At the outset, a ballet, with a de rigueur wooden floor. A theatre? No, the Volkswagen
factory in Dresden, the acme of personalized high-tech production of cars fitted by
hand in an automated universe, silent, all with an elegant glide. Follows a workshop
that seems to be out of the 1950s, in Chicago, where blind workers assemble, by
touch in assembly-line work, clocks intended for post offices. Then, the last panel
of the triptych, here we are in Istanbul, between the narrow walls of a workshop for
manufacturing cymbals where the future instruments are modeled by hammering.
Three countries, three ways of working, three moments of industrial history, to a
chronology that is here upside down. But more than a sociological study on the
universe of work and its geographical particularities, stands out what connects these
sequences of equal length. This connection is drawn from forms. The last shot of a
wheel that turns until slowly stopping the book: it’s the circle. Hypotheses and
correspondences can now be coiled around its vicious perfection: from the mutistic
ballet of the beginning to the noisy promise of a concluding music; of time blindly
stamped in the central sequence in the manner in which it seems to have fainted in
the beginning and is punctuated at the end, etc. In short, Daniel Eisenberg and his
fine stable film, notwithstanding its title, dodge between the noise of time and the
musical round that every piece of work begins. (NF & JPR)