24 Cinematic Points of View of a Factory Gate in China

Between 2013 and 2014, hidden surveillance cameras were installed in front of the gates of various Chinese companies that had recently been listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In Ho Rui An’s short film, their footage is recontextualized within a genealogy that traces back to the Lumière brothers’ film, which depicted workers leaving a factory gate. More than a century of European, American, and Chinese cinema history is explored to examine how the Revolution, which returned factories to the workers, has culminated in their near disappearance.

«In what is often regarded as the first motion picture ever made, workers are seen walking out of a factory gate. According to the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, the Lumière Brothers, in choosing this subject for cinema’s original scene, consigned cinema to the space outside the factory, thus allowing stories of leisure and consumption that unfold after a day’s work to become the primary subject of cinematic representation over those of labour and production. Yet, the very visibility of the factory gate in this image also suggests that even as labour retreats from representation, cinema remains inextricable from the conditions of industrial modernity.»

«In 24 Cinematic Points of View of a Factory Gate in China, this relationship between cinema and industry is re-examined through an over-century-long genealogy of European, American and Chinese films. The film opens with a composite of twenty-four videos captured by a surveillance camera pointed towards the gate of a Chinese factory where production appears to have ceased. Throughout the narrative, each video is replaced by a film excerpt that is set in or around a factory, gradually transforming the film’s grid composition into a structure that contains the workers appearing in each film within their individual cell.»

– Ho Rui An