"In Comparison"

On Harun Farocki's In Comparison (1999), I find myself compelled to write. The film depicts the processes of brick-making across several societies--in Guinnea-Bissau, in India, and in Germany, for starters. While the film never diverges from this mission, it does invoke a series of questions which I shall return to in a bit.

Farocki's lens often frames assembly lines, rotary belts, and neat stacks of bricks vanishing deep into the background. Interminable lines run off toward the horizon, creating a truly classical perspective of three-dimensionality and depth. (Check David Bordwell re: some comments on the origins of "perspective"). Before viewing In Comparison, I had read some writings on and by Farocki. Speaking about his research-film on the Lumiere Brothers' "Workers Leaving the Factory," Farocki said that he did not believe that an image or images can narrate the ungraspable, massive totality of labor and production. Neither photography nor the cinema could relate the sum of relations, actions, and reactions, nor could they, in and of themselves, provide thorough analysis. Pictures of that totality we call "labor" or "production," he noted, could fit into no building or museum, let alone a gallery. To gesture toward the totality, one's project would need to approach the project of capital--to span the globe, to spread its being across the vast expanse of natural resources, human labor, industrial machines, factories and warehouses, shipping crates and 18-wheelers, storefronts and private homes that constitute the process of production. If the scope of labor and production is so vast, how could we attempt to represent that scope through a photograph or even a series of photographs? Farocki believes to do so is impossible.

This reticence is perhaps the reason for the director's obsession with and attention to the depiction of depth in the frame itself -- an overcompensation, it may be, to cover for his paralytic impotence in describing the relations of man, machine, and money in analytic depth. Instead, he turns his lens toward revealing physical and material depth. One static shot shows a young worker tossing freshly-dried bricks onto a belt that carries them up a small hill and into a modest storehouse at its summit, where we can roughly glimpse the actions of a coworker who pulls bricks off at the other end. In the left side of the frame, foreground, we see the first worker, his truck, and the bricks as he lays them onto the belt. They recede through the middleground and into the background, stretching across the frame and into the upper right of the frame as they diminish. As viewers, we can pick out our favorite block and follow its journey up the hill and into the shadows of the building up yonder. Another shot that I recall shows a stack of bricks, three or so high but at least one-hundred long, that stretches into the deep recesses of the frame while a worker places the latest stack in the foreground.

That Farocki has made the above observation regarding the inability of images to describe the labor process, and that In Comparison takes a particular mode of production as its subject, we cannot ignore. The filmmaker's stated opposition to representing labor in full through images manifests itself in the narration's act of detailing the physical depth in these spaces where bricks are sculpted. Thus we can take physicality, light and space, to be Farocki's objects of study.

The film's rich visual texture complements an equally compelling and dynamic soundtrack. We hear laborer slapping wet folds of clay, sliding fresh blocks out from their molds, and tapping newly minted iron bricks with hammers. Farocki was also quoted as saying we ought to begin seeing with our ears and hearing with our eyes. I take this to say we ought to lead with our ears, the second-class organs we often use to supplement that primary information which our eyes have brought to us first. Farocki probes his sites in this way -- rather than attempt to cover the breadth of their existence, he favors the "narrow and deep" approach. I must say that he has convinced me of the effect that such studies can have.

Farocki's camera does not shy from panning, tilting, or tracking either, as it often follows the human chains of workers handing bricks up a scaffolding, the assembly-line machinery that carries materials through a factory, and the transportation of unfinished materials from one station to another at one brick-making site in India. Movement becomes another tool in Farocki's arsenal -- a way to hint at his awareness of the long chain of natural resources, physical labor, and factories that are involved not-just-in-but by production. While his lens can follow these chains that are visible to the human eye, those that take place in one location, Farocki does not attempt to look after his bricks as they board transportation vessels, wait on supply shelves, and reach their (potential) final purpose in community structures. (Perhaps Farocki would reject this reading of mine, but I would welcome the conversation that it might introduce.)

Another quote, this time from Godard: "We must not make films about politics, but make films politically." There is something in Farocki's attention to detail -- his own brick-making skills, if you will, that gestures toward a deeper critique or observation. For In Comparison is not about making buildings, it is about making bricks. In a similar vein, Farocki's quest is not to tell grand stories, but to detail the construction of the blocks that comprise that tower we call cinema. Barthes' bricoleur, in true form.

