Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in Contemporary Cinema [1st ed. 2020] 9783030459000

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Class on Screen The Global Working Class in Contemporary Cinema Sarah Attfield

Class on Screen

Sarah Attfield

Class on Screen The Global Working Class in Contemporary Cinema

Sarah Attfield School of Communication University of Technology Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-45900-0    ISBN 978-3-030-45901-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: eStudioCalamar Cover image: Jetta Productions Inc, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

As I was preparing this manuscript for final submission, the world changed. The COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world and many people died. The subsequent lockdowns in many countries also led to sudden, mass unemployment as businesses and whole industries closed in attempts to reduce the spread of the virus. The pandemic threw the precariousness of work into the spotlight and revealed the huge numbers of people working on temporary contracts with no job security, no sick pay, and in some countries such as the US, no health insurance and therefore limited or no access to healthcare. It also made visible many working-class occupations that have previously been dismissed in disparaging terms as ‘low-skilled’. The need for and importance of cleaners, shop workers, delivery drivers and warehouse workers, as well as nurses and other front-­ line health-related staff, became apparent and in a complete reversal, these formally undervalued roles were celebrated. Cleaners became heroes along with nurses and doctors. The COVID-19 crisis continues as I write this, and despite some countries starting to ease their lockdowns and move back towards the status quo, there are still many places around the world very badly affected. It will be a long road to recovery. But will the recovery include a continuation of this celebration of working-class occupations? Can the increase that’s been seen in union membership lead to a resurgence of union and worker power? Will there be any inroads into the fight against neo-liberalism? This all remains to be seen—but at the very least, there might be a little more respect for the work that millions of people do around the world every day, often for the lowest wages and in unsafe conditions. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COVID-19 hasn’t been the only monumental change in 2020. The rise in worldwide support for the Black Lives Matter movement has been deeply significant. African Americans have always been fighting for racial justice, along with Indigenous people and all people whose lands have been colonised. But the tipping point may have come with the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota. Floyd is one of too many Black people to have been killed by police, and Black people in America (and around the world) have had enough. And the protests against police violence have shown how class intersects with race—the majority of Black American victims of police violence are working class. The uprisings in US cities and the marches and rallies of support in many countries do indicate a turning point—the acknowledgement of the structures of oppression and the ways that systemic racism operates. And the need to dismantle these systems. This must occur at all levels, and while a book about film might seem inconsequential in the scheme of these struggles, the role of popular culture is a very important one. This book would not have happened without the support and encouragement of many people and I thank everyone who has listened to me rave about films and talk about class. I am the product of my working-class upbringing—I have held onto the working-class values taught to me by working-class family. My formal education and my current role as an academic does not mean I identify as middle class. I retain my workingclass characteristics and proudly assert that I am a working-class academic. It’s a strange position to occupy and I would have felt very alone without my working-class academic ‘family’—members of the Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) who have helped me to value my work and encouraged me to keep going with it. Good old-fashioned workingclass resilience and determination is probably what my WCSA friends would call it, (or sheer bloody-mindedness as my mum might have said). I have met and talked about my work with many wonderful WCSA people, but there are some who have become close and need to be acknowledged here: Barbara Jensen, whose work on the psychology of class has been so important; Sherry Linkon and John Russo—the founders of the Association; Jack Metzgar, who always went away and watched the films I presented on at conferences and then bailed me up to argue about them the following year; Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Terry Easton and Cherie Rankin—the ‘OG’ gang; Nathan Bryant, who shares my passion for grim film viewing and Tim Strangleman, who thinks I’m way too miserable. And so many colleagues over the years from around the world

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who have become friends and who inspire me with their intellect and activism and make me proud to be part of the WCSA—Lisa McKenzie, Matthew Sparkes, Joe Varga, Debbie Warnock, Sara Appel, too many to mention! There are many others to acknowledge. At UTS the students have given me much to think about and I have appreciated their enthusiasm and their criticisms. My most long-­standing film buddy at UTS has been Rayma Watkinson. We have taught film studies together for many years and have had endless discussions about films and our favourite filmmakers. I know that if Rayma likes a film, I will too. David Adlam has introduced me to many filmmakers and without him, I would not have known about Roy Andersson—and that would have been a tragedy! Sunil Badami has provided me with endless amounts of fascinating film trivia—his knowledge of film always astounds. And I have many super supportive colleagues in my faculty. But a special mention has to go to Liz Giuffre who has been unwavering in her support and encouragement and has never let me give up on anything. Liz is a genuine superstar and I’d be lost without her. My partner John has also watched numerous films with me and has shared my love for Taiwanese film, especially Tsai Ming-liang’s deliciously weird representations of life in Taiwan. I have always appreciated John’s willingness to watch whatever I suggest. And my kids have tolerated their mother’s post-screening mini-lectures on films that I’ve taken them to see. It must be annoying to have an academic parent. Finally, this book is really for my mum. She didn’t get to see it in print, but she was always my biggest fan and she would’ve been so proud. I would love to see a film about working-class women like her—a film that shows struggles and hardships but also the ability to have a laugh despite the circumstances. Women around the world like my mum who have worked so hard for so little financial reward but whose sharp minds and collective spirit have kept families and communities going. Women who refuse to give up the fight and who pass that fight on to their daughters. Thanks mum.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Work and Unemployment 27 3 Working-Class Culture 59 4 Immigration and Diaspora 89 5 Gender and Sexualities123 6 Race and Class in Australian Indigenous Film167 7 Afterword195 Filmography201 Index207

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book began more than 30 years ago with a trip to a cinema in central London. I was working at Hamley’s (the famous toy shop) and looking for cheap entertainment that wasn’t just the pub after work. So Katie Daniels and I ventured to a nearby cinema in Soho because we’d heard that the tickets were cheap on a Tuesday. We had no idea what we were going to see but we bought tickets for Pedro Almodóvar’s What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). It was the first subtitled film I’d watched. This was also the first film I’d seen with working-class characters that seemed real. I was hooked. Almodóvar was my ‘gateway’ director, and from that first film at the Metro Cinema, I sought out films from around the world and became a regular at the small independent cinemas in central London. This might not seem such a big deal, but for a shop girl from a London council estate, this was a huge deal. There weren’t many like me at the Metro and I have been told on many an occasion that working-class people don’t like art house cinema. But I saw myself represented in these films in ways that didn’t happen in the Hollywood films that flooded our suburban cinemas. I became an autodidact film buff and most likely annoyed everyone who accompanied me to the cinema. Fast forward 30 years and I find myself working as an academic and able to teach film studies and introduce to students some of the films I loved so much as a teenaged shop assistant. The irony of watching films with working-class characters in cinemas full of middle-class audience members has never been lost on me and it’s something that I’ve wrestled with for a long time. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Attfield, Class on Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7_1

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I have some ideas on audience that I will share later, but I will assert here that working-class people do like art house films, but that the opportunities to watch them are not often forthcoming. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the representation of working-class people world-wide in contemporary cinema to see what commonalities of experience might be presented and to consider the differences and cultural specificities on offer in some of these representations. There are many questions to be posed and not all will be answered, but I will try. My main point is that representation is important—it really does matter, and seeing yourself or others you recognise on screen is powerful when you are marginalised, ignored, demonised or ridiculed. Working-­ class people globally do most of the work. Working-class people make the products, deliver the products, dispose of the products, clean up after everyone, look after the children, the elderly, farm the land, build cities, cook food, serve food, cut hair, dig for those minerals needed to make those products or to provide energy. Working-class people form the majority but are the least represented. I take an interdisciplinary approach born from working-class studies. This means a focus on the lived experiences of working-class people (Linkon and Russo 2005, 11) which is why I started with an autobiographical note. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of autobiography in working-class studies (Attfield 2016, 46, 2017, 95) but I will repeat here that I come from a working-class background, and grew up on a north-east London high-rise council estate. I have first-hand experience of hardship, working-class work, poverty, classism, but also of community, resilience, culture and fun. I am white—ethnically Anglo-Saxon and so I have never experienced racism (although I have witnessed racism on many occasions). My class background gives me some authority to speak in class, but I am aware that I have benefited from white privilege. It is important therefore to be intersectional, which, according to Hill Collins and Bilge, requires an understanding of how ‘the major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability and age operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work together’ (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, 13). Intersectionality can be used as an ‘analytical tool’ (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, 12) to identify and understand how the layering effects of discrimination operate. The majority of the films discussed in this book illustrate the concept of intersectionality in concrete terms as characters face layers of oppression due to their class, race, ethnicity, sexuality,

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religion and gender. There is a major omission though—none of the films deals explicitly with disability and class which points to the lack of engagement with disability within the film (and other cultural products) more widely. The field of working-class studies allows the scholar to draw from disciplines that are relevant (Linkon and Russo 2005, 11), and in this book, I draw from film studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, economics, geography, literary studies, labour history and so on. This combination of theories and approaches might seem messy—and even within film studies, there are many different theories that I draw from. Within film studies, I dip into Marxist, feminist, semiotic, formalist, phenomenological and various other approaches using what has been described as a ‘piecemeal’ methodology favoured by some feminist scholars such as Freeland (2000, 356) who suggests that this helps to avoid a heavy ‘top-down’ approach where one theory is applied to everything. Although there is probably a general tone of Marxism because a Marxist approach is not just concerned with analysing films but also influencing production and looking for ways to effect change (Rushton and Bettinson 2010, 34). Film is a great pedagogical tool and has potential to be used to educate, inform and agitate (which is not mutually exclusive with entertainment).

Defining Class Before beginning any analysis of film, I need to define what I mean by ‘working class’. To suggest that there is an identifiable global working class might seem a bit ridiculous and I am not attempting to homogenise working-class experience. It’s probably quite obvious that working-class experience will be very different between one place and another, and not everyone who might fit into the categories I’m using to assign working-class membership will identify themselves as working class. So, the definitions are already problematic but necessary. How is class generally defined? There are various ways that scholars understand class. A classic Marxist approach divides people according to their position in a capitalist society. There are two main classes in this model—the bourgeoisie, who are the capitalists and own the means of production, and the proletariat, who sell their labour to the capitalists in a system of exploitation that requires the proletariat (working class) to ‘generate a social surplus product for those who own the means of production’ (Boucher 2014,

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31). It’s a neat model, but it doesn’t allow for nuance. And does it apply outside of the western world? Can we compare a factory worker in the UK with a rural farm labourer in India? The type of labour they sell, how much they get paid for it, and their working conditions will vary enormously. A more contemporary economic definition might consider the role of power (Zweig 2004, 4). This model suggests that in general, the working class are those who are reliant on others to buy their labour and who have little to no power in the workplace (Zweig 2004, 4). Understanding how power works also helps to differentiate between people who also sell their labour, but who have control and autonomy in terms of the work they do. Academics are paid by an employer, precariously employed academics are paid by the hour, but this does not make them working class. They might experience poverty due to a lack of regular hours and might be exploited by their institution. But this does not equal working-class status. The academic enjoys a good amount of autonomy in their workplace. They can usually choose how they will teach and what they research. Despite the constraints of the neo-liberal university and the work-intensification that makes many academics unwell due to overwork and stress, they are still not working class. A sociological approach to class uses the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and considers the cultural aspects of class, particularly that which is related to the consumption of art and culture—in other words, ‘taste’ (Bourdieu 1984, 6). In this model, class is not determined by income alone but also by the amounts of other types of capital that are accumulated. Middle- and upper-class people have high levels of cultural capital, which is the knowledge of things deemed important by middleand upper-class people, such as knowledge of high art, literature, and general knowledge, and which allows entry into middle- and upper-class spaces. Working-class people, due to lower levels of educational capital (formal education), often have lower levels of cultural capital and therefore find it difficult to be accepted into these middle- and upper-class spaces (Bourdieu 1984, 1). The lack of cultural capital means they are deemed inferior (intellectually and culturally) by their middle- and upper-­ class counterparts (Bourdieu 1984, 7). Bourdieu (1984) suggests that the type of culture consumed is used as a way of ‘legitimating social differences’ (7). Possession of cultural capital is necessary when attempting, for example, to gain employment in a middle- or upper-class dominated industry. Knowing the ‘right’ kinds of things means fitting into the middle- or upper-class world and is often more important than having the

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right kind of things—someone who is asset poor, such as an artist, but cultural capital rich, is likely to be accepted by the middle-class gatekeepers of the art world (the gallery owners and agents). There are other types of capital too—linguistic capital relates to the way people speak. Having a working-class accent can be a barrier to employment in certain industries as it is associated with lack (of education and of sophistication). And social capital relates to who people know. Those who have parents with connections in the industries they want to work in are definitely advantaged when seeking employment. These various forms of capital work together. So, as a young autodidact film buff and avid reader, I could talk to middle-class people about art house film and literature. But I knew nothing about classical music and I had a working-class accent which immediately marked me as different. Even as an academic I still feel the effects of this lack of cultural capital when talking to colleagues who grew up in households where reading works of literature and having academic discussions was totally normalised—colleagues who had access to music lessons, and holidays abroad. As Bourdieu explains, cultural capital is passed on through generations, and a child raised in a family with high levels of cultural capital gains a ‘head start’—an advantage which ‘enables the newcomer to start acquiring the basic elements of the legitimate culture’ and without any effort (Bourdieu 1984, 70–71). To understand how class works requires an approach that combines elements of classic Marxism, economics and the sociological model, because class is both complicated and messy but also quite clear in terms of how class structures create and reinforce inequality. The way the working class are defined needs to be ‘broad and inclusive’ (van der Linden 2014, 73) and those who are not usually included in the older, more binary models need to be considered. Class status is felt and is lived, and often for working-class people, it is quite clear who are the ‘haves’ and who are the ‘have nots’.

The Global Working Class With this in mind, who are the global working class? In the western world, the old image of blue-collar, manual male workers (the coal miner or the autoworker) is being replaced by one that is feminised and white collar (the call centre employee, the shop assistant). This change is real, with the decline of manufacturing in western countries and a move towards service industries. Many towns in western countries have been deindustrialised in

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the past three decades, and the local industries have moved on to places where the labour is cheaper, leading to a fragmentation of previous working-­class communities (Atzeni 2014, 5). Work is often gendered, and heavy industry in the west has been traditionally male-dominated. So, while there are still some heavy industry and blue-collar occupations in western countries, the old working class now consists of those workers, plus anyone engaged in routine work (particularly service work). If we apply the economic model, the working class is made up of people earning low wages (minimum wage where it exists), or who are, increasingly, employed precariously (part of the ‘gig’ economy or on casual or zero-­ hours contracts). These workers are part of the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors—meaning, they might be working formally for an established employer, or informally selling goods on the street (Bieler et al. 2008, 1). The power model also includes workers without autonomy in the workplace—those who have no, or very little say in their day to day tasks. And Bourdieu’s approach potentially broadens the category and includes people who lack high levels of educational, cultural and linguistic capital (so, culturally, a person could be considered working class if they have low levels of cultural capital even if they are earning a high wage). When we move away from the western world, we can see that the class categories are more defined and there is even less potential to move classes by gaining formal education or finding opportunities to be entrepreneurial. In some places, workers have less safeguards too in terms of industrial laws that help to protect workers in the west (Ness 2016, 6). The impacts of decades of neo-liberalism have been felt strongly in the developing world, and almost half of all employed people globally are now classified as the ‘working poor’ (Bieler et al. 2008, 9). And there are fewer safety nets such as access to unemployment benefits or affordable health care. But what unites working-class people across the world is the way they are exploited by employers and subject to the whims of the ruling classes. And where the older established working-class communities might have become more fractured due to deindustrialisation, there are new working-­ classes constantly forming (Silver 2014, 49).

Representation What is representation and why is it important? Representation, simply put, is the portrayal of people or things or places. But analysis of representation is also used to explore how people, things and places are portrayed.

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What sort of portrayals dominate? Are certain people always presented in a negative or stereotypical manner? Are some people not represented at all? The study of representation considers the ways we acquire our knowledge of people, things and places. What do we know, and how do we know it? A lot of what we learn about people comes from portrayals in the media and popular culture. If we aren’t from a particular group, or know people from that group, we learn about them via representations. And if those representations are limited, so will be our knowledge of that group (Hall 1997b, 258). Society rests on shared meanings (Hall 1997a, 2) and a general consensus can be created around these meanings. And the creation of these meanings is often controlled by those with the power and means to distribute them widely. If it serves the interests of the ruling classes to portray working-class people in a certain way (or to limit their portrayal), they can use their influence and power to do so. Working-class people are often marginalised, and despite being completely crucial to the running of societies and economies, working-class people don’t often see their own stories told in the public sphere. This is significant because representation matters. Linkon and Russo (2005) state that representations provide important insights into how working-class people are understood and viewed by various institutions such as ‘the media’ (12). We can use film to tell us the story of class in different places and times—films offer snapshots of contemporary society and can show us what might have changed across time and location and where commonalities might exist (Zaniello 2005, 153). Films are important because they help to create the sorts of values and norms that can dominate society and help to ‘make us think’ (Rushton and Bettison, 2). According to Dowd (2013), the way that films are consumed, usually in a ‘relaxed mode’ (60) belies the particular ideologies that underpin them, and audiences can be easily persuaded by what is seen on screen. bell hooks (2009) suggests that films provide a version of the real that can be ‘life-transforming’ to watch (1–2). According to Cardullo, the famous French film theorist André Bazin claimed that film could ‘grasp social, cultural, political and economic realities’ and each film operates as ‘social documentary’ (Cardullo 2012, 35–36); ideas that related to the realist film that Bazin advocated which is the favoured mode of the majority of filmmakers discussed in this book and therefore relevant here. And as mentioned previously, there is a strong educational potential to film and it is where many audiences learn about issues such as class, gender and race (hooks 2009, 3). According to hooks, there is a seduction at play when

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viewing films, and a potential flow of power that is one-sided (2009, 4). hooks acknowledges the ‘radical possibility’ of film, but also states that it is possible to be critical of a film that has brought enjoyment on various levels (2009, 135). Linkon and Russo stress the significance of using working-class voices as a ‘primary source’ (Linkon and Russo 2005, 12) for studying working-class life, and this is something that I grapple with when analysing film, because many of the films discussed in this book are made by filmmakers who are not working class.

History of Class on Screen How have working-class people been portrayed on screen? Cinema actually has a rich history of working-class representation. It isn’t too hard to find stories about working-class people in films from various eras and different parts of the world. It is worth including here some historical context for the contemporary films to be discussed later in this book, because the films mentioned in the following section have been influential for contemporary filmmakers and in many ways, created the space for subsequent working-class representation. America In the earliest days of filmmaking in the US, working-class stories tended to dominate. The films of the silent era in the US catered to working-class audiences, and according to Ross (1998), this early cinema was ‘remarkably sympathetic to the plight of the working class’ (4). From the beginnings, the producers of films saw the potential of the medium as entertainment and education (Ross 1998, 6), and they saw the benefits of targeting the largest groups as audiences (working-class people). Many films that were made told stories of workers and the poor and were instrumental in shaping the ways in which people viewed American society (Ross 1998, 10). Movie theatres of the silent era were mainly working-class spaces, and going to see a film was a cheap pastime. Audiences wanted to see their own lives reflected and flocked to the screens. Many films of the time were overtly political, and sparked political discussion and debate among the audience members (Ross 1998, 27). Films depicted workers’ struggles for decent pay and conditions, fights with bosses and life trying to make ends meet. They were often ideological in nature (Ross 1998, 62), and presented particular political messages to working-class

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audiences. Films such as The Italian by Reginald Barker, 1915 depicted the hardships faced by an Italian immigrant living in a New York tenement and were empowering for working-class immigrants seeing their stories on screen (Ross 1998, 5). The Blacklist by William C. de Mille (1916), represented a strike, and encouraged workers in real life to engage in strike action (Ross 1998, 8). Radical filmmakers knew that film could be employed as a ‘powerful weapon of mass ideology’ (Ross 1998, 85) and harnessed its potential as a radical pedagogical tool (O’Neill 2018, 133). This ‘progressive phase’ (Stead 2014, 23) which dominated US filmmaking, lasted until the 1920s, when the Hollywood studios started to rise and films moved away from radical content and on to more ‘respectable’ themes and middle-class stories (Stead 2014, 15). Australia In Australia at the same time, there was also an emphasis on working-class stories in films. In 1906, one of the first feature films made in the world, The Story of the Kelly Gang by Charles Tait, was released. This film told the story of notorious bank robber, Ned Kelly and his gang and dramatised the famous police siege of the gang’s hideout that resulted in Kelly’s capture and subsequent execution. The film set in motion an Australian preoccupation with the stories of working-class criminals (mostly male and white) and spawned many further screen adaptations. Audiences of the time sympathised with bushranger Kelly and his poverty-stricken family (he was the son of an Irish convict) and it was a hit with working-class audiences (Shirley and Adams 1989, 18). The ‘golden age’ of Australian film production that occurred prior to the First World War (Shirley and Adams 1989, 24), saw a number of working-class characters and tales translated to the screen. A stand out film from just after the First World War was Raymond Longford’s 1918 feature The Sentimental Bloke. This film told the story of The Bloke, a working-class petty criminal living in the slums of Sydney. The Bloke falls for a girl, Doreen, and vows to change his ways and leave crime behind. The film was an adaptation of a popular poem by C.J. Dennis, who had used working-class argot in his verse and the spirit of the poem is maintained in the film. Many of the film’s scenes were shot on location in the (since gentrified) working-class area of Woolloomooloo in Sydney’s centre. The naturalistic acting, and the street locations, made the film an authentic slice of Australian urban working-­ class life and it has held up well despite its age.

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Soviet Cinema In other parts of the world, as cinema developed, it also often took on a working-class flavour. Soviet cinema is well known for its employment as an ideological tool, and a centralised industry formed relatively quickly after the October Revolution in 1917. By the mid-1920s, Soviet cinema was well established and recognised as a ‘useful propaganda and educational tool’ (Christie and Taylor 1994, 61). The films designed to disseminate revolutionary ideology often featured proletariat characters and settings and were critical of the bourgeoise—the villains of the films (Youngblood 1992, 117). Yakov Protazanov’s 1917 drama The Man from the Restaurant serves as a typical example of a film about a working-class man (a waiter), who is pitted against a bourgeois villain (a wealthy man attempting to dishonour the waiter’s daughter). Another example would be Fridrikh Ermler whose films such as his 1926 Katka the Appleseller positioned him as a ‘chronicler of Soviet life’ (Youngblood 1992, 67). In the 1920s, Soviet filmmakers responded to the state requirement for the film to be created for ideological purposes, but many of them moved away from popular genres such as melodrama, and towards experimental practice. Such filmmakers saw the medium as an art form, not as popular culture, and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein engaged in experimental art practice producing films about the proletariat and revolutionary ideas that were Avant-Garde in form (Christie and Taylor 1994, 52). Eisenstein’s 1925 The Strike, and his famous 1925 The Battleship Potemkin, have been hailed as masterpieces of cinema but in 1920s Soviet Russia, audiences considered them to be ‘too challenging, too difficult’ (Christie and Taylor 1994, 54) and they were not popular or well received by filmgoers at the time (Taylor 2016, 163). In response to audiences’ criticisms of experimental film styles, the state encouraged filmmakers to use popular forms of cinema to spread the message of Soviet Russia and the principles of socialist realism were applied to genres such as melodrama and the musical, capitalising on socialist realism’s ‘revolutionary romanticism’ by representing socialist utopias (Taylor 2016, 165) and culminating in the ‘Stalinist musicals’ of the 1930s such as Ivan Pyr’ev’s 1939 Tractor Drivers (Taylor 2016, 166–168). Europe In Europe, filmmakers in France embraced the naturalism of novelist Émile Zola—whose stories about ordinary French people inspired a

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number of film adaptations during the silent era and had a significant influence on early French cinema (Aitken 2006, 30). Adaptations of Zola’s work include Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset’s 1912 imagining of La Terre. These films brought the stories of striking coal miners and agricultural workers in nineteenth-century France to the screen. The influence of naturalism also had the propensity to create some romanticism of working people and nostalgia for more simple times, and there were questions about the intended audience for films such as André Antoine’s 1932 Les Travailleurs de la Mer, about a small coastal community, with suggestions that despite the ‘evocative portrayal of lower-class experience’ in his film, it was aimed at bourgeois audiences interested in class tourism (Aitken 2006, 33). The realist period between 1930 and 1938 in French cinema saw a number of films engaging with the lives of workers, and one of the most prolific filmmakers of the time with an interest in social realism was Jean Renoir. During the 1930s, Renoir made films such as Toni (1936) about the lives of migrant workers, and La Bête Humaine (1938) about a murderous train driver. Renoir’s films contained anti-bourgeois themes and offered a ‘pronounced social critique’ (Aitken 2006, 37). In later years in France, members of the French New Wave were also interested in working-class stories, and while a number of the French New Wave films focus on bourgeois characters, there are plenty of working-­ class characters too such as juvenile delinquent Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s 1959 Les Quatre Cents Coups and Michel in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 À bout de soufflé. A wonderful picture of working-class coastal life is presented in La Pointe Courte—Agnès Varda’s 1954 story about a difficult marriage. The film is set and filmed in a small fishing village in France and includes everyday scenes of the locals going about their daily tasks. Varda places equal importance on the working-class residents of the village as she does on the protagonists. Varda continued her interest in working-class characters in her 1985 feature Vagabond about a young homeless woman who meets a tragic end and her 2000 documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse which is centred on people trying to make ends meet by scavenging for discarded food and other items. In the post-war period, neo-realism took hold, particularly in Italy, and offered audiences realist representations of working-class life, with stories of poor individuals and struggling families set against the backdrop of unemployment and economic instability. One of the undoubted masterpieces of the genre is Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves (1948), described by French critic André Bazin (1971) as containing ‘supreme

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naturalness’ (58) and an example of ‘pure cinema’(60). Neo-realist cinema was characterised by its seeming naturalness, although this was carefully crafted by the filmmakers (Marcus 1986, 58). On-location shooting and natural light was used, which depicted the poor neighbourhoods of the stories’ settings. Non-professional actors played the roles, adding to the authenticity and the focus of the narratives was working-class life, and many of the films contained tragic endings, illustrating the real hardships in society at that time. Da Sica was particularly effective in taking a simple premise and extracting the drama that exists within the everyday for the poor and marginalised (Marcus 1986, 55). The Bicycle Thieves follows the protagonist, Antonio Ricci, as he attempts to locate his bicycle—a piece of essential equipment that is stolen from him on his first day at work after a long period of unemployment. The despair experienced by Ricci and his son Bruno is palpable and despite the efforts of his comrades, Ricci does not find his bicycle and the film ends on a depressing note (Marcus 1986, 74). Despite being set and filmed in 1940s Italy, the themes of the film have stood the test of time, and it is particularly relevant in the current days of the so-called gig economy, which relies on workers to provide their own equipment (vehicles for delivery services, etc.). Britain has a tradition of working-class cinema that really began with documentaries made in the late 1920s-early 1930s with working-class subjects such as John Grierson’s 1929 Drifters about Scottish fishermen (Leach 2004, 33) and films made through the film units established by Grierson which produced documentaries that celebrated working-class life (Leach 2004, 33). Some of these documentaries have been criticised for being overly romantic representations of workers and for avoiding social critique. Robert Flaherty’s Industrial Britain (1932) showcased the skill of industrial workers, but didn’t contain the ‘documentary realism’ which had been the initial aim of Grierson (Leach 2004, 35). In the 1950s a group of directors developed a new style of documentary filmmaking known as Free Cinema which tried to break free from some of the perceived restrictions of the film industry (Leach 2004, 53). The directors involved tended to be left-leaning politically and believed that film was dominated by middle- and upper-class concerns and so they turned their cameras onto working class subjects, making documentary films about working class people and working-class culture. These directors also became influenced by the emerging literary movement known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ (Leach 2004, 53)—a group of writers who were challenging the dominant discourse and literary conventions, and there

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were a couple of notable members who wrote about working-class life such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe. Osborne was a lower-middle class rebel but Sillitoe was a working-class man. Directors of this ‘New Wave’ of British cinema (Leach 2004, 53) such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson began to make dramas, some of which were adaptations of Osborne’s plays or Sillitoe’s novels such as Look Back in Anger made in 1959 by Richardson and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning made in 1960 by Karel Reisz and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner made in 1962 also by Richardson. These films were characterised by their social realism (Hill 1986, 1), the focus on working-class life and reflected the changes to traditional working-class culture that were occurring in the 1950s and 1960s. They were generally about young men who were at odds with society but who were bound by their class backgrounds. They were sometimes referred to as ‘kitchen sink dramas’ and many were set in northern England. Many of the film directors were middle class—they were not making films based on their own experience, but felt these were important stories to tell. The 1960s were pivotal due to the emergence of Ken Loach, a director from a working-class background and one of the crops of ‘scholarship’ boys who obtained a middle-class education but who maintained an interest in their working class backgrounds and the inequalities created by the class system (Garnett 2001, 71). Loach began in TV, and his doco drama Cathy Come Home made in 1966, told a story of unemployment, poverty and homelessness and is considered a classic of British drama. Loach went on to make many feature films about working-class people, beginning with Poor Cow in 1967 and then Kes in 1969 and he has had a long career with recent films being I, Daniel Blake which was released in 2016 and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Sorry we Missed You released in 2019 (these films will be discussed later in the book). Loach provides his working-­ class characters with political agency and gives expression to those at the margins (Forrest 2013, 81). He focuses on the world of work and on working-class community and is a committed Marxist filmmaker (Leach 2004, 191). He shows the resilience of working-class people and depicts the struggle and hardship of working-class life. Loach uses a documentary realism and tends to use a combination of professional and non-­ professional actors as he believes actors need to understand the circumstances of their characters in order to play them authentically (Leigh 2002, 70). He also states that ‘politics is reflected through the aesthetics of filmmaking’ (Fuller 1998, 114)—so the politics is embedded in all

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aspects of the film and is not necessarily conveyed explicitly—although it is sometimes (Forrest 2013, 98). Latin America/The Caribbean There is a history of working-class representation in Latin America and the Caribbean film—including films made for decolonising and revolutionary purposes. Political film movements in the region have been influenced by Classic Soviet cinema, Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave (Díaz López and Elena 2003, 4). For some filmmakers in the region, film has been an important aspect of revolutionary culture and filmmakers have used theoretical ideas to inform their work, such as those of the anti-­ colonial revolutionary writer Franzt Fanon (Stam 2003, 31). Fanon was a Caribbean psychologist who wrote about the impact and effects of colonialism on the psychology of people. He also wrote about the ways in which violence was used in efforts to decolonise, and these ideas appealed to those engaged in armed resistances. These ideas led to concepts such as ‘Third Cinema’ which is very important in Latin American film studies (Díaz López and Elena 2003, 128). Third Cinema is film from third world post-colonial societies and also applies to African cinema as discussed below. In 1969, Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino wrote a manifesto for Third Cinema called ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ which stated: The anti-imperialist struggle of the people of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognises in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—in a word, the decolonisation of culture. (in MacKenzie 2014, 347)

For Solanas and Getino, first cinema was what Hollywood produced and second cinema was European art cinema which they were critical of due to its focus on individual characters (in MacKenzie 2014, 353). Third Cinema was intended to be collective—to speak for the many, and to be critical of systems that exploited and oppressed people. Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s ideas on ‘imperfect cinema’ have also been influential. He stated in 1969 that ‘Imperfect cinema finds a new audience in

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those who struggle, and it finds its themes in their problems’ (in MacKenzie 2014, 339). For Espinosa, cinema should be ‘committed’ and ‘partisan’ (in MacKenzie 2014, 338) and should be democratic—made by the people and less concerned with ‘quality or technique’ (in MacKenzie 2014, 341). Another important figure from this time was Glauber Rocha with his 1965 pivotal idea of the aesthetic of hunger which manifested in the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement. Rocha was an experimental and Avant-­ Garde filmmaker and his films such as Black God, White Devil (1964) were very influential. The aesthetic of hunger was realised in films that explored class and inequality, with the hunger being literal (due to hardship) and metaphorical (due to a hunger for expression) and realised through the violence necessary for anti-colonial messages to be understood by the coloniser (in this case—representational violence within film) because ‘violence is normal behaviour for the starving’ (in MacKenzie 2014, 326). South Asia This interest in portraying working-class life on screen can also be seen in films from the Golden Age of Indian cinema (generally acknowledged as running between 1940 and 1960). India has a long and rich history of filmmaking and this history has gone through various transitions due to changes in the political and social context, such as the impact of British colonisation and the rule of the British Raj, through to Independence and Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Chakravarty (1993, 15) suggests that Indian films can therefore not be analysed without an understanding of the context of Indian history (particularly that of colonisation and decolonisation, and culture (with acknowledgement of the variety of languages spoken and religions practiced). After the end of British rule, a new wave of Indian cinema emerged. The films of this period were neo-realist in style and dealt with social concerns (Ahmed 2015, 35). They also ran parallel with more popular forms of cinema and the same period saw the growth of commercial cinema which was created for entertainment (Bordwell and Thompson 2003, 640). The bulk of these commercial films were in Hindi and became known as masala films due to their mixing of genres such as romance, drama, action and the musical. The parallel cinema produced some classic films that were centred on the lives of rural poor characters and contained ‘political critiques’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2003, 641), such as Bimal Roy’s 1953 film Do Bigha Zamin (Roy was Bengali but this film is in Hindi) and Satyajit Ray’s famous 1955

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Pather Panchali—which is a story of childhood in a poor rural village, shot on location and noted for its ‘restrained acting’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2003, 434). Africa In Africa, film by Black Africans didn’t really emerge until the end of European colonialism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but when it did, it often featured the poor and marginalised and operated as a form of Third Cinema—which resisted colonial forces (Murphy and Williams 2007, 63). In 1963, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène released a short film, Borom Sarret, about a cart driver in Dhaka—this was the first professional film released by a sub-Saharan Black African. Sembène followed up with Black Girl in 1966, which told the story of a young African woman who travels to Paris to work as a nanny. Sembène was a Marxist (Gadjigo 2010, 116) who viewed film as a form of ‘evening school’ (in Rapfogel and Porton 2004, 21) and he was aware of the ideological nature of film and believed in its potential to ‘raise issues and trigger discussion’ among audiences (Sembene in Rapfogel and Porton 2004, 25). Sembène had turned to film as a medium when he realised that many Africans were illiterate and that his Marxist message was only able to reach the elite minority (Opondo 2013, 39). Sembène was a big influence on other Black African filmmakers such as Safi Faye, whose 1975 drama Kaddu Beykat was also focused on rural people making their living from working the land. This historical survey is not exhaustive of course (there is no reference here to the early films of east and south-east Asia or the Middle East), but it illustrates the rich variety of working-class representation that has been a feature of film since the technology was invented, developed and distributed globally.

Methodology (Choice of Films and Approach) As already stated, this book uses an interdisciplinary approach, which allows me to consider the chosen films from a number of different angles. Class is complex, and no one discipline is sufficient when attempting to analyse texts from a class perspective. There is an emphasis on textual analysis though because my main concern is with representation. To determine whether working-class people and experience has been represented in nuanced and sympathetic ways requires close readings of the film texts.

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These close readings are accompanied by consideration of the context of production, and where appropriate, the context of the filmmaker. I am interested in the potential differences between representations of working-­ class people created by working-class background filmmakers and those by filmmakers with other class backgrounds. Is there a noticeable difference? Do working-class background filmmakers bring different perspectives? Is it possible to suggest that a working-class filmmaker might bring a sense of authenticity to their films (acknowledging that claims of ‘authenticity’ can be contentious)? This does assume the filmmaker as ‘auteur’ which suggests that filmmakers operate as the principal creative force behind a film’s production and that their films, therefore, are likely to contain ‘a stylistic signature and a distinctive worldview’ (Rushton and Bettinson 2010, 4). This is not without problems, because analysing films on this basis does not take into account the collaborative process and the influence of other members of the production team such as cinematographers and art directors, the screenwriters and the performers (although these roles are mentioned in some of the discussions). The close readings and consideration of context are also discussed with an acknowledgement of audience. Do working-class cinema-goers watch working-class films? Not all the films are accessible to a wide audience. In some countries (such as Australia), film distribution is dominated by American companies that have monopolies and control what gets distributed. This has the effect of squeezing out local content and favouring Hollywood studio films. Because of these restrictions, the independent films that might contain working-class content have limited distribution, often confined to inner-city art house cinemas, and so working-class audiences with only mega-plex cinema chains in their neighbourhoods, miss out on films representing working-class life. There is also the question of whether working-class audiences want to see films about everyday working-­class life. It might be possible that audiences are looking for escape, and watching films that show struggle and hardship might be too close to home for some audiences who are looking for entertainment and distraction. I consider film to be art and to be educational and suggest that working-class film has great scope to educate middle- and upper-class viewers about working-class life, and can empower working-class audiences as the films can show that working-class stories are valid, important and interesting. The films included in this book have been chosen because their stories focus on working-class people and experience. This is my main

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requirement. I have not restricted films based on genre—any genre is fine, because I’m looking at films in terms of the themes they contain. If a theme is work—it’s entirely possible for a genre film (such as a comedy), to be set in a workplace. While most of the films are independent (in terms of production) and many can be categorised as art films due to their style, I have included films that have been mainstream successes in their country of origin. According to Klinger (2006), art film can lack ‘the mainstream’s cultural currency’ (20), and the popularity of a film at the box office can potentially lead to a greater impact in terms of effecting change. Dennison and Lim suggest that mainstream film is often excluded from studies of global cinema because popular films have not been regarded by film scholars and critics as important enough because of a perception of a lack of ‘ideological resistance’ (2006, 10) which does not take into account the ability of popular culture (mainstream or otherwise) to impact and influence a society. I have chosen films from around the world, and it is interesting to consider how films from different parts of the world differ in their treatment of working-class related themes, and where commonalities might occur. I have included a lot of films—some have lengthy analysis/ discussions attached, but others are mentioned much more briefly. While this might lead to some imbalance, I have taken this approach in order to introduce the reader to as many films as possible—with the films written on more extensively operating as exemplars within the theme under discussion. Fuery suggests that it is useful to include a large range of films in a film-analysis because it can, as he states make ‘critical concepts become clearer if we see them in different contexts’. I hope that the reader will have their appetite for the films whetted by the briefer descriptions and will be more sated by the longer analyses. I have restricted the timeline to films released between 2000 and 2019. This is to allow a focus on contemporary films, and a cut-off date is necessary otherwise the book would never be completed! There are the inevitable exclusions—some films are not included because there isn’t space. Others because they fall short of my list of requirements. And there will be many films that I’ve simply missed, because I didn’t have access to them, or found out about them too late to be included. Studying film from around the world does have some obstacles—mostly in accessing films that have not been released on DVD or available via streaming services. I have a long list of films that I have not yet been able to access. As an English only speaker, I am relying on subtitles, which can mean that some nuance of dialogue is lost in translation. As well as the narrative of the chosen

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films, I am also interested in how filmmakers use cinematic devices and I consider the ways in which various aspects of the mise-en-scene have been used to convey themes and ideas, as well as the sound and music design. This approach combines the examination of narrative choices along with aesthetic choices, and in some examples, I argue that the aesthetic choices are more significant than narrative choices in terms of representing working-­class life (this is seen particularly in the work of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang for example).

Chapter Outline As mentioned, this book is organised around themes rather than regions. The point of the book is to analyse the films and examine their representations of working-class life, rather than describe a selection of films from various countries. To base, the book on regions would mean cursory inclusions of some countries, and many exclusions. Instead, each chapter explores themes relating to working-class experience. This structure is designed as a ‘polycentric’ approach which tries to avoid homogenising regions and cinema production (Nagib et al. 2012, xxii). I am also aware of the criticisms of ‘world cinema’ as a definition due to the way it has been used to categorise film from outside of the west (Gorfinkle 2018, 8). ‘World cinema’ or ‘global cinema’ tends to focus on films from non-­ English speaking countries and has been used in ways that have exoticised films from the global south. There is often an assumption in western film analyses that the audiences of ‘world cinema’ are western and white and the films have therefore been analysed through a white (and colonial) lens (Dennison and Lim 2006, 1). This doesn’t allow for the audiences watching the films in the origin country, or the diasporic audiences watching from around the world. There is a sense that ‘world cinema’ has been made for western consumption and the local audiences, and the intentions of filmmakers to reach those audiences have been ignored. This ‘othering’ of world cinema also does not take into account the ‘transnational cinematic flows’ (Gorfinkle 2018, 3) of filmmaking and assumes the west as the centre rather than understanding how film practice has emerged and evolved in a global context but with very local and specific adaptations and transformations (Sarkar 2010, 38). As Nagib suggests, there is no ‘center’ of the world—and ‘world cinema is simply the cinema of the world’ (2006, 35).

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Chapter 2 considers the ways in which work and unemployment is depicted in contemporary cinema. This is a rich vein to explore because many filmmakers have focused on working-class labour, and the difficulties that occur when work is not available. There are films set in workplaces such as Ji-young Boo’s 2015 Cart, set in a South Korean supermarket and Boots Riley’s 2018 Sorry to Bother You, set in a US call centre. These two films also include representation of workers organising through strikes or other industrial action. Ken Loach’s The Navigators (2001), focuses on British railway workers and shows the negative impact of privatisation on workers’ conditions and work safety. Nana, by Tatiana Fernande Geara (2015) is a documentary about women in the Dominican Republic who work as nannies for rich people on the island or on the US mainland. Man Push Cart (Ramin Bahrani, 2007) features an immigrant worker trying to make ends meet in New York City. The chapter examines whether work has been depicted in convincing ways, and considers how to compare portrayals of work in very different contexts, from urban European factory work, to rural labour in the developing world. Chapter 3 is focused on working-class culture and the ways in which working-class people express themselves. This can mean an understanding of collectivist working-class culture, but it also refers to working-class leisure and pastimes such as sport or engaging with popular culture. This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006), depicts a group of young working-class people in Northern England who find pleasure in ska music, but it also shows the impact and consequences of racism. In Marcel Rasquin’s 2010 Hermano, we follow two boys in Venezuela who share a love for football. Boy (Taika Waititi, 2010), shows the importance of popular music in a small working-class Maori town in New Zealand. For many working-class people, consumption of, and participation in, popular culture is an important method of escape from the daily grind, but it also has potential to be used as tools of resistance. In Chap. 4 there is an examination of class from the perspective of immigrants, diaspora communities, asylum seekers and refugees. This includes films about ethnic minority youth such as Serhat Caradee’s 2009 Cedar Boys about Lebanese youths in Western Sydney. In Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 Le Havre, a worker tries to help a young immigrant. Welcome (2009) by Philippe Lioret is about a French swimming coach’s interactions with a young Iraqi-Kurd immigrant in the port town of Calais. The Journals of Musan, a 2011 South Korean drama by Park Jung-bum, is a grim tale of North Korean defectors living in Seoul. Films exploring these themes

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often also portray the tensions between established working-class communities and newer immigrants, as well as the commonalties that are recognised and camaraderie that develops. While many of these issues do intersect in the previous chapters, in Chap. 5, I focus more closely on the intersections of class, gender and sexuality and look at films that contain a more explicit gender slants and explorations of diverse sexualities. Some of the films deal with homophobia in working-class communities such as Matthew Warchus’ 2014 biopic Pride, about the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners activist group who formed relationships with miners and their families in a Welsh mining village during the 1984 Miners’ strike. Pelo Malo is set in a Venezuelan housing estate and centres on a young boy exploring his sexuality and gender identity (Mariana Rondón, 2013). Barry Jenkins offers a poetic representation of gay identity in a US working-class Black community in Moonlight (2017) and Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) presents a slice of life of trans sex workers in Los Angeles. Many of the films chosen feature strong female characters who navigate sexism and misogyny, both in their working-class neighbours and at the hands of bourgeois characters. This is seen in Florence Jaugey’s 2009 La Yuma, which depicts the determination of a young woman who takes up boxing in an impoverished neighbourhood in Nicaragua. It’s also evident in Rungano Nyoni’s 2017 I am Not a Witch, which is a funny and disturbing look at the marginalisation of women in a rural Zambian setting. And in Girlhood, 2014 by Céline Sciamma, about a group of African French girls living on a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. Chapter 6 explores race and ethnicity in a working-class setting, with a particular focus on Australian Indigenous experience. There are a number of Australian Indigenous films that demonstrate the legacies of colonialism and the ways in which Indigenous people have been relegated to the bottom rungs of the social ladder. Warwick Thornton’s 2009 Samson and Delilah is a hard-hitting portrayal of life for two homeless Indigenous teenagers and Satellite Boy by Catriona McKenzie (2012) centres around a young Indigenous boy trying to save his home from a mining corporation. These films show how Indigenous people experience layers of oppression; racism in the form of racist and abusive individuals and institutions and judgement and discrimination based on their poverty and low-class status. The chapter also includes films that utilise genres such as the musical and romantic comedies (The Sapphires, 2012, Top End Wedding, 2019, both directed by Wayne Blair) to bring audiences into the cinema with the

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promise of entertainment, while including subtle political messages in the films. The book also contains a short afterword which poses some further questions and possible directions for future research. Ultimately, the aim of the book is to show how filmmakers have represented the diversity of working-class experience from around the world, and to analyse and evaluate the films in terms of the representations offered and the potential they offer to challenge stereotypes about class and working-class experience.

References Ahmed, Omar. 2015. Studying Indian Cinema. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Aitken, Ian. 2006. Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The Nineteenth Century Lukácsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Attfield, Sarah. 2016. Rejecting Respectability: On Being Unapologetically Working Class. Journal of Working-Class Studies 1 (1): 45–57. ———. 2017. Tsai Ming Liang’s Alternative Narratives of Working-Class Life in Taiwan. IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film 4 (1): 93–105. Atzeni, Maurizio, ed. 2014. Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism: Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bazin, André. 1971. What is Cinema? Berkley: University of California Press. Bieler, Andreas, Ingemar Lindberg, and Devan Pillay. 2008. Labour and the Challenges of Globalisation: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity? London: Pluto Press. Bordwell, David, and Kristen Thompson. 2003. Film Art: An Introduction and Film Viewers Guide. New York: McGraw Hill. Boucher, Geoff. 2014. Understanding Marxism. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. Cardullo, Robert J. 2012. Cinema as ‘Social Documentary’: The Film Theory of André Bazin. Studies in French Cinema. 13 (1): 33–46. Chakravarty, Sumita. 1993. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987. Austin: University of Texas Press. Christie, Ian, and Richard Taylor, eds. 1994. Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. London: Routledge. Dennison, Stephanie, and Song Hwee Lim. 2006. Introduction: Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem. In Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, 1–15. London: Wallflower Press.

