French premiere

LUNCH BREAK

Sharon Lockhart

UNITED STATES
2008
Colour
35 mm
83’

Original version
Mute
Music
Becky Allen
Photography
Richard Rutkowski
Sound
Becky Allen, James Benning
Editing
James Benning

Production
Clay Russell Lerner
Distribution
Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V.

Filmography
EXIT, 2008
PINE FLAT, 2005
NO, 2003
TEATRO AMAZONAS, 1999
SHIRLEY, 1999
GOSHOGOAKA, 1997
KHALIL, SHAUN, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, 1994

A frame slowly comes into focus; staged stillness the journey of photography to cinema and the reverse. Since the end of 1990, the Amercian Sharon Lokhart has been at the forefront of both photography and cinema, questioning one medium while placing the other at risk through her projects with an anthropological approach. Lunch Break, shot in a US Navy base in Bath, Maine, is informed by this research. With her point of view clearcut, Lokhart choses to confine herself to one place, one space in time: the lunch break of the workers, who sit opening their lunch boxes all the way along an interminably long corridor midst the machines, is filmed in a single, slow motion travelling shot. We follow this chain of little sketches; people having their snacks, but also reading, biding this dead time on their hands, exchanging inaudible tittle tattle. A condensed fresco of factory life, the film oscillates betwee focused concentration and diffused attention, between indulgent sweeping shots and delving deep into the social space. We soon grasp that the workers won’t ever leave the factory, but have become part of it, without being involved, caught up like insects trapped in amber granting them a few final flutters.
The film is reminiscent of Wavelength by Snow, a long zoom before diving into a photograph. But Lokhart swaps the zoom for the travelling shot and digs deep into this opaque space testing real life as a medium. Repetitions and variations are set against a soundtrack by Becky Allen and James Benning which mixes music, voices and industrial sounds. Lockart invites us to partake in the asceticism of her take on life, its duration renders it solid, material. Like an exercise in observation the film reminds us of the infinite possibilities of bringing together the banal and the sublime, our aesthetic experience and social issues – an inexhaustible task, an ever-present challenge.

Nicolas Féodoroff