COMBAT BREATHING: LABORING IMAGES, PART 1
LABORING IMAGES, IMAGING LABOR, PART 1 In 1895, cinema's inaugural image was made by Louis Lumière in France. Autologically titled LA SORTIE DE L'USINE LUMIÈRE À LYON (WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIÈRE FACTORY IN LYON), the silent black-and-white film holds its frame still as workers exit the factory gates. Replete with historical and symbolic connotations, this early image – revisited and reexamined by Harun Farocki nearly a century later – both refers to cinematic technology's inextricable relationship with emergent forms of modern industrial labor while it simultaneously stages the factory floor, long imagined as labor's primary site of exploitation and organization, as being left behind. "Laboring Images, Imaging Labor" departs from this visually rendered tension by considering how labor constitutes film and how film, in turn, gives form to structurally occluded and socially dispersed realities and conditions of labor. Moving from reflections on the position of labor under communist social formations; to the uncounted, feminized work of social reproduction; to the psychic and gestural labors of revolutionary dreaming and fugitive plotting; to the co-constitutive relationships between racialization and ascendant regimes of gig and AI-training labor, the films gathered here ask what makes – and unmakes – the laboring social body and the formations it sustains. The works of Sara Gómez, Dina Mimi, Maissa Maatouk, Nicolas Gourault, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet show us not only what comprises the systemic category of labor under global capitalism, but how moving images make labor's multiple, stratified realities perceptible. Sara Gómez ABOUT EXTRA HOURS AND VOLUNTEER WORK / SOBRE HORAS EXTRAS Y TRABAJO VOLUNTARIO (1973, 9 min, 16mm-to-DCP) At the 1973 congress of the Confederation of Cuban Workers, textile workers debate the value and necessity of unpaid overtime and "voluntary work" within the country's economic development plans. Sara Gómez edits their testimonies against voice-over, intertitles, and images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh working alongside laborers. Revolutionary rhetoric fills the screen as workers describe unnecessary overtime, administrative disorder, and tasks performed for their symbolic rather than practical value. One woman recalls being sent three times to move the same stones, each time to a different place. Neither a rejection of collective labor nor an affirmation of its official representation, EXTRA HOURS AND VOLUNTARY WORK asks what voluntarism means when organized through institutional pressure, and whether labor undertaken in the name of revolution can remain emancipatory when workers have little power over its purpose or conditions. Sara Gómez YEAR ONE / AÑO UNO (1972, 9 min, 16mm-to-DCP) In YEAR ONE, Sara Gómez turns to the period immediately after childbirth, foregrounding the care and material support required of new mothers. Postnatal care emerges not as a private concern or a given resource but as a collective responsibility, bringing the intimate labor of feeding, healing, and sustaining life into the political field of revolutionary transformation. By attending to forms of work historically naturalized as feminine – and therefore rendered invisible or unremunerated – the film considers how women's emancipation depends upon a reorganization of everyday life. Gómez locates the revolution not only in the transformation of economic production but also in the institutions, social relations, and infrastructures through which life is reproduced. YEAR ONE asks what forms of collective provision might relieve women of the unequal burdens of care, and what a revolution must make possible for those whose bodies and labor sustain its future. Dina Mimi THOUSAND THRASHING ARMS (2024, 13 min, DCP) Frantz Fanon famously observed that "the first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits." Against the enforced stillness of colonial order, the native dreams of "jumping, swimming, running, climbing." Drawing on Fanon's account of the colonized body and its fugitive dream life, THOUSAND THRASHING ARMS examines the relationship between liberation struggle, dreaming, and movement. Through an elusive montage of statues, animals, and bodies wrapped in cloth, the film traces figures held captive, traversing tunnels, resisting underground, or struggling to emerge. The body appears as an instrument of control, a site of resistance, and a vessel of rebellion, while movement becomes double-edged – both disciplined and made productive – exceeding the limits imposed upon it. The image of labor performed, pixelated, stretched, and overlayered, is material, political, and oneiric – the labor of dreaming and revolting, rehearsing in sleep what the waking body is forbidden to do; what it will one day do during wakeful hours. Maissa Maatouk EXERCISE IN WAITING, (2023, 7 min, DCP) In the wake of Lebanon's 2019 economic collapse, Beirut witnessed the rapid expansion of the gig economy and digital labor platforms that drew surplus labor into new circuits of capitalist valorization. EXERCISE IN WAITING follows migrant service workers managed through the city's dominant delivery app in 2023, which mediates among customers, restaurants and shops, and couriers. Set in Beirut's Manara neighborhood, the film observes the vacant lots where couriers gather to rest between deliveries. With minimal poetic intervention, it dwells on the uneasy temporality of waiting and the restless immanence registered in the workers' gestures as they oscillate between agitation and stillness. Always passing through or pausing between orders, the men rest amid seemingly impervious yellow chamomile flowers. Nicolas Gourault THEIR EYES (2025, 23 min, DCP) How does a machine learn to read the world? THEIR EYES follows online microworkers in the Global South whose task is to train the artificial intelligence used by self-driving cars in the Global North. Through testimonies and screen recordings, the film attends to the workers' encounters with images of U.S. streets: identifying objects, interpreting movements, and translating visual ambiguity into data. Yet these acts of looking are not entirely contained by the task. As workers reflect on the distant worlds passing across their screens, they devise small ways of organizing, withholding, and interfering with the system that coordinates their labor. The film considers how geographically dispersed workers are made to inhabit the machine's vision – and how their own forms of attention might exceed it. Introduced by Nour Annan.