Factory (ФАБРИКА). 2004. Russia. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. No dialogue. 30 min.
In this wordless ballet of worker and machine, the men and women of the 170-year-old Borovichi Refractory Plant in Ukraine perform the repetitive labors of fabricating fireclay bricks, steel products, and granulated powders. The soundtrack is a musique concrète of elemental noises: the grind and whir of motors, the lapping and slurping of molten metal, the smack of clay and the crackle of fire. Sergei Loznitsa offers an inverted take on the Lumière brothers’ pioneering 1895 film Workers Leaving the Factory; rather than a scene of antics and leisure after a hard day’s labor, in Loznitsa’s version, a worker literally crawls out of the womb of a hulking blast furnace. Interestingly, Borovichi is the oldest refractory enterprise in Russia, built in 1857 by Alfred Nobel when he discovered that the Novgorod province boasted the richest reserves of refractory clay on the continent. It’s now a leading joint stock company serving major industrial groups in metallurgy, cement, oil, and gas, including Gazprom Neft, Rusal, and NLMK.
Landscape (ЛАНДШАФТ). 2003. Germany. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktions GmbH. In Russian; English subtitles. 60 min.
If Sergei Loznitsa’s 2000 film The Halt suggested a limbo of somnolence or oblivion, then Landscape, the first he shot in color, situates us in a morbidly comical stratum of hell. The film opens with a series of 360-degree pans across a wintry landscape of ramshackle wooden and brick houses and children frozen on muddy paths in almost Pieter Breugel-like genre poses. Each circular rotation of the camera, however, reveals a new cast of characters and movements, subtly shifting depths of field and patterns of light and sound, so that by the third revolution we now find ourselves at a bus stop among restless old people in sheepskin ushankas and teenagers in Nike caps. Snippets of their mundane conversations and idle gossip, a kind of chorale of discontentment, reveal the infinite patience of a lifetime of such interminable waiting: for affordable meat and well-stocked shops; for a break from all the aches and pains and drunken, abusive husbands; for Chinese investors; and for an end to the war in Chechnya. A carousel to nowhere, the film concludes on a note of absurdist inevitability.