Work Is Beautiful: A New Cinema Genre?

In The Process Genre, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky identifies a new genre of film “whose processual character has gone largely unremarked” (6). Though the book concentrates primarily on cinema, Skvirsky considers the transmedial aspects of the genre and traces printed precursors to the mid-fifteenth century, leading her to date the genre to the beginning of modernity. While “process” may sound like a neutral term, Skvirsky mounts a meticulous, carefully reasoned, and riveting polemic that argues that the process film is really about celebrating the centrality of work to human activity, a “basic embrace of the existential, as well as the material, value of labor to human life” (47). For Skvirsky, the genre has become even more compelling and more visible now that industrial labor is giving way to a digital world produced by immaterial labor, “the eclipse of the machine age and dawn of the digital age” (95).

The genre has two essential features. First, it shows “a sequentially ordered series of steps with a clearly identifiable beginning, middle, and end” (2). Second, the genre “produces in the spectator a singular wonder and deep satisfaction” (2). Skvirsky writes clearly, with authority (richly documented in the notes), across a broad range of subjects, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, narrative, and genre theory. She cites Tom Gunning’s remarks on ciné-genre as her model, heeding his call to reduce the prominence of character-driven narrative and thematic markers in genre definition in favor of medium-specific formal features coupled with attendant spectator response. Skvirsky finds the sequential ordering of the process genre particularly apt for cinema, as the medium itself unfolds in time, unlike written predecessors: “one might think that processual representation is the formal correlate, the expression, of an industrial way of organizing labor, just as some have argued that the camera and projection apparatuses are technological correlates of industrial production” (130).

The first chapter tries to position process films in relation to other film categories. Think of the configuration in terms of Venn diagrams. Some process films can be found within various other familiar groupings: industrial films, educational films, and ethno-graphic films. But process films do not conform fully to the criteria of any of them; industrial films are normally sponsored, but processual industrial films may not be sponsored. The most important category, because of its often normative views of culture, is the ethnographic film. The carving and installation of an ice window in Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic film Nanook of the North may exemplify the two defining features of processual representation and wonder, but Skvirsky ultimately brings her own normative judgment to the assessment of the films. In the introduction, she relies on the words of another scholar for substantiation of spectator response to the Flaherty film: “As the ice window slides into position, we have a moment of elation at this ingenuity” (29); in Chapter 4, however, she claims that “for Flaherty development is a calamity” (181). The film, then, qualifies as a process film for its formal features and spectatorial wonder, but it falls into the ideological morass of “cultural evolution,” for it facilitates “a fossilization of peasants and artisanal modes of production” (191). The second half of the chapter offers a fascinating tour of precinematic process treatments, including not only printed how-to manuals but also craft demonstrations at international expositions of the nineteenth century.

The history of cinema has corresponded roughly to the history of industrial work or, rather, the transformation of labor from manual rural work to the assembly line. Among the films cited to illustrate the state of absorption elicited by the process film in Chapter 2, Skvirsky chooses the 1981 episode “Competition” of public television’s Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood in which there is a memorable segment about crayons. In a wonderful account, Skvirsky shows how the visit to the crayon factory follows the molds and wax-pouring on the Crayola company shop floor to produce crayons freshly wrapped in Crayola...