Harun Farocki and the Question of Cognitive Labour https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/harun-farocki-and-the-question-of-cognitive-labour-tickets-28250822972?aff=erelpanelorg https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/harun-farocki-and-the-question-of-cognitive-labour Fri 18 November 2016 18:30 – 21:00 University of Westminster 309 Regent Street 1st Floor Boardroom London W1B 2HW Marking the 120-year anniversary of the first screening of Lumière Brothers' *Workers Leaving the Factory* at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street campus, the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies hosts an evening featuring short films by Harun Farocki and comments by two distinguished experts. In 1896, the Royal Polytechnic Institution – today the University of Westminster – hosted the first ever screening of moving images to a British audience: A set of ten short films by the Lumière Brothers. One of these was *Workers Leaving the Factory*. In 1995, German filmmaker Harun Farocki produced a film of the same title, exploring the relation between the cinema and the factory. Farocki asked: W hy have the factory and industrial labour been systematically hidden and disregarded in the history of cinema? Through the montage of similar scenes from the history of film, Farocki depicts the factory gate as a site of social struggle. The gate functions as a metaphor for the gradual eviction of the industrial worker from the factory and the emergence of new forms of cognitive labour. In other words, *Workers Leaving the Factory* marks the exit of the mass worker from industrial capitalism and into what is called the social factory in Italian autonomous theory. Farocki’s films prompt us to ask pressing questions in relation to what today is called cognitive/informational/cultural labour. The event aims to show how contemporary theories of labour allow us to read and interpret the work of one of the key figures in contemporary German cinema and how cinema can inform critical social theory. On this evening, Dr Claudio Celis Bueno (Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies) and Dr Michael Cowan (University of S. Andrews) will be exploring the internal relation between the audio-visual work of Farocki and new theoretical reflections on labour in contemporary society. Drawing lines backwards into film history, the event takes place in the historical building where the Lumière Brothers’ film was first shown to a British public. We will be just next door to the Regent Street Cinema, which was re-opened by University of Westminster in 2015.