FROM SELF-FULFILMENT TO SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. FROM SELF-FULFILMENT TO SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST WORK IN EUROPEAN CINEMA FROM THE 1960S TO THE PRESENT EWA MAZIERSKA Berghahnonfilm This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Ewa Mazierska Open access ebook edition published in 2019 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mazierska, Ewa. From self-fulfilment to survival of the fittest: work in European cinema from the 1960s to the present / Ewa Mazierska. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-486-1 (hardback: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-487-8 (ebook) 1. Work in motion pictures. 2. Working class in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures-- Europe--History--20th century. 4. Motion pictures--Europe--History--21st century. I. Title. PN1995.9.L28M39 2015 791.43’6553--dc23 2014029467 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-486-1 hardback E-ISBN 978-1-78920-474-2 open access ebook An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initia- tive designed to make high-quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at knowledgeunlatched.org. This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. license. The terms of the license can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/. For uses beyond those covered in the license contact Berghahn Books. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Homo Faber and the Work of Cinema 9 2 The 1960s: In Search of Self-fulfilment 46 3 The 1970s: Seeking Change 100 4 The 1980s: Learning to Survive 151 5 The 1990s, the 2000s and Beyond: Moving towards the Unknown 198 Conclusions: Towards the New Cinema of Work and Idleness 258 Notes 267 Bibliography 273 Index 294 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Illustrations Fig. 2.1 Sport as an escape from working class life in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 59 Fig. 2.2 Frank and Mrs Hammond in This Sporting Life 61 Fig. 2.3 Kazik and his factory in Gold 66 Fig. 2.4 Fearful factory in Red Desert 77 Fig. 2.5 Artist at work in Blow-up 84 Fig. 3.1 Emma Küsters as a working class icon in Mother Küsters Goes 113 to Heaven Fig. 3.2 Culture industry in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven 121 Fig. 3.3 Culture industry Eastern European style in Dance Leader 125 Fig. 3.4 Culture industry in East Germany in Solo Sunny 128 Fig. 3.5 Michael Travis beginning his travels in O Lucky Man! 131 Fig. 4.1 Cyril, Shirley and Karl Marx in High Hopes 167 Fig. 4.2 Polish workers in London in Moonlighting 180 Fig. 4.3 Escaping the fate of ‘homo sacer’ in Ariel 190 Figs. 5.1 and 5.2 Olga’s work in Import/Export 209 Fig. 5.3 Body work in The Full Monty 215 Fig. 5.4 Isa searching for work and a place to live in The Dreamlife of Angels 217 Fig. 5.5 Brassed off in Brassed Off 224 Fig. 5.6 Workers and postcommunist capitalists in Old School Capitalism 232 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to Lars Kristensen, Eva Näripea, Elżbieta Ostrowska and Jonathan Owen for reading this manuscript and for their insightful comments. I am also indebted to Greg De Cuir Jr, Martin O’Shaughnessy, Laura Rascaroli, Želimir Žilnik and Adam Wyżyński, who helped me to find the films, journals, books and stills. I am also grateful to the University of Central Lancashire for supporting several conferences devoted to work and Marxist critique of cinema, which allowed me to exchange my views with various colleagues interested in this subject, especially Ian Fraser, Martin O’Shaughnessy, Alfredo Suppia and William Brown. Small parts of Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 were published in the dossier, ‘Working Life Now and Then’, with the titles ‘Cinema and the Realities of Work’ and ‘What Happened to the Polish Multitude? Representation of Working People in Polish Postcommunist Cinema’, in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 53.1, 2012. Thanks to Wayne State University Press for permission to reuse them here. I dedicate the book to my daughter, Kamka. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Introduction I believe that we live at a time when technological and cultural inventions should save the vast majority of people from unpleasant and dangerous labour, and ensure a prosperous life for everyone. I am not alone in this conviction. Eric Hobsbawm writes in his last book, ‘Our productive capacity has made it possible, at least potentially, for most human beings to move from the realm of necessity into the realm of affluence, education and unimagined life choices’ (Hobsbawm 2011: 12). Yet, these ideals, even in traditionally affluent Europe, appear further away than fifty, forty or even twenty years ago. Unemployment and poverty are growing, and the majority of those in employment are expected to work longer hours and have more years of service before being able to retire on a smaller pension than the generation of their parents. They earn less in relative terms and their work is less stable than their parents’ was, as demonstrated by the extraordinary career of the word ‘precariat’ (Ross 2003, 2008; Berardi 2009; Standing 2011), which blends ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’. Young people are especially affected, with the highest level of unemployment, lowest wages and level of security, and the smallest chance, even for those with graduate education, to enter so-called professions. A desire to understand and assess this paradox lies at the root of this book. I wanted to explore whether there was ever a golden age for work and, if so, did it feel that way then, and when, why and how has the situation changed, and again, how was it experienced ‘on the ground’: in factories, offices and places where information is processed and art created? Because I regard film as a privileged medium for registering and commenting on changes in society and their subjective meaning, I decided to seek answers by examining cinema in conjunction with histories and theories of work. The fact that my initial assessment of the social reality was critical and that the book argues in favour of overthrowing the current system affected my choice of films and concepts. I turned to Marxist theories and films that lent themselves to Marxist analysis. I chose Marx for two reasons. First, I regard his criticism of capitalism, as well as that of state socialism – which I treat as a version of capitalism – as still valid, and even more convincing now than forty or fifty years ago. Marxist thought is thus a perfect tool to conduct the ideological critique that is one of the main goals of my study. The second reason is, as Hobsbawm notes, quoting This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. 2 . FROM SELF-FULFILMENT TO SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST Jacques Attali, ‘the universal comprehensiveness of his thought. It is not “interdisciplinary” in the conventional sense but integrates all disciplines … Philosophers before him have thought of man in his totality, but he was the first to apprehend the world as a whole which is at once political, economic, scientific and philosophical’ (ibid.: 12). I am not alone in finding Marx both comprehensive and contemporary. My study should be regarded as one of a number of recent attempts to revive Marxist thought in film studies and cultural studies at large, along with works such as The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders, Diasporas (Wayne 2002), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Boal et al. 2005), Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (Kapur and Wagner 2011) or Music and Marx (Burckhardt Qureshi 2002), which refer to Marxist thought explicitly or through intermediaries. As this project proved very wide, I had to be selective, both in relation to the aspects of films singled out for close analysis and the choice of films.