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COLLAGE AND CROWD
Notes On the Histories and Politics of Collage and Montage
By Kim West

Ulrich had just walked over to the window when the marchers
arrived. they were flanked by police, who dispersed the
onlookers lining the avenue like a cloud of dust raised by
the firm tread of the marchers. A little farther back, vehicles
could be seen wedged in the crowd, while its relentless
current flowed around them in endless black waves on
which the foam of upturned faces seemed to be dancing.
when the spearhead of the mob came within sight of count
Leinsdorf’s windows, it looked as though it had been slowed
down by some command; an immense ripple ran backward
along the column as the advancing ranks jammed up, like a
muscle tightening before launching a blow.

• Musil, the Man without Qualities, 1930

One of John Heartfield’s many famous photomontages shows a clenched fist, raised in a gesture of triumph or resistance. Within the figure of the hand and the lower arm, which is placed in a diagonal against a neutral, dark background, one sees another image, displaying a multitude of people with their clenched fists in a corresponding gesture. The image was published on the cover of a special issue – on the resistance against fascism – of the magazine Arbeiter Illustrerte Zeitung in 1934, with a clear caption: “Alle Fäuste zu einer geballt”, “all fists clenched as one”. Heartfield’s simple yet effective composition, Benjamin Buchloh points out in a text on Soviet Constructivism and Productivism, seems to be directly inspired by a photomontage by Gustav Klutsis from 1930, which shows a similar motif, constructed according to the same rhetorical figure: a multiplicity of open, outstretched hands form a common, outstretched hand, placed in a diagonal against a neutral, monochromic background. In this case, the caption said: “Let us fulfill the great project of the plan”; the poster was supposed to encourage the viewer to participate in the new five year-plan. The two images are based on the same metaphor: the crowd as a hand, a clenched fist, a muscle. But the images are not metaphoric; the qualities of photomontage instead make it possible for them to show the different elements at the same time, in a simple relationship of tension: the crowd and the fist, the multiplicity and the unity.
            There exists, it seems, a clear, almost obvious relationship between photomontage – or, to use a more general term, collage – and crowd during this period, the years around 1930. Art had concrete political tasks and the stakes were high: Fascism and Nazism were gathering their forces; counter-images against their ideology and propaganda, their notions of the people and the nation, were of immediate necessity. During the same period, a new type of mass culture was established, and the crowd became a palpable phenomenon in urban life and in collective consciousness. In a famous article from 1927, Siegfried Kracauer writes about the “mass ornaments” of the new theatre and dance spectacles, which directly mirror the instrumentalization of man by the capitalist conditions of production; against this notion of the mass, there was a need for images which could show a people whose nature was not separated from itself, images that did not reproduce an alienating ideology. In the techniques and operations that were pioneered in the Cubist and the Futurist experiments with papiers collés, Constructivists and Surrealists, Communist and Anti-Fascist artists found the means to produce rhetorically powerful images characterized by an indissoluble tension between the different, assembled elements, on account of which they could represent the crowd without reducing its complexity and multiplicity. Collage was political: because of its material and formal qualities, it seemed to have a specific ability to engender images of a new, revolutionary or critical political subject. But this was during the years around 1930. The question seems apparent: and today? Which are collage’s contemporary political possibilities? Which relations between collage and crowd could one talk about in our age – given that these concepts and phenomena are still at all relevant?
            The question is essential, but perhaps not as apparent as it seems; perhaps its simplicity is treacherous. Formulated in an incautious manner, it can imply a certain idea about history, according to which forms, techniques, or materials can only have a true effect – political, artistic, or otherwise – in “their own” time, “their own” historical moment. Collage’s – contemporary? – political or critical possibilities would rather seem to be connected to its ability to question, complicate, even transgress such a notion. Its relationship to history is complex, not simple. Collage, we could say, seems to be characterized by a perpetually renewed actuality, at the same time as it is constantly traversed by heterogeneous temporalities. In fact – or at least in principle – each significant artistic movement since the first appearance of collage in Picasso’s and Braque’s studios in 1912 has laid claim to collage’s forms and operations as its own; and it always seems to be possible to construct an art historical narrative that points out collage as specifically representative of a certain period or tendency. Collage is emblematic of the early avant garde-experiments, of synthetic Cubism’s, Futurism’s, and dada’s break with the stylistic codes and conventions of classical painting; it is the paradigmatic image of the Surrealists’ unexpected combinations of heterogeneous elements, and its techniques are at the basis of the Constructivist photomontage; after the war it becomes the figure above all for the different movements that search for new relationships to an emerging, late capitalist consumer culture, in New Realism, Pop art, and Situationism; with 1968 it returns again, in the form of political photomontage, but now fused with the problematics of conceptual art and institutional critique; in the 80s it becomes emblematic, rather, of Postmodernism’s border-transgressing eclecticism and fragmentation; in the 90s it is evoked as a model for the sampling culture of the emerging digital networks, and in today’s visual arts and cinema it remains an essential resource for the different attempts to establish new forms of archives and alternative historiographies. Collage seems in itself to be incompatible with art historical narratives that are based on the idea of the “death” and the following “rebirth” of certain forms of expression or media – painting, film, etc.
