{"id":19835,"date":"2022-09-26T17:07:58","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T21:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/?page_id=19835"},"modified":"2022-09-27T13:30:12","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T17:30:12","slug":"labour-in-a-single-shot-interview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/community\/critical-conversations\/labour-in-a-single-shot-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Coeditors on “Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki\u2019s Global Video Project”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Described as a \u201cproject of truly global proportions,\u201d Labour in a Single Shot<\/em> is a video project that uses the accumulated weight of small-scale films to provide insight into the nature of work. Between 2011 and 2014, German husband and wife team, filmmakers Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann, traveled to fifteen different cities across the globe to conduct filmmaking workshops with students of the craft. Former Goethe Institute director Detlef Gericke describes their motives as twofold: \u201cTo train aspiring film-makers through the historically tested model of art and film workshops and to create a visual encyclopedia of labour in the twenty-first century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Participants in the workshops were tasked with creating films no more than two minutes long that depicted people engaged in labor. Of course, there was much more to this seemingly simple task than would appear at first glance. As Gericke explains, the objective was \u201cto tell something in a single shot\u2026to concentrate entirely on a single sequence of images [in order] to grasp the essence of a complex process or condense it into a compact statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

In designing this exercise, Farocki and Ehmann were inspired by Workers Leaving the Lumi\u00e8re Factory<\/em> (1895), which many scholars consider to be the first film ever made. In just one shot, the film depicts exactly what its title describes, and together the three versions of the film, shot on three different days, total less than two minutes. By \u201chonouring the original Lumi\u00e8re film\u2019s basic parameters of theme and style,\u201d Farocki and Ehmann and their workshop participants create a through line from 1895 to the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

The fruit of the project is over 550 short films that have been shown at exhibitions around the world. Some of the films were created in a workshop that Farocki and Ehmann held in Boston in 2014, and that, together with an international conference on the Labour in a Single Shot<\/em> project, was jointly sponsored by Boston University and the Goethe Institute.<\/p>\n

In Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki\u2019s Global Video Project<\/em><\/strong>, BU faculty members Roy Grundmann<\/strong><\/a> (COM), Peter J. Schwartz<\/strong><\/a> (WLL), and Gregory H. Williams<\/strong><\/a> (HAA) \u201coffer a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot<\/em>\u201d with particular attention to the 2014 Boston conference. In what follows, Grundmann, Schwartz, and Williams respond to questions posed by BU Center for the Humanities staff about their interdisciplinary publication, which was published by Amsterdam University Press with a subvention from the BU Center for the Humanities. The publication is freely accessible via Open Access Publishing in European Networks<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Interview with Grundmann, Schwartz, and Williams<\/strong><\/p>\n

One important component of your application for a BUCH publication subvention was a request for funding to make this volume an open source resource. How does that request support the values and goals of Farocki and Ehmann\u2019s global video project? When and why did creating an open-source resource become a priority for your team?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann conceived of Labour in a Single Shot<\/em> in the tradition of the twentieth-century left-wing educational workshops designed to encourage the political and social emancipation of civil society. The ethos supporting such workshops first emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as part of a drive towards mass education following the Russian Revolution. The workshop model was picked up in the 1930s by left-wing political news organizations and independent documentary filmmakers in North America, and then again in the 1960s by democratic emancipation movements in Latin America, the United States, and Western Europe. Some of these efforts were sponsored by reigning liberal governments, while others were developed in opposition to the political status quo. In all cases, however, the idea was to empower “the people” by providing them with the means to their own education.<\/p>\n

Farocki’s lifelong trajectory as a filmmaker followed this path. At the beginning of his career, in the 1960s, he made films to “shake up” the masses, to help move them towards a new state of political consciousness. Later, he made films to educate and to guide people to self-reflection, encourage critical analysis of the world around them, and transform viewers from passive recipients of art and media into active participants in their production. Labour in a Single Shot<\/em> represents a final stage in this trajectory.<\/p>\n

