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The unproductive attention

What sets the artist apart from what we usually understand as the worker? Yes – the artist can be unproductive when she works.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

C'est quoi ce travail?
Directed by: Luc Joulé and Sébastien Jousse
photo: Sébastien Jousse

According to a modern understanding, the artist is one who gladly makes us stop and relate to the surroundings in an "unproductive" way. The artist is one that changes our habitual attention, revealing a former "imperfection" in the world. This is often what you aim for when you talk about the usefulness of art not to be useful: It asks us to stop, watch, and play with the world, without it benefit us it. The artist is such a thing as not lubricates society's production machinery, but the one who throws the play's unproductive cutting edge over it.
Several filmmakers have stopped at the production plant and watched it with their eyes. Charlie Chaplin was one: Whether it was Hitler and the rise of fascism, or the modern mechanization of life, Chaplin was an artist who stopped to warn us of a development that would lead us to an earthly hell. Chaplins Modern times (1936) is just another, more popular stop signal than Marx's writings were a few decades earlier. Chaplin hurts where Marx analyzes: The modern mechanization of life alienates the creative man. The production factory makes the body itself an assembly line. Marx gives us the thesis, the Chaplin caricature. Both say, "Stop!"
Even if you were not in a crisis situation, it may still be worth at least slowing down. C'est quoi ce travail? (2015) is one of those films that stops at the factory and wants us to relate to it in an unusual way. But the film is not – like Chaplins – comical, satirical and characterized by crisis mood; it is rather comfy and stressed, and simply wants us to calm down and listen to sounds we would probably not otherwise notice.

Screen Shot at 2015 12-12-16.41.19Low heart rate. Throughout the film we find ourselves in a car factory in Saint-Ouen, a suburb north of Paris. We are invited to take part in the sounds that are also produced there. The documentary is based on composer Nicolas Frize, who wanders around and collects different types of noise at the factory. He is preparing a piece of music that will be performed in the factory room upon completion.

The artist is not one who lubricates society's production machinery, but is the one who throws the play's unproductive reins over it.

The film is free of interviews and in-depth contextualization. It observes and lends ear to daily work – it imitates, rather than explains, Frize's interest. One of the few facts we get is that Frize stays in the factory for two years.
C'est quoi ce travail? is a very low heart rate movie. It is so calm and restrained that I afterwards immediately want to put on a ragged exploitationmovie (I also saw a vhs copy of Final Score from 1986). The pace makes us rest in the images, which are often static, balanced and a little distant from humans and machines operating in mechanical interaction. The soundtrack is characterized by rustling with metal and machines in rhythmic movement, sometimes accompanied by small comments and messages between the workers. Sometimes all sound is removed, so that we only hear the buzz of silence as production goes on.
In the serenity that characterizes the film, every movement and audible size gets something remarkable about it. In these harsh, steel-laden surroundings, a small, gentle smile sounds like a big event. A few times the expression is captured by a modest person who knows that he is being watched by a camera – a characteristic, light smile that almost tries to hide for himself. Similarly, it occurs as a dramatic event when a person interrupts the work to take a look at their cellphone.

Interaction. We rarely see Frize interacting with the workers, who usually have ear plugs. One of them borrows Frize's audio equipment, and thus meets an auditory world that otherwise unnoticed surrounds him for several hours a day.

[Frize appears as] a ridiculous curiosity seeker trying to get a musical sensitivity out of the machines.

How many sounds do not affect us without our attention to them? In 1998, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbafs made a powerful film about a boy who listens to everyday sounds in idle wonder. IN Sokout (The Silence) a blind boy constantly goes "away" on his way to work, distracted by the sounds that surround him. Everyday disturbing or imperceptible "noise" is for the blind boy life-giving and powerful – it fills his world as colors and shapes fill the viewer's.
The blind boy is reminiscent of the artist in how he hears music where we others pass by and does not mean anything. Perhaps it is no wonder that the composer Frize sometimes seems to have what he calls "mental impairment": It is as if he is lagging behind. When it is true, he sometimes looks rather comical as he walks around the large production premises – the snuggly sniffing of enterprising workers. He appears as a foreign element in the factory, a ridiculous curiosity seeker trying to get a musical sensibility out of the powerful machines.

Relax shape. C'est quoi ce travail? struggles a bit with the absence of a moving, holistic composition. I have highlighted the ability and ability of the artist to be unproductive – but as a filmmaker you have to give life for something – create a work that can somehow trigger your thoughts or feelings. C'est quoi ce travail? not just a little for stressed and monotonous for their own good; the film's attention and compositional character feels somewhat mechanical (!) and effortless. The film occasionally appears as a slightly uninteresting sequence of interesting single shots. The composition of recordings feels neither necessary nor willful, thus causing images and sounds to lose some energy and direction.
This makes the film a bit chewy and lifeless, but there is also a quality to it. Precisely the absence of an energetic and creative cutting style provides a reflection space where typical demands for progress, dynamics, variation and contrast are set aside. It is as if the film, in its "relaxed" form, disciplines the viewer to eavesdrop monotony. What is opening up in this static "void"?
The film's lack of intensity and variety facilitates a viewer's attention that concentrates on himself; which rests in its own low pulse perception. Thus, the film manages to create a multifaceted world in the seemingly monotonous. For C'est quoi ce travail? is less about a car factory and a composer than it is about an elementary human experience, and about reducing stress in a stressed world: the limited but also multifaceted perception that allows the world to appear as sound.

endreeid@gmail.com
endreeid@gmail.com
Teaches film studies at NTNU Email endreeid@gmail.com

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