Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema by Barbara Mennel (review)

Barbara Mennel's new book could be considered an implicit response to a crucial observation made by Christian Petzold. With reference to his late mentor, Harun Farocki, and around the time he made Yella (2007), Petzold frequently pointed out that we do not yet have any new images of neoliberal capitalism. He meant to call attention to the fact that too many contemporary films depict processes of labor as if the mode of capitalist production had not undergone significant changes from the Fordism that Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) depicts to an economic regime—call it finance, communicative, or just-in-time capitalism—that increasingly extracts profit from immaterial or affective labor, including care and human attention.

While Mennel does not discuss Petzold's films—perhaps a surprising omission given both the sheer quantity of contemporary films from fifteen European countries that she analyzes and the fact that Petzold's films are populated by working female protagonists—her central argument nevertheless is characterized by the desire not only to shed light on the sheer variety of work depicted in European films between 2001 and 2016 but also to foreground the crucial roles women are given in them. Even beyond her intervention in the more local debates within feminism that provide the overall theoretical context, Mennel's central accomplishment is to conclusively demonstrate that any cinematic effort to find new images of, and for, capitalism in the age of neoliberalism must take seriously women's work—whether work done by women born within the European borders or that performed by those having migrated to Europe, whether work in which well-educated middle- or upper-class women engage or labor offered by women from less privileged economic backgrounds that frequently enable the better-off (white) women to leave the home. Translated into the practice of film criticism, this also means that any critical conversation about contemporary labor (in Europe) cannot afford to ignore the crucial role women's work assumes in a neoliberal regime of power that increasingly derives its profits from the kind of skills often associated with femininity, namely "flexibility and adaptability" (5). Important to Mennel's argument is, furthermore, the need to embrace intersectionality as both a methodological tool and a political value, not least since the dialectical relationship between contemporary white women's ability to leave the home and become professionals (and thus potentially icons of feminist liberation) and women of color willing to accept low pay for the very work on which their more privileged sisters have been able to turn their backs, thanks to the (successful) interventions of second-wave feminism.

Mennel invites readers on a journey across Europe, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, from Great Britain to Bosnia, Macedonia, and Greece, covering both cinemas of "small nations" and those of European powerhouses. Moreover, Mennel's critical eye does not limit itself merely to one kind of film such as, for example, independent or art cinema, which is often alleged to be more politically conscious than mainstream productions or exercises in genre cinema. While the cost of such a transnational methodology applied to a wide range of film forms is, at times, a lack of depth regarding the analysis of any given country and its cinema's representation of women at work, its benefit—which clearly outweighs the cost—is the ability to counteract a facile privileging of one specific instantiation of neoliberal capitalism: that of Europe's core economic powers. In other words, too often claims about labor in the neoliberal age posit the economically "most developed" countries such as Germany, France, and the UK as the norm; in turn, such analyses both diagnose contemporary capitalism as if it were a monolithic phenomenon and imagine possibilities of resistance based on such normative assumptions. Mennel, in contrast, turns to Ernst Bloch's concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit (nonsimultaneity or nonsynchronism), and especially his idea of "the simultaneity of nonsynchronism" (6...