The juxtaposition of various cultures' brick-making methods creates at least one obvious comment on hand-made bricks and machine-produced blocks. In both we see the rote, memorized, automatic routine. An Indian woman, kneeling in a muddy mess of wet clay, rolls out a sopping boulder, flops it into a metal molding, smooths off the top of her new brick, slaps twice the slimy surface, and passes off the package to a man who will haul the brick to its next destination. He leaves her an empty tray, which she primes with a dab of water around its rim before beginning her process anew. In an industrial factory in Germany, a maze of machines packs the bricks, cuts them into blocks, and self-cleans its razor-wire periodically. Nevertheless, a human supervisor must be present; he merely stands in wait for the machines to malfunction, for a glitch or an error that will require the human know-how of improvisation or critical thinking. In the mean time he stares blankly at a monitor and sighs. In a different factory of indeterminate location, one worker's sole responsibility is to grab the shaggy end-bricks, marred by a jagged slicing job, from each batch of mechanically-produced bricks. Farocki -- or perhaps it is I who inserts this meaning (a different day we will tackle this question) -- grants a more favorable documentation of the creation of hand-made bricks. Despite the hard labor required, the human individual retains authorship. The factory workers, by comparison, look on at labor taken over by machines; they are Plan B, mostly useless over-seers.

Perhaps Farocki does not believe machine = Bad and human hands = Good. I do not believe that Farocki would assign any relative value judgment toward each method. Nevertheless we cannot deny the implications of the information placed before us, nor the title. They are not presented In Comparison for the viewer to chalk differences up to cultural variety, all equally benign and banal. Our minds do eagerly grasp at the variations in content, method, and style across each site of production, searching for meaning, and we also do not forget the greater purpose they all share: everyone here is making bricks. Farocki is no fool, nor is he trying to trick us into a base interpretation that he consequently mocks from on high.

On brick-making rather than building-making as a subject: we may view this decision as a call for attention to the formal structures of cinema. Farocki's exercise champions formalist techniques by eschewing didactic, narrative voice-over in favor of visual and auditory textures that illumine his sites of study. In Comparison becomes a sensory -- and sensual -- experience by dwelling where many films pass over. The careful composition of each shot reminds one of a fine-art photograph. Farocki's attention to the minute emanation of each workplace brings the viewer's focus to the structures of stimulation and simulation.

One more quotation, this time from the narrator of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil: "It seemed to me the most unnatural thing in the world that people should not look into the camera." Indeed the subjects of In Comparison, the workers, are aware of Farocki's lens. The aforementioned woman, the one who sits in clay and rolls out brick after brick, stares into the camera with indignation at her documenter. Elsewhere, the occasional worker will turn around his work, look into the camera, and by reflex avert his eyes, pretending not to have noticed the kino-eye. During one pan of the camera, which follows a woman who balances bricks atop her head while she walks, a group of young men walk by in the foreground at the same speed, hanging in the frame and staring back at us. This particular moment jolted me from my slack-jawed complacency as viewer of an age-old form of human labor and production, one which heretofor I had never contemplated. Suddenly it is our--Western--custom of filming the activity that seems the bizarre cultural curio. "Why must you capture, reassemble, and represent this on screen?," the man might have asked. "How can you come closer to understanding through that layer of mediation?" I could only respond that it is through the refashioning of everyday experiences that we might pause for reflection; that in such deliberate framing and retelling, we force ourselves to consider a more complex reality than the one we are dulled to believe we inhabit. With such a focus on the surface of life, Farocki reminds us of the vast complexity of history underneath. He represents what he cannot, by virtue of its absence.

H.R. & the Human Rights

H.R. & The Human Rights band performed what may have been the strangest concert I have ever participated in on Tuesday, November 2, 2010, at the U Street Music Hall. After two hours of reggae and house music from the DJs, around 50 people had gathered in the cavernous basement space around two long bars. The band came out first and asked if people were ready for some live music. The enthusiastic “Yes!” from the crowd was maybe the most energetic moment of the evening. H.R. then waddled out, wearing a Human Rights hooded sweatshirt. However he was most certainly wearing what could only have been a thick, inflatable life jacket or a substantial bullet-proof vest underneath his sweatshirt. I waited for the punch-line, but his unnatural girth went unacknowledged the entire night. The bassist for the band had a knowing smirk on his face the entire time, likewise promising some revelation that never came. The keyboard player, named Sven or something Nordic, was wearing a sweatshirt of the controversial D.C. band Iron Cross, whose moniker was “Hated and Feared Since 1983.” Iron Cross has been accused of being neo-Nazi, “white power” advocates. H.R. and the guitarist being African-Americans, this confused me a little.

