Resumen de A work force of images: militancy as historical experience in Joaquim Jordà’s Numax presenta
The understanding of the factory as a key cinematic site is predicated on the promise of a future able to inherit the possibilities of the past, what Harum Farocki has called “a future library for moving images” able to assemble assorted footage of factories into a veritable “work force” of images. Taking these insights as my starting point, I focus on Joaquim Jordà’s collaboration with Numax factory workers in Numax presenta (1980). At the request of the workers, the film documented the occupation of the Numax factory in Barcelona from 1977 to 1979, at the peak of the dismantling of the militant Left in the name of a peaceful Transition to Democracy after almost 40 years of Francoist rule. Once it was clear that the factory occupation could no longer be maintained, the Asamblea de Trabajadores de Numax decided to invest their remaining capital in the re-enactment and historicization of their exercise in self-management. Thus, the film is at once urgent and late, caught in the anachronisms that defined the militant images of the last century. My analysis will concentrate on the historical experience contained in Jordà’s “work force of images” and attempt to demonstrate that anachronism is not an accident but rather the precondition for the production of the factory as a cinematic site that can, in turn, engage in the production of the political.
