Synopsis
For an entire year, the German director Harun Farocki attended the meetings of the Quickborner Team (QT), a consulting company from Hamburg that was developing a new product. Fixed, personalised offices are dead! Long live the companies whose 80,000 square metres of floor space constitute the nomadic office of all the employees, authorised to go jogging during work hours to boost their productivity!
A word from Tënk
Harun Farocki, the master analyst of the implicit rhetoric that governs our world, turns his gaze to the verbiage and jargon of a team focused on changing the habits of the employees of a large corporation. The collection of details the filmmaker gathers highlights the process of how ideas are portrayed so that they can be transformed into practices. The metaphors are chosen with great care and supported by various representations – diagrams, mock-ups and virtual modelling. The team’s abstract discussions as they strive to overhaul management will have very real consequences for a lot of people. But the violence of the power exercised, its attempt to control even the private lives of the workers, although glimpsed from time to time, is usually concealed by the harmonious images it produces and the technical nature of its presentation.
Olivia Cooper Hadjian
Member of the Cinéma du Réel Selection Committee, critic for Les Cahiers du Cinéma
