Masculine and feminine, hard and soft, continues and interrupted, whole and fragmented. All that is encompassed by just one day at the factory.
EN
“In The Factory, Sergei Loznitsa develops an inventive visual pattern relying on tropes of repetitions, stillness, punctuations, pauses, and other compositional rhythms that create a textured interface as dynamic as the mutating material states with which the factory workers interact. The film demands a responsive orientation that attends to these formal dialogues with critical reflexivity. Undeniably, the spectator confronts the labour of working through the material nature of visuals to process the reflexes, continuities, and breaks of factory workers the film captures. This spectatorial labour matures as a political praxis in the aesthetic programme of Loznitsa. Perhaps the meta-textual implications of labour cannot be more apparent than in this film during the auteur’s early career. Among the number of short and mid-length documentaries he made during the turn of this century, The Factory seemingly manifests as the idiomatic culmination of their maturing political vision.”
Santasil Mallik1
“Masculine and feminine, hard and soft, continued and interrupted, whole and fragmented. All that is encompassed by just one day at the factory.
The film tells about one day in the life of a factory. The film has two parts. The first is named Steel and the second is named Clay. This is a film about a human being as a part of the world of machines, or about the world of machines as a part of the human world. The metal, once created by the people, enslaves them, reducing their life to the level of reflexes. This is my short commentary on this film. It is much more primitive than the film itself because it is hard to tell with the words something you can see without oversimplification.”
Sergei Loznitsa2
- 1Santasil Mallik, “Spectatorial Labour: The Political Vision of Sergei Loznitsa’s Documentaries,” Senses of Cinema, May 2023.
- 2Sergei Loznitsa in a promotional flyer.
