Every picture taken of a human at work, and therefore every picture in general (behind which there’s always a human), can, in varying degrees, evoke the 'original' crime, over which humans were punished by constant toil and struggle, to eat only in sweat and sorrow. But instead of creating a superimposition, this complete overlap amounts to a total eclipse where the provisional signifier ceases to signify, obscuring the ahistorical signified, along with the omnipresence of work; traces vanishing from what would otherwise be recognized as a crime scene.
Enter the Nazis. Only with a historical Hell did the form and content of this “crime and hard labor” allegory come apart, superimposed in a two-word term: “industrial killing”. Notwithstanding the telling slogan at Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei“ (“Work sets you free“), work kills, but more importantly, killing is the work.
The inseparability between this unspeakable horror and the birth of modern cinema, at the hands of Resnais, Godard and Co., cannot be overstated.
Modern, urban crime scenes
Eugène Atget's fin de siecle photographs of the empty streets of Paris (well over a century of abortive revolutions, that also saw the founding of a Second French Empire in Algeria) have been said to strongly suggest a crime scene. Although he had to work hard on his visual documents to give evidence, only then could one of those who looked hard at them ask, rather rhetorically: “But isn't every square inch of our cities a crime scene?“
Many decades later in postwar Japan, Masao Adachi quit cinema as at least some of us know it, and then reentered, joining the Palestinian armed struggle and wielding a militant camera before and during the Lebanese civil war, having already practiced his “theory of landscape” (fukeiron). Thus, In AKA Serial Killer (1969), he follows a possible trail of a murderous, unemployed teenager, in vain search for work, who’s been the subject of an avalanche of sensational media coverage; Adachi’s strictly informational voiceover accompanies the sparsely narrated footage of pure landscape, shot along the real and imagined itinerary, that now becomes the (larger) crime scene.
At least since the Sixties, up to this day as we approach the second quarter of the 21st century, the specter of a quite specific crime has haunted a remarkably increasing number of films, from many countries, developed, developing and underdeveloped. Sometimes, it even materializes, say, in one or more dead bodies; of the employee and employer’s wife in Souleymane Cissé’s Baara (Work, 1978) , or of the employer in Nouri Bouzid’s Man of Ashes (1986), or of the client in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). In the latter, the machinery of a woman’s largely invisible work, including sex, is slowly made visible, patiently and reflectively observed in its abundance of commodities, colorful splendor, and hypnotic rituality, until it is finally disrupted, and only then blood is spilt and feelings are divulged.
The “specter” that was “haunting Europe”, as conjured up by Marx and Engels, lurks through the comparative class analyses read by the voice-over narrators of Trop tôt/Trop tard (Too Early/Too Late, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1981), as other incriminating specters loom over the small towns and countrysides of France and Egypt. The haunted texts, now reading like a Bill of Indictment, together with the haunted sounds and images of mainly backward landscapes and failed modernization, rehearse a historical tribunal. But when, for example, the camera is staring, up close, at a greenish, turbid patch of the Nile, listening hard, it is hard to shake off a sense of the macabre: someone must have just (been) drowned here—not even the first victim and won’t be last.
Is a factory an altar? A slaughterhouse?
Straub–Huillet’s essay film features a scene outside an Egyptian factory that could count as an omission from Harun Farocki’s Arbeiter verlassen di Fabrik (Workers Leaving The Factory, 1995). Made on the eve of the centenary of cinema, Farocki’s short found-footage essay painstakingly yet very selectively traces filmic reincarnations of La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon, 1895) back to cinema’s foundational moment in the latter, enshrined in the “exiting the factory” experience. Over time, cinema’s enduring relationship with factories, going back as far as it can remember, would also be characterized with the paradoxical “commercial film’s dread of factory work” that “is second only to [its fear] of death.”
Under the Fordist system of production, another dialectical tension between modern labor and film industry led to the standard average duration in popular cinema; movies had to take shape by fitting in within the free time left to the wage worker, during which they needed to let off steam, and hence many of the ways of the movies to entertain and gratify. The rise and evolution of slow cinema have been both a rebellion against this system and a sign of its impending collapse.
Work, glorified for all contradictory reasons - socialist progress, capitalist wealth building, or a religious work ethic - and protested on same ideological grounds - revolutionary, democratic or justice-seeking - has been fertile ground for filmmaking; inside and outside studio systems, in colonized and independent Third World, and in European and worldwide arthouse cinema.
