Art Cinema’s Immaterial Labors

Art cinema has often been understood as requiring a certain type of work on the part of its spectators. The art cinema spectator must entertain a variety of possible interpretive strategies in order to understand the complexity and ambiguity of the film’s textuality or the psychological opacity of its fictional characters. In their hermeneutic flexibility and engaged, serial questioning of the film, the art cinema spectator’s activity resembles that of the immaterial laborer. Art cinema itself could be seen as an unacknowledged training ground of the immaterial laborer. Two films are analyzed in order to pursue this line of inquiry. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) exemplifies the art cinema’s ambiguity and the spectatorial labor entailed by the same. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) translates the immaterial labor of the art cinema spectator into something resembling the reproductive labors represented in the film, but it does so in a manner that challenges the valorization of labor itself.