This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Allegories of Dispossession Neoliberalism and Proletarian Global Cinema Wagner, Keith Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: Allegories of Dispossession: Neoliberalism and Proletarian Global Cinema Author: Kieth Wagner The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. 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Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. 1 Allegories of Dispossession: Neoliberalism and Proletarian Global Cinema Dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film Studies at King’s College London Keith B. Wagner 2013 2 3 Abstract This thesis attempts to theorize how precarious work—poorly paid, flexible, on call, even part-time employment—is pronounced in the global cinema of filmmakers Jia Zhangke, Park Chan-wook, Neill Blomkamp and Sebastian Silva. The images of the urban worker envisaged by these global directors show Chinese, Korean, Chilean and South African working classes as less attuned to the predatory nature of neoliberalism and the uncertainty they face: overwork, downward mobility, beckoning consumerism often out of reach, physical exhaustion, strains on family ties and worst of all, the lingering threat of destitution. These hardships point, at least since the late 1990s, to the insertion of a precarious worker in global cinema. With this in mind, much cinematic precarity is demonstrable to flaws in our current network society, wherein nomadic dispersal and managerial hegemony are part of a neoliberal agenda to dismantle any type of collective bargaining and shared prosperity. But these cinematized conditions must be read “against the grain,” where to conceive of workplace precarity we must go beyond The Maid and The World as compelling “foreign melodramas,” District 9 as video game inspired “science fiction” and, finally, Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance as depoliticized “neo-noir.” To see them as labor films advances our understanding of the transformation of labor practices in advanced capitalist systems (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). It also, in a double move, exposes the inadequacy of the phrase and category of “world cinema” and its institutionally homogenous and problematic orientation to comprise new cultural capital—itself, another form of work. Thus by rephrasing world cinema to global cinema acknowledges its own material production as well as its artistic and social value, in that we understand any particular instance or text to be globally orientated. More specifically, individual chapters will be based on the relational phenomena that show political and economic forces at work, or—allegories of dispossession—which mark and differentiate spaces within these urban centers for its proletarians: neoliberalism, particularly in its geo-cultural manifestations. To date, two monographs and two anthologies in film studies deal with labor and its revivification in a contemporary (but also Western) context: Broe, 2009; Nystrom, 2009; James & Berg, 2001; and Zaniello, 2003. In light of this gap in research, this project examines how cinematic formations of the proletarian can lead to new articulations about national identity, race relations, urban citizenship, unstable labor networks and their social interactions under neoliberal globalization. 4 Table of Contents Declaration 2 Abstract 3 Table of Contents 4 List of Figures 5 Acknowledgements 6 Dedication 7 Introduction Histories of Neoliberal Dispossession: Film and the Global South - PART I Macro-Social Histories: Theories of Global Culture and Capitalism - Chapter 1 Allegory, World-Systems Theory and Global Cinema Discourses 40 Chapter 2 Film Criticism: Labour Films and Representation 60 PART II Micro-Formulations: Proletarian Global Cinema and Neoliberalism 123 Chapter 3 Zones of Regulation, Zones of Despair: District 9’s Extraterrestrials in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg 124 Chapter 4 Made to Serve: Neoliberalism’s Social and Psychic Devaluation and the Familial in The Maid 171 Chapter 5 Fragments of Labour: Neoliberal Attitudes and Architectures in Park Chan wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy 204 Chapter 6 Jia Zhangke’s Neoliberal China: the Commodification and Dissipation of the Precarians in The World/Shijie 236 Conclusion 274 Notes 281 Bibliography 301 Filmography 318 5 List of Figures Figure 3.1-4 In the opening moments of the film we see the illegal eviction and the removal of extraterrestrials discussed in semi-documentary style. 128 Figure 3.5-10 The duality of Blomkamp’s Chiawelo shantyscape: part 163 ramshackle labyrinthine, part CGI bric-a-brac 164 168 Figure 4.1-2 The feelings and spaces of social and psychic devaluation in The Maid. 200 201 Figure 5.1 The precarians Jing confronts his chaebol boss Dongjin with a box cutter, demanding an explanation for his termination. 221 Figure 5.2 Learning he will not be re-hired, Jing maims himself with the box cutter as a symbolic and sadistic gesture of his own despondent state. 221 Figure 5.3 Ryu labours arduously on the factory floor to support himself and his ailing sister. 224 Figure 5.4 The victim of downsizing right before the firm’s financial collapse, management pitilessly sacks Ryu, taking the 225 neoliberal stance: management first. Figure 6.1 New precarians dancers on display in Jia’s the World Park. 239 Figure 6.2 The twentieth-century precarians traverses the Beijing’s cityscape. 239 Figure 6.3 Phantasmagoric visual motifs of miniaturized models at the World Park. 256 Figure 6.4 Quarrelling in a Beijing hospital after Little Sister’s accident. 259 Figure 6.5 The provincial nature and look of Jia’s animation sequence. 259 Figure 6.6 Greif-stricken after Little Sister dies of head trauma, Jing hold’s Little Sister’s last will and testament on the back of a cheap pack of tobacco, absolving him of his debts. 261 Figure 6.7 The emerald colour hospital wall serves as postmortem, precarians art. 261 Figure 6.8 Tao, reluctantly moon-lighting as an escort to Chinese businessmen. 269 Figure 6.9 The temptation but ultimate fictitious nature of cosmopolitanism on display. 269 6 Acknowledgements The world of labour studies is elusive and constantly changing. And it is only through dialogue, participation, introspection, critique, and research that I have begun to understand the nuances, beauty and vitality of “work as culture” these last five years. This dissertation is a culmination of conversations I’ve had with labour scholars and social scientists, film theorists and anthropologists and those unionists and working men and women directly involved in their own production and organization of work—in material or immaterial form—across the world. It is their voice, and their unique erudition on class, subjugation and precarity that I have tried to reflect and expound upon in relation to global cinema under neoliberalism. I would like to thank the following people who in one way or another made this project possible. I first need to acknowledge David Trotter, in the University of Cambridge, for allowing me to formulate the relationship between global cinema and neoliberalism on my M.Phil degree in 2007. After Cambridge, I explored many of the ideas presented in these pages as a Film Media faculty member at the University of Rhode Island, under the tutelage of former department chair, John Leo. The next phase in my academic training saw me return to the UK in 2009 to begin my PhD at King’s College London. It is at KCL that I need to thank my co-supervisors, Mark Betz and Alex Callinicos, for their exquisite mentoring, intense probing of my sometimes clumsy formulations and encouragement and belief in this project the whole way through.