Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition

293 Pages·2013·1.979 MB·English

by  Ewa Mazierska (eds.)

W ork in C inema
L ist of P revious P ublications
European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Nabokov’s Cinematic Afterlife , McFarland, 2011.
Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist , Berghahn, 2010
Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema , Berghahn, 2008
Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller , I. B. Tauris, 2007
Polish Postcommunist Cinema: From Pavement Level , Peter Lang, 2007
Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie
(with Laura Rascaroli), Wallfl ower, 2006
Women in Polish Cinema (with Elż bieta Ostrowska), Berghahn, 2006
Relocating Britishness (ed. with Steven Caunce, Susan Sydney-Smith, and
John Walton), Manchester University Press, 2004
Dreams and Diaries: The Cinema of Nanni Moretti (with Laura Rascaroli),
Wallfl ower Press, 2004
From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema
(with Laura Rascaroli), I.B. Tauris, 2003
W ork in C inema
L abor and the H uman C ondition
Edited by
Ewa Mazierska
WORK IN CINEMA
Copyright © Ewa Mazierska, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-37085-3
All rights reserved.
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ISBN 978-1-349-47544-5 ISBN 978-1-137-37086-0 (eBook)
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First edition: December 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ontents
Introduction Work, Struggle, and Cinema 1
Ewa Mazierska
Part I N eoliberal Work
1 Affective Labor and Alienation in Up in the Air 29
Ian Fraser
2 Becoming Cinema: The Social Network , Exploitation
in the Digital Age, and the Film Industry 49
William Brown
3 The New European Cinema of Precarity:
A Transnational Perspective 69
Alice Bardan
4 Acting as Value: Juliette Binoche in Michael Haneke’s
Code Unknown 91
(cid:297) aneta Jamrozik
Part II N ational and Transnational Cinemas
5 The Trauma of Daedalus: The Labyrinth of Labor in
Brazilian Cinema 113
Alfredo Suppia
6 Beyond Work and Sex in Czech Cinema 133
David Sorfa
7 Desensitized Migrants: Organized Crime Workers
in David Cronenberg’s E astern Promises and Aleksei
Balabanov’s S toker 151
Alexandar Mihailovic
8 The Damnation of Labor in the Films of B é la Tarr 169
Christina Stojanova
vi Contents
Part III Genre
9 You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Work, But It Helps:
Work in Comedies of the 1930s 191
Glyn White
10 Work in Outer Space: Notes on Eastern European
Science Fiction Cinema 209
Eva N ä ripea
11 The Migrations of Factory Style: Work, Play, and
Work-as-Play in Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman and
Apichatpong Weerasethakul 227
Jonathan L. Owen
12 Work in Bicycle Cinema: From Race Rider to
City Courier 249
Lars Kristensen
13 Documentaries, Work, and Global Challenges 265
Ib Bondebjerg
Notes on Contributors 283
Index 287
I n t r o d u c t i o n
W ork , S truggle , and C inema
Ewa Mazierska
We agree that we can live without love, friendship, or art, however
impoverished our life then can be, but we cannot live without work,
either our own work, or of other people, whose efforts, paid in
money, allow us to buy our daily bread, as well as more lofty goods,
such as books and tickets to concerts. One thus expects that what is
most important for our material and cultural survival, would also be
a privileged topic for cinema.
W ork and L abor
However, in the seminal essays and introductions to collections
devoted to the representation of work in film we find an opinion that
cinema shuns work or represents it in an incorrect way. 1 For example,
Jean-Louis Comolli, the veteran critic and filmmaker, points to the
fact that the first-known film, Workers Leaving the Lumiè re Factory
( La sortie des usines Lumiè re , 1895, France ) by the Lumiè re brothers,
shows workers leaving the factory, not entering it or working there.
In Comolli’s view, cinema fails to account for the true, living experi-
ence of work:
When it shows work, cinema is drawn to its spectacular dimension, the
dance of body and machine that obscures salaried labor’s oppressive
nature. This is the typical fodder of the kind of films that companies
make about themselves which concentrate on work’s choreographed
gestures to the exclusion of its duration, its harshness, its wear and tear
2 Ewa Mazierska
of the worker, and its fatigue. (Comolli 1996: 39–44, also quoted in
O’Shaughnessy 2012: 156)
I would like to refute this statement as I came to the conclusion that
it is not filmmakers who ignore this topic, but rather critics and histo-
rians who fail to account for the different ways films represent work.
This collection is meant to make up for this gap by offering new,
varied, and thought-provoking approaches to representing work on
screen. Most importantly, rather than assuming what work is and how