The drummer looked like the actor Karl Urban in Lord of the Rings, with long dark hair, a swirly short beard, and a fierce, feline face. His arms and legs were heavily tattooed and he wore a t-shirt with Andy Warhol-style reproductions of a figure whose identity I could not decipher. The guitarist was the least notable of the bunch, not in terms of musical chops but in failing to match the odd grouping of the men around him. He wore a red t-shirt under an unbuttoned, white, collared shirt.

The music was heavily reggae with none of the sing-along communalism inspired by Bob Marley’s best songs. H.R.’s debt to and obsession with Marley has been detailed before, but he now plays as a meek shadow of his vibrant elder. Lennon-esque, wire-rimmed glasses adorned his face, and a thick beard drooped down onto the unnatural flatness of his artificial chest. Four or five songs into the music, I realized that H.R.’s guitar—which he did not play in the early years of Bad Brains, although perhaps in the later, I don’t know—was not amplified. He ran his fingers up and down the scales, strummed along, and soloed a bit, but never could the audience hear him. Between songs about half way through the set, H.R. gestured to the sound engineer and said, “Man, you’d do that to me?” He turned his own amplifier up, giving us a tiny bit of presence, but he was again totally inaudible throughout the rest of the set. It left me with several questions: did H.R. know that his guitar was turned off, and did he just like to hold it and play it for his own sense of well-being? Does he know, perhaps, that he is not a good guitarist and should not be amplified, but holding a guitar gives him some feeling of security? Or, more cringe-inducing, has the band secretly acknowledged that H.R. can’t play worth shit and that he is so out of his mind that he might not even notice if they turn his guitar all the way down? Is there some in his monitor or in the other band members’ monitors? If so, does it screw their rhythm up with how terribly he plays?

On to H.R.’s state of mind: it appears to be enfeebled. He seems to be going for the Rasta-Man vibe, care-free and loving of all, respecting the Bible and preaching goodness. At one point he went over about twenty times the spelling of the Good Book. “B-I-B-L-E, Bible. Read your B-I-B-L-E, Bible. The Bible, Bible.” However he comes off not as a kind-hearted yogi but instead just a little senile. He forgot which songs to play and started to walk off-stage several times, but the band would call him back and he’d say, “Alright, we’ll do one more for Sven” (or whatever his name was). This was not the orchestrated encore that ends most live shows; this truly seemed to be a case of inter-band indecision. The band also at one point tried to play an old Bad Brains song, “Attitude,” at the original warp-speed, but H.R. stopped them, shouting on the mic, “No, no, it’s reggae man, reggae beat.” He told the crowd, “When you get to be older you appreciate different styles.” The few other moments when the band neared Bad Brains’ hardcore roots, it was clear that that was the style the crowd had been hoping for. An over-zealous mosh pit sprang into being after the first chords of another louder track, but it quickly dissipated. There was one notable straight-edge punk, home-drawn X’s on his hands, 30s, cue-bald, small and skinny. Another mosher was wearing a big puffy Misfits sweatshirt, and his girlfriend had her white-bleached hair softly gelled up into a faux-hawk.

The selection of tracks was illuminated after a conversation I had with a young man who grew up in Falls Church in the 1990s. He said that a reunion show of Bad Brains about 2 years ago involved a hardcore set, a reggae set, and then another hardcore set. It’s clear that H.R.’s interests remain in reggae, with the rift that originally separated Bad Brains still dividing H.R.’s musical direction from Dr. Know’s.

The guitarist of Human Rights shredded a bit in the vein of Dr. Know, and the bassist certainly thumped out excellent grooves, but somehow the music never gelled as interesting, danceable, or catchy. The entire night remains a maddening mystery. It’s undeniable that the documentary on H.R.—for which this concert was to raise funds—must be completed, if only to chart his own wild descent from frenetic front-man to burned-out hippy. It may not be original, but it’s certainly a story that needs to be told. Too few people know about this progenitor of the D.C. punk scene, and even fewer know that D.C. punk wasn’t synonymous with white-power skinheads from the beginning. That’s what makes his appearance on stage with Sven, or whoever, all the more confusing.