The eternal drama of work comes with a plethora of dichotomies and conflicts worthy of the moving images: Work that “sets you free” is also enslaving; it’s invigorating and sapping, enriching and impoverishing; it’s orderly and frantic, technophilic and technophobic; it’s intimate and alienating, inevitable and unnecessary, invisible and everywhere.
In order to look at work even more, even harder, genres, formats and practices abound. A machine under the gaze is not necessarily inanimate; it can be a living organism or a city or a process. Many YouTube, Instagram and TikTok users, as well as businesses of all sizes, belong to this vast tradition by engaging in the creation of industrial videos, mobile app-edited how-tos, and a wide range of what can be seen together, a recent book suggests , as processual moving images.
Abandoned dream factories
In hindsight, so much has happened in a blink to the Arabic-speaking world: from mechanization to (de)industrialization; from the defeats of the regimes to the defeats of the popular revolts against them. What, then, remains of the eras of Ahmed Kamel Morsi’s The Worker (1943) and Our Industrial Renaissance (Tewfik Saleh, 1959), i.e. of the at once romantic, militant, and propagandistic images of labor, whether anticolonial, anti-bourgeois or both? It’s ironic, and indicative of the state of the Egyptian film industry, along with the Egyptian state itself, that both of the above-mentioned films are lost or nearly lost—the ever-reinvented “wheel of production” can surely go on without archives.
Images outlive the material realities they tout, in more than one sense. It was already too late when, in The Revolution of Machines (Madkour Thabet’s short from 1967) - extant most probably because it was preserved in a personal archive - machines turn into abstract artistic formations, dancing to a soundtrack that blends together musical vibes evocative of carnivals, Africa, fighters and a future. But the factory is disturbingly emptied of its workers, with the only sign of a single one present - or left behind - is a nervous (almost anguished) cry repeated, as if in an echo chamber, by an unseen (working?) man, speaking for the unspecified others “who built it”. Perhaps unknowingly, the crew of fresh graduates of the Film Institute were documenting a horrendous crime, while capturing what they thought was a convivial party, sleepwalking into ruin and disaster.
Exits and arrivals
This film program, made of four documentary/hybrid features, calls your attention to a crime at work, where the crime scene is a workspace, a workplace, a worksite, and so on, with the economy involved, more often than not, having to do with mass production and state-level capitalism, and with the common universe of the films assumed to be an Arabic-speaking one. In these films, work conditions are scrutinized, questioned and negotiated, including those for making the film itself; industrial work and film industry are the two sides of the coin. It feels like a truth-finding investigation is going on in film form, and the aesthetic politics at play ensure that the laws in place - of all kinds - are simultaneously anatomized and rewritten. There’s no employer, some capitalist, or some government, simply on trial or singled out. Otherwise, this work would be yet another episode in the unfolding crime. In these films and many others, the workplace-as-a-crime-scene pattern is also likely to point, quite pertinently, to repressed and besieged amorous needs. In what follows, I will try to place the four films in a broader context of Arab(ic) films since the late 1960s.
In Un jour, le Nil (The Nile and the Life, 1968), Youssef Chahine gives a voice - in real time - to the Nubians playing themselves, while being dispossessed and stripped of their historical homeland, within a complex multiple-narrative portrayal of Nasser’s most spectacular project. Both the High Dam and the Egyptian-Soviet state-commissioned film would be the final such collaborations in their respective fields. Chahine’s unique experiment, which is also open to a queer reading, was rejected by both parties involved in the production, and he was forced to do redoubled work in order to cater to their socialist sensibilities, hence the 1972 remake (The People of the Nile). The film archive’s artistic verdict: only the authentic original would be canonized and survive in restored form (more than once); the later version was found dismissible and forgettable as pure propaganda.
In De quelques événements sans signification (About Some Meaningless Events, 1974), the program’s closing film, Mostafa Derkaoui returns to Morocco from his studies in Eastern Europe, with the typical youthful enthusiasm of his generation of intellectuals, who were going to make a revolution inside the revolution (well, at least the cinematic one would soon prove to be more or less short-lived, an infanticidal moment that recurred elsewhere in the Arab world, captured in Suhaib Gasmelbari’s 2019 Talking About Trees). Derkaoui’s experiment is an attempt to approach and imagine a truly independent Moroccan cinema, although the undercurrent is to actually ask - again - “What is cinema?” Answers are sought with and among Moroccans from many walks of life, his own position as an auteur being explored in the process. A dockworker and his attempted murder of his boss gradually take centre stage, but only for the distance between the subjects filmed and filming - with the former resisting and resenting representation - to be recognized and examined. The film was banned, lost, and resurfaced only in recent years, to be restored and rediscovered, an unearthed gem also serving as an exhibit of an unfinished revolution. But “what if they made a revolution and nobody saw it?”
