"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.