Precarity in European Film

Depictions and Discourses

Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten, Hanna Prenzel, Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten, Hanna Prenzel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9783110707724
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110707915
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Anthropology

This volume brings together renowned scholars and early career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema —whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working with traditional or new media— engages with phenomena of precarity, poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the representation of social class in contemporary visual culture.

Watch our book talk with the editors Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel here: https://youtu.be/lKpD1NFAx2o

Studying the Cinema of Precarity

An Introduction

Guido Kirsten

In his 1845 article “Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany,” young Frederick Engels informs the readers of the English weekly The New Moral World about the latest political developments in Germany. He claims that “the rapidity with which Socialism has progressed in this country is quite miraculous,” and discusses a painting by Carl Wilhelm Hübner (1814–1879), called Die schlesischen Weber (The Silesian Weavers, 1844, Fig. 1), which, according to Engels, “has made a more effectual Socialist agitation than a hundred pamphlets might have done.”¹

Remarkable is not only the enormous effect Engels attributes to the painting, but also his description of what is depicted. It is a genuine ekphrasis of the absent work, which he sought to vividly present to his readers. Moreover, besides meticulously and illustratively describing the picture, Engels in the same movement interprets it in order to explain the claimed political effect. According to him, the canvas not only shows “some Silesian weavers bringing woven linen to a factory owner” but also “very impressively contrasts cold-hearted wealth on the one side with desperate poverty on the other.”²

Narrativizing the pictorial elements,³ Engels reads the arrangement of the figures as a particular situation within a larger story:

The well-fed manufacturer is represented with a face as red and unfeeling as brass, rejecting a piece of cloth which belongs to a woman; the woman, seeing no chance of selling the cloth, is sinking down and fainting, surrounded by her two little children, and hardly kept up by an old man […]; and two men, each with a piece of rejected cloth on his back, are just leaving the room, one of whom is clenching his fist in rage, whilst the other, putting his hand on his neighbour’s arm, points up towards heaven, as if saying: be quiet, there is a judge to punish him.⁴

Engels thus discerns several smaller scenes within the overall scene, several micro-narratives, which have as their common theme the exploitation of the Silesian weavers’ families by rich linen factory merchants, embodied by the patriarch centrally placed in the picture, his employees, and his son. Engels’s reading is clearly informed by the broader media discourse of his time (including newspaper articles, political pamphlets, and poems), which had made the general public particularly sensitive to the suffering of the Silesian weavers after their uprising in June 1844.⁵

Fig. 1: Die schlesischen Weber (The Silesian Weavers, Carl Wilhelm Hübner, 1844/1846).

Engels’s description and interpretation raises several questions that can be linked to our contemporary research on filmic representations of precarity.⁶ In what follows, I will sketch three sets of research questions. The first is concerned with film production and aesthetic structures, the second with the filmic works’ different kinds of impact, the third with the social discourse to which the works relate. After that I will discuss Lauren Berlant’s concept of the “cinema of precarity” in an attempt to redefine it before engaging with the polysemic term “precarity” itself.

Three Sets of Research Questions

1. Poetics

The first set of questions has to do with poetics, that is, with the relation between artworks and the circumstances of their production: What are the major principles of construction and composition of the work in question? What stylistic repertoires were at hand, what formal choices were common, what functions might those which were chosen fulfill? What kinds of (commercial, ideological, aesthetic) objectives were involved in the production? Who authored the work and under what economic, political and artistic conditions? And who can be supposed to be the public primarily targeted by it? The success of The Silesian Weavers can at least partially be explained by the timing of its creation and exhibition. Hübner completed the canvas in July 1844, immediately after the famous uprising of the weavers in the small Silesian towns of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau on June 3 and 4.⁷ But he had begun work on it earlier, in the course of a major fundraising campaign in support of the weavers in the Rhenish press in the spring of the same year. The large-format painting, which bears traces of romantic painting but can also be seen as an early example of nineteenth-century realism, attracted public attention in Cologne, Berlin, and other places where it was exhibited from July onwards—under the immediate impression of the June events, which were much discussed, although or precisely because there were few established facts about them. Hübner did not thematize the uprising itself, but his painting could be understood as illustrating its causes, and also as clearly taking sides in favor of the weavers. (The unsympathetically drawn factory owner was easily identified as the particularly exploitative textile merchant Ernst Friedrich Zwanziger, whose house and warehouse became the target of the first attack by the Peterswaldau weavers.)

