La sortie

Siegfried A. Fruhauf

6 min, black and white, 16mm

Austria 1998

“The first film of cinematographic history shows workers leaving a factory. The title of this work which is 50 seconds long and bequeathed to us by the Lumière brothers is La Sortie des Ouvriers de l´Usine.

There are three known versions of the work. In the hardware and software of the cinematographic ‘machine’ resides much of the specifically mechanical charm of the industrial age. In one sense it is a paradox that the Lumières began film history with workers leaving the factory instead of giving place of honour to them working on the production lines. Over a hundred years later Siegfried A. Fruhauf has made a fourth version of La Sortie des Ouvriers de l´Usine. This remake gives short shrift to the unconscious irony of the Lumière films. Fruhauf needs six minutes to run through the current fate of industry. Fourteen workers are present here – five on the (optically) vertical axis, the rest cross the horizontal axis in the background. Their movements form a cross – a symbol of death as a ballet mécanique.

The initial image is transformed into almost abstract black and white surfaces, harnessed, Sisyphus-like, to a lunatic dance of repetition. Fruhauf increases the acceleration of the striding workers in discrete steps until they are tearing along – the capacity of the film tested to its outer limits – until it can’t take any more. Maximum acceleration leads to stasis – after the acceleration throughout the film comes the logical consequence – the last frame – the freeze frame. Nothing more can happen. The model (literally) of progress collapses. And instead there is paralysis. A dead end. The workers are motionless, and with them the factory.
Rien ne va plus.” (Peter Tscherkassky (http://sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/show/1033)

Siegfried Alexander Fruhauf, born 1976 in Grieskirchen, Austria, lives and works in Vienna and Heiligenberg, Austria.