ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the concept of found memories by focusing on Sharon Lockhart's engagement with cinema's past in two films made as part of her Lunch Break project, completed at the Bath Iron Works in Maine between 2005 and 2008. It illuminates the many other ways that contemporary cinema and visual culture are engaging with film history but only through the practice of remaking. Lockhart's synthesis of factory downtime and cinematic slow motion creates a potent allegory not only about the decline of industrial labor in a post-industrial world but also about the transformation of cinema in a post-filmic age. Lockhart's film Exit poses questions formally by making the reprise its very structure. Lunch Break's visual politics of labor in the age of mechanized production works in tandem with its consideration of the state of film in the age of digital technologies. Rephotography projects insist upon and foreground counterpresence as their organizing principle.
