ABSTRACT
This essay draws on both film-making practice and the work of Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard to develop a critical cinematographic term, “distance.” This term encompasses both the physical distance between the camera and its subject and the constructed relationship of the viewer to the subject of a film, as well the film-maker’s (sometimes unconscious) relationship to the subject as expressed through both. It then uses this term to analyze Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s Labour in a Single Shot workshops and to trace their relationship to Farocki’s 1995 film Workers Leaving the Factory, from which the workshop originates. Paying particular attention to the definition of cinema behind the workshops’ command to “use video as though it were film,” Barker examines which aspects of the critique in Farocki’s film are developed in the workshops, as well as whether some of Farocki’s critiques of image production are left behind or even contradicted.
