Harun Farocki was a highly influential filmmaker known for an explicitly political body of work that often focused on conditions of labour and production. For this film, Farocki filmed processes of brick production across three continents – showing those made directly by hand and those made in highly mechanised factories side-by-side whilst offering little or no commentary.  

In 2011, Farocki wrote of the film: ‘I wanted to make a film about concomitance and about contemporary production on a range of different technical levels. So I looked for an object that had not changed too much in the past few thousand years. This could have been a shoe or a knife, but a brick becomes part of a building and therefore part of our environment. So the brick appears as something of a poetic object.’

As Ute Holl has said: ‘Bricks are the resonating foundations of society. Bricks are simply very long-playing records. Like records, they appear in series, but every brick is slightly different – not just another brick in the wall. Bricks create spaces, organize social relations and store knowledge about social structures. They resonate in a ways that tells us if they are any good. Bricks form the basic sound of our societies, but we haven’t yet learned to listen to them.

Farocki’s film lets our eyes and ears consider different traditions of brick production in comparison – and not in competition, not as a clash of cultures. Farocki shows us various brick production sites in their colours, movements and sounds … Brick burning, brick carrying, bricklaying, bricks on bricks, no voice-over. 20 inter-titles in 60 minutes tell us something about the temporality of brick-making processes.’