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Díaz López, Marina, and Alberto Elena. 2003. The Cinema of Latin America. London: Wallflower. Dowd, James J. 2013. Understanding Social Mobility Through the Movies. In Cinematic Sociology: Social Life in Film, ed. Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn Feltey, 60–69. London: Sage. Forrest, David. 2013. Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publisher. Freeland, Cynthia. 2000. Film Theory. In A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young, 353–357. New Jersey: Wiley. Fuller, Graham. 1998. Loach on Loach. London: Faber and Faber. Gadjigo, Samba. 2010. Ousmane Sembène the Making of a Militant Artist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. García Espinosa, Julio. 1969. ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ in 2014. In Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott Mackenzie, 328–342. Berkeley: University of California Press. Garnett, Tony. 2001. Working in the Field. In Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, ed. Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon, 70–82. London: Rivers Oram Press. Gorfinkle, Elena. 2018. Introduction. In Global Cinema Networks, ed. Elena Gorfinkle and Tami William, 1–20. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1997a. Introduction. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, 1–13. Open University Press. ———. 1997b. The Spectacle of the Other. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, 223–290. Open University Press. Hill, John. 1986. Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: BFI Publishing. Hill Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. hooks, bell. 2009. Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies. New  York: Routledge. Klinger, Barbara. 2006. The Art Film, Affect and the Female Viewer: The Piano Revisited. Screen 47 (1): 19–41. Leach, Jim. 2004. British Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leigh, Jacob. 2002. The Cinema of Ken Loach. London: Wallflower Press. Linkon, Sherry, and John Russo. 2005. What’s New About New Working-Class Studies? In New Working-Class Studies, ed. Sherry Linkon and John Russo, 1–18. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. MacKenzie, Scott. 2014. Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Berkley: University of California Press. Marcus, Millicent. 1986. Italian Film in the Light of Neo-Realism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Murphy, David, and Patrick Williams. 2007. Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nagib, Lúcia. 2006. Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema. In Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, 30–37. London: Wallflower Press. Nagib, Lúcia, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Dudrah. 2012. Introduction. In Theorising World Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Dudrah, xvii–xxxii. London: Tauris. Ness, Immanuel. 2016. Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class. London: Pluto Press. O’Neill, Dierdre. 2018. Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool. London: Routledge. Opondo, Sam Okoth. 2013. Cinema is Our ‘night school’: Appropriation, Falsification, and Dissensus in the art of Ousmane Sembène. African Identities 13: 34–48. Rapfogel, Jared, and Richard Porton. 2004. The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Ousmane Sembene. Cineaste 30 (winter): 20–25. Rocha, Glauber. 1965. The Aesthetics of Hunger. In Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott Mackenzie, 324–327. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ross, Steven. 1998. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Rushton, Richard, and Gary Bettinson. 2010. What is Film Theory. New  York: McGraw Hill. Sarkar, Bhaskar. 2010. Tracking “Global Media” in the Outposts of Globalisation. In World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Ď urovičová and Kathleen Newman, 34–58. New York: Routledge. Shirley, Graham, and Brian Adams. 1989. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Revised ed. Sydney: Currency Press. Silver, Beverly. 2014. Theorising the Working Class in Twenty-First Century Global Capitalism. In Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism: Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues, ed. Maurizio Atzeni, 46–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. 1969. Toward a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World. In Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott Mackenzie, 342–371. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stam, Robert. 2003. Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity. In Rethinking Third Cinema, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, 31–48. London: Routledge. Stead, Peter. 2014. Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society. New York: Routledge.

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Taylor, Richard. 2016. The Stalinist Musical: Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism. In A Companion to Russian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers, 163–183. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Van der Linden, Marcel. 2014. Who is the Working Class? Wage Earners and Other Labourers. In In Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism: Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues, ed. Maurizio Atzeni, 70–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Youngblood, Denise J. 1992. Cinema as Social Criticism: The Early Films of Fridrikh Ermler. In The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton, 67–90. New York: Routledge. Zaniello, Tom. 2005. Filming Class. In New Working-Class Studies, ed. Sherry Linkon and John Russo, 152–165. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zweig, Michael. 2004. Introduction: The Challenge of Working Class Studies. In What’s Class Got to Do With It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Michael Zweig, 1–18. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Work and Unemployment

One of the earliest moving pictures is a 38-second film made in 1896 by the Lumière brothers called Carmaux, défournage du coke. The film shows workers in a French steel works pulling coke from a smelter. The men hose the hot coke and try to break it up using large metal poles. In the year before, 1895, at the Lumière’s first public screenings, they included La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon—a 46-second scene of workers leaving their factory and Les Forgerons, which featured two blacksmiths at work. These short snippets of working-class life were not incongruous with the new art form, because the medium of film emerged during the heyday of industrial production (Mennel 2019, 7), and the Lumière brothers therefore were tapping into very visible elements of society at the time. Depictions of work such as these continued (as discussed in the historical overview in the introduction to this book), with an emphasis in the west on films that centred on a ‘working-class masculinity defined by industrial labour’ (Mennel 2019, 11). According to Zaniello, workers have featured in US film since its beginnings, but he qualifies this statement with the suggestion that such representations have not always been sympathetic, particularly when they have included stories and characters that are union related (1996, 1). And since the late nineteenth century, work in the western world has been extensively documented visually by photographers interested in the conditions of workers, as can be seen in the photographs of Lewis Hine, a social reformer who took photographs to highlight the dangerous conditions of © The Author(s) 2020 S. Attfield, Class on Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7_2

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labourers such as children working in factories and construction workers employed to build the Empire State Building in New  York City (Strangleman 2004, 186). But how often is work represented in contemporary cinema in ways that are realistic and feel authentic? How many films represent working-­ class occupations (blue and white collar), and where they exist, are they convincing—do they provide the viewer with an understanding of that type of job? What about working-class people who are unemployed—is the reality of unemployment accurately depicted? And how do films portray workers in both the formal and informal economies—is a film about a drug dealer a film about work? It could be—in the same way that a film with a central character who is a coal miner might not feature their work at all. Mazierska asserts that work is such a dominant feature of adult life that it should be ‘good material for cinema’ (2013, 1) and she also suggests that it’s possible that some work in films is missed by critics because they do not ‘understand what work is/can be’ (2013, 2). It is possible therefore that Julia Robert’s character, Vivian Ward, in Pretty Woman (1990) is not considered to be working when she accepts the proposition from Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) which diminishes the labour involved in sex work. O’Shaughnessy (2011) cites French film writer Jean Louis Comolli who suggested that work in film is usually only seen in ‘fragments’ which has tended to ‘eliminate work’s complexity, duress and boredom’. And these fragments have generally focussed around work when it has been ‘halted’, through, for example, a ‘strike or an occupation’ (60). If we spend so much time at work, or looking for work, or surviving due to lack of work, it seems strange that work doesn’t feature more explicitly in contemporary films, and even films about working-class people don’t often focus very closely on actual work conducted. This chapter will consider the ways in which work, in its variety of forms, is depicted in contemporary global cinema, and evaluate these representations in terms of their authenticity and nuance. The chapter also includes a discussion of films focusing on unemployment—a state that is often never too far away in the consciousness of working-class people. Films chosen depict workers in traditional blue-collar occupations as well as the growing white-collar working class. The films also include portrayals of urban and rural workers, and those engaged in the formal and informal economies. Some of the films feature workers in steady and secure work, while others reveal the ‘hustle’ of life moving from job to job in the informal economy, or of workers trying to make a living in the ‘gig’

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economy. The chapter looks at the various choices made by filmmakers in these representations and explores how cinematic techniques have been employed to bring work and workers to life on the screen.

Changing Nature of Work, from ‘Jobs for Life’ to Zero Hours Contracts (Sorry We Missed You) There is growing job insecurity worldwide (Bieler et al. 2008, 2667)—this is one of the big shifts in the nature of work since the rise of global neo-­ liberalism. Precarity affects millions of workers worldwide, both in the west and in the developing world. These changes have been reflected in film, particularly since the global financial crisis of 2008, and the work depicted on screen often represents jobs that are characterised by insecurity. This shift towards precarious work and how precarious ‘invisible workers’ are portrayed on screen has been acknowledged by Zaniello (2020, x1) who discusses a number of feature dramas, documentaries and film installations that feature (and advocate for) precarious workers around the world. It seems appropriate then to begin this chapter with an analysis of Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You (2019) which, despite being set in the UK, arguably speaks to the experience of workers in many locations. This is a film that could be characterised as an example of what Elsaesser (2018) terms the ‘cinema of abjection’ which reveals ‘what neoliberalism does to human beings’ (129). This film is an angry critique of the UK government’s austerity measures and is an indictment of the impact of neo-­ liberalism on working-class people. Watching films like this is very personal for me—my working-class background means that I understand the issues portrayed in the film first hand. The characters could be my working-class family or friends and as a result Sorry We Missed You is not easy viewing (Attfield 2019, para. 1). Sorry We Missed You follows Ricky (Kris Hitchen), Abby (Debbie Honeywood), and their two children, Seb (Rhys Stone) and Liza Jae (Katie Proctor). Ricky’s work in the construction industry has petered out due to a building down turn and he is persuaded by a friend to work as a van courier for a parcel dispatch company. There are some catches though. While the job is described as self-employment, with the flexibility of not answering to a boss, in reality Ricky is expected to follow the strict rules of the dispatch company and is immediately thrown into debt as he has to pay for his own vehicle and essential equipment. To make a decent living,

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Ricky has to deliver a ridiculously high number of parcels each day. To enable this, he has to forgo meal and rest breaks and his physical and mental health begin to suffer. The intensity of Ricky’s work takes its toll on his family life too, as the stress and exhaustion lead him to lash out verbally at his wife and son and his absence from the family particularly affects his troubled teenage son. Abby meanwhile is trying to manage on a zero hours contract as an agency home-care provider. She is responsible for looking after vulnerable people in the community, but the pressures placed on her by her employer mean she is unable to provide even the most basic of care unless she works into her unpaid time (which she often does). The situation for Ricky and Abby is dire as Ricky becomes more trapped in debt and the financial strains wear down the family relationships. The film is grim, there doesn’t seem to be any hope, and even though workmates and members of the community try to help each other out, all are let down by the system. The film depicts both Ricky and Abby at work. We follow Ricky as he loads his van and attempts to make his deliveries. The tension increases as the film progresses as it becomes clear that Ricky will not be able to keep up with the required pace. There is a constant sense of dread as we sit with Ricky in his van, or go with him to knock on the doors of customers. Will he fall asleep at the wheel? Will the customer be home to sign for the package (without a signature he won’t be paid)? Abby is shown preparing food for her clients, washing, dressing and feeding them and sitting with them to provide some much-needed company. The unfairness of the system they are caught up in is portrayed effectively, and the authenticity of the situation is assisted by the realist aesthetic favoured by Loach. The camera (and therefore the viewer), follows Ricky and Abby and brings us close into their world (both in their workplaces and at home). The colour palette is muted, adding to the sense of despair and naturalistic performances from the actors lends a sense of realism. There is something about the expression on Kris Hitchen’s face—and the frustrated and weary tone of his voice, that suggests the actor understands his character. It feels as though he has lived through such scenarios, or has been very close and this replicates the emotional and sensory aspects of class experience. The same applies to Debbie Honeywood’s performance in the film. Her character’s sense of care towards her elderly and disabled clients is palpable—the tactility of her job is displayed and the importance of touch made clear. In one scene, Abby allows an elderly client to brush her hair. This is an incredibly moving moment—Abby sits on the floor as the woman gently

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brushes her hair and Abby cries silently, both for her client, whose main need is human contact, and for herself, because of the constant heartbreak of her job, and because there is no one caring for her. Loach’s ability to create affect—real feeling—is what makes his films stand out in terms of British films focusing on working-class experience. The politics is embedded into every aspect of his films’ narrative and mise en scène. In Sorry We Missed You, we experience the cramped living conditions of the family in their rented home and notice the chipped paint on the walls. The characters look tired—this is carried through their facial expressions and body language. They often slump, defeated by exhaustion or the unfairness of the systems. For most of the film Abby wears a uniform—Loach shows very clearly how class is marked on the body. There is no mistaking their working-class status. It is displayed via work uniforms, and through the constant frustration, anger and distress on the characters’ faces and through their voices—they have been beaten, there is no relief in sight. Ultimately, this is a very depressing film, but an important one. While there are arguments to be made against only creating bleak pictures of working-class life—this film operates as a political tool and brings the plight of characters like Ricky and Abby to light. Loach shows, that despite their best efforts, people like Ricky and Abby can’t get ahead, because the system is stacked against them. This is an uncompromising political approach that clearly fits in with Loach’s commitment to his Marxist principles of filmmaking. Loach’s film undoubtedly contains a political message, but are there films that just depict working-class people at work—doing their jobs, going about their daily activities? Such films do exist as actuality films or documentaries, but it would be rare to find a film portraying work without some commentary or narrative included. While I might enjoy watching workers on a production line demonstrating their high levels of skill and dexterity, this is unlikely to be the subject of a feature film. When work does appear, it is usually not the main feature, although the work place might be. The narrative tends to focus on other issues, such as a work place conflict (either personal or industrial), or a workplace drama, such as an accident, or the work is shown to give the audience an idea of a character’s life, but the camera doesn’t usually dwell on the actual work activity. Despite the relatively short screen time devoted to depicting actual work, there are a number of films from around the world that use the workplace and the nature of work as a focus. What follows is a discussion of films that feature work or a workplace prominently.

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Industrial Disputes (Cart, Sorry to Bother You) There have been some classic Hollywood films that have featured union activity and industrial action, but in the decades following the early pro-­ worker years of cinema, the mainstream have tended to present a negative view of union officials as corrupt and obstructive such as On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954). Some more contemporary Hollywood films have been more sympathetic, including Martin Ritt’s 1979 Norma Rae which tells the true story of a female cotton mill worker attempting to improve working conditions in her workplace, but generally, films about union activity are few and far between in Hollywood (which is linked to the rise of anti-­ left sentiment during the second Red Scare of the McCarthy era). Lisa Milner (2014) has pointed to the importance of film in promoting union activity and encouraging workers to organise in their workplaces. She points to the history of union activism in Australia that included the film production from the 1950s and peaked with the accomplished and persuasive films of the Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit, who employed Marxist principles of filmmaking to disseminate messages around worker safety, worker housing and other issues important to the working classes (186) in films that operated as ‘visual representations of union solidarity’ (Milner 2014, 195). There are some contemporary films that focus explicitly on union activity. In Ji-young Boo’s 2015 Cart, the central protagonist, Sun-hee (Yum Jung-ah) discovers that she, and her fellow casually-employed colleagues, are to be laid off by the big South Korean retail company they work for. Sun-hee and her workmates, who are mostly women—many middle aged—decide to fight against the redundancies and begin strike action and an occupation of the store. Their actions are met with hostility from management and violence from the police who are sent in to break up the strike. The women maintain their resolve despite the ensuing drama and hardship they face. Cart is a conventional film, in terms of its style and narrative structure—it employs the tropes of melodrama to engage the viewer and create empathy with the characters. The store is portrayed as a cold and unwelcoming place, with use of washed out blue tones to connote this uncaring feeling. Workers in the store are initially depicted with uniformity—dressed in identical, spotless uniforms and bowing in unison during the pre-shift group pep talks. They follow the rules and try their best to please their bosses. The filmmaker introduces a group of characters, but the focus remains on Sun-hee, and this allows the viewer more

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time to get to know her character and feel for her plight. We see how hard she works in the store, and how she tries to keep a stable family home for her two children (her husband works away from home, and remains unseen). In contrast to the cool colour palette of the store, the small family home has yellow and orange tones that suggest the warmth of the mother towards her children. These warm tones are also used in scenes with the women of the store meeting to discuss their plans, and during the occasional time we see them enjoying a communal moment of pleasure (such as eating together). The melodrama genre is effective in this context—the film is primarily about women, and the emphasis on the relationships that the female colleagues form, and the strength they draw from each other, fits well into a genre that has been described as a ‘women’s genre’. While this description may have been used in the past (especially in a Hollywood context) to disparage so-called women’s films or weepies (Haralovitch 1990, 60) the genre has been used by filmmakers—notably Douglas Sirk (Halliday 1972, 60) to make films with messages about gender and female empowerment, packaged in an entertaining way to appeal to a mass audience. Ji-young Boo’s film doesn’t have the gritty realism of Ken Loach’s work, but it uses the tropes of melodrama to bring the audience close to the characters’ cause. This is significant, because striking is not common in South Korea, and women are generally held accountable to conservative values. Melodrama is a popular genre in South Korea (Jin 2010, 61), and female characters are often confined to roles as mothers, wives and dutiful daughters, but they are also depicted working, whether in the home or outside (McHugh 2001, 8). Transgression is often punished and conservative gender ideologies are upheld. In Cart, Sun-hee is a wife and a mother, but she does subvert these roles when she takes on the role as a union organiser. She also subverts the conservative ideal by demonstrating her working-­ class experience. Sun-hee cares for her children, but she relies on her son to look after his younger sister, when Sun-hee is working or involved in union activities. Her husband is absent—he is working away at sea and Sun-hee is effectively a single parent. The women in Cart are working class, and don’t fit in with the usual image of middle-class respectable housewives in many South Korean melodramas. There is an element of ‘feel good’ in Cart, but in a similar way to Loach, there is not a happy resolution to the film. The women are empowered by their collective action and the film depicts the precariat fighting back (Zaniello 2020, 137) and the strike strengthens their bonds and

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teaches them about their rights, but they don’t win the dispute and some of the workers are not reinstated. This is where the melodrama intersects with the true story that the film is based on—a 2007 strike by retail workers employed by the E-Land company that lasted for 510 days (Young and Broadbent 2015, 229). This strike had been called after hundreds of mostly female employees on temporary contracts were fired and replaced by outsourced workers ahead of a change in industrial law that would have seen the temporary workers converted to continuing positions (Young and Broadbent 2015, 234). The film highlights the employment precarity faced by women in Korea, as Young and Broadbent (2015) state, ‘since the beginning of industrialization to the present day, irregular work has been the major form of women’s work’ (234) and this has implications for unionising and organising in workplaces (Young and Broadbent 2015, 234). Ji-young Boo has packaged a pro-union, pro-collective action film in a popular and recognisable genre for South Korean audiences. As a complete contrast in terms of style and genre, is Boots Riley’s 2018 Sorry to Bother You, an American film that tells the story of a young African American worker who takes a job at a call centre and has to decide whether to climb the corporate ladder or join his fellow workers in collective action. The film is a comedy with a surreal twist—it is not a realist drama or a melodrama but the depiction of working-class life is still convincing. The central protagonist, Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) lands a job in a call centre and learns quickly that the best way to make sales (and therefore money) is to adopt a ‘white voice’. Cassius is able to emulate a white voice expertly and becomes a star employee who is promoted to ‘Power Caller’ and given the key to the executive elevator and he embraces an aspirational approach. In the main call centre pool—depicted as a gloomy, tatty and dated environment, the workers decide to fight for a decent wage. They are only paid sales commission and they start to demand a retainer for the hours of work carried out. The workers are organised initially by Squeeze (Steven Yeun), a veteran of workplace disputes and union organising. Squeeze persuades his colleagues to go on strike and the whole pool joins the action except for Cassius who is lured by the promise of money and prestige as a Power Caller. Cassius breaks the strike and joins the ‘scabs’ who continue to enter the building under increasingly brutal police protection. On paper, the scenario doesn’t look too different to a conventional industrial dispute story, but Sorry to Bother You could not be more different to a film like Cart. Riley sets the story in a parallel existence. Much of

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the mise en scène is recognisable, but there are hints at the dystopian nature of this world. As Cassius drives his beaten-up and constantly smoking car, we see evidence of mass homelessness on the streets. There are multiple people living in temporary dwellings built on the side of the roads, or in their cars. This is not commented on by any of the characters, and there is a sense that this has become totally normal and accepted. The colour pallet is strong and rich and although the call centre is shot in muted tones, the majority of the film pops with colour and rich tones adding to a heightened reality. The acceptance of social inequality and injustice is also portrayed by the ubiquitous advertising for ‘Worry Free’—a company that is effectively running workhouses. Poor people move into the Worry Free dorms and work as indentured labour for various companies. Very few of the inhabitants of Cassius’ world seem bothered by Worry Free. The callousness of society is also shown through clips of a television show that are broadcast throughout the film. The show is called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me, and consists of people getting beaten and humiliated on live television. It is replayed without comment throughout most of the film. The surreal elements of the film such as the sudden fantasy elements as Cassius appears to literally enter the homes of the people he is cold calling, do not detract from the pro-worker, anti-capitalist themes of the film and Riley acknowledges that the devices he employs have their origins in the magic realism of authors such as Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose anti-colonial works contain social and political commentary (Riley in Fuchs 2018, para. 6). In the same way as Cart though, Riley’s film depicts growing solidarity between workers as they realise they are stronger together. The industrial dispute brings people together and the union organiser helps people to understand the conditions of their exploitation. Even though the film moves between comedy, surrealism and horror—the focus is ultimately the same, and the world of work is centred. Sorry to Bother You also shows the ways in which class and race intersect—while Cart was concerned with the gender discrimination faced by the temporary workers, Sorry to Bother You contains references to racism and to the exploitation of workers of colour. Despite the fantasy elements, the workers in the film are believable as working-class characters. Cassius begins the film in a critical mode—questioning everything he sees, but his need for a job, and then his potential to become rich quells his critical thinking (temporarily). This aspiration can be understood—Cassius wants to earn money so that he can stop

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living in his uncle’s garage and help his uncle meet his house repayments and assist his girlfriend with her art endeavours. It makes sense that he would be attracted to the extra money and better working conditions, and his character is not portrayed as ignorant or evil for initially choosing this path. His friends and workmates are disappointed in him, and eventually this disappointment, coupled with witnessing the solidarity forming among his former colleagues, works to persuade him that he has chosen the wrong side to align with. The workers in the call centre eventually have their demands met and they return to work. The capitalists have been momentarily defeated by collective action, and the company owner is forced to abandon his plans to create a race of super strong Equisapiens (half human, half horse) after his experiments are exposed by Cassius and the Equisapiens use their strength to fight back. But the film ends on an ambiguous note when Cassius appears to be transforming into an Equisapien in the closing shot. While the workers had a victory, they did not defeat the system that will continue to exploit workers. Whether Boo’s film is intended to educate audiences on the importance of collective action is unclear, but Riley is an avowed anti-capitalist and it could be suggested that his film is presenting a political view (and possibly a call to arms). A more explicitly pro-union and worker organising film is Made in Bangladesh (2019), which is a workers’ rights film made by Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain. In the film, set in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka—garment workers fight for better pay and conditions. The film is centred around one of the workers, a young woman, Shimu (Rikita Nandini Shimu) who lives with her husband in one of the slum areas of the city. Shimu works in a clothing factory run by an unscrupulous manager who routinely holds back the workers’ overtime pay, despite requiring them to work all night in the factory to complete orders for western buyers. The film begins with close-up shots of the women’s work—the sewing machine needles, fingers expertly running the material under the needle and feet operating pedals. It is a very noisy scene, with the loud rattling of the sewing machines, the hiss of steam from irons and the whirring of the ceiling fans creating a cacophony. The noise levels continue throughout most of the film—Shimu’s neighbourhood are saturated with traffic noise, the yells of people hawking their goods on the streets, chickens squawking and rumbles of thunder. There is no escape in Shimu’s home—there is a constant background hum of the activities and conversations of the people living in the cramped and flimsy homes. After a fire in the factory closes it down temporarily, Shimu meets a women’s

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rights activist who persuades her to start a union at the factory in order to give the workers protection during their demands for their overtime and the reinstatement of unfairly sacked co-workers. Shimu is armed with a book outlining the labour laws that (technically) protect them, and sets out to convince her colleagues to sign up and to join her in encouraging the other women to be part of the union. There is much tension and drama, but eventually Shimu succeeds in having the union registered, but not before facing several obstacles—there are the factory bosses who threaten the women with termination, the fear felt by the women worried that they will become targets of retaliation if they agree to join the union, and her husband who orders her to stop organising. She also faces the forces of bureaucracy and corruption when she lodges her application, but Shimu is completely determined and refuses to be stopped in her mission to unionise the factory. She succeeds by the end of the film after threatening to expose the corruption of the official entrusted with her application and the film ends with a shot of Shimu’s face—a determined expression and a sense of empowerment as she leaves the office with her registration in hand. Hossain’s film follows the traditions of films from around the world that have been created to educate and empower their audiences. Shimu’s story reveals the difficulties of trying to organise a workplace, particularly for women who are also marginalised due to their gender, but her persistence leads to success, and the power of collective action is highlighted and celebrated. It offers an explicit message while garnering sympathy and respect for a strong young woman who has been characterised sensitively and authentically.

Migrant/Itinerant Workers (Last Train Home, White Night, Nana, Man Push Cart) There are a number of films globally that focus on migrant and immigrant workers and while the circumstances of the characters/subjects vary, there are some commonalities among workers who travel for work in terms of their vulnerability to exploitation and the potential harmful psychosocial effects of being far from home, family and community. Fan Lixin’s 2009 feature documentary Last Train Home offers the viewer an insight into the impact on family life, and relationships with children for migrant workers. Fan Lixin is Chinese, but now lives in Canada, and arguably brings an insider’s perspective on Chinese society, but with the benefit of distance

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that provides him with a critical eye. His status as a resident of Canada also means that his films can escape the Chinese government censors. Last Train Home is his debut and the film is notable due to the way in which he uses the documentary form that is ostensibly about the conditions faced by migrant workers in China to create a family drama. The film follows the Zhang family—the mother and father, Changhua Zhang and Suqin Chen, work in a garment factory in Guangzhou (in southern China) and make the annual New Year holiday trek back home to their village in Sichuan province in South west China—an epic journey of over 1000 kms to visit their two children who are cared for by their grandmother. They are just two among the 130 million workers who travel across the country at Chinese New Year which is the largest movement of migrants anywhere in the world (Li et al. 2012, 182). We get an idea of the couple’s working conditions and of their reasons for working so far away from their children. The device of the journey is used well— the epic nature of the trip and the difficulties the couple face in purchasing tickets and actually making it home in time for the holiday, stands in for the experiences of millions of migrant workers across the country. Depicting the journey gives an idea of the sacrifice made by the parents and highlights the impact on the whole family. The style of the documentary is ‘fly on the wall’—the camera follows the family and there is no narration. Although this is disrupted when Qin, the daughter, yells at the film crew and invites them to keep filming her angry outburst and fight with her father, a moment that Fan acknowledges as awkward and as having left him wondering whether to intervene (Fan in Taylor 2010, para. 11). The lack of narration means that the conditions experienced by the family are revealed through their everyday activities—the cramped living quarters of the factory, the less than safe looking working conditions. The filmmaker also uses some establishing shots to show the city and its factories (and the polluted air). This is contrasted with the almost idyllic scenes filmed in the family village where the grandmother and children harvest vegetables and live among beautiful, lush surroundings. From a western perspective, it would be easy to wonder why the parents would move to such an apparently inhospitable city when they come from a beautiful rural area—but the audience comes to understand that there is no work in the countryside and to live beyond a subsistence existence and to pay for their children’s education requires a move to where the work is located. The film also illustrates the reasons why Changhua Zhang and Suqin Chen would leave their children behind. It is evident from the scenes in the city, that there is

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no adequate childcare for children, and the factories are not safe places to take small children (Li et al. 2012, 177). But we also see the problem with children being raised by grandparents who might not be able to help them with their homework or be able to provide for them outside of basic needs (Li et al. 2012, 178). Another feature of this film is the staginess of some of the scenes. Some of the scenes feel slightly set up. The filmmaker’s presence is not visible, he doesn’t include himself in the frame (unlike some well-known filmmakers famous for manipulating subjects such as Werner Herzog), but it does feel that some of the drama has been encouraged, particularly in the scenes where the family sit down to eat in the grandmother’s home and the father admonishes his children for not studying hard enough. These types of awkward conversations relate to the ideas of Comolli (cited in O’Shaughnessy 2011, 65) who writes about the confusion surrounding listening and speaking positions in documentary films. It can be unclear whether the subject speaking is ‘addressing the camera, the person behind it, the…director…the questioner…or the cinema spectator’ which can then ‘destabilise the scenes’ (Comolli cited in O’Shaughnessy 2011, 65). There is a danger then that the subjects might attempt to create a ‘subversion of the mise-en-scène’ (O’Shaughnessy 2011, 66) which is what Qin arguably does during her outburst directed at the camera. But Fan suggests that the family displays an unselfconsciousness and credits this with his effort to get to know them and spend time with them, gaining their trust (Fan in Taylor 2010, para. 9). Fan states that he felt deeply for his subjects, and this empathy is visible in his representation of the family (Fan in Taylor 2010, para. 3). Last Train Home operates as a critique of society. The representation of China in the film is often quite negative—not in terms of the behaviour and actions of the family and other workers (they are represented very sympathetically), but in terms of the critique of the impact of capitalism in China. Through the focus on one family, the film raises awareness of the working and living conditions of China’s migrant workers, and brings home the sacrifices made by migrant workers in China and elsewhere and the ways in which the odds are stacked against them in the context of global capitalism and how they are trapped by systems they are unable to control (Li et al. 2012, 175). Another documentary that features migrant workers is White Night (2012) by Israeli filmmaker Irit Gal. This film follows a group of Palestinian women who cross the border illegally into Israel every night in order to work as cleaners in Jerusalem the next morning. They make their way across the rocky hills in the middle of the night and look for holes in the

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border fences. If they make it across the border, they must then evade the police who are on the lookout for illegal workers so they disguise themselves as Israeli by removing their hijabs. Some of the women are successful and make it the homes of Israelis where they will begin their shifts, while others are forced to go back into Palestine and some are arrested by the Israeli police. This is a bleak representation of the workers’ lives. Their journeys are hazardous and the reward seems small compared to the effort and danger expended. But the women are persistent and resilient and do not allow setbacks to deter them, despite falling ill on occasion and suffering psychologically from the stress of the nightly crossings. The women describe themselves as having no choice—they are women with ‘personal problems’ and without work permits. Some are divorced, others have unemployed husbands or are widows. The traditional family structures that might have supported them are not available. The women rely on each other for support and they help each other along the journey, sometimes by unhooking barbed wire from the clothing of a fellow worker attempting to climb through a small hole in a fence. The aesthetic of the film fits in with the themes—the hand-held camera follows the subjects and the jerky movements add to the sense of tension and chaos as the women keep moving in an attempt to avoid the authorities. The scenes are often dark due to the filming taking place during the night, and the darkness also creates confusion and provides a concrete manifestation of the workers’ subterfuge. We don’t see the women working—we only see some of them entering homes or being picked up by vehicles to transport them to a place of work, but we don’t witness the actual work they do. What we witness is the labour involved in the women getting to work. Before they even begin a shift they have completed the arduous journeys and used much mental effort to cross the border. Female migrant workers also feature in Nana, by Tatiana Fernández Geara (2015) from the Dominican Republic. The women in the film work as nannies, some in the US and some in the Dominican Republic. The film shows the issues the women face as they leave their own families to care for other people’s children. Child care is undervalued work and the nannies in the film show how seriously they take their work and the sense of pride they take in their jobs. The film also shows the genuine bonds created between the nannies and the children they are employed to take care of. In the same way as Last Train Home, the film depicts the impact on families when parents move away to work, and we see how much children raised by their grandmothers have missed their mothers. The filmmaker

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uses a combination of talking head interviews with the workers and their families and scenes filmed in the workplace or in the homes of the migrant workers’ own children. Fernández Geara is a photo journalist and Nana is her first film. She shot the documentary herself, and operated on a very low budget. The film follows Leidy, Fina and Clara and explores ideas around work and motherhood. It’s a moving film and the subjects allow us to get close—their accounts are honest and candid and we are left with an understanding with the complexities of lives for immigrant workers and are not positioned to judge them. In contrast with Last Train Home and White Night, Geara’s film does include some scenes of the women working—we see them taking care of children, brushing their hair, feeding them and getting them ready for school as well as engaged in housework. What is also noticeable in this film is the racial element. The majority of Dominican nannies are women of colour employed to look after the children of white middle-class women. Nana offers a glimpse into the lives of people who migrate for work and operates as an exploration too of transnationalism. Not so much in the production of the film because it is a domestic production, but in the way it deals with border crossing, particularly with the women who work in the US. Americans rely on workers from Latin America and the Caribbean, but these workers are not often given a voice—they are mainly reported on and discriminated against. The film offers a chance to understand the experiences of women who travel for work out of necessity and puts a human face on the issues of immigrant workers. Giving voice to those who are not heard is powerful and the film brings the women’s experiences to the audience in an affecting way. In this sense, it can also be described as a feminist film, due to its privileging of the female voice and the focus on domestic labour (paid labour here, but as mentioned, generally undervalued). These factors also make it political which aligns the film with many of the political filmmakers of the region from previous eras (as mentioned in the introduction to this book). In contrast with these documentaries is Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 drama Man Push Cart. Bahrani’s realist film is set in New York City and the central protagonist is a young immigrant from Pakistan who was a successful recording artist in his home country. In America he works as a coffee and bagel vendor operating from a food cart, and each day he has to push his cart from the depot to the street corner where he serves mostly affluent office workers. The main contrast between Man Push Cart and the other films discussed in this section is the individual emphasis in Bahrani’s film.

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The protagonist, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) must fend for himself and for the majority of the film it is Ahmed attempting to make a living in an uncaring society. While there are some other characters who offer solidarity such as newspaper kiosk vendor and Spanish immigrant Noemi (Leticia Dolera), for the most part Ahmed is on his own and must rely on his own wits to survive. We do see Ahmed work—he sets up the cart, serves customers and we follow him as he engages in the very strenuous work of pushing his cart through the streets of Manhattan. Ahmed also walks the streets trying to sell bootleg DVDs and he works as a handyman for a rich Pakistani man he meets at his cart. In many ways, this film resembles Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece The Bicycle Thieves (1948). In De Sica’s film, Antonia Ricci needs his bicycle for work, and when his bicycle is stolen he loses his livelihood. At one point in Man Push Cart, Ahmed’s cart is stolen—and along with it, his hopes to make a living and get on his feet. Ahmed needs the cart to work and without work, he can’t afford to buy or rent another cart. Bahrani’s aesthetic style adheres to the characteristics of neo-realism— the film was shot quickly on location and includes interactions between actors and members of the public (Ebert 2006, para. 4). It was a lowbudget production and used a combination of professional and non-professional actors (Wilkinson 2016, 21) and creates a film that paints a picture of New York City as a constant hustle for working-class immigrants, complete with representations of the everyday lives of those migrants and others who are usually ‘overlooked’ (Wilkinson 2016, 21). The film fits into a resurgence of realism seen in filmmaking around the world in recent decades (Canet 2013, 155). The influence of De Sica can also been seen in the way that Bahrani’s uses the location—in Bahrani’s film, New York City is rendered anonymous, much like De Sica’s Rome in The Bicycle Thieves, there are no visible landmarks or tourist attractions in sight. Bahrani rejects the ‘manufactured backdrop of innumerable Hollywood films’, and instead gives the viewer an insight into how working-­class people experience the city (Kroik 2016, 229). The film illustrates very well the way in which working-class people, particularly immigrants, are either ignored or demonised in the city—despite the numbers of immigrant workers who fill the streets selling food and other items to locals and tourists. There is no sense here though of ‘paternalistic sympathy or ethnographic fascination’ (Kroik 2016 232). The representation of low-paid immigrant labour is presented just how it is, with no commentary or particular message included. This is how many workers operate in the neo-­liberal economy—they find ways to make ends meet and are often alienated from the means to engage in

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collective action or workplace organising. It is difficult to unionise when you have no real boss to fight against.

Redundancy, Unemployment and the Effects of Neo-­liberalism (Two Days One Night, Wendy and Lucy, The Navigators) The flip side of work is unemployment, and this status is less represented in films about working-class people. The Dardenne Brothers’ 2014 realist drama, Two Days, One Night depicts the immediate aftermath of an employer’s decision to make a worker redundant in order to pay the remaining workers a bonus in exchange for them working longer hours to cover the sacked worker’s role. In a small Belgian industrial town, factory worker Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is sacked from her job and spends a weekend attempting to persuade her colleagues to vote to keep her position and lose their bonuses in what Vidaillet describes as an ‘impossible choice’ (2016, 124). This kind of choice is a result of capitalism and the way in which it deliberately pits workers against each other and where everyone eventually loses (Vidaillet 2016, 129). Sandra visits her workmates at their homes and is able to convince a few of them to stand up for her, but she is also aware that the bonuses are much-needed by her working-­class colleagues, many of whom are struggling to meet their basic needs. There is a sense of solidarity among the workers—most of them are sympathetic to Sandra’s plight and don’t want to see her lose her job, but they are in a very difficult position. The film shows how the employer has affectively pitted the workers against each other in a classic divide and conquer move. Workers are concerned that if they take a stand they will make themselves vulnerable to redundancy. The film also shows the psychosocial effects of job loss. We learn that Sandra has previously suffered from mental ill health and over the course of the weekend, Sandra attempts self-harm due to the overwhelming feelings of despondency. Work had provided much-needed income for her family, but had also provided sense of usefulness and contributed to Sandra’s recovery from ill health. Sandra’s mission to convince her workmates is successful and her employer agrees to keep her on—but at the expense of a young immigrant worker, Alphonse (Serge Koto) who will lose his job instead. Sandra demonstrates working-­ class solidarity when she refuses the offer in order for Alphonse to keep his job. The collective action has bolstered Sandra’s confidence and she feels

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ready to move on and find different work. What is missing from this film though is any representation of union support. The workers help each other, but outside of the formal structures of a union. As mentioned, there are few contemporary films worldwide that explicitly include representations of union activity and this may be partly due to the erosion of union power under neo-liberalism. Contemporary films about working-class people do tend to be more individual focused, with less emphasis on collective action. Zaniello suggests that other structures have started to replace the traditional union structures and describes the rise of ‘quasi-union and community organisations’ that try to represent workers (2020, 140). This individualism is also portrayed in films about transient workers and unemployment such as Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 drama Wendy and Lucy. In a similar way to Two Days, One Night, Reichardt’s film is centred on a female character—but in this narrative, the character of Wendy (Michelle Williams) only has her dog Lucy to support her. Wendy is a drifter—travelling to Alaska in search of work in the fish processing industry. She becomes stuck in a small town in Oregon when her car breaks down and she doesn’t have enough money to get it fixed. This is a depressing film—few people can help Wendy, and she is eventually forced to abandon her dog to a new home in order to travel to reach work. It is filmed using a documentary aesthetic and naturalistic performances. The landscape is bleak—despite being summer (or at least spring), there is a coldness created through the grey and blue tones. There is nothing picturesque about the environment. Wendy is homeless and when her car is stuck at the mechanics, she sleeps in the woods where there is a constant sense of potential menace because Wendy is so vulnerable. The audience doesn’t know why Wendy is transient—there is minimal dialogue and lack of exposition, but her face expresses the struggle and hardship and the toll of this self-imposed isolation. Reichardt shows how the dangers faced by homeless people are compounded by gender, but she also demonstrates the resilience of Wendy, as she attempts to overcome her setbacks and continue her journey towards work. The desire to be on the road and to escape (from what, we never learn) is thwarted by the reality of dwindling resources (Hester 2017, 819). The reality of life on the road for an unemployed woman is far from the American ‘myth of the road’ (Hester 2017, 811) as a symbol of ‘freedom and mobility’ (Hester 2017, 815). Wendy could stand in for many Americans who are at risk of losing their jobs and homes and whose options are limited due to a lack of social safety net for people in similar circumstances. This focus on the individual

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struggle and lack of collective support (despite the existence of sympathetic people along the way) is an indictment of the current neo-liberal condition. When talking about films about workers, the effects of neo-liberalism and collective action, it is hard to ignore Ken Loach’s The Navigators (2001). In this film, the emphasis is on collective action, and the ways in which workers fight injustice together. There is a strong sense of workplace camaraderie (albeit of a very masculine type) and these is expressed through the good-natured banter between workers. This is a funny film. It is a strong critique of privatisation and of eroding job security and work conditions, but it is punctuated by the working-class humour and this, I believe is a result of Loach’s own working-class background and the space he allows his working-class actors to improvise dialogue and present a genuine picture of working-class job sites. In The Navigators, the characters face a number of issues as a consequence of the privatisation of British Rail (the film is set in the 1990s in a Yorkshire depot). They discover that they are no longer working for British Rail, but are now employed by a private company—the employer wants to find efficiencies to save money (now that maintaining the rail network is a for-profit business) and permanent workers are laid off and forced into registering with agencies to work as contractors. They lose their work benefits such as holiday and sick pay, and they witness a decline in safety standards as their new employers chase profits and the company becomes increasingly bureaucratised (Kelly 2001, 121). The union representative tries hard to maintain their conditions, but the workers find themselves in an impossible position. In order to keep their jobs, they have to accept the worsening conditions. This eventually has deadly consequences when a worker is killed due to neglect of adequate safety procedures. Like some of the characters in the films mentioned above, the workers in The Navigators also face job insecurity and are pitted against each other in the scramble for work. But Loach does not give up on collective action, and the main message of the film is that unions are important and will hold employers accountable.

Informal Economy (Biutiful, Maria Full of Grace) Working-class people aren’t only engaged in established industries or employed by companies in the formal sector. Many working-class people around the world work in the informal sector—they are not employed legally and while they might not pay tax, they also have no job protections

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and are open to exploitation and abuse. For some, the informal sector is the only place they can find work. This might be because they have a criminal record, or no formal education. Or it could be because they are immigrants who do not have work permits. In every aspect of the informal sector, the workers are vulnerable. Informal sector workers are occupied in a variety of different jobs. They could be working cash-in-hand as a restaurant dishwasher or construction worker. Taking care of children (baby-­ sitting) for neighbours or family is informal work. The informal sector includes unlicensed street vendors and sex workers in countries where sex work is illegal. Drug dealers still work, but not within the structures of the formal economy. Working in the informal sector often involves moving from job to job, or constantly shifting locations to avoid the authorities. It is always insecure and often risky (both due to its illegality but also due to the dangers that come with unregulated work). Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 drama Biutiful illustrates the risks of working in the informal sector, albeit with a strong sense of morality and no direct critique of the structural inequalities that push people into the informal sector. Iñárritu is Mexican, but Biutiful is set in Barcelona, Spain and follows Uxbal (Javier Bardem)—a single father who earns money by managing and soliciting labour for local businesses. The labourers are illegal immigrants with no work permits and Uxbal is responsible for making sure they are not caught by the police. He regularly bribes a police officer to ensure that the African street vendors he runs do not get harassed by the authorities. He is involved in various parts of the supply chain for the goods sold by the African vendors—he supplies labour for the sweat shop where the bags and umbrellas are manufactured by Chinese immigrants. Uxbal also employs one of the Chinese workers, Li (Lang Sofia Lin) to mind his children, Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella) while he is working. Li has her own infant and works for Uxbal so that she can feed her child. Uxbal also becomes indirectly responsible for the death of Li and her baby, plus another 23 of the Chinese workers, when he organises heaters for them that lead to them being poisoned by carbon monoxide in the warehouse they are locked into at night. We watch Uxbal interact with the immigrant workers, he tries to help one of the Senegalese vendors, Ekweme (Cheikh Ndiaye) but Ekweme is arrested and deported. Instead, Uxbal takes in Ekweme’s wife Ige (Diaryatou Daff) and her son, and she in return, looks after UXbal’s children after Li dies.

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The camera rarely moves from Bardem’s face, and despite the jerky, hand-held movements, there are lots of close-ups and extreme close-ups which help to create empathy between the audience and the Bardem’s character. This level of empathy is complex, because it means that the audience can feel for Uxbal (and feel sorry for him), despite his part in exploiting the immigrant workers. He is kind to the workers—he tries to intervene when Ekweme is being beaten by police and he organises the heaters for the cold workers. Uxbal speaks to the workers as equals and is particularly grateful for Li’s help in looking after his children. And Uxbal is also sick—he has been diagnosed with cancer. But at the same time, Uxbal is essentially trafficking the workers to make money. That he saves his money to provide for his children and helps out individual workers doesn’t detract from the exploitation suffered by the immigrant workers. Del Mar Azcona describes the focus on Uxbal as ‘suffocating’ (2015, 3), but I would suggest that the occasional movement away from Uxbal onto some of the other characters, prevents the focus on Uxbal from being too limiting. Like many of the films discussed so far, cool blue tones are used which adds to the bleakness of the environment. The city of Barcelona is rendered as an unwelcoming and inhospitable place. For most of the film, no recognisable landmarks are shown, and when there is a brief shot of the famous Sagrada Família cathedral, it is in the distance and serves to heighten the sense of alienation from society that is experienced by the characters. The characters live in slum conditions. Uxbal’s apartment is cramped and there is a plume of mould growing on his ceiling. In his ex-­ wife Marambra’s (Maricel Álvarez) apartment, there is a leaking fridge that has an electrical fault and the family are at risk of electrocution if they approach the fridge with bare feet. Uxbal and his children eat poorly. At night, he feeds them breakfast cereal, and he makes do with some cheap and small pieces of fish. They talk about the food they would like to eat— fatty foods such as hamburgers that they can’t afford. In the outdoor scenes the impoverished neighbourhood includes run-down buildings, homeless people on the streets and the immigrant workers are crowded into small spaces without adequate facilities. Poverty causes tensions and stress between family members. Uxbal becomes angry with his son Mateo for playing with his food, and Marambra punishes Mateo after he approaches the dangerous fridge without shoes. Uxbal is working-class and a victim himself of structural inequalities. But the focus on his daily survival doesn’t include any reference to, or

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criticism of, the inequalities that have caused his current circumstances. We watch Uxbal access health care. Spain has a universal health care system which means the treatments are free, but Uxbal has not sought medical help despite being sick and discovers that he has a cancer that is now incurable. There is no explanation as to why he neglected his health, the film only focuses on the consequences (he will die and leave his children alone). There is a sense here that the reason for not seeing a doctor earlier must be an individual personal choice, and he is ultimately punished for this. His avoidance of the doctor paints Uxbal as a martyr figure in some ways. The pain and suffering he experiences is the payback for his role in the exploitation and deaths of the immigrant workers but the audience is made to feel much sorrier for him, than the mostly nameless Chinese and African workers. While Biutiful employs a realist aesthetic for the most part, it also contains elements of the supernatural and abstract images which means it is a very different viewing experience to the films already discussed. As well as running illegal workers, Uxbal also earns money as a psychic—he is able to speak to the dead and see the dead around him. He is paid to talk to the dead by the relatives of the deceased and he relays messages to their loved ones. This work is totally normalised in the film, there is no sense that he is a fraud and Uxbal clearly sees the dead too—this is also treated in a matter of fact way and isn’t sensationalised. It is simply part and parcel of the lives of the working-class Spaniards he helps. The abstract occurs at the beginning and the end of the film. The opening scene begins in media res and shows Uxbal talking with his daughter Ana, in what we discover later is his last conversation. As well as the whispered conversation between Uxbal and Ana is a scene set in a snowy forest. Uxbal meets a young man in the forest—they seem to know each other and they chat and share cigarettes. There is no explanation of this strange scene until late in the film when we realise that the young man in the forest was Uxbal’s father. We see him in a photograph and realise that he is the same man. The young father had left Uxbal’s mother when she was pregnant in order to flee Franco’s regime. But even when learning his identity, it isn’t clear whether this encounter between the men who never actually met is a dream or fantasy of Uxbal. The closing scene suggests that this is actually the moment of Uxbal’s death as he joins his father in the afterlife. Again, treated in a low-key manner and fitting with the previous representations of belief in the afterlife among the working-class characters.

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Another Spanish language film (this time set in Columbia) that features characters working in the informal sector is Maria Full of Grace (2005) by American director Joshua Marston. The title character, teenager Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) decides to leave her job on a flower farm and agrees to become a drug mule along with two other girls. Despite being pregnant, she swallows capsules of drugs and flies to the US, where she manages to evade customs and eventually deliver the drugs. Maria leaves a job in the formal sector due to feeling exploited by her employer, and moves to a much more dangerous occupation (and one of the other drug mules dies due to the capsules bursting inside her). The promise of a large payment for delivering the drugs is persuasive and Maria knows she will never earn as much de-thorning roses or working in a factory. She is willing to take the risk because she feels she has nothing to lose, and because she is likely to be exploited wherever she works due to her class status and gender. While it is clear that she is being exploited, there is also a sense that Maria has agency in the situation. She chooses how to use her body and is not forced to swallow the drugs (even though the men sent to collect the drugs she passes are brutal). Maria isn’t passive—she is able to take some control and to fight back. At the end of the film, despite the risks, she decides to stay in the US and not return home. This type of young, marginalised but ultimately strong and resilient young woman features in a number of working-class films from around the world such as La Yuma (Florence Jaugery, 2009, Nicaragua), Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009, UK), Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010, US) and Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009, Australia) which will be discussed in later chapters.

Rural Workers (The Orator, Ohong Village) The films discussed in the previous section have focused on stories set in towns and cities, but there are a number of films that tell stories of rural workers. Tusi Tamasese’s The Orator is the first film made in Samoa by a Samoan director and about Samoan life. The story is quite straightforward—it’s about taro farmer Saili (Fa’afiaula Sagote) who is marginalised and bullied by the other men in the village due to his short stature and because his wife, Vaaiga (Tausili Pushparaj) has a daughter to another man which has brought shame to her family. Saili has to decide whether to try and take on his chiefly attributes (inherited from his father) at a pivotal moment when he needs to make a stand. The film offers the viewer an

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insight into Samoan culture but is also critical of the culture being depicted and the filmmaker reveals the patriarchal nature of the village and ways in which people can be marginalised. The Orator takes an ‘observational’ approach and is very visual (Gray 2012, 30). Dialogue is minimal, but feeling is conveyed through silences, body language and the mise en scène. The film is beautifully shot—the setting is lush but not romanticised. The viewer is provided with privileged access to the village and the people. And there are a number of scenes that depict work in the village. Saili tends to his taro fields, cutting plants with his machete and he sits on guard during his night shift as a security guard at the village store. There are lingering shots of mat weaving which give an insight into Samoan village life. The pace of life (including work) in the village is very slow, and this is reflected in the film’s form. It is a good example of ‘slow’ cinema. ‘Slow’ cinema requires a different mode of viewing because it is so far removed from the ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell 2002, 16) of most Hollywood film that it can be difficult to get used to. Hollywood cinema uses very fast editing with average shot lengths of only a couple of seconds. In contrast, films like The Orator employ a slow rhythm, and force the viewer to slow down. Shot lengths are much longer and there is time to look carefully within the frame and notice small details that would be missed in a fast-paced film. Slow cinema allows for contemplation and reflection and also allows the audience to appreciate the everyday. No big moments, explosions or over-the-top emotional reactions. Just everyday events and how they are dealt with by the characters. There are a number of filmmakers who prefer an ‘aesthetic of slow’ (Flanagan 2008, para. 3) and who reject the ‘cinema of acceleration’ (Flanagan 2008, para. 5). Tamasese himself cites the Japanese masters Ozu and Kurosawa (Gray 2012, 32) who were able to include much weight to their films despite the simple narratives, lack of dialogue and exposition, and the long, lingering shots of everyday objects. Tamasese suggests there are clear parallels with the style of The Orator and that of Ozu—particularly Ozu’s fondness for the ‘tatami’ angle shot which emphasises the ways in which people in Japan would sit or kneel on the floors of their homes. Tamasese says that this is akin to Samoan practice and so he utilised a similar style (Gray 2012, 32). The effect of the slow pace is that it gives the viewer time to scan the frame. When scenes play out in real time there is a sense of sharing the experience with the character (which can sometimes be voyeuristic). Watching a film like The Orator requires viewers to change expectations of

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film. Not all viewers like being forced to slow down in this way. Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time image is useful here. Deleuze’s understanding of time is based on that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson who rejected the idea of ‘clock time’ in favour of that of ‘duration’ (Bergson 2004, 155), which is flowing time that is not divided into past, present and future, but intertwined. The past exists as memory and the future exists as desire. In Deleuze’s model, cinema is a form of philosophy, with filmmakers taking the position of philosophers in modern society (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 159). Deleuze was less interested in what he called the ‘movement-image’ (Deleuze 2009, 100), which is a sequence of images representing chronological time and championed the ‘time-image’ which is ‘transcendental’ (Deleuze 2009, 101) and a ‘direct presentation of time’(Deleuze 2009, 102). For Deleuze, cinema has both ‘virtual’ images and ‘actual images’. The actual image is the objective and perceived image (the what is right in front of us) and the virtual is the subjective, recollected image (Deleuze 2009, 102). In other words, the actual refers to the present and the virtual refers to the past. Images that help us to recollect, or recognise something or dream are time images. Deleuze also describes mirror images in films—images that disrupt time (Deleuze 2009, 103). This can be understood by thinking about a hall of mirrors as an analogy— when space is reflected in the mirrors and starts to resemble itself, it disrupts time. This hall of mirrors becomes a crystal with multiple reflecting surfaces. In Delueze’s crystal image we can ‘see’ time (Deleuze 2009, 102). We experience both the present moment of watching a shot combined with the pastness of what has been filmed and recorded. We are both in the moment and outside of the moment simultaneously. The past, present and future imply each other—they cannot be separated. For Deleuze, the past may be virtual, but it is also real—it isn’t happening right now, but it exists, only differently to the present. Time is to be thought of as non-linear, and as indeterminate and infinite. Time is whole, is ‘one’ and we exist within time—it is not exterior to us. Time is never as it seems and contains multiplicity and difference. Being aware of this— through, for example, the treatment of time through cinema—allows us to question, test limits and experiment. Cinema, for Deleuze, shows the workings of time and shows what is and what can be. For Deleuze, it is in art films that the time image is more likely to occur, and he suggests this is what makes them different to films that focus on the movement image— or the placing together of shots to form a sequence. In films dealing with time there is more scope for philosophical thought, more chance for

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infinite meaning as the crystal (like time) is always expanding and there is more chance to explore any ‘cracks’ in the crystal. While The Orator doesn’t deal directly with time as a concept (unlike time travel films for example), arguably the slowness of the film and the way in which the film reveals the daily repetitions of life for the characters, the mirroring of events in this repetition, can bring us closer to the ideas of Deleuze. Time takes on a different feel in the village compared to the city and the viewer experiences ‘duration’ along with the characters. This concept of duration can also be applied to other aspects of working-class life, particularly when much time is spent waiting (for an offer of a job, for a better economic situation, waiting for a long day at work to end, or finding a way to endure long hours in a difficult job). Time can have a different feel for working-­ class people compared to middle- and upper-class people. There is a slow pace too in Lim Lung-Yin’s 2019 Taiwanese drama Ohong Village set in a fishing village in the south west of the island. This is an unusual film because Lim has used 16 mm film to shoot the film—creating a grainy effect that renders the film quite timeless (even though it is set in the present). It falls into the realm of art cinema, but its focus is on a working-class community and we watch the characters work—shucking oysters, tending to the oyster farm, soliciting tourists for boat tours. The work is hard, and the environment is tough—the land is being consumed by the sea and a typhoon hits the village. There is also an observational style here—but the setting is not lush, and the landscape is mostly grim. But this grimness is not created through the use of blue or grey tones, the colours in the film are rich and the scenes are punctuated with vibrant reds and the rainbow hues of fairy lights around the village. We do gain entry into village life though—the camera lingers on the rituals of a village festival which represents the importance in Taiwan of ‘folk rituals’ (Yeh and Davis 2005, 221) and we follow the central protagonist, Shen (Lin Yu Hsu) as he refamiliarises himself with life in the village after living in the capital, Taipei, for some years. The realist mode stretches to the performances, with many of the roles played by non-professional actors. The professional actors were immersed in village life prior to the shoot because Lim wanted his cast to understand and empathise with their characters.1 1  The director, Lim Lung-Yin, engaged in a Q&A session at the screening of Ohong Village at the July 2019 Taiwan Film Festival in Sydney. During the Q&A he explained that some of the actors were non-professional and that the professional actors lived in the village prior to shooting to familiarise themselves with the local culture.

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Shen’s childhood friend Kun (Chen Hsin Tai) is engaged in constant money-making schemes, and his daily hustle illustrates the ways in which Shen has changed due to living so far away from his family and original community. It becomes clear that Shen never made it in Taipei, and eventually he decides to remain in the village and take up a role as an oyster farmer. There is a sense here of the continuity of work. While the villagers’ livelihoods are threatened by changes in the climate and encroaching development, the community is strong and resilient, and they find a shared identity through the work. This identity is something that Shen realises is important, and difficult to replicate in the city and staying in the village gives him purpose again. This film fits into a large body of film work in Taiwan that is centred on working-class life. The emphasis on the representation of working-class life in Taiwan reflects the broader workingclassness of Taiwanese culture described by Yeh and Davis (2005) as street wise and vulgar (224). This is not meant to be understood as disaparaging in any way—this earthiness is celebrated and foregrounded (Yeh and Davis 2005, 209). A female perspective is provided in Pili (2018). This film is set in Tanzania and focuses on the life of a young single mother, Pili (Bello Rashid) as she tries to provide for her children in her rural home. Pili is directed by a white British director, Leanne Welham, and made in collaboration with a British academic, Sophie Harman, with the express aim of bringing to light the stories of women living with HIV in Tanzania, and to reduce the stigma surrounding HIV status—a stigma that prevents women from seeking treatment due to shame. The filmmakers used mostly unprofessional actors to play the roles of Pili’s friends and neighbours, and many of the cast are HIV positive. There is a pedagogical aspect to the film, and Pili is educated along the way by various people in her community, until she decides to reveal her HIV status and stop hiding the truth from those close to her. Despite the film being made by two white British women, there is a sensitive and respectful tone to the film and the story of Pili was based on stories told by Tanzania women living with HIV (Welham in Bastianello 2019, para. 1). There is an authenticity created by the use of non-professional actors and a sense that the actors really understand their characters’ situations. Pili herself is stoic and resilient. She has made a plan to improve her economic situation and to provide security for her two children. This does result in some self-sacrifice that she eventually realises is counter-productive. It is better for Pili to take care of herself, so that she can take care of her children. While the filmmakers are white, the film

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operates as an example of Sembène’s ‘evening school’ and the filmmakers took the film to the village where it was filmed and received a very positive response (Newey 2018, para. 12). Their intention is to show the film in other areas where HIV is widespread and spread their message of acceptance, self-care and prevention (Newey 2018, para. 13). Pili is shot with a hand-held camera which follows Pili as she goes to work, visits the doctor and as she attempts to raise the deposit needed to purchase a vending stall. The village is in a rural setting, and Pili works in the fields tilling soil. The colours of the surroundings are intense and the scenes in the fields are punctuated by the sounds of insects and birds, but there is nothing idyllic about the setting—while the landscape has beauty, Pili and her co-workers are seen tilling the dry earth in the hot sun. They are paid very little and seem to work without adequate water, food and shade. All are women and this is a noticeable feature of the film. The majority of people working hard are women. Men are quite peripheral in the film, but they occupy positions of power. It is men who is responsible for paying the women after a day working the fields. One of the men attempts to underpay Pili’s friend, but Pili intervenes on her behalf, using her literacy skills to read the ledger and prove that her friend is being short-changed. It is a man who owns the vending stalls, and who pressures Pili into raising a deposit to buy one of the stalls. While this is what she wants, the man, Mr. Mahela, does not make it easy for her and she is eventually forced into accepting his request for sex to secure the stall. It is transactional sex, and while Mr. Mahela holds the power in this situation, it is Pili who makes the final decision. The unromantic depiction of the setting is also reinforced through the location of Pili’s house. She lives on the edge of a very busy road, and there is a constant stream of trucks and buses hurtling past. This creates tension because her young children are vulnerable to being hit by vehicles and there are moments in the film when the road becomes menacing. At night when Pili is walking home with her children, they come across a road traffic accident scene and for a second, Pili loses her grip on her young daughter. The door to Pili’s house has been broken by a stray football, and is no longer secure, and Pili’s daughter is drawn to the unfastened door. But Pili’s children survive, and the film does not rely on melodrama and excess tragedy to make its point. It’s important that Pili and her children survive, because the aim of the film is to show other women that it is possible to live a happy and normal life while HIV positive. All through the film we watch women working; in the field, taking

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care of children (their own and others’), selling goods, working as a clinic receptionist and doctor. And the women make the community—they look out for each other and offer support. The women in Pili’s village run a Vikoba—a village community bank that can be accessed for small loans. There is a sense here that the women are the hub of the villages and towns which also adheres to Ousmane Sembène’s assertion that African women are the key to success on the continent (Murphy and Williams 2007, 61). A number of other films also feature rural workers Snow, 2008, Aida Begic (Bosnia) is about women working farmland after the menfolk were killed during the Balkan war. Ixcanul (Volcana), 2015, Jayro Bustamante (Guatemala), is set in a remote coffee growing region and also focuses on a central female protagonist who does not want to marry the man arranged for her. And Peepli Live, 2010, Anusha Rizvi (India), which is a satirical comedy that tells the story of Indigenous farmers in a village in Mukhya Pradesh who contemplate suicide to clear debts owed and therefore save their families from destitution. It’s clear that workers do feature in many films from around the work, but that there is very little representation of actual work. While films might include some scenes of work, they are usually used to set a scene or provide context—they are not usually stand-alone moments in the films. There is one strong exception to this in Stray Dogs (2013) by Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang. Stray Dogs has some memorable scenes which focuses wholly on work being performed. The central character, a homeless father (Lee Kang Sheng) stands on busy intersections holding a wooden sign advertising a real estate company. He must hold tight onto his sign to avoid it being carried by the strong wind and rain that batters the city of Taipei. The father is protected by the elements only by a thin plastic rain coat—and this flaps in the wind noisily (Attfield 2017, 97). These scenes create affect through the use of foregrounded ambient sound (Birtwistle 2015, 82) of the plastic coat flapping, and through the length of the shots. The shots linger and remain static and the viewer has plenty of time to feel the discomfort of the father and his fellow sign-holders (Attfield 2017, 97). This type of scene brings the audience closer into the world of work and into the ways in which work impacts the body. Arguably if more such moments were included in film, audiences would understand better what it means to work in a working-class job.

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References Attfield, Sarah. 2017. Tsai Ming Liang’s Alternative Narratives of Working-Class Life in Taiwan. IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film 4 (1): 93–105. ———. 2019. Is ‘Doing Your Best’ Ever Enough When You Are Working Class? Working-Class Perspectives, June 23. https://workingclassstudies.wordpress. com/2019/06/23/is-doing-your-best-ever-enough-when-you-areworking-class/ Bastianello, Maria. 2019. Interview with Leanne Welham: Pili—A Story of Women. The Italian Reve, March 8. https://www.theitalianreve.com/ interview-with-leanne-welham-pili-a-story-of-women/ Bergson, Henri (1889) 2004. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. New York: Routledge. Bieler, Andreas, Lindberg, Ingemar, and Devan Pillay. 2008. Labour and the Challenges of Globalisation: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity? London: Pluto Press. Birtwistle, A. 2015. Heavy Weather: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tsai Ming-liang, and The Poetics of Environmental Sound. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32 (1): 72–90. Bordwell, David. 2002. Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film. Film Quarterly 55 (3): 16–28. Canet, Fernando. 2013. The New Realist Trend in Contemporary World Cinema: Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop as a Case Study. Acta Univ.Sapientine, Film and Media Studies 7: 153–167. Del Mar Azcona, Maria. 2015. We are All Uxbal: Narrative Complexity in the Urban Borderlands in Biutiful. Journal of Film and Video 67 (1): 3–13. Deleuze, Gilles. (1989) 2009. The Time-Image. In The History on Film Reader, ed. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, 100–107. London: Routledge. Ebert, Roger. 2006. Man Push Cart: Review. RogertEbert.com, October 19. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/man-push-cart-2006 Elsaesser, Thomas. 2018. European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment. London: Bloomsbury. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York: Routledge. Flanagan, Matthew. 2008. Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema. 16:9 6 (29), November. http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_ inenglish.htm Fuchs, Cynthia. 2018. Act it Out: Interview with Boots Riley. Pop Matters, July 23. https://www.popmatters.com/boots-riley-interview-2588457323.html Gray, Richard. 2012. The Other Side of Paradise: Tusi Tamasese on The Orator. Metro Magazine 172: 30–32.

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Halliday, Jon. 1972. All That Heaven Allows. In Douglas Sirk, ed. Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday, 59–66. Edinburgh Film Festival 1972: Edinburgh. Haralovitch, Mary Beth. 1990. All That Heaven Allows: Color, Narrative Space, and Melodrama. In Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman, 57–72. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press. Hester, Diarmuid. 2017. Highway to Hell? Images of the American Road in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff. Journal of American Studies 52 (3): 810–827. Jin, Dal Yong. 2010. Critical Interpretation of Hybridisation in Korean Cinema. Javnost—The Public Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 17 (1): 55–71. Kelly, Richard. 2001. “We Shouldn’t be Doing This”: The Navigators, Stories from the Trackside. Critical Quarterly 44 (1): 119–123. Kroik, Polina. 2016. Neoliberal Labour in Ramin Bahrani’s Films: Uneven Development, Entrepreneurial Governmentality and Political Resistance. Canadian Review of American Studies 46 (2): 223–244. Li, Na, Wei-hsin Lin, and Xiaobing Wang. 2012. From Rural Poverty to Urban Deprivation? The Plight of Chinese Rural-Urban Migrants Through the Lens of Last Train Home. East Asia: An International Quarterly 29 (2): 173–186. Mazierska, Ewa. 2013. Introduction: Work, Struggle, and Cinema. In Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition, ed. Ewa Mazierska, 1–25. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McHugh, Kathleen. 2001. South Korean Film Melodrama and the Question of National Cinema. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1): 1–14. Mennel, Barbara. 2019. Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Milner, Lisa. 2014. Labour Culture on Screen and Online: Union Films as Mobilisation Strategies. Labour History 107:181–196. Murphy, David, and Patrick Williams. 2007. Ten Directors. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newey, Sarah. 2018. HIV Positive Cast Star in Pili, the Film Shining a Light on the Struggles of Tanzanian Women Living with HIV. The Telegraph, October 16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/hivpositive-cast-star-pili-film-shining-light-struggles-tanzanian/. O’Shaughnessy, Martin. 2011. Filming Work and the Work of Film. L’Esprit Créateur 51 (3): 59–73. Strangleman, Tim. 2004. Ways of (Not) Seeing Work: The Visual as a Blind Spot in WES? Work Employment and Society 18 (1): 179–192. Taylor, Ella. 2010. Following Workers’ Trails of Tears in China. New York Times, August 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29home.html Vidaillet, Bénédicte. 2016. Two Days, One Night, or the Objective Violence of Capitalism. M@n@gement 19 (2): 124–132.

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Wilkinson, Alissa. 2016. Redirected Attention: The Films of Ramin Bahrani. Books and Culture 22 (3): 21. Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu, and Darrell William Davis. 2005. Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island. New York: Columbia University Press. Young, Kim, and Kaye Broadbent. 2015. “Still out on the Street Waging this Fight”: Women Irregular Workers and Industrial Action in Korea. Economic and Industrial Democracy 39 (2): 228–248. Zaniello, Tom. 1996. Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riff Raf: An Organised Guide to Films about Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2020. The Cinema of the Precariat: the Exploited, Underemployed, and Temp Workers of the World. New York: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 3

Working-Class Culture

The global working class is not homogenous, but there are some commonalities of experience that can be acknowledged. Financial hardship might be felt in different ways, but the struggle is experienced around the world. Another commonality is the ways in which working-class people find ways to enjoy themselves, regardless of this hardship. This is where working-class culture comes in. It can manifest in a variety of different ways, but it brings people together. It could be music played in the clubs of Havana. Or bingo games in the community centres of the UK. Sport is often important, with the ‘world game’—football (soccer) being loved across the globe. People need pleasure in their lives—while being able to meet the basic needs of food and shelter are obviously priorities, it is also important to be able to enjoy life. This is the ‘bread and roses’ maxim, that insists not only on decent wages for workers but for decent conditions too—a quality of life beyond the pay packet. Finding joy in the small things is a working-class characteristic. The collective pleasure of watching a TV show together, or attending a sporting event is significant. Listening to music, singing along and dancing is also beneficial for working-class well-being. Collecting cheap nicknacks such as ornaments or tea towels brightens up homes when expensive decorating is not an option. The grind of work or of surviving unemployment can be bearable with these everyday pleasures. Working-class people often take pleasure in popular culture and some of the films discussed in this chapter focus on music and membership of subcultures and participation in football culture. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Attfield, Class on Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7_3

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Some Marxists such as Theodor and Max Horkheimer, have been critical though of the consumption of popular culture among the working classes and have suggested that it leads to a dulling of critical thinking. In their famous essay on the ‘culture industry’ (in During 1999), Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that ‘culture now impresses the same stamp on everything’ (32) and they describe cinema and the radio as ‘business … made into an ideology’ (32). They saw the film as an instrument of the ruling classes (Leslie 2005, 34), that was used to provide ‘instant gratification’ to compliant workers (Leslie 2005, 37). According to this argument, formulaic music, movies, television shows and so on, give no space for questioning and merely serve as a distraction (Adorno and Horkheimer in During 1999, 35). This distraction is in the bosses’ favour, as the working classes do not see their own conditions of exploitation and continue to be compliant workers. This also applies to spectacles such as sporting tournaments, which make people forget about their working conditions. For Adorno and Horkeimer, the way to counter this stupefaction was through exposure to serious and difficult art—the kind of art that makes people think and therefore become critical and steered away from ‘naturalistic representation’ (Leslie 2005, 38). Once this critical thinking is switched on, people can question the conditions of their existence and begin to demand change. Art can create revolutionary potential, but popular culture can only stifle it. But this argument assumes that working-class people cannot be critical of the popular culture they consume. Working-class people do question what they are watching, listening to, participating in and do not consume popular culture products blindly. Working-class people are very aware of the conditions of their existence. They know when they are being exploited and can recognise injustice. But they aren’t always in a position to fight against these injustices, especially when they operate outside of the structures of unions and other organisations. And popular culture is used as a site of resistance to power. This can be seen in the participation in subcultures (discussed later in this chapter), and in the ways in which some popular culture is targeted at working-class people at the exclusion of other classes. There are spaces that require working-class capital—spaces where middle- and upper-class people are not welcome. This chapter looks at some films that focus on culture and considers how working-class culture is represented. Is it depicted as something that binds communities together? Or is it seen as distracting working-class people from their exploitation? Are there any aspects of working-class culture that are common around the world? What sorts of culture is specific

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to a time or place? We have already seen in the introduction, that historically, movie-going has always been popular with working-class people. Do contemporary films have the same draw and do contemporary films portray movie-going in working-class communities? The chapter begins with a discussion of films that focus on music and music subcultures.

Music and Subcultures (Boy, This is England, Northern Soul) Taika Waititi’s 2010 feature Boy is set in a rural working-class town in New Zealand and is based on Waititi’s own experience of growing up in a Maori family in New Zealand. Boy is also a good example of a personal nostalgia on screen and is a ‘coming of age’ film. The main characters in Boy are misfits in their community, mainly because they dream of lives elsewhere. The film is set in the 1980s and centres on the titular character, Boy (James Rolleston) who creates elaborate fantasies about his absent father, Alamein. His younger brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu) feels responsible for the death of their mother (who died during his birth) and he retreats into a fantasy land structured around drawings that come to life. When Alamein (played by Taika Waititi) returns to the town, Boy starts to realise that his father is a flawed man and not the hero he had invented. Running through the film, alongside the story of Boy and his relationship with his father, is Boy’s love for the music of Michael Jackson. Pop songs feature throughout the film, and this love for the pop star, his music and his dance moves is given weight. Boy uses the music to soothe his feelings of loss (his mother died while giving birth to his brother), and to deal with constant bullying at school, as well as to impress a girl he likes. Music is therefore an integral aspect of his young life. There are other songs woven through the film too—songs that were popular in New Zealand at the time, operating as ‘memory triggers’ (Perrott 2010, 51) and creating an authentic picture of life which contrasts with the use of fantasy and animation. This film is also very funny—Waititi is a comedy writer, and he uses comedy in the film to create a bittersweet tragicomic tone. Perrot points to the use of humour in the film and suggests that the funny moments help to highlight the ‘emotional complexities’ of the characters (2010, 50). She also points to the use of satire and irony in the film and the way it demonstrates that people experiencing struggle also have complex, layered and ‘rich’ lives (Perrott 2010, 51). The result is effective—while the

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film is funny and contains elements of fantasy, it also operates as a social commentary and a realist representation of life for the people living in the working-class town. The realist aspect is created through the depiction of the environment—most of the townsfolk are poor and Boy and Rocky live in a run-down house with their grandmother. There is evidence that poverty has led to dysfunction, manifesting in the character of Alamein who is a convicted criminal. The focus on Maori life is significant too, and there are few Pakeha (non-Maori) characters included. It is possible to think of Boy as ‘light’ and entertaining due to its use of animation, fantasy sequences and humour, but the politics of Boy is implicit—it is in the setting, the environment and the ways in which the community works together to cope with hardship. The film also offers a representation of Maori history from an insider’s perspective. But the film is also nostalgic. Should this be criticised? Can nostalgia be useful? What does a film like Boy achieve? Nostalgia can be described as an emotional yearning for the past, which can be personal in that the past yearned for was once experienced, or it can be commodified, in that a particular era is revived by the culture industry leading to the evocation of nostalgia in those who may not have experienced the era themselves (Shumway 1999, 39). So, for example, people who are in their twenties in 2020 who like 1950s clothes and cars. Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson has nothing but scorn for nostalgic film and suggests that films such as American Graffiti are examples of ‘aesthetic colonisation’ (1991, 19). For Jameson, nostalgia films aim for historical accuracy but end up ‘bland in their very visual elegance’ (287) and only manage to achieve a representation of ‘the stereotypical past’ (21). He asks whether the people alive in that particular era actually saw themselves that way at all (279). French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard (1994) also criticises historical films and states that in film, history is fetishised and that history in contemporary cinema is hyper-real, that there is hyper-resemblance (45). When watching films set in the past, it is common for the mise en scène to be too perfect (45). A film set in 1962 should not only include items/fashions/cars from that specific year. The things we have are from a variety of years and eras, but often a filmmaker will attempt to be so specifically historically accurate that what they achieve is possibly creating (according to Baudrillard) ‘marvellous artefacts without weakness—pleasing simulacra’ (1994, 45). This nostalgia is created through the costuming and the use of other artefacts (or at least replicas of artefacts) such as cars/ furniture and architecture, but it is also created through the use of music. Davis Shumway suggests that in

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American Graffiti it is the music that produces nostalgia. He describes popular music as ‘the madeleine of the masses’ (1999, 40), and states that the use of ‘temporally specific’ music of the late 1950s/early 1960s in American Graffiti leads to a creation of a ‘fictional set of memories’ for audiences who did not have the experience of growing up in 1950s small-­ town America. And music is a dominant feature of the film. These ideas can be applied to Boy, and some questions can be posed regarding the use of music in the film. Does the music transport the audience into the 1980s? Does it help the audience to understand the history? Is the music familiar or alien for audience? The audience might not have any experience of Waihau Bay in 1980s New Zealand, but they might be familiar with Michael Jackson. The music can therefore provide a hook, a connection. Or it might be the case that the music in Boy too specific to its place. There are familiar songs in the film (songs that were global hits in the 1980s), but there are also songs by New Zealand bands such as the Herbs, the Patea Maori Club (who were chart-toppers in the 1980s), The Phoenix Foundation (who are not a 1980s band), and 1970s New Zealand artist Alastair Riddell. Is it possible that the sound of the music in the 1980s enough to take an audience to that era even if they don’t know the artists? (This film was a box-office hit in New Zealand). Nostalgia films raise other questions too. Does Boy merely satisfy the nostalgic pangs of Taika Waititi or is there something else—is it an accurate portrayal of 1980s rural New Zealand Maori adolescence? Can a film like this be considered a historical document? How do we trust Waititi’s representation of the era, and what might be missing from this story? Can we excuse Waititi for any omissions because this is his story and is not trying to tell anyone else’s? What’s the effect of the humour and fantasy sequences—do they diminish any sense of historical accuracy, or does the humour help create audience engagement? Perrott suggests that the fantasy elements in the film operate as a representation of the internal escape that can happen as a result of dysfunction or trauma (2010, 52), so would an audience interpret the animations of Rocky’s drawings in this way? What can be learnt from the depiction of a specific culture here? I would suggest that, from a working-class perspective, Waititi’s film combines love for popular culture with hard-hitting social commentary and the result is an engaging and nuanced representation of working-class life. Music is also a big feature of Shane Meadow’s 2006 biopic This is England which is a representation of working-class life and subculture membership in Nottingham (in the north of England) in the 1980s and

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set against a backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain, with the presence of her speeches in the opening scene. Although this is a biopic, no one is famous or notorious—the credits set the scene with footage of news stories and aspects of popular culture from the 1980s. There are images of the miners’ strikes and of the Falklands War. Thatcher looms large in these images and scenes of her are interspersed with footage of far-right groups and racist violence. Although the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana is included, the news footage represents the interests and concerns of working-class people and it is accompanied by the sounds of ‘54-46 Was My Number’ a reggae tune about prison life performed by Jamaican band Toots and the Maytals. The film focuses on a 12-year-old boy, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), who is based on Shane Meadow’s younger self. Shaun has recently lost his soldier father to the Falklands War and he joins a gang of skinheads because he’s looking for friendship and identity. According to Dyer, this desire to join a gang and to behave in ways that might be considered anti-social to the wider community is a result of Shaun’s suppressed grief—he has lost his father but has not been able to grieve sufficiently (2017, 315). The film explores masculine identity in working-class communities and depicts the impact of racism in the community too, so it doesn’t shy away from the negative aspects of working-class life, but it does also depict the positive aspects of community and how working-class culture is expressed through everyday life activities such as listening to music. The film also provides a context for the characters’ lives and comments on the effects of government policies on working-class people. It doesn’t set out to excuse bad behaviour, but it provides some understanding of why it might happen. Due to their subject matter, biographical films are often subject to scrutiny as to the historical accuracy of the depiction and some films have created controversy due to their inclusions or exclusions or for particular examples of artistic license. Sometimes the filmmaker will stretch the ‘truth’ somewhat to make for a more dramatic and entertaining film. Key events might be compressed or combined. Certain characters might be composites of several real people; chronologies might be tweaked to create more tension or suspense. The actor playing the subject might be more glamorous or taller or thinner than the real person. Certain characteristics or behaviours might be exaggerated or excluded depending on whether the filmmaker intends for a sympathetic portrayal overall. There are many examples of how the truth has been tweaked in a bio pic. The King’s Speech, 2010 (directed by Tom Hooper), has a number of inaccuracies including the timeline depicted (deliberately for dramatic effect), the

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characterisation of key figures (such as the speech therapist) as more interesting than they were in real life (by admission of their families) and the inclusion of imagined scenes that clearly did not happen (such as the final scene from the balcony at Buckingham Palace). The Imitation Game, 2014 (Morten Tyldum), depicts the code-cracking expertise of Alan Turning but changes a number of key events and changes the personalities of some of the characters, including Turning who is depicted as unable to cope in social situations which contradicts descriptions of him by people who knew him. How important is accuracy though? Are audiences savvy enough to know that the person we see on screen is unlikely to be exactly like the subject depicted? Does it make a difference to the audience when we think the actor resembles the subject? Julia Roberts was seen as a good match for Erin Brockovitch. But what about when the actor doesn’t resemble the subject at all? Does it matter that Charlize Theron played serial killer Aileen Wournos in Monster? Theron did alter her appearance to play the part, and audiences are therefore asked to suspend disbelief. In some situations, this becomes more of an issue. Cynthia Mort’s 2016 biopic of singer Nina Simone, Nina, courted controversy due to the casting of Zoe Saldana as Simone. Mort has been accused (Shand-Baptiste 2016, para. 4) of whitewashing by casting an actor with much lighter skin than Simone. And this is potentially where a biopic straying from historical accuracy is problematic—when the filmmaker excludes certain elements that might be important in depicting people who are marginalised or depoliticises a political story. Or deliberately leaves things out (or adds things) to represent the subject in a particular way, for example, in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2011 biopic of Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, the depiction of Thatcher is a strangely depoliticised one considering how significant she was as a political figure (Bradshaw 2012, para. 6). It is possible that a biopic about an ordinary person might hold less weight for audiences in terms of accuracy, and it is unlikely that reviewers would have demanded proof that the character of Shaun in This is England is depicted accurately because he is based on Meadow’s experience. The film offers insights into working-class subcultural membership and also shows what can happen when disenfranchised white working-class youth are groomed by the far-right. The representation of the skinhead subculture (at least as it manifested in the north of England), is handled very well in the film. Meadows shows how important subcultures have been for working-class youth and he depicts the strong sense of community. Shaun is grieving for his father, and his mother is struggling to support the

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family. He meets skinhead Woody (Joseph Gilgun), who introduces him to the music and clothing of the subculture. Shaun loves the ska, reggae and soul music and the inclusivity of the group. Membership of the subculture helps Shaun find purpose and the friendships he has been craving, but the film also depicts the infiltration of the far-right into the subculture and the subsequent split between the multicultural skinhead groups united by a love for Black music, and the racist neo-fascist element that eventually came to dominate. Meadow’s depiction of the racist, Combo (Stephen Graham), is an accurate one—Combo is an outsider who doesn’t have a place in society. His isolation makes him a perfect candidate for the far-­ right who groom young people like Combo, and convince them that people of colour are to blame for their unemployment and lack of opportunities, rather than the policies of governments and their position in the class system. The importance of subcultures in working-class life should not be underestimated. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s 1976 collection of essays, Resistance through Rituals and Dick Hebdige’s 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style outline the significance of subcultures (from a British perspective, but their ideas can be applied elsewhere). These texts have been influential and the terms coined to describe subcultures are still used. The authors in Hall and Jefferson’s edited collection were interested in the development of youth culture in post-war Britain. They focused on the culture of working-class youth in particular because they considered class to be a defining feature of youth subcultures. They suggested that certain elements had combined to create the environment for the growth of youth culture and subcultures in the 1950s. These elements included the lifting of the school leaving age in Britain to 15, an increase in disposable income as wages began to rise, the increasing availability of consumer goods and improved and faster communication through mass media that brought news of music, dances and fashion to young people. The 1950s was the beginning of the concept of the ‘teenager’ and the idea of adolescence. In previous generations, education for working-class youth finished early (if they had any at all) and young people were working by the age of 12 or 13. They were expected to marry early too and there was no concept of adolescence. So, the post-war period saw the construction of a time between childhood and adulthood, before the responsibilities of full-time work and families and an increasing amount of leisure time. In their introductory chapter, Hall, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts (2006 edition) noted that for some young working-class people,

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something else was happening. The young people were not following the culture of their parents’ generations, and appeared to be actively rebelling against what they called the ‘parent culture’. These groups of young people were deliberately challenging the wider culture and this led to ‘resistance’. Not through political activity but through dress and behaviours. The ‘rituals’ were the ‘activities, values … material artefacts, territorial spaces … which significantly differentiate them from the wider culture’ (7). In Hall et  al’s book, contributors wrote chapters on Teds, Mods, Skinheads and Rastas among others. The book has a Marxist approach and resistance to class structures through rituals is a dominant theme. A Marxist understanding of subcultures describes young people as expressing ‘an alienation from society, rebellion against society and a reflection on the nature of a society divided into classes’ (Moysey 1993, 11). Hebdige (1979) was also interested in the role played by the media in both creating, reinforcing and representing constructions of class and suggested that the media attempted to ‘relay back to working class people a picture of their own lives which is contained or framed by the ideological discourses which surround and situate it’ (85). Subcultures then operated to interfere with this process but at the same time were sustained by the very media that they were challenging. Hebdige (1979) proposed that subcultures represented ‘noise’ and interfered successfully with mainstream systems of representation and his focus was on a semiotic analysis of subcultures and the ways in which certain subcultures created ‘semantic disorder’ and created a ‘temporary blockage in the system of representation’ (90). Hebdige was therefore interested in style and how subcultures acted their resistance through style. Hebdige referred to subcultures that were visibly different (in terms of style) to the wider culture as ‘spectacular subcultures’. These groups were easy to identify (they stood out) and were immediately marked as different. In his book, he writes about Mods, skinheads and Rastas too, but there is an emphasis on punks due to the extreme difference in their look to the wider society. Hebdige (1979) suggested that subcultural style was a ‘form of refusal’ (2) and of revolt because of the way in which it disoriented dominant discourse and exposed ‘the arbitrary nature of the codes which … shape all forms of discourse’ (91). There was therefore an unsettling effect on the general public when confronted with the image of a punk, for example. Spectacular subcultures didn’t just look different, they challenged dominant forms of meaning such as class, gender roles and race relations through dress, music and behaviours such as dancing. He borrowed some

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terms from art and anthropology such as bricolage (103), homology (113) and polysemy (117). Bricolage referred to the ways in which objects could be relocated thus ‘stripping them of their original connotations’ (Hebdige 1979, 105). Objects could be placed out of context or juxtaposed to create new and challenging meanings. Homology referred to the coherence of parts into a whole. So, the seemingly chaotic elements of some subcultures did have their own internal rules and orderliness that made sense to the members. And polysemy refers to the range of meanings that can be attributed to any text. Subcultures can be read in many and various ways and all text are open to multiple interpretations. Of all the spectacular subcultures, Hebdige was most interested in punks because they were ripe for semiotic analysis. The punks were very fond of relocating objects and thus creating new meanings for them. This was especially noticeable in their choice of dress. They used non-clothing materials such as garbage bags and used safety pins, string and toilet chains to hold non-matching pieces of home-made clothing together. They brought out onto the street, apparel that was usually hidden in sex clubs and sex shops such as bondage gear, pvc, bodices, fishnet stockings and so on. They stuck various symbols to their clothing such as Union Jacks and most notoriously, Swastikas. They created aggressive hairstyles with sharp spike and applied make-up that challenged the idea of make-up for beautification. Girls and boys wore severe eyeliner, black lipstick and so on. They were certainly hard to miss out on the street. Their music was (in a way) non-music and their dancing (especially the pogo) was described by Hebdige as ‘a dumbshow of blank robotics’ (1979, 108). They were wilfully anti-authority and deliberately set out to shock and disrupt mainstream society. But despite the seeming chaos of their style and lifestyles and so on, Hebdige suggested that there was an orderliness, a homology that tied the subculture together (1979, 113). And the ways in which they and the various aspects of their attire could be read were polysemous (117). Skinheads were described by Hebdige as ‘aggressively proletarian, puritanical and chauvinist’ (55) with a style that was ‘dressed down’ (55). According to Hebdige, skinheads drew from ‘West Indian immigrant’ and ‘white working-class’ culture and identity to create a hybrid version of both cultures (55). Skinheads listened to Black music and wore clothes that were inspired by Jamaican rude boys and white working-class manual labourers (56) creating a ‘dialogue which reconstituted each in terms of the other’ (57). But Hebdige also notes that skinhead culture eventually split, with some white skinheads moving away from an interest in Black

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music and culture, towards a violent racism that is highlighted in This is England when Combo viciously assaults Michael ‘Milky’ (Andrew Shim). Hebdige was also interested in the ways that these subcultures were represented in the media and he pointed to the notion of moral panic that had been developed by Stanley Cohen (Hebdige 1979, 47). Cohen’s extremely influential 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, outlined how the media whips up fear through sensationalist reporting. Cohen was interested in how this had occurred in the 1960s through the reporting on fights between Mods and Rockers, but he also updated his work to include various moral panics that occurred since the 1960s. Cohen (1972, 94) suggested that the media creates scapegoats (folk devils) and moral panics which exaggerated any actual real risk (if any). He uses the term ‘panic’ metaphorically, but it is a useful metaphor for describing the sometimes-outrageous headlines and reporting we see especially in the tabloid press. He suggested that these moral panics are deliberately created to help maintain ‘hegemonic control of the public news agenda’ (1979, xxix) and to defend against any challenge to the dominant discourse. Hebdige commented on the fate of spectacular subcultures—on their longevity and continuing opposition to the mainstream. He suggested that eventually, subcultures become incorporated, via both commodity and ideological forms (Hebdige 1979, 94). In the commodity form, the subcultural signs such as mode of dress and music are converted into commodities and become mass produced. This can certainly be seen with punk—the look of punk (or at least parts of it) has been a staple of fashion for a long time now. Ideological incorporation is the re-labelling of subcultural behaviour into ‘acceptable’ forms and therefore contained. The initial challenge is diluted and the behaviours become naturalised (domesticated) or are trivialised and therefore stripped of their power. Despite the influence and importance of Hall, Jefferson and Hebdige’s work, there have been some subsequent criticisms and developments of subcultural theory. Some feminist scholars such as Angela McRobbie (1991), took Hebdige to task for what she saw as a male-dominated focus (25). She suggests that the female participants of the subcultures are invisible in his work and she considers why this might be the case. She points to the possibility of women being more actively involved but just not written about because the writer is male, but also considers some potential reasons for why young women may not have been as involved with the subcultures (5). She did her own studies of young women and found that there was

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often more risk involved for women in subcultures (7) but also found that young women were less inclined to listen to non-mainstream music or to challenge the ‘parent culture’ (13). She suggested that young women negotiated identity and their place in society through membership of female friendship groups (14). This adds a useful layer to the work although I would argue that McRobbie misses some aspects of working-­ class culture. There’s a sense that her middle-class feminism is at odds with the types of feminism that exist in working-class communities. And in terms at least of punk, this was one subculture where women were very involved at all levels, as musicians, fans, fanzine writers, gig promoters and so on. But, Hebdige and all did neglect the role of women in subcultures. Sarah Thornton gives us the concept of subcultural capital (2018, 11), an idea she developed from Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of capital. Thornton suggests that entry into a subculture requires the right amount of subcultural capital, that is, the knowledge of the various aspects of the subculture in order to fit in. Knowing the right music, how to dress, the slang and so on, all of these aspects can be seen in This is England—the theory matches the depiction very well. Another film that depicts a subculture in careful detail is Elaine Constantine’s 2014 period drama Northern Soul which is set in Lancashire in the 1970s and centres on two young working-class men who bond over their love of American Soul music. The two young men, Matt (John Whitehouse) and John (Elliot James Langridge) are fans and collectors of soul music and find their purpose in the clubs of northern England where they start deejaying. In a similar way to This is England, Constantine’s film does not romanticise the era or the location and depicts the negative aspects of working-class life. Matt and John work in gruelling factory occupations and they use prescription drugs recreationally. There is violence in the community and there is racism. While Matt and John and the members of the subculture love Black music, there are racists in the community who are not afraid to express their racist opinions. The film’s setting is grim—Lancashire is cold, drab and mostly brown in terms of colour hues and tones and there is a grittiness to the film that pays homage to the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s. The angry young men of the British films of the 1960s are alive and well and display the continuity of realism in British working-class films.

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Sport (The Workers Cup, Shaolin Soccer, Rudo y Cursi, Gaza Surf Club) According to Crosson (2013), sport has been a feature of cinema since its origins and organised, modern sport came into being at about the same time that cinema developed (3). Early experiments in moving picture technology included images of athletes, such as the boxing and jumping captured by motion capture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and the gymnastics recorded by Etienne-Jules Marey in the late 1800s (Crosson 2013, 31). When the film was developing in the west, filmmakers and distributors wanted to ensure audience interest, and so they turned to cultural practices with established popularity, such as sports, with a particular focus on films about boxing in the US (Crosson 2013, 32). Sports have had the ability to create a ‘sense of belonging’ and have been very important in creating structure and meaning in the lives of working-class people since the industrial revolution caused the fragmentation of working-class communities (Crosson 2013, 6). The sports film has followed in popularity and has become a staple feature of studio output, and while sports films might not always be considered a distinct genre, the films tend to contain tropes and conventions that suggest genre belonging (Crosson 2013, 56). Crosson also suggests that sports films operate to reinforce ideologies of social mobility and merit-driven societies, particularly in the US, and often depict ‘utopian possibilities’ both for the characters within the films who make it big in the sporting world, and the audiences who can imagine themselves into those trajectories of social mobility (2013, 6). These tropes and conventions therefore wield hegemonic power and reinforce dominant discourses and ideologies attached to capitalism, neo-liberalism and the concept of the ‘American Dream’ which can be applied outside of the US (Crosson 2013, 6–10). There are many contemporary Hollywood and independent US films that have a sports theme, and the majority of these films feature working-class characters. Some of these films have included major Hollywood stars and have been box-office success such as The Fighter (2010), David O. Russell’s biopic of boxer Micky Ward, which stars Mark Wahlberg; Million Dollar Baby (2004), directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Hilary Swank as a waitress turned prize fighter; the 2017 biopic of figure skater Tonya Harding I, Tonya by Craig Gillespie, with Margot Robbie playing Harding, and Mickey Rourke as has-been wrestler Randy Robinson in Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 hit The Wrestler.

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Sports films worldwide also feature a number of different sports. There are boxing films from the US, wrestling films from Mexico, Indian films about cricket, and even a North Korean film about an amateur gymnast turned flying trapeze artist (Comrade Kim Goes Flying, a North Korean/ British/Belgian co-production directed by Kim Gwang Hun, Nicholas Bonner and Anja Daelemans and released in 2012). But arguably, football (soccer) is one of the sports that is truly global and despite the money that is made from the sport, and the huge salaries paid to top international players, it is still a working-class sport and is very important in working-­ class communities around the world. Football brings people together (as players and as supporters) and is also seen as an opportunity to leave poverty and make money to support families. While this is obviously a dream that is only realised by a small minority of players, it is a potent one. This dream of football as a way out of poverty or hardship is explored in the 2017 documentary The Workers Cup, directed by Adam Sobel. This documentary is filmed in Qatar and focuses on immigrant workers from around the world who have been recruited to work on the 2022 World Cup infrastructure construction. The film follows a group of men working for a construction contracting company in Doha who are invited to form a football team to play in an inter-company competition for workers. The players come from a variety of different countries—Kenya, Ghana, Bangladesh, Nepal—and their love of football unites them. There is a sense in the film that some of the men are hoping that their talents on the field might lead to an escape from their gruelling work conditions. Even though the men have already chased one dream of a better life by travelling far from home to work in Doha, the reality of their working existences means they are now looking for a way out from the ‘sweat and dirt’ and the ‘trapped’ nature of their employment, which one young man describes as ‘modern-day slavery’. There is a conventional structure to the documentary, in that it follows the progress of the team as they advance into the semi-finals of the Workers Cup. There is the pain when they lose and the triumph of their wins. Tension is created through the scenes of penalty shoot outs. Alongside this element of barracking for the ‘underdog’ which is a standard cliché of sports films (Crosson 2013, 62), the film also deals with some social commentary and critique. This critique comes from the worker/players themselves as there is no narration (although there are some facts and figures included in subtitles). Between games, the men are shown labouring in the hot and dusty conditions. We see their substandard living accommodation in the workers’ camps on the outskirts of the

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city. The men explain that they must seek permission from the company for everything. They can’t leave the camp without permission. They are forbidden from going to the mall (in case their appearance offends the rich shoppers there). The company controls all aspects of their lives while they live and work in Qatar and is common for the men to work 12-h days, often 7 days a week for small wages. While the men clearly love playing football and gain tremendous pleasure from the training and the matches, they are under little illusion that the reason for the tournament is a Public Relations exercise, rather than a genuine effort to improve their conditions and provide some respite from their work. The workers mentioned that international attention due to reported deaths and injuries of workers has forced companies to demonstrate that they are looking after their workers’ well-being. The men are cynical—they know that the companies need to continue recruiting from their home countries to satisfy the labour demand. Although they are very aware of their circumstances, their passion for football means that they participate enthusiastically. The workers show how devoted they are to football—they follow international players and teams and one man from Bangladesh proudly talks about his two sons who are named after players from Manchester United. Sobel’s film highlights the importance of football to these working-class men, but it also shows how working-class people are not distracted from the conditions of their material existence by the sport. In contrast to Sobel’s serious political and social issue documentary, is Mexican comedy Rudo y Cursi, 2008, by Carlos Cuarón. This was a box-­ office smash in Mexico and very popular with audiences, but contains some of the class and racial stereotypes that tend to dominate in Hollywood sports films. Crosson (2013, 35) describes one of these stereotypes as the ‘seeming simpleton’ who overcomes their humble origins to become a sporting star. Rudi y Cursi includes two such stereotypes but also includes other class stereotypes. The main characters, Beto and Tato (nicknamed Rudo and Cursi), are brothers from a rural village in Mexico whose football talents are discovered by football scout Batuta. The brothers are taken to Mexico City where Batuta sells their talents to professional teams while taking a cut of their wages. Rudo (Diego Luna) and Cursi (Gael García Bernal) are depicted as buffoons who are not initially aware of their football skills until Batuta (Guillermo Francella) happens upon them. Cursi has a deluded idea of himself as a talented singer and the brothers work at a banana plantation until Batuta takes them to the city. They are naïve and

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easy to exploit as the cliched country ‘hicks’. Batuta and everyone else take advantage of their naivety and the brothers soon fall victim to their lack of self-control and stupidity. Despite their skills on the field, Rudo succumbs to a gambling addiction and Cursi is duped by a gold-digging girlfriend (also a sexist stereotype). Their social mobility is short-lived as they both return to their village with nothing, and are only saved from returning to the banana plantation by their new brother-in-law, a local drug lord, who finds them both work in his businesses. Failure to make it big and fulfil the underdog success convention of a sports film might seem like a challenge to the trope, but Cuarón resorts to class stereotypes and the working-class characters are either stupid or devious. There is moral judgement placed on his working-class rural characters, as well as the racial and cultural stereotypes in the film such as Mexican drug lords and hot-tempered and violent football fans. Ultimately, this film ‘punches down’ and contains mocking humour at the expense of the working-class characters. This kind of representation arguably reinforces and confirms class stereotypes. An unusual film that sits between the serious documentary of Sobel and the stereotypical comedy of Cuarón is Stephen Chow’s 2001 fantasy comedy Shaolin Soccer—a Kung Fu fantasy comedy from Hong Kong described by Hitchcock (2007) as a ‘hilarious and outrageous comic romp’ that can be classified as ‘niche’ cinema (221) that caters for a number of markets the Hong Kong action film audience, the Chinese Shaolin Kung Fu devotees and international football fans (Hitchcock 2007, 221). The film fits Bordwell’s description of Hong Kong film as ‘silly, bloody and bizarre’ and as ‘outrageous entertainments’ containing ‘remarkable inventiveness’ (2000, 2). Kung Fu films were initially distinguished from other martial arts films (such as wuxia) due to their depictions of realistic fighting (Teo 2009, 58) that operated as a counter to the fantasy fighting routines of the wuxia films which were set in ancient China (Teo 2009, 58). In the 1970s, Kung Fu films made their way outside of Hong Kong and became popular in the West (Teo 2009, 78). Films such as Fist of Fury (Lo Wei, 1972) with Bruce Lee appealed to Western audiences and Hong Kong film—mainly martial arts films—started to gain cult status overseas. These films, which moved away from the stage-influenced Mandarin language films, paved the way for a more colloquial form of cinema. The martial arts films were also significant because of the ways in which they challenged Orientalist notions of Chinese people. The west had long depicted Chinese people as inferior and weak to westerners and it has been suggested that Hong Kong Kung Fu became a method of developing a sense of national pride (Teo

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2009, 77)—as Kung Fu was unique to Chinese culture, it assisted in a process of national self-invention, removed from the Orientalist notions of westerners, and the powerful masculine body of stars such as Bruce Lee represented a new strong masculine identity that challenged the west’s representation of China as weak and feminine. Shaolin Soccer contains many inter-textual references (Hitchcock 2007, 223) to other films and film stars (such as Bruce Lee), and it defies genre, but Chow commits fully to the sport film tropes and includes the underdog element and the ‘big game’ finale (Crosson 2013, 62), but in doing so, he privileges the working-class characters and shows them to be resourceful and determined. The members of the football team are all Shaolin Kung Fu masters, and they utilise these skills on the pitch. But they are poor (Li 2005, 53) and have no equipment or resources and rely on their talents alone. Mui (Zhao Wei) is a baker and her physical coordination is used both in her work making steamed buns and on the football field when she takes up the goalkeeper position. Sing (Stephen Chow) collects garbage for a living and the rest of the teamwork in low-paid jobs. It is a zany comedy, with over-the-top Kung Fu sequences and supernatural elements, but the film is firmly grounded in working-class culture. Morris (2004) suggests that ‘class matters in action film … many revolve around ethical wish-fulfillment fantasies … which make a strong and explicit appeal to working-class audiences’ (188). She describes Hong Kong films as ‘full of lumpen-proletarians, all those street-fighters, bodyguards, hired muscle, hitmen, prostitutes, and self-employed “martial artists” trying to survive with the only assets they have, their bodies, their beliefs and their street-smarts’ (Morris 2004, 195). This can definitely be seen in Shaolin Soccer, but unlike Rudo y Cursi, Chow’s film does not mock its working-class characters—their working-class culture and characteristics are celebrated. There are a number of other films that represent working-class sports, Marcel Rasquin’s gritty Venezuelan drama Hermano (2010) is also a film about football and also features two brothers who love football, but this time against the backdrop of poverty and gang-related violence. Norwegian romantic comedy United (2003) by Magnus Martens is set in a working-­ class village and follows characters whose love of football (and of Manchester United) brings them together. But it isn’t just football that is represented. Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 Bollywood epic Lagaan is set in India during the British Raj and tells a story of resistance to colonial rule through a cricket match as poor villagers play against the British. Boxing

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continues to feature, and overwhelmingly, boxing stories are set in working-­class communities. Muay Thai Chaiya by Kongkiat Khomsiri (2007) is a Thai film set in Thai boxing gyms and the world of illegal bare-­ knuckle fighting. Sudha Kongara’s 2016 Irudhi Suttru is also a boxing film, centred on an up-and-coming female boxer who is coached by disgraced former boxing star. And some other films about sports have themes that intersect with those of chapters to come such as Florence Jaugery’s 2009 film about a young female boxer in Nicaragua, La Yuma, which demonstrates the intersections of class and gender and will be discussed in Chap. 4. The 2017 documentary Gaza Surf Club by Philip Gnadt and Mickey Yamine is worth mentioning in this section. This documentary shows that even a ‘free’ activity such as going to the beach is context-bound and classed. While surfing is not a pastime exclusively associated with working-­ class people, there are connections with surfing and working-class culture, particularly in Australia and parts of the US. In the film, a young man from Gaza, factory worker Ibrahim Arafat, loves to surf and dreams of building a surf club near the Gaza beach. But due to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, is almost impossible to import surfboards, and there are no local resources to make them. Gaza surfers make do with ageing boards that were taken into the region by the Red Cross, and their resources consist of some wooden shacks on the beach. The surfers are passionate about their sport, and despite the lack of equipment and the ever-present threat of conflict with Israel, they surf after work and during periods of unemployment (there is very high unemployment in Gaza). They help each other and share what they have. All of the surfers are resourceful and use what they have to be able to surf and repair boards. The boards are precious and the beach is a sanctuary. Participants in the documentary comment on the importance of the beach in their lives; it provides escape and pleasure in an environment that is devoid of hope for many of the local people. The film does not use commentary—it is structured around the subjects and their thoughts. There is surfing footage that employs some of the conventions of surf movies though. With slow-motion action, sunset silhouettes and cameras capturing the moments that surfers touch the wall of a wave. Music combines western surf rock with Arabic sounds and demonstrates the cultural flow between global surfing culture and the more specific culture of the Palestinians in Gaza. All around the beach is a sign of devastation and the filmmakers also utilise establishing shots and pans of the surroundings—the bombed buildings and the ways in which people reuse

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materials from the flattened buildings to build new ones (there is very little access to new materials). But there are also scenes of people enjoying small pleasures—cooking fish on the beach, dancing, drinking tea, playing on the beach and attending a run-down fun fair. Life for the residents of Gaza continues despite the obvious hardship and lack of opportunity which displays a sense of working-class resilience and resourcefulness.

Life on the Streets and Disaffected Youth (City of God, Bekas, 7 Boxes, Noi the Albino, Unknown Pleasures) Youth culture and the experiences of young people feature quite heavily in films about working-class life. Some of the young people find themselves on the margins of society—they might be denied opportunities for education or might be affected by the dysfunction that comes with poverty. As already discussed, popular culture and youth subcultures have been important for young working-class people, who have found community and belonging in pop culture fandom, music and sport. For some young working-­class people, the streets are pivotal. This can be because they are homeless, or because the streets provide opportunities that official institutions do not. There are films dealing with street culture that focuses on young people and shows the ways in which young people learn how to survive the dangers of street culture. Some are set in urban centres, and others are set in the rural fringes. A stand-out film of the 2000s is Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s 2003 global hit City of God which provides an unromantic, working-class and Black Brazilian exploration of adolescence. City of God gives the audience samba, brutality, poverty, drugs, guns and a dog-eat-dog world. Both directors are from middle-class backgrounds but they have taken an interest in the lives of the poor in the favelas (slums) of Brazil. The film is based on the novel of the same name written in 1997 by Paulo Lins, an author who grew up in a favela of Rio and who writes from direct experience (Nagib 2004, 240). The favelas are slums that ring the cities in South America such as Rio de Janerio. The people of the favelas are marginalised from the rest of the city and suffer from high levels of unemployment and poverty. The favelas have also been very dangerous due to the presence of armed drug gangs who have controlled the areas. These gangs have recruited children to work for them with the enticement of money and

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belonging (and fear of violence too). The police conduct regular raids on the favelas and these have ended up in violent and bloody battles between the police and the drug runners. The police are known for their brutal treatment of favela residents and for their corruption (being in the pockets of the drug barons). The population of the favelas in Brazil is about 95% Black and the residents are very much second-class citizens in their country and the favelas represent an embarrassing aspect of Brazilian life at odds with the usual presentation of the glamour of Rio’s beaches (Nagib 2004, 248). Most middle and upper class and white Brazilians do not venture into the favelas (Peixoto 2007, 171), although increasingly the crime has spilled into rich neighbourhoods (Siwi 2003, 237). Meirelles decided to make the film after reading Lins’ novel. He had already shown an interest in social commentary with his 2001 Maids, which is about domestic servants. Katia Lund has also shown an interest in the lives of working-class favela youth and has made documentaries to highlight their lives (Gonzalez 2003, para. 10) and has also run an organisation that helped young people in the favela—an organisation set up by her and Meirelles after they made City of God. Film and photography is used by favela residents to tell their stories and to improve their lives— something that is not overlooked by the makers of City of God, as they give the central protagonist, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) a camera. The camera (and technology in general) becomes a weapon in the war for self-­ representation. There are a number of active social action groups in the favelas of Rio who teach filmmaking skills to residents and who distribute their films both in their communities and outside. The representation of favelas has become more common since the early 2000s and there are now a number of films and documentaries focusing on the experiences of the residents and which are created to deliver social commentary. What is significant is the way in which some directors packaged their films commercially to create entertaining and commercially successful films that also offer searing critiques of class, racism and police violence. And City of God fits into this genre. The film was shot on location, although not actually in the Rio City of God favela itself, but in a favela outside of Rio. The majority of the actors in the film were unprofessional and were sourced from the favelas (Siwi 2003, 235). Meirelles encouraged the young actors to improvise lines based on their own experiences (Lally 2003, 22) which adds to the immediacy and authenticity of the film. The film is set in different time zones, beginning towards the end of the story in the 1980s in an in media res moment and then moving back

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to the late 1960s and then moving forward into the 1980s along with the memories of the protagonist, Rocket. The film depicts the historical development of the favelas, from a 1960s social housing project designed to house people displaced by natural disasters to the modern dangerous slum. This jumping between time zones is easy to follow—different aesthetics are used (particularly colour palettes) in each time zone, with the first part of the film bathed in rich golden tones and the subsequent zones becoming darker and colder in colour and lighting (Nagib 2004, 247). The film had a big impact on release—it did very well at the box office in Brazil and has been successful overseas. Its distribution through Miramax saw it reach a wide international audience. It garnered a number of awards and has generally been very well received and reviewed and is the subject of numerous academic articles. In Brazil, the film started debates about the favelas and poverty, crime and race and on the representation of Brazil on the world stage (McDonald 2006, 19). The film has been credited with bringing the conditions of the favelas to light and providing a voice for those who are usually socially excluded in Brazil (McDonald 2006, 19). Although some critics have accused the filmmakers of exploiting poverty (Melo 2004, 475), the film did have a role in pushing a social agenda—the then-presidential candidate Da Silva watched the film and commented on it publicly, stating that something needed to be done to improve the lives of the favela residents. And the film had some longer-term effects for those involved—the actors from the film shared their skills with their communities (Lally 2003, 23) and the film led to a spin-off TV series City of Men which used some of the actors from the original film. The film is fast-paced and uses what has been described by Bordwell (2002) as the particular techniques of ‘intensified continuity’ (16) which include fast edits, close framings of dialogue, extremes of focal length— switching between wide angles and zooms—an often free-ranging movement of the camera and the use of Computer  Generated  Images effects which create a very different experience to the disjointedness and slow pace of many art films. The soundtrack is lively and upbeat, often employing the rhythms of samba to punctuate the scenes. This is a Hollywood style of filmmaking that has become familiar to audiences and is often the style most favoured now for action films, and Kilbourne states that this style has become a lingua franca of film and can cut across cultural boundaries (2012, 84). The filmic conventions on display here are so well understood that English speaking audiences unused to ‘foreign film’ found the film easy to

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follow. But Kilbourne suggests that Meirelles and Lund have taken these conventions and have indigenised them and given the film a particularly Brazilian look and feel (84). Vieira (2005) suggests that the internationally recognised tropes the film employs such as gangster film and conventions of westerns are used by Meirelles and Lund in a de-­familiarising way with the effect of ‘taking a national reality across frontiers’ (viii). The familiarity of the style in terms of genre conventions and aesthetic elements is rendered unfamiliar for western audiences due to the subject matter of the film. The style of City of God has been described as employing the Brazilian ‘aesthetics of hunger’—of depicting life for the working class, the poor, the street kids using a ‘new realism’ and Meirelles cites Ken Loach as an inspiration (Gonzalez 2003, para. 9) which has its origins in the realist Brazilian Cinema Novo movement (Nagib 2004, 244). This is a slick, attractive film, but the violence is never glamorised and the social reality is always evident despite the pace, colour and music. And the quite self-­ reflexive ‘intensified continuity’ of the film arguably does not lead to a distancing. Although there are moments in the film such as the slow-­ motion effects that remind the viewer that this is a film, it doesn’t have the effect of taking the viewer outside of the story. The particular aesthetic of the film and the way in which audiences from around the world are able to read it quite easily aligns with Kilbourne’s idea of ‘transnational memory’ (90). He says that City of God is a ‘transnational memory film’ because the kinds of events depicted are understood by people outside of Brazil and outside of those experiences and periods. Events/times can be remembered across cultures and a Brazilian memory can become a global memory. These memories are mediated through popular culture such as film and music and a transcultural ‘imagined community’ develops. This is sometimes referred to as ‘prosthetic memory’ where we ‘feel’ a memory even though it is not our own, although this particular term has been problematised by Vivian Sobchack for being ableist (Sobchack 2004, 165). In terms of the depiction of adolescence or ‘coming of age’ stories set in the past, this film is very different to many other films that depict such themes. It is a far cry from English language films such as American Graffiti (1973, George Lucas), Stand by Me (1986, Rob Reiner), Dead Poets Society (1989, Peter Weir), The Year my Voice Broke (1987, John Duigan) or Flirting (1991, John Duigan), or more recently, An Education (2009, Lone Scherfig). This is because City of God is a story of those who are marginalised—the poor, the working class. Although there are some similarities in terms of story (but not style) with the 2008 Italian film

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Gomorrah (2008, Matteo Garrone) and it brings working-class culture to life while also showing both how poverty impacts on young lives and the potential dangers associated with street culture. There are other period films that deal with working-class adolescence (such as This is England, discussed in an earlier section of the chapter), but the harsh reality of working-class adolescence is not a common subject matter for a film. Childhood traumas do feature but bleak class-based period portrayals of social realities are reasonably rare. Karzan Kader’s 2012 drama Bekas is a period piece and is set in the Kurdish region of Iraq in the 1990s. The film follows orphaned brothers Zana (Zamand Taha) and Dana (Sarwar Fazil) who live on the streets in their village and make a living from shining shoes. When the film Superman comes to their village, the two boys decide to travel to America to find Superman. They try to persuade smugglers to take them, but they have no money and no passports. The boys buy a donkey (which they name Michael Jackson after the singer) and start their journey via dusty roads, but they are unable to cross the border. Bekas depicts the boys’ daily struggles, as they rely on people in their village to provide them with food and with water to bathe. They sleep on roofs and have no possessions except for their shoe-shining kit. The cinematography makes the most of the dusty environment, but mostly employs warms tones. Even though there are scenes in the film when the boys are either dismissed by adults or treated badly, for the most part they encounter helpful people who are sympathetic and even encourage them on their journey (and do not point out the impossibility of their goal to get to America). The film ends without closure. The boys don’t fulfil their dream, but they have overcome adversity and the threat of death (Dana steps on a landmine that turns out to be disarmed) and separation. The film ends with their tearful reunion and embrace. While they might have nothing and an uncertain future, they have each other and know that they have much more chance of surviving their circumstances if they are together. This is very different from the constant threat of betrayal and physical attack experienced by the young (mostly male) characters in City of God. Along similar lines to City of God is Paraguayan thriller 7 Boxes (2012), directed by Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori. 7 Boxes also contains a male teenage protagonist and the action takes place on the streets. Victor (Celso Franco) works in a market as a barrow boy, but he loves to watch movies and his dream is to see himself on screen (and he often projects himself into the onscreen images he sees). His immediate goal is to

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earn enough money to buy a mobile phone with a camera but he gets involved in a mix-up with some local violent gangsters and spends the majority of the film trying to evade them. The hand-held camera follows the characters as they move through the working-class spaces of the market and surrounding streets. We see how people navigate through their poverty and the constant hustle of daily life as people are hungry, need medicines and other essentials, and despite working hard, cannot afford these basic requirements. There is a sense of a dog-eat-dog world, but unlike City of God the film is not relentless and there is camaraderie among the market workers, who look out for each other and help where they can and the filmmakers inject humour into the film, which makes the viewing experience less bleak overall. Ultimately, Victor gets his wish, when he is filmed in a final stand-off with the gang leaders and the footage is shown on national television. His desire to be famous and be on screen is fulfilled, although as a result of violence. This reflects the ways in which working-­ class people often only see themselves represented via reality television, and due to extreme circumstances. On a very different note, and far from the favelas, city markets or dusty desert towns is the quirky Nói the Albino, the 2003 feature debut of Icelandic director Dagur Kári—a film that depicts disaffection and alienation. Nói the Albino is set in the snowy western fiords region of Iceland, and centres on teenage misfit Nói (Tómas Lemarquis), whose main desire is to escape his working-class fishing town and his alcoholic father. Nói does not have a plan, he skips school and wanders the frozen town. He finds a connection with a new employee of the town service station and they dream of running away together. These plans do not eventuate and after a series of failed escapades, that include attempting to rob a bank and steal a car, Nói is eventually trapped in his grandmother’s basement by a devastating avalanche. He survives the avalanche and discovers that everyone he knew in the town was killed. This leaves him alone, but free and with nowhere to go. It is hard to define the film, because it is not realist in mode—there are elements of the absurd and surrealist moments. There is a fable-like quality to the narrative and Nói encounters a fortune teller who predicts that he will bring death to the town. The prophecy is fulfilled, and this superstitious thinking appears to be linked to the Icelandic beliefs in myths and legends (inspired by the landscape). Nói is a working-­ class teenager with few prospects. For a young man in this situation, there is little to look forward to. He does not want to be a fisherman, but he does not have the academic ability or inclination to seek further education

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as a way out of the town. There is something quite depressing about the tale, despite Kari’s use of dry humour and the stunning icy landscape. The film’s message seems to suggest that wanting to stay in a working-class town is only an aspiration for losers, but to dream of leaving is foolish and dangerous. Nói can’t leave—but there is nothing for him to stay for either. Iceland is not a large producer of films, and few Icelandic films are well known outside of the country, and it is significant that Nói the Albino as one of the few Icelandic films to garner global attention (Nordfjörd 2010, 7), is focused on working-class life and received very positive reception on the art house film festival circuit (Nordfjörd 2010, 21). Reviewers suggested that the appeal of the film is due to its universal story—of a small-­ town boy who dreams of a life elsewhere (Nordfjörd 2010, 22)—but I would suggest that this is really not a universal story, not from a cross-class perspective. Nói is unable to leave his town and fulfil his tropical island fantasy because he has no means to do so. Young people with financial means and contacts away from their home towns have fewer obstacles when they wish to relocate. The failure of Nói to leave his town can be seen as a lack by middle/upper-class audiences who may not understand why he is stuck in place. The ‘Nordic melancholia’ combined with the story of a ‘teenage slacker’ (Nordfjörd 2010, 22), does lead to a creative and funny film (the humour is dark and deadpan), but ultimately Nói the Albino presents another working-class stereotype. Dagur Kári has been compared to Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, who is also known for his use of understated humour and quirky characters (Nordfjörd 2010, 23), and Kaurismäki’s films also focus on working-class characters, but the big difference is Kaurismäki’s commitment to telling working-class stories and the ways in which the characters in his films create communities and provide each other with support. It might be possible that this is due to Kaurismäki’s own working-class background. Disaffected youth also appear in Jia Zhangke’s 2001 realist drama Unknown Pleasures, which is set in the industrial city of Datong in the north of China. Jia is well known for the realist aesthetic of his films, and cites neo-realist filmmakers such as De Sica as influences (Mellos 2019, 3) and has been described as exploring the ‘interplay between documentary impulse and artistic pursuit’ (Zhu 2013, 89). In Unknown Pleasures, the cinematography of Yu Lik-Wai leads to a grainy image despite the use of digital cameras and this aesthetic choice emphasises the dusty town and grittiness of life for the characters. Melo states that these grainy images help to convey the themes as they fit with the ‘depressed city’ environment

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(Melo 2004, 103). Lin (2014) suggests that Jia also uses sound to evoke the tone of the film with ‘noises of the Chinese urban space’ (146) foregrounded. We hear the whine of a motorcycle engine as its rider attempts to push it beyond its ability, the everyday noises of the streetscape are foregrounded and we hear the regular community announcements broadcast via the town’s public address system which Lin (2014) likens to the town loudspeakers that were used to spread the ideologies of the Communist Party during Mao’s regime (153). The film follows three young main characters; friends Xiao Ji (Qiong Wu) and Bin Bin (Wei Wei Zhao) and Xiao Ji’s love interest Qiao Qiao (Tao Zhao), a young woman who works as a dancer and singer for a liquor company promotional team. Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are unemployed and they appear to have little ambition outside of satisfying immediate needs such as smoking endless cigarettes, and in the case of Xiao Ji, chasing Qiao Qiao. They spend a lot of time on the streets, in bars or in a dilapidated bus station where young men gather and play pool. Xiao Ji and Bin Bin live in cramped apartments and each has an absent parent. Qiao Qiao is dependent on her ‘boyfriend’ Qiao San (Zhubin Li), who is really her abusive pimp. The film is populated by working-class people—there are unemployed men, as well as hairdressers and sex workers and the town appears to be impoverished. A nearby textile mill is mentioned as is the local coal industry, but the numbers of young unemployed people suggest a de-industrialising town. The young characters talk despondently of escape. Bin Bin decides to enlist with the army to become a ‘Beijing Soldier’, but his attempt is thwarted when he discovers he has hepatitis. Xiao Jin’s escape is through the fantasy of Qiao Qiao—but despite the death of Qiao San, this romance does not eventuate. The two young men decide to rob a bank—but this fails too. Bin Bin is caught and Xiao Ji makes it out of town but into an uncertain future. The only successful escape is made by Bin Bin’s girlfriend Yuan Yuan (Qing Feng Zhou), who achieves the grades she needs at school to enter university in Beijing. The ‘prolonged observation’ (Mellos 2019, 4) style of Jia’s film means that the audience is taken along the dusty roads (often on Xiao Ji’s motorcycle) with the characters. Some scenes play out in real time, and the audience has no choice but to stay and observe the moment. This creates an intimacy which brings the characters closer to the audience despite the lack of conventional emotional cues (such as close-ups or a music score). Jia captures well the tedium of unemployment and the long scenes of everyday life convey the boredom and

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flow-on lack of motivation that it accompanies. There isn’t a sense here of Jia judging his characters—he just allows them to be. And the authenticity of the setting is also reinforced through the use of television screens being watched by the characters and the use of popular music. Televisions play in many of the scenes, and with the volume turned up, and background noise foregrounded, the audience is also able to view/listen to what is being broadcast (Lin 2014, 153). There are news bulletins reporting on real-life events in China such as a protest by Falun Gong practitioners and the announcement of Beijing as the winning city to host the 2008 summer Olympics. There is also a report on a new highway built between Datong and Beijing, a highway that features in an unfinished state throughout the film possibly representing the difficulty of escape for the young people in the town. The televisions do not just include the news—there is also an animated adaptation of the Chinese classic Journey to the West (1592), and the character of the Monkey King is admired for his independence and resourcefulness. Pop music also features via the TV screens. Bin Bin and Yuan Yuan sing along to a popular song and this song appears in several moments in the film, most notably at the end, when Bin Bin is forced to sing for an arresting officer in a police station. The song is significant. There is no non-diegetic music in the film, but the renditions of the song ‘Ren Xiao Yao’ which translates as ‘to wander free and easy’ speak for the generally stoic characters. The words relate to freedom through love, but none of the characters are able to achieve this kind of freedom. According to Lin (2014), the use of music in Jia’s films is often jarring or incongruous and ‘noisified’ which undermines its musical attributes and becomes another element of the cacophony that connotes the general chaos or discomfort of the characters and their surroundings (148). While Jia suggests that the characters represent the first generation of single children to be born after the implementation of China’s one-­child policy (Mellos 2019, 105), and convey the consequences of the policy in terms of the potential loneliness and isolation of young people without siblings and cousins, the film also points to the ways in which working-class youth can be disaffected and alienated from society due to lack of opportunity. There are many other aspects of working-class culture that are specific to places and to different eras, but some of the films discussed in this chapter highlight the commonalities that do occur around the world. These commonalities include love of popular culture such as films, music and sport. In a globalised world, there are more chances now that working-­ class people in different countries might share the same interests.

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References Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 1999. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 31–34. London: Routledge. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bordwell, David. 2000. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film. Film Quarterly 55 (3): 16–28. Bradshaw, Peter. 2012. The Iron Lady: Review. The Guardian, January 5. https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/05/the-iron-lady-film-review. Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. 2006. Subcultures, Cultures and Class. In Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-­ War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 3–59. London: Hutchison. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Crosson, Seán. 2013. Sport and Film. New York: Routledge. Dyer, Hannah. 2017. Reparations for a Violent Boyhood: Pedagogies of Mourning in Shane Meadow’s This Is England. Pedagogy, Culture and Society 25 (3): 315–325. Gonzalez, Ed. 2003. Interview: Fernando Meirelles Talks City of God. Slant, August 27. https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/city-of-gods-an-interviewwith-fernando-meirelles/. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hitchcock, Peter. 2007. Niche Cinema, or, Kill Bill with Shaolin Soccer. In Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island, ed. Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam, 219–232. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kilbourne, Russell J.A. 2012. ‘Prosthetic Memory’ and Transnational Cinema: Globalised Identity and Narrative Recursivity in City of God. In Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, ed. Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney, 71–94. New York: Columbia University Press. Lally, Kevin. 2003. Cruel City: Fernando Meirelles Directs Dazzling Tale of Rio’s Slum Kids. Film Journal International 106 (1): 22–24. Leslie, Esther. 2005. Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht and Film. In Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, ed. Mike Wayne, 34–57. London: Pluto Press. Li, Siu Leung. 2005. The Myth Continues: Cinematic Kung Fu in Modernity. In Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, ed.

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Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, 49–61. Durham: Duke University Press. Lin, Chunfeng. 2014. Noise in Chinese Neorealist Cinema: Sonic Rebellion and a Temporary Reverse. Studies in the Humanities 39&40 (1&2): 137–162. McDonald, Sarah. 2006. Performing Masculinity: From City of God to City of Men. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 12 (2): 19–32. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Mellos, Cecilia. 2019. The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film. London: Bloomsbury. Melo, João Marcelo. 2004. Aesthetics and Ethics in City of God. Third Text 18 (5): 475–481. Morris, Meaghan. 2004. Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Marking of a Global Popular Culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5 (2): 181–199. Moysey, Sean. 1993. Marxism and Subculture. In Youth Subcultures: Theory, History and the Australian Experience, ed. Robert White, 11–18. Hobart: National Clearinghouse for Youth Studies. Nagib, Lucia. 2004. Talking Bullets: The Language of Violence in the City of God. Third Text 18 (3): 241–243. Nordfjörd, Björn. 2010. Dagur Kári’s Nói the Albino. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Peixoto, Marta. 2007. Rio’s Favelas in Recent Fiction and Film: Commonplaces of Urban Segregation. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122 (1): 170–178. Perrott, Lisa. 2010. Call and Response: Taika Waititi’s ‘Boy’. Metro Magazine 66: 48–53. Shand-Baptiste, Kuba. 2016. Casting Zoe Saldana in Blackface as Nina Simone Exposes the Shocking Colourism of Hollywood. The Independent, March 3. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/casting-zoe-saldana-in-blackfaceas-nina-simone-exposes-the-shocking-colourism-of-hollywood-a6909761.html. Shumway, David. 1999. Rock ‘n’ Roll Soundtracks and the Production of Nostalgia. Cinema Journal 38 (2): 36–51. Siwi, Marcio. 2003. City of God, City of Man. The SAIS Review of International Affairs 23 (2): 233–238. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Stanford, CA: University of California Press. Teo, Stephen. 2009. Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Thornton, Sarah. 2018. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Vieira, Else. 2005. City of God in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action. Nottingham, UK: Critical, Cultural and Communication Press. Zhu, Ping. 2013. The Sincere Gaze: Art and Realism in Jia Zhangke’s Films. Chinese Literature Today 3 (1&2): 88–92.

CHAPTER 4

Immigration and Diaspora

The experiences of immigrants have been subject matter for films since its early days. Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 silent film The Immigrant was popular in its time and continues to be watched, studied and enjoyed by viewers who appreciate Chaplin’s comic timing and filmic innovations, but also because it offers social commentary on the treatment of new immigrants into the US. Chaplin’s famous character, the Little Tramp, appears as the immigrant, firstly on the ship with many other people from non-specified homelands and later as poor and hungry but open to romance while wandering the streets (of presumably New York City). As the ship arrives in New York, the immigrants on board marvel at the Statue of Liberty. But their wonder is short-lived when they are manhandled and roped off to be examined by the immigration officials. The Tramp’s new beginning in America is marked by hustle—he needs to find food and to work out how to make his way in the new country. He is mostly helped by luck, illustrating the lack of structured support for new immigrants. Many of the film production pioneers in the US were immigrants themselves (Bordwell and Thompson 2003, 158)—and a large number were refugees who became part of the Jewish diaspora (Berghahn 2013, 7). This diaspora went on to develop the film industry in America and to influence filmmakers across the globe. And in subsequent waves of immigration, people have used creative pursuits to express their culture and to maintain ties with homelands. Like Chaplin’s short film, filmmakers from immigrant backgrounds

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have also used the film medium to represent their experiences and to both celebrate culture and critique the countries where they have settled. This chapter will look at films by and about immigrants, members of diasporas, refugees and asylum seekers. The chapter covers films that are made by immigrant filmmakers from the global south who have settled in the global north, as well as films about the experiences of immigrants within the global south. Films by diasporic filmmakers will be considered—these diasporas do tend to be in the global north, although there are established diasporas across the world such as Japanese Peruvians and Indian Fijians. There is an emphasis in this chapter though on films from Europe that explore the experiences of diasporic communities. Many of these films are from the UK, which has some of the most established diasporas, particularly the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities. Established communities have the largest body of films, with most diasporic films in a European context coming from the Black and Asian British, Turkish-German and Arab-French communities (Berghahn 2013, 7). There will also be a discussion of some films from Australia that focus on Lebanese-Australian and Chinese-Australian experience. I have not included many films from the US in this chapter, because some of the films that would fall into the category of US diasporic films are covered in other chapters (such as Ramin Bahrani’s 2007 Man Push Cart, discussed in Chap. 1). The chapter begins with a consideration of the preoccupation among both diasporic and host-country filmmakers with the role of crime in immigrant communities. Some of the films discussed have been made by filmmakers from the host country who show an interest in the lives and experiences of immigrants and refugees and a willingness to explore the ‘diaspora space’ (Berghahn 2013, 8). While undoubtedly there are immigrants and members of diasporas who have high socio-economic status, the films explored in this chapter are all centred on working-class immigrants/diasporas. It has been noted that wealthy western countries rely on the labour of people from the global south who form part of the ‘global precariat’ (Munck 2018, 159). These workers are vulnerable and easily exploited and do not always receive the kinds of labour rights that western workers take for granted (Munck 2018, 159). The films included here reveal these exploitations and vulnerabilities and also show the ‘racial geography’ of the global movement of labour which is connected to the history of western colonialism (Munck 2018, 169). The films depict the discrimination and inequality suffered by immigrant workers (Banerjee 2012, 7) but also

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portray the various cultures of immigrants, refugees and diasporas and illustrate the ways in which these cultures meet (and sometimes collide) with the host culture. People from various and diverse cultures are most likely to meet in working-class communities because the majority of immigrants and refugees live (at least initially) in working-class areas due to their economic status. This leads to a diverse and cosmopolitan working class in towns and cities in the global north where immigrants and refugees from the global south have settled (Werbner 2018, 140). According to Berghahn (2018), there is a difference between migrant and diaspora filmmaking. The migrant is newly arrived and starting their life in an unfamiliar land, whereas a diasporic filmmaker is usually part of an established immigrant group and may be the second or further generation of a particular immigrant family (80). A diaspora can be understood as a community that has left the ‘homeland’ and which is distributed over a number of territories. This is a group of people who despite their geographical distances, retain a sense of cultural or national identity. Diasporas are complex and heterogeneous and even when hailing from the same country bring differences of language, religion, cultural practice and so on (Cohen and Fischer 2018, 5). Generally speaking, a diaspora is a ‘group of dispersed people who share symbolic and/or material associations to an idealised homeland’ (Abebe 2018, 55). But there is not necessarily agreement between members of a diaspora regarding their homeland. These different ‘levels and types of connection’ with homelands (Cohen and Fischer 2018, 6) could be fiercely nationalistic or located more in a romantic and nostalgic notion of the homeland. But, despite these differences of opinion and feeling towards the homeland, it is often the case that members of diasporas are seen by authorities and some sections of the adopted home population as a ‘challenge’ to the country they now reside in, and may even be considered a threat to national security (Cohen and Fischer 2018, 3). Berghahn (2018) suggests that diasporic filmmaking is often concerned with ‘place and displacement’ (82) and features stories of ‘social exclusion and marginalisation’ (82), and this is certainly the case with many of the films discussed in this chapter. Hamid Naficy (2001) describes an accented cinema that produces films that cross between ‘home and host societies’ (6). This accented cinema is created by ‘exilic, diasporic and ethnic’ filmmakers (Naficy 2001, 11), and contains an ‘accented style’ (20) characterised by ‘border consciousness’ (31) and being ‘multiperspectural and tolerant of ambiguity, ambivalence and chaos’ (31). There is a difference, according to Naficy, between these

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categories of filmmaker though, with the ethnic identity filmmaking focusing on particular ethnic identities and aspects of ethnic culture from within a host country (15), the exilic with a focus on the homeland and the diasporic more interested in the relationship between the homeland and the new land (15). This accented cinema shares the experience of being deterritorialised and the decentred conditions of production and consumption. The accent then is also acquired through the multi-national, multi-lingual and transcultural mode of production (Naficy 2001, 59). The issue of identity is one that is often explored by immigrant and diasporic filmmakers (Grassilli 2008, 1237)—this is understandable because immigrants and members of a diaspora can be positioned in a liminal space and occupy a state of ‘inbetweenness’ (Mitchell 2008, 105) as they straddle more than one culture. This liminal space can be a difficult space to be situated due to experiences of racism and discrimination if the immigrant culture is easily identifiable to a racist host country and when navigating between cultures and languages and not feeling completely connected to either the homeland or the host country. But inbetweenness can also be positive and lead to a deep understanding of both (or multiple) cultures, allowing an individual to move between and across cultures with ease and to be enriched by the multitude of experience that follows. This can then be channelled into creative works and provides these works (such as films) with an insiders’ perspective that cuts across multiple cultures. Filmmaking for immigrants is fraught with challenges though, not only due to racism and discrimination which may prevent voices being heard from minority communities but also due to practical reasons of access to resources. Newly arrived immigrants from working-class backgrounds often experience economic hardship (Van Hear 2018, 129) and are therefore unlikely to have access to the infrastructure required for filmmaking, and this is much less likely if the new arrival is a refugee (Grassilli 2008, 1245). In her book on intercultural cinema and embodiment, Laura Marks (2000) suggests that intercultural cinema is work made by ‘minorities living in the west’ (1). She goes on to say that this work is necessarily experimental in form because the experience of living between cultures cannot be expressed through conventional narrative means due to its complexity (10). For Marks, intercultural cinema is that which is concerned with memory and the ways that cultural memories might be held and conveyed through cultural networks (2). The memories operate within the holder’s sensorium and are triggered by sensory stimulation such as touch or smell (2). Intercultural filmmakers use the film medium to reach the viewer’s

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sensorium and thereby passing on the cultural memory that is held within the senses (195). Marks (2000) presents the idea of ‘haptic visuality’, where the eyes operate as ‘organs of touch’ (162) and film therefore affects the body (163). This bodily experience emulates and evokes the physical aspects of ‘exile, immigration and displacement’ (Marks 2000, 1) and creates cinema that can be empowering for the intercultural audience and challenging for the majority culture audience (29). Some of the films discussed in this chapter are unconventional in terms of form or style, but the majority do use a narrative structure (even if somewhat loose) and therefore do not fit in with Mark’s definition of intercultural cinema. However, many of the films (not just in this chapter, but in the book as a whole), do appeal to the viewer’s senses and do contain the sorts of cultural memories of which Marks speaks. Her insistence that intercultural cinema must be experimental in order to challenge regimes of power and dominant discourses is actually quite limiting and discounts the experiences of working-­ class intercultural filmmakers (and those interested in working-class stories). There is a sense of elitism in her definition, and by her own admission, the audience for the experimental film is limited (Marks 2000, 20). Film installations playing in art galleries might be interesting and valuable works, but they are much less likely to reach a working-class audience than a film that plays in  local cinemas and/or on streaming services (and television).