            What is the reason for this constantly renewed actuality? One can imagine a double answer. The fundamental operation of collage is the aggregation of existing, heterogeneous cultural elements. A piece of wallpaper or a newspaper cutting is pasted into a Cubist painting; elements of photo reproductions are combined into a new composition; a bicycle wheel is mounted on a stool; a martial arts-film is given a soundtrack with Maoist propaganda; photographs, cuttings, and sketches are assembled into a gigantic, mnemotechnic atlas – and so on. In each one of these cases, a certain number of cultural artifacts of varying dimensions – from fragments to full works – are joined together into a new whole. This operation has two consequences. First, it implies an awareness regarding the material characteristics of the artwork. To combine elements from different origins, produced in different materials and media, is to be forced to reflect upon the inherent qualities and limitations of these separate elements, as well as the differences, the transitions, and the confrontations between them in their new totality. One could say that this is what Clement Greenberg focuses on in his famous article, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” from 1958, which inscribes collage into the narrative about modernist art’s search for the purity of the medium: Picasso’s experiments with newspaper cuttings and reproduced images aimed to explore the relationships between figure and ground, and to accentuate the painting’s surfaceness, and they were therefore but a link in Cubism’s examination of the essential qualities of painting. In this way, Greenberg obviously blinds himself to the second essential consequence of collage’s fundamental operation: its openness towards the outside, towards the changing landscape of technologies and media within which art operates. Collage incorporates the forms, materials, and artifacts of mass media and capitalist culture – Schwitter’s ticket stubs, Rauschenberg’s postcards and gadgets, Sanja Ivekovic’s fashion images – into the interior of the artwork. Thereby it is also open towards the changes in technologies and media that characterize the conditions of production of a certain society, and stands in a direct relationship to that society’s ideologies and social processes, which it therefore has a privileged ability to play with and criticize.
            The reason for collage’s constantly renewed actuality, then, would be that it entails an awareness and a reflection about the artwork’s material qualities, at the same time as it always stands open towards, registers, and employs its surrounding society’s technological and ideological transformations. However, another characteristic trait of collage is that it is traversed by heterogeneous temporalities: an image that combines elements with different origins will unavoidably assemble a multiplicity of historical legacies. What characterizes a work such as Jacques Villeglé’s Les Bulles du Temple (1969) – one of his many décollages: torn posters gathered from the walls and boards of the streets of Paris, in which the different layers of images glued onto one another are rendered visible as the sedimentations of a geological cross section – is precisely that it holds together in its interior a number of operative temporalities. The work’s most apparent element is a torn film poster with images of Barbra Streisand, which has been subjected to a Situationist détournement: next to her face, speech bubbles have been placed, within which a simple phrase is declined according to the verb forms of French grammar: “Je suis un produit de consommation”, “Tu es un produit de consommation”, “Elle est…”, “Nous sommes…”, etc. Through the tears in the film poster, one can then see fragments of other posters: ads, political slogans, homemade notes; colors, deconstructed words, hardly identifiable image elements, which together form a complex composition. A sprawling network of genealogies, then, is gathered in this work: the different overlaying posters’ separate histories; the different iconographies at work in the images of the playbills and placards; the political and social events which are mirrored in slogans and messages; the Situationist intervention’s play with references and its own art historical tradition, and so on. Les Bulles du Temple is a complex image, which gives an impression of a moment – February 1969, when the experiences of May ‘68 were still vivid, while their hopes for the future were beginning to seem dated – which is in itself an aggregation of heterogeneous histories and temporalities. The same thing could be said about collage in general: it is always an assemblage of more or less compatible histories. And this would of course be valid a fortiori if one were to think of some of the last century’s great atlas projects: Hanna Höch’s image album, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, Hanne Darboven’s Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, which are all based on the historiographic effects, the play of resemblances and differences, the analogies and continuities which become visible when great numbers of images are combined in groups and series.
