Ewa Mazierska, ed., Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition.
Forsyth, Scott
Ewa Mazierska, ed., Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013)
This collection claims to correct a lack of attention from film
critics and historians to the many complex ways films have represented
work and the labour process. It aims to respond to new developments in
global capitalism, particularly the ongoing domination of neoliberalism
and its ruthless attacks on a weakened labour movement and drastic
reconfiguration of work and labour relations, and to new developments in
theoretical and conceptual debate, within, and post-, Marxism. A modest,
if worthy, number of previous books and essays in film studies have
focused on the representation of the working class, particularly
conceived as the industrial proletariat in specific national cinemas, or
in the work of class-conscious filmmakers, such as Ken Loach or Aki
Kaurismaki. The contributions here have a broader ambition.
Mazierska provides an introductory foundation for the contributions
with a succinct and thoughtful canvas of key concepts in Marx and Engels
that relate to the centrality of labour in human history --value,
alienation, consumption, class, globalization, perhaps the open-ended
imagination of a post-capitalist future. All have been developed by
subsequent Marxists and post-Marxists, such as Harvey, Hardt and Negri,
Foucault, and Badiou, and these thinkers inspire many of the essays. Not
surprisingly, the key analytical frame for the book is the rise and
triumph of neoliberalism as the dominant political and social regime for
contemporary global capitalism, and its rollback of gains of the Left
and the labour movement everywhere.
The first section covers work in this neoliberal world. Highlights
include two astute readings of recent Hollywood films that focus on
neoliberal ways of organizing work and leisure. Each questions our
comprehension of contemporary social life. The recently popular concept
of affective labour seems to describe the cruel, soulless corporate
world of Up in the Air and finally shows us the normalization of its
corruption and ruthlessness. The Social Network seems to offer, in the
characteristic digital technologies of recent work and leisure, a
possibility of collective labour and liberation, even utopian in the
oft-repeated Internet rhetoric. It too founders in a grim reproduction
of much the same old alienation and exploitation, with the disturbing
extenuation and proliferation of willingly exploited masses. If this is
labour in the higher reaches of class hierarchy, Alice Bardan takes us
through grim accounts of neoliberalism's most predominant impact on
work locally and globally with a survey of a powerful European cinema of
precarity. This covers numerous fiction films highlighting the painful
impact of casualizing, downsizing work for a generation of Europeans,
including especially exploited immigrants, in all kinds of work from
white collar to blue to informal. The discussion concludes with a series
of activist documentaries that are hopefully part of the fightback.
The second section looks at particular national cinemas and several
transnational developments. The intention to consider cinema's
representation of different kinds of work, particularly crime and
prostitution, is notable here. Czech films, including classics from the
1960s and more recent post-communist comedies, dramatize sex and
prostitution as a different kind of work, but finally offering much the
same kind of exploitation and alienation. It is much the same under
state socialism as in the supposedly liberalized order of capitalist
freedom. The world of Russian organized crime is analysed as a
particularly brutal product of global neoliberalism with all its
dehumanization and grisly violence in a striking transnational
comparison of Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and Balabanov's
Stoker. In each case, migration, internal and international, represents
a false hope and finally an indentured fate for workers in this world.
Christina Stojanova's discussion of the films of Bela Tarr--famed
for their demands on the audience's labour --proposes an original
interpretation of a foundational tension in Tarr's dark films
between dissident Marxist humanism and Neitschean nihilism.
The final section covers Genre, that most expansive and accessible
cinematic categorization. Glyn White surveys a selection of American and
British comedies of the 1930s Depression years and finds both
irreverence and ambiguous enjoyment in the picture of work, and the
comic work, of favourites like the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, and W.C.
Fields. Eastern European science fiction films of the 1960s share much
with Western generic conventions but also provide an unexpected location
for tensions and problems in the ideologically imagined futures of
Soviet-style socialism.
A number of themes recur in several essays. Harvey's bitter
summary of neoliberalism as the epoch of feral capitalism illuminates a
powerful account of radical traditions in Brazilian cinema, from cinema
novo to recent films showing Brazilian capitalism as brutally predatory
from its very beginnings. The same ruthlessness is dramatized in films
about Russian mobsters, Chinese bike couriers and the hard, physical
labour globalization distributes around the world. Several discussions
explore the rich conceptualization of filmmaking and acting as cultural
labour that illuminates neoliberalism's heartless reconfiguration
of work and workers themselves in films by such formally challenging
artists as Haneke, Warhol, Ackerman, and Weerasethakul. Not necessarily
radical, some of these films may at least pose a ludic alternative to
neoliberal labour.
In the final essay, Ib Bondebjerg provides a sweeping and
illuminating account of documentaries on work and class, from classics
of the 1930s documentary movement to later post-war developments in the
USA, Canada, the UK and Scandinavia. Attention to important work since
2000 that is responding to immediate historical confrontations is
welcome. The aesthetic innovations and global perspective of filmmakers
like Josh Oppenheimer and Michael Glowogger are particularly encouraging
for those interested in the continuation of radical traditions in
documentary.
Overall, this is an impressive, timely, and challenging collection.
As promised, it builds on comprehending older films and responds
forcefully to more recent work. It considers a fascinating range of work
in films, including film/cultural labour itself, beyond older industrial
conceptualizations and technologies. Neoliberalism is changing work and
labour relations and the collection responds to this momentous
historical change and develops new ways to think about
it--theoretically, historically, and aesthetically. The collection
achieves a laudatory range of coverage--from Hollywood to art cinema
through to various popular genres, including the persistence of
politically conscious documentaries--and from the USA to Scandinavia,
Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, France, Thailand and more. It
is particularly exciting to see North American scholars introduced to
less-known film work from Russia and Eastern Europe, including films in
the period that the writers call state socialism and more recently in
post-communist capitalism, even if several essays highlight the failures
of socialism and the similarities in ongoing alienation and exploitation
in the neoliberal present.
Mazierska notes that many of the contributions are by scholars
affected by precarity in academic labour, products of the very
neoliberal labour processes explored. That may contribute to the
passion, hopefulness, and engagement that distinguish the essays,
including the introduction. Indeed, it is encouraging to see this
scholarly work marked by the emotion that such miserable social material
should demand. She hopes that the collection has political potential
outside an academic audience. That may be true, though a number of the
essays have weighty philosophical and theoretical introductions that
could be more concise. It is exploration of films that is the strongest
attraction of the collection. Film criticism has a rich lineage of
writing that reaches popular and engaged audiences. This collection is a
rich resource of ideas, cinematic worlds and filmmaking practices for
both scholars of film, culture, and labour and for politically minded
filmmakers and spectators.
SCOTT FORSYTH
York University
