with Abstracts in Alphabetical Order by Author
The Many Faces and Spaces of Precarity in the Moving Image
ONLINE CONFERENCE – 14-15-16 DECEMBER 2023
Keynote Speakers: Professor Guy Standing
Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and a founder and co-President of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an NGO promoting basic income as a right. He has held chairs at the Universities of Bath and Monash (Australia) and was previously Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation. He is currently working on pilot basic income schemes. Famous publications include The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011). Other titles: The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea; Basic income: and how we can make it happen; The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. His Latest book is The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty (Pelican Books, 2023).
Time has always been political. Throughout history, how we use our time has been defined and controlled by the powerful, and today is no exception. But we can reclaim control, and in this book, the pioneering economist Guy Standing shows us how. The ancient Greeks organised time into five categories: work, labour, recreation, leisure and contemplation. Labour was onerous, whereas leisure was schole, and included participation in public life and lifelong education. Since the industrial revolution, our time has been shaped by capitalism, our jobs are supposed to provide all meaning in life, our time outside labour is considered simply ‘time off’, and politicians prioritise jobs above all other aspects of a good life. Today, we are experiencing the age of chronic uncertainty. Mental illness is on the rise, some people are experiencing more time freedom while many others are having more and more of their time stolen from them, particularly the vulnerable and those in the precariat.
But there is a way forward. We can create a new politics of time, one that liberates us and helps save the planet, through strengthening real leisure and working together through commoning. We can retake control of our time, but we must do it together.
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Sk Abbas Uddin (Ph. D Scholar, Department of Mass Communication, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India) and Syed Murtaza Alfarid Hussain (Associate Professor, Department of Mass Communication, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India):
Precarity and Screen Leisure: The Vanishing Single-Screen Theatres and the Rural Underclass in India
In India, traditional single-screen cinema theatres that previously served as cultural cornerstones in rural communities are gradually disappearing, creating a breach in the everyday consumption of affordable entertainment for the rural precariats. This research article investigates India’s disappearing single-screen theatres, resulting in the growing lack of public spaces for entertainment for the rural underclass. In recent decades, the Indian media and entertainment industry has witnessed a dramatic transformation; the proliferation of multiplexes coupled with the advent of digital OTT platforms, and the corresponding decline of traditional single-screen theatres. This transition has not only transformed the sites of the cinema-viewing landscape, but has also altered the experience of screen-leisure, particularly for the precariat class of the country. Situated in West Bengal, this study combines participant observation and non-structured interviews, to delve into the role of rural Bengal’s single-screen film theatres as spaces for communitarian solidarity and identity for the rural underclass. It investigates how the closure and redevelopment of single-screen theatres have not only resulted in the shrinking of public spaces of recreation and leisure for the rural precariat class, but has also disrupted their age-old livelihoods and contributed to the erosion of communal spaces within local communities. The research article scrutinizes the multifaceted challenges confronting the existence of single screen theatres in India, and its spillover effect on the rural underclass, as they grapple with the diminishing availability of affordable and accessible entertainment options.
Bio
Authors: Sk Abbas Uddin is a Ph. D Scholar, Department of Mass Communication, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India; Dr Syed Murtaza Alfarid Hussain is Associate Professor, Department of Mass Communication, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India.
Email: skabbasuddin728@gmail.com
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Enes Akdağ (Visiting Scholar in Core Program, PhD Candidate in Communication Studies, Kadir Has University, Turkey): You Wouldn’t Be Here If I Didn’t Pay You: Intersectional Look to Employee/Employer Child Actor in Honeyboy (2019)
From Jackie Coogan to Shia LaBeouf, labor conditions of child actors in studio system, and parental share of child actors’ earnings, have been always controversial topic. Honeyboy (Dir: Alma Har’el, 2019) is one of those films that might offer new ways of looking to precarious subjectivities of child actors in studio system. Honeyboy is, in a way, Shia LaBeouf’s semi- autobiographical film about the dysfunctional relationship between 12-year-old budding young star Otis Lort (Noah Jupe) and his former rodeo clown, ex-alcoholic, convicted sex offender, father James Lort (Shia LaBeouf), who lives in a seedy motel room in the San Fernando Valley/Los Angeles. While James seems to be an on-set guardian of Otis, he, literally, acts as a cheerleader who pumps full of strength to Otis, in exchange for taking possession of all his earnings. Otis is supposed to get permission to spend, even a little amount of his earnings, from his employee father James. Otis seems to be both employee and employer, in studio system. Otis might be positioned under “The Underpaid” in Guy Standing’s four types of precariat. Otis has relatively small autonomy on his labor and frustrated about their future precarious work conditions. In this research, it is aimed to analyze Honeyboy (2019), with refer to Otis’s precarious subjectivity at the intersection of gender, age, class, and race.
Bio
Enes Akdağ is Turkish filmmaker, researcher. He received his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations with a double major in Cinema and Television from Istanbul Sehir University. Istanbul. During his undergraduate years, he wrote and directed a total of five short films, two of which received short film production grant from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey. He received his master’s degree in Media and Communication Studies from Galatasaray University with his thesis entitled “Current Aspects of Communal Viewing Experience: Subscription Video-On-Demand Platforms and Online Watch Parties”. He joined the Ph.D. program in Communication Studies at Kadir Has University in September 2022. His current research interests lie in the fields of film industries, new cinema history (moviegoing experiences in rural areas), and queer cinema, sociology of childhood. Recently, he joined Kadir Has University Core Program as a guest lecturer.
Email: enes.akdag@stu.khas.edu.tr
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Carlotta Antonelli (PhD student in the XXXV cycle of doctorate in communication, resume in methodology, social research and marketing at the Coris, department of the University La Sapienza of Rome): Citizenship of disability in the mediapolis: evolution of media representations. A precarious space? Main evidences
The proposal analyses the relationship between media and disability from an ecological perspective (Bennato, 2018). Object of analysis is the corpus of scientific production “Report-media and disability” produced in the years 2005-2012 on which was conducted a thematic analysis with the following results: historical, semiotic and cultural evolution of the concept of disability; criteria of noticeability and gatekeeping; role of media representations in orienting the public opinion; citizenship of disability in the media space. The corpus signals an evolution in the terms of disability. A key to understand this semiotic process is provided by Tullio De Mauro (2012), who states “[…] The laborious and arduous affirmation of these norms and their wide impact quickly made the word handicapped popular and […] opened the way to negative and offensive uses.” What remains of the discussion in the media representation? The emphatic, sensationalist and paternalistic tone (Fondazione Giacomo Matteotti, 2012). In the corpus, then, too many factors still play against the undiscussed assertion of a ‘new citizenship’ of disability in the media: habit (system, editors and public); professional routines (manifested in gatekeeping) (Fondazione Giacomo Matteotti, 2008). In addition to their function as fact-reporters, media also play the role of ‘polltakers’: they provide indirect representations of public’s response to issues (Price and Roberts, 1987). An example is the Englaro case, which was reported as out-of-date information. The noticeability of the media event suggests the media’s ability to propose (impose) the representation as ‘real’ to the reader/listener; Neumann (1974): ‘the media create public opinion by providing the environmental pressure to which people respond with acquiescence or silence’. We are human beings or inhuman through the communication that Mediapolis conveys in its space understood as public, the platform of life (Manzato, 2012).
Bio
PhD student in the XXXV cycle of doctorate in communication, resume in methodology, social research and marketing at the Coris, department of the University La Sapienza of Rome. She participated in the Italian team for the 2020 Global Media Monitoring Project. Her research interests are in disability studies, barriers and facilitators, and university inclusion. Other research interests: she is formally included in the university project “Experts in the limelight”, whose focus is on comparing the narratives of politicians and experts on talk shows around the Covid issue immediately pre and post first lockdown.
Email: carlotta.antonelli@uniroma1.it
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Fotis Begklis (filmmaker and independent scholar): Softening the trauma?
In this presentation I explore the potential of film montage, conceptualising it as a process in which the dialectic linkage of disjunctive linearities is constantly softened or exaggerated as the result of the clashes between multiple interwoven temporalities. Filmmakers over the years have developed a number of practical methods and classifications to find ways to edit shots together to build coherent films. Aumont describes the perceptually disruptive dislocation viewers experience when a cut between two shots occurs as a trauma. The softening, or exaggeration of the trauma and the relationships between two sequential shots in a film has been a subject of reflection and experimentation for film practitioners. The starting point for this presentation is my hybrid online essay film Grand Tour a film in-debt(ed) interrogated through Godard’s poetico-historical images and Farocki’s notion of soft montage. Grand Tour explores an alternative reading of the recent Greek financial. It dialectically associates the financial debt with the cultural debt of ancient Greece, suggesting modes of ambiguity and speculative thinking that describe Greece as a place in a precarious state, defined by a series of fragmented past and present encounters. In this presentation, I argue that Grand Tour’s montage can be described not as a simple accumulation and juxtaposition but more as a soft and open dialogue in between (use another word here as you repeat this below) the hard progression of the linear narration layer and the interwoven layers that allow viewers to explore cracks and openings within the fabric of the film and engage in a precarious dialogue with the film. I conclude that the disjunctive nature of the film does not offer specific answers and fixed interpretations. Instead, it suggests and explores questions that challenge the current limited narratives about the Greek and global financial crisis.
Bio
I am a film-maker and academic who has developed a body of creative work, making documentaries, multimedia projects and non-fiction films. In my work I am primarily interested in cinema’s ability to evoke thinking and memory and the power of film montage. I have worked with many artists, corporate brands, musicians and local communities and collaborated on innovative educational, historical and artistic projects. I have worked with various underrepresented groups and voices while maintaining a focus on equity and social justice. My research interests concentrate on: practice-as-research; montage; essayistic filmmaking; documentary practice; community filmmaking; accented cinema and socially engaged non-fiction.
Email: fbeglis@hotmail.com
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Claudio Celis Bueno (IAS Fellow, Assistant Professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam)and Pei-Sze Chow (IAS Fellow, Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam): Precarious Creativity: The Use of Generative AI in the Film Industry
In the last year the topic of “creative AI” has become broadly discussed in popular media, industry events, online spaces, film festivals, and academic contexts. With the rapid development of so-called generative AI software such as Midjourney, Dall-E, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Runway, etc., old questions regarding the possibility of machine creativity have once again become an object of interest. In the film industry, different stakeholders have rushed to either celebrate their potential benefits for the industry or to express their concerns regarding issues of labour, copyright, biases, environmental footprint, or even existential fears. The writers and actors strike in the US, for example, is highlighting some of the negative consequences that these technologies may have on different forms of labour within the industry. This paper will present an overview of the main findings of the project ‘Automating Cinema: Technographic Explorations of Artificial Intelligence in Film Culture’. During 2023 we have been interviewing filmmakers and industry professionals regarding their own experience using these technologies. In particular, the paper will focus on a series of questions regarding the issue of creative labour: are these film practitioners experiencing these technologies as competitors or as enhancers? Do they fear being replaced by AI? Are their labour processes changing? Is generative AI liberating labour time from tedious task and allowing for more creative processes? Or is it contributing to the broader tendency towards precarisation that characterises the creative industries? Conceptually, the paper would like to argue that current debates regarding machine creativity often conflate two ways of understanding the relation between creativity and precarity: on the one hand, precarity as a necessary condition of creativity in general; on the other, precarity as a consequence of the commodification of creativity in the specific context of the creative industries. We argue that in order to properly grasp the relation between creativity and AI today we need to separate the two and shift the focus from the former towards the latter. We suggest that only by focusing on the specific context of the creative industries we would be able to better understand the relationship between AI, creativity, and precarity.
