Picture three places. 1. A workshop in Germany where we follow the making of a prosthetic hand. 2. A traditional glove-making workshop in Millau, in the south of France. 3. A jeans factory in Istanbul, illustrating large-scale industrial production. A succession of three workplaces, but with a common viewpoint and subject: the relationship between the hand and the machine, the work and the material, all of them patiently and rigorously observed. Daniel Eisenberg scrutinises these interactions and gestures meticulously, and he pays close attention to each action involved and to the time required for each operation, from the starting point to the finished forms. With this film, Eisenberg continues the work he started with his previous one, The Unstable Object (FID 2011), in which he also used a triangular structure to compare the work in a high-tech car factory in Dresden, then in an antiquated clock repair shop in Chicago, and finally in a cymbal factory in Istanbul. From one production site to the next, the film focuses on hands, bodies, images: reconstructed bodies, modelled bodies, dressed bodies. And on the social body as well – either collective bodies at work, or their images, shaped by the very objects which are being produced. The patience of an attentive camera and the fascinating rhythm of this choreography let the gestures fully unfold. The geography of production modes also shapes the story it underlies, like the globalisation of exchanges. And what is also paramount here is that the time it takes to make the objects seems to mirror the experience of the viewer watching the film, like an echo between absorbed gazes, theirs like ours. A nice piece of actual work from the gaze and the mind about the ever so unstable object that is work.
(Nicolas Feodoroff)Daniel Eisenberg