Introduction: Cinema and the Realities of Work

Author(s): Ewa Mazierska

Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 53, No. 1 (SPRING 2012), pp.
149-154
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41552304
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 Introduction:
Cinema and the
Realities of Work
Ewa Mazierska

Despite being a staple of most of our daily lives, work has received surprisingly
little coverage in critical studies of cinema. This scarcity can be explained
by two seemingly competing hypotheses. According to the first one, presented
at length by Martin O'Shaughnessy in his article opening this dossier, this is
because cinema itself rarely engaged with work in a serious way, opting for
less mundane and more adventurous and escapist topics. O'Shaughnessy
draws on Jean-Louis Comolli, the veteran critic and filmmaker who points
to the fact that the first film shown to the public, La sortie des usines Lumière
(FR, 1895), shows workers leaving the factory, not entering it or being there.
However, what Comolli really objected to was not cinema's shunning of work
altogether, but representing it in a "wrong way," which does not account for
the true, living experience of work:

When it shows work, cinema is drawn to its spectacular dimension, the dance
of body and machine that obscures salaried labor's oppressive nature. This is
the typical fodder of the kind of films that companies make about themselves,
which concentrate on work's choreographed gestures to the exclusion of its
duration, its harshness, its wear and tear of the worker, and its fatigue. Because
of this, a cinema that really wishes to engage with work must, as Comolli says,
"film against cinema," or, in other words, find ways of filming that refuse to be
drawn to the spectacular surface.1

From this fragment, we can deduce that behind Comolli's rejection of

cinema's engagement with work stands a particular understanding of "work."
He equates work with what is conveyed by the term "labor," which is derived
from the Latin word for crushing and imparts a sense of pain that is often

Frameworks 3, No. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 149-154.

Copyright © 2012 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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Ewa Mazierska

associated with toil and giving birth.2 O'Shaughnessy's use of words such as
"labor," "toil," and "fatigue" also points to this understanding. Simultaneously,
his argument evokes the Marxist concept of "alienated work," which encom-
passes the negative aspects of "labor," adding to them those resulting from
power relations pertaining to capitalism: the oppression, submission, and
silence suffered by the worker and the immense power enjoyed by the capi-
talist.3 If we treat work only in such terms, then we have to agree that it is
indeed marginalized in cinema and only natural that film critics and histo-
rians would not grant it much attention. Moreover, as O'Shaughnessy sug-
gests, the most "productive" way to approach it is through trying to see the
"invisible," paying attention to the corner of the frame, offscreen space, gaps
in a dialogue, and such elements of the mise-en-scène as the gates and walls
dividing the work of labor from that of leisure.
In line with the second hypothesis, which I favor, work is neglected in
the critical studies of film because, in a sense, it is present in practically every
film concerning humans. The process of laboring might not be shown, but
work is usually mentioned in dialogues; it affects the construction of characters
and the choice of mise-en-scène. When reading even rudimentary synopses
of films, we typically learn that the character is a factory worker, clerk, artist,
politician, or housewife. We divide films into specific genres, such as the west-
ern; gangster, police, and war films; even science-fiction films and biopics
on the basis of the occupations of their main characters. In the films, we tend
to see factories, offices, and scientific laboratories, or private homes where
housewives and maids work. Furthermore, if we interpret certain genres
metaphorically, we can argue that they provide a deep insight into issues
such as the labor-capital division and an effect of work on modern people. A
case in point is horror, with its iconic vampire and zombie figures, where
the former can be interpreted as an alienated worker and the latter as a capi-
talist. Why, then, does work presented or alluded to in these films appear to
be overlooked by the majority of critics? Why is work in cinema more often
associated with Ken Loach than Ken Russell? This is partly because as
Comolli and O'Shaughnessy argue, these films, through privileging work's
adventurous, unusual, or hidden aspects, fail to show work as insiders per-
ceive it and do not agree with the prevailing discourses on work, as much on
the Left as on the Right.
However, in my view, these seemingly unrealistic depictions of work also
deserve consideration because they highlight the difference between what
is regarded as a true or living experience of work (or the prevailing discourse
on it) and the way it should be experienced- between the reality of an alien-
ated work (regarded as the fate of the vast majority of people living either
under capitalism or socialism) and the nonalienated, fulfilling ideal. Conse-
quently, they potentially serve two purposes: elucidating different ideas of
work and acting as propaganda for making work pleasant, interesting, and
meaningful. If we dismiss films about beautiful or pleasant work-for example,