            How could one describe this aggregation of temporalities in collage more precisely? Which are its specific traits, its abilities and qualities? Even the most simple of collages performs a complex semiotic operation. This operation is clearly described in an often cited passage from a text written by the experimental research collective Groupe µ in 1978:

Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition.

Collage combines separate elements into a new whole; the elements are given a new significance through being parts of the new whole, but the significance of this whole, in turn, presupposes that the joined elements retain something of their old significance, their original connotations and histories. “The trick of collage”, Groupe µ writes, consists in “never entirely suppressing the alterity”. In a hypothetical, minimal collage, which would only consist of two combined elements (one may for example think of Ivekovic’s Double Life-series from 1975), there is, then, always at least three histories active simultaneously: those of the two separate elements, and that of the whole, which is generated through the irreducible tension between the elements. But most collages of course contain far more than two elements, of different scales and degrees of legibility, and the description of their semiotic operations can consequently be made far more complex: one can talk of “minor” and “exaggerated” elements (where the former would be too small or fragmented to read or identify as such, and the latter would on the contrary constitute autonomous entities); one can establish a grammar for the ways of combining these elements in the syntax of collage (in paratactic series or groups; in dialectical oppositions and syntheses; in collisions between incommensurable reference systems); one can discuss different methods for separating elements from their original contexts and inserting them into new ones (cut, quote, sample, etc). Through its great – even limitless – number of variables, collage can break free and analyze, reconfigure and combine histories in a kaleidoscopic multiplicity. The essential aspect, however, remains collage’s non-reductiveness: its ability to aggregate separate elements and histories in a new totality, within which the integrity of the elements is not lost, but rather maintained in an open relationship of tension. “The use of the sample”, the poet and theorist Olivier Quintyn writes in one of the most advanced texts on collage’s dispositif, “oscillates between conserving the ontological gap between the constituents, and recombining them in a homogenizing manner through the effect of the disposition”.
            Collage is characterized by a constantly renewed actuality and is traversed by heterogeneous temporalities. It is based on an awareness regarding its material qualities and an openness towards its technological and ideological context, on account of which it always, in a self-reflexive manner, “updates” itself in relationship to the changing social and mediatic system that it can at the same time criticize. In this sense one could, on a very abstract level, describe collage as a sort of intelligent interface or program, which rewrites itself in relationship to new data, hardware, and feedback, and consequently changes its information output. And in collage, this process of rewriting and transformation takes the form of a play with histories that is potentially limitless in its complexity, combining and confronting historical elements with each other in open tensions, exposing new differences and similarities, breaks and continuities. Collage’s relationship to history is complex, both its place within history and its ways of treating historiographic narratives. Perhaps it is starting from such an analysis – however swift and superficial – that it can become sensible to approach the question of the political significance of collage today, of the relationship between collage and crowd in our historical moment. To understand the politics of collage must in some sense be to reflect upon the ways it relates to, renegotiates, and complicates the present’s relationship to the past and to the coming. One could point out three general ways to think the politics of collage, which do not exclude, but rather layer with and complicate one another: as a model for how the artwork may stage an ideal of equality; as a form with a certain redemptive force; and as a collection of techniques and operations with a specific critical capacity.
            Can one speak of the appearance of collage as a political event? When Picasso and Braque make their first papiers collés, this can in a certain sense be seen as the culmination of an art historical process that has been under way since the second half of the 18th century: the process with which the stylistic rules of “classical” art – codified, in the most apparent manner, in the doctrine of the hierarchy of the genres, and the corresponding system of conventions – are gradually dismantled, and the limits between “noble” and “humble” materials, techniques, and motifs are dissolved. Together with the readymade, collage constitutes a drastic radicalization of this critical process: here, it is no longer only the demands for the dignified rank of the motif and the nobility of the style that are questioned and transgressed (as – to simplify to the point of caricature – in Realism and Impressionism), but reality itself which intrudes into the interior of the artwork (collage), or is endowed with artistic value by being placed within a certain institutional context (readymade). As Jacques Rancière has argued in a number of texts, this process is not only a development in the history of styles, but a fundamental displacement which transforms the very conditions for how to think the nature of art and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. That the stylistic rules of classical art are dismantled implies, in a simple sense, a democratization of art: the conventions that direct the choices of styles and motifs are no longer necessarily inscribed into a strict social hierarchy. However, this process also points towards a more radical equality: art as such is not defined as a system of practices that follow certain rules, but is instead seen as a mode of being that generates a certain impression, a certain – aesthetic – type of experience. Thereby, art can be separated both from its connection to a specific author, whose technical abilities are expressed in the work, and from its specific addressee, the recipient who would be particularly suited and qualified to experience this work. In what Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime”, there is no longer anything that defines a priori which techniques and materials are artistic, and who is legitimized to create or experience artworks.