Bios
Claudio Celis Bueno is an IAS Fellow, Assistant Professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and co-director of the AI and Cultural Production research group at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. He is the author of the book The Attention Economy: Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism. His research focuses on the relationship between technology, capitalism, and labour.
Pei-Sze Chow is an IAS Fellow, Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and Co-Director of the AI and Cultural Production research group at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is currently conducting an ethnographic study on how film practitioners in Europe are using AI tools in film production, exploring issues relating to creative labour, agency, and equity.
Email: claudiocelisbueno@gmail.com ;
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Elisa Cuter (Ph.D. Candidate at the Film Universität KONRAD WOLF Babelsberg): Screening the Cognitariat. Precarious Intellectual and Artistic Labor in Contemporary European Cinema
The proletarianization of the workers active in the so-called cultural or creative industries in late Western capitalism has been summarized by operaismo in the concept of “cognitariat” (cognitive labor + proletariat): an ambivalent concept that, on the one hand, recognized their precarization, and, on the other, saw in the emergence of a “mass intellectuality” a premise for the development of radical political ideas. However, the neoliberal paradigm has identified in the creative worker a central model for the restructuring of labor, largely neutralizing said critical potential. As a result, a struggle over the role of cognitarians has emerged in the public discourse, with three main perspectives that identify them either as outsiders, accomplices, or victims of the broader precarization. The first perspective focuses on their status as artists, and tends to consider creative work as something per se external or even opposed to the capitalist model. The second focuses on the privileges (especially in terms of social and cultural capital) they still possess compared to other members of the precariat, and the third insists on their precarious working conditions and poor wages. I intend to show how this tripartite division is reflected in contemporary European cinema through an analysis of the films Los ilusos, Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes, and Le Monde après nous, highlighting variations in their discursive approaches, i.e. reading their rhetorical elements as functional to a quasi-argument through which the film becomes a political actor situated within the broader social discourse. By examining the films’ different approaches, I explore the challenges and potential for self-reflection within the cognitariat and its role in critiquing both its own and society’s precarization. The representation of the cognitariat in European cinema, a field itself predominantly composed of cognitarians, is a valuable vantage point for illuminating the complexities of the cognitariat’s position in contemporary society and provides a platform for further discussion of the precarious conditions and political implications of creative labor.
Bio
Elisa Cuter is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Film Universität KONRAD WOLF Babelsberg (Potsdam) in the DFG-funded Emmy-Noether-Nachwuchsgruppe “Filmische Diskurse des Mangels” (“Cinematic Discourses of Deprivation – Analyzing the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Fiction Film and Documentary”). She is a member of the editorial board of the Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema, editor-in-chief of the politics and society section of the online magazine Il Tascabile, published by the Treccani Institute for the Italian Encyclopedia and author of the essay on politics and sexuality Ripartire dal desiderio (minimum fax, 2020). Together with Dr. Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel she is the editor of the first book in the book series she co-curates “Film, Class, Society”, the volume Precarity in European Film: Depictions and Discourses (Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter, 2022). Her contributions have been published in peer-reviewed journals (e.g., gender/sexuality/Italy; Image & Narrative; Porn Studies; IJFMA) and edited collections.
Email: e.cuter@filmuniversitaet.de
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José Duarte (Lecturer in Film Studies, ULICES-ULisboa): “There is nothing particular about my life”: On the Precarity of Bodies in Motion and at Rest
Rooted in the documentary tradition of Portuguese cinema, but also on films such as Blue (Derek Jarman, 1983), What Now? Remind Me is the journey of director Joaquim Pinto through a year of experimental clinical trials to treat HIV and Hepatitis C. Part road movie, part personal essay, part diary, as we follow Pinto’s memories, stories and images, we are faced with a film about a man who openly confesses his struggle with the illnesses and the treatment he undergoes, one that he fears will affect “the notion [he] exist[s]”. Similarly, Pinto’s film, which also addresses the nation’s struggle against an economic crisis, positions much of What Now? Remind Me as a story against ruin and precarity: jumping back and forth in time, the documentary is a testimony of intimacy, a confessional film on the passage of time, but also a work that raises awareness of our frail and precarious human condition. As such, Pinto’s work ruminates on “the nature of time, being, and memory” (Quandt, 2014) and of his (confessional) voice capable of transmitting his past and present experiences, a symphony of a body at motion and at rest. This presentation, therefore, will try to look at Joaquim Pinto’s journey and voice, one that puts forward the experience of the precariousness of everyday life which is, at the same time, revelatory of an illness (and of a minority culture) that it still much stigmatized. While the film is somewhat philosophical and fatalistic it also stresses the director’s desire to continue, survive, and love, an act immortalized by cinema itself.
Bio
José Duarte teaches Film Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities (ULisboa), where he is also a researcher (ULICES – University Lisbon Centre for English Studies). His main research areas include independent cinema, Portuguese Cinema, Film History, Television Studies.
Email: joseaoduarte@gmail.com
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Emma Duester (Associate Professor, Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University): Precarious Careers: A Longitudinal Study with Contemporary Visual Artists from Emerging to Established Career Stages
This paper explores the nature of artists’ careers over 8 years. It investigates artists’ career paths including developments, highlights, challenges, and stasis over 8 years. This longitudinal study that comprises two sets of interviews conducted with the same 15 artists in 2013 and 2021. It also comprises a visual analysis of their artworks in 2013 and 2021 in terms of themes surrounding self-reflection and precariousness. It analyses artists’ self-reflections in interviews and their artwork on their careers as emerging artists in 2013 and as established artists in 2021. It exposes how these artists’ experience changes and shifts along their career paths, yet, how the one continuity throughout their careers is precarity. Together, this longitudinal study uncovers new knowledge on the nature of artists’ careers by exposing how precarity is experienced over the course of their careers. In addition to the more commonly understood precarities like financial struggles and self-sustained working style, this paper will uncover other mental precarities that surface after a sustained amount of time in this lifestyle as well as strategies used to overcome precarities to survive this lifestyle long-term. It is important to include both the tangible and mental aspects of precarity to expand existing literature that often considers only the practical, tangible precarities of work. Together, this paper expands this definition of precarity by exposing how artists are affected by precarities along their career, how precarities are both tangible and mental, and how strategies are used to cope with this type of precarious career. Addressing this can shed new light on the nature of artists’ careers and the nature of work in the creative industries today.
Bio
Dr. Emma Duester is Associate Professor at Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Previously, Emma was a Faculty Member in the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University (Vietnam). She held this position from 2019 until 2022. Emma was principal investigator of a funded research project entitled ‘Digitization of Art and Culture in Vietnam’, carried out from 2020 until 2023. Emma was part of a DFAT Grant project entitled ‘Investing In Women’ across Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. She is the author of ‘The Politics of Migration and Mobility in the Art World: Transnational Baltic Artistic Practices Across Europe’, published by Intellect in 2021, and the author of ‘Digitization and Culture in Vietnam’, published by Routledge in 2023. Emma received a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2017, after undertaking an ESRC-funded doctoral research project on transnational artistic practices across Europe. She has expertise in both research and practice in cultural sector development and transnational communication in Europe and Vietnam. Her areas of research interest include the culture sector, work in the creative industries, precarity, the politics of migration and mobilities across Europe.
Email: emmaduester@sjtu.edu.cn
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Daniel Fairfax (Assistant Professor of Film Studies Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): Fragments of Neoliberalism in Jean-Gabriel Périot’s Adaptation of Retour à Reims
Having gained attention on the film festival circuit with his essayistic found-footage retelling of the history of West Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in Une jeunesse allemande (A German Youth, 2015, the French filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot has continued the practice in the feature films Lumières d’été (Summer Lights, 2016), Nos défaites (Our Defeats, 2019) and a series of short films. All of his output uses montage to re-purpose existing film footage with the goal of shedding light on the history of left-wing politics, with a particular focus on the defeat of the 1970s and its aftermath for contemporary culture. His latest release, Retour à Reims [Fragments] (Return to Reims [Fragments]) from 2021, represents a new stage in this work: for the first time, a pre-existing text forms the spine of the film, the sociologist Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir Retour à Reims. Eribon’s text gained international renown for its unflinching depiction of the effects that neoliberalism and de-industrialisation had on the author’s family in the small northern French town, with the defeat of working-class institutions and the loss of economic security providing fertile ground for the rise of the populist right, in the shape of electoral gains made by the Front national. This talk proposes an exploration of the way in which Périot’s film converts the book into a montage of fragments, in which voiceover extracts of the text accompany a kaleidoscopic array of archival material, used to trace the intertwining of socio-economic transformations and media mutations, as filmic documentation of daily working-class life gives way to the audiovisual spectacle of television electoral coverage.
Bio
Daniel Fairfax is assistant professor of film studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and the author of The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
Email: fairfax@tfm.uni-frankfurt.de
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James Fenwick (Associate Professor in Culture and Media at Sheffield Hallam University): Precarity and Film Festival Programmers: Screening and Voicing Experiences of Work
In 2022/23, I led a Screen Industries Growth Network (SIGN) project to create a series of short films about the experiences of film festival programmers. The project idea stemmed from the evidence of precarity at film festivals like Sheffield DocFest where, in 2021, all the programming staff were fired without warning (Ravindran 2021). Programmers subsequently posted a letter on social media demanding that their working rights be protected and their centrality to the success of a film festival be recognised. Instead, the programmers were told to reapply for their jobs in 2022. Such an example is not isolated, with other festivals around the world also treating programmers in such a disposable fashion (Langlois 2016). Despite their centrality to the operation and successful delivery of a film festival, film festival programmers are not guaranteed future work and are often subject to the most extreme forms of precarious working: no contract, no working rights, long hours. Often working alone and in isolation, often in their own house, spending days, weeks, months even reviewing and critiquing film submissions, or attending at their own expense other festivals to seek out potential film screenings, the programmer is a festival worker that puts in extreme amounts of hours with very little recompense for their labour, and quite often very little acknowledgement. It is perhaps a role that could be said to be ‘hidden’: it is a role that is shrouded in mystery, typically not advertised as a vacancy, and removed from the immediate view of festival audiences. Given the lack of research in Film Festival Studies about film festival programmers and their experiences, the aim of the project has been to empower programmers to tell their own stories. Programmers from festivals in the UK and USA were interviewed and a series of short films created titled Experiences of Film Festival Programmers. Extracts of the films will be screened as part of the talk. The films were created in a process of collaboration with programmers and will be disseminated to academics, students, and industry in order to make precarity a threshold concept that cannot be unseen or ignored: to stop precarity from being internalised and normalised, and instead to externalise it. The films were co-produced and edited by the project’s research assistant Saiful Hisyam Bin Md Salleh. I will outline how the project findings and the films intercede into timely conversations about diversity, barriers, inclusiveness of media labour, and the precarious structures on which the film festival circuit is built, with the aim to emphasise, challenge, and eliminate precarious conditions of work and to reimagine a democratic, transparent, and people-centred film festival circuit.
