One of the first possibilities opened thanks to cinema is the showing of the production process. In the years in which progress was related to mechanics, industry, “electrical” and “steam” modernity, the production process became the subject of innumerable non-fiction films. The process – of which the workers are inevitably and completely a part – places itself decisively at the centre of these films, which are (in the vast majority) precise and scrupulous in the reproduction of the production phases. Bakery, Industrie des marbres, Le ver a soie, do not seem to miss a single phase of the process. They succeed (certainly before other genres of non-fiction) in constructing an internal narrative logic which tends to be linear (line of editing, line of assembly). This narrative often concludes with the consumption of the finished product (as in Bakery) or with the end of the working day which in certain cases seem to excel the look and the function of the “prise de vue”, of “the seen”, where the camera “sees” rather than “looks”. On the contrary the objective is approached in films from this genre. The workers’ hands or the cogs of the machine are scrutinised in detail. There exists a fascination with the ability (long shots of the workers’ hands) or the lightness of technology (the minute observation of the cogs in motion or of the precise lightness with which the pulleys and the belts move). All of this with a look which knows how to be everything except naive and devoid of a wilful order. Rather, it reveals a complex vision of the world, a glance which is never “pure” -a glance, which if read in another way, may give us much information of an historical and social nature.