            Collage is paradigmatic for this new regime. It is based on the incorporation of foreign, non-artistic elements into its interior, and through its fundamental operation it transgresses each notion about the artist’s command over her work: a collage always combines a multitude of authors and voices, and always includes forms and techniques that escape the creator’s control. Does this entail that collage is inscribed into a certain history about the heroic adventures of early modernism, that it is trapped in a certain – obsolete – ideal about subversive breaks with the codes of established art? For Rancière’s argument, it is essential that the aesthetic regime should not be understood as a new phase or epoch in a linear art history, that the process with which it is installed is not irreversible or global, implemented once and for all, and then generally valid. On the contrary, there is always a multiplicity of regimes active simultaneously: the aesthetic one coexists and competes with the “representational” one, within which art remains locked in a system of positions, limits, and abilities. The aesthetic regime, then, must in a sense be recreated or reconquered in each artwork: forms, techniques, materials, and expressions must be torn away from the positions to which they are ascribed, the abilities and ranks with which they are associated; styles, media, and technologies must be inscribed into other genealogies, alloted new origins starting from which they can point towards other uses, other ways of relating to the present and the coming. That collage is paradigmatic for the aesthetic regime therefore does not mean that it is enclosed in a certain historical narrative, but rather that it, in a particularly evident way, enforces the ability of art within this regime to disturb such positions and narratives, to open them up towards heterogeneous temporalities and subjectivations. This, then, would be a first way to understand the politics of collage today: it can render an ideal of equality operative; it can tear away images, materials, forms, and techniques from the roles they are ascribed in certain hierarchies and systems; and it can liberate styles, media, and technologies from their compelling connections to a certain present, a certain historical moment. This is what John Heartfield does when he rearranges Nazi news imagery into a new representation of a crowd united in resistance; it is what Richard Hamilton does when he assembles the icons of the new consumer culture into an image of tomorrow’s life forms (the incomparably famous Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956); but it is also what Jean-Luc Godard does when he cuts together sequences and images from the archives of the histories of cinema and art, in order to tell the true history of cinema, as well as the histories that cinema itself was never allowed to tell (Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988–97).
            The final example also points towards another, adjoining way to think the politics of collage, which renders its historico-philosophical figure more precise and complex. One finds a first model for this in one of the 20th century’s greatest montage or collage works: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, his never finished exploration of the Paris passages, the built-in pedestrian streets which led through certain neighbourhoods in this city, and where a new type of capitalist culture began to take shape during the first half of the 19th century. “Method of this project: literary montage”, Benjamin writes in an often commented passage in this text. “I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them”. Benjamin’s application of collage techniques was here based upon a specific historiographic model. He wanted to study the architectural, urban, and social phenomenon of the passages as the place where a number of history’s lines of force intersect, in order to understand, starting from this place, the origin of his own culture in its true complexity. However, the aim of the Arcades Project was not to anchor, to fortify a given present – Benjamin’s own time, the Central Europe of the 20s and 30s – by describing its deepest origin and subsequent development. Instead, Benjamin wanted to perform a “Copernican turn” in the writing of history, and reveal the multiplicity of origins starting from which it would be possible to shatter the continuum of tradition and open new ways to see and to transform the present. And it was for this work he found the form in the “literary montage”, which can assemble the “insignificant” traces and details of history – “the rags, the refuse”: marginal documents, texts on ephemeral phenomena and forgotten attractions, sketches for unrealized inventions – into a new type of historiographic narrative, which neither reduces the integrity of the elements, nor re-establishes those stories which lead up to the present in its given – catastrophic – state. The semiotic operation of collage – the aggregation of heterogeneous elements into a new whole that at the same time upholds their original qualities and connotations –, as well as its ability to renegotiate temporalities and histories, for Benjamin gave it a double redemptive power: to “save” the objects of history from the mythological or archaic narratives to which they had been subjected, instead allowing them to “come into their own” and as historical enter into a relationship of tension, a constellation with the present – what Benjamin calls a “dialectical image”; and thereby to disclose history’s abundance of origins and unrealized possibilities, which can lead to a political “awakening” for the alienated masses.
            Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma is based on a partly corresponding method. Just as the Arcades Project, Godard’s great collage of film sequences, images, literary quotes, pieces of music, and voices aims to understand a certain age in its true complexity, starting from the study of a specific place where history’s lines of force intersect. In this case the subject is not the 19th century of industrialization and urbanization, but the century of cinema, which is studied starting from and with the help of cinema itself, which for Godard should be understood as a heterogeneous aggregate of techniques, forms, and ideas. Just as Benjamin, Godard uses collage to assemble the traces and details of history into a historiographic narrative that allows these elements to retain their qualities and connotations, at the same time as their combination does not conform to the story that leads up to the present in its existing state. In this case, “the rags and the refuse” consist of scenes and cuts from the archive of the history of cinema, which are juxtaposed to and layered with art historical images, quotes written on the screen, and recorded and sampled voices and sounds in the soundtrack, altogether forming an almost infinitely dense and polyvalent composition. And just as the Arcades Project, Godard’s work thereby aims to “save” the objects of history from the great myths into which they are inscribed, in order, instead, to restore their true nature, allow them to “come into their own”. In this case, the “myths” in question are primarily the great myths of Hollywood and the commercial fiction film, and to allow the objects of history – film clips, images, texts, sounds – to “come into their own” here rather means to tear them away, dismantle them from their original contexts in these films, in order to remount them into a new one, in which they can use their inherent power to tell the story they were themselves not allowed to tell: the story about the 20th century and its catastrophies and utopias. However, unlike the Arcades Project, Histoire(s) du cinéma does not in any apparent way fall back on a messianic faith. Even in his most pessimistic texts and fragments Benjamin seems to uphold an underlying belief in an “awakening”, in the arrival of a new, revolutionary age that can transcend the disaster of the present. In Godard there does not seem to exist any corresponding faith, and Histoire(s) du cinéma, in the end, instead resembles a vast, apocalyptic tombstone to cinema and its histories, which, according to an intricate temporal figure, wants to restore the fragments of history to what they could have been, in order thereby to erect a monument for resistance against the present. However, aside from the differences between Benjamin and Godard, one could, in these grandiose projects, find a common, second way of thinking the politics of collage: it has a redemptive force; it can, through its ability to insert the objects of history into a historiographic narrative that at the same time upholds their integrity, tear them away from their established contexts and traditions, and restore their true nature, creating a messianic promise or a monument for untimely resistance.
            One can also speak of a third way to understand the politics of collage, where it instead employed as a form of knowledge: collage as the model for a critical historiography, but without messianic claims or apocalyptic pessimism. In his recent study on two books by Bertolt Brecht, the Arbeitsjournal and the War Primer, Georges Didi-Huberman writes: “[This is] what Brecht names an art of historicizing: an art that breaks the continuity of narrations, extracts their differences and, recomposing these differences themselves, restitutes the essentially ‘critical’ value of all historicity.” Brecht’s books, which in different ways approach the experience of WWII, are both based on a montage, or, rather, collage technique: they combine text passages, quotes, and cut-out images into heterogeneous wholes. The Arbeitsjournal collects Brecht’s notes from his years in exile 1933–1955, and assembles them with newspaper cuttings and different types of reproductions, according to an open, organic method. The War Primer is a sort of curious children’s book for grown-ups, which in a more systematic fashion combines photographs of the horrors of the war with short prose passages and poems. Both books could be said to apply the “art of historicizing” about which Didi-Huberman writes: they break the continuity of the stories about the war, reveal their fissures and internal contradictions, and then aggregates their elements into critical stories. But these books do not, for this reason, constitute exceptions in Brecht’s “normal” practice as a poet and playwright. There is, Didi-Huberman claims, an elaborate collage or montage aesthetic in Brecht, which sets his fundamental theoretical and methodological concepts into play, and is operative in all aspects of his work. For Brecht, to break the continuity of the story by tearing away the images and the texts from their given contexts does not mean to restore them to their true nature, to allow them to come into their own, in accordance with Benjamin’s and Godard’s redemptive logic. It is instead a critical operation, which aims to expose these objects as something foreign – what Brecht with his perhaps most famous term names “Verfremdung”, the distanciation that breaks the spectator’s or reader’s identification with the characters of epic theatre, and disturbs her empathy with plots and illusions.
