Setting up an intense reciprocal gaze, Lisandro Alonso – whose work consistently explores the personal quests of men navigating natural settings – creates a face-to-face encounter with the wild in the beguiling and enigmatic S/T, a moment observed in a seemingly floating abyss.
Observation is similarly the main modus of Harun Farocki’s latest film, In Comparison, which revisits issues explored in the director’s 2007 two-channel installation “Comparison via a Third.” Renowned for his rigorous theoretical works and writings, Farocki is a sly image maker, acutely aware that every subsequent image alters and appends meaning to create the successive language that is cinema. His notion of “soft editing,” a non-hierarchical representation allowing for maximum deduction from the viewer, is very much at work in this deceptively contemplative documentary about contemporary brick production. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick – that very basic unit of foundation – and traces its contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi-industrialized mouldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Eschewing traditional commentary, but certainly employing a deft, wilful and playful point of view, In Comparison presents various methods of labour production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.
Never schematic but nevertheless possessing a notable (and charming) structure, this handsome 16mm colour film reveals the innate beauty of forms, rows, clay, fabric and skin that gleams in the sunlight. It also examines the repetitive movements and shapes that operate under the harsh glare of the fluorescents in sterile European factories, which reveal their own compelling aesthetics – particularly of the machine, with its hypnotic rhythms and musique concrète clatter. Farocki’s films have often emphasized the machine-like qualities of the camera. And while In Comparison can be seen as a comparative study, the film is so rich in imagery that its revelatory function encourages inquiry as much as wonderment for what the world contains, from muscular bodies in motion, infectious camaraderie and shimmering fabrics, to leaps in modern progress, with their attendant complicated and contradictory implications. Amid this polyphonic array, the image of the hand dominates, positing a wide-ranging idea of labour that is as rich with meaning as a building block.
Andréa Picard
Lisandro Alonso was born in Buenos Aires. He studied film at the Universidad del Cine, and founded the production company 4L to produce his own films. He co-directed the short Dos en la vereda (95). His acclaimed feature films include Freedom (01), Los Muertos (04), Fantasma (06) and Liverpool (08).
Harun Farocki was born in Nový Jicín Czech Republic, and studied at the German Film and TelevisionAcademy in Berlin. He has served as a guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His films and installations include Images of the World and the Inscription of War (89), How to Live in the FRG (90), Videograms of a Revolution (92), Workers Leaving the Factory (95), Prison Images (00), War at a Distance (03), Respite (07), Deep Play (07), and In Comparison (09).