Political depression and working practices in recent French cinema

Abstract

This article will address the concept of political depression, as defined by Anne Cvetkovich in her 2012 work Depression: A Public Feeling. Drawing comparisons between Cvetkovich and the more extended interrogation of capitalist working practices in the sociology of Alain Ehrenberg, the article will then explore how recent French film depictions of the workplace have created representations of loss that can be construed as images of political depression. These include a parallel (established in one of the chosen films and in the wider discourse) between French corporate working practices and the Holocaust. The films under analysis are Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines (1999) and L’Emploi du temps (2001), along with Nicolas Klotz’s La Question humaine (2007).

Notes

1. My translation from the French. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2. Ehrenberg is here quoting statistics from a 1996 report by Le Pape and Lecomte. Other surveys in the Nineties, from SOFRES (Société française d’enquêtes par sondages) and INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherché médicale), also indicate a significant increase in depression over the previous decade. Taking several reports together, Ehrenberg suggests that the percentage of the French population suffering from depression at any given moment increased from 3% to 5%, and in certain studies, to 6% or even 7% (see Ehrenberg 2000, 231).

3. Higbee notes that ‘Vincent’s deceit is […] tied to notions of performance’ and that ‘the body is thus a site of performance that conceals a crisis of identity’ (Higbee 2004, 246). There is a similar emphasis on performance in Ehrenberg (1991).