Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition ed. by Ewa Mazierska (review)

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 Kaurismäki. 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 Béla 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...