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 Introduction

Steven Spielberg's saga about the archaeologist Indiana Jones-as not con-
cerning work at all, how will we persuade those on whose decisions our work-
ing life depends that we want them to improve our working conditions?
Another reason that work appears to be overlooked by film historians is
its absorption by other subjects, such as politics, emigration, technology, art,
gender, youth, authorism, and self-reflexivity. The fact that work appears to
be swallowed up by these discourses testifies to its close link with other
aspects of human life. There are, for example, no political programs with-
out ideas about dealing with employment/unemployment. The task of the
film historian interested in the subject of work will be to identify and ana-
lyze the complex links between work and other issues; to do this, he or she
will need to look not only at "work-centered films" but also at those whose
center appears elsewhere. An additional advantage to dealing with such
films might be that, due to being less constrained by existing stereotypes of
representing work, they might offer us fresher and more complex represen-
tations of work. An example that comes to mind are the films of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, a workaholic director who gives us an excellent insight
into the realities of labor in different periods of German history, examines
work practices of artists of various kinds, and even ponders on the future
when working might no longer be necessary. Although Fassbinder was
never considered an author of "work-centered films," and he would proba-
bly reject such a label himself, I believe that such a perspective would
considerably enrich scholarship on his cinema and the limited literature on
work and film.
The choice of essays in this dossier reflects these two approaches. It begins
with a piece by Martin O'Shaughnessy entitled "French Film and Work:
The Work Done by Work-Centered Films." True to its title, O'Shaughnessy
focuses on films that privilege work in their narratives: two fictitious films,
Laurent Cantet's Ressources humaines (FR, 2000), Jean-Pierre Dardenne and
Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (FR/BE, 1999), and two documentaries, Marc-Antoine
Roudil and Sophie Bruneau's Ils ne mourraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés
(FR/BE, 2006) and Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier's Un Monde moderne
(FR, 2005). Through comparing these four films, made in France or Belgium,
and using as his lens the writings of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Ran-
cière, O'Shaughnessy tries to achieve three interconnected objectives. One
is to account for the challenges faced by the different genres, fiction and
documentary, in representing the realities of work. His second goal is to cap-
ture the specificity of contemporary work and the problems of its representa-
tion. Finally, he assesses the political value of the discussed films by examining
how they use work to force oppressions and exploitation into audibility and
visibility, and ultimately what they can do for the workers, especially those
devoid of power and public voice.
The issue of work-centered films is continued in an essay by Michael
Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, "Cinema, the Post-Fordist Worker, and

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Ewa Mazierska

Immaterial Labor: From Post-Hollywood to the European Art Film." Employ-

ing theories of post-Fordism, immaterial labor, and biopolitics-developed
by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, and Paolo
Virno, among others-Goddard and Halligan examine representation of
work in two distinctive moments of political and cinematic history: Hollywood
genre cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, and European cinema after 2000.
Hollywood 1970s and 1980s films, in the opinion of Goddard and Halligan,
capture accurately the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, marked by dein-
dustrialization and changing patterns of work. They focus on science-fiction
films and on the characters played by Michael J. Fox as embodying the new
type of worker. They further argue that, while Hollywood cinema tended to
represent the post-Fordist present and future with ambiguity or even some-
times with optimism, this is not the case with European art house films made
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In particular, Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export
(AT, 2008) and Lars Von Trier's Direkteren for det hele /The Boss of It All (DK,
2006) picture a world in which a worker is practically devoid of any rights,
reduced to abare existence. Surprisingly, this opinion refers not only to migrant
workers from poverty-ridden postcommunist countries, as represented by
Seidl, but also to high-tech specialists, who populate Von Trier's film. A con-
clusion one can draw from their analysis is that there are no good jobs any-
more: the professional class is today in almost as precarious a position as
manual workers.
Two essays that follow, Jonathan Owen's and mine, differ in their geo-
graphical and theoretical directions, as they focus on films made in the East
of Europe and that have hardly been treated as "work-centered." Owen
considers films from two distinct periods of Czechoslovak (and, later, Czech
and Slovak) film history: new wave and postcommunist films. Among them
are Stefan Uher's Slnko v sieti/ Sunshine in a Net (CS, 1962), Věra Chytilová's
Sedmikrásky /Daisies (CS, 1966), Tomáš Vorel's Cesta z města/ Out of the City
(CZ, 2000), and two films by Martin Šulík, Záhrada/ The Garden (SK, 1995)
and Sluneční stát/ The City of the Sun (SK, 2005). Owen locates them in two
contexts: Czech history and Czech writings about the value of work, includ-
ing by Karel Čapek, Karel Kosík, and Vaclav Havel, and Marxist and post-
Marxist critique of work, represented by Herbert Marcuse and Slavoj Žižek.
An important feature of Owen's essay is its dual focus on work and its
obverse: various forms of nonworking. He shows how films of Czechoslovak
New Cinema succeeded in undermining the special value attached to work
by socialist ideologues and how postcommunist films tend to arouse nostal-
gia for the communist world by focusing on unemployment.
My own article discusses three Polish postcommunist films: Psy /Dogs
(PL, 1992), directed by Wladyslaw Pasikowski; Komornik/Bailiff{ PL, 2005),
directed by Feliks Falk; and Silesia , directed by Anna Kazejak-Dawid, part of
an omnibus film Oda do radosci/Ode to Joy (PL, 2005). I situate them against the
background of the Cinema of Moral Concern of the 1970s, the last distinctive