Crime and Violent Masculinity (My Brother the Devil, Bullet Boy, Gangs of Tooting Broadway, Blue Story, The Combination, Cedar Boys) A preoccupation of contemporary films dealing with the experiences particularly of second- and third-generation working-class immigrants is that of a violent masculinity manifested in the membership of criminal gangs. A number of films in the UK and Australia focus on this aspect and while reflecting the reality of life for many young men in British and Australian cities, they also risk perpetuating a stereotype of young men of ethnic minority background as violent and prone to criminal activity. They also play into the moral panic centred around minority youth in these countries and do not provide more positive representations for young minority youth audiences. This is not to say that the films under discussion here are not significant and important in telling stories that have been marginalised,

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but that they are limiting in terms of the representations they offer. Malik & Nwonka (2017) suggests that the plethora of films centred on urban gangs, gun and knife crime are a result of media interest in stories of Black youths that started to appear in the early 2000s (428). He states that these media reports created a ‘culture of anxiety about young Black workingclass men in Britain’ (428) that was of interest to filmmakers. In My Brother the Devil (2012) by Sally El Hosaini, two working-class brothers with Egyptian heritage negotiate identity on their London council estate. Rashid (James Floyd) is the older brother who works for a local drug dealer and possesses plenty of social capital that secures him a place in his gang. Rashid is tough and strong, and his younger brother Mo (Fady Elsayed) looks up to him and aspires to work with the gang transporting ‘food’ (drugs) around the estate. Rashid wants Mo to work hard at school and to avoid his criminal life, but Mo is looking for a sense of belonging—he doesn’t feel close to his Egyptian or Muslim culture and he wants to be one of the big boys. The film includes a violent and subsequently deadly rivalry with a neighbouring gang and, as a result, is relatively predictable. However, the film also includes a queer subplot as Rashid comes to terms with being gay after meeting and falling for Moroccan-French photographer Sayyid (Saïd Taghmaoui). The title of the film comes from Mo’s initial inability to accept his brother’s sexuality, and at one point in the film, he announces that he would rather his brother was a terrorist than gay. El Hosaini (in Hoggard 2013) states that she was interested in exploring the reasons why young working-class men might join gangs, but she was also interested in issues of identity, love and how young disenfranchised people deal with their disenfranchisement (para. 1–5). The film privileges the male Arab Muslim characters of Rashid and Mo, but it does also arguably rely on some stereotypes of this particular minority group. Muslim men are not often represented in a nuanced and sympathetic light, and while Rashid is a sympathetic character, he still reinforces the stereotype of young working-class Muslim men as involved with gangs and drugs (Cherry 2018, 271), even though he challenges the tropes of Muslim as terrorist and Muslim as homophobic. Rashid and Mo’s parents, Hanan (Amira Ghazalla) and Abdul (Nasser Memarzia), also reinforce some ethnic stereotypes, particularly due to their unwillingness to accept their son’s sexuality. In their final scene in the film, Abdul walks away from Rashid and Hanan hugs him tearfully but is unable to assert her own position and must follow her husband’s lead and also walks away from Rashid to join Abdul. There is some exploration of Rashid and Mo’s ‘inbetweenness’, but it manifests mostly as a rejection of their Arab and Muslim culture. Both

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Rashid and Mo drink alcohol and use drugs. Mo does refuse a bacon flavoured potato chip from his friend, but he doesn’t refuse alcohol. Both Rashid and Mo seem to choose what they consider to be Haram (forbidden). Mo reacts angrily when his father and Sayyid discuss Egyptian politics (the film is set during the Arab spring of 2011) and Rashid makes fun of Sayyid for playing and dancing to Arab music. Neither of the boys seems interested or close to their Arab or Egyptian backgrounds, although they do both seem to understand and can speak some Arabic. The only character in the film who seems to have embraced her religious background is Aisha (Letitia Wright) who is a Black Muslim and wears a hijab. Aisha does refuse alcohol and appears to be an observant Muslim. Her character also breaks the stereotype of the conservative Muslim, as she tells Mo he should support Rashid. In many ways, Aisha is the voice of reason in the film, but she still plays a minor role overall (as do the other female characters). The young men in My Brother the Devil also display hyper-­ masculinity which Cherry (2018) suggests is performed to compensate for their general sense of disenfranchisement and lack of power (276). Rashid’s gang is multi-ethnic, but the diversity of the young men’s cultural backgrounds does not detract from the commonalities they share, born from the hardships associated with their working-class status. Having said this, most of the gang members are young men of colour, and the absence of white youths from the multi-racial gang suggests that criminality and gang membership is mainly the domain of second- and third-generation immigrant youth of Black, Asian and Arab background. The depiction of criminal gang culture in the film also reinforces stereotypes of council estates as sites of criminality and deviance. The members of Rashid’s gang sell drugs to vulnerable people and are generally menacing. They are involved in violent confrontations with rival gangs and they display an insular mindset that doesn’t allow them to leave the ‘ends’ (their neighbourhood) either literally or figuratively. This kind of representation of council estates as dangerous places has a history as long as the estates have existed and estates have been portrayed as dangerous, grim and violent. The majority of the London high-rise council estates were built in the late 1960s and early 1970s and were initially built to solve the ‘problem’ of urban slums—overcrowded private rental properties that were not fit for habitation. Estates were clean and orderly and efficient due to the density of the housing (more people could be housed in a relatively small space). Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange was filmed on the Thamesmead estate in south-east London. According to Inez de Coo (2017, para. 2), this violent film helped to cement the notion of concrete estates as brutal (and the

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modernist architecture of the estates as cold and menacing). Considering Kubrick’s film was made when many of the estates were brand new, it set up a negative image of estates from the beginning. In the 1980s and 1990s, media reports of estates mostly focused on negative aspects. Years of council neglect led to serious disrepair and new crews visited estates to report on problems with mould, crumbling concrete as well as damage caused by graffiti and vandalism. Reporters described the estates as ‘sink estates’ and as ‘dumping grounds’ for ‘problem families’. Footage showed broken windows and burnt-out cars. Since A Clockwork Orange, there have been a number of films with dystopian themes set on estates. These thrillers and horror films depict tower blocks as sinister places, full of dark shadows, threatening figures, crime and dysfunction. Films such as Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown (2009), Joe Cornish’s 2011 Attack the Block, James Nunn and Ronnie Thompson’s 2012 Tower Block and Ciaran Foy’s 2012 Citadel present nightmarish images of tower block life on London estates, with residents terrorised by violent criminals, vicious youth gangs and even aliens. While there are some exceptions such as Hettie MacDonald’s 1996 Beautiful Thing, about two working-class boys in love set on the Thamesmead estate and the struggles and joys of working-class council estate residents depicted in Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric (2009), the default portrayal of council estates appears to be negative with very little representation of everyday life and pleasures and of the sense of community that many estate residents experience (something that I have first-­ hand knowledge of, having grown up on a high-rise multi-ethnic London council estate). What is also of interest is how films such as My Brother the Devil (even if it does end on a marginally hopeful note) might have an impact on the understanding of council estate life for those from the outside and whether the negative and stereotypical representations contribute to the misunderstanding and devaluing of council estate communities. If council estates are considered to be dangerous places, then it legitimises councils’ efforts to have estates demolished and the sites ‘regenerated’. The lack of representation of the positive aspects of council estate life is potentially very damaging. And because council estates tend to be multi-ethnic, it also pathologises people of colour as part of the same problem. But contradictions abound too. The demonisation of council estates—the labelling them as no-go areas and the representation of high-rise council estate life as undesirable—is now operating in tandem with the marketing of apartments on refurbished former council blocks to wealthy buyers. The

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proximity of some of the former estates to transport links into cities is now making the sites highly desirable for private developers. And the architecture itself is now being celebrated as significant (as examples of Brutalist architecture). El Hosaini’s film is shot beautifully, with cinematographer David Raedeker utilising establishing shots of the estate, many close-ups and dimly-lit interiors to establish the overall tone of insularity. The camera rarely leaves the estate, and the close-ups confine the characters to the frame. The use of framing is even referred to in the film when Sayyid tells Rashid (in relation to his photography) that perspective is all ‘about where you put your frame’. While Sayyid is attempting to encourage Rashid to move beyond the ‘ends’, the camera work in the film keeps the characters firmly within the frame of the estate and its accompanying crime and violence (a ghetto mentality). The film’s narrative and the characterisation is believable and there is merit in telling this story from the perspective of the young, Arab background working-class council estate resident, but the film does perpetuate some stereotypes in the process. Prior to El Hosaini’s film was Saul Dibb’s 2005 drama Bullet Boy, which is also set in the London inner-city suburb of Hackney. In many ways the films are alike—they both tell the story of young ethnic minority men who are involved in crime and who are affected by violence. The protagonists in Bullet Boy are Afro-Caribbean, rather than Arab, but they experience the same disenfranchisement and desire for community that draws them into gang life and criminality. The film centres on Ricky (Ashley Walters), who is out of prison but on probation. Ricky falls back in with his friend Wisdom (Leon Black) who will set in motion a train of events that will lead to Ricky’s death. Curtis (Luke Fraser) is Ricky’s younger brother, who tries to emulate his brother, resulting in him playing with a gun and accidentally shooting his friend. The boys live with their single mother, Beverley (Claire Perkins), who tries to keep them out of trouble, and who takes solace in her local church. Dibb’s film is also set on a council estate, and also offers both a representation of the reality of life for some young Black men in London, but reinforces the stereotypes and moral panic surrounding young Black working-class men. Watching the two films sideby-side reveals certain tropes used by the filmmakers. Both include older brothers attempting to give up their lives of crime and younger brothers who look up to their older siblings and want to emulate their toughness. There is a tragedy in the form of senseless killings and violence is everpresent. The similarity even encompasses small details—in both films the brothers share a bedroom with bunk beds in a council flat and both films

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include the killing of a rival’s dog. There are similarities in the films’ aesthetics too—in Bullet Boy, Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography also includes establishing shots of the estate and surrounds, a hand-held camera accompanied with close-ups, resulting in a tight frame. And the colour palettes are also similar. The main difference is with the degree of hope suggested at the end of the films. Whereas Dibb’s film ends in the death of Ricky and the possible redemption of Curtis and a potential (but still ambiguous) end to the cycle of crime and violence, El Hosaini’s film suggests a more hopeful ending, with both brothers alive and reconciled but with a nod towards social mobility as a ‘way out’ of the ends. Rashid now has access to cultural capital and a middle-class life due to his association with Sayyid, and Mo will presumably continue his success at school and follow the path of social mobility offered by formal education. Both films present a sense of moral judgement—characters who do bad things receive punishment, and those who decide to follow the rules will eventually be redeemed. The criminal activities and violence are rendered as bad choices made by the characters. There is really no sense in either film of the structural inequalities that have led to the characters’ circumstances (Malik & Nwonka 2017, 431). While the mise en scène does depict the impoverished environments of the estates, there is nothing to suggest the reasons for the characters’ disenfranchisement and alienation from society. There is no explanation for their reluctance to leave the ‘ends’ and why life on the ‘road’ seems better to them than a job in the formal sector. The viewer doesn’t witness any structural racism or discrimination, and Rashid, Mo, Ricky and Curtis appear to come from ‘good’ homes with hard-working parents who try their best. They are all likeable characters and without some context to accompany their actions, they can be seen as simply having made bad individual choices, rather than these actions being connected to the conditions of their existence. And both films operate as examples of cautionary tales. This theme of gang membership, knife and gun crime continues with Andrew Onwubolu’s (Rapman) 2019 Blue Story. Andrew Onwubolu’s film contains many of the same tropes as Bullet Boy and My Brother the Devil. There is a sibling relationship, there is a promising young man who becomes entangled in gang rivalries—there is violence and crime. But Onwubolu also utilises music in the form of rap at certain points to narrate the events, which breaks the stylistic conventions evident in Dibb and El Hosaini’s films and points to the importance of rap music in working-­ class communities (Bramwell 2015, 1). Onwubolu also claims that his film is intended as a reflection of reality, but also as an anti-violence and antigang film, and he hopes that the story will make young audiences reflect

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on their choices and decisions to join gangs and engage in futile turf wars (in Leigh 2019a, para. 19). The storylines ring true and the characterisation is convincing, but once again, the message is about individual choice, rather than exposing the systems that lead to young Black men feeling disempowered and only able to express themselves through gang affiliation and displays of macho masculinity. There is an argument to be made for the potential empowering effects for young ethnic minority men seeing their stories on screen, and thereby validating their experiences, and films like Blue Story are important due to their sympathetic representations of young Black men—a group that is often demonised by the media and the subject of moral panics. But they still only offer one kind of representation of Black British experience, locking young Black men into the ‘roadman’ archetype and do not contain overt political consciousnesses. The Gangs of Tooting Broadway also focuses on gangs and crimes in London, but in this film, the gangs are made up of people of Tamil background, rather than the Afro-Caribbean or Arab diaspora in My Brother the Devil, Bullet Boy and Blue Story. Devanand Shanmugam’s 2013 crime drama is set in south London amid a war between Tamil and Afro-­ Caribbean gangs vying for territory. The story is set amid the backdrop of protests in London in 2009 against the Sri-Lankan civil war, which gives the tale some political context. Once again, the narrative centres around male siblings—Arun (Nav Sidhu) is a former gangster who returns home to try and save his younger brother Ruthi (Kabelan Verlkumar) from a life of crime. There are few representations of the Sri-Lankan Tamil diaspora, and this film does shed some light on the reality of life for Tamil criminal gangs in London, but the emphasis again on young, violent and hyper-­ masculine men, and the usual tropes of the gangster film genre means that there is less space for a nuanced representation and a real understanding of life for the majority of working-class Sri-Lankan Tamils who are not members of criminal gangs. Films such as Bullet Boy, My Brother the Devil and Blue Story do have value in their representation of London working-class speech. The films all use Multicultural London English (MLE) in an authentic manner and show the richness of this working-class dialect (also known as a sociolect because it is exclusive to a particular social class). MLE is a combination of Cockney, Jamaican, African and South Asian accents that developed among young working-class Londoners towards the end of the twentieth century (Cheshire et al. 2017, 2). The dialect has its own grammar and vocabulary and challenges the rules of standard English. It is the

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vernacular of council estates and of UK grime music and epitomises the multi-­ethnic nature of London working-class communities. To hear MLE used in the film has the effect of revealing the richness of working-class argot and the influence of multi-ethnicity on youth culture. There are films by British Afro-Caribbean filmmakers that offer an alternative representation to those of the films discussed above, but they tend to be experimental in form or designed for art gallery installation, which does limit the potential audience (young ethnic minority people did go to the cinema to see films like Bullet Boy and Blue Story). Films such as the documentaries of Ayo Akingbade (Tower XYZ, 2016 and Dear Babylon, 2019) that focus on public housing, offer an alternative view of life on estates from those seen in the crime genre films. Different options, rather than a life of crime, are presented in the short films of Caleb Femi, notably in his short And They Knew Light (2017), which is filmed on the same London estate as My Brother the Devil, and uses the style of a rap music video, but subverts the image of violent youth by depicting young Black men meeting to exchange sporting equipment and to hang out to play a version of golf together. There are also the experimental documentaries of Akinola Davies Jr. which explore topics such as Black history—his BBC series Black to Life: Rethinking the Black Presence within British History (2019) reveals the stories of Black people through British history that have been deliberately excluded. Debbie Tucker Green offers an intriguing story about a working-class Black woman who finds herself mysteriously pregnant (despite having stopped having sex with her husband) in her 2014 feature Second Coming. In a completely different vein is Destiny Ekaragha’s 2013 comedy about a British Nigerian family, Gone too Far!. Ekaragha’s film offers two perspectives—that of British born Yemi (Malachi Kirby), who wants the respect of the other young people on his London council estate, and his older brother Ikudayisi (OC Ukeje) who has arrived from Nigeria and embarrasses Yemi with his Nigerian ways. The film is a humorous insight into identity and cultural understanding within a working-class setting. And Shola Ammo’s The Last Tree, 2019, is a coming-of-age film about a young Black man who is moved as a child from his rural white foster family back to his Nigerian birth mother in inner-city London and then as a teenager on to Lagos, Nigeria, where he learns about his culture. This is a film about identity and belonging, and it also challenges the negative depictions of council estates seen in the crime dramas. Ammo states that he wanted to present an alternative view

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of estate life, and show the beauty and the pleasure that also exists in these spaces (in Leigh 2019b, para. 11). There are other, more established Black British filmmakers, but to date, they have not made films that focus on the diasporic experience. Ama Asante has directed one contemporary drama and two period dramas— both of which focus on a Black protagonist, but do not deal with the experiences of the contemporary Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain. Asante’s first feature, A Way of Life (2004), is a bleak story of racism in a small working-class town in Wales—but the focus is on the white characters and the terrible consequences of their racism. Her next feature, Belle (2013) is set in eighteenth-century London and operates as a challenge to the whitewashing of British history. The film is based on the life of real historical figure Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was the daughter of a white naval officer and an African slave. In Asante’s version, Belle is adopted by her father’s aristocratic uncle and raised amid wealth and opulence, yet experiences discrimination due to her ancestry and her gender. Asante has also directed a romantic period drama, A United Kingdom (2016) that is based on the late 1940s marriage of white British woman Ruth Williams to Botswanan prince Seretse Khama. Steve McQueen has made a number of acclaimed films. Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011) are centred on white protagonists—the Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands in Hunger and a sex-addicted New York executive in Shame. Twelve Years a Slave (2013) is an adaptation of an 1800 slave memoir and is a visceral representation of the impacts of slavery on the victims. His 2018 crime drama Widows is a female-led heist story that casts a Black woman as the central protagonist. McQueen and Asante are probably the most successful contemporary Black British filmmakers, but their films have taken directions away from the themes and topics found in many other films of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the UK. The aforementioned preoccupation with violent masculinity, crime and ethnicity also applies to films about diaspora in Australia, notably in two films about the Lebanese community, The Combination (2009, David Field) and Cedar Boys (also 2009, Serhat Caradee). Both films are set in the working-class and multicultural suburbs of western Sydney, and both feature young Lebanese men who find themselves mixed up with drug-­ related crime and violence. In a similar way to the British representations of young working-class Black men, these two Australian films both attempt to challenge ethnic stereotypes, while also reinforcing them to some extent. Middle-Eastern background men in Australia have been subjects of

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moral panic and have been associated with organised crime. Krayem (2017) outlines the ways in which people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds have been homogenised as ‘Middle Eastern’ and how this term has been used to demonise and create a ‘deviant group’ (20), feeding into an ‘Orientalist discourse…that places Arabs and Muslim communities outside the space of belonging’ (32). While Krayem (2017) suggests The Combination and Cedar Boys ‘offer voice’ to ‘disenfranchised…Arab and Muslim males’ (65), she also criticises the films for reinforcing some stereotypes and the perceived links between Arab and Muslim men and crime. In The Combination, a young Lebanese-Australian, John Morkos (George Basha) returns home from a spell in prison and attempts to start afresh, away from crime. His younger brother, Charlie (Firass Dirani) has become involved in drug crime while John was in prison, and Charlie tries to steer him away unsuccessfully. Cedar Boys follows a similar narrative with Tarek (Les Chantery), a young Lebanese-Australian, attempting to help his older imprisoned brother Jamal (Bren Foster) financially via drug-­ related crime. The writer of The Combination is Lebanese-Australian George Basha, who based the story on his own experiences of growing up in Western Sydney and Serhat Caradee who wrote Cedar Boys is Turkish-­ Australian. The backgrounds of the writers do assist in the authenticity of the portrayals in the films and there is a sense that the films are reflecting a reality of life for young working-class Arab and Muslim men in Sydney’s western suburbs, but at the same time, the representations are somewhat limited by the emphasis on drug and gang-related crime and violent masculinities. The films do fit into an Australian tradition of working-class narratives that focus on male crime, although the presence of Arab and Muslim young men challenges the dominant narrative of white working-­ class male violence. There have been studies in Australia that link the colonial concept of mateship (borne from colonial violence towards convicts in the penal colony and to Indigenous people) to contemporary gang-related violence and which suggest that working-class men use violence as a way to compensate for their powerlessness in a classed society (Connell 1995, 111). The crime genre is a staple of Australian film and the majority of these films are centred on white working-class criminals who often display violence to women, ethnic minorities or anyone else perceived as a threat to their masculinity (such as gay men). This has the effect of potentially pathologising violence as an inherent trait of working-class men which is problematic because it not only reinforces class stereotypes but also ignores

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the reasons behind violent behaviour such as the impact of race and class oppression.

South Asia Diaspora and Positive Representations (Bend it Like Beckham, Anita and Me, Brick Lane, Blinded by the Light) According to Desai (2003), South Asian diasporic cinema is both informed by and challenges the hegemony of Hollywood and Bollywood as well as challenging what is meant by national cinemas (34). South Asian diasporic filmmakers include South Asian characters and narratives that are rarely explored in Hollywood and tend to move away from the excess of Bollywood genres, while also offering alternatives to dominant representations of British, American, or Canadian culture and so on. What is noticeable in many films made about South Asian diasporas is a tendency towards quite positive representations (when compared to those of Black British working-class men, for example), and the presence of female directors with films centred on female characters. While quite a number of South Asian diaspora films are about middle- or upper-class people, there are some that focus on working-class characters and communities such as Bend it Like Beckham, Brick Lane and Anita and Me. Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 comedy/drama Bend it Like Beckham is often noted for its positive portrayal of a South Asian family and for its feminist sensibility, but it is less noted for its representation of two working-class families—a white working-class family and a British Sikh working-class family. Bend it Like Beckham can be described as a heart-warming film that follows a conventional narrative and provides a happy ending. The characters encounter obstacles and conflict, but these are overcome by the film’s conclusion. Jessminder Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) is a young British woman from an Indian Sikh family. She wants to play football and is a talented player, but her family wants her to focus on her studies and they initially consider football to be a man’s game, not suitable for women. Jessminder meets Juliette Paxton (Keira Knightley), a fellow player who encourages Jessminder to join her team and the two young women become close friends. In many ways, the film is a classic clash of cultures story as Jessminder’s family come to terms with her choices and the influence of British culture, and Jessminder realises that her Indian culture is something to celebrate. Both families are working class. Jessminder’s father

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works at Heathrow airport and they live in Hounslow—a suburb close to the airport and under the flight paths. It is unclear what Juliette’s father does for a living, but they live in a modest home and their accents mark them as working class. This is a positive representation of working-class culture. Both families reconcile any differences and bond over their desire for their daughters to be happy. Juliette and Jessminder also represent the many working-class young people who dream of a career in professional sport. The film is not without some stereotypes though. Jessminder’s sister and her friends provide some comic relief due to their portrayal as ‘trashy’ through their choices of clothing and their uncouth mannerisms and language. The film has also been criticised for presenting an ‘overly triumphalist version of contemporary multicultural society’ (Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb 2015, 142) that sends an overall message of ‘assimilation’ due to Jessminder’s rejection of aspects of her Indian culture (Abdel-­ Shehid and Kalman-Lamb 2015, 147). But ultimately the film presents an important picture of multi-ethnic working-class cooperation and friendship—a reality of life for many working-class people living in multicultural cities such as London. Comedy/drama is also the genre employed by Turkish-Cypriot British filmmaker Metin Hüseyin in his 2002 film Anita and Me which is an adaptation of Meera Syal’s 1996 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name (Syal wrote the screenplay for the film). Hüseyin does not tell a story of the Turkish-Cypriot diaspora and instead chooses to adopt a narrative about a young British Indian girl living in a mining village in the north of England in the early 1970s. The film’s central protagonist Meena Kumar (Chandeep Uppal), meets and befriends a white girl, Anita (Anna Brewster) and in a similar way to Jessminder in Bend it Like Beckham, she has to negotiate between her English and her Indian culture. The film does deal with the issue of racism in the working-class village (through the figure of Anita’s racist boyfriend), but ultimately, it is also a feel-good film that again presents a ‘clash of cultures’ that eventually reconcile. The female-­ centred stories portrayed in Bend it Like Beckham and Anita and Me suggest that it is possible that the experiences of women in diaspora communities is different to that of men, but also that female filmmakers and writers tend towards positive representations possibly in an effort to counter the negative depictions of diaspora communities that abound in the mainstream media. In contrast is Brick Lane (2007), which is an adaptation of Monica Ali’s 2003 novel of the same name. The film’s director, Sarah Gavron is not of

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South Asian descent, but her film adaption is quite faithful to Bangladesh-­ born Ali’s novel. The film tells the story of Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), who leaves her village in Bangladesh to marry an older man settled in Brick Lane in London’s East End. Her new husband, Chanu Ahmed (Satish Kaushik) lacks warmth and demands subservience to which Nazneen complies. Her life in Brick Lane is difficult—they live in a small council flat on a very modest income and the Bangladeshi community are harassed by racists. Nazneen has three children, but her eldest dies as an infant. Nazneen is the primary carer of her surviving daughters and must also take on sewing work when her husband loses his job. She is isolated and deeply unhappy and misses her family in Bangladesh. She begins an affair with a young man who delivers her sewing and finds herself in constant conflict with her husband and her daughters. The setting of the film is grim—the council estate and surrounding area are depicted as unwelcoming, and there is little that suggests the dynamic environment of this part of London. While the film doesn’t end on a despairing note, there is an overall feeling of melancholy as Nazneen resigns herself to disappointment. The film does not include much recognition of the community and the support provided by the working-class Bangladeshi community in London. Positive aspects of South Asian culture and multiculturalism are also represented in Gurinder Chadha’s 2019 comedy/drama and musical, Blinded by the Light. This is another film with a happy ending, but it has a slight gritter edge than Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham, depicting racism more explicitly. The film is constructed around a semi-biographical story of Sarfraz Manzoor, a journalist who became a devoted fan of Bruce Springsteen as a teenager while growing up in a working-class neighbourhood of Luton (just outside of London). The film’s protagonist, Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra) is a young Pakistani-British high school student in a mostly monocultural, white neighbourhood. Javed is introduced to the music of Bruce Springsteen through a new school friend, Roops (Aaron Phagura) and he finds a deep connection to Springsteen’s lyrics. The lyrics of the songs convey how Javed feels about his working-class town and his desire to leave to search for something different from the factory and the sewing work of his parents. In a similar way to Jessminder in Bend it Like Beckham, Javed finds himself bumping up against the wishes of his father who attempts to maintain his Pakistani culture and principles. Eventually, Javed’s father realises that his son has been raised within two cultures and accepts the path that Javed chooses (journalism). Blinded by the Light

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departs from Chadha’s previous film due to its use of music. The film includes a number of scenes of Javed singing along to Springsteen’s songs, and contains some semi-fantasy musical moments as the diagetic music takes on non-diagetic properties. As well as the more overt treatment of racism in the film (at one point Pakistani characters are attacked by members of the racist National Front), the film is also more explicitly class-­ conscious due to the inclusion of Springsteen’s music (a working-class icon in the USA) and one of the messages of the film is arguably that class struggle can be understood across cultures. Javed identifies with the stories in Springsteen’s music despite their geographical and cultural differences. Unlike the representation of the working-class community in Brick Lane, in Blinded by the Light, the town of Luton is depicted with more nuance. There is racist graffiti and working-class racists in the town, but there are also white working-class people who are staunchly anti-racist and show their support for Javed and his family. Working-class characters in the film show that they can find joy too, in music and in working-class camaraderie.

Asylum Seekers/Refugees (Le Harve, Welcome, Mother Fish, Journals of Musan, Baran, Frozen River) Despite the growing awareness globally of asylum seekers and refugees, there are relatively few representations of their experiences on screen (at least in dramatised forms—there are a number of documentaries). The films discussed in this section (with one exception) have not been made by filmmakers from refugee backgrounds, but each provides a sympathetic representation of people seeking asylum, or of refugees trying to settle in new homelands. The protagonists of the films discussed here are working class and the asylum seekers and refugees seek shelter in working-class communities and work alongside working-class people. This mirrors the ways in which asylum seekers and refugees find themselves living in working-­class areas (and in the West, often in public housing) and taking on working-class occupations (regardless of their levels of education or previous occupations in their homelands). Working-class people in the host nation respond either with care and concern for their vulnerable new neighbours, or with resentment or fear at a perception that the refugee may have received more in government benefits such as welfare, or has

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jumped an imaginary queue for resources such as housing in a pressured system, and because they do not understand the culture of the newly arrived individuals and families (particularly when there is already a stigma associated with the refugees’ homeland such as Syria and Iran). The filmmakers included here have attempted to humanise people seeking asylum, while also depicting struggles faced and resistance encountered. Each film sends a powerful message that people seeking asylum should be treated with compassion and as equals and should be offered help by those in more stable circumstances. Some of the films also show that working-class people with limited resources themselves are often very generous and will share what they have with those who have nothing. Sympathetic portrayals of asylum seekers and refugees are important due to the tendency of governments (particularly in the UK, US, parts of Europe and Australia) to dehumanise asylum seekers and refer to people as ‘illegal arrivals’, thus justifying harsh and punitive immigration and border control policies. Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki is known for his quirky films about working-class life, mostly set in his native Finland. Kaurismäki’s films often depict working-class people who are down on their luck and helped by fellow working-class neighbours. His films are unconventional in style— the settings are often indeterminate in terms of time, and he eschews glamourous actors for those who are ordinary in terms of looks and stoic in terms of character. His films are saturated with colour and resemble the aesthetic of American Painter Edward Hopper’s paintings (Romney 1997, 12). He includes unusual soundtracks to his films which vary from melodrama-­style film scores to classical music, folk music, blues, country and western and rock n roll. Kaurismäki’s 2011 Le Havre employs these typical style elements but contains a political message about asylum seekers amid the quirkiness. Le Havre is set in the French port city of the same name and centres on shoe shiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms) who lives in a shack in a run-down part of the city with his Finnish wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen). Marcel comes across a young African asylum seeker, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) who has escaped from a shipping container intercepted by police. Marcel and his neighbours provide Idrissa with sanctuary and Marcel plans to assist Idrissa to travel to England to be reunited with his mother who is already there. They evade the local police and Marcel eventually secures a passage to England for Idrissa on a local fisherman’s boat, paid for with the proceedings of a charity concert featuring an ageing local rock n roll star. Marcel’s neighbours (mostly local shopkeepers) are unquestioning of Idrissa’s right to sanctuary and their help, and they

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accept him immediately and do what they can to help in their own modest way. The working-class community around the harbour rallies around Marcel and Idrissa and each plays a part in his eventual departure for England. The film also includes representation of other African asylum seekers in France—Marcel visits members of an African community to seek information and advice on how to help Idrissa. He goes to an African community centre in the town, he visits Idrissa’s grandfather in an immigration detention centre and he travels to a refugee camp near Dunkirk where African asylum seekers share their meal with him. Despite the indeterminate time setting of the film, it also includes news footage of the destruction of the Jungle—the unofficial refugee camp built by asylum seekers in Calais. Le Harve is funny, in the quiet and understated manner of Kaurismäki’s films and provides a sympathetic portrayal of asylum seekers that challenges the often anonymous representations of asylum seekers and refugees seen on the news (where they are often identified only in terms of numbers of people). Kaurismäki’s follow-up film, The Other Side of Hope (2017), also focuses on asylum seekers—this time a Syrian asylum seeker who is helped by a working-class community in Helsinki. Other Scandinavian films dealing with asylum seekers and immigrants include Eat Sleep Die (Gabriela Pichler, 2012) about a young unemployed Serbian immigrant in Sweden trying to support herself and her sick father, and And Breathe Normally (Ísold Uggadóttir, 2018) which tells the story of a friendship that develops between an Icelandic border security guard and an African asylum seeker. Philippe Lioret also tells the story of an asylum seeker in France, in his 2009 drama Welcome. This film also provides a sympathetic portrayal of asylum seekers, but, unlike Kaurismäki’s film, the end result in Welcome is a tragic end for a young asylum seeker. Lioret’s film centres on a young Iraqi-Kurd Bilal Kayani (Firat Ayverdi) who arrives in Calais in order to attempt to reach England, where his girlfriend has settled. Bilal is befriended by a local swimming coach, Simon Calmat (Vincent Lindon) who takes in Bilal (despite the aiding of ‘illegal immigrants’ being illegal) and teaches him how to swim. Bilal wants to learn to swim so that he can swim across the English Channel—which eventuates in his drowning. While there are some sympathetic characters in the town, many are opposed to what they see as illegal immigration, and there is hostility shown towards asylum seekers like Bilal. The film did lead to some debate and discussion of the plight of asylum seekers in France (Hird 2009, para. 19), and the depiction of the tragedy reflects the reality for many seeking

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to travel to the UK in dangerous conditions. The film humanises asylum seekers (the character of Bilal is nuanced) and forces audiences to acknowledge their own biases against asylum seekers and their potential complicity in the tragic ends met. But Welcome also shows how some working-class people are not willing to accept asylum seekers and see them as a threat. It does not have the warmth and optimism of Kaurismäki’s Le Havre. In a very different mode in terms of style and narrative structure is Khoa Do’s 2009 drama Mother Fish. This film draws on Do’s own experience as a Vietnamese refugee whose family travelled from Vietnam by boat and settled in Australia. He creates a fictionalised account of a family fleeing Vietnam by boat in a series of flashbacks narrated by a middle-aged woman now working in a suburban Australian sweatshop. As the woman recreates the traumatic voyage, the action takes place within the confines of the small factory—using what is available in the setting as props. The film has a staged quality as a result, but Do successfully creates tension and drama despite the absence of an actual ocean-setting. The film has a stylised aesthetic, but the recounts of the voyage provided by the characters are authentic and convincing which might be due to Do’s decision to cast actors with refugee backgrounds, and this authenticity is also intensified due to Do’s own background and experience that informs the narrative. Do is committed to representing marginalised Australians, particularly those from refugee and immigrant backgrounds, and most of his films to date have featured Vietnamese Australians who arrived as refugees, or who are the descendants of refugees. Films such as Mother Fish show how many Vietnamese refugees have settled in working-class neighbourhoods and taken on working-class jobs, such as factory and sewing work. An earlier film, The Finished People (2003), is a documentary-style drama that follows young homeless Vietnamese Australians on the streets of Cabramatta, in working-class western Sydney and challenges the stereotypes of that time of young Vietnamese Australians in Cabramatta as heroin addicts and drug dealers. His comedy-drama Footy Legends (2006) stars Do’s brother, Ahn Do, as a young unemployed man in western Sydney who starts a rugby league team for his old school friends, many of whom are from immigrant and refugee backgrounds, and who face a number of problems due to unemployment and the impacts of poverty. This commitment to representing communities that are rarely given screen time in Australia and in a variety of forms and genres makes Do an important figure in Australian film making.

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The plight of asylum seekers of a different kind is explored in The Journals of Musan, a 2011 realist drama by South Korean director Park Jung-bum. Park’s film is about a North Korean defector attempting to survive as a refugee in Seoul. The refugee, Jeon Seung-chul (played by Park himself), encounters hostility as he tries to find work and a place within South Korean society. He is treated with suspicion and is haunted by the trauma of his life in North Korea. This is a relentlessly grim film— while Seung-chul does his best to follow rules and be a good citizen, he is constantly thwarted by his circumstances and the indifference or brutality of those he encounters. He displays resilience and takes solace in the companionship of a stray dog, which is eventually run over and killed by a car. The fly-on-the-wall documentary-style shooting of the film brings the viewer close to Seung-chul and his daily pain and there is no relief for the audience as Seung-chul is doomed to fail in the society that has purportedly given him asylum. The film raises questions—would he have been better off taking his chances and staying in North Korea, where at least he had some sense of community, or will he eventually be accepted by South Korean society? While there are characters in the film who do offer some assistance to Seung-chul, they are countered by those who wish him harm. It is a bleak view of working-class life with an underlying sense of brutality in the working-class neighbourhoods depicted (and this working-class aggression appears more recently in Bong Joon-Ho’s award-winning 2019 drama Parasite). There is some brutality too in Majid Maidi’s 2001 Iranian drama Baran, but there is also warmth and working-class camaraderie. Baran is centred on Afghani refugees living and working in Iran, with the central protagonist, Lateef (Hossein Abedini) as a worker in a construction site that employs a number of Afghani refugees illegally. Lateef becomes smitten with young worker Rahmat (Zahra Bahrami), after discovering that she is actually a young woman posing as a man in order to gain employment. The young woman, named Baran, is trying to help support her family after her father has been injured on the site. The film depicts the unsafe working conditions of the construction site—the men lift extremely heavy loads and move around the building without the aid of safety rails or scaffolding. They light fires to keep warm in the bitter cold and they mix cement by hand and do not wear face masks to protect them from the dust. When the government inspectors arrive, the illegal Afghan workers must hide to avoid arrest. There are lots of scenes of the men at work which create a realistic portrayal of the hardship they endure and the

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gruelling nature of their work. Hard labour is also depicted in a scene set near the village where Baran lives—Lateef watches Baran as she heaves heavy rocks by hand from a river bed along with a number of other women, all of whom must wade into the freezing river to find the best-sized rocks. The strenuous nature of this work and the work on the construction site portrays the physical nature of some working-class work very well. Amid the difficult conditions is a sense of friendship and collectively as the men help each other out, and sit together to enjoy communal meals. Lateef sacrifices his own security (via his sought-after work permit), in order to help Baran and her family, knowing full well that there is really no chance that he would ever be allowed to form a relationship with Baran (and the film ends as she prepares to join her family on a journey away from Iran). It is a sensory film, and Majidi creates not only the physicality of the work but also the restrained intimacy between Lateef and Baran as he watches her comb her hair through a glimpse provided by a billowing curtain and when he helps her retrieve her shoe, stuck in the mud. He places the lost shoe on her foot and they share a glance that speaks volumes of their shared attraction. This is a working-class environment, and it is also a film that works very well within the restrictions placed on filmmakers in Iran, who must adhere to a code of modesty to please the censors (Naficy 1999, 45). One of the few American films to be included in this chapter is Courtney Hunt’s 2008 Frozen River, a film that depicts asylum seekers from the perspective of those who make money from assisting their passage across borders. Frozen River was made on a small budget and shot in only 24 days. The film is set in Upstate New York, near the Akwesasne St. Regis Mohawk Reservation and the border crossing to Cornwall, Ontario, marked by the St. Lawrence River, which is frozen solid in winter. The main protagonists are Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), a working-class white woman who works in a discount store, and Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) who is Mohawk and lives on the Reservation and works as a bingo caller. Ray needs money to purchase a new trailer home for herself and her two children, and Lila wants to save enough money so that she can support her child who is currently being raised by his grandmother. They begin working together to transport immigrants across the border, using the frozen river and Lila’s knowledge of the landscape. This trafficking work pays well and their system seems to be working until they almost leave the baby of a Pakistani couple out on the frozen river. Ray and Lila are eventually caught by the authorities and Ray takes the fall for their criminal activity, leaving

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Lila free to reclaim her child. Frozen River operates as a thriller, and there certainly is suspense created. But it is also a border film. A film that focuses on literal and metaphoric borders. The literal border is that between the US and Canada—but this official geopolitical border is challenged by the way in which the Mohawk land stretches across the geopolitical border and the way the women overcome their own psychological borders in terms of race and culture (Raussert 2011, 16). Both Ray and Lila are marginalised, trapped by different kinds of borders, such as their class, gender and for Lila, race. They function within a liminal space. There is the liminal space of the Reservation—at once advantaged by its protection from some of the state laws, but also marginalised and separated from mainstream American society. Reservations are highly contested spaces and represent the impact of colonisation. The frozen river itself can be seen as a heterotopia—Foucault’s idea of counter-hegemonic sites (Raussert 2011, 22). A heterotopia is a place that has multiple meanings and can challenge the dominant discourses of place (Foucault 1986, 2). The river when frozen becomes a means of income for the women and facilitates their illegal activity. It also challenges the official border space as illegal immigrants are taken across the frozen river. Hunt says that she was interested in how circumstances lead to people taking risks and also in the role of the mother and the kinds of risks a mother might take to protect her children (in Merlin 2008, para. 3). She was also particularly interested in the struggle of single mothers, having grown in a single mother household herself (in Merlin 2008, para. 5). The strength and resilience of working-­ class single mothers comes across very strongly in this film and while Ray and Lila remain in difficult circumstances, the bond they develop as working-­class women means they need not struggle alone.

Other Immigrants, Eastern Europeans, Chinese in the West, North Africans in France, the Turkish Diaspora in Germany, Koreans in Japan (Eastern Promises, God’s Own Country, Ghosts, The Home Song Stories, Head-On, Go!) There are singular or small groups of films that deal with the experiences of immigrants in a variety of different places, and the following films do so, with an emphasis on the stories of working-class immigrants. Some adhere

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somewhat to stereotypes, while others challenge them and open up spaces for marginalised voices to be heard. Despite there being a million Polish people in the UK, and Polish being the second most spoken language in the UK, there are very few representations of the Polish diaspora on film. When Eastern European characters do appear in British film, they tend to fulfil the negative perception of Eastern Europe as ‘murky and mysterious’ (Butt 2010, 248) and focus on stories of ‘corruption and violence’ (Butt 2010, 248). While at the time of writing, there are no UK films about the Polish diaspora (and only one or two Polish characters have appeared on the small screen, although there is a Polish television soap opera about Polish immigrants in London called Londynczycy, 2008–present). Considering how large the Polish diaspora is in the UK, British filmmakers are missing an opportunity to represent the diversity of experience of working-class Poles and other Eastern Europeans in the UK. One film which is focused on Eastern Europeans in the UK is Eastern Promises, 2007, directed by Canadian David Cronenberg. This film fits with Butt’s criticism of Eastern European representation and presents (in this case) Russians in the UK as tragic exploited sex workers, or as members of the violent Russian mafia. Eastern Promises does depict the very real issue of sex-trafficking of vulnerable Eastern European women, but it reinforces stereotypes of Russians in the UK as either victims or criminals. By contrast, Francis Lee’s 2017 drama God’s Own Country tells the story of a young Yorkshire farmer who falls in love with a Romanian farm worker employed to work on his sheep farm. Not only does the narrative centre around a same-sex relationship, but it challenges the stereotypes of Eastern Europeans (particularly Romanians in the UK) as hapless victims or criminals. The film does resemble Ang Lee’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain a little in terms of its storyline of two men who form a romantic relationship while tending to livestock in the wilderness. The Chinese diaspora is also under-represented in the west, with few films that tell stories about Chinese immigrant communities and their descendants (there has been a new interest from Hollywood in films about Asian-Americans since the box-office success of Jon M. Chu’s 2017 comedy Crazy Rich Asians, but so far, the films have not focused on working-­ class Asian-Americans). Nick Broomfield’s 2006 drama Ghosts is based on the tragic deaths of Chinese workers employed to pick cockles in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire (north-west England) in 2004. Twenty-three Chinese workers (undocumented workers) drowned when the tide turned rapidly and they found themselves trapped by the incoming tide. This

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shocking event caused by the exploitation of illegal workers is dramatised in Broomfield’s film, which gives voice to the workers through the character of Ai Qin (Ai Qin Lin), a young woman who is trafficked to Lancashire by a Chinese gang. The film is informed by the investigative work of journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai (Zaniello 2020, 40). The anonymity of the workers who were killed is challenged and the film brings to light the dangerous conditions often faced by undocumented workers who feel unable to speak out about their conditions due to their visa status and their reliance on the criminal networks who control their passage around between China and the west. Another film about Chinese working-class immigrants, but this time in an Australian context is Tony Ayres’ 2007 semi-­autobiographical drama The Home Song Stories, based on his experience as a child relocating from Hong Kong to Australia with his mother and his sister after his mother marries a working-class Australian sailor she met in a night club in Hong Kong (where she worked as a singer). The story is narrated by the adult child, Tom (Joel Lok) who attempts to make sense of his traumatic childhood and reconcile the memory of his deceased mother, Rose (Joan Chen). The family arrive in Australia in the 1960s and initially settle in the suburban working-class home of sailor Bill (Steve Vidler), a well-meaning and kind man who is not able to cope with his new family and their cultural differences. Rose begins to have affairs with other men, and she and the children move between homes and various levels of poverty until Rose takes her own life. Ayres’ film depicts well the working-class area of Melbourne in the 1960s and the racism and discrimination faced by Rose and her family as well as the support she receives from fellow Chinese immigrants in the area. Ayres’ melodrama remains one of the few representations of Chinese-Australians in the film to date, which is incongruous with both the numbers of Chinese-background Australians and the established nature of the Chinese diaspora in the country. Ayres himself comments on this absence and suggests that there is a resistance in Australia to films about Chinese experience (in Yue 2008b, 246). The film was slow to sell at the box office despite Ayres’ intention for the film to be ‘accessible’ to a ‘broader audience’ (in Yue 2008b, 246) and despite the general popularity of other ‘ethnic autobiography’ films with Australian audiences (Yue 2008a, 236). Moving to Germany, and the Turkish diaspora represented in Faith Akin’s 2004 Head-On. This film is about Turkish-German Cahit Tomruk (Birol Ünel) who feels despondent following the death of his wife and self-­ medicates with alcohol and drugs. This is a fast-paced film that gives some

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insight into the world of Turkish-Germans and depicts some of the discrimination faced by members of this diaspora. Cahit’s life is chaotic, and the audience follows him into bars and prison. It is gritty, funny and despite the dysfunction represented, it is ultimately a sympathetic portrayal of the Turkish diaspora. Isao Yukisada’s 2001 coming-of-age drama Go!, also focuses on an immigrant community, but this time the lesser-­ known community of North Koreans in Japan. Sugihara (Yō suke Kubozuka) is a third-generation North Korean teenager living in Japan and the film is set among his working-class community. Sugihara faces continuing discrimination from Japanese people when they discover his ethnicity and his class status is also brought into focus when he tries to develop a romantic relationship with a Japanese girl from a richer family. The films discussed in this section illustrate well the intersections of class with race, ethnicity, gender and visa status, and despite the differences between cultures represented, there are clear commonalities when it comes to either rejection or acceptance by the host societies.

A Detour into Palestinian Cinema (Paradise Now, Omar, Five Broken Cameras) The last section of this chapter takes a detour into Palestinian cinema. This is included here due to the displaced nature of Palestinians, many of whom live in refugee camps and/or in exile—reside in other parts of the Middle East and in Europe, North America and Australia and because the majority of Palestinian films are focused on working-class characters/subjects. Many Palestinians have been forced from their land and therefore form a diaspora. The Palestinian diaspora retains a sense of cultural and national identity, despite their geographical distances from their homelands and the absence of an ‘official’ nation-state. Palestine is not a United Nations-­ recognised nation-state and the people are often regarded as stateless, which, according to Dabashi, creates a sense of ‘geographical absence’ (2006a, 10). There is a sense of living in exile (Gertz and Khleifi 2008, 2)—and the cinema of the people potentially becomes ‘excilic’ too. Naficy (2006, 91) suggests that Palestinian cinema is structurally exilic—meaning there is an internal exile experienced by Palestinians living under occupation, or an external exile that occurs when Palestinians move to other countries. A number of Palestinian filmmakers can be considered as working in exile as

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they do not live in Palestine. Some live in Israel, but a large number live in Europe or the US. Filmmaking in Palestine is fraught with difficulties. To begin with, there is no infrastructure for filmmaking—no film school, very little chance of gaining funding, hardly any cinemas plus the complications of continued curfews put in place in certain towns by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). There is also the difficulty in moving around—filmmakers have had their film stock confiscated by Israeli border guards and are often treated with suspicion by the Israeli authorities and there are also the demands from Palestinian groups to be represented in a certain way. Most Palestinian films—films made by Palestinians and dealing with Palestinian issues—are made with the help of European funding and are often multi-­ national projects. But despite the fact that Palestinians do not have a UN-recognised state, it is possible to refer to a national cinema of Palestine, due to some common concerns that tend to appear in many Palestinian films. Contemporary Palestinian film tends to feature borders and checkpoints regularly. Gertz and Khleifi (2008, 153) suggest that Palestinian films are often ‘roadblock movies’ and the representation of checkpoints operates both as a depiction of the reality of everyday life, but also symbolises the oppression of Palestinian people whose mobility is severely impeded by these checkpoints and the security wall. There is a sense that life is ‘stuck’ under occupation and is in a perpetual state of siege (Gertz and Khleifi 2008, 135). And the checkpoint remains in the memory even when it has been successfully traversed. The borders also mean that Palestinians and Israeli Jews are not often able to make connections, and rarely see the real and diverse nature of each other. Palestinians see Israelis only from one side and despite the linked histories of the people they rarely come together (Gertz and Khleifi 2008, 7). Collaboration between Israeli Jews and Palestinians does occur, but not often. But there are some Israelis who, for example, work with Palestinian filmmakers and who make a point of showing Palestinian films in their independent cinemas. Cinema arguably has the power to overcome the roadblocks and filmmakers often use ‘cinematic means’ to cross borders—sometimes using symbols such as animals or even balloons to cross the border. Filmmakers also use the camera to ‘resist the siege’ and challenge the occupiers’ gaze. The representation of the border is also connected to the increasing lack of space available to Palestinians as the Israeli settlements grow and as the violence between both sides makes many spaces dangerous—even the home (Gertz and Khleifi 2008, 136).

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Another important aspect of Palestinian film is the idea of trauma and the way that trauma affects the present by retaining a vision of the traumatic past. The trauma works in a similar way to a repressed memory which remains under the surface and creates a ‘traumatic realism’ (Dabashi 2006a, 11) that permeates through society and everyday life. The trauma remains unchanged and persistent and the lack of reconciliation with the trauma creates a cycle—it is ‘acted out’ in the present and this repetition is made worse by the violence of the everyday reality (Gertz and Khleifi 2008, 3). The more violent this reality is, the harder it is to break the cycle and so on. In cinema, this manifests in what Dabashi (2006a) calls ‘a subdued anger, perturbed pride and a sublated violence’ (11). He describes Palestinian cinema as an ‘aesthetic under duress’ (2006a, 11) but suggests that filmmakers can ‘reimagine’ the traumatic history and can resist the power of the trauma through their medium (2006a, 18). To some degree, Palestinian identity rests on the trauma as a connecting event. Palestinians have moved from their homelands and have been deterritorialised and they are diverse in religion and culture, but the collective memory of the trauma of the 1948 ‘catastrophe’ is a unifying force. This is very similar to the unifying force of the holocaust for Jewish people (also a diasporic people) and Palestinian film can represent a ‘collective identity’ (Said 2006, 3). Hany Abu-Assad’s dramas Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013) contain many of the features of the Palestinian cinema outlined above. Abu-Assad is based in Holland and America but returns to Palestine regularly. His best-known films so far are Nazareth 2000, which is a doco-­ drama filmed in his home city of Nazareth and which follows two petrol station attendants as they go about their lives amid the political reality of life as an Arab in Israel. His 2002 film Rana’s Wedding features many roadblocks and checkpoints and encounters with Israeli soldiers as the protagonist travels between East Jerusalem and Ramallah searching for her lover. His 2003 feature documentary Ford Transit also features checkpoints heavily as it follows a van driver who ferries Palestinian passengers between Palestine and Israel and who dispenses advice along the way. Paradise Now was released in 2005 and was funded primarily from European sources (Abu-Assad did apply for funding from the Israel Film Fund but they turned him down). The film is about two young men in Nablus in the West Bank, who work for a mechanic. Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Said (Kais Nashef) have agreed to become suicide bombers and to target bus passengers in Israel. The film follows the two men as they

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prepare themselves and go about their business in the town of Nablus. The film is realist in style but shot on 35 mm to create more depth than available with video (Abu-Assad in Georgakas and Saltz 2005, 19) and the negative was slightly underdeveloped in order to reduce contrast. The film has some quite long takes and does not use any non-diagetic music. The realism of the film is combined with some moments of absurd humour is incongruous with the subject matter. The idea of humour and suicide bombers may seem rather contradictory, but absurd and black humour actually works quite well and depicting the absurdity of the bombers’ situations can be seen as a critique of their planned actions. Paradise Now created controversy due to its humanising depiction of suicide bombers and it is the first Palestinian film to deal with suicide bombers at all. Abu-­ Assad (in Georgakas and Saltz 2005, 17) states that he wanted to open discussion on the topic and try to build new perceptions away from the extremes. He understands that the depiction of this aspect of Palestinian reality might shock—but says this is intentional and suggests that the film provides viewers with an experience of Palestine that they don’t usually get. The image of Palestinians that most people from the West have is of the stone-throwing youth—Abu-Assad wanted to present another image (although arguably the representation here is still focused on violence). The humanising of the prospective suicide bombers led to criticisms from both sides—some Jewish critics were offended by the idea of humanising murderers and there were protests by Jewish organisations at the Oscars and the film did not gain mainstream distribution in Israel (although it was shown at the independent Tel Aviv cinematheque). Not all Israeli Jewish critics were against the film though and reviewers Rokem and Hasan-Rokem suggested that the film offered a different representation of suicide bombings—stating that the usual representation of suicide bombings for Israelis was usually the horror of the bombing and its aftermath, whereas the film represented what might happen before such events and they found this worthwhile because it was a different perspective (2005, para. 3). Abu-Assad’s representation of the bombers as ordinary men was also criticised by some Palestinian groups who suggested that the depiction had the effect of ‘de-martryrising’ suicide bombers and making them too ordinary (Georgakas and Saltz 2005, 17). Advocates of the film have suggested though that the humanising of the bombers is important because it shows how violence is created and reveals the often banal aspects of violent acts. The bombers do not come across as mad fanatics—for most of the part they are just like any other ordinary working-class men,

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trying to make a living and making the most of life in an environment with little opportunity available. It is arguably much easier to perceive bombers as evil madmen rather than ordinary people. Abu-Assad urges viewers to see the film twice and states that ‘the first time you will be busy with your own pre-judgments. The second time you will experience it as a movie’ (Georgakas and Saltz 2005, 19). Dabashi argues that the point of a film is to ‘connect with the pain at (its) heart’ (2006b, 145)—but is this possible if viewers aren’t Palestinian or Israeli—can a film let audiences into a particular reality? Abu-Assad’s follow-up film, Omar (2013) tells the story of a Palestinian baker Omar (Adam Bakri) in the West Bank who takes risks to meet with his girlfriend by climbing the security wall and entering Israel. Omar turns collaborator, and the film explores the complexity of this kind of relationship between Palestinians and the Israeli authorities. But at its heart, it is a love story about two young working-class people who try to overcome obstacles to be together and is arguably less controversial than Paradise Now. Five Broken Cameras (2011) is a collaborative documentary project between Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi. The film follows Burnat as he learns to use a video camera to document life in a West Bank village. The cameras of the title are the ones used by Burnat and which end up being destroyed by the Israeli authorities because they are perceived as ‘dangerous weapons’ (Mustafa 2013, 36). This is a political film that documents protests in the village first hand through Burnat’s footage when the villagers learn that a new section of the security wall will cut their farming land in half, making one-half inaccessible. It is a story of struggle against a powerful force, but it is also a snapshot of Palestinian life in a village, and the film portrays villagers as they not only engage in protests but go about their daily lives—working the land and sharing their resources. It also points to the potential of film to empower people who are marginalised, and the camera becomes a powerful symbol of resistance. Burnat also uses filming as a method to heal and to maintain a sense of hope (Mustafa 2013, 36). It might seem difficult to claim similarities between such a variety of films dealing with immigrants, diasporas, asylum seekers and refugees from around the world, but the issues they face such as discrimination, racism and challenging negative stereotypes reinforced by the mainstream media, do point to the commonalities of experience. Newer arrived immigrants and refugees face fear and ignorance and this is compounded by their working-class status, as they not only face hostility and

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misunderstanding but also struggle financially and must navigate government departments in order to access welfare and housing. More established diasporas such as the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the UK also face racism, not due to their newly arrived status, but due to decades of structural racism from British institutions. While there are, of course, middle-­ class Britons of Afro-Caribbean descent, the majority of Black Britons are working class and therefore experience the double oppression of race and class. Films such as those discussed in this chapter have the potential to challenge stereotypes and to address silences, and can have empowering effects to those represented, and can educate the majority population about the issues faced daily by immigrants, diasporas, asylum seekers and refugees.

References Abdel-Shehid, Gamal, and Nathan Kalman-Lamb. 2015. Multiculturalism, Gender and Bend it Like Beckham. Social Inclusion 3 (3): 142–152. Abebe, Alpha. 2018. Performing Diaspora. In The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, ed. Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer, 55–62. London: Routledge. Banerjee, Sukanya. 2012. Introduction. In New Routes for Diaspora Studies, ed. Sukanya Banerjee, Aims McGuinness, and Steven McKay, 1–22. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berghahn, Daniela. 2013. Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2018. Diasporic Filmmaking in Europe. In The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, ed. Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer, 79–85. London: Routledge. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2003. Film History: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw Hill. Bramwell, Richard. 2015. UK Hip-Hop, Grime and the City: The Aesthetics and Ethics of London’s Rap Scenes. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Butt, Nadia. 2010. Between Dream and Nightmare: Representation of Eastern Diaspora in Eastern Promises. In Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Barbara Korte and Sissy Helff, 245–258. Netherlands: Brill. Cherry, Peter. 2018. “I’d Rather my Brother was a Bomber than a Homo”: British Muslim Masculinities and Homonationalism in Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53 (2): 270–283. Cheshire, Jenny, David Hall, and David Adger. 2017. Multicultural London English and Social and Educational Policies. Languages, Society & Policy. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.9804.

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Cohen, Robin, and Carolin Fischer. 2018. Diaspora Studies: An Introduction. In The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, ed. Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer, 1–10. London: Routledge. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de Coo, Inez. 2017. Ultraviolence in Representation: The Enduring Myth of the Thamesmead Estate. Failed Architecture, November 15. https://failedarchitecture.com/ultraviolence-inrepresentation-the-enduring-myth-of-thethamesmead-estate/. Dabashi, Hamid. 2006a. Introduction. In Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi, 7–22. London: Verso. ———. 2006b. In Praise of Frivolity: On the Cinema of Elia Suleiman. In Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi, 131–160. London: Verso. Desai, Jigna. 2003. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Georgakas, Dan, and Barbara Saltz. 2005. This is a Film You Should See Twice: An Interview with Hany Abu-Assad. Cineaste 31 (1): 16–19. Gertz, Nurith, and George Khleifi. 2008. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grassilli, Mariagiulia. 2008. Migrant Cinema: Transnational and Guerilla Practices of Film Production and Representation. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34 (8): 1237–1255. Hird, Alison. 2009. Breaking the Law to Help Immigrants, a French Film Sparks Controversy. RFI, March 27. http://www1.rfi.fr/actuen/articles/111/article_3303.asp. Hoggard, Liz. 2013. Sally El Hosaini: ‘I’m interested in People on the Margins of Society’. Guardian, January 27. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ jan/27/sally-el-hosaini-film-interview. Krayem, Mehal. 2017. Heroes, Villains and the Muslim Exception: Muslims and Arab Men in Australian Crime Drama. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Leigh, Danny. 2019a. Rapman: The London Film-maker Who Gatecrashed Hollywood in Style. Guardian, November 8. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2019/nov/08/rapman-the-london-film-maker-who-gatecrashedhollywood-in-style. ———. 2019b. Shola Amoo: The Man Behind the British Moonlight. Guardian, September 19. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/19/sholaamoo-the-man-behind-the-british-moonlight. Malik, Sarita, Nwonka, Clive James. 2017. Top Boy: Cultural Verisimilitude and the Allure of Black Criminality for UK Public Service Broadcasting Drama. Journal of British Cinema and Television 14 (4): 423–444. Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Merlin, Jennifer. 2008. Frozen River: Courtney Hunt Interviewed by Jennifer Merlin. Alliance of Women Film Journalists, July 30. https://awfj.org/ blog/2008/07/30/frozen-river-courtney-hunt-interviewed-by-jennifermerin-exclusive/. Mitchell, Tony. 2008. Second Generation Migrant Expression in Australian Hip Hop. In Ties to the Homeland: Second Generation Transnationalism, ed. Helen Lee, 25–42. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Munck, Ronaldo. 2018. Rethinking Global Labour. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing. Mustafa, Ali. 2013. 5 Broken Cameras. Briarpatch 42 (2): 36. Naficy, Hamid. 1999. Veiled Vision/Powerful Presences: Women in Post-­ Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. In Life and Art—The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Sheila Whittaker and Rose Issa, 44–65. London: British Film Institute. ———. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Palestinian Exilic Cinema and Film Letters. In Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi, 90–104. London: Verso. Raussert, Wilfred. 2011. Inter-American Border Discourses, Heterotopia, And Translocal Communities in Courtney Hunt’s Film Frozen River. Norteamérica 6 (1): 15–33. Rokem, Freddy, and Galit Hasan-Rokem. 2005. Paradise Now: The Movie. Palestine-Israel Journal 12 (2). https://pij.org/articles/416/paradise-nowthe-movie. Romney, Jonathan. 1997. The Kaurismäki Effect. Sight and Sound, June, pp. 11–14. Said, Edward. 2006. Preface. In Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi, 1–6. London: Verso. Van Hear, Nicholas. 2018. Diaspora and Class, Class and Diaspora. In The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, ed. Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer, 129–137. London: Routledge. Werbner, Pnina. 2018. Working-Class Cosmopolitans and Diasporas. In The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, ed. Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer, 138–145. London: Routledge. Yue, Audrey. 2008a. Queer Asian Australian Migration: Creative Film Co-Production and Diasporic Intimacy in The Home Song Stories. Studies in Australasian Cinema 2 (3): 229–243. ———. 2008b. Interview with Tony Ayres: on The Home Song Stories and Asian Australian Film-Making. Studies in Australasian Cinema 2 (3): 245–254. Zaniello, Tom. 2020. The cinema of the precariat: The exploited, underemployed, and temp workers of the world. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 5

Gender and Sexualities

This chapter takes a more detailed look at the intersections between class, gender and sexuality and examines films that deal with gender and sexuality within working-class environments. When discussing gender, the majority of the films included here focus on the experiences of women and will be considered in light of feminist film theory, but with an acknowledgement of how working-class women around the world have not always benefited from the gains won by white middle-class feminists in the west. White feminists have been critiqued by scholars of colour such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984, 334) who accuses white, western feminists of creating discourses of women from the global south both as victims and as having all the same priorities as white feminists in terms of how they perceive gender equality. She suggests that this type of feminism does not consider the material and historical contexts of women in the global south (Mohanty 1984, 335). Trinh T Minh-ha (1989) points to the ways in which white feminists have also been complicit in relegating women from the global south as the ‘other’—sometimes in an exotic fashion and as subjects to be studied and inspected (82). Films from the global south challenge these discourses and provide agency for women, aligning with Minh-ha’s argument that storytelling is a method for countering the position of women from the global south as the other (1989, 140). And as White (2015) asserts, so-called women’s cinema is not confined to the west and ‘crosses geographical borders’ (201).

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Women’s stories in the west have often been considered inferior to those of men—and in Hollywood, the melodrama and more recently the romantic comedy or ‘chick flick’ have been regarded as women’s films and less worthy of attention than the more serious dramas that are centred on men. While working-class women have always appeared in film (since its beginnings), they have often been in the form of non-speaking workers in the background, the ‘hairdressers, typists and hotel maids’ identified by Barbara Mennel (2019, 1). Men have been given more screen time, and this includes films about working-class life where they have sometimes occupied the position as ‘heroic … industrial workers’ (Rowbotham and Beynon 2001, 25) as outlined in Chap. 2. There have been few Hollywood films with a central working-class female protagonist, with a couple of notable exceptions such as Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt)—mentioned in Chap. 2—and North Country (2005, Niki Caro) about a female mine worker. These two films both starred well-known actors—Sally Field in Norma Rae and Charlize Theron in North Country which provided them with a high profile. Feminist film theory has attempted to analyse the representation of women on screen and to challenge the male dominance of film production. Theorists such as Claire Johnston, Laura Mulvey, E.  Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn and Ella Shohat have brought women’s films to the fore, and championed the work of female filmmakers. But not all of these theorists engage in issues of class, or write specifically about the representation of working-class women and many of the authors have focused on white, western women (Kaplan 2004, 1239) and have tended to champion experimental film, and be critical of narrative film (Smelik 1998, 12). Claire Johnston does acknowledge that films are made in a context of capitalism and that film is therefore an ‘ideological project’ (1999, 36) created via ‘male bourgeoise’ ideas that should be challenged (1999, 37), but Johnston does not mention class directly. Mulvey’s pivotal text ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ first published in the 1970s, used psychoanalysis to analyse and interpret classic Hollywood films and to argue that such film was controlled by a ‘male gaze’ (1999, 62). For Mulvey, the male gaze rendered the female subject as passive, to be looked upon for male pleasure (1999, 63), to be an object of mere ‘erotic contemplation’ for the viewer (1999, 63). Mulvey insists that this voyeuristic gaze must be challenged and broken, in order for women to be represented in less passive ways (1999, 68). While subsequent feminist theorists have continued to use the concept of the male gaze in their work, there have been pushes

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to expand feminist film theory outside of its white, heteronormative western dominance (Foster 2003, 2). Smelik notes that the work of Mulvey and others interested in psychoanalysis tends to assume the viewer as heterosexual and as occupying binary, dominant gender roles of masculine and feminine (1998, 20) and she points to the absence of analysis of race in classic feminist film theory—absences that have been addressed by Black scholars such as bell hooks (Smelik 1998, 23). Kaplan (2004) points to a shift in her own focus towards ‘cultural differences racialized by national discourses and historical traditions’ (1242) and finds herself more interested in films about and made by women around the world (rather than Hollywood or Europe).

Working-Class Feminism What does it mean to be a working-class feminist, and how does that differ to other types of feminism? Working-class women have often encountered different obstacles to their middle- and upper-class counterparts, and their particular needs have not always aligned neatly with the demands made by middle- and upper-class feminists. Whereas middle- and upper-class feminists have called for more opportunities to work outside of the home (particularly during the second-wave feminist era), the majority of working-class women around the world have already been wage earners, and have not been able to choose whether to work outside of the home or not. Working-­ class feminism often manifests in the workplace, in the fight for wage justice and decent working conditions (Roth 2000, 310), and working-class feminism has often gone hand-in-hand with union activism (Deslippe 2000, 6). Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, working-class women have borne the brunt of low wages and unsafe working conditions and they have organised themselves and fought collectively. There are many examples, such as the Matchgirls strike1 of 1888 in London and the Ford Motor Company sewing machinists strike of 1968 (dramatised in Made in Dagenham, 2010, Nigel Cole), as well as the current organisation of female garment workers in Bangladesh and so on. While middle- and upper-class women have campaigned for an end to gender discrimination and defined gender roles and for the provision of child care and access to reproductive health, it has been mostly working-class women who have 1  http://theconversation.com/meet-the-matchstick-women-the-hidden-victims-ofthe-industrial-revolution-87453.

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worked in childcare centres and as babysitters, and who have not had the financial resources to pay for abortions and who have cleaned the homes of middle- and upper-class women, providing them with the opportunities to leave their homes and continue their activism. Working-class women experience gender discrimination and sexual harassment differently too. Working for low wages and on precarious contracts means that working-­ class women are often unable to call out discriminatory behaviour or report sexual harassment for fear of being fired from a job they cannot afford to lose. It is working-class women around the world who are the first to suffer during wars, natural disasters and periods of economic depression. As a result, it is important that films about working-class women reflect these differences and also show how working-class women work collectively and support each other through hardship (acknowledging the ways in which class intersects with race, ethnicity, religion, ability and sexuality in a layering of oppression). With this in mind, this section of the chapter focuses on films about working-class women.

Pedro Almodóvar’s Celebrations of Spanish Working-­Class Women (What Have I Done to Deserve This? All About My Mother, Volver) Because this book started with Almodóvar (who was responsible for my immersion into world cinema), it seems fitting to begin with a discussion of some of his films. Almodóvar is a male filmmaker, but the majority of his films are centred on female characters, and he is known as a maker of women’s films (Smith 1994, 2) and I would suggest, demonstrating a feminist sensibility in his work. While many of Almodóvar’s female characters are self-sacrificing mothers and his female characters have suffered hardships and traumas, they are always surrounded by a community of other women who support them. The main focus of this section is his 2006 drama Volver, but the section also includes a brief mention of some of his earlier films (technically outside the remit of this book’s focus on film from 2000 to 2019), in order to provide some context to his work and his portrayal of working-class women. Almodóvar is probably Spain’s most famous contemporary filmmaker and his films are very popular among art house and world cinema fans around the world. His films have a distinctive aesthetic which marks him as an auteur—all of his films

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explore similar themes—with one of his main concerns the exploration of identity—national, religious, gender, family, sexual identity and authenticity. Acevedo-Muñoz (2004, 25) describes Almodóvar’s work as ‘irreverent and self-reflexive: excessive explorations of identity, sexuality, repression and desire, sprinkled with rich allusions to different genres and assorted media intersections’. There are also recurring motifs and stylistic choices that make his films easy to identify, as well as trademark humour and complicated plots. Almodóvar was born in southern Spain to a poor, rural family in 1949. He left the family to move to Madrid in the late 1960s and in the late 1970s became part of Madrid’s punk avant-garde punk scene known as La Movida (Strauss 1996, 1). Members of La Movida were young, artistic people who experimented artistically, culturally and socially and who represented a post-Franco transitory period no longer marked by dictatorship or censorship but still not fully democratic. Almodóvar is a classic autodidact—a self-taught filmmaker who didn’t have the money to attend film school and so taught himself how to shoot films using a Super 8 camera (Strauss 1996, 8). He developed a love of film from an early age and was also attracted to performance (Strauss 1996, 2). He has been influenced by a number of directors and genres of film but his early efforts were very much influenced by punk and by underground directors such as John Waters (Strauss 1996, 13). Almodóvar made a number of short films in the 1970s and the screenings became popular events as he staged them as ‘happenings’ which would include him speaking the dialogue over his silent films and singing along to them (Strauss 1996, 2). He also drew comic books and wrote short stories (Strauss 1996, 1). He was persuaded by his friend, the actress Carmen Maura, who appears in a number of his films, to make a feature film and she helped him to gather the money and people needed (Strauss 1996, 11). He began shooting his first feature in 1979 on a part time basis using friends to play the roles and to act as crew. In 1980 he released Pepi, Luci, Bom and it became very popular among the underground art crowd (Strauss 1996, 21). Almodóvar employs a transgressive gaze in this film and some scenes are shocking, but the overall effect is comic and while not all characters are working class, many are and the female working-class characters have agency throughout the film. After Pepi, Luci, Bom, Almodóvar continued making films (albeit it on a very tight budget to begin with) and his visual style gradually developed. Almodóvar has given centre stage to characters that would usually be marginalised. These are people at the periphery of society—drug addicts, sex

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workers, transgender people and so on. His later films are characterised by visual excess—a lush, rich aesthetic that has developed over time (Kinder 2013, 281) and Almodóvar states that he takes delight in the ‘artifice’ of filmmaking (2004, 97). He is a meticulous director who uses long rehearsals in order to create an illusion of ‘naturalism’ (Strauss 1996, 197). And there is also a sense of camp—sometimes bordering on kitsch that has been described by Acevedo-Muñoz (2007, 19) as an ‘aesthetic of bad taste’. But according to Smith (1994, 2)—amid the ‘conspicuous frivolity’—there are ‘serious concerns’. When looking past the excess it is possible to find social and political commentary, especially in the way Almodóvar deals with questions of gender performance and the way he normalises diverse sexualities, challenges patriarchy and traditions such as the family unit. Almodóvar’s films are also notable for their ability to create affect. Smith describes Almodóvar’s body of work as ‘a cinema of saturation’ (1994, 3), and his films create an intense viewing experience for the audience. In many ways this allows the viewer full access into the worlds of his working-class women characters, and Almodóvar is very aware of cinematic techniques that draw the viewer in and create empathy for characters such as the close-up—a common feature of melodramas (Strauss 1996, 34). Almodóvar displays his influences—especially his love of Hollywood film and melodrama. According to Allinson (2001, 75), Almodóvar is very aware that his films are melodramas and he suggests that Almodóvar has subverted the genre for a more feminist reading. His films show the influence of Douglas Sirk’s use of colour (Allinson 2001, 140), but Almodóvar has taken popular genres such as melodrama and film noir and added something which Allinson suggests places his films in a space between ‘the excesses of Hollywood and the understatement of the European auteur tradition’ (2001, 193). And there are moments of subtlety between the rich colour, texture and stylised elements of his films. Almodóvar’s 1984 satirical comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? was his fourth feature and is centred on a cleaner, Gloria (Carmen Maura) who lives in a cramped apartment in a working-class area of Madrid with her husband, two teenage children and her mother-in-law. Almodóvar is also a fan of classic Hollywood ‘screwball’ comedies (Strauss 1996, 22) and many of his films contain a slapstick comedy element. Gloria’s husband, Antonio (Ángel de Andrés López) is a taxi driver obsessed with a German singer he had met years previously. Gloria’s life is quite miserable—there is no love between her and her husband, and little shown by

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her sons. She works long hours to support her family and takes speed to keep going. A series of events occur that ends with the accidental death of her husband as she defends herself during an attack. Gloria’s only respite from her daily grind are her neighbours, Cristal (Verónica Forqué) and Juani (Kiti Manver). Cristal is a sex worker and Juani is a dressmaker and they provide Gloria with female solidarity and relief from her struggles and frustrations. This is a comedy and therefore is not a realist representation of working-class life in Madrid, but Almodóvar provides an empathetic treatment of Gloria and the other working-class women in the film and despite the absurd elements, and surreal moments, the struggles that Gloria faces as she tries to make ends meet are based in the reality of working-class life (Smith 1994, 54). These struggles put pressure on her relationships with her husband and sons and point to the ways in which economic hardship causes psychological pain. In All About my Mother (1999), the focus is once again on a strong woman—Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a single mother who works as a nurse and lives with her teenage son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín) in Madrid. When Esteban is hit and killed by a car, Manuela travels to Barcelona to find Esteban’s father in order to give him the news about Esteban’s death. Manuela is grief stricken and barely coping, but she takes solace from the women she meets in Barcelona, some of whom are old friends, particularly Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a sex worker who is a trans woman. The women support each other unconditionally (Allinson 2001, 86). Esteban’s father is also a trans woman now called Lola (Toni Cantó), who Manuela eventually tracks down. This film is a melodrama and Almodóvar employs many melodrama techniques such as extreme close ups, melancholy music and layering of tragedy. But the film creates a totally normalised representation of working-class sex workers and trans women, and challenges the ways in which such characters are often marginalised or sensationalised, as well as portraying the strength of women’s solidarity (Strauss 1996, 193). Volver was released in 2006 and was a box-office success in Spain. It is a genre blurring film which Almodóvar states requires ‘a naturalistic interpretation that manages to make the most ludicrous situation plausible’ (Almodóvar in Levy 2006, para. 19). The genres that are blurred include Hollywood melodrama, South American telenovelas (TV soap operas), Italian Neo-realism and magic realism. There is a comic approach to misfortune that is very Almodóvar. The film follows Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), a working-class woman with a teenage daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo), and a partner who attempts to sexually assault Paula who

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accidently kills her step-father in self-defence. Raimunda decides to conceal his body to evade the authorities. Raimunda is surrounded by other working-­class women such as her hairdresser sister Soledad (Lola Dueñas) as well as neighbours who rally to help Raimunda when she is given the opportunity to use a closed-down restaurant to provide catering for a visiting film crew in order to make some money. Raimunda and Soledad are also ‘haunted’ by their mother, who they had presumed dead, but who has actually been hiding at the house of Raimunda and Soledad’s aged aunt. This is also a film about gender identity and the performativity of gender (more specifically the performance of roles such as wife and mother in a working-class context). Raimunda has performed her role as a desirable woman despite the abuse she has been subjected to at the hands of men she trusted. After her daughter is attacked, she refuses to play this role any longer, and decides to rely on her own resourcefulness and the solidary of her neighbours and friends. Ultimately it is the working-class women in this film who prevail and who demonstrate strength and resilience (the male characters are quite forgettable). Like many of Almodóvar’s films, intertextuality is employed in this film—such as elements akin to the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, especially in the richness of the mise-en-scene and the way Almodóvar uses the settings to speak for his characters, and the attention to a Sirkean ‘feminised world’ (Bradshaw 2006, para. 5). The use of music provides intertextuality too, the song sung by Raimunda, Volver, is a flamenco version of an Argentinian tango about the pain of return and of stoking old memories, and the song that plays over the opening credits is adapted by the film’s score composer, Alberto Iglesias, from a 1930s Spanish operetta about star-crossed lovers. The film’s protagonist, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), has been modelled on the working-class female characters of some Italian Neo-realist films played by actors such as Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani (Almodóvar in Levy 2006, para. 27). Overall, this is a richly emotional film that privileges the experiences of working-class women in Spain and Almodóvar’s body of work provides audiences with a variety of female working-class characters who defy stereotypes and challenge patriarchal structures in ways that are firmly based in their working-class culture and on their own terms.

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Transgressive Women (Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, I Am Not a Witch, La Yuma, 100 Yen Love) As discussed, Almodóvar employs a transgressive gaze and includes taboo themes and scenarios. This type of transgressive gaze is quite overt, but there are other ways that filmmakers can create a sense of transgression without using the zany and over-the-top approach characteristic of Almodóvar. The threshold for transgression for women is often quite low and women can be labelled transgressive if they are perceived as loud, uncouth and vulgar. Some recent Hollywood films have tapped into the ways in which women can behave ‘badly’ with ‘gross-out’ humour, once limited to stories of men (particularly young men) now seen in films about women such as Paul Feig’s 2011 Bridesmaids and Malcolm D. Lee’s 2017 Girl’s Trip. Both films feature groups of women drinking excessively, seeking casual sex and losing control of their bodily functions, and both films are directed by men but written by women. This type of comedy is one way to represent transgression and the two films discussed below use transgression in different ways—displaying less of the abject as seen in the toilet humour of comedies and more transgression via central protagonists defying expectations and resisting their oppression (with different levels of success). According to Bengret and Mulvey (2015) a feminist ‘cinema of transgression’ (188) displays ‘a willingness to address onscreen corporeality in sensuous, visceral, graphic, and in some cases horrific terms’ (189). Although they are referring here to contemporary European feminist film, these ideas can be applied to Mouly Surya’s 2017 Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017). Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya challenges the stereotype of Asian women as passive and also challenges narratives around sexual assault, refusing to allow her protagonist to become a victim. The film is set on an Eastern Indonesian island and Marlina (Marsha Timothy) lives on a small farm in a remote rural area. Her husband has passed away, and she lives alone with his embalmed corpse. Marlina’s home is raided by bandits who steal her livestock and plan to rape her. Marlina is ordered to cook the bandits’ food before they assault her, but she poisons the gang and kills them. She is raped by the gang leader, but she decapitates him during the assault. Marlina then leaves her home with the decapitated head of the gang leader to take to the police in the nearest village which is a significant distance from her home. The abject is displayed in the film

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through the image of the husband’s embalmed corpse, the vomit of the poisoned men, the blood of the rapist and his decapitated head—this aligns with Kristeva’s notion of the bodily aspects of the abject (1982, 4), but also in terms of the female body (here Marlina) refusing to comply and to be a victim. The head of the rapist operates as an abject reminder of Marlina’s transgression. Much of the film is about Marlina’s journey and the obstacles she faces. She meets a pregnant neighbour, Novi (Dea Panendra), on the road, and they board a bus along with an older woman delivering horses as a wedding dowry. The surviving bandits catch up with the bus and hijack it, but Marlina manages to escape on one of the horses. She refuses to be a victim, and her determination to deliver her rapist’s head to the police is very strong, as is her stoicism, a trait that is often used against women when they have experienced trauma or been victims of crime. Because women are expected to respond in demonstrably emotional ways, they are treated with suspicion when they remain stoic and calm. Marlina’s stoicism matches the sparseness of the setting and the minimalist aesthetic which is crisp and uncluttered. When Marlina reaches the police station she discovers that the police are quite uninterested in her rape and can’t process her report because they do not have any rape kits available. She decides to abandon her quest and heads home after Novi persuades her to return (Novi has been forced to do this by the remaining bandit). Marlina reaches home and the bandit attempts to rape her, and this time it is Novi who decapitates the attacker. Novi goes into labour and gives birth, and the two women leave the house in the morning with the baby. Marlina and Novi face their oppression head on—Marlina fights back against her attackers and takes control of her situation. Novi is on a mission to find her husband, after he abandons her due to his belief that her unborn child is not his. Novi refuses to accept this abandonment, and when she finally finds her husband and he assaults her, she decides to leave him. There is a fable-like tone to the film, with its elements of revenge and retribution, but despite the presence of the ghost of the gang leader from time to time, and the matter-of-fact way that Marlina carries his severed head around, the majority of the film represents the hardship of life on the island for the women in a realistic way. The remoteness of the setting is emphasised and established through long shots that give the audience a very good idea of the distances between dwellings and of the dry landscape. These can be seen as the kinds of ‘arresting images’ that Klinger describes as being tangential to the narrative but with the power to ‘stoke emotions in the

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audience’ (2006, 30). The long shots of Marlina—a tiny figure in the landscape waiting for the bus alone—represents her isolation. And this image is shattered suddenly by the camera cutting quickly to a shot of another woman who seems to have appeared from nowhere—suggesting that female companionship is never actually too far away. The women walk a long way to reach the road and the buses are uncomfortable trucks. Their homes are modest and Marlina is dependent on subsistence farming for her livelihood. The film also displays a strong sense of female solidarity, as the women assist each other, and this solidarity cuts across generations, with the older woman on the bus helping Marlina and a young girl working on the village food stall showing affection and understanding which is reciprocated by Marlina. Rungano Nyoni’s 2017 I am Not a Witch is set in an African village where a young girl, Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), appears in a village unannounced and is accused of being a witch. Shula does not confirm whether she is or is not a witch, and under threat of being turned into a goat, she agrees to move to a camp for witches. The camp is populated with elderly women who have been labelled as witches and are tethered to spools of white ribbons which are slackened off to allow them to labour in fields. Shula is taken from the village to perform witchy duties such as identifying a thief and summoning rain. At one point she even appears on a television show alongside a government worker who has claimed her witchy abilities for his own gain. This film can also be read as a feminist fable, but it also shows the ways that poor rural women are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and can be punished for what are seen as transgressions. In this case, Shula is condemned to the hard labour of the witch camp due to her refusal to cooperate with the villagers and authorities who have accused her of being a witch, and who cannot understand how a young girl could be on her own and able to survive on her own wits. This is a visually stunning film, with many scenes that belie the hardship faced by Shula and the other witches. The way the ribbons are unfurled and billow in the breeze is quite beautiful and creates an incongruity with the mistreatment of the women. It is also a funny film, with a deadpan humour laced throughout. The humour provides a satirical edge and highlights the absurdity of the situations, while also providing some comic relief that is short-lived due to the tragedies that occur, thus increasing the impact of the film’s sad ending. Nyoni states that she wanted to highlight the absurdity of the situation because the story and the reality that informs it is ‘comical and ridiculous in its blatant misogyny’ (in Mitchell 2017, para. 7). These two

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films about rural working-class women contain many aspects that are culturally specific, but they also work well together as examples of representations of exploited and oppressed women who refuse to accept their positions. This challenging of gender roles through transgressive behaviour can also be seen in films that portray women choosing an occupation or identity that does not fit with those expected of women. La Yuma is a 2009 drama from Nicaragua, made by French-born filmmaker Florence Jaugey who lives in Nicaragua, and to date, has made films that highlight social issues (Murillo 2018, 234). Murillo (2018) also asserts that current Latin American cinema directed by women gravitates towards social and political transgression due to its depiction of female characters asserting their right to gender equality (235), and La Yuma fits the bill in this respect. The film depicts a young woman, Yuma (Alma Blanco) who is looking for something other than what is on offer in her disadvantaged neighbourhood (including the local boys), and trains to become a professional boxer while forming a relationship with a middle-class university student. Yuma is independent and resilient and is determined to succeed and take her siblings away from their dysfunctional and abusive family situation. Her middle-class boyfriend turns out to be quite unhelpful and his class snobbery comes to the surface and so she decides not to rely on him or any other men. She finds her own opportunities but also is helped by others in her community, mainly women including her trans neighbour (Murillo 2018, 234). This representation of a strong young working-class woman in Nicaragua is significant in a country where women’s rights are not guaranteed, and where working-class women in particular face discrimination and conservative attitudes and the film displays the ways in which ‘intersectional discrimination’ operates through the various issues Yuma and the other characters experience due to their gender, sexuality, age, disability and class (Murillo 2018, 234). Yuma is an outsider who has to fight for her place in society and she does this via a non-traditional route, challenging gender norms along the way. She is also pragmatic and does not have any qualms about taking a job in a circus where audiences pay to watch women’s boxing matches (which are marketed as a novelty). The steady income and the camaraderie she has with her fellow circus performers is worth the compromise and she continues to fight with integrity and purpose. Unlike I Am Not a Witch, this film ends on a positive note as Yuma and her siblings leave their home town with the circus.

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A young woman turned boxer is also the premise for Masaharu Take’s 2014 comedy drama 100 Yen Love. The difference in this film is that the main protagonist Ichiko (Sakura Ando), a discount store worker, does not begin the film as a committed boxer—she takes up boxing and discovers that it gives her purpose and motivation. Prior to beginning her boxing training, Ichiko is a ‘loser’. She has estranged herself from her family and is a misfit. She has no grace and is clumsy and unkempt—she has rejected expectations to be ladylike and to maintain control of her impulses. Boxing provides her with discipline in the same way as it does for many working-­ class youth around the world. With the confidence that she acquires she is able to forge her own identity without compromise and determine that has value (the kind of value that is not usually afforded to people who work for low wages in discount stores). Take is a male director, but arguably has created a strong female character and the comic aspect of the film does not diminish the social issues highlighted. Girlhood is a 2014 drama by French director Céline Sciamma which follows a group of French girls of African descent who are members of a girl gang on their public housing estate on the fringes of Paris. The public housing estates in Paris are known as the banlieue, and while they have been represented on screen, for example, in Mathieu Kassovitz’s iconic 1995 La Haine, the focus has been on male residents and male experience and the estates have generally been portrayed as dangerous places (Smith 2020, 31, 33). The lead character is Marieme (Karidja Touré) who joins the gang and finds solidarity among the members. Marieme has been told by her school that she does not have the academic ability to go to university and she has been advised to attend a vocational college to learn a trade. She does not want to accept this suggested path and she also does not want to accept the path of her mother, who works as a cleaner. Marieme rejects the cleaning job on offer and joins the gang in their pursuit of hedonistic enjoyment—they don’t care about school or careers, or what’s in store for the future. They want to party and to meet boys, and they are not afraid to steal to pay for their alcohol and drugs and shoplift the clothes they cannot afford to buy. The transgression here is the way in which the girls behave badly—they can be loud and course, they get into fights and they are determined to enjoy themselves. While Sciamma’s film creates a celebration of the bonds formed between the young women, the film does contain some class stereotypes. The girls have all rejected formal education and they come across at times as ignorant or foolish for having taken themselves away from school and onto a path of excess and criminal

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activity. The representation of the young African-French people on the housing estate as either drug dealers and petty criminals or extremely conservative from a religious and social perspective (which leads to some of the girls being harshly punished by their families for transgressing gender rules) is quite limiting. Marieme appears to be very easily led by her new friends, and any ambitions she may have had are quashed once she joins the gang. The violent acts committed by some of the girls play into the potential moral panics associated with immigrants and Black youth culture (Smith 2020, 51). Overall, there is a sense here of mothering the girls and the representation is somewhat limiting. Sciamma herself has stated that she decided to make the film after watching Black girls hanging out together in central Paris, she says that the girls ‘caught my eye; they fascinated me’ (Smith 2020, 2) which suggests that she found the presence of young Black women in Paris to be surprising. This points to the ways that some filmmakers potentially exoticise or create limiting representations when attempting to tell stories of people from marginalised communities. Sciamma has been criticised for employing a ‘privileged white gaze’ even though she claims to have collaborated with the actors (Smith 2020, 2). While there is value in a representation of a group when there are generally so few available, I would argue that Sciamma’s comments and her approach makes Girlhood a problematic film.

Young Resilient Women (Fish Tank, Winter’s Bone, Rhymes for Young Ghouls) The films discussed in the previous section all include women who show determination and resilience, and these characteristics are also displayed in the protagonists of the films discussed in this section. The common factor among the films here is the youth of the central characters and how the young women (all teenagers) determine their own direction as either part of or separate to their own communities. The films discussed here are from the North America and the UK, with an emphasis on the films of British filmmaker Andrea Arnold. The films of Andrea Arnold are female-focused and many have centred on the experiences of young women. Arnold’s films are also about working-­class women, and in many ways she provides the kind of female working-class perspective that compliments the more male-focused approach of Ken Loach. Arnold’s background as a working-class woman,

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raised on a council estate has shaped her work so far. There is a particular working-class and council estate sensibility that runs through her work. It is a way of looking at things and an understanding of her characters that reserves judgement. She knows the people the characters are based on— she understands how their material conditions effect their behaviour and she doesn’t blame them. The un-stated political reality of their existence is what is to blame—and this is embedded into the films as a whole, through not only the stories but also the depiction of the working-class world. I am suggesting that there is a council estate aesthetic—an aesthetic that cannot be removed from its political reality. British Marxist Terry Eagleton criticises the bourgeois notion of the aesthetic, especially the idea of aesthetic ‘autonomy’ (1990, 2) or the way in which art is often separated from its political reality and seen as somehow beyond politics (so art for art sake). He states that aesthetics are in fact ‘inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class society’ (Eagleton 1990, 2). It makes sense therefore that Arnold’s working-class background seeps into her work and that as a filmmaker, what she creates will be bound in some way by these ideological forms—her films are showing the effects of class and challenging bourgeois forms but they are also a product of class. As Bourdieu states (1984, 41), the working-class aesthetic is a ‘dominated aesthetic’ which has to ‘define itself’ in terms of the bourgeois aesthetic and so it may be impossible to escape the constraints of class completely. Arnold states herself that the film industry is dominated by middle-class people and this is because filmmaking requires the kind of cultural and economic capital that is still more easily available to the middle and upper classes (in Mullen 2009, 17). The working-class, council estate girl who is now an acclaimed filmmaker is still an exception. And working-class filmmaking in Britain has been dominated by men. There have been a few working-class films made by women but they are in the minority. Some of these films include Beautiful Thing (1996) by Hettie MacDonald, Ratcatcher (1990) by Lynne Ramsay, A Way of Life (2004) by Amma Asante and The Selfish Giant (2013) by Clio Barnard. But as mentioned in the introduction, usually when contemporary British working-class cinema is usually discussed, it is in relation to the films of Loach or maybe Shane Meadows. Arnold’s first films were shorts, Milk in 1997, a ten-minute short about a young woman dealing with the loss of her baby and Dog, another ten-­ minute film about a teenage girl and set on a council estate. In 2003 she made a 23-min film, Wasp about a young single mother who meets up

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with an old flame and leaves her four children outside the pub so that she can go on a date with the man. This film won an Oscar for best live action short and was he breakthrough film. From the very beginning of this short film, there is a strong sense of Arnold’s style, via the cinematography of Robbie Ryan—especially her liking for hand-held camera action. Wasp is a very dynamic film, as exemplified in the opening take of the young woman running down the stairs with her children which was filmed as the camera operator ran backwards. Arnold’s films use hand-held cameras which generally follow the central protagonist. This creates a sense of intimacy and helps the audience to connect with her main characters. This is important when the characters can be flawed. There is a naturalism to her films combined with attention to detail and a strong colour palette. For Fish Tank she also chose a 1.33:1 aspect ratio (which is box-like) to keep her subject in the centre of the frame and to add to the claustrophobic atmosphere (Thomson 2010, 20). Fish Tank follows 15-year-old Mia during the British school summer holidays on her council estate, as she tries to find ways to escape dysfunction at home and the other young people on the estate who she is alienated from. She takes solace in dancing and she makes friends with a young man who is a traveller and lives on a traveller’s camp site. Mia does not get on well with her mother, and she is often angry at the world around her. Her mother’s new boyfriend Connor (who turns out to be a married man), grooms Mia by showing an interest in her dancing, and he waits for his moment to have sex with her. While Mia consents to this sex, she is vulnerable and of course, underaged and Connor (Michael Fassbender) takes advantage of Mia’s desire to make connections and to be shown affection and has no qualms in exploiting her sexually. But reviews of this film are at odds with Arnold’s intentions and the reviews reveal the middle-­ class dominance of the film world. While Arnold states that the title of the film refers to how council estates are ‘full of life’ (in Mullen 2009,17), reviewers tend to take a much more negative view—commenting on how in a fish tank the big fish devour the smaller ones, or describe the film as a ‘grimy glass tank’ (Kroenert 2010, para. 1). These negative descriptions (in positive reviews) also include ‘decaying dystopia’ (Davis 2010, para. 8), ‘dysfunctional home’ (Badt 2009, 67), ‘claustrophobic urban wasteland’ (Bennett 2009, para. 5), ‘breeding ground for anger and despair’ (Bennett 2009, para. 5). But there is generally no mention of class. Arnold states that she sees estates as ‘great places’ (in Mullen 2009, 17). Arnold’s depiction of England and working-class life might seem relentlessly

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bleak—there seems to be little hope amid the depressing surroundings. In Fish Tank it seems that Mia is doomed to a miserable life—she is wronged by the adults around her, she is an outsider in the community. But Mia is also independent, she is determined and resilient and there is a hint at the end that she will make things work in her own way even if there is no happy resolved ending. This is not to detract from what is embedded in the aesthetic—a critique of class, of inequality and of the kinds of failed social policies that put people on estates and then let the places become run down. Of schools that fail working-class students, of the kinds of circumstances that lead to the behaviour of Mia’s mother. It isn’t a pretty picture of this kind of life— there is no romantic representation of poverty. But what Arnold does, I would suggest, is give the viewer a chance to see the estate through the residents’ eyes. When living on a council estate it’s possible to find beauty in odd places.2 Everyone needs beauty and when there isn’t a nice house or leafy street to enjoy, it is found in other ways. There is the afternoon sun catching the tower block windows, swifts and swallows that roost in the concrete, wild flowers that grow through pavement cracks or in the inevitable waste ground around an estate. It is possible to find ways to appreciate the environment—to look past what should be beautiful and find what is beautiful among what is available. This is necessary, because life is hard and can be brutal but beauty makes it worth living. And as Fish Tank conveys, there is pleasure to be found in music, in dance, in watching television shows, in going to the pub and in forging connections with animals and with other people. Underneath the dysfunction, Fish Tank shows how important these connections are. Moving across the Atlantic to the US and Debra Granik’s 2010 drama Winter’s Bone. This is a very atmospheric film with a compelling performance by Jennifer Lawrence as the film’s central character, teenager Ree Dolly, living in rural Missouri with the responsibility to care for her sick mother and younger siblings. Ree and her family live in poverty and are informed they will lose their house due to debts owed by Ree’s missing father and so Ree sets out to find him and to have the debts cleared. Ree is fearless and is not phased by having to deal with the local criminals who have killed her father. When she discovers he is dead, she is tasked with retrieving the hands from his dead body so she can prove to the sheriff that 2  I grew up in a flat on a high-rise council estate in a single-parent family and much of Fish Tank is extremely relatable.

