14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Workers Leaving the Factory 243
straying from the path we may discover something of this prehistory. Immediately
after the command was given to leave the factory back in 1895, the workers
streamed out. Even if they sometimes got in each other’s way – one young
woman is seen tugging on another woman’s skirt before they part in opposite
directions, she knows this woman doesn’t retaliate under the camera’s stern
eye – the overall movement remains swift and nobody is left behind (see
ill. 71). That this is the case is perhaps because the primary aim was to represent
motion, but maybe an additional sense is already being signalled. Only
once it had been learned how filmic images grasp for ideas and are themselves
seized by them, were we able to see with hindsight that the resolution of the
workers’ motion represents something, that the visible movement of people is
standing in for the absent and invisible movement of goods, money, and ideas
circulating in the industrial sphere.
In the opening sequence of this first film, the cinema’s basic stylistic principle
is already present. Its signs and meanings are not put into the world, they
arise from the real. In the cinema it is as if the world itself wanted to tell us
something.
Translated by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim.