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.
Notes
3.CitationStead, Film and the Working Class; CitationJames and Berg, The Hidden Foundation; CitationRoss, Working-class Hollywood; CitationZaniello, Working Stiffs, Union Maids; CitationMiller et al., Global Hollywood 1; CitationMiller et al., Global Hollywood 2; CitationHozic, Hollyworld; CitationBroe, Film Noir, American Workers; CitationO'Shaughnessy, The New Face; CitationTrumpbour, Selling Hollywood; CitationKapur and Wagner, Neoliberalism and Global Cinema; CitationGorfinkel, “The Work of the Image; CitationLeigh and Durand, Marxism and the Movies; CitationBâ, “Film, Labor, and Migration”; CitationNystrom, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men.
8.CitationAllen, Campbell, and Mcllroy are quoting E.P. Thompson in their Introduction to Histories of Labor, 1; CitationThompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1.
26.CitationRoss, “Beyond the Screen: History, Class, and the Movies,” 34.
33.CitationRoss, “American Workers, American Movies,” 33–34.
36. See Duke University Press journal, Positions: Asia Critique, a leading Asian studies publication.
39.CitationO'Shea, quoting Kracauer in his “English Subjects of Modernity”, 20.
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.
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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.