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he is deceased and the debts can be waived. In many ways it is a bleak film, compounded by the setting and the aesthetic. It is cold in the mountains and the palette is mostly blues and greys providing a cold tone overall. Like many of the female characters already discussed in this chapter, Ree is stoic in the face of adversity and trauma and this stoicism allows her to maintain her focus and complete her task. Granik centres Ree, and the audience becomes part of her struggle. She must rely on herself, and she must survive in order to protect her family. While there are some class stereotypes in the film—the criminal family who operate a meth lab in the mountains, and the quick escalations into violence from members of the community, Ree’s character challenges such stereotypes. She is vulnerable, but she is not weak, and she shows intelligence and discernment as well as determination. This film shows how Ree cannot trust the men in her community—they cause the problems and let her down. It is the women who end up helping her (González 2015, 70) and who eventually provide solidarity, a feature seen in many of the films discussed so far. Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls also features a young female protagonist and was released in 2014. Barnaby is Indigenous—he is Mi’kmaq, from the Atlantic coast of Canada, and this film also operates as a form of self-representation for Indigenous Canadians. Rhymes for Young Ghouls was Barnaby’s debut feature. This is a film set in the past (1976), on the Mi’kmaq fictitious Red Crow Reservation, and tells the story of Aila (Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs), who overcomes family tragedy and finds her own ways of surviving in a harsh environment. Aila has managed to avoid being sent to an Indian Residential School—the notorious and often brutal boarding schools with forced and compulsory attendance policies created to educate Indigenous children and to undermine their Indigenous culture in order to assimilate them into white culture. Aila makes a living from growing and distributing marijuana and she uses some of the proceeds to bribe the local Indian agent, Popper (Mark Antony Krupa), who is a government employee tasked with monitoring the Indigenous community and rounding up children for the school. The film is constructed around a revenge plot as Aila and a group of other young people from the reservation attempt to rescue children from the school and take their revenge on Popper, but the context is political, with the focus on the abuse inflicted on young Indigenous students at Indian Residential Schools. The schools existed from the late 1800s until the mid-1990s and left a terrible legacy still felt by Indigenous Canadians today. Barnaby presents a strong female character who demonstrates

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pragmatism (by taking over her father’s drug dealing business) and resilience. Alia survives her brother’s death and the suicide of her mother as well as brutal treatment at the residential school when she is eventually taken there, and at the hands of Popper. The revenge plot is not accidental and it challenges the colonial status quo because those seeking vengeance are Indigenous people and taps into the ideas of Franzt Fanon (1963, 35) who stated that ‘decolonization is always a violent event’. The representation in this film isn’t always pleasant. There are Indigenous Canadians in the film who are drug dealers and who can be violent. The filmmaker is not casting judgement—these behaviours are understood as a consequence of colonialism. The consumption of marijuana can be seen as a necessary release from the daily discrimination and oppression (Doyle 2020, 46). And the choice of a young female protagonist is political, particularly in Canada where thousands of Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing since the 1970s. Barnaby also plays with form and uses ‘the tools and traditions of Hollywood cinema’ (Santoro 2013, 274) for his own purposes. There are elements here of stoner movies and teenager ‘caper’ films as well as magic realism and folk tales, this makes for an unconventional representation of Indigenous Canadians. Derry suggests that the horror elements of the film reveal that colonial structures are the ‘real monsters’ (2018, 19), rather than the ghosts and ghouls that are displayed on costumes. Barnaby twists the horror genre and uses it to serve an anti-colonial narrative through his depiction of colonial society (so-called civilisation) as the terror, rather than the more conventional horror that uses the decline of civil society as the trigger for horrific events (Derry 2018, 19). The horrific events for Indigenous Canadians began with the presence of the colonisers. White North America (specifically Hollywood) has a terrible record of misrepresentation of First Nations People due to ignorance and/or desire to forget the traumas inflicted on Native Americans by white settlers. There are many contradictions. On the one hand there is a whitewashing of Indigenous history in North America, but on the other hand, symbols of Native American culture have been appropriated by white Americans. Despite protests and increasing criticism, white Americans still wear ‘Indian’ costumes at Halloween, or use Native American symbols in fashion (such as war bonnets—the feather headdress). These kinds of items have cultural significance and it is offensive to Native American people to see them worn and misused by non-native people. These are examples of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1989, 21)—violence that might not be

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against the body, but which perpetuates the violence inflicted on Indigenous people by colonial forces. The taking of land, the taking of lives, of cultures and languages manifests in the taking of cultural symbols without permission. It is possible that nuanced and varied representations of Native Americans/First Nations People in film can counter this symbolic violence and provide non-native people with a counter narrative to the one reinforced through Hollywood film and provide opportunities for Native Americans and First Nations People in North America to tell stories on their terms and receive the empowering effects of doing so. Films such as Rhymes for Young Ghouls and the films of Native Americans such as Sterlin Harjo (e.g. in his 2015 Mekko) are focused on Indigenous characters who due to their race, find themselves at the bottom of the social ladder. The films represent well the ways in which racism is also compounded by class status.

Family and Mothering (The Island That All Flow By, Head First, the Arbor) Working-class mothers often face hardships that are less likely to be experienced by their middle- and upper-class counterparts. While mothers of all classes might find themselves expected to conform to gender roles and to take on more of the parenting and for heterosexual women to be submissive to male partners due to oppressive patriarchal structures, the middle- and upper-class women often have the financial means to pay for childcare and help with domestic tasks. They have the means to pay for things that need to be repaired or replaced—in other words, they have contingency funds. And they are less likely to be judged for their parenting than working-class women. The following films feature working-class mothers who display various levels of ‘success’ in their attempts to care for their children and highlight the difficulties faced by working-class women when trying to parent while poor. The Island that All Flow By is a 2016 made for television Taiwanese film directed by Chan Ching-lin. Chan tells the story of Lin Chia-wen (Ivy Yin), a toll booth operator on a freeway who finds herself in dire financial need after her son is accused of raping a fellow student at his high school. The son claims that he has had consensual sex with his girlfriend, who is the daughter of a wealthy businessman. As is not untypical in Taiwan, the father demands financial compensation from Lin Chia-wen in order to

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keep the case out of the courts. The amount he requests is impossible for Chia-wen, and she tries to find ways to accumulate the money. She contemplates stealing from the toll booth, but decides against this. Eventually she takes up the offer of a persistent truck driver who passes through the toll booth every day and asks her to go on a date with him. The truck driver, Wang Chih-hao (Cheng Jen-shuo) is irritating and uncouth and it is clear at the beginning that Chia-wen has no interest in him romantically, but she agrees to have sex with him if he pays her. He agrees and finds himself in financial difficulty too because he uses all his wages to pay for their encounters. The film is realist in form and is a gritty and often confronting representation of life for characters in desperate financial circumstances. Chia-wen is trying to protect her son, and while he initially seems ungrateful and refuses to treat Wang Chih-hao with respect, he does seem to eventually understand why his mother is engaging in transactional sex on his behalf. Chan also depicts the working-class world of the characters very effectively. The noise from the freeway is foregrounded during the scenes in the toll booth and in the workers’ restroom, and the pollution from the vehicles is almost palpable. In a shot of Chia-wen walking through the tunnel under the freeway to deliver her toll booth takings, the audience is immediately provided with a sense of her isolation. The cluttered and cramped apartment of Chia-wen illustrates her poverty, and the characters rarely move outside of their working-class neighbourhoods. When Chia-wen goes to the businessman’s house in an affluent suburb, the contrast is marked. The houses are big, they are not apartments and the streets are peaceful and tree-lined. Chan reserves judgement and the characters, despite their flaws are treated with respect and compassion. It is their circumstances that have led them to both be lonely and to seek desperate measures to resolve their current crises. The film also contains a sub-plot which deals with the transition from cash toll booths to electronic toll tags. The jobs held by the women who operate the booths will eventually cease to exist, and the years they have spent working in extremely unpleasant and unhealthy conditions will not count for anything despite their attempts to organise and engage in industrial action. In this way, the film also depicts the precarity of many working-class jobs, and of the toll on women in such positions as technology changes the way people work. In Antti Heikki Pesonen’s 2014 Finnish black comedy Head First, another single mother, Essi (Armi Toivanen), tries to deal with problems caused by her teenage child Taaku (Mimosa Willamo). Taaku is in trouble at school and Essi is attempting to keep her out of state care, but Essi

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herself suffers from anger management issues, and is prone to explosive outbursts. Essi works hard and has little joy in her life. The economic pressures she faces, and the worry about her daughter weigh heavily on her. Essi was a teenage mother, and is still a young woman but there is little opportunity for her to find love or companionship in their small working-­ class town which is depicted as grim and run down. Both Essi and Taaku reveal little of their emotions besides anger, and this keeps them at a distance from each other. They use their hardness as a defence against disappointment and betrayal. The film is punctuated by aggression (sometime alcohol-fuelled) and dysfunction, but it is bitingly funny. Each character is a misfit and despite their many unlikeable traits, it is not difficult to feel for them and to understand their frustrations and reasons for their anger. Unlike some other stories set in working-class neighbourhoods, there is little support available to either Essi or Taaku and they struggle through each day. Essi and Taaku are offered some respite from the enigmatic alcoholic Saake (Kai Lehtinen), who may, or may not, be Essi’s father and Taaku grandfather, but while he makes a connection with the women, he ultimately is unable to save them. The film ends in tragedy with the death of Taaku and the realisation that Essi is now alone, and must decide whether to keep going or to give up. It’s a very bleak portrait of working-­ class life, but the humour prevents it from falling into overly grim working-­ class miserablism (which as seen, can be a feature of many working-class films). The humour doesn’t necessarily lighten the tone of the film, but it does show how working-class people are often witty and darkly funny in the face of adversity. The Arbor (2010) is film very different in form to those already discussed in this section. It is an experimental bio-pic and the director, Clio Barnard uses a number of techniques to tell the story of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, a working-class woman who wrote about life on her council estate in northern England, and who died very young. While the film is presented as a story of Dunbar, the majority of the film is spent on the story of Lorraine, Andrea Dunbar’s eldest child. The audience gradually finds out through Lorraine’s own words, that her early life turned out to be far more traumatic than her mother’s, even though we learn about the hardships faced by Andrea Dunbar herself. Lorraine’s story unfolds and the tragedy and horror of her life builds slowly. In fact, we actually find out very little about Andrea Dunbar. We learn that Dunbar grew up on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, west Yorkshire and that she fell pregnant as a teenager. We find out that she became successful as a

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playwright while still very young and that one of her plays was adapted into a film. We also learn that she was an alcoholic and a victim of domestic violence. And we know that she had two other children and died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 29 after falling ill in the local pub. But the majority of the film focuses on Lorraine which makes the central message of the film difficult to ascertain. Barnard uses experimental techniques—she borrows from the genre of verbatim theatre (which involves actors speaking lines that have been written verbatim from the experiences of real people), but she intensifies this effect by using actors to lip-sync to the actual voices of the real people telling their stories via interviews. It’s a strange effect. While the actors’ performances are convincing, there is a disconnect from the ‘real’ subject. The audience can’t see the faces or body language or the real people and therefore have to trust the depiction presented by the actors. The choice of this technique raises questions—does the use of the actual voices add an authenticity to the story? Does the use of actors protect the identity of the subjects? Or is this just a theatrical device? Barnard also incorporates scenes from Andrea Dunbar’s plays, performed by actors but in the actually setting of the estate. There appear to be estate residents watching the scenes. There is also archival footage of Andrea Dunbar woven throughout, but the audience really only gets to know her through her children’s testimonies and the excerpts from her autobiographical plays. Barnard certainly makes the audience do some work. We can’t be sure as to who might be telling the ‘truth’ about Dunbar’s life. It isn’t clear which parts of the film should be trusted, whether the audience should believe what is seen in the archival footage or the excerpts from the plays, or even the testimonies of Dunbar’s children. Lorraine seems to blame Dunbar’s neglect for her own dysfunction, but Dunbar’s other children are much more forgiving and sympathetic to their mother. Lorraine seems to have good reason to be angry and she remembers not just the neglect but also the racism she experienced as a young girl (her father was Pakistani) and she perceives her mother as rejecting her due to her being mixed race. Barnard states that in this film she is deliberately drawing attention to the ‘gap between reality and representation’ (Hockenhull 2017, 123) and wants the viewer to think about how the fact and fiction connects. This film is not really about Andrea Dunbar, it is more about her daughter Lorraine’s experiences and Barnard focuses on the impact of a dysfunctional childhood and Dunbar’s role in the subsequent tragedy of Lorraine’s life (Lorraine becomes a heroin addict and her own son dies from an accidental dose of methadone he

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found in Lorraine’s home). There is a moral message here about responsibility and good choices. Dunbar is represented as a neglectful single mother responsible for the abuse that her daughter experiences at the hands of men. What sort of representation of working-class life do we end up with? One reviewer of the film suggests that Dunbar’s plays ‘exposed the fallout of Thatcherism on the English working class’ (Bunting 2010, para. 1), particularly in areas that were experiencing deindustrialisation and the increasing unemployment and deprivation as a result. The same reviewer states though that the film does not provide this wider context. Without knowledge of this wider context of the impacts of social change on already deprived communities, the audience of The Arbor might see the dysfunction as a result of the personal choices made by the characters. Particularly because the film is relentlessly bleak and does not provide a happy ending. Representation does not have to ‘reassure’ because working-class life often includes hardship, and can include dysfunction, but the moral standpoint presented doesn’t allow for understanding of the wider context, and the depiction presents misery and no positive aspects of working-class life. This creates a picture of working-class northern life in the 1970s and 1980s as one of total and complete horror.

Queer Film and the Working Class Gay Gaze I’ve decided to use the term ‘queer’ to refer to the films discussed in this section. This is because much of the work on the films I’m going to mention refer to films as ‘queer’ rather than LGBTIQ+. This is because the use of LGBTIQ+ (or equivalents) is relatively new. I’m therefore going to use the umbrella term ‘queer’, but this is not intended to homogenous diverse sexualities. Queer here refers to diverse sexualities outside of the narrow discourse of heteronormativity (MacCormack 2008, 6). And queer film studies is based on the wider discipline of ‘queer’ theory which has been described as ‘a theoretical approach to rethinking human sexuality’ (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 1). In this section I use the term queer but also use the terms gay, lesbian, homosexual and transgender when referring to works or filmmakers who identify using these terms. There are quite a number of texts that outline the history of queer representation on the screen such as The Celluloid Closet (Russo 1987), and

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there are a number of others from theorists such as Richard Dyer, which trace the depiction of queerness in film from the beginnings of cinema. And these surveys show that the representation of queerness, and specifically homosexuality, has a long history on screen, albeit not necessarily a very good one. The film documentary adaptation of The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman 1995) begins with a snippet of film shot in 1895—an early experimental sound film made for Thomas Edison’s studio. In this short piece a man is playing the violin, while two men dance next to him. Benshoff and Griffin (2004, 6) suggest that even if the men aren’t gay, the image is certainly queer, as it challenges the convention of opposite-sex dancing. And while it is not possible to know whether the same-sex dancing couple in this early film was intended to be read as gay, there certainly were homosexual characters in early film, although the depictions (at least in Hollywood) were not usually positive or sympathetic. The early Hollywood blockbusters of Cecil B.  Demille, for example, included scenes of women kissing in orgiastic ecstasy—but these women were included to demonstrate sin and debauchery that was to be ultimately punished (Russo 1987, 27). Early Hollywood films generally portrayed queerness as either a joke or something to be feared (Russo 1987, 6). The figure of the ‘sissy’ was not uncommon (Russo 1987, 6), and this representation of an effeminate man was usually included as comic relief (Russo 1987, 32). As was the male to female cross-dresser (who could also be used in farcical, mistaken identity scenarios). And many stars such as Chaplin and Stan Laurel appeared in drag at times (Russo 1987, 6). And I use the term ‘cross dresser’ to illustrate that in Hollywood at least, there was no understanding of transgender. These characters were not to be taken seriously, they were intended to look ridiculous and they behaved outrageously. A sissy, or other queer character, was there to reinforce the norms—to remind the audience of what should be and what was not ‘normal’ (Russo 1987, 59). Sometimes the queer character was evil, there was an implied pathology to queerness. Sometimes such characters seduced ‘innocent’ young men and women, had their wicked way and discarded them or murdered them. This figure of the evil lesbian or Machiavellian gay man—the ‘queer psycho-killer’ (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 10)—has arguably not gone away and exists in film such as Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme). In Hollywood, the Hays code (1934–1968) limited the depiction of queerness because anything deemed ‘sex perversion’ was banned (Benshoff

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2004, 67) and queerness didn’t really appear on screen (at least in mainstream Hollywood) until the 1960s when the code was overturned (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 8). At the same time that Hollywood was showing negative queer characters, there were films being made elsewhere that did engage with queerness on a more sympathetic level. Weimar Germany produced a number of films depicting homosexuality in a more sympathetic light including the 1919 film Anders als die Anden—or Always the Others (Richard Oswald)—which was a deliberate attempt to demonstrate to the public how laws against homosexuality could impact negatively on gay men. In the film, which was a success at the time (Dyer and Pidduck 2002, 61) the central character is blackmailed due to his relationship with a man and the film suggests quite didactically that homosexuality is not wrong, but that people’s negative attitudes towards homosexuality are wrong. And in 1931 the German film Madchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan) was released and gained popular appeal (Dyer and Pidduck 2002, 88). This film is about a teenage girl at a boarding school who falls in love with one of the young teachers. And there were a number of other German films with queer characters and themes, but this potential early queer cinema movement was halted by the Nazis (Dyer and Pidduck 2002, 122). Moving back to Hollywood, and forward in time a bit to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although in general, queer characters continued to occupy the role of light relief or as warnings against transgression, there were a few films that managed to create more sympathetic representations such as the 1968 film The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich) which was about a lesbian actress and The Boys in the Band (William Friedkin) from 1970 which was about a group of gay friends in New  York City. Lesbians also appeared in soft core sexploitation films which were made for heterosexual male audiences (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 9). During the 1960s and 1970s there were underground and experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol who made films about gay men (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 9). Some of these films have become quite well known such as Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963). There were also experimental lesbian filmmakers such as Jan Oxenberg and Barbara Hammer (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 9). Barbara Hammer made a number of experimental documentaries on lesbian history, and she continues to make films. Films such as these remained underground though and there was a dearth of queer representation in Hollywood through the 1960s and

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1970s. It was a different story in Europe, with directors such as Fassbinder in Germany, Derek Jarman in England and Pedro Almodóvar in Spain (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 10). In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis became public and this impacted negatively on the representation of (especially gay men) in Hollywood even further. But there was a growth of independent films during this period and the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the advent of what has become to be known as ‘New Queer Cinema’ (Juett and Jones 2010, ix). There were a number of features and documentaries that contained queer characters and queer themes in a diverse array of styles (Juett and Jones 2010, ix) but mostly in realist mode and with a gritty tone (Juett and Jones 2010, x) and creating characters that were flawed and not necessarily positive (Aaron 2004, 4). Some of the best know films of this time were Tom Kalin’s 1992 Swoon, Todd Hayne’s 1991 Poison, Jennie Livingstone’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, Gus Van Sant’s 1991 My Own Private Idaho and Rose Troche’s 1994 Go Fish. These filmmakers opened the space for others to follow and the 1990s saw quite a large number of queer themed films (though not necessarily directed by queer directors), some of which crossed into the mainstream such as Neil Jordan’s 1992 The Crying Game and Stephen Elliot’s 1994 Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Hettie McDonald’s 1996 Beautiful Thing and Chen Kiage’s 1993 Farewell to My Concubine. The late 1990s, early 2000s gave us Kimberly Pierce’s 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, and Todd Hayne’s 2002 Far from Heaven and Stephen Daldry’s 2002 The Hours. This increase in representations is seen as important by queer theorists but some of the films have been criticised for leading to a trend of films with happy endings (Juett and Jones 2010, xii)—leading some to suggest that such films have just replaced bad gay clichés with good gay clichés, the epitome of which occurs in the ‘straight woman best friend with gay man’ scenarios of films like P.J. Hogan’s 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 13). Within the mainstream film industry, especially in Hollywood, those involved have found ways of queering their work even when faced with censorship and negative public opinion, and some directors and screenwriters and actors have connoted queerness rather than state it obviously and have encoded their films with queer themes that could be ‘decoded’ by queer audiences (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 7). According to Benshoff and Griffin, this has included the ‘subcultural reception strategy known as camp’ (2004, 7) and queer audiences could read the excess of hypermasculine or feminine performances as being queer. Screenwriters and actors

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could add queer nuances to the dialogue or performances that straight audiences would most likely miss (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 7). Richard Dyer states that at the end of the 1960s there was an increase in what he calls ‘homosexual heritage films’ (2002, 205). He uses the term heritage to point towards the importance of legacy in depicting queerness and suggests that many of these films were made to try and show the presence of queer people in the past and the long-term impact of their existence and to make visible what has been omitted from the official histories (2002, 206). But he also offers a critique of such films, suggesting that they often create a utopian vision (2002, 224) that places queer characters in the centre of what are known as homophobic pasts, but allows the characters to be heroes and to show them engaging in ‘small acts of courage from the past’ (2002, 209) such as coming out or standing up for their rights and so on. He calls this a contradiction between critique and spectacle as the gay male characters in particular are depicted as confident and sartorially elegant. He points to examples of films such as the 1984 English period drama Another Country by Julian Mitchell, where the young gay men look extremely elegant and which he argues is partly to show the audience what men find attractive about each other (Dyer 2002, 218). This is relevant to the discussion below, because there are still very few depictions of working-­ class queerness, whether from an historical perspective or set in the contemporary. While much of this analysis of queer cinema is focussed on Hollywood, or European film, it should be noted that queer cinema is of course, being made around the world. Shoonover and Galt (2015) suggest that global queer cinema is creating an ‘increased queer cultural visibility’ (88), that is particularly important in places where LGBTIQ+ people experience violence and intimidation (88) and where queer cinema itself can be under attack, with threats made against filmmakers and queer film festivals cancelled as a result (2015, 88). They see global queer cinema as playing an important role in ‘imagining the world’ (2015, 89) and challenging dominant discourses (89). The ‘activist impulse’ of much global queer cinema (Shoonover and Galt 2015, 94) reveals a desire on the part of filmmakers to make a difference and to challenge status-quos and they point to the continuing appeal of cinema as a tool to educate and challenge and to make it possible for ‘different ways of being in the world’ to be expressed and celebrated (2015, 89). The films discussed in the following sections illustrate some of the intentions and concerns presented by Shoonover and Galt.

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Black Queer Experience (Pariah, Moonlight) Dee Rees’ drama 2011 Pariah and Barry Jenkin’s 2016 Moonlight work well together as companion pieces. Both are about young people learning about their sexuality and how to negotiate being queer in their communities and both are poetic, slow-paced and employ a lush cinematography that is vibrant with colour and contrast. The main difference is that Pariah stays with its protagonist over a short space of time, while Moonlight follows its protagonist across different times in his life. Moonlight became a global hit and put Barry Jenkins on the map, while Dee Rees remains critically celebrated but her work has not crossed over to the mainstream. Pariah tells the story of Alike (Adepero Oduye) an African American teenager living in Brooklyn, New York. Alike is learning how to negotiate her sexuality and her identification as a butch lesbian—the ‘tensions’ that she experiences within the lesbian community (Mayer 2015, 93) and how to deal with the resistance she encounters from within her Christian family. Her family are a ‘respectable’ church-going aspirational working-class family, her father is a police officer and she has had a safe and comfortable childhood. The politics of respectability are at play here—Alike’s mother is attempting to maintain a respectable front that is challenged by her daughter’s sexuality. This desire for respectability is linked to class and racial politics—the image of a respectable working-class, Black person is a white and bourgeois method of control (Wolcott 2001, 6) designed to force Black working-class people to behave in ways that adhere with white middle-class values. Being perceived as respectable has been considered by some Black women as a way of being accepted by middle-class white people, and therefore cushioned from the impacts of racism and discrimination and distanced from poor white working-class people who are considered to be degenerate by the white middle class (hooks 2000, 112). For Alike’s mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), this respectability is created via her nuclear family structure, her husband’s respected job, her religion and church-going, her clean home and her ability to clothe her children in quality garments. The reality of her life contradicts this construct—her husband has distanced himself from her and it is suggested that he engages in extra-marital affairs, she lives in a basement apartment, rather than a house and her daughter is a lesbian which disrupts the illusion of the nuclear family structure. After a fight with her mother, Alike makes the decision to leave Brooklyn—she has a place at college and leaves early to avoid further

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conflict with her family. Dee’s film is at heart a coming-of-age film, but it is also a Black feminist text, one that is conscious of class and acknowledges the homophobia that can exist in African American working-class communities (Kang 2016, 267). The poetry of the film exists in the sumptuous cinematography which uses colour in a powerful and symbolic way. Cinematographer Bradford Young shoots the Black characters in ways that emphasises their skin tones, and also washes the frame in colours that sit outside of the typical colour palette to acknowledge their liminality (Rees in Vollmer 2011, para. 16), while also confining them to specific places to convey the ways in which they are bound by their circumstances. As the film progresses, Alike is given more space in the frame and the colours settle as she realises that she can assert her own identity (Rees in Vollmer 2011, para. 16). The poetic qualities are also present in the actual poetry written and read by Alike. Poetry is her solace and her method of empowerment. Ramanathan describes characters such as Alike in the films of Black women as ‘griots’, evoking the traditional storyteller of African villages, and suggests that such characters (and I would suggest the filmmakers too) ‘speak with the authority of the griot’ and ‘claim a speaking place for Black women’ (2015, 122). Alike also represents working-class young people who find themselves transformed (and distanced) from their families through the accumulation of formal education. Alike’s English teacher encourages her interest in creative writing, and there is a sense, that Alike’s continuation of her education at college will further remove her from the culture and community of her childhood. In many ways, Alike is on a middle-class trajectory. The narrative of Moonlight works differently, in that the central character, Chiron (played by three different actors at different points in the story—Alex Hibbert as a child, Ashton Sanders as a teenager and Trevante Rhodes as the adult Chiron) does not leave his working-class community and is not provided the same aspirational storyline. Drake (2020) suggests that Moonlight operates as an ‘intervention’ in the usual ‘macho, heteronormative representations of Black masculinity’ (252) which is one of the reasons it is so significant. The film is constructed in three parts, each focusing on a different pivotal time in Chiron’s life. Moonlight is set in Florida, and the Cinematography conveys the heat and languidness of the setting. Similarly to Pariah, colour is saturated and is used carefully with light to render skin tone accurately. While the film is shot on digital cameras, there is a film-effect created which challenges the grittiness of other working-class social realist dramas. These rich visuals show that a

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working-class neighbourhood, even a deprived one that experiences dysfunction and disrepair such as the public housing project where Chiron lives, can look beautiful in certain lights, at certain times of the day. Chiron’s early life is difficult—his mother is addicted to crack and he is neglected as a child and he takes refuge in the home of local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali). Chiron is bullied for being different to the other boys and is the target of gay slurs. Juan is totally accepting of Chiron’s developing sexuality, and tries to instil pride and self-respect. The character of Juan challenges the machismo stereotype of the Black male drug dealer and provides nuance to such a representation. While Juan is accepting of Chiron being gay, and acts as a positive male role model, he is still selling drugs for a living, some of which are sold to Chiron’s mother. As a teen, Chiron builds an uncertain and ambiguous relationship with another boy, Kevin who initiates Chiron’s first sexual experience, but then participates in bullying Chiron due to fear of the other boys at school. Chiron does not blame Kevin for this though and takes his revenge on the ringleader of the bullies, resulting in being incarcerated for assault. The audience does not find out any more about Chiron’s teen years, but in the next chapter, the adult Chiron is now himself a drug dealer, inferring that his early experience of being incarcerated has had a profound effect on his life and leads him on the path to crime—a scenario that is very real for many young Black working-class men. Chiron slowly comes to terms with his early life and the way his experiences of violence as a child and teen have led him to suppress his sexuality. He is now a ‘big’ man—both in terms of his status as a drug dealer and physically due to his muscular frame. But Chiron is also a man of few words and says very little throughout the film. His feelings are conveyed visually or through the film’s soundtrack as the musical replaces dialogue (Drake 2020, 258). This quiet and thoughtfulness also challenges the macho male stereotype. Chiron is eventually able to reconcile with his mother and tell her how her neglect damaged him. She in turn apologises and shows that she is attempting to overcome her addiction. The film ends with Chiron reuniting with Kevin, and Chiron eventually confessing to Kevin that he has avoided and denied his sexuality. Kevin and Chiron offer each other emotional support and there is a sense that this will be a catalyst for the next chapters of their lives. Moonlight has all the characteristics of an art house film—it is slow-paced, contains many deliberate gaps in the narrative, and uses the cinematic elements to convey meaning. The story of a working-class Black gay man and the themes of sexuality and Black masculinity resonated deeply with

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audiences and it crossed into the mainstream, pulling in audiences and doing very well at the box office in the US and across the world. In this sense it is a ground-breaking and very important example of a film that effectively and authentically captures the experience of working-class gay Black men, laying the foundations for other films to come.

Trans Identities (Tangerine) There are few films that represent the experiences of Transgender people, and some such films have courted some criticism or controversy for various reasons. Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 drama about the tragic life of a young working-class trans man, Brandon Teena, Boys Don’t Cry, was a mainstream success and while it was praised as an ‘important and provocative film’ (Pidduck 2007, 270) it was also criticised for what has been described as an example of cross-dressing performance (Aaron 2007, 260). Hilary Swank is not transgender, and this tendency to cast non-transgender actors in trans roles has persisted. Henderson also points to the ways in which the film pathologises working-class people as inherently dysfunctional, prone to violence and hate crime (2007, 285)—in some ways, it is suggested that the men who rape and eventually kill Brandon do so partly because they are working class (2007, 285). Other films, more recently, have attempted to depict trans people, but have also been criticised due to casting of non-­ trans actors. Duncan Tucker’s 2005 drama Transamerica is centred on a trans woman, Bree (who is played by non-trans actor Felicity Huffman) and did well at the box office. Tom Hooper’s 2015 biographical drama The Danish Girl was a critical and commercial success, with Eddie Redmayne, who plays trans woman Lili Elbe, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. Both films offer sympathetic portrayals of trans women but are problematic due to the casting of cis actors which perpetuates the invisibility of trans people. Tangerine (2015) does challenge this trend, and the filmmaker, Sean Baker, casts trans women in the roles as transgender sex workers Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor). Tangerine is known for its innovative form—the film was shot on iPhones using various apps and was praised for its visual achievement and overall aesthetic despite these technology limitations. Baker did not just use a typical phone though, he also used a special lens that created the cinematic aspect ratio and employed a variety of post-production techniques to create the overall lush and colourful aesthetic of the film (Monaghan 2015, para. 11). This

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is a film saturated in colour and contrast—with many beautiful shots of the urban landscape—the tangerine of the film’s title is the dominating colour and softens everything it touches. The film is also known for its farcical narrative which follows Sin-Dee and Alexandra over the course of one night as Sin-Dee seeks revenge on her cheating partner, and Alexandra attempts to live her dream of singing in a night club. They encounter various characters through the night, including Armenian taxi driver Rasmik (Karren Karagulian), who is a regular client of Alexandra’s. The world of Tangerine is a working-class one—the women and the other characters spend much of their time on the streets of L.A.—but not the glamourous and rich parts of the city. Their world is low-rent, seedy motels, doughnut shops and laundromats. They ride the bus, or walk—no one seems to have a car, expect for Rasmik’s taxi and the cars of the sex workers’ clients. Sin-­ Dee and Alexandra are engaged in a constant hustle, but they look out for each other, and there is a sense of solidarity among the sex workers in general. Rasmik’s character also challenges class stereotypes, unlike the working-class men in Boys Don’t Cry who are bigoted and violent, Rasmik shows tenderness towards Alexandra, while maintaining an element of denial about his sexuality (he is aware that Alexandra is transgender) and hiding this element of his life from his family. Tangerine offers a positive representation of marginalised characters, and while it may have some aspects that are problematic, it does still offer an authentic insight in to the lives of people like the characters Sin-Dee and Alexandra, the kind of people usually ignored or subjected to judgement.

Acceptance and Refusal (Two Spirits, Pelo Malo) Two films that illustrate well the ways in which young working-class people of diverse sexualities and non-binary gender identities can find both acceptance and refusal—sometimes with deadly consequences—are Lydia Nibley’s 2009 feature documentary Two Spirits and Mariana Rondon’s 2013 drama Pelo Malo. Two Spirits provides some insight into an aspect of Native American culture that is not widely understood and shows both warmth and belonging and the consequences of hate. Nibley is not Native American herself, but she brings compassion in her telling of the story of teenage Navajo Fred Martinez, who was gender non-binary in the Navajo tradition of Two Spirits (nádleehí). Fred is accepted completely by his family, but is the victim of a homophobic and racist hate crime and is killed by a young white man. Fred’s family live in a trailer home on the edge of

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town, and Nibley takes the camera into Fred’s home where she interviews Fred’s mother, and the camera lingers on the objects in the trailer—the photos of Fred, the household objects and ornaments that create a picture of the love and warmth in Fred’s family. It is clear, that despite being poor, Fred’s mother has tried her best to protect her son, and she celebrates his identity while mourning his death. The film also shows the lack of power that Fred’s mother has as she seeks justice for his death, and how she eventually relies on the assistance of middle-class professionals to lobby for his murder to be recorded as a hate crime. While this is a tragic tale of a young person killed because of their gender non-conformity, it is also a celebration of Two Spirits identity and operates as an educational film for those unfamiliar with this aspect of Native American culture and paints a picture of Fred’s working-class family as loving and supportive which counters some of the representations of working-class families as dysfunctional. Pelo Malo (Mariana Rondon 2013) is also about a young person who resists gender norms, and the setting this time is Venezuela which has a long history of state-sponsored film production. When Hugo Chávez was in power, he bolstered the state film industry and set up a state-sponsored film platform called Villa del Cine. Chávez was interested in the educational potential of film, and knew that film could be used to influence citizens. He understood the power of representation and referred to film as a ‘weapon’ in the ongoing fight to maintain his ideology. This links back to the ways in which film was used by Espinosa (imperfect cinema) and Rocha (the aesthetics of hunger), outlined in the introduction to this book. It is in this environment that Pelo Malo was made—a state-funded film that was released to critical acclaim around the world and to some criticism within Venezuela. Pelo Malo is a complex film because of the way in which it represents the intersection of class, race, gender and sexuality and the subtle critique it offers of Venezuelan society. The film follows Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano) a young boy who lives with his single mother and younger brother in an apartment on a housing estate. Junior is not interested in the sorts of things that masculine boys are supposed to be interested in, and he prefers the company of a young female friend, and wants to be able to style his afro hair to resemble the pictures of a singer with slicked-back straight hair. This obsession with his hair and his interest in female beauty pageants as well as the innocent crush he forms on a young male vendor on his estate are met with anger by his mother. Junior wants to be able to express himself, but his mother will not allow it, and she tries various methods to ‘cure’ him of perceived homosexuality, some of which

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border on abusive. Junior’s mother struggles—she has no support and has recently lost her job. She engages in transactional sex with men who can offer some financial assistance and she shows her baby son the kind of affection that Junior is not afforded. Farrell (2017) suggests that the film challenges the national imaginary. Chávez wanted film to ‘narrate the nation’ (191) in a particular kind of way (i.e. celebrating the notion of Bolivarian revolution), but Pelo Malo does not do this and it was criticised by the authorities in Venezuela (Farrell 2017, 193). This film represents Venezuela and its capital Caracas, as containing an underlying sense of violence which is conveyed mostly through personal relationships, but very subtly. And the filmmaker illustrates the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality through the central motif of Junior’s hair. Junior is challenging norms of gender and sexuality and he is punished as a result. The film illustrates how social class (poverty and unemployment) can impact on personal relationships. Ultimately Rondon is working in the tradition of some of the radical filmmakers from the region who came before her—but there is a strong feminist sensibility to her work that differs from some of her predecessors as she focuses more on individuals rather than collectivity and creates a flawed and quite unlikeable female character.

Denial (Brokeback Mountain) How do filmmakers represent life in the closet, denying queerness for whatever reason? This denial might be due to time/place—living in an era or a location where being known as queer would likely result in ostracisation, arrest or even death. This section begins with Hollywood box-office success Brokeback Mountain (2005), which might seem to contradict the intention of this book to foreground cinema from outside of Hollywood, and it has been described as the ‘most mainstream queer film ever’ (Rushton and Bettinson 2010, 107) but Brokeback Mountain is an important film because it had such a large impact on audiences and it is also an example of transnational cinema—it is adapted from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx but directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee, and set in an America of the past, an America that is firmly rooted in the dominant American imaginary. Needham (2010) states that Brokeback Mountain had a ‘profoundly affective emotional impact’ on him that he had not necessarily been expecting (1), partly due to the way it told the story of being closeted, but also because attending a cinema screening of the film

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required queer audience members to un-closet themselves if they wanted to respond emotionally to the film (2). This feeling of being potentially unsafe was compounded when watching the film in a suburban multiplex cinema, away from the safer spaces of art house and independent theatres (Needham 2010, 2). Lee’s film is a romantic drama/melodrama that centres on the closeted love between shepherds Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) in 1963 Wyoming. They conduct their relationship in secret, and neither is able to leave their wives for each other. It is a heart wrenching tale, with much emotional pull and a tragic ending. Jack and Ennis are working-class men—transient workers who take on seasonal ranch work. They live and love within a working-class setting, and the working-class masculinity that is attached to working the land is a hypermasculine one (Needham 2010, 5) that they are not prepared to challenge with their relationship. In order to express their interest in each other in a repressive society, Jack and Ennis engage in subtle actions that indicate romantic interest—actions which could be easily missed by the heterosexual men in their environment. These actions are described by Needham as identifiable to gay men as ‘cruising’ (2010, 103) and are articulated through a series of usually conventional shot/reverse shots at the beginning of the film, combined with silence as the men glance at each other, but say nothing (Needham 2010, 105). Needham suggests that these actions would be recognised by gay viewers, which immediately challenges the heteronormative gaze of most mainstream film (Needham 2010, 103). The film operates as a tale of repressed love, but it is also about the added repression that can occur in some working-class settings. Despite being seen as a pivotal film in terms of audience’s acceptance of queer stories on screen, there are still relatively few mainstream films that feature intense and passionate relationships between men, particularly working-class men.

Romance and Connections (Weekend, Blue Is the Warmest Colour) The themes of romance and making connections also appear in the films discussed in the following section, with the main difference being the absence (for the most part) of the need to closet feelings, although some of the romantic connections are not made successfully. Andrew Haigh’s 2011 drama Weekend is a simply constructed story of two working-class

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men in the north of England who meet, have sex and enjoy each other’s company for a weekend. At the end of the weekend, one of the men must leave town, and the short-lived romance ends. Over the course of the weekend, they are able to reveal aspects of their characters that they usually keep to themselves, and by the end of the few days they have both grown as people and come to terms with various aspects of their lives. They learn from each other despite the brevity of their relationship. The film is shot in realist style with a documentary aesthetic and as a result projects an authentic exploration of two people finding a connection. The naturalism of the style and the performances means the same-sex relationship is totally normalised—there is no sensationalising, no tragedy and no melodrama. Russel (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New) are two ordinary men and the time they spend together is both special and completely ordinary. The characters challenge the criticism of queer films made by Dyer (2002, 218) regarding the tendency in queer heritage films to cast beautiful men in non-realistic situations. Cullen and New are not Hollywood heart-throbs, and they look like the kinds of white men who might live in northern English towns. The everydayness is also depicted through their conversations and discussions and their interactions with their circles of friends as well as through the depictions of them having sex. This film counters the tragic tales of either closeted gay men or gay men in working-­ class communities who live in fear of homophobic attack. Weekend shows that working-class people can, and do, accept diverse sexualities. The naturalness of Weekend is contrasted with Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 romantic drama Blue is the Warmest Colour. This is a film about a passionate relationship between two young women, one of whom is working class, but it relies on stereotypes and is arguably constructed around a male, heterosexual gaze. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a working-class girl from a conservative family. She meets Emma (Léa Seydoux) who is finishing up an art degree. They form a romantic relationship which lasts for some time, but eventually falls apart. The film has been criticised due to its sex scenes between the women which have been seen as created for a heterosexual male viewer looking for the titillation of lesbian sex, rather than as authentic depictions of lesbian sex and desire. The male gaze is present here—unlike Weekend, which presents actors who are ordinary looking—the cast of Blue is the Warmest Colour are all conventionally beautiful. Shachar claims though, that despite the employment of the male gaze, when filming the sex scenes, that these scenes are actually not the focus of the film which is more concerned with exploring issues around

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identity (2018, 149). Shachar also suggests that Kechiche is interested in class due to his self-identified position as working class (2018, 148), but I would argue that there are other problems with the class representation. Adèle’s family do not accept her sexuality because they are working class and socially conservative. Emma’s family are artistic and middle class and have no problems with Emma’s choice of partners. Snobbery is depicted— Emma is not impressed with Adèle’s choice of career as a primary school teacher, and she surrounds herself with middle-class friends who Adèle cannot relate to. While this is likely meant as a criticism of middle-class snobbery, the choice to create a romantic partner for Adèle who is middle class suggests that Adèle would not be able to find a partner in her working-­ class community, reinforcing the stereotype of working-class people as inherently homophobic and bigoted.

Solidarity (Pride) Homophobia in a working-class community is a feature of Matthew Warchus’ 2014 biographical drama Pride, but in this film (based on a true story), the homophobic characters learn acceptance through the presence of gay and lesbian people who arrive to offer solidarity. This is a feel-good film with a conventional narrative structure and form but the overarching message is that ignorance and bigotry is not pathological or fixed and can be challenged and transformed. Pride recounts the story of the activist group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, who provided support and solidary for striking miners during the 1984 miners’ strike. A group of activists visit a Welsh mining village to offer money to the strike fund, and they are welcomed by some of the villagers (mostly the women, although not all), and rejected by some of the men with homophobic attitudes. As the story progresses, the formerly bigoted members of the community realise that they have struggle in common with the lesbian and gay activists and they appreciate the solidarity offered. They learn about queer culture and this education opens their minds and challenges their preconceptions and assumptions. Bonds form between the villagers and the activists and these are cemented when the miners’ union (and other unions) march in the 1985 Gay Pride march in London. The film shows the importance of solidarity and the ways in which people can act collectively in the face of oppression and are stronger as a result. While the miners’ strike was unsuccessful, the links between unions and queer rights has

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remained strong. Pride is a touching and ultimately uplifting representation of working-class people and collective action. This chapter has surveyed films that focus on issues around gender and sexuality and chosen some films as examples that illustrate the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with class. There are many more films that could be included here. Jafar Panahi’s 2000 drama The Circle portrays Iranian women fighting against the patriarchal structures that inhibit and oppress them. It is a bleak and gritty tale of escaped female prisoners attempting to leave the city and other women caught up in the patriarchal rules that govern their lives. They are poor women, without the cushion of financial means or education that allows middle- and upper-class women in Iran some freedoms. Poverty and gender also collide in 1000 Rupee Note—Shrihari Sathe’s 2014 drama about a widow in rural India who acquires some money from a corrupt politician and finds herself in trouble when she tries to spend the money in town. She is accused of using a forgery, and is arrested so that the corrupt police can spend the money on food. The widow was previously poor but happy—and manages an independent life as woman in her village due to the support and friendships with her neighbours. In the town she is powerless against the men who are employed to protect the people. There is some moralising here though, as the overall message of the film is that working-class, poor people are corrupted somehow by access to money. Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s, 2004 Moolaadé also tells a tale of women resisting oppressive forces, this time in rural west Africa in a village where a group of girls and women have refused to participate in the expected female genital mutilation (cutting of the clitoris). The women band together to fight the men and the women who want to hold on to this tradition. They invoke an ancient spirit of sanctuary to protect girls and use reason to argue their case to the village elders. Moolaadé is a deliberately didactic and educational film intended to change practices in rural west Africa—it is also a celebration of African women and of the power of female solidarity. In Nadine Labaki’s 2007 Caramel, there is a subtle critique of patriarchy, as three women working in a beauty salon in Lebanon support each other and offer each other counsel regarding their relationships. They reject men who cheat, and support a blossoming same-­ sex relationship. Their salon is a sanctuary away from the patriarchal society outside of the shop. Tropical Malady (2004) by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul depicts a romance between a soldier and a farm worker in rural Thailand.

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In typical Weerasethakul style, the film is slow-paced and contains elements of the supernatural and strange. Many elements are not explained but the film’s languid style and tropical setting is enthralling and mysterious. And This enigmatic style is also employed by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang in his 2006 drama I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, set in Malaysia and containing parallel stories, one of which is about a mystery man who is beaten on the street and nursed back to health by a Bangladeshi migrant worker. The worker takes in the man and tends to his wounds and provides him with food and shelter. The relationship between the two men is tender—they sleep next to each other and the scenes between them, while not sexual, are intimate. There are many other films that could be included here—and the strength and resilience as well as the hardships and oppressions faced by women and by LGBTIQ+ working-class people are represented well in films from around the world.

References Aaron, Michele. 2004. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2007. Pass/Fail. In Queer Screen: A Screen Reader, ed. Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street, 259–226. London: Routledge. Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto. 2004. The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About my Mother. Quarterly Review of Film and Media 21: 25–38. ———. 2007. Pedro Almodóvar. London: British Film Institute. Allinson, Mark. 2001. A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. London: I.B.Tauris. Almodóvar, Pedro. 2004. Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. Badt, Karin. 2009. Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank Makes the Most Waves. Film Crit 33 (3): 67–71. Bengret, Martine, and Laura Mulvey. 2015. Film Corporeality, Transgressive Cinema: A Feminist Perspective. In Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, ed. Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers, 187–202. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bennett, Ray. 2009. Fish Tank. Hollywood Reporter, 15 May. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fish-tank-84035. Benshoff, Harry. 2004. The Monster and the Homosexual. In Queer Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, 63–74. New  York: Routledge. Benshoff, Harry, and Sean Griffin, eds. 2004. Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ———. 1989. Social Space and Symbolic Power. Sociological Theory 7 (1): 14–25. Bradshaw, Peter. 2006. Volver review. The Guardian, August 25. https://www. theguardian.com/film/2006/aug/25/drama.pedroalmodovar. Bunting, Madeleine. 2010. Social Deprivation in Britain: How a Writer’s Life Turned to Tragedy. BrillFilms, October 17. http://www.brillfilms. com/2010/10/social-deprivation-in-britain-how-a-writers-life-turned-totragedy/. Davis, Luke. 2010. Through a Glass Brightly. The Monthly, March. https://www. themonthly.com.au/issue/2010/februar y/1342595497/luke-davies/ through-glass-brightly. Derry, Ken. 2018. Myth and Monstrosity: Teaching Indigenous Films. Journal of Religion and Film 22 (3): 1–32. Deslippe, Dennis. 2000. Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Doyle, Caitlyn P. 2020. Truth Unreconciled: Counter-Dreaming in Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Film Criticism 44 (1): 42–53. Drake, Simone. 2020. He Said Nothing/Sonic Space and the Production of Quietude in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. In Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty First Century, ed. Simone Drake and Dwan K. Henderson, 252–267. Durham: Duke University Press. Dyer, Richard. 2002. The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge. Dyer, Richard, and Juliane Pidduck. 2002. Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Fanon, Franzt. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Farrell, Michelle Leigh. 2017. Pelo Malo: Representing Symbolic Violence in the Intricacies of Venezuela’s Contemporary Film Landscape. Cincinnati Romance Review 42: 190–210. Foster, Gwendolyn A. 2003. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/constructions in the Cinema. New York: SUNY Press. González, Jesús Ángel. 2015. New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone. Western American Literature 50 (1): 51–76. Henderson, Lisa. 2007. The Class Character of Boys Don’t Cry. In Queer Screen: A Screen Reader, ed. Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street, 283–288. London: Routledge. Hockenhull, Stella. 2017. British Women Film Directors in the New Millennium. New York: Springer. hooks, bell. 2000. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge. Johnston, Claire. 1999 (1973). Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema. In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, 31–40. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Juett, JoAnne C., and Jones, David M. 2010. Coming out to the mainstream new queer cinema in the 21st century Creator. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Kang, Nancy. 2016. Audre’s Daughter: Black lesbian Steganography in Dee Rees’ Pariah and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Journal of Lesbian Studies 20 (2): 266–297. Kaplan, Ann E. 2004. Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory. Signs 30 (1): 1236–1248. Kinder, Marsha. 2013. Re-Envoicements and Reverberations in Almodóvar’s Macro-Melodrama. In A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, ed. Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon, 281–303. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Klinger, Barbara. 2006. The Art Film, Affect and the Female Viewer: The Piano Revisited. Screen 47 (1): 19–41. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection. New  York: Colombia University Press. Kroenert, Tim. 2010. When Adults Fail Children. Eureka Street 20 (9): 7–8. Levy, Emanuel. 2006. Volver: Almodóvar’s Confession. Emanuel Levy, Cinema 24/7. https://emanuellevy.com/interviews/volver-Almodóvarsconfession-9/. MacCormack, Patricia. 2008. Cinesexuality. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mayer, Sophie. 2015. Uncommon Sensuality: New Queer Feminist Film/Theory. In Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, ed. Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers, 86–96. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Mennel, Barbara. 2019. Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, Wendy. 2017. Production Focus: Rungano Nyoni’s “I Am Not a Witch”. Screen Daily, May 22. https://www.screendaily.com/news/production-focusrungano-nyonis-i-am-not-a-witch/5118303.article. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Boundary 2 12 (3): 333–358. Monaghan, Whitney. 2015. From iPhone to iFilm: The Queer Experience of Tangerine. The Conversation, August 11. https://theconversation.com/ from-iphone-to-ifilm-the-queer-experience-of-tangerine-45302. Mullen, Lisa. 2009. Estate of Mind. Sight and Sound 19 (10): 16–19. Mulvey, Laura. 1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, 58–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Murillo, Bertold Salas. 2018. Forging Her Path with Her Own Fists: Autonomy and Contradictions of Age, Class and Gender in Florence Jaguey’s La Yuma/ Yuma. Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinema 15 (2): 233–248.

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Needham, Gary. 2010. Brokeback Mountain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pidduck, Julianne. 2007. Risk and Queer Spectatorship. In Queer Screen: A Screen Reader, ed. Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street, 265–271. London: Routledge. Ramanathan, Geetha. 2015. Sound and Feminist Modernity in Black Women’s Film Narrative. In Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, ed. Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers, 111–122. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Roth, Silke. 2000. Developing Working-Class Feminism: A Biographical Approach to Social Movement Participation. In Self, Identity, and Social Movements, ed. Sheldon Stryker, Timothy Owens, and Robert W. White, 300–323. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Rowbotham, Sheila, and Huw Beynon. 2001. Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain. London: Rivers Oram Press. Rushton, Richard, and Bettinson, Gary. 2010. What is Film Theory? New York: McGraw Hill. Russo, Vito. 1987. The celluloid closet: Homosexuality in the movies. New  York: Harper & Row Santoro, Miléna. 2013. The Rise of First Nations’ Fiction Films: Shelley Niro, Jeff Barnaby, and Yves Sioui Durand. American Review of Canadian Studies 43 (2): 267–282. Shachar, Hila. 2018. “He Said We Can Choose Our Own Lives”: Freedom, Intimacy and Identity in Blue is the Warmest Colour. Studies in European Cinema 15 (2–3): 146–161. Shoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. 2015. The Worlds of Queer Cinema: From Aesthetics to Activism. ArtCultura 17 (30): 87–95. Smelik, Anneke. 1998. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Paul Julian. 1994. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. London: Verso. Smith, Frances. 2020. Bandes de Filles: Girlhood Identity in Contemporary France. London: Routledge. Strauss, Frédéric, ed. 1996. Almodóvar on Almodóvar. London: Faber & Faber. Thomson, Patricia. 2010. Hard Lessons. American Cinematographer 91 (2): 8–22. Vollmer, Deenah. 2011. How Dee Rees Built a Cocoon. Interview, December 15. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/dee-rees-pariah. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Wolcott, Victoria. 2001. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 6

Race and Class in Australian Indigenous Film

In previous chapters I have looked at films that deal with the intersections of class with race and ethnicity. In this chapter, the focus is also on the intersections of class with race, but with a specific focus on films made by Indigenous Australians. Films made by Indigenous Australians form part of a wave of Indigenous filmmaking that began in the early 2000s—it has produced a number of high-quality and important films which are excellent examples of self-representation. Whereas some of the films discussed in previous chapters have been made by non-working-class background filmmakers, or filmmakers who do not share the race/ethnicity/ gender of their protagonists/subjects, all of the films discussed in this chapter have been made by Indigenous Australians and ultimately have been made for Indigenous audiences. The range of films is significant, as is the technically mastery shown by many of the filmmakers. The films show the ways in which Indigenous filmmakers challenge the coloniser’s gaze and use film as a method of self-representation (through storytelling). A note on terminology here—I’m using the term ‘Indigenous’ to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Peoples in general, but will also refer to Aboriginal filmmakers where this is the term used by filmmakers. When I use the term ‘white’ I am referring to those who represent the colonisers, so ‘white’ is used here politically (keeping in mind that not all people who appear to be white are not Indigenous). I’m also aware that as a non-­ Indigenous white person who is a British immigrant living and working in Australia, I benefit from colonial structures and acknowledge that it is © The Author(s) 2020 S. Attfield, Class on Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7_6

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problematic to be speaking for Indigenous people. This is not my intention and I have used the work of Indigenous scholars where possible. Indigenous experience in Australia has a number of specific considerations to take into account—namely, the history and legacy of invasion and colonisation. The Australian colony began in a violent act. In 1770, on his way to land on what is now known as Kurnell on the shores of Botany Bay, Captain Cook fired his gun at Indigenous men on the beach and hit one of those men, named Cooman. The Indigenous men had been throwing spears towards Cook’s landing party to warn them to retreat and when Cook landed on the beach (after the community had fled) he picked up the spears and a shield that had been penetrated by a bullet. This shield and spears are currently in the British Museum. The Gweagal people have been campaigning to have the shield returned for a long time now. Violent dispossession followed with the First Fleet of 1788, as Indigenous people were forced from their land. Many Indigenous people in the Sydney region died as a result of smallpox which spread through the communities very quickly. As the British settlements grew, so did the dispossession of Indigenous people. Australia had been claimed for the Crown and declared Terra Nullius (unoccupied land). Terra Nullius is one of the terrible and absurd contradictions of the British colony in Australia. While declaring the land unpopulated, the British proceeded to document and catalogue Indigenous people. The accounts of Cook and those who sailed with him, and the accounts of writers among the First Fleet, all include descriptions of Indigenous people and recount any encounters with Indigenous people. Artists created many representations of Indigenous people too, and early colonial art often includes Indigenous figures. Later in the history of the colony, anthropologists and ethnographers also documented Indigenous people (and once technology facilitated they recorded and filmed people). One of the first films ever made features Australian Indigenous people. In 1898 British ethnographer, Alfred C. Haddon travelled to the Torres Strait and filmed Torres Strait Island people dancing and making fire. He also recorded their speech on wax cylinders. Snippets of this footage remain and can be viewed via the Australian Screen Online website.1 McNiven (n.d. para. 3) claims that the men in the films display ‘agency’ and were clearly pleased to be able to share their ceremonial dances and other practices with Haddon. This is an example of ‘cultural exchange’ 1

 https://aso.gov.au/titles/historical/torres-strait-islanders/notes/.

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common among Indigenous people happy to share their culture (McNiven n.d. para. 3). But many of these ethnographic films were made without cultural consultation, although early footage such as Haddon’s film was used as evidence in the landmark 1996 Mabo Native Title case, which overturned the principal of Terra Nullius.2 The British also brought their class structures to the colony and imposed this system on Indigenous people—ideas of social stratification were imported and Indigenous people became members of the working class. The British wanted all the benefits of the class system—a subjugated workforce dependant on the sale of their labour providing a plentiful supply of workers for the growing business of agriculture and to serve the needs of the growing cities. The ‘landowners’ wanted to recreate the culture of class too, with domestic servants providing status (Haskins and Scrimgeour 2015, 89). This treatment has led Indigenous people to be overly-­ represented among the working class, with many Indigenous people identifying as working class and being acutely aware of the ways in which class intersects with race to prevent opportunities to gain power. While the founding story of Australia does now sometimes acknowledge the dispossession of people from their land, it doesn’t often acknowledge the resistance to that dispossession. Australia’s frontier wars are not officially recognised as such, and while recounts of a struggle do exist, they are considered to be isolated events. This is challenged in Rachel Perkins’ 2008 documentary series The First Australians, an important programme that was one of the first to feature Indigenous scholars and experts as well as non-Indigenous scholars. In the first episode of the series, stories are told of resistance to colonisation. Some Indigenous activists suggest that these frontier wars continue but that they manifest in different ways as Indigenous people use whatever resources are available to resist the coloniser’s structures. Examples would be civil disturbances (often labelled as riots) that have occurred in Indigenous communities as a result of violence against Indigenous people. In 2004, for example, Indigenous people on Palm Island in Queensland attacked the courthouse, police station and other buildings to protest the verdict in an inquest into the death in custody of a young Indigenous man (Porter 2015, 292). The Queensland government eventually agreed to a settlement of $30 million and an apology to residents, acknowledging that the police response to residents had been racist. These kinds of events point to the continuing injustices that  https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/articles/mabo-case.

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occur against Indigenous people and can be related back to the continuing impact of colonialism. Non-Indigenous Australians are not always aware of this and other violent stories of invasion and colonisation and find the history difficult to acknowledge. What film, literature and art can do is bring the history closer, to reveal its affect—to show how people have suffered and legacies of suffering impact on the present. In their study of Indigenous literature, Hodge and Mishra (1991) suggest that Indigenous art reveals displacement and a struggle for voices to be heard (97). Indigenous art offers diverse representation (Hodge and Mishra 1991, 107) and Indigenous voices heard on their own terms, and helps to challenge white versions of history (Hodge and Mishra 1991, 102). These suggestions can certainly be applied to screen media too. Ernie Blackmore (2015) discusses the ways in which Indigenous filmmakers are offering ‘critique’ (62) and ‘analysis’ (66) of Australia as well as facilitating empowerment for Indigenous people through self-­ representation. Blackmore (2015) notes how Indigenous filmmakers are using the ‘colonisers’ technologies’ (62) to create works that challenge stereotypes, challenge white history and dominant white discourses about Indigenous people and also contribute to a de-commodifying of Indigenous culture (taking back Indigenous culture from those who have sought to appropriate it for their own means—which ties back into the concept of ‘symbolic violence’ referred to in Chap. 4). Griffin et al. (2017) also point to the importance of Indigenous film and states that Australian Indigenous filmmakers are ‘taking artistic control’ (131) of Indigenous stories as a method of ‘self-determination’ (131). They also point to the educational potential of Indigenous film due to its ability to challenge the coloniser’s version of history and the ‘colonial hegemony’ present in Australian society (Griffin et  al. 2017, 133). The success of Indigenous films at the Australian box office creates ‘enthusiasm and hope’ (Griffin et al. 2017, 134) for the future for Indigenous people because the increase in nuanced and positive representations of Indigenous experience is empowering for Indigenous audiences and creates empathy towards and understanding of Indigenous people for non-Indigenous viewers (Griffin et al. 2017, 132), leading to a shift in societal attitudes towards Indigenous people overall (Griffin et al. 2017, 136). I would suggest that Indigenous filmmaking and the kinds of representations of Indigenous people in such films is very different to those in films made by non-Indigenous filmmakers, despite the so called ‘good

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intentions’ of some filmmakers. There is an authenticity of experience in Indigenous films that is powerful and empowering for Indigenous people. There have been films made about Indigenous people by non-Indigenous filmmakers. For example, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda was seen as ground-­ breaking at the time of its release in 1955. Chauvel cast Indigenous actors to play most of the Indigenous characters and the character Jedda, was seen as a sympathetic portrayal of an Indigenous person. But Jedda is highly problematic for a number of reasons. The film focuses on the character Jedda (Ngarla Kunoth), an Indigenous girl raised by a white family who own a cattle station in the Northern Territory. Jedda’s adoptive mother attempts to erase Jedda’s Indigenous identity and assimilate her completely into white culture. The experiment doesn’t work though, as Jedda follows an Indigenous man into the bush and is eventually killed by him. The overriding message of this film is that Jedda’s Indigenous nature is untameable and wild, and despite the good intentions of the white mother, it is impossible to turn her into a white woman. Charles and Elsa Chauvel engaged in a white telling of Indigenous culture and their film operates as a commodifying of Indigenous culture. They renamed Indigenous actors and named Indigenous characters with their own versions of Indigenous names and attempted to create an ‘acceptable’ version of Indigeniety for a white audience. This kind of possession of Indigenous people has occurred since invasion and occupation of Australia and forms part of the ‘white colonial hegemony’ (Rekhari 2008, 126) that leads to representations of Indigenous people as ‘unadaptable to the reality of the “civilised” white world’ (Rekhari 2008, 127) This is not to say that there haven’t been some genuine collaborations between white filmmakers and Indigenous people. There are a number of films that are focused on Indigenous stories, but with a white filmmaker as the facilitator. Examples include Martha Ansara and Essie Coffey’s 1979 documentary My Survival as an Aboriginal, about Essie’s life and her community in northern NSW. The 1982 documentary, Two Laws, directed by Carolyn Strachan, Alessandro Cavadini which is about the Borroloola People’s struggle for the recognition of Aboriginal law (the Borroloola community is in the Northern Territory). Wrong Side of the Road is a feature drama directed by Ned Lander in 1981 and based on the experiences of two Indigenous bands. The band members wrote the story and starred in the film. And Rolf De Heer’s 2006 film Ten Canoes, which was a film initiated by David Gulpilil and co directed by Peter Djigirr is generally well-regarded. Ten

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Canoes tells a story from Gulpilil’s community in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. In her important 1993 essay on Indigenous representation in popular culture, ‘Well I heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television’ (named after a line in Indigenous band Yothu Yindi’s 1991 song Treaty), Marcia Langton wrote about the ways in which Indigenous people have been represented in Australian film and television. Langton stated that by 1993, a ‘staggering 6,000 films have been made about Aborigines’ (24). She stated that many of these representations had been uninformed and often racist (1993, 24). In order to counteract stereotypes and incorrect representations, Langton called for Indigenous people to create self-­ representations to challenge non-Indigenous perceptions. Langton pointed to the importance of such representations because it is through the media that most non-Indigenous people learn about Indigenous culture and experience (1993, 33). Langston also argues that Indigenous self-representation needs to be honest and willing to show life as it is and to be ‘self-critical’ (85) and this is arguably what contemporary Indigenous filmmakers are achieving. And it should be acknowledged that films discussed in this chapter present a particular Indigenous story—they don’t speak for every Indigenous person’s experience, although some aspects, particularly the traumas associated with colonisation are generally understood. And Langton makes it clear that Indigenous representations should be as diverse as Indigenous culture. Aileen Moreton-Robinson also writes about representation and suggests that historically, Indigenous people have been studied by whites, but have rarely been asked to provide knowledge (Moreton-Robinson 2004, 75). There are many examples of problematic ethnographic photographs and films of Indigenous Australians. I’ve already mentioned Haddon’s film of Torres Strait Islander people and other examples include the films of anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer who filmed Indigenous people and ceremonies while on an expedition to the Northern Territory in 1911. And the 1913 films of Indigenous people in Southern Australia made by TJ West and later, films such as one made on the coast of Arnhem Land in 1948 by anthropologist Charles P Mountford for the Australian National Film Board. There were even government departments set up to facilitate the filming and recording of Indigenous people such as the Board for Anthropological Research. These problematic ethnographic films show how Indigenous people have been represented by whites, and help to illustrate why films made by Indigenous people contribute to a

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‘re-framing’ of Indigenous people and to a ‘reframing’ of Australia’s colonial past and present (Collins 2010, 69). The idea of reframing Indigenous people is important, because for many years, non-Indigenous filmmakers have tended to frame Indigenous people and Australia’s colonial past in ways that distance such people and events. As Kaplan (2000) suggests, non-Indigenous representations of Indigenous people in film prevent the past from ‘erupting into the present’ (67). Essentialising representations have tended to occur—falling mainly into the representation of Indigenous culture as ‘timeless’, ‘mystical’ and ‘ancient’ or as negative and dysfunctional. It is arguably an acknowledgement of how the past lives in the present that is powerful in contemporary Indigenous films. In Indigenous films we are witnessing the ways in which the legacies of the colonial past manifest—from the perspective of the oppressed. The difficult lives that can be seen in some Indigenous films are a result of devastating colonial practices. Collins speaks of a need to acknowledge the causes of such behaviours which are a result of the ‘traumatic afterwardsness of colonial dispossession’ (2010, 66). An acknowledgment that non-Indigenous audiences often seem reluctant to make.

Colonial Trauma (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country) A film that comes to mind when discussing this idea of representing trauma is Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film, Samson and Delilah. This film is about two young people, Samson (Rowan McNamara) and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) who leave their remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory and head to the town of Alice Springs where they live under a bridge and attempt to survive day to day. Both teenagers have experienced trauma—Samson is beaten by his brother and Delilah is beaten by women in the community who blame her for the death of her grandmother. In Alice Springs, Samson consoles himself by sniffing petrol and Delilah is sexually assaulted and is hit by a car. In many ways, these traumas and the way in which the two young people manage to survive represent the traumas experienced by Indigenous Australians across the country. And the film portrays the daily hardships they face, both while living in poverty in a community without adequate housing and facilities and while homeless in Alice Springs where they also experience racism and judgement from white people. Warwick Thornton is an important figure in Australian

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Indigenous film. He has been involved in film since the early 1990s and has worked as a cinematographer and director of photography on a number of Indigenous films and television programmes since the late 1990s. Samson and Delilah was his first feature and picked up international awards such as the Camera D’or at Cannes. Collins suggests that Samson and Delilah can be seen as an example of trauma cinema—a cinema that engages with horrific events of the past— and the filmmaker engages with the legacies of the past in the depiction of the present (Collins 2010, 69). I touched on this a little in the discussion of trauma in film from Palestine—how the trauma of occupation has become a common thread for Palestinians and seeps into cultural products such as film. The trauma of invasion and colonisation has a similar impact on Indigenous films such as Samson and Delilah, but manifests somewhat differently. In Samson and Delilah there is no overt reference to the traumas experienced by Indigenous people such as dispossession from land, massacres, forced removal of children from families and the other dreadful things that occurred—but the legacies of these events live on in the dysfunction, anger and self-destructive behaviours that are represented in this film. According to Kaplan and Wang (2004) in their book on trauma and cinema, there are dangers in representing trauma—the main one being the possibility that the trauma might become aestheticised and more palatable for audiences (11). They suggest that filmmakers can position viewers of trauma cinema in four main ways. Firstly there is the position of being introduced to a trauma but being ultimately satisfied by a ‘comforting cure’ (2004, 9) at the end of the film. Secondly the viewer can be ‘vicariously traumatised’ (2004, 9) which has the effect of making the viewer turn away and ultimately ignoring the trauma. Thirdly the viewer may be positioned as a voyeur and the victims of the trauma are exploited for entertainment (2004, 10). And fourthly, the viewer can operate as a witness—Kaplan and Wang see this positioning as more productive (2004, 10). The viewer as witness experiences an ‘empathetic identification’ with the vicarious traumatisation and therefore ‘enters the victim’s experience’ which both moves the viewer and makes them very aware of the trauma (10). This can overcome the problem of trauma cinema creating affect but which results in an enervating effect that prevents the viewer from taking any action. The viewer may feel great empathy but feel unable to do anything that will make a difference to the survivors. Arguably Thornton is able to create this fourth position, and he does this through his ‘measured realism’ in Samson and Delilah (Collins 2010,

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73). Collins suggests that the slow pace of the film allows the viewer to experience the trauma as it occurs and provokes an ‘ethical response’ in the viewer (2010, 74). The personal trauma represented can become a collective experience as the audience becomes witness. As Ashuri (2010) asserts, the representation of personal trauma can be channelled through film and create a sense of ‘collective history’ (172) and Thornton certainly gives the viewer an unrelenting picture, this is realism at its most painful but hopefully a realism that not only speaks to its intended audience (Indigenous people) but also forces non-Indigenous audiences to acknowledge this reality. Thornton tends to take on tough topics—he explores substance abuse, domestic violence and does not avoid the problematic aspects of Indigenous life. But in doing so he gives voice to the marginalised. Thornton claims that when he makes films he includes a ‘bit of anger’ and his focus is on his community, not whites (Thornton in Stefanoff 2006, 121). He also suggests that one of his aims is to make whites ‘obsolete’ in his filmmaking process (Thornton in Stefanoff 2006, 121). Audience for Thornton is very important. He screened Samson and Delilah first in his own community as he wanted to be sure of their approval (Thornton in Buckmaster 2009, para. 9). Samson and Delilah is a film made for Indigenous people but it has resonated with non-Indigenous audiences around the world. This is the kind of no-holds barred representation that Langton called for, but it has also been criticised as potentially limiting. The depiction of life for Indigenous people in films such as Samson and Delilah have been criticised for maintaining negative stereotypes of Indigenous people as substance addicted and so on. Filmmakers such as Thornton stress the importance of showing how life is—this is a reality that can’t be ignored or made prettier to comfort non-Indigenous audiences. Thornton has commented on how his films tend to be very well-received by overseas audiences, but can be criticised for being too grim by Australians. He states that ‘white Australia has a problem with us. In Australia we’re not allowed to whinge, about anything’ (Thornton in Stefanoff 2006, 121). Samson and Delilah is a very cinematic film—the story is told through visuals, music and sound—there is minimal dialogue, but emotions and intentions are displayed unambiguously. Davis (2009, para. 4) describes this method as the ‘language of cinema’ and suggests that the nonverbal expression and use of music creates an ‘intimate mode’ of storytelling (2009, para. 5). The camera moves slowly across the landscape and the beginning of the film portrays the rhythm of life in the community through

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a series of repeated actions (Davis 2009, para. 9). The film opens with Samson waking up in the morning. The light is soft and highlights Samson’s beautiful face. A curtain billows in a breeze—it is a languid scene up until the moment Samson picks up a can of petrol and sniffs. The magic is also broken when Samson gets out of bed and we see that he sleeps on the floor in a dilapidated house with no furniture. There is no dialogue in this scene—there is non-diegetic music coming from a radio, the song is the country love song Sunshiny Day sung by African American country star Charlie Pride which creates an incongruity between the music and the images. Thornton points to the use of music in the film and states that the lyrics of the songs often speak for the characters (Thornton in Phillips 2009, para. 17). The soundtrack includes original score composed by Thornton as well as songs by Indigenous artists such as Troy Casser-Daley and the African American country singer Charley Pride. Thornton says that country and western music is important to many Indigenous people (Thornton in Phillips 2009, para. 13), arguably due to country and western’s usual affinity with working on the land and the focus on hardship and community, as well as the practical aspect of only requiring a guitar to perform—important in communities where resources to music equipment and access to music lessons are practically non-existent. Thornton states that Samson and Delilah is ultimately a love story—but a love story that exists in the context of a political reality. He also states that this is a film made for Indigenous people—he wanted to make a film about the kind of young people who are written off by non-Indigenous and Indigenous people alike (Thornton in Buckmaster 2009, para. 13). The petrol-sniffing and taciturn Samson is not a typical hero. But despite the seriousness of Samson and Delilah’s situation, the film also employs humour. Samson and Delilah deals with some very weighty issues—but there are moments of humour which are characteristic of Indigenous culture. Thornton states that comedy also ‘breaks down barriers’ and helps to ‘relax the audience, to give them a sense of place and for them to be happy and laughing before you actually hit them with a darker, deeper, nastier idea of the world’ (in Stefanoff 2006, 115). Thornton reveals Australia’s violent past more explicitly in his 2017 feature, Sweet Country. The film shows how Australia was built on ‘slavery and racism’ (Thornton in Buckmaster 2009, para. 7) and shows (as he explains) ‘who Australians are and where we come from’ (Thornton in Buckmaster 2009, para. 6). At the heart of the film is the exploitation of Indigenous labour as the Indigenous workers are considered by most

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whites in the same way as livestock—expendable and there for the taking. This theme of violent exploitation also refers to white people’s taking of land and the use of it for their gain only. It is a film that is told from an Indigenous perspective and forces non-Indigenous viewers to confront their complicity in the treatment of Indigenous people—not just in the past, but in the present too. The film is set in the 1920s and was inspired by true events—from the official white records, and stories handed down by Indigenous elders. The film is set in Central Australia and was filmed in the MacDonnell Ranges in the Northern Territory—this is desert country, a place familiar to the film maker who comes from Alice Springs. The story is about an Indigenous stockman, Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), who shoots and kills a white man in self-defence. Knowing that the other white men will kill him in revenge, he heads into the outback with his wife, Lizzie (Natassia Gorey-Furber) to hide. Sam is tracked by a policeman, Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown), a John Wayne figure determined to find the fugitive. The story consists of the pursuit, followed by capture and then trial of Sam. Sweet Country is a western, with many of the trappings of the genre. There is a fugitive, a determined law man, a search. There is harsh country, a saloon owner, a preacher and a lawless town. But Thornton uses the genre to tell a story from the perspective of the colonised rather than the colonisers. All of the white characters are filtered through an Indigenous lens and represent the ways in which Indigenous people viewed white people at the time. Which means that the white characters in the film range from violently racist to well-meaning but ignorant of Indigenous culture. Thornton also defies expectations of a western and plays with form. The film includes sudden, short flash-forwards, the meanings of which do not become clear until the end of the film. This creates a disconcerting viewing experience that amplifies the discomfort created by the racism and treatment of the Indigenous characters. Unlike Samson and Delilah, there is no soundtrack—and no non-diegetic music in the film. Thornton says that he decided to instead allow the sounds of the desert to come through, because it has its ‘own soundtrack’—the soundscape of the environment (Thornton in Lines 2018, para. 15). For viewers used to film music, this also has an unsettling effect. The films shows in brutal detail how Indigenous people were central to the establishment of the white colony and the capitalist expansion. White Australians set up their cattle and sheep stations (equivalent of ranches) on stolen land. Land that was leased or sold to them by the Crown for very

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low rates (or land that they squatted on). Any Indigenous people on that land were classified as stock and could be forced to work for the whites. Indigenous people worked with the livestock and as general labourers as well as working as servants and childminders for white households. In most cases, Indigenous people were never paid for their work—they were given meagre rations of flour, tea and blankets and had to provide everything else themselves (Haskins and Scrimgeour 2015, 90). Indigenous workers were not permitted to live near the white homesteads, and were relegated to camps on the fringes of the white properties (Haskins and Scrimgeour 2015, 90). While the film is set in the 1920s, this exploitation of Indigenous labour continued well into the 1970s and families of former farm labourers are still fighting for unpaid wages.3 This is a history that is still little known in Australia. For the most part, non-Indigenous Australians accept the myth of white Australia as built by white convicts and white people working the land. There is very little recognition of the role played by forced Indigenous labour. This is why Thornton’s film is so important. He says that as an Indigenous filmmaker he has a responsibility to tell Indigenous stories, and because he is achieving recognition both locally and globally, he is able to reach a wider audience with his films (Thornton in Casey and Di Rosso 2018, para. 14). The use of a familiar genre is a way to get viewers interested and into the cinemas and the casting of two famous white actors was also a good way to get people to see the film. The violence of colonialism is also represented throughout Sweet Country. There is Philomac (Tremayne and Trevon Doolan)—a young boy (fathered by a white farmer) who is accused of stealing by that same farmer and chained to a rock as punishment. Sam and Lizzie are subjected to racist comments from new farmer, Harry March (Ewen Leslie), who asks to ‘borrow’ them from their boss, the preacher Fred Smith (Sam Neill). They are then confronted by Harry in a terrifying violent rage as he tries to kill them both (which is what leads to Sam killing Harry). Lizzie has previously been raped by Harry (but is ashamed and doesn’t tell Sam). Harry (and many white men), raped Indigenous women and fathered children, who were then treated the same way as the other Indigenous labourers. These are realities, and Thornton doesn’t hold back in the graphic descriptions of the violence. The audience can feel the pain and fear of the Indigenous characters, and barrack for Sam as he tries to evade the law. 3  https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/09/indigenous-workersreceive-190m-stolen-wages-settlement-from-queensland-government.

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The film also shows that the exploitation of Indigenous people operated hand in hand with the exploitation of the land. In one scene, Sergeant Fletcher sits on his horse during a pause from his search for Sam. He surveys the beautiful landscape in front of him and says that there is some ‘sweet country’ there for the taking. There is no acknowledgement of the Indigenous people who already live there—as a white man he can take what he wants with no repercussions. Yet, if an Indigenous person takes livestock, or any of the white colonist’s things, they are punished swiftly and brutally. When watching the film I was reminded of the Indigenous fight for land rights, which began in the cattle and sheep stations around the country. Indigenous stockmen and women, and Indigenous domestic workers began to strike and walk off properties. They demanded proper wages and better living conditions, but they also demanded the right to occupy their own land. As a result of strikes in the 1940s through to the 1970s, the Land Rights movement was born (Hokari 2000, 99). Indigenous workers utilised the tools of the labour movement in the fight for land rights—they knew that white people understood claims for unpaid wages and fights for better working conditions (Hokari 2000, 108). They mobilised white allies in their cause—union delegates who took the stories to the cities and to the white media and lobbied politicians. Eventually, all Australians became aware of the Land Rights movement, and the cause gained momentum. Sweet Country shows how easy it was for white people to take the land, and brings this home to the white audience, who, hopefully see their own complicity in stolen land and may begin to acknowledge that no land was ever ceded and that all of Australian society has been built on stolen land. The matter of fact way that Sergeant Fletcher claims land with a sweep of his hand, is a moment in the film directed at white people who become Fletcher too in that moment, regardless of the time that has passed since the film’s setting, and regardless of whether their ancestors were directly responsible for taking land. All non-Indigenous white people are complicit, due to the continued benefits they enjoy at the expense of Indigenous people while living on stolen land. Sweet Country also shows that Indigenous people have always resisted the colonisers. Sam fights back against his aggressor, and other characters resist in different ways. Some of the stockmen employ a ‘go slow’—a manner of working that deliberately takes longer than necessary as a way to frustrate the white landowners (but avoids punishment). Philomac steals a watch, but at the end of the film he

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rejects this symbol of white culture after listening to advice from the older men to not trust white people.

The Importance of Country (Satellite Boy) This ‘intimate’ and cinematic mode of storytelling is quite common in contemporary Indigenous film and many Indigenous filmmakers use visual and aural elements to convey ideas and themes. In her 2012 drama Satellite Boy, Catriona McKenzie uses shots of the landscape to speak for the importance of the connection to the land for the characters and to highlight the impact of colonisation on the environment (through shots of decaying colonial structures for example). Satellite Boy is set in the Kimberley’s region of Western Australia and the landscape is an important feature of the film. The film is about a young boy, Pete (Cameron Wallaby) who lives with his grandfather Jagamarra (David Gulpilil) in an abandoned outdoor movie theatre. While they live in run-down building, this is their ancestral land and is of vital importance to them. Jagamarra tries to teach Pete how to manage the land and to survive in the outback, but Pete is initially reluctant because he dreams of moving to the city to be with his mother who has left him in Jagamarra’s care while she seeks employment. Their land is threatened by the expansion of a mining company, and Pete decides to travel to the company’s offices to ask them to leave his land alone. He travels with his best friend Kalmain (Joseph Pedley) and during their adventure they become lost in the outback. Pete remember the skills taught by Jagamarra and they are able to survive. They are no match for the mining company though, and eventually find themselves in police custody. Pete is eventually reunited with his mother in the city, but he chooses to return to his country and to Jagamarra. McKenzie reveals the importance of the land to the characters but without creating a romantic representation. The landscape is stunning but it is not an easy place for Pete and Jagamarra to live, or for Pete and Kalmain when they get lost in the outback. The landscape is under threat too, and the prospect of a mining company taking over the land is symbolic of the legacy of colonial land taking. McKenzie has stated that the story began with the landscape and she wanted the audience to ‘feel’ the environment (McKenzie in Dawson 2012, para. 20). She also plays with space within the film—the plot is simple and there is much outdoor space. This connotes various themes such as freedom and confinement. Pete and Jagamarra have the vast landscape at their disposal, but they are

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constrained by the colonists’ continuing expansion, and their own lack of power in the face of capitalist expansion. The film has plenty of stunning imagery, but it is not all necessarily there to create pleasing aesthetics. At one point, Pete throws a plastic chair onto a fire. The image of the chair burning is quite beautiful as the orange embers float into the night sky. But this was Jagamarra’s only chair and the burning is quite mean-spirited. Pete is trying to defy his grandfather and reject his teaching, and he does not think through the consequences of this action. But the chair is also made of metal, and like the many rusting metal structures depicted in the film, it is likely to remain in the landscape as a reminder of how colonial structures have blighted the landscape and have only been of limited use to the local Indigenous people. Satellite Boy also operates as a counter narrative to that of non-­ Indigenous filmmaker Nicholas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout. In Walkabout, Roeg creates a mysterious character in the form of a young Aboriginal man who tries to help two upper-class white children who are lost in the outback. The Aboriginal man is played by David Gulpilil, who plays Jagamarra in Satellite Boy. The character in Walkabout is silent and ‘other’. The children are scared of him but also become dependent on him. He is subject to their gaze and judgement. In Satellite Boy, Pete sets out on an unintentional walkabout, but he has agency and is able to help himself and Kalmain and returns home on his own terms. Although Pete’s life is obviously negatively affected by the legacies of colonialism, he is able to eventually choose his own path, unlike the young man in Walkabout who is unable to exist within the white people’s world. Satellite Boy taps into the current shift towards recognition of the wrongdoings of Australia’s past and an acknowledgment of the pain caused by colonisation.

Using Genre (The Sapphires, Top End Wedding, Stone Bros, Mystery Road) Wayne Blair’s 2012 musical comedy/drama The Sapphires is a period piece based on a true story. The film is set in the 1970s and is about a group of young Indigenous singers who travel to Vietnam during the Vietnam war to entertain troops. This is a conventionally structured film that uses the musical comedy very well to tell a story about Indigenous women. Blair harnesses the genre elements and creates an entertaining film, at the same time including some political messages. While these political messages are

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quite subtle in the film, it could be argued that by its very existence the film is political, because it is centring Indigenous experience. The film’s protagonists are sisters Julie (Jessica Mauboy), Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), Gail (Deborah Mailman) and their cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) wo grew up in Cummeragunja, an Indigenous community in rural New South Wales. The women had performed together as children but Kay was taken away from her family and community by government authorities, to be raised in an institution for light-skinned Indigenous children (she is a member of the Stolen Generations). As a result of being raised in a white institution, Kay takes some time to come to terms fully with her Indigenous identity and also displays some class snobbery initially because she is embarrassed by her country cousins when they travel to the city to find her. The Sapphires includes musical numbers as diegetic performances during the group’s rehearsals and performances in front of troops. The women are encouraged to sing soul music to appeal particularly to the African American troops they will encounter and they switch from singing country to singing soul. The film was well-received and popular with audiences in Australia (Stratton 2015, 17), but it has been criticised for playing into neo-liberal ideas and aligning with white conservative notions of history (Stratton 2015, 18) effectively rewriting the past to reduce the impact of colonial practices on Indigenous people (Stratton 2015, 18). While Kay had been removed from her family while young, Stratton suggests that there is little sense that she suffered as a result (Stratton 2015, 18). But the women do refer to the impact of racism throughout the film and there are scenes that reveal the everyday racism they experience. Some of these acknowledgements are delivered with humour and sarcasm, but they are there, indicating that the characters are very aware of their position as marginalised in white society. The film is not necessarily historically accurate, but this is not really the point of the film. It is intended to be a ‘feelgood’ film that celebrates Indigenous women, and the genre conventions (the performance of songs and the obligatory montage sequence as the women rehearse and gradually get better at delivering the message of the music), are a way to hook an audience in, and while doing so, privileging Indigenous experience. The Sapphires is not a gritty and realist film, and it could be described as predicatable. There is an elitist tendency to dismiss genre films and to dismiss them as shallow and lacking the pedagogical potential of more ‘serious’ art house films. But films such as The Sapphires are also potentially more accessible to working-class audience, who due to lack of cultural capital, might not feel confident about watching an art

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house film that they might perceive as ‘difficult’. Genre films have the capacity to entertain audiences used to mainstream conventional films while also providing self-representation and showing audiences that stories about Indigenous people, for example, are interesting and good subject matter for film. Dolgopolov (2014) suggests that mainstream successes such as The Sapphires are ‘redefining the Australian cinematic consciousness’ (79) and are challenging previous portrayals of Indigenous people by creating characters who have agency and who refuse to be limited to the role of victim (82). Blair continued his use of genre in his next film, which is a romantic comedy called Top End Wedding released in 2019. The film stars Miranda Tapsell as Lauren, who lives a middle-class life in the city (Adelaide) but decides to have her wedding back in her home-town of Darwin (in the Northern Territory). When Lauren and her fiancé Ned (Gwilym Lee) arrive in Darwin, they discover that Lauren’s mother Ronelle (Shari Sebbens) has gone missing. Eventually they track her to the Tiwi Islands (north of Darwin) which is where she is from originally. The film contains a clash of cultures sub plot as Ned’s family also travel to Darwin, and then Tiwi for the wedding. Ned’s mother is a white middle-class woman who attempts to be supportive but initially displays snobbery at the working-­ class family her son is marrying into. There seems to be less concern at Lauren’s racial identity than for her class identity. In the same way as The Sapphires, there is some subtle social commentary embedded into the film, mainly around issues of identity and importance of land and family for Indigenous people. But the main message of the film is once again the centring of Indigenous women, and the film provides its Indigenous characters with agency, which challenges colonial structures. The film maintains a bright and cheerful tone throughout, and utilises the lush tropical landscape effectively. It has a happy ending, which does create a counter point to the social realist films representing trauma and dysfunction. Films like Top End Wedding are still important Indigenous films, and go towards the variety of representation hoped for by Marcia Langton. Another film that uses genre unashamedly is Richard Frankland’s 2009 comedy Stone Bros. This is essentially a stoner road film with Indigenous protagonists. Australian film has long engaged with the road film genre, with many iconic films structured around a road trip such as the original Mad Max (1979, George Miller), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994, Stephan Elliot), and Wolf Creek (2005, Greg McLean). The preoccupation with the road film trope has been linked to the history of

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colonisation in Australia, as roads play a significant part in the settlement of Australia and dispossession of Indigenous people from their land, as well as the method for transporting Indigenous children taken from their families by the authorities (Gall and Probyn-Rapsey 2006, 425). White Australians have seen the road as both a symbol of freedom (in a similar way to the American road film genre), but also as a potential danger due to a discomfort with the unknown areas outside of the cities, hence the blending of the road trip genre with horror and crime in films such as Wolf Creek (Gall and Probyn-Rapsey 2006, 426). Road films also tend to be working-class films—there are few that feature middle- or upper-class people seeking escape of redemption along the road. And the sorts of obstacles faced by characters along the road are usually amplified by their lack of funds and resources (in some road films, the ability to travel is hampered due to a lack of vehicle, which can lead to vulnerability as characters are forced to hitchhike). Indigenous filmmakers have subverted the colonial road trip genre and claimed the road for Indigenous people, while acknowledging the specific difficulties and discrimination Indigenous people face while on the road such as racist attitudes leading to the refusal of lifts, or increased police surveillance and the constant fear of racial violence from white people (Gall and Probyn-Rapsey 2006, 427). In Frankland’s film, Eddie (Luke Carroll) is a cleaner in museum who loses his job. Eddie’s slacker cousin Charlie (Leon Burchill) loses a sacred stone that Eddie had been given by his since deceased uncle and the two men embark on a road trip to locate the stone and return it to Eddie’s uncle’s country. The trip is full of comic mishaps as Eddie and Charlie encounter various misfit characters and spend much of the time stoned. In this regard Frankland maintains the genre’s conventions, but by creating two Indigenous protagonists, he is disrupting the history of road films in Australia that have almost exclusively featured white people, with Indigenous people occupying the periphery. The film is also the first feature-­length Indigenous comedy, and this also makes it significant politically. The characters are flawed (they are stoned slackers), but they also show the viewer that regardless of these characteristics, their connection to country, family and tradition is very important. There are also some elements of the supernatural in this film which are completely normalised and ties in with some aspects of Indigenous spirituality. The road also features in Ivan Sen’s 2013 Mystery Road, which is more rooted in the crime/noir genre with an element of the western too (Ward 2016, 111) in what has been described as ‘outback noir’ (Dolgopolov

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2016, 11). Outback noir is not set in the urban confines of typical noir and is characterised by its use of the Australian landscape—seemingly a contradiction to the stylistic expectations of noir because the outback is so bright and vast with an unending horizon, leading to an ‘incongruity’ (Dolgopolov 2016, 11) that utilises the openness and brightness of the landscape as a cloaking/hiding device (Dolgopolov 2016, 12). Sen’s film is a murder mystery set in a rural town in Queensland. The film’s protagonist is police detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), who returns to the town after spending time training in the city. He finds himself facing discrimination from both white people in the town who do not want to cooperate with an Indigenous man, and the local Indigenous community who treat him with suspicion because he had previously left the town, and because of the difficult relationship many Indigenous people have with the police due to the history of police racism and brutality towards Indigenous people (Dolgopolov 2013, 12). The figure of the police officer is one of the most common characters with working-class backgrounds/occupations seen in mainstream film. While there are variations in the representations, from the corrupt cop to the hero cop and the troubled cop with a drinking or relationship problems, in general they are usually from working-class backgrounds (even if some Hollywood representations seem to overestimate the salaries they earn and the homes they can therefore afford). The Indigenous detective challenges this well-worn character by presenting the complications surrounding Indigenous people joining the police, considering the aforementioned history. The crime that Jay is investigating is also political—the murder of a young Indigenous woman which is being covered up by some white men in the community. This is political because the abuse and exploitation of Indigenous girls by white men does not often make the news in Australia, and the suspicious deaths of poor and marginalised Indigenous people are not often provided with the adequate resources to be investigated properly. Mystery Road uses the genre conventions of the cop