Bio
James Fenwick is Associate Professor in Culture and Media at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2020), Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry (2021), and Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (2024).
Email: J.Fenwick@shu.ac.uk
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Catherine Gough-Brady (Head of Postgraduate Studies at JMC Academy in Australia, and is an associate editor of Screenworks): Precarity and Screen Creative Practice Human Research Ethics
In this paper I delve into the growing literature on creative practice research ethics to examine the ways in which academic ethics and screen creative practice research interact. A particular focus of this paper is the human research ethics process, with its underlying principle of reduction of harm by the researcher on the individual researched person. I investigate this by reflecting on the experiences of researchers as documented in the literature, as well as reflecting on my own experience. This paper examines the tensions that arise between the underlying assumptions of university ethics that emerged from the medical science’s Nuremberg Code, the realities of interreacting with participants in screen-based creative practice research, and existing screen industry moral codes. In particular, I explore whether ethics can be discipline specific; the potentially harmful effect of participant anonymity; using a rolling consent process to allow for changing circumstances and understanding; and who the consent is between, for instance, a researcher and a community. As a result of the discussion, I challenge existing university research practices as directing screen-practice researchers into a colonial relationship with the researched. This research has implications for how universities manage their human research ethics and audit research.
Bio
Catherine Gough-Brady is an award-winning documentary producer and director who publishes on the relational nature of documentary production processes in journals including Media Practice and Education, Screenworks, [In]transition, The International Journal of Creative Media Research, and Cultural Geographies. She is the co-editor of the edited collection exploring the intersection of theory and practice, Constructing the Real (2023). Catherine produced and directed six ABC TV documentary series, including Legal Briefs (2016) and Ethics Matters (2017). Catherine created 11 radio features for ABC Radio National. Her most recent TV half-hour for ABC TV is called The Communicator (2022). Catherine is Head of Postgraduate Studies at JMC Academy in Australia, and is an associate editor of Screenworks.
Email: catherine.gough-brady@snodger.com.au
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Malini Guha (Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa): Precarious Images for Possible Futures: The Moving Image as Mobile Home
In the end credits of Spell Reel (2017), a documentary made by 22 individuals, Portuguese filmmaker and artist Filipa César is credited with ‘assemblage’ rather than as ‘director’. Part of a collaborative project titled Luta ca caba inda, films such as Spell Reel, Conakry (2013), Cacheu (2012) and others are built around archival fragments previously stored in The National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual in Guinea-Bissau. These images were exposed to adverse conditions before being retrieved and digitized. These unrestored fragments are traces of a militant cinema praxis forged during the height of the anti-colonial resistance to Portuguese rule led by the Amilcar Cabral and his party, Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné Cabo Verde. In this paper, I will argue that Spell Reel is configured as a mobile home for these archival images, enabling a desired audience of Guineans and others to come into contact with them and in a context that asks us to consider their precarity not simply as a matter of impending loss but as a method of inquiry. César has made it known in interviews that her work is driven by the question of how knowledge can be reclaimed for the future. Her films offer one path toward reclamation in their ability to provide new homes for these images to “reintegrate into the cycle of time” (Achille Membe). If artist Hito Steyerl famously points toward one possible future for rare prints of militant, essayistic, and experimental cinema, which sometimes circulate as “poor” digital images, César demonstrates how cinema itself can function as a site of habitation for the remains of such practices. César foregrounds the laborious processes of assembly in place of authorship, opening up ways of considering the potential of the cinematic medium to function as infrastructural formations primed for decolonial futures.
Bio:
Malini Guha (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa). Her research interests extend from a longstanding commitment to writing about film and the city to more recent turns toward the subject of world cinema and other moving image practices, including public projection. She is the author of Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor of London as Screen Gateway (2023). Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, NECSUS, Screening the Past and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. As a contributing editor for the online journal Mediapolis, she writes a regular column, ‘Screening Canada’, where she explores aspects of Canada’s mediated place-making in relation to issues concerning its global role and domestic negotiation of racial and ethnic difference. Guha has recently joined the editorial board of the journal Screen.
Email: MaliniGuha@cunet.carleton.ca
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Gert Jan Harkema (Lecturer in Film Studies, Department of Media Studies
University of Amsterdam): Neighborhood films and cultural geographies of precarity and care in Dutch documentary filmmaking
This paper focuses on what I call the ‘neighborhood genre’ in documentary filmmaking as a recurring form to represent cultural geographies of precarity in Dutch cinema. Comparing Sarah Sylbing and Ester Gould’s contemporary work on Amsterdam North to the films by Vincent Monnikendam from the 1980s, I argue that these films visualize what it precarity as “processes of placemaking and unmaking” (Harris and Nowicki 2018, 390). In these films, we see different forms of precarious living in marginalized urban spaces characterized by affective atmospheres of anxiety and stress. Moving between conflict and solidarity, these documentaries can be read as performative utterances of the throwntogetherness that characterizes living socially in a globalized neoliberal world (Massey 2005), as well as the thrownapartness that marks the living of migrants at the edges of society (Gawlewicz and Yiftachel 2022). Thereby the rhetoric of these documentary films reaches well beyond the neighborhood.
Bio
Gert Jan Harkema is lecturer in Film Studies at the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His current research focuses on the representation of precarity and poverty in Dutch contemporary film and television. He contributed a chapter about relational aesthetics in contemporary Dutch documentary filmmaking to Cuter, Kirsten, and Prenzel’s anthology Precarity in European Film. This current paper is a follow-up project to that.
Email: g.j.harkema@uva.nl
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Mariz Kelada (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin): Men Behind the Scenes: The Operationalization of Care in Egypt’s Visual Media Production
Male bodies on the screens of Egyptian cinema and TV are dense capsules of reified representations of one-dimensional masculinities, from the patriarch Si El Sayed (a master), the brute Fetwa (local gangster), the Westernized playboy or don Juan as commonly referred to in Arabic, the dependable poor but resourceful Ibn Al Balad (son of the country), to the most recent version of the patriotic hyper-macho soldier or policeman — savior from all dangers. While there are substantial critical engagements, scholarly and otherwise, with how these representations of masculinity affect society and reproduce certain values, ideologies, and ultimately culture; however, little attention has been given to the contradictory entanglements between these representations and the construction of the gendered subjectivities behind these scenes, i.e., the predominantly male workers of the visual media industry. In this paper, I ethnographically analyze the labor of production crews in what it entails of affective and care labor to first problematize and contrast these singular representations of masculinity on the screen and, second, to demonstrate how this labor’s requirements factor into neoliberal subject formation that is always already political. I use the term “neoliberal” in an anthropological sense which can be boiled down to two main points: “as a structural force that affects people’s life chances and as an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities.” (Ganti 2014) However, what can get overlooked in this definition is how neoliberal subjectivities ultimately act on and in their worlds. The production of subjectivity is, in the most recognized enunciation, a target of neoliberal force and governance, while the less reckoned-with aspect is when that subjectivity becomes the enactor of neoliberal rationality, which is substantively different from an ideology of governance or an internalized governmentality in Foucauldian terms. Similarly, the concept of political subjectivity can be predominantly entrapped in the realm of formal politics, be it in the contestation of power with governments or institutions through policy and political action (e.g., Althusser 1970; Butler 1997; Kraus and Schramm 2011). Examinations of gendered subjectivity tend to consolidate the ideological, structural capitalist, and patriarchal determinations that shape individuals’ experiences and actions. However, multiple theories have expanded the realm of political subjectivity to encompass contestation over the social distribution of power in terms of resources and status. (e.g., Rancier 2010) and opened considerations of gendered subjectivity beyond the aforementioned determinations (e.g., Sassen 2000; Wilhoit 2021). Through this paper, I argue that under contemporary conditions of precarity, production workers’ tactic of what I term operationalization of care, exemplifies a potential framework for understanding gendered political subjectivities as more than a passive or involuntary product of neoliberal and patriarchal ideology.
Bio
Mariz Kelada recently completed her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University and starting October 2023 she will be a EUME Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Kelada also holds an MA in Modern Culture and Media, and the Cogut Institute Certificate in Collaborative Humanities from Brown University, as well as an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from the American University in Cairo. Her interdisciplinary research is invested in the labor and political economies of the cultural and creative sectors in Egypt and the MENA region, political theory, and multimodal ethnographic methods. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Sociology, MERIP (the Middle East Research and Information Project), and Film and Media Studies Journal SYNOPTIQUE. Since 2010, Kelada has worked in Cairo’s cultural sector in various capacities, from project management and research to film production and is the co-founder of Qaaf.Laam.Collective: a research and advocacy group that works on improving work environments and labor conditions of Egypt’s cultural workers.
Email: mariz_kelada@brown.edu
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Matthias Kispert (PhD researcher at CREAM, University of Westminster): Workers leaving the cloud factory: visualising the digital precariat
Workers leaving the cloud factory is a looped video that shows workers on the digital labour
platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk and Microworkers leaving their workplaces. The videos have been sourced by posting jobs on the respective platforms, requesting workers to submit videos created by themselves. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Microworkers are two examples of clickwork platforms, through which simple digital tasks can be distributed to a large number of workers, to be completed on their own computers or mobile phones for a small fee. These platforms are used in areas such as the manufacture of AI training datasets, in content moderation or for text transcription and translation. Their architectures allow employers to address workers through lines of code (Irani 2015), eschewing any of the interpersonal relationships that are part and parcel of more conventional employment relations, while also driving down wages and outsourcing risks to workers. Workers leaving the cloud factory revisits the Lumière brothers’ 1895 film Workers leaving the factory, in which a crowd can be seen leaving the site of production as one workforce. In the contemporary version, on the other hand, workers are atomised, departing on their own from spaces that include bedrooms, living rooms, cafes, offices or shops. Individual videos are arranged in a grid on screen reminiscent of a surveillance camera display, highlighting structural conditions rather than individual narratives, while spatially the cloud factory is shown to be located everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Through highlighting these aspects, the project proposes a strategy for visualising the precariat working on the digital assembly line (Gray 2016).