            But what does “foreign” mean in this context? This word should not be understood as synonymous with “bizarre” or “alien”; it does not refer to a phenomenon whose intrusion into an established order is frightening or threatening. The foreign in Brecht is the familiar, an element of the established order, but torn away from its apparent naturalness. ”In what follows”, Brecht writes at one point, ”’foreign’ should never be understood in the sense of ’bizarre’. There is not the least interest in presenting the processes on the stage as curious, incomprehensible phenomena. The task, instead, is precisely to render them comprehensible. […] Art should not present things as evident […], nor as incomprehensible, but as comprehensible, only not yet comprehended.” In short, distanciation denaturalizes the narrative – the dramatic one as well as the historiographic one. A denaturalized narrative does not only show a certain development, in order to implicitly present it as unavoidable, but also shows that it shows it, in order to allow it to appear in its contingent and heterogeneous nature. Each collage is necessarily based on such a distanciation, and sets to work what Didi-Huberman names a ”knowledge through strangeness”: in order to assemble collage’s heterogeneous elements one must first separate them, tear them away, distance them from their given contexts; and therefore it is only with collage or montage, now understood as a form of knowledge or principle of analysis, that history itself can be dismantled, exposed in its non-naturalness, that its discontinuities and contingencies may be revealed. In other words: it is only before the gaze of the collage or montage artist that history can achieve its essentially critical value – as montage. Montage, Didi-Huberman writes in another context, “is not the factual creation of a temporal continuity […]. It is, on the contrary, a way of visually unfolding the discontinuities of time at work in each sequence of history.”
            On account of the celebration of cinema’s “100th birthday” in 1995, Harun Farocki – one of the contemporary artists who in the most apparent fashion remains close to a Brechtian method – was commissioned to produce a film that reflected upon the history of cinema. The result was a collage composition – a “documentary montage”, Didi-Huberman would say, with a concept coined by Benjamin – in which Farocki returned to film history’s own repetitions of one of its moments of origin: the Lumière brothers’ first film, which shows how the workers at their lamp factory in Lyon leave their workplace at the end of the day and swarm out through the gates of the factory complex. Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik assembles the different sequences in film history that return to this motif: Charlie Chaplin causes a riot in front of his workplace in Modern Times; Marilyn Monroe bickers with her boyfriend outside of a fish cannery in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night; strikebreakers and starving unemployed workers fight in Pudovkin; proletarians take control over the means of production in a Soviet propaganda reel; but also state of the art surveillance imagery and commercials for road blocks and security technologies. A number of conditions are exposed in this aggregate of sequences and scenes. In an article about this film, partly based on the text which is read in its soundtrack, Farocki establishes that “Films about work or workers have not become on of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind.” If the images of the crowd in front of the factory gates, however, constitute exceptions in the history of fiction films, they have on the contrary remained a topos in the tradition of documentary and propaganda films. Why? Farocki finds the answer through the montage of his own film, which exposes the rhetorical figure at work in the assembled imagery. “The work structure”, he points out, “synchronizes the workers, the factory gates group them, and this process of compression produces the image of a work force”.
In the political films that Farocki samples – which originate from all segments of the spectrum of ideologies – the image of the workers therefore has a clear function: it offers an effective instrument in order to show the workers as a united force. However, Farocki’s film also tells us something else: that this image will gradually lose its rhetorical efficiency. As the ideal of the people is progressively repressed from political consciousness, the image of the crowd will consequently be marginalized, withdrawn from the public eye and mind. The propaganda film that shows the united force of the workers is replaced by the digital surveillance footage, which is decoded and put into action within the closed circuit of the computer and the industrial robot, without any gaze ever having to fall upon it. The crowd disappears from the public spectacle of the moving images. This, of course, does not mean that it ceases to exist. It means that its mode of existence is another, that it prevails as an anachronism, and that it is therefore only the techniques and operations of collage that can render it visible.