The Fist (Ayo Akingbade, 2022) (Patreon)

There is an inherent fascination with learning how things are made. And while the production of the products in The Fist are secondary to the labor (and laborers) being observed, there is simply a poetry to industrialized production, something Dziga Vertov certainly recognized. Then again, we understand that Vertov could locate that poetry because he was trying to depict a future in which labor would not be alienated. And that is not the future we've created.

So there are different ways to achieve a sort of political poetics of industrialized labor. The factory films of Sharon Lockhart, for example, treat the filming process as a mechanized, abstract event, the slow tracking shots mirroring the meticulous control exercised between worker and machine. In a very different key, Kevin Everson's eight-hour Park Lanes depicts a single workday at an AMF factory, asking the viewer to "work" alongside the various employees manufacturing bowling alley parts.

Probably the filmmaker most closely associated with industrial inquiry is Harun Farocki. His numerous related projects, from the early Napalm film Inextinguishable Fire to the commercial photo shoots in Still Life and his installation Workers Leaving the Factory, all involve a consideration of political economy, the body under capitalism, and the industrial process as but one of many rationalizing technologies that extract cash value from daily existence. Ayo Akingbade's short film probably resembles Farocki's work more than it does anyone else's.

For 23 minutes, Akingbade shows us the daily grind at a Guinness plant in Ikeja, Nigeria. In addition to bottles of original Guinness beer, we see the mass production of Malta Guinness, a non-alcoholic beverage that is incredibly popular there. We see the workers sign in, work the bottlers, empty the malt presses, and cart high pallets of cans and bottles into position for shipping out. We also observe the inevitable waste that comes with mechanized production. Several workers inspect the bottles to make sure they are not chipped, are capped properly, and have no obvious defects. And if one of those bottles should happen to fall...

98 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Anyway, The Fist strikes me as pleasantly devoid of overbearing politics. There is of course the dissonance of seeing such an iconic Irish product being brewed and packaged in Nigeria. And apparently the factory was established in 1962, just after Nigeria attained independence from Britain. Still, The Fist does not immediately communicate a postcolonial moral. Instead, it's a dispatch from our late capitalist economy, one in which the nation-state has been supplanted by the circulation of global capital. 

And I truly have no idea why this film is called The Fist.