it should be represented, as does Comolli, the authors of the chapters
interrogate the very concept of work and the ways of dealing with
it by cinema. One way to do so is by looking at the boundaries and
extreme forms of work. They include the work of criminals, prosti-
tutes, professional sportsmen, astronauts, as well as affective labor
and work on one’s own self. Several chapters are also devoted to what
is regarded as the opposite of work: unemployment, inactivity, leisure,
play, military conflict, love making, and consumption. They ask the
question in what sense is work different from these activities and states
and, conversely, when do these “non-works” feel and look like work.
Another way of accounting for the complexity of work is by chart-
ing the changes in the character, status and meaning of work, which
occurred over a longer period of time, paying particular attention to
the shift from the Fordist-Keynesian or embedded liberalist paradigm
in the West and its Eastern equivalent, state socialism, to the post-
Fordist neoliberal system or simply neoliberalism (for an explanation
of these terms see Harvey 1990; Harvey 2005; for a discussion on
neoliberalism and cinema see Kapur and Wagner 2011). While some
authors try to achieve this goal by researching films belonging to
one national culture, the majority embark on a “cultural journey,”
comparing films about workers performing similar jobs in differ-
ent settings, for example bicycle couriers in the United States and
China, avant-garde filmmakers in the United States and Thailand,
illegal immigrants in Russia and England, and made by filmmak-
ers of different nationalities and generations. By contrast, relatively
little space is devoted in this collection to what fills the majority of
publications about representation of work in film: factory work. Even
when such work is tackled, it is discussed largely to illuminate nonin-
dustrial work. This is not because industrial labor declined globally.
As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, it still constitutes the
majority of labor performed on the globe. However, it has lost its
hegemonic status in qualitative terms and today, to explain its speci-
ficity, for example why it is performed largely in what is known as the
Work, Struggle, and Cinema 3
“global South,” we have to turn to other types of work (Hardt and
Negri 2006: 109).
Focusing on nonstandard and extreme work is meant to fulfill two
functions. First, to make up for the gaps in tackling work as repre-
sented in earlier films, such as classical Hollywood comedies, science
fiction films, and films about less well-known facets of the economy
and ordinary life under state socialism. Second, to account for the
specificity of contemporary work and nonworking life, which, as many
contributors observe, have become practically indistinguishable. The
question thus asked by them, either tacitly or openly, is what is so
life-like about contemporary work or so work-like about contempo-
rary life and whether this similarity between life and work should be
deplored or celebrated. To answer this question, they refer most often
to Marxist and post-Marxist thought, the work of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Paolo Virno, Slavoj
Ži ž ek, Alain Badiou, and Melinda Cooper. These names are men-
tioned in the bibliographies to specific essays and are evoked by the
frequent use of terms such as “alienation,” “multitude,” “biopolitics,”
“technologies of self” or “affective labor.”
This book owes so much to Marx and Engels because these two
thinkers practically rewrote human history as the history of work. For
Marx and Engels, a human being is essentially a homo faber, who
was created and transformed through work. The first premise of all
human existence, and therefore, of all history is that
men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.”
But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habita-
tion, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus
the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of
material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental
condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must
daily and hourly be fulfilled merely to sustain human life. (Marx and
Engels 1947: 48)
Likewise, society was created through work: “From the moment that
men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social
form” (Marx 1965: 71). Individuals and societies develop in step with
the invention of tools of production and means of organizing work,
predominantly by increasing the division (specialization) of labor.
Marx and Engels are best known for documenting and theorizing
work and life under the capitalist system. The results of their research
in this field are still valid, especially those included in E conomic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1977), T he Condition of the Working