Hübner was not a socialist, however, and his main target audience was the bourgeoisie in the Rhineland. Historian Christina von Hodenberg explicitly discusses his painting not as part of the socialist line of interpretation of the events but as part of its “bourgeois myth.”⁸ The immediate intention of The Silesian Weavers was a charitable one: As part of the above-mentioned campaign, it sought to motivate wealthy donors to aid the impoverished weavers, in which it apparently succeeded.⁹ Albeit clearly critical of the textile merchant’s cold-heartedness and his supposed greed, the main impression the painting sought to elicit was pity.

Questions of authorship, address, contexts of production, and their bearing on the works’ form are important for the cinema of precarity, as well. In the conclusion of his Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens, Stephen Pimpare introduces the concept of the “propertied gaze” in order to explain the problematic biases in cinematic representations of the poor in twentieth-century Hollywood cinema. Pimpare proposes the term “propertied gaze” in analogy to Laura Mulvey’s famous feminist concept of the “male gaze”: “I want to argue that American movies have also had a propertied gaze—the viewer is never assumed to be poor or homeless, and films are never meant for them, even when they are ostensibly about them.”¹⁰ As a reason for this bias, Pimpare states that poor people are much less likely to author cinematic works than they are to write books, for example, because of the high financial costs and organizational prerequisites involved in film production. Only in exceptional cases, therefore, are films about poverty informed by first-hand experiences.

Whether his diagnosis ought to be limited to twentieth-century Hollywood productions—at some moments in his books, Pimpare introduces European films such as Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941) and Entre les murs (The Class, Laurent Cantet, 2008) as more progressive alternatives—is an open question.¹¹ What is certain, however, is that in the more recent cinema of precarity, the division between the depicted (the precarized) and those depicting them (directors, screen-writers, actors, cinematographers, etc.) is less clear-cut. There are two reasons for this: First, the means of film production have become more widely available. Access to cameras and editing devices is not limited to studios anymore. This allows for filmic self-represen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Studying the Cinema of Precarity An Introduction
• Precarious Narratives in French and Francophone Belgian Cinema
• Housing Precarity and Construction in Spanish Cinema From Francoism to Contemporary Documentary
• Aspects of Poverty and Precarity Puzzle-Pictures from Portugal
• From Poverty to Precarity Bridging the Gap Between Arthouse Films and Domestic Blockbusters in Contemporary Italian Cinema
• Varieties of the Precariat in Contemporary Greek Cinema
• Transformation of the Precariat in Istanbul Naivete, Idealism, and Corruption with and within the City
• Film as Social Visibility Two Forms of Precarity in Romanian (and Bulgarian) Cinema
• Precarity in Post-Yugoslav Cinema Everyday Life in Post-Socialist, Post-War, and Transition Societies
• Move on Down Precarity and Downward Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian Feature Films
• Social Martyrs in Slovak Social Film Drama and Documentary
• Pandemic (Dis)Proportions On the Depiction of Precarized Work and Living Conditions in Austrian Film
• Precarity and Paradox in Swiss Cinema
• Individualization as a Shared Experience? Precarious Conditions Negotiated in German Film: Individual Refusal and Collective Agency
• Representation of Poverty and Precarity in Post-Communist Polish Cinema
• Economic and Social Precarity in Baltic Cinema
• Screening Precarity Scenes Precariousness and the Welfare State in Scandinavian Film
• Working-Class Precarity and the Social-Realist Tradition in British Cinema
• Relational Aesthetics of Precarity in Contemporary Dutch Documentary and Beyond
• Index