film, 40 min.
Much like in the 1895 Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, Lockhart observes with her camera employees exiting an industrial plant. Here, however, we do not see workers’ faces or dynamic interchange among them as they depart after a shift’s end, day by day, in the course of a five-day working week. All we are offered are prolonged shots of a largely unchanging continuous flow of people leaving; most of them are dressed in denim, some hold onto their lunchboxes, and some wear backpacks. Inevitably, though, we are challenged to seek differences in the repetitive action as we experience the sensation of time slowing down and with it a sense of exhaustion in the relentless rhythm of labor in the twenty-first century. Although the temporal dimension of the work is its calling card, the authorial usage of the static camera seems to suggest that outside of the frame—and thus outside of what we can see—a new dynamic might unfold. But in her politically astute artistic vision Lockhart seems to speak not only of the delineation between work and free time, but also—so explicitly pertinent for our time—a demarcation between work and no work, suggesting it is not merely the factory people here that routinely exit, but possibly also an epoch of social security and other things that we used to take as certain.
Maria HlavajovaScreening times are: Monday: 20–24 hrs; Tuesday: 20–24 hrs; Wednesday: 10–12 hrs, 17–24 hrs; Thursday: 17–24 hrs; Friday: 21.30–24 hrs; Saturday: 10–16 hrs, 21–24 hrs; and Sunday: 10–18.30 hrs.
