentification is exploited to further disempower those most at the mercy of neoliberal policies (privatization, downsizing, outsourcing and so on).
12. Jordà uses theater in similar ways in two of his later films, Mones com la Becky (Monkeys like Becky) and De nens (Of children). The latter also explores the role of rumor as an insidious modality of oral transmission for which nobody takes responsibility.
13. The theatrical interludes bring to mind certain modes of early cinema, such as the cinema of attractions, and reminds us of the medium’s initial dependency on the stage.
14. Fran Benavente and Gloria Salvadò insightfully describe Jordà’s fascination with orality:
In the same way that there are filmmakers with a keen eye, like Johann Van Der Keuken (who operates the camera in his films), or filmmakers with a keen ear, like Frederick Wiseman (sound operator in his films), Joaquim Jordà can be classified as a filmmaker-converser.
15. In his 1969 Maria Aurèlia Capmany parla d’un lloc entre els morts (Maria Aurèlia Capmany speaks from a place among the dead), Jordà had already begun to experiment with the film essay. Thus, the transformation I allude to here does not follow a chronological order.
16. Both authors have been thoroughly studied in the last twenty years. However, their works are presented at times as disconnected from some of the militant practices they were contemporaneous to when developing core ideas in their thought. I will not dwell on them in this essay. For a study of Lefebvre’s reconfiguration of the aesthetic vis-à-vis the political, which is very close to Rancière’s, see Nadal-Melsió, “Lessons”.
17. I am referring specifically to the 1976 La parole ouvrière 1830–51 and the 1981 La nuit des prolétaires: Archives du rêve ouvrier. For a concise and accurate account of Ranciére extensive archival work, see Lerner.
18. It is in these playful scenes where the influence of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1972 Tout va bien (All’s Well), a film depicting the occupation of a sausage factory, is felt more strongly.
19. Foucault began the formulation of the concept that same year, 1979, in his famous lecture at the Collège de France entitled “The Birth of Biopolitics”.
20. In this context, it is worth recalling that Numax factory workers, as well as CCOO and the PSUC members, protested the 1980 screening of the film. In fact, one of the female protagonists of the film shouted at Jordà, “Con las tripas de un burócrata te ahorcaremos”, expressing her disapproval with a ready-made and desperate phrase that gives a sense of the troubling times that the workers’ movement was already facing (Jordà).
21. The secondary nature of industrial labor is somewhat debatable in today’s global context. In fact, it is in serious danger of becoming a case of double exploitation: first, by capital and, then, by the “primary” or immaterial labor of first-world countries, complicit in an incrementally abstract and expropriating modality of capital. The changing and multiple nature of capital, its “becoming”, is already a key factor in Marx’s Grundrisse. The simultaneous existence of different modes of labor is subsumed under a capitalist narrative whereby their differential is turned into an exploitative relationship.
Incidentally, the term “double exploitation” is used by one of the actors in the film to describe how she exploits herself as a self-managed worker while simultaneously being exploited by capitalism. This is one of her reasons to vote for the end of the occupation: “Mucho más debería cambiar”, she exclaims.
22. “What lies at the core of this relationship between capital’s abstract logic and history is the bonding supplied by formal subsumption – capitalism’s rule of development – and its inexhaustible capacity to make history by joining what it takes over or appropriates for use and combining with it the new. Above all else, it should be stated at the outset that the rule of formal subsumption was a temporal category that performed as a form bound to neither a specific time nor place, which, through its protean capacity to appropriate from the past what it found useful to capitalism, constantly introduced practices that embodied past times in every present. It was capital’s logic that made possible history, as we know it, and defined the relationship between itself and the past”. (Harootunian 26)
23. In many ways, the post-Fordist labor force looks more and more like an “artistic” endeavor. Jordà is closer to that emerging reality, not just because of his connection to Negri’s operaismo, but because he is a filmmaker, an artist. In a sense, so are the Numax factory workers. Their exit from the factory space also marks their entry into the unpaid labor force of art workers.