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 Introduction

paradigm of Polish "communist cinema" and one preoccupied with relations

forged at and through work. My purpose is to find out how the situation of
working people in Poland changed since the end of communism and, espe-
cially, whether there remained much solidarity among them-a feature of Pol-
ish society that played a crucial role in the overthrow of the old system. My
main conceptual tool to describe similarities and differences pertaining to the
representation of work in these two cinematic paradigms is Hardt and Negri's
concepts of "multitude" and Pierre Bourdieu's "capital," "field," and "habitus."
Although the four essays in this dossier discuss different phenomena and
address different problems, they reveal some important synergies. One point
of correspondence is their preoccupations with contemporary films made in
a period described as post-Fordist, neoliberal, or of "liquid modernity." Their
authors ask how work has changed on the way to this epoch, typically
regarded as disadvantageous for labor and advantageous for capital (hence,
their frequent references to earlier periods in political history) and how this
change was captured in contemporary films (hence, their anchoring in film
history). They also, explicitly or implicitly, question how the shift from Ford-
ism to post-Fordism, from solid to liquid modernity affected cinema in a
wider sense. For example, is postmodernist/post-Fordist cinema about work
more conformist to the dominant ideology? Have the new films invented a
new language of work, or do they recycle the older models? What are the main
obstacles in creating new films about new work?
The second common denominator of the collection of articles is their
engagement with politics, its history and theory. Of course, all films are politi-
cal and all film histories are political too-after the work done by authors such
as Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, Laura Mulvey, and Teresa de Lauretis,
to name just a few, it would be naïve to say otherwise. However, touching the
topic of work means encountering the question of how the world should be
organized and governed head-on, and the authors of these essays do not hide
their political sympathies. The concepts and names they evoke belong to, by
and large, Marxist thought. At the same time, they attest to the richness and
versatility of Marx and Engels's legacy, both in the sense of the spread of dis-
ciplines they relate to-such as sociology, political theory, cultural studies,
and film studies- and the ideas elaborated by specific authors. Practically all
authors point to what they regard as the absurdity of the contemporary reali-
ties of work, summarized by the title given by Owen to a part of his essay that
discusses postcommunist films on work: "Overworked and Unemployed."
The Left-leaning bias of the essays in this collection might in part reflect my
personal bias, but I believe it also attests to the fact that Marxism remains a
strong current in Western academia. Unfortunately, it appears to have less
and less influence on the realities of working in universities, which are increas-
ingly adopting practices characteristic to post-Fordist businesses.
Finally, all the essays engage with the question of "work films" as a specific
genre. In particular, they inquire whether we can talk, per analogy to "tourist

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Ewa Mazierska

gaze," about "work gaze" or "work imagination" in analogy to "melodramatic

imagination." They do not give a definite answer to these questions, but I
believe they open a space and provide a frameworkto tackle them.

Notes

1. Quoted by Martin O'Shaughnessy, "French Film and Work: The Work Done
by Work- Centered Films," published in this issue.
2. Maurice Godelier, "Language and History: Work and Its Representations: A
Research Proposal," History Workshop 10 (1980): 164-174.
3. On "alienation," see Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(Moscow: Progress, 1977); Berteli Oilman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man
in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); and Robert
Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964). The last work offers an empirical study of
alienation in modern factories and other places of work.

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