As a series of workshops combined with a series of exhibitions \u2013 both still ongoing \u2013 the project\u2019s primary goal has been to teach people to be artistically and perceptually proactive in their perception of the worlds of labor. Workshop participants were taught to produce films that would educate themselves and others, while the project\u2019s self-presentation less as a product<\/em> than as a process<\/em> invites spectators to reflect on their own relationship not only to labor, but also to its construction as an object of representation. The underlying premise of all this is that art should serve and be accessible to the masses. Labour in a Single Shot<\/em> was thus conceived as a public access project from the beginning. Most of the cost of the workshops was covered by Germany\u2019s premier public agency for cultural exchange, the Goethe Institut, and all of the videos produced since 2011 \u2013 to date, over 550 of them! \u2013 have been uploaded to an open-access online archive<\/a><\/strong>, where they will remain available indefinitely.<\/p>\n

When we were looking for a publisher for the volume, which arose from conferences in 2014 and 2015 in Boston and Berlin (the former co-funded by BUCH), we settled on Amsterdam University Press partly because of their highly visible line of open-access publications. We felt that our work should remain consistent with the ethos and political tradition within which Farocki and Ehmann conceived and executed their project, and that it would be difficult to justify placing a paywall or the purchase price of a printed volume between our book and the reader.<\/p>\n


\nThe very intentional physical manifestation of Farocki and Ehmann\u2019s project and the participatory experience of attending an exhibition seem fundamental to the project\u2019s goals. How does the print medium express the video project\u2019s original goals?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The online publication mode of our book enables readers to access the videos under discussion directly from the book\u2019s footnotes. And of course they can then browse through other videos on the Labour<\/em> website. We have also created a separate index of the videos addressed in the book so that readers can compare how various authors discuss them. We thus hope to encourage our readers to engage with the materials in interactive ways that are consistent with the project\u2019s original vision.<\/p>\n


\nAs stated in the introduction, Farocki and Ehmann \u201csubscribe to the modernist ideal that art should be an agent of political change.\u201d How might their project inspire change in the third decade of the twenty-first century?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

As noted above, we feel that the educational workshop mode of Labour in a Single Shot <\/em>instantiates important ideas, dating originally to the late 1960s and early 1970s, about how film and media \u2013 indeed, art in general \u2013 can help bring about political change. This was a moment when political non-fiction filmmakers found themselves obliged to accept that films cannot be used as bullets in a political or a social revolution; they can only help educate those who then go and make revolutions, or otherwise bring about reform. The insight that film and media can thus participate dialectically in the process of political change is built into the conception of Labour in a Single Shot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

However, the project\u2019s accent on smallness of scale (following the model of the first film to show workers, which was indeed the first film, the Lumi\u00e8re brothers\u2019 one-minute Workers Leaving the Factory<\/em>, of 1895), the videos are each one to two minutes long, and achieved with minimal technological equipment. This signals a transition from the professional production of long films and grand statements to the making of small films by laypersons, and from large-scale venues and practices of distribution to diffusion through decentralized networks and across global digital platforms. An apposite way, we hope, of bringing about change in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n


\nYou point out in the essay collection’s introduction that Farocki and Ehmann were interested in \u201cquestions such as why images privilege or omit certain things, from where images issue forth, in what contexts we encounter them\u2026\u201d Of course no one project can fully address such huge questions, but looking back, is there a particular type of labor experience omitted by the project that today\u2019s viewers might expect to see?<\/em><\/p>\n

The more abstract the labor, the more difficult it is to put it on film. The Labour<\/em> videos skew heavily towards artisanal, manual labor, often in public places (such as the street). Then come industrial labor and jobs in the service industry. Hardest to depict are processes in which people simply sit around and think (though some videos do attempt this) and workplaces defended from representation by public or private security.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ehmann has continued the Labour in a Single Shot<\/em> project with several collaborators following Farocki\u2019s death in 2014. Her most recent workshop took place in Bucharest, Romania in 2021. All films created as part of the project are available online in an open access archive<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Described as a \u201cproject of truly global proportions,\u201d Labour in a Single Shot is a video project that uses the accumulated weight of small-scale films to provide insight into the nature of work. Between 2011 and 2014, German husband and wife team, filmmakers Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann, traveled to fifteen different cities across the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16661,"featured_media":0,"parent":13947,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19835"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19835"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19868,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19835\/revisions\/19868"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}