Biography
Matthias Kispert is an artist, researcher and educator with an interest in the intersections of art, politics and activism. For his practice-based PhD at the University of Westminster, he has been using artistic research methods to investigate precarious conditions of on-demand labour distributed through digital platforms. He is a co-founder of Hyphen Journal, assistant editor of MIRAJ and is convening the Radical Film Network and the Committee on Activism for the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy. He lectures at the University of the Arts London and the University of Westminster.
Email: info@matthiaskispert.com
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Jochem Kleinjan (Postgraduate student, Leiden University): Portraying precarity by producing precarity in Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined (2018)
The new European cinema of precarity as described by media scholars Alice Bardan (2013) and Temenuga Trifonova (2021) calls for new ways of conceptualizing worker’s lives under current shifting labour practices. Precarity as a concept transcends borders of both historically marginalised groups and nation-states. Therefore, the absence of discussions on non-Western cinema dealing with precarity is striking. This lack is not simply a detriment to the representational spectrum of precarious lives, but also obscures new and different ways of portraying these lives. I argue that the Singaporean film A Land Imagined (2018) by director Yeo Siew Hua engages with its precarious subjects in a way that radically differs from its Western counterparts. With its portrayal of a detective’s investigation into a missing migrant worker on a Singaporean construction site, the film deals with invisibilised precarious lives.
In the only Western scholarship on the film, cultural anthropologists Anita Lundberg and Jasmin Peer (2020) argue that it makes migrant worker’s lives visible. I oppose this reading of the film as an exposé and argue that instead, it offers a new way of cinematically confronting audiences with precarious lives. Instead of simply making these lives visible, I argue the film counters the logic of what cultural theorist Elmo Gonazaga dubs ‘slum voyeurism’ (2017). Employing a similar style to the transcendental style conceptualised by filmmaker Paul Schrader, the film places its audience in a precarious position mirroring both the lives of its precarious subjects as well as dominant narratives that invisibilize the film’s subjects. Continuing the invisibilization of its subjects, A Land Imagined uproots the voyeuristic position of the audience, bringing them closer to the precarious lives than an exposé ever could.
Bio
Jochem Kleinjan recently graduated cum laude from the MA program Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University with a thesis on cinematic ways of portraying precarious lives in Asian cinema. He also holds a Bachelor in Philosophy (University of Amsterdam) and Film- and Literary Studies (Leiden University). His research interests include the cinema of precarity, Asian cinema, Marxist theory, film philosophy, transcendental style and animal studies.
Email: jochemkleinjan@proton.me
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Dr Stella Lange (Max Kade Visiting Research Scholar at the Department of Comparative Studies at Harvard University): The Fragmentation of the White Apparatus in Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970)
Ten years after Africa’s decisive stepinto decolonization (1960 ‘Year of Africa’), Mauritanian film and theatre director Med Hondo (1935-2019) elaborates his migratory experiences in France’s big cities amongst other North and West African labor migrants dating back to the late 1950s.In the black-and-white film Soleil Ô(1970) he wisely anticipates the notion of precarity from a black migrant worker’s perspective. Conceived as a structural phenomenon that permeates all areas of life (economic, social, political, media) in interdependence, his non-linear, essayistic style leaves space for questioning connections and contexts. Originally addressing Africa’s audience as well as that of the African diaspora, Hondo clarifies the realities in the land of liberté, égalité and fraternité and, with united forces, drafts the utopia of a transcontinental rebellion of the oppressed. The ongoing colonization of the black screen, however, initially prevents the film’s dissemination. During Nouvelle Vague and multiplied notions of neoliberalism, the prolific artist –combining animation, documentary, fiction, theater, and an experimental soundtrack–creates a new African cinematic language built on the few economic, personal, and temporal resources available to him as a temporary cook, student, dubber, actor and political engaged citizen. In Soleil Ô, African influences resonate polyphonically and antagonistically with European ones, from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Césaire’s self-assertive ‘cri nègre’to avant-garde theater and Brecht’s alienation technique. Lastly, the recently restored film represents a (media-)critical, parodic examination of whiteness and its apparatus that shaped the images of Africa so far. How does Hondo manage to capture analytically the ongoing, covert subjugation of the black subject? And, while replicating colonial frames, partly borrowed from the white apparatus, how does he succeed in never running the risk of victimizing the black subject, but rather endowing it with an agency that forms its own counter-narratives?
Bio
Stella Lange has been a postdoctoral researcher within the FWF project Cinema of Migration in Italy since 1990at the Department of Romance Studies, University of Innsbruck. She is currently a Max Kade Visiting Research Scholar at the Department of Comparative Studies at Harvard University. Recent publication: Lange, Stella (2023). In and Out of the Zoom: The Photographic Act as Frame of Precarity in Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema since 1990. In: Studies in European Cinema. Special Issue Intermediality and Media Reflexivity in Italian cinema of migration, Vol. 20 (2), 187–208.
Email: stella.lange@uibk.ac.at
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Sebastian Lederle (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) Precarious effects of spatialization of film in post cinema
The presentation discusses the general thesis that the postcinematic dispositif of film possesses a media-philosophical characteristic in a specific form of spatialization. Film can be found everywhere, can enter into open, intermedial as well as transcategorial affiliations with everything, and can multiply, contract, expand, change, and have a transforming effect on its cinematic as well as extra-filmic environment in an incalculable way. It is only, when transforming, when affecting and being affected. This is also the case because the postcinematically transformed film has become a spatially determined effect and operator in an excellent way (Vinzenz Hediger, Malte Hagener). Above all, the spatial mode of its ubiquity plays a special role: film in postcinema can temporarily gather everything into its operations and manifestations because it is dispersed everywhere and is no longer fixed in time to a particular place. The ephemeral, transitory dispersion and gathering marks a prius of a dislocated, dispersive space in both production and reception aesthetics, as well as in theory. Postcinematic spatialization starts differently from the heterotopic spatiality of cinema (Francesco Casetti). In contrast to the determination of a place, a de-localized spatial conception is assumed, which allows to think of all places where film can and could be, as belonging to one level, which film and non-film are horizontally a part of. If film could in principle appear everywhere, this does not mean that this has to be the case all the time. It does mean, however, that the presence of film implies a virtual filmability or cooperation of film that is spatially indexed. The filming of the world can become the case at any time and anywhere, so that one can speak of a situational-transitory and immanent enviromentalization of the extra-filmic world. Cinematic reality is embedded in the world as an uncompletable displacement movement. The space of film is thus at the same time a space of non-film, which is not mediated and integrated by any tertium comparationis. Rather, the movement, that film itself is or generates, produces diverse, fleeting, and unstable coprescences with where it is not. The world is the virtual environment of film. But since film does not simply coincide with itself, this virtuality will remain in the making: It delimits and de-finishes the world touched by the virtual filmic presence: It generates de-coincidence and uncertainty within the world: It could become part of filmic enviromentalization, but it cannot be predicted or prevented in what way and how this alters being in the world. The argument is directed towards the spatial aspect of the dynamic contact between film and world. Therefore, it is always precarious to determine, what really is outside or beyond film. The making of film is in a certain sense always already the making of the world. But it is unknown, how, where and when, since it is a depending on the filmic operations themselves as they are expanding and retracting from where they are currently are resp are not. The boundary between film and the extra-filmic is precarious, because it cannot be unified on one side and must always be iterated anew and differently with and through film. This is the case, it is argued, because the state of postcinematic film has entered a specific spatial dimension of precarious de-limitation and migration
Bio
Dr. Sebastian Lederle, research associate at the Chair of Philosophy and Aesthetics in the Faculty of Media at Bauhaus University Weimar. Studied philosophy and history in Vienna and Freiburg im Breisgau, PhD on Hans Blumenberg 2016 in Vienna, Visiting Professor for Perception Theory at HfG Offenbach am Main 2018/19, Junior Fellow at IKKM, Weimar 2019/20. Main areas of research: Phenomenology, hermeneutics, anthropology, philosophy of technology, philosophy of media and film (Hollywood, Postcinema). Ongoing habilitation project on a media philosophical conception of precarity.
Email: sebastian.lederle@uni-weimar.de
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Raquel Martínez Martín (Teaching Associate at the Department of Humanities in Strathclyde University): Precarity, Austerity and (Im)mobility in Spanish Crisis Cinema: Yesterday Never Ends (Isabel Coixet, 2013)
The austerity programmes implemented by the Spanish government put considerable pressure on a depleted welfare state and exacerbated the widespread climate of precarity after 2008. Spanish cinema has often portrayed the precarious lives of those citizens who survive without institutional support, those who have lost their homes and, to a lesser extent, those who have taken a stand against a neoliberal government that chose to bail out banks rather than help its citizens. Set in a near-future version of Spain, Yesterday Never Ends (Isabel Coixet, 2013) links precarity, the end of love and the traumatic effects of a child’s death as a direct result of austerity cutbacks. Inspired by Lot Vekemans play Gif (2010), Yesterday Never Ends conveys what sociologists Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (1997) call ‘social suffering’, the ways in which political, institutional and economic powers affect the lives of citizens and how they react against such strategies. Focusing on tropes of (im)mobility, I argue that the loss of the son has an immobilising effect on the protagonists, comparable to the general paralysis experienced by both the Spanish population and national public institutions after 2008. The austere setting, editing and composition accentuate the personal, social and political stagnation in which the characters find themselves. The non-binary connections between the physical (im)mobility of the characters thus convey the effects of personal grief intertwined with precarity, the economic crisis and the austerity programmes designed to deal with it.
Bio
Raquel Martínez Martín is a Teaching Associate at the Department of Humanities in Strathclyde University. Her research focuses on contemporary Spanish cinema and she is currently completing her PhD on (im)mobility in Spanish crisis films. She has presented her research at several UK and European conferences. She is a board member of the Ibero-American film platform CinemaAttic and a regular speaker at the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival.