In Ali au pays des merveilles (Ali in Wonderland, Djouhra Abouda, Alain Bonnamy, 1975) , the film of the third week, also recently restored and rediscovered, Algerian and other migrant workers are hurled against us, as they fall upon the streets of Paris digging and building, alongside images of their ex-colonizer’s wealth and consumption, reports of their own crimes, and a relentless voiceover sounding like an indignant migrant is giving condemning testimony in court, or petitioning or challenging the court, or an agitator inciting a crowd (or the silent workers themselves), while desperately making the case for a return to build Algeria’s “Popular Socialist Democracy”. Superimpositions, jump-cuts, and action sped up through time-lapse shots, all contribute to something akin to a stroboscopic effect (so that the courtroom also becomes a strange sleepless discothèque).
The paths of the filmmaker and the worker intersect again in Houseboat No. 70 (Khairy Beshara, 1982), Egypt’s first neorealist film during the early deindustrialization under Sadat’s Open-Door policy. Genres come into a mix: it’s a mystery-thriller-detective-horror movie about an evil djinn disguised as a hazardous machine, a literal killing machine, and a social political drama about sexual frustrations and corrupt public-sector factory management.
On the eve of 2011, Ahmed Fawzi Saleh’s gritty documentary Living Skin (2010), showed the sweatshop toil and drudgery of abjectly poor child and young workers in Cairo’s tanneries, that cannot be different from workshops during pre-modern protocapitalism. Long after the crucial year, Saleh returned to the same universe (in Poisonous Roses, 2018), in order to fictionalize and visually interrogate the grim reality; an antidote to the burden, explosiveness and incommunicability of truth in the wake of the 2013 coup. Thanks to the film’s minimalism, love, suffering, and something eerily similar to what Freud calls “the horror of incest” (provocatively and unsettlingly confused with one or more other possible, unnamed sex crimes), help restore the wider conditions underpinning the socioeconomics of both the center and the peripheries—“Civilization and its discontents”. It is remarkable, with regard to our program, that the film is loosely based on a novel that begins and ends with the unsolved death of its protagonist, a child worker-cum-unemployed poet, devastated by Nasser’s defeat and betrayal long afterwards.
Few Arabic films have come out of the post-2011 era about the violent conditions of manual workers. Among them, two (Waiting For His Descent, by Bassam Mortada, 2014, and White Hell by Ahmed Assem, Mahmoud Khaled and Omar Shash, 2018) frequent the all-white limestone quarries in northern Upper Egypt, that once again look anachronistically protocapitalistic, where uninsured and unprotected workers give a new sardonic meaning to engaging in “high-risk business”. A more prominent film is Sami Tlili’s Maudit soit le phosphate (Cursed Be the Phosphate, 2011), which revisits a working-class community’s months-long civil disobedience, including wildcat strike, in the face of police brutality. A site of part of the widening protests and growing discontent leading up to the Tunisian uprising, the mining area at the center of the struggle is depicted as a wealth forbidden to its sacrificial producers. Strikingly, the characters are consciously and defiantly presented, one after another, like criminals making televised confessions.
Amussu (tamazight for “movement”, Nadir Bouhmouch, 2019), the program’s opening film, also revisits earlier episodes in an ongoing struggle, highlighting a particular experience that began in 2011, when a Berber farming community, impacted by a water pipeline feeding Africa's biggest silver mine (in a way reminiscent of Chahine’s The Land, 1969), sabotages it, and turns into a protest camp, and then years later, into a lush, verdant oasis, still under permanent threat by forces analogous to those destroying the Amazon and the native activists. A Palestinian answer to this uplifting transformation of work conditions from below can be found in Foragers (Jumana Manna, 2022), where the still directly colonized Palestinians are 21st-century illegal gatherers, but a comparison with their turn-of-the-century counterparts in Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), can shed more incriminating light on the compounded absurdity and misery of the former’s situation.
