Cet ouvrage explore le thème des luttes ouvrières au cœur du film du réalisateur finlandais Erkko Kivikoski sorti en 1973 en abordant un reportage fondateur de l'écrivaine Marja-Leena Mikkola sur les ouvrières industrielles, et en replaçant ces deux œuvres dans le contexte plus large de l'histoire du mouvement ouvrier finlandais.
A Shot in the Factory: Workers into the Frame is based on the 1973 Finnish film directed by Erkko Kivikoski.
Set at the dawn of the neoliberal era, the film A Shot in the Factory [Laukaus Tehtaalla] tells the story of a wildcat strike initiated by the workers of Finnmetalli Oy [Finnmetal Ltd], who organised against the new management's profit-oriented push to reduce the workforce. The self-organising workers are not only fiercely opposed by the management—they receive no support from either the labour union they belong to nor from the media they follow. Left outside of the frame of legal representation, one of the workers decides to take radical measures, resulting in the violent murder of the new manager.
The book discusses the film in the context of Finnish post-war politics, and analyses its formal innovations within the tradition of experimental usage of documentary material. Expanding the scope of the labour struggles represented in the film, the book discusses the seminal 1971 reportage book by Marja-Leena Mikkola on women industrial workers and situates her work within the broader context of Finnish labour history.
Edited and written by Sezgin Boynik and Minna Henriksson, the book conceives A Shot in the Factory as a work representing the 'factory as subjectivity'—that is, it considers working-class struggles not only as the product of objective economic relations, but also as a subjectivity transforming and democratising reactionary capitalist culture. By juxtaposing discussions on the film with Mikkola's early writings and poems, and a poem of Maria Fusco, the book reveals some unexpected patterns that contribute to our understanding of working class history and forms of labour organising outside the frames of legal unions and political parties.
Designed by Ott Kagovere, the book features a comprehensive selection of images from the film, as well as factual workers' struggles in Finland.
