In Comparison

Directed by Harun Farocki

In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.

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Reviews

  • ★★★★ review by Vadim Rizov on Letterboxd

    Not a workingman death's-type scenario, but a journey traversing a sliding scale where dignity in labor is present/absent to varying extents, mediated by varying degrees of mechanical labor. There are two shots in here that, if you'd shown them to me in a Hollywood film, I would've sworn were shitty CGI: one of the stamping gears of an automated brick line pumping back and forth, like someone doing reps faster than humanly possible, and another assembly line image of bricks being coated with some kind of goo whose texture is like nothing I've seen in this actual world. Good to know there are things I'm unfamiliar with that simply don't look real.

  • ★★★★ review by connor on Letterboxd

    Farocki's best film by being his most translucent, leaving the viewer subject to little more than the process itself. i quite like his other films that i've seen, but this one works best in finally allowing the images to speak for themselves--just the gestures, rhythms, patterns, and toil of labor.

  • ★★★½ review by David_Bautista on Letterboxd

    3.6

  • ★★★★ review by Emerson Goo on Letterboxd

    Captivatingly rhythmic.

  • ★★★★ review by FredrikPohl on Letterboxd

    A meditative, mesmerizing gaze on the nature of work and its meaning.

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