The formal choices at the core of Out on the Street (Philip Rizk and Jasmina Metwaly, 2015), for the program’s week two, immediately bring us to the atmosphere of a (privatized) factory floor turned crime scene. Through stage floor planning, reenactment, and oblique, multidirectional (self-)reflexivity, the austere film lays bare the foundations of class struggle, together with attempts of its representation (the limits and contradictions of class consciousness, as well as the language used to develop and express it, and turn it into action). Out on the street, yet stuck within, the (ex-)factory workers, along with the film, call for a double comparison, one with A Feeling Greater Than Love (Mary Jirmanus Saba, 2017) with its radicalized Lebanese workers reunited decades after their own now reconstructed battle, and another with Ghost Hunting (Raed Andoni, 2017), with its Palestinan former prisoners voluntarily going back to (the theater of) prison, in hope of really exiting the Israeli prison inside.
Three more recent films worth mentioning. First is Into Studio Masr (Mona Asaad, 2018), a personal documentary that also chronicles the curious case of a privatization that at the same time looks like reclaiming a (film) factory by (film) workers, shedding light on Egyptian cinema as a once full-fledged industry from the era of renaissance-esque aspirations, now having metamorphosed into a caricature of itself that stirs very mixed feelings. Second is Dans ma tête un rond point (Roundabout in My Head, Hassen Ferhani, 2015), which turns an abattoir in Algiers into a bloodstained stage/screen, while the slaughterhouse workers recount and live (out) the experiences of their psychologically distressing job, that does not even bear meaningful fruit, and fantasize about love. And finally, there is Feathers (Omar El Zohairy, 2021), where slaughter again figures, signaling the general, numbing, routine cruelty, culminating in mariticide, against a bleak, filthy, and rundown industrial landscape.
References and notes
1. (1) Walter Benjamin, in his 1931 essay “Little History of Photography“.
2. (2) I’m grateful to Mohamed Amin, of Wekalet Behna, for bringing my attention to, and showing me, this film.
3. (3) This subheading alludes to Hito Steyerl’s “Is a Museum a Factory?“, in issue 7 of e-flux journal, June-August 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/07/61390/is-a-museum-a-factory
4. (4) For more about this film, see Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review titled “Cinemeteorology”: https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/09/cinemeteorology-serge-daney-on-too-early-too-late/
5. (5) See Farocki’s article about his experiences, theory and practice behind the film: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/harun-farocki/farocki_workers. Farocki was later to develop a related collaborative video project, “Labour in a Single Shot”. See: https://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net/en/project/concept/
6. (6) See Moira Weigel’s essay “Slow Wars“, in issue 25 (Spring 2016) of n+1: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-25/essays/slow-wars
7. (7) The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, 2020, Duke University Press. For more on this point, see a previous essay by the author and curator on what has been proposed to be called ‘design film’, “The Spectres Haunting These 5 Egyptian Documentaries“: https://www.warehouse421.ae/en/makers-in-the-sun/?setLang=en#anchor_the_spectres_haunting_these_5_egyptian_documentaries
8. (8) I’m grateful to Mostafa Youssef, of Seen Films, for bringing my attention to, and sharing, this film.
9. (9) I.e., the most significant symbolically, but the actually largest industrial project is EISCO. See Malak Labib’s article “Re-shaping the “Socialist Factory” in Egypt in the Late 1960s–1970s“: https://trafo.hypotheses.org/28429
10. (10) See here https://notesonfilm1.com/2020/07/09/the-youssef-chahine-podcast-no-7-un-jour-le-nile-an-nil-oual-hayat-egypt-ussr-1964 and here https://notesonfilm1.com/2020/07/13/the-youssef-chahine-podcastno-9-a-return-to-a-later-version-of-un-jour-le-nil-people-of-the-nile-1972 for two podcast episodes that highlight the queer aspect among others.
11. (11) For more, see: « Un fleuve d'amour », Yousry Nasrallah, La Persistance des images, Cinémathèque Française Musée du Cinéma, Paris, 1996. https://www.cinematheque.fr/catalogues/restaurations-tirages/film.php?id=64366#autour-du-film and Malek Khouri, The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine's Cinema, AUC Press, 2010 (pp. 67-74)
12. (12) In the words of Richard Brody, who was actually talking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968), a curiously similar case. See: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/daring-original-overlooked-symbiopsychotaxiplasm-take-one
13. (13) Cf. their earlier short collaboration, Cinécité (1974).
14. (14) For more on these two films, see Hoogla-Kalfat, ibid.