Email: raquel.martinez-martin@strath.ac.uk
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Jacopo Francesco Mascoli (PhD student in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick): Capitalist Temporalities. Post-Fordism and Industrial Present in Italian Documentary
Over the last 20 years, cinema has been engaged with the accelerating financialisation and deindustrialisation of economies in Europe and beyond. Bela Tar’s Prologue in 2004 the anthology film Visions of Europe (Fatih Akın, Ágnes Hranitzky, Arvo Iho & others, 2004) vehiculates the idea of a systemic deindustrialisation through a single medium close-up shot of people queuing outside a brick building. The road movie Detroit: Ruin of a City (George Steinmetz, Michael Chanan, 2005) similarly documents the Motor City’s progressive decline by looking back at its history through a rich variety of archival footage. These films can be associated with attempts to visually map the unrepresentable totality of the world system in the age of multinational capitalism (Jeff Kinkle, Alberto Toscano, 2015; Fredric Jameson, 1992). In doing so, cinema can be conceived as a model that forges and registers images and figures that in turn mediate new spaces, temporalities, and subjectivities within a global economy. Against this backdrop, the paper will consider how Italian documentary cinema elaborates a visual and aesthetic model that allows us to rethink cinema’s capacities to participate in the processes of visualising deindustrialisation, financialisation and labour changes. Firstly, I will consider how Italian cinema reshapes the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. The aim is to emphasise how Fordist production processes, embodied mainly by the industrial sphere, coexist in a post-Fordist scenario where the economy shifts towards the service sector. Two case studies are pivotal to my analysis: Il mio paese (Daniele Vicari, 2006) and I sogni del lago salato (Andrea Segre, 2015). I will consider how these documentaries challenge the question of the representation and representability of labour as such. Using the notion of the distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2004; 2014), I will show how both films not only produce a critique of the economic system, but also allow us to reconfigure alternative visions of the economic system in Italy.
Bio
Jacopo Francesco Mascoli is a PhD student in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick (UK). His project focuses on representations of labour in contemporary post-2007 crisis Italy, ranging from documentary to experimental and fictional cinema. More specifically, the project aims to map how cinema has represented changes in the Italian economy, such as deindustrialisation, immaterial labour, logistics and others. His research interests include Italian and European cinema more broadly; film philosophy, especially post-representational paradigms of the cinematic image; and formal and stylistic aesthetics in relation to sociological issues in film.
Email: Jacopo-Francesco.Mascoli@warwick.ac.uk
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Min-Kyoo Kim (PhD candidate in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge): Austerity, nuclear anxiety and the archive: Thatcher’s politics of precarity in Threads (1984)
This paper explores how Threads (1984) mediates the contemporaneous precarity of austerity and nuclear anxiety in Thatcherite Britain. Threads was produced and released by the BBC at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s political power. Through the kitchen-sink realism of screenwriter Barry Hines, Threads observes the impact of Thatcher’s neo-liberal economics on the working-class in Sheffield, where local residents are preoccupied by the lack of industry, not the prospect of nuclear war. Threads further collapses the distinction between fiction and reality, by broadcasting real-life reports of protests against Thatcher’s controversial decision to host U.S. nuclear weapons at Greenham Common. Thatcher’s belligerence is shown to contribute towards the outbreak of nuclear war, which un-threads the social fabric of Britain, with atomised family units scrapping for survival in the absence of public institutions. I thus argue that Threads’s vision of nuclear apocalypse is not only a cautionary tale against Thatcher’s militarism, but also an enaction of her shibboleth that “there’s no such thing as society”. In this dystopia, Ruth and her daughter Jane directly exchange their labour for food in a primitive economy. As Ruth dies, Jane’s last words to her are “work, work, work”, suggesting that even familial dynamics are stripped down to labour relations. Concomitant with this breakdown of society, I discern how Threads foregrounds the precarity of the archive. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism, I reflect on how Threads demonstrates nuclear war’s “remainder-less destruction” of the archive. Derrida perceived that this destruction would leave no traces of literature, foreclosing any possibility of memory. This dystopia is evident when Jane departs from Ruth’s deathbed, and leaves behind a rare trace of pre-nuclear civilisation, her father’s cherished Handbook of Foreign Birds. Threads thus indicates the precarity of memory itself in a world predicated on the politics of austerity and nuclear anxiety.
Bio
Min-Kyoo is a PhD candidate in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. He previously studied for a BSc in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge. Drawing upon this interdisciplinary background, Min-Kyoo’s research project explores how the entanglement of nuclear power in discourses of classism, racism and imperialism occludes the historical and ongoing proliferation of atomic violence. He explores these complex visualities of the nuclear in a range of different national contexts and media, from the experimental photo-roman of La Jetée, documentary footage of the Chernobyl disaster, to historical and contemporary North Korean propaganda. Min-Kyoo’s research project is funded by the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities.
Email: mkk44@cam.ac.ukv
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Anne O’ Brien (Associate Professor in Gender and Production Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University): Precarious Women: Inequality and Screen Production
This paper on ‘Precarious Women: Inequality and Screen Production’ investigates how women are rendered doubly precarious relative to men through their experiences of gender inequality as workers in film and television production industries in Ireland. Examining women’s place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This presentation goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at work. It argues that women experience exclusion at a structural level through horizontal and vertical segregation into and out of particular roles in screen production. It also documents how the culture of screen work- with precarious networked freelance models of recruitment and progression – mitigate against the involvement of women. It investigates the marginalisation of mothers in particular who often carry disproportionate care burdens. In addition the presentation touches on the subjectivities that are generated in response to women’s experiences of inequality. Women internalize their experience of gender inequality by adopting various beliefs: that gender does not matter in the workplace; that the workplace is now post-feminist; or that the self as liminal, neither fully included nor excluded from the industry but existing in a constant twilight zone of limited and precarious participation. Drawing on detailed academic research and empirical investigation this paper will set out the context for precarious women working in screen production industries. (262w)
Bio
Dr Anne O’ Brien is Associate Professor in Gender and Production Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University in Ireland. Her research examines gender inequalities in film and television production, motherhood and inequality in Creative Industries and the position of graduates as new entrants to media work. She is the author of Women, Inequality and Media Work (Routledge, 2019), Media Work Mothers and Motherhood (Routledge, 2020) and Media Graduates at Work (2021). She has published numerous articles on inequalities in screen production for journals such as Gender, Work and Organisation, Media Culture and Society, Television and New Media, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries.
Email: Anne.OBrien@mu.ie
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Melissa Oliver-Powell (Lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York): ‘Domestic Waste Only’: Welfare Policy and Precarious Parenting in Ken Loach’s Austerity Dramas
In a late scene in Ken Loach’s 2019 film Sorry We Missed You, a struggling gig-economy worker laboriously peddles a child’s bike down an alleyway in search of his fracturing family, passing as he does a sign on a communal dustbin that reads ‘domestic waste only’. The meanings of ‘domestic waste’ here are multiple: the composition recalls abjectifying political and media rhetoric in 21st-century Britain of ‘waste populations’, ‘budgetary waste’, and ‘problem families’, which seek to legitimise austerity agendas promoting particularly punitive cuts to welfare and family services. It also reflects a concern in Loach’s UK-based activist filmmaking in which the intimate, domestic sphere of the precarious family is increasingly foregrounded to explore and emotionalise critiques of neoliberal policy regimes and their human costs. This paper analyses representations of parenting in precarity and the domestic impacts of neoliberal welfare policymaking in two of Loach’s post-2008 ‘austerity dramas’, I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019). I initially examine the visual strategies of Loach’s domestic social realist aesthetics, which I argue are deployed in these films to suggest an alternative, more compassionate and more intersubjective way of looking at precarious families to the punitive surveillance of the state, or the abject caricatures of right-wing media. From here, I take a critical approach to examining the genderedness of these domestic images, considering the ways in which working-class mothering subjectivities, and particularly suffering maternal bodies, are politicised within these films, questioning the balance between rhetorical victimhood and creative resilience. I ultimately suggest that, whilst Loach’s activist domestic films do valuable work in exposing the ideological and material violences of punitive welfare policies, they also often draw unsettlingly on an ‘exposed’ maternal body in pain to channel the most cathartic expressions of state brutality and precarious life.
Bio
Melissa Oliver-Powell is a lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, where she teaches on topics across world cinemas, literature, and feminist and queer theory. She has previously lectured in film and literature at the University of Exeter and UCL, where she received her PhD in 2018, with a dissertation on motherhood in British and French film in the 1960s and 1970s. Her research focuses on issues of mothering, politics and social justice in film. She has published on topics including representation of abortion, care and visual ethics, mothering subjectivities, mother-blame, and mothering, migration and racism in British, French, Senegalese, and American film. Her debut monograph, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969, was published by Berghahn Books in 2023.
Email: melissa.oliver-powell@york.ac.uk
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Wikanda Promkhuntong (Lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies. Mahidol University) Screen labour precarity and potentiality in (post)-pandemic Thailand
This paper extends conversations on de-westernizing creative labour (Alacovska & Gill, 2009) to take a closer look at film and screen labour in the context of Thailand. The local film and screen industries have long engaged with Hollywood runaway productions as sub-contractors and post-production providers. In the last two decades, its screen sectors have also grown through star-auteurs with transnational co-productions, regionally-driven genre films and, more recently, Boy’s Love series. None of the above productions have been discussed in relation to labour until the pandemic. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Thai screen workers during and after the COVID-19, the paper offers an overview of the start of labour-conscious movement as young film graduates reclaim public discourses on screen production as revenue for the state and instead introduce notions of labour activism and below-the-line as a class system via online platforms, in line with political protests and societal progressive politics. Through this movement, conditions that resonate with creative labour precarity in the Anglo-European context can be seen through local lenses with different hierarchical and intersectional range of workers involved. The contrasting experiences of film crew reflect precarity gaps conditioned by works in foreign or local productions, along with circumstances of age groups and social relations. These ranges from film crew who were able to treat the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime holiday after long years of constant work, a period to re-train and reflect, to those pulling all resources and skills to find work outside the creative industry to supplement the lack of income. Apart from this inter/national precarity division, the paper proposes exploring alternative geographical imagination of screen labour through the ways those who went back to work translate and hustle with restrictions on filmmaking imposed by different authorities and a range of care practices and the post-pandemic recomposition of labour.
Bio
Email: wikanda.pro@mahidol.edu
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Akriti Rastogi (PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University) Practices of Care in Precarity: Mapping Cine-Work on Social Media
How do we arrive at an understanding of care given that exploitation is baked into the work of creative industries including media industries? Is it even germane to begin thinking about care as a critical inquiry in studying media industries? And, if so, how can we go about doing the same? Studies in the Hindi film and media industry have annotated cultures of precarity, particularly in below-the-line workers in the film industry (Mehta,2019; Ganti, 2016; Govil, 2013). However, with the growing multimedia presence of film workers on social media platforms, the offline workspace starts to bleed into online stories. My paper argues for a counter-reading of precarity by understanding and locating ‘practices of care’ in some inherently exploitative creative industries, including the Hindi film industry. While social media accounts of film professionals are coded to represent the lifestyle of highly aspirational cine-work, my paper examines these codes in fleeting Instagram stories shared by stylists and other assistants on a film set who coordinate an ecosystem of pro-filmic practices that serve the promotional purpose of a film. In other words, within the neoliberal logic of social media, the labour of the film crew gets enunciated as the practices of care. While there is an unsaid contract of cooperation and collaboration on a film project, these practices are woven around the promotional labour of a film. Indeed, while this serves the purpose of film promotions, as soon as the film project ends, these professionals double up their social media presence to account for the media portfolio showcasing the platform labour they performed in service to the film. The cruel optimism of growth narratives in the media industry on one end, and the invisible platform work on the other, this paper will annotate the pain points of mapping precarity in a platformized Hindi film industry.
