Lunch Break

Lunch break at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine, hometown of the American artist, photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart. 42 workers look for somewhere to eat, dose, chat or read along the locker-lined corridors that stretch across the entire shipyard. The camera moves (a novelty in Sharon Lockharts’s oeuvre) through this social space and observes the lunchtime activities of the shipyard workers. In post-production, Lockhart slows down this tracking shot so its original ten minutes become 80. This extreme slow motion allows the viewer to grasp a rich wealth of details, textures and gestures. Combined with a soundtrack of industrial noises, music and voices that flow into one another, the world of industrialized work is revealed to be hugely unreal. (mg)