Filming Work and the Work of Film

This article will examine three relatively recent French documentaries about work, Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud's Paroles de Bibs (2001), Marc-Antoine Roudil and Sophie Bruneau's Ils ne mouraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés (2006), and Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier's Un Monde moderne (2005). It will draw heavily upon the writings of Jacques Rancière to think about the general relationship between the aesthetic and the political, and those of Jean-Louis Comolli to explore the more specific relationship between cinema and the world of work. The article arises out of two seminars devoted to the question "que peut le cinéma?" or "what can cinema do?" Recognizing the complexity of this apparently simple question, it narrows its focus by concentrating on a cluster of recent films, asking not what cinema can do, but what a certain type of cinema can do now. It also separates the question "what do these films try to do?" from "what do they achieve?" As Rancière has noted, and as I have attempted to summarize elsewhere, committed art tends to take its effects for granted, or seeks to control them in a way that denies the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter. ¹ Thus, for example, committed art assumes that the showing of revolting things can stir us, that pedagogic stories will instruct us, or that taking art out of its normal surroundings will bring about a parallel shift in response to it. The Brechtianism that was so influential in critical art and notably in the committed cinema of the post-1968 period combined the aesthetic shock generated by the collision of different sensoria with the more traditional corrective representation of behaviors. It sought to tame indeterminacy by bringing the distance that typifies the aesthetic encounter within the artwork itself. Yet, it could seem to guarantee its effects only because it was received in a transparently divided political context. Now, under contemporary conditions of consensus, when dissent struggles to be heard, the critical collision of divergent elements risks becoming an empty mechanism. The old recipes no longer function in the way they once seemed to. ² It is for this reason that I have chosen to focus on some contemporary films in order to ask what committed cinema can do now.

I concentrate on work-related films because they have been such an important strand of recent French cinema, especially but not only documentary. Comolli, a veteran critic and filmmaker, has been one of the most perceptive analysts of work-related films. At a general level, he suggests that, born as a sortie d'usine rather than an entrée d'usine, cinema has generally located itself on the side of leisure and avoided engagement with the constraints and asymmetrical power relations of labor. ³ When it has shown work, it has let us see only fragments. Shortening what we see to thirty seconds of the production line, drawn to the photogenic choreography of workers' gestures, it has tended to eliminate work's complexity, duress, and boredom. Comolli comments, "le cinéma inévitablement réduit le travail à quelque chose qui est le spectacle du travail," before adding, "pour filmer le travail, il faut donc filmer contre le cinéma" (Comolli, Séminaire 4), a remark that informs much of the discussion to follow. At a more specific level, Comolli suggests that something fundamental has now changed in cinema's relationship to work. The situation of workers has become "opaque." Neither constrained labor nor workers have disappeared, but workers are now doubly in the wrong place. Not only are they the losers of history, but they have also lost the battle at the level of representation. Comolli comments, "il y a un épuisement des représentations lié à l'épuisement des possibles. Quel enthousiasme récolter, quelle ardeur militante réveiller si les prolétaires eux-mêmes paraissent n'y croire plus guère?" ⁴ Whereas the workers of 1936 or 1968 could be seen as heroic makers of history, now the desire to see workers on film has ebbed away so that they themselves no longer...