Bio
Ms. Akriti Rastogi is a PhD candidate in cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research aims at mapping the monetization channels of cinema effects using the lens of Web 2.0. The project examines the shifting terrains of the contemporary Hindi film industry. The key areas of analysis are film promotion strategies, stardom, exhibition spaces, and other “Bollywoodized” paratexts. Ms. Rastogi received the ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship for this study. She has an MPhil degree in cinema studies, for which she studied web-based do-it-yourself filmmaking circuits in urban India. This helped her analyze the sites of competition and collaboration between the mainstream Hindi film industry and amateur filmmaking circuits. After completing her MPhil, Ms. Rastogi worked as a transmission executive for All India Radio, New Delhi. She received her Master of Arts degree in mass communication at the AJKMCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Through the Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, she is studying the transnational flows of cinema effects in the global Hindi film industry. She is analyzing the discourses around transmedia platforms for paratexts, and the shifts in contemporary work cultures of this media industry that has a ubiquitous presence in the digital era.
Email: akriti.miranda@gmail.com
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Elina Reitere (independent film scholar and critic, 2nd editor-in-chief of the Latvian film magazine kinoraksti.lv): Better than in Europe. Precarity in Latvian film industry as will-o’-the-wisp of European values
The Baltic states have been regarded as “the paragons of neoliberalism”, because they, after regaining the independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, accepted the “radical neoliberal” version of economic development. This choice was grounded in the wish to cut any ties or resemblances to the “collectivism” or “state control” of the Soviet period. This strategic move can be regarded in the framework of decolonization from Latvia´s Soviet past. But the case study of Latvia and decolonization has to be put into a broader historical perspective, taking into account the community of values of a small nation. Even if, as Dzenovska has observed, this discourse puzzles Western political liberalism, because it is dangerously close to backward nationalism and even fascism. The entho-territorial nationalist sensibilities of the Eastern-Europeans have for quite some time been regarded as not-yet-European. But the version of neoliberal precarity as encountered in Latvian film industry, is directly linked to this particular set of problems, even if at home sometimes disguised as European values. This paper will tackle the contradicting discourses and factual paradoxes that underlay the Latvian film industry on a daily basis and ensure its development even in times of different kinds of crisises.
Bio
Dr. phil. Elīna Reitere is an independent film scholar and critic, 2nd editor-in-chief of the Latvian film magazine kinoraksti.lv. She studied audio-visual culture, film, media and performance studies in Riga and Mainz (Germany). She wrote her dissertation on narration in slow cinema (published in 2018). Her latest academic publication – an article in the monograph Latvian Cinema: Recent History, 1990-2020 (2021) – deals with the careers of different generations of Latvian filmmakers after 1990. Now she is developing it into a book on social history of Latvian film. For her academic film reviews she has been nominated for Normunds Naumanis Prize for Art criticism in Latvia in 2019.
Email: elina.reitere@gmx.de
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Alessia Risi (Lecturer in Italian and Film at the University of Exeter): Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?’ Exploring Precarity in Aftersun
This proposal seeks to contribute to the discourse on precarity in contemporary cinema by examining its nuanced treatment in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (UK, 2022). Overwhelmingly praised since it premiered at Cannes in May 2022, I argue that this moving debut feature also provides a compelling canvas for exploring the multifaceted dimensions of precarity, both in its aesthetic and narrative forms. Little “happens” plot-wise throughout the film – we basically watch the last days of a father and daughter’s summer vacation in a Turkish resort near the turn of the millennium. Soon, however, we realise that the narrative of Aftersun in reality unfolds as a de facto flashback from the adult daughter’s point of view, one that interposes fragments of memories with glimpses of an ever fleeting present. Neither time-period is stable, which is evident in the film’s fragmented form, which I interpret as a commentary on the alienation of vulnerable characters at a turning point in contemporary history. Armed as we are with the historical hindsight that comes from two resultant decades of socio-economic turbulence, my central argument is that, as viewers, we can register these moments as both the final fragments of a happy childhood and more broadly a political complacency that environmental and economic decay will soon shatter. Such decay finds expression in the film’s formal construction which, from the outset, gestures toward a disaster that is about to happen.
Bio
Alessia Risi is a Lecturer in Italian and Film at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and span from Italian contemporary literature to Italian cinema, screen and cultural studies. She has published articles on Italian crime and noir fiction, women’s writing, reader response, and visual narratives.
Email: a.risi@exeter.ac.uk
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Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera (Film and Media scholar teaching at U-TAD University of Technology and Digital Art Madrid, Spain): Female adolescence and animals in recession films Nevia (Nunzia De Stefano, 2017) and Colo (Teresa Villaverde, 2017)
Contemporary European cinema insistently depicts animals in association with female teenagers. A variety of recent films connect the vulnerable teenage protagonists with non-human animals that play a relevant part in the story. Some examples include Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), Sarah Plays Werewolf (Katharina Wyss, 2017), or Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009). Among this trend, a few films show the traces of the economic recession in narratives connecting teenage girls with animality. This presentation thus explores the connection between precarity, animality, and female adolescence in the films Nevia (Nunzia De Stefano, 2019) and Colo (Teresa Villaverde, 2017). On the one hand, the temporality of these films highlights the precarity of the girls’ coming of age. Their transition to adulthood is marked both by the vulnerability of their own female teenage bodies as well as of their families’ economic struggles. Lauren Berlant highlights the importance of impasses in economic crises, as they destroy the linear fantasy that should lead individuals to a good life. In these coming of age narratives, the protagonists’ vulnerability is not only symptomatic of their assigned social role as girls, but also of their diminished socioeconomic status. In addition, the protagonists in Nevia and Colo have close relationships with non-human animals. Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon argue cinematic representations of animals point at social relations and “distributions of power.” Contemporary cinema often links animals to diminished agency, but this presentation looks for the constructive connections between the shared precarity of the girls and the animals. It must be noted that the analyzed films come from Portugal and Italy, which, along with Spain and Greece, were pejoratively referred to as “pigs” after the 2008 recession. Ultimately, this presentation explores the potential alliances between girls and animals in response to their shared vulnerabilities.
Bio
Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera is Film and Media scholar teaching at U-TAD University of Technology and Digital Art (Madrid, Spain), where she is the Academic Director of the Animation department. Her work focuses on three predominant topics: transnational cinemas, especially in Iberoamerica and Europe; the role of women in contemporary European media; and the audiovisual literacy and media habits of the Generation Z, with special attention to interactive media. In 2017, Cristina received the Ruth McQuown Award for the Humanities of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in recognition of her commitment to diversity and overcoming barriers through her research and teaching style. She has also participated in film festivals such as San Sebastián and has experience working in 3D animation, as she worked in the production of the award-winning Mortadelo y Filemón (Javier Fesser, 2014). Cristina received her PhD from the University of Florida in 2018 and her B.A. from the University Carlos III of Madrid 2011.
Email: cristina.ruiz@u-tad.com
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Aidan Power (Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter): Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Authoritarian Liberalism and Precarious Witnesses in Lazzaro Felice
This paper will consider Lazzaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher; Italy, 2018) as counter-history to the neoliberal takeover of the modern Italian state. Specifically, it will argue that the film’s characters serve as precarious first-hand witnesses to an authoritarian liberalist hijacking of democracy, the logical endpoint of which is a return to fascism. This reading will be contextualised against the seemingly perpetual cycle of economic and political crises that have beset Italy from the establishment of the Second Republic in 1994 to the election of Giorgia Meloni in 2022, positing that the resurgence of the far-right has been facilitated by a deliberate, technocratically executed separation of economic and democratic spheres, a process that Lazzaro addresses in both its content and form. The eponymous Lazzaro, in this reading, emerges as a Benjaminian Angel of History, one who would like to warn us about the impending disaster but keeps getting blown off track by the neoliberal storm that we call progress.
Bio
Aidan Power is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter, where he teaches amongst other things, film history and theory. His research has a focus on the relationship between visual media and crises (socio-political, economic, ecological), and he has written about topics including climate migration, Black Mirror, John Ford, Michael Haneke, the epic Swedish poem Aniara, and European film funding. He published books on science fiction cinema and more recently has begun a new project on precarious cinematic flight in the Anthropocene.
Email: a.power3@exeter.ac.uk
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Giuseppe Previtali (Assistant Professor of Film and Visual Studies at the University of Bergamo): Pixellated Uprisings: Politics and/of Precarity in Revolts’ videos
Since the late XXth century, mass uprising has been one of the key phenomena of contemporary politics, to an extent that the new century has been labeled an age of revolts. In various parts of the world (from the Middle East to Taiwan, from the US to Iran and France), vast group of people variously excluded from the master narratives of neo-liberalism grouped themselves and acted to produce a momentary occupation of the public space. As various scholars (from Judith Butler to Nicholas Mirzoeff, just to name two of the more influential) have noted, these actions promote (and perform) a new understanding of what we can define as political, while at the same time highlighting the condition of structural precarity that many subjectivities are doomed to experience. Given the unprecedented relevancy that the visual has in these processes, it is urgent for scholars to start addressing the visual practices of uprising, to promote a more nuanced understanding of the role played by images in the political sphere, especially in a deconstructing way. Considering both theoretical issues and specific case studies (focusing mainly on the so-called Arab Springs), the paper will try to define a possible transcultural framework for the study of the role played by moving images in contemporary uprisings. If photographs and still images have been scrutinized as a veichle of political struggles, films and videos, while playing a crucial part in the contemporary media ecosystem, are still overlooked in this respect. As the paper will try to demonstrate, it is precisely through these media that the feeling of shared precariousness is alchemically transformed in a new and radical political claim. The fragility of moving images, dangerously taken in spite of all and virally shared online, becomes here the precondition of a new politics of collectivity and care.
Bio
Giuseppe Previtali is Assistant Professor of Film and Visual Studies at the University of Bergamo. His main research interests are connected with the extreme forms of contemporary visuality, the issue of media literacy and the critical epistemology of digital humanities. He published extensively on these topics and he is the author of the books: The Last Taboo. Filming Death Bewteen Spectacularization and Gaze Politics (2020), Visual Literacy (2021) and What are the Digital Humanities (2022).
