ENTRÉE DU PERSONNEL

Factories, workers: Outdated words. Obsolete realities? The gloomy dawns that
open Manuela Frésil’s film and announce a new day, redoing the exact same pitiful
gestures, ruthlessly confirm the contrary to the deliberately forgetful of the slaughter
of beings. Bleak choreography of industrial slaughterhouses: cutting, emptying,
loading, etc., an austere gymnastics in which disappears, a digit here, a muscle
there, all their bodies and their night of impossible rest, haunted by nightmares.
In echo, orderly and hurried procession of imposing remains, methodically
disemboweled carcasses, labelled poultry, pink meat sliced to the millimeter. On
the voiceover, follow quickly stories one-by-one but with multiple voices: the high
turnover of the employees, productivity, bruises, pains and the accepted inevitability
of few years to live in “retirement.” In the factory, the camera slides, embraces the
movements and their production lines. In the factory, the camera becomes a terribly
efficient, oiled machine. Outside the factory, it becomes almost stiff. What outside?
So it starts all over again: one explains, one redoes, one pretends to mimic the
tasks, on the beach, in an office, on a platform. From outside, none really, other than
the timbre of their voices, their accents, their way of speaking that tries to adopt the
speed of working. And yet something silently takes shape, and it is not only the sea
at the end where closed oysters are caught. (NF+JPR)