Lunch Break (2008)

directed by Sharon Lockhart
USA
83 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Full disclosure, I'm a total newbie to Sharon Lockhart. She's been at the fringes of my mental "directors I need to get into" shortlist but I'm not familiar with her work or even with video art at all as opposed to the concept of a "movie" that I'm used to. For anybody unaware, Lunch Break is an 83-minute (or 73-minute depending on where you watch it) single tracking shot where the camera moves slowly down the main corridor of a shipyard while the crew eats their lunch off to the sides. It's not that it's an extraordinarily long shipyard, it's that the camera moves so slowly that it takes the full runtime for it to traverse the hallway- and it's only just part of the hallway.

Lockhart's presence as a woman in the avant-garde canon is important, because men are afforded so much creative freedom and more often than not are the ones in the forefront getting their works discussed and celebrated while women's efforts tend to go unnoticed and occasionally get grouped into the "too weird" category. For some perspective, Michael Snow's film Wavelength, a 45-minute zoom-in on a window, has 1,494 ratings on imdb. Andy Warhol's infamous Empire, eight hours of a single shot of the Empire State Building, has 804. Lunch Break has 35.

I can't say for certain what the film is meant to symbolize if it's meant to symbolize anything at all. I had two total spitball theories that are most likely way off the mark but were the only things I could come up with. The first is less a theory than an examination of the structure of the film: Considering that Lockhart worked to become intimately familiar with the shipyard and its crew during filming, the movie can be looked at as almost a brain-body type structure where the brain is disconnected from the body- the "brain" part is all the knowledge Lockhart acquired over the five days in which this was filmed, and the "body" is the film itself, which draws absolutely nothing from Lockhart's efforts to get close to her subjects. The body is not aware of what the brain is doing and the brain does not influence the body.

The second thing I noticed was that it reminded me very vaguely of the saying that life flashes before your eyes before you die. The film could be something of a drawn-out death sequence, the camera serving as the final memories of some unnamed person working on the shipyard, their life slowing down and stretching into infinity as they lose consciousness.

Whether you like it or not, you have to agree that this is something we never see. It's a common and boring locale to spend 83 minutes in, yes, but it's a perspective on the shipyard's hallway that nobody ever gets to see. The world's slowest ethnographic film, if you will. People carry equipment all over the world to film remote parts of civilization, Lockhart turns her camera on the accessible and makes it a study of that environment similar to any study taking place in the badlands of an isolated country.