Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), by Louis Lumière is often referred to as the first motion picture ever made. The film shows a vast mass of, mostly female, workers pouring out of the gates of the Lumière Factory. The Lumière siblings chose to film this scene, artist Ho Rui An, argues, because workers being freed from the disciplinary confines of the factory was the perfect way to capture motion, in the physical sense, as well as transformation workers undergo when, shedding their class identity, they leave the factory behind and resume their personal lives. This is because, as Marx put it, the worker ‘feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home’. Whereas factory gates kept these two worlds separate, the artist finds that current security cameras offer a different perspective, one that allows one a peak into the world inside the gates. Examining security footage of a factory in China, the artist finds there is ‘not a lot to be seen’.There are not enough workers leaving the factory.