Email: giuseppe.previtali@unibg.it
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Seung-hoon Jeong (Assistant Professor of film and electronic arts at California State University Long Beach) Peacefully Pervasive Precarity: Nomadland, or, No Country for Old Frontiersmen
Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland portrays the American precariat, who opt for homelessness over pursuing the American dream of homeownership. Inflicted by the Great Recession, the van-dwellers in the film embrace their minimalist lifestyle as a deliberate choice to break free from the harsh capitalist system that stripped them of their possessions. However, I illuminate the illusion of liberation perpetuated by this very system, as Amazon provides seasonal employment that supports their freedom in the mode of ‘included exclusion.’ Being an outsider of the system is its intended outcome. Consequently, the nomad camp does not appear as a rebellious Hippie commune but as a self-sustaining New Age network adapted to flexible neoliberalism. It lacks political unity or utopian alternatives, serving as an ecological refuge for nomads to choose on the fringes of the economic world. I here emphasize the protagonist’s pivotal decision to depart from the camp and even a friend’s home. When she finds more comfort sleeping in her car than in a bedroom, her compulsive nomadism signifies pathological individualism. It echoes the Last Man’s nihilistic contentment with self-isolation, internalizing neoliberal atomization and even privatizing outdoor spaces. Her foray into nature does not lead to a genuine outside, failing to experience the Romantic sublime or the American nationalism associated with scenic landscapes. The ‘Go-West’ frontier spirit, which underpinned the American myth of robust individualism and its potential for public good, has now been co-opted by the self-managing DIY culture of gig workers who erroneously perceive themselves as liberated. The Deleuzian nomadism of deterritorialization has been reterritorialized into the Deleuzian control society. In the current context, it is worth noting the increasing climate anomalies, particularly in California, where the nomad roams. This precarization of nature itself, exacerbated by the neoliberal economy, implies precarity permeating ‘everything everywhere all at once.’ The solitary nomad, no longer a pioneer of the old frontier, may have nowhere to go as her social precarity becomes naturalized in the peaceful outside the system. This double bind merits further scrutiny and exploration.
Bio
Seung-hoon Jeong is an assistant professor of film and electronic arts at California State University Long Beach. A former assistant professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, he has held a visiting professorship at Columbia University and a few Korean universities. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media (Routledge, 2013) and Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2023). He also co-edited The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology (Routledge, 2021), guest-edited the special issue of Studies in the Humanities titled “Global East Asian Cinema: Abjection and Agency” (2019), and co-translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature into Korean (Moonji, 2013).
Email: 99sj81@gmail.com
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Giovanni Salvagnini Zanazzo (Postgraduate Student at Padua University) «on l’aura la vie tranquille»: Duras’ Existential Precarity, Nowadays
The paper wants to start from the representation of existential precarity in the works of the writer-director Marguerite Duras, specially in films such as Baxter, Vera Baxter (1976) and books like La vie tranquille (1944). In this text, the female protagonist is a 26-years-old worker in the house of her parents, sustained with an agricultural vocation. She has no desire to change her situation. She says, any form of life is preferable to another: no perspective is worth an effort. After a period alone to the beach, during which she explores the feeling of being psychologically separated from herself, she returns home and decide to get married, without joy, only to definitively seal her place in the world. In her monologue she insists: «on l’aura la vie tranquille» – the “quiet life” that is the one conducted in the family’s farm, solid basis to pursue that experiment on himself which is the game of depersonalization. What could be such a tale, nowadays? Working precarity challenges the possibility of developing a philosophy, also if it is already a philosophy of the crisis and of vital atony. We can argue that economic precarity prejudges the exploration of the existential one, although the latter may seem to be a universal and a-temporal instance. The continue solicitation from the changeable industrial world constrains the individual to a super-exposition of itself, due to the necessity of remaining appetible. The curriculum vitae, with its rules and its quest toward efficiency and competition, is the contemporary economic instrument of self-writing, substituting forms of slower and potentially more troubling analysis such as the Journal intime. Individual must stay loyal and deep-rooted to himself, if he wants to remain inserted in capitalist dynamics.
Bio
Giovanni Salvagnini Zanazzo graduated in Literary Theory at Padua University with a thesis on The Invention of Japan: Paths of Cultural Reception in Twentieth-Century French Literature. He’s now completing binational course in Modern Philology — Italian and French Studies at Padua University and Université Grenoble Alpes. He has published articles in academic journals on japonisme, Italian writers (Landolfi, Manganelli) and questions of contemporary literary theory. His interests involve the problem of individual identity, of its redefinition in contact with the Other, and of geniality. ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3095-8511.
Email: giovanni.salvagninizanazzo@gmail.com
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Aatika Singh (PhD from the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University): On Ephemerality of Emancipation-The Dalit Heroine in Karnan
In Tamil Nadu, the film industry remains a significant site of caste contestations. The vastly expanding Tamil cinema has been making waves both nationally and globally. Out of a range
of films that are being produced every day, it is the anti-caste Tamil cinema that has been the subject of much debate as well as consistent popularity. This cinema has directly impacted the cultural as well as the political sphere. However, as much as caste identity forms a conscious thread in these films, ‘gender precarity’ remains a contentious category due to the marginal depiction of the Dalit heroine. The social and political consequences of such a representation invariably end up in creating newer forms of oppression. This ephemerality of equality and emancipation that is being increasingly depicted in anti-caste Tamil films necessities an inquiry into the gender dynamics of these select films, specifically Karnan (2021) directed by Mari Selvaraj. Karnan, widely appreciated as an epistemological and political act to have established a different cinematic category, offers a new possibility of recognition and identification. As widely documented, the audience transforms after such cinematic experiences despite there being no signifier of Dalit feminism, agency or participation as the signs, weapons and dialogue all speak to male dominance. This phallic affirmation reaffirms authority in terms of caste but not gender, clearly reflecting the precarious social reality of our times. The claim of an alternative community being generated at the site of these films only caters to an androcentric distribution of sensibilities. The aesthetics of such anti-caste experience through the spectacle of cinematic charisma in which melodrama as a cultural mode encourages identification with the victim renders Karnan, at best a male heroic tale of emancipation and equality and therefore ephemeral.
Bio
Aatika Singh is a scholar and artist. She is currently pursuing her PhD from the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her research is on the philosophical and political connections of aesthetics to Dalit cultural history and assertion. Her doctoral project looks at the issue of defacement of Ambedkarite iconography, its amalgam with legality and the intervention of critical caste studies. After her graduation in law, Aatika was briefly employed with Navayana Publishing. She finished her masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 2022. She has been published with The Hindu, TwoCircles, The Wire, Cafe Dissensus, Trolley Times, Indian Cultural Forum et al. She is passionate about third world solidarities, emotional labour, and continental philosophy.
Email: aatikasingh16@gmail.com
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Evdokia Stefanopoulou, (Lecturer, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki): Necropolitics and ontological precarity in Vesper (2022)
Precarious futures of ecological devastation and social collapse abound in contemporary speculative cinema, echoing anxieties of our Anthropocene era. One recent film that exemplifies this trend is Vesper (2022), a film that features a young girl in a dystopian world where the elites are living in the futuristic enclosed spaces of the Citadel while the underclass people are struggling in the harsh environments of the outside world. Vesper’s female protagonist, tries to survive both from the unwelcoming environment and from a “social existence…which …confer[s] upon…[her] the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40). In doing so, this film enacts a state of precariousness where the protagonist, like the marginalized people in global neoliberalism, have to endure unstable living conditions, harsh environments and limited resources—a precarious condition that renders her less-than-human. At the same time, the film portrays the non-human biosphere as a living organism that similarly tries to sustain its existence, thus intermingling the human with the non-human in a common state of vulnerability. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s (2019) concept of necropolitics and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) posthuman theory, this paper analyzes Vesper as a cinema of ontological precarity. I propose this term to indicate the precariousness of life-itself and describe a cinema that portrays “a shared sense of vulnerability” between humans and nonhumans (Braidotti 2013, 40) in the face of the Anthropocene, one that blurs the strict boundaries between categories of being. This ontological precarity is expressed mainly through the protagonist’s interconnection with harsh environments, and especially through the film’s parallelism between the precarious existence of both underclass people and synthetic life forms. At the same time, as the film’s ending suggests, this cinema of ontological precarity does not only portray vulnerability, limitations, and dangers, but also it offers alternative possibilities that move beyond the death-worlds of necropolitics.
Bio
Dr. Evdokia Stefanopoulou teaches in the MA program “Film and Television Studies” at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. She recently completed her postdoctoral research which was funded by the Special Account for Research Grants, AUTh. She received her PhD in 2019 from the School of Film, AUTH with the highest grade (A with distinction). She received a scholarship for PhD candidates from the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) (2017-2019). She has published and presented papers in international conferences about science fiction film and television, gender, and posthumanism, among others. She is the author of The Contemporary Science Fiction Film in Hollywood. A Social Semiotics of Bodies and Worlds (Bloomsbury Press, 2023).
Email: evstefan@yahoo.gr
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Ian Towers (Professor of management at SRH Berlin University of Applied Science): Precarity in television comedies: Giving up, fighting back, opting out
When the economic conditions in society bring about new forms of employment, these will be represented in the products that the culture industry produces. And as modes of production change, so do forms of domination, and as forms of domination change, so too do forms of resistance. The presentation examines two themes: how precarity is depicted in fictional narratives, and what forms of resistance are shown. I use the genre of the television comedy provide examples, because it often reflects and comments on societal norms, values, and issues. In comedies we can see the multifaceted strategies employees employ to confront and mitigate precarity. Through intricate character development, plot dynamics, and narrative devices, these narratives shed light on the lived experiences of individuals in a precarious workforce. Three comedy series will be analysed. Superstore is a US network series that ran from 2015 to 2021, set in a Walmart-like retail store. It is formally a typical situation comedy, and over the course of its life introduced some labour-relations themes. The second series is Die Discounter, a German series (2021-2022)based on the Dutch comedy Vakkenvullers. Set in a small branch of a low-cost supermarket chain, it is a semi-improvised mockumentary that is available only on Amazon Prime. The third series is Canadian and is also a mockumentary, but it shows completely different ways of dealing with precarity. Trailer Park Boys’ main characters are forever looking for ways to survive, sometimes through employment, sometimes through crime, sometimes through money-making schemes. The analysis of these three comedy series provides insight into the representation of precarity and what forms of resistance are presented and how they are presented.
Bio
Ian Towers is a professor of management at SRH Berlin University of Applied Science. His research is interdisciplinary and international by nature. He is interested in the changing nature of work and how this is having an impact on employment relationships, in particular, the growth in alternative employment relationships (precarity, gig economy) and their effect on individuals in terms of their identity and how they are organising in non-traditional ways to improve their situation. He is also carrying out research into how cultural products (novels, films, plays, art) both reflect and influence the ways in which business works.
