Machines

The first thing that strikes you about Rahul Jain’s light­ly exper­i­men­tal work­place doc­u­men­tary, Machines, is that it’s dif­fi­cult to dis­cern just when the images on screen have been cap­tured. The sub­ject of the film is a dim Gujarat tex­tile fac­to­ry, and so appalling are the con­di­tions that you’d expect that you’re watch­ing some hor­ren­dous dis­patch from the 1950s, where work­ers’ rights and safe­ty pro­ce­dures were more flu­id than they are now.

Or, maybe this is some future mis­sive detail­ing the crip­pling effects of glob­al­i­sa­tion and a swelling work­ing class pop­u­la­tions? There’s a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic feel to these scenes, like this is what hap­pens when it every­thing goes wrong. But the sad real­i­ty is, this is all hap­pen­ing in the present, and the pover­ty on dis­play is a symp­tom of cur­rent eco­nom­ic systems.

The title refers to the clank­ing tex­tile con­trap­tions used by work­ers to pro­duces rolls and rolls of pat­terned sheets. Sweat­ing pro­fuse­ly, suf­fer­ing through pun­ish­ing shifts and often forced to engage direct­ly with mov­ing indus­tri­al parts, these men are liv­ing a dai­ly hor­ror movie and with scant reward when the time bell rings at the end of the day. Every­thing is on its last legs. Giant wash­ing machines rock while sit­ting in giant con­crete crevass­es. Dyes are stored in filthy plas­tic bar­rels and are mixed up with house­hold cut­lery. Waste is poured over the wall at the back of the fac­tor, where chil­dren scav­enge for dis­card­ed metal.

Ini­tial­ly Jain’s film is more of a detached chron­i­cle of unskilled work­ing prac­tices, his rov­ing cam­era observ­ing dis­creet­ly as these mal­nour­ished fig­ures com­mune with their daunt­ing and poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous machines. There’s some­thing hyp­not­ic about watch­ing the pro­duc­tion line whiz past the eyes and the rep­e­ti­tious, instinc­tive move­ments made by the unsmil­ing workers.

Yet at about the 20 minute mark, the film trans­forms into a work of blunt polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy, and begins to take in tales of the work­ers’ hor­ren­dous hand-to-mouth exis­tence. And there are no ways around this drudgery, as the fac­to­ry own­ers offer mea­gre wages know­ing that the alter­na­tive star­va­tion. Though the sto­ries empha­sise the unre­lent­ing hor­ror of giv­ing your­self over to these places, the images speak loud enough on their own and the inter­views end up lim­it­ing the film’s scope.