Editorial

This issue’s dossiers focus on labor and film—onscreen and offscreen, above and below the line. Labor is an easily abstracted word, and the two dossiers—“The Work of the Image: Cinema, Labor, Aesthetics,” guest edited by Elena Gorfinkel, and “Working Life Now and Then,” guest edited by Ewa Mazierska—offer complex perspectives on what labor is and how it is treated. Labor is viewed through ways in which cinema refashions actual work with an intention to disguise, ignore, aestheticize, laud, or make blatant. Both guest editors cite Lumiere’s actualité Workers Leaving the Factory (FR, 1895) as a starting point, but each dossier diverges its focus. “The Work of the Image” examines labor within the industry of cinema itself and “Working Life Now and Then” examines depictions of labor by cinema. Each dossier emphasizes labor’s “screen presence” and discusses it as laborious and everyday, but also as something subtle and critical. Gorfinkel describes it as “ambiguously central” to film. Yet the nature of that centrality is in question because, in Mazierska’s words, there is so little in film to “account for the true, living experience of work.”

Another elusive state is discussed in the three additional essays—what happens to history when a story is retold. Ewa Mazierska’s essay “Retelling Polish History through the ‘Soft Avant-Garde’ Films of the 1960s” newly interprets the codes in Poland’s experimental cinema. John Thomas McGuire’s “Rending the Veils of Illusion: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and Its Two Definitive Film Interpretations” and Mrinalini Chakravorty’s “Picturing The Postmaster: Tagore, Ray, and the Making of an Uncanny Modernity” analyze the symbiosis of a writer’s writing and its visualization—as painting, theater, film, or acting—and how that affects its era.