Email: ian.towers@srh.de
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Karim Townsend (PhD student at Cambridge Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge): Environmental pollution, precarious bodies: Hollywood eco-cinema and social impact entertainment
This paper examines questions of ecological precarity in relation to filmic representations of environmental pollution and chemical contamination. In particular, the paper focuses on the ecological dimensions of the film Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019), whose narrative portrays the real-life story of lawyer Robert Bilott’s legal fight against the DuPont corporation, known for causing the contamination of American towns with unregulated chemicals. These “forever chemicals”, known for their resistance to biodegradation, have been linked to a variety of health problems and diseases, enacting a slow violence against human and animal bodies, as well as natural environments. The paper contextualizes the film’s depiction of these forever chemicals in relation to their origins in the US military, the beginning of the atomic age, and the ecological discourses that emerged thereafter. I think alongside Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality to examine the ecologically inclined rhetoric through which the film, and eco-film generally, give expression to the materiality of both human and nonhuman embodiments, as well as the porous assemblages of cross-species contact by which they are shaped. The paper also considers the film’s promotional campaign – centered on consciousness-raising in relation to the real-life material impact of anti-environmental and neoliberal deregulation policies on human and nonhuman life – and examines the effectivity of these campaigns and the social and political impact of environmental whistleblower films, as well as Hollywood activist films, more broadly.
Bio:
Karim Townsend is a PhD student at Cambridge Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge. His research explores connections between contemporary film and screen media, neoliberal culture, ecocriticism, and critical theory. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Review of Film and Television Studies and the European Journal of American Culture.
Email: ks576@cam.ac.uk
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Joule Zheng Wang (PhD researcher, University of Amsterdam): Living on the Precarity of Intrusion: Intrusion Complex and the Cinematic Figure of Real Estate Agent
The intrusion complex is a concept that I develop as a significant trope in contemporary cinema, unpacking the peculiar dialectic between the host and the intruder within the context of capitalism as a modern form of (reverse) primitive accumulation and precarisation. Under the preestablished material difference between the inside and the outside, the intrusion complex entails how a landless outsider, having no shelter nor access to means of production, is left with the choice of either dying from the ills of capitalism or being precarised as an intruder who enters a closed space not of their own and who parasites on the exploitative host at the risk of elimination and without the prospect of a synthesis. For this conference, I present one of the strangest figures in intrusion complex — the real estate agent. If, allegorically, the landlord is, to borrow Marx’s words in his Capital, Vol. I, a “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour” and for private property, then the real estate agent is a blood dealer, a mediator between the blood sucker and the blood provider, between the propertied capitalist and the propertyless proletariat, between being the pseudo-host who offers hospitality and the household labour, the intruder who squats in empty properties. Does this make the realtor a class traitor or a potential intruder? With a close reading of the real estate agent in the 1994 film Vive l’Amour, which tells the encounter of three precarious intruders in an uninhabited apartment in Taipei, I offer a contemplation on the cinematic representation of the intruder-host dialectic (Wang), the uncanny space of speculative economy (Vidler; Harvey), and the corporeality of homelessness (Kawash) mediated by the precarious, paradoxical figure of the real estate agent.
Bio
Natural from Guangdong, China and currently based in Amsterdam, Joule Zheng Wang has completed a Research MA in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. His research interest mainly lies in queer cinema and literature, body, sex, and HIV/AIDS, critically engaging with queer theory, Marxist theory, ontology, and psychoanalysis. He is also an editor for LA RIOT (Rialto Cinema, Amsterdam) and a programmer for Berlin NewGen Chinese Film Festival.
Email: joulewang1999@gmail.com
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Amy Wigelsworth (Senior Lecturer in French, Sheffield Business School at Sheffield Hallam University): Sandrine Bonnaire retrouvée’: space and mobility in Sans toit ni loi and Prendre le large
This article considers the parallels that can be drawn between two characters portrayed by Sandrine Bonnaire at distinct junctures in her film career: Mona, a young homeless woman whose wanderings are recounted retrospectively after her frozen corpse is discovered at the start of Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985), and Édith, a middle-aged woman who relocates to Morocco to keep her job with an offshored French textile factory in Gaël Morel’s Prendre le large/Catch the Wind (2017). The methodological approach draws on Kate Ince’s phenomenologically inspired reading of Varda, first to consider Mona and Édith in the context of a stasis-mobility dynamic identified as central to both films, and subsequently to consider a more proximate notion of space, with reference to the theory of haptic visuality explored by Laura Marks (2000). This approach aims to sensitise the reader to the experiences of precarity depicted in the films and to demonstrate how the quite specific questions of labour and relocation broached point to broader existential issues pertaining to identity and movement. Prendre le large illustrates the limits of the palimpsestic star image and, in counterpoint, the recuperative possibilities of a film depicting an immersive encounter with a foreign space.
Bio
I am a senior lecturer in French based in the Sheffield Business School at Sheffield Hallam University. I have published a Conversation article on French workplace fiction entitled ‘Five books on work by French authors that you should read on your commute’ and a book chapter entitled ‘Woman at Sea? Space and Work in Catherine Poulain’s Le grand marin,’ in the edited collection Taking Up Space: Women at Work in Contemporary France. My current work is on representations of the Other at work in French film.
Email: A.Wigelsworth@shu.ac.uk
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Melanie Wilmink (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea): AI monsters: machine visions of human-animal relations in the work of Unmake Lab
Long before the recent AI boom, South Korean artist duo Unmake Lab (Sooyon Song and Binna Choi) have used generative and machine-learning algorithms to highlight the precarious tension between human, nature, and technology. As Korea—like many other places—struggles with climate change, Unmake Lab has turned towards AI image generation processes to understand how these tools of capitalist technocratic extractivism mediate and construct our understanding of the ecological crisis. Their recent work “Ecology for non-future” interrogates the blurred boundaries between the virtual and the real as they train AI datasets on trail camera footage of endangered animals in a natural preserve that had been damaged by wildfires. The videos produced by this automated process often renders natural forms incompletely or with uncanny errors. As with Freud’s notion of the uncanny as familiar but wrong, which creates uncertainty, the AI image seems to imitate life but cannot quite accomplish it properly. In Unmake Lab’s images generated using trail cam photos, animals have agency to perform for the cameras that collect data, but these performances are always incomplete, only showing glimpses of the creature. The AI then has to interpolate the blanks, filling them in with information that may not resemble a living creature, and highlighting the flawed datasets that are used in training the algorithm. These monstrous creatures then become stand-ins for animals that are rarely seen due to habitat loss and climate change that dwindle their numbers. Through this work, the artists reveal the broken and unrealistic ways that AI understands the natural world while drawing analogies between predictive algorithms and fortune telling in order to question the appropriate use as well as the ethical implications of these tools.
Bio
Melanie Wilmink is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) where she investigates the art of the Korean smart-city. Specializing in the spectatorial dynamics of media art environments and art as embodied knowledge-production, her ongoing research emerged through her independent curating practice. She holds a PhD in Visual Art & Art History from York University (Toronto, Canada), with honours such as the 2014 Elia Scholars Award and a 2015 SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Past exhibitions include the Situated Cinema project (Pleasure Dome, 2015), Winter Warmer (Sidewalk Labs Toronto, 2019), and Re[new]All (Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology, 2021). She is the co-editor of the anthologies Sculpting Cinema (2018) and Landscapes of Moving Image (2021) with Solomon Nagler. www.melaniewilmink.com.
Email: A.Wigelsworth@shu.ac.uk
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Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Andrew V. Tackes Professor in Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame): Adrift: Precarity, Sexuality and Hitchhiking in Cinema
My forthcoming book Unhomed: Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema examines different cycles of American film that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed: failing, resisting, or opting out of the mandate for a home of one’s own. I examine tramps, soldier returning home from World Warr II, hitchhikers, street people, and the precariat in five distinct film cycles. These films suggest the degree to which ideas of home and fixity in America depend upon othering certain modes of mobility while promulgating others. They show a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as, on the one hand, deviance, or threat, and, on the other, as freedom and independence; and provide ways of thinking about what it means to be domiciled, who can choose to be unhomed, and how mobility is defined through privilege and precarity. Rather than marginal, these cycles of films about unhomed figures remind us that genres of precarity have been central to the American cinema (and American story) all along. These precarious narratives, in effect, unhome dominant narratives about American cinema as a cinema focused on ideologies of success and social mobility. My talk will discuss the long arc of precarity in United States cinema with particular attention to the ways in which precarity gets gendered. I will consider the figure of the woman adrift in the brief but intense cycle of hitchhiker films in the late 1960s and 1970s. As figures of voluntary precarity, women hitchhikers stake a claim for female mobility against security and stability, as a form of resistance, intimating the possibility, however tenuous and temporary, of extraordinary freedom. At the same time, they locate women in troubling logics of rape and sexual exchange and disclose a moral panic engendered by the seeming threat of young women running away from home, asserting their sexual freedom, and claiming their right to the road.
Bio
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is the Andrew V. Tackes Professor in Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, former president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is author of numerous books including The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 and Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction.
Email: Pamela.Wojcik.5@nd.edu
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Sophia Zhang (Assistant Head of Creative Media at the London campus of Liverpool Media Academy): Producing Chinese Reality TV: Power, Precarity and Working Cultures
As more and more TV producers look for business opportunities in other countries, China has become a market with massive potential for UK exporters. Emerging studies on production cultures aim to understand the everyday working practices of media practitioners worldwide. However, it remains difficult for academic scholars to explore the inner workings of China’s creative industries, and very few have had the chance to conduct ethnography. This paper presents behind-the-scenes stories to analyse the self-management of television practitioners facing challenges in their daily working practices while producing Chinese reality shows and how other factors contribute to the precarious status of television employment. The management styles have had a far-reaching influence on television employees, not only on how they should work together but also on how they decide to work together. Television management, from above, expected cooperation from employees even when orders were unrealistic and inexplicable. Many television practitioners have cleverly handled workplace relationships in a society where returns of favour are valued and turned things around under an unfavourable working environment. Moreover, employment policies, social welfare, China’s household registration system and the absence of trade unions also make it difficult for migrant workers to strive in media clusters in developed cities. In response to the adverse working environment, creative workers have learnt to build trust with colleagues via God-worshipping, hotel-sharing, and after-work socialising to form workplace allies. In summary, this presentation argues that Multiple external and internal factors have contributed to the precarious nature of the Chinese television industry, and in turn, the industry has shaped its workers into the new precariat of society.
Bio
Dr Zhang is the Assistant Head of Creative Media at the London campus of Liverpool Media Academy (LMA). She worked in China’s state-owned television and private TV production companies. She was awarded her PhD at Royal Holloway University of London in January 2022. After her graduation, she became a Film Lecturer at London South Bank University. She also has an MRes in Media and Gender Studies from Communication University of China and an MA in International TV Industries at Royal Holloway.
Email: sophiazhang92@gmail.com
The Cinematic Precarity Research Network 