Course Description:
Since the origins of cinema, producers of moving images have put work, workers, and workplaces of all kinds on screen. Especially since movies and television are often considered a way to escape or forget the stresses and strains of the workday, or to imagine identities beyond what we do all day on the job, we might wonder: what’s behind this mutual attraction between the screen arts and the domains of hard labor, the factory, the nine-to-five, the professional rat-race, and the employment line? This course explores the widest possible range of relations between filming and work, in narrative fiction, documentary, and experimental film and television.
One focus of our study will be work and working as the subjects of screen representation in film and television. Possible topics include: manual and physical labor, industry and industrial relations, slavery and “wage slavery,” machines, bureaucrats, bosses, organizing, strikes, white-collar labor and the office, (un)professionalism, hustling, whistle-blowing, time-wasting, daydreaming and workplace fantasy, spare time, unemployment. Alternately, we’ll consider screen productions as a form of work, by reading about the labor and manufacturing of images in screen industries, jobs, and professions, in the historical and critical analysis of film, television, and other media industries and professions. Our eclectic range of examples will include: classics of political cinema about workers and the proletariat (Eisenstein’s Strike, newsreels from the Workers Film and Photo League of the 1930s, Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A., Tahimik’s Turumba etc.), and some lesser-known documentary and experimental films from the U.S. and elsewhere; television series’ dramatizing the white-collar workplace (The Apprentice, The Office, Mad Men, etc.); non-theatrical and sponsored films that promote industrial methods, sciences, technologies, and products; and a selection of popular and unpopular fiction films about different facets of the life and work of laborers of all kinds, including slaves, servants, office drones, entertainers, bosses (Modern Times, Gold Diggers of 1933, Norma Rae, Hardly Working, The Informant!, 12 Years a Slave, etc.) Readings to accompany screenings and to feed discussion will be drawn from both film and media studies, the humanities, and the social sciences.