Historicizing labor cinema: recovering class and lost work on screen

Abstract

Workers of all stripes and colors comprise a large and often forgotten segment of cinema history. This essay historicizes several key films and genres associated with early cinema, with an emphasis on pre-Great War French and American cinemas. Simultaneously, this essay formulates several critical responses to labor practices as globally understood and thus anchors this recovery of cinematized working classes, still an ongoing but marginal project in film studies today. Taken together, cinema can refract real-life occupational complexities, class dynamics, and workplace alienation – manifestations that are crucial to, primarily, view class as a social concept and to help us to think through the tensions workers faced under monopoly capitalism. Against this backdrop we must see film's ability to both trivialize class archetypes and capture the complexities as a type of tribute, as the latter becomes a central focus in this essay.

Keywords::

• labor cinema
• working class
• early cinema
• the global
• monopoly capitalism
• cinema of congregate attractions

Notes

^1.Silver, Forces of Labor, 1.

^2.Perera, “Rethinking Working-Class Literature,” 2.

^3.Stead, Film and the Working Class; James and Berg, The Hidden Foundation; Ross, Working-class Hollywood; Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids; Miller et al., Global Hollywood 1; Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2; Hozic, Hollyworld; Broe, Film Noir, American Workers; O'Shaughnessy, The New Face; Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood; Kapur and Wagner, Neoliberalism and Global Cinema; Gorfinkel, “The Work of the Image; Leigh and Durand, Marxism and the Movies; Bâ, “Film, Labor, and Migration”; Nystrom, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men.

^4.Stutesman, “The Work of the Image,” 21.

^5.O'Shaughnessy quoting Jean-Louis Comolli in “French Film and Work,” 56.

^6.Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1.

^7.Denning, Culture in the Age, 91.

^8.Allen, Campbell, and Mcllroy are quoting E.P. Thompson in their Introduction to Histories of Labor, 1; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1.

^9.Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, 17.

^10.Ross, “Beyond the Screen,” 26.

^11.Waters,Globalization: Key Ideas, 7.

^12.Silver, Forces of Labor, 14.

^13.Fink, Working across the Americas, xii.

^14.Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood, 13.

^15.Ross, “Beyond the Screen,” 27.

^16.Ross, “American Workers, American Movies,” 88.

^17.Sweezy, “Monopoly Capitalism,” 12.

^18.Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, 100.

^19.Wright, “Introduction,” 15.

^20.Grieveson, “The Work of Film,” 26

^21. Ibid., 27.

^22. See Silver, Forces of Labor.

^23.Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 31.

^24.Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids; James and Berg, The Hidden Foundation.

^25.Zaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, 2.

^26.Ross, “Beyond the Screen: History, Class, and the Movies,” 34.

^27. Ibid., 30.

^28.Musser, High-Class Moving Pictures; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema; Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions”; Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life.

^29.Benjamin, The Arcade Project, 9.

^30.Herrnstein Smith, “Contingencies of Value,” 1.

^31.Marx, Capital, Vol III, 383.

^32. Ibid., 383.

^33.Ross, “American Workers, American Movies,” 33–34.

^34.Stricker, “Repressing the Working Class,” 460.

^35.Ross, “Americal Workers, American Movies,” 83.

^36. See Duke University Press journal, Positions: Asia Critique, a leading Asian studies publication.

^37.Bowen-Struyk, “Introduction,” 257.

^38.Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 231–2.

^39.O'Shea, quoting Kracauer in his “English Subjects of Modernity”, 20.

^40.Marriott, “Sensation of the Abyss,” 90.

^41.Trotter, Cinema and Modernity, 71.

^42.Ross, “Beyond the Screen: History,” 26.

^43. Ibid.

^44. Ibid., 57.

^45. Ibid., 66.

^46.Foner, “A Martyr to His Cause,”104–5.

^47.Breitbart, “The Controlling Image,” 7.

^48. Ibid.

^49. For instance, in Washington DC in 1912, presidential candidate Eugene Debs, a card-carrying socialist from Illinois, had won close to one million votes in the US presidential election; a true milestone, even today.

^50.Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 54.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith B. Wagner

Keith B. Wagner is a film scholar and social theorist, with a strong interest in labor struggle, globalization, and cultural formations from across the North-South divide. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Film and Digital Media at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea – and co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (Routledge 2011) and China's iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty First Century (Bloomsbury 2014). His first monograph which is based on his dissertation is entitled Living with Uncertainty: Precarious Labor in Global Cinema and will be published 2016. He is also editing several journal special issues, of note: Beyond Hallyu: Innovation and Experimentation in South Korean Film and Television and Financial Crisis and Hollywood.