La sortie (1999)

Overview

"La Sortie ironizes one of cinema's original motifs: Under Fruhauf's expert hands, just as in the people's real history, the workers will never manage to leave the factory; instead of escaping into off-screen space, as in the initial three stagings by the Lumière brothers, their movements from foreground to background and simultaneously from left to right and right to left form a plastic cross which refers to the death of manual labor in factories, the figurative erasure of its working class, and the death of cinema. In other words, after the harmonious mise-en-scène of the Lumières who invented an appeased everyday comes a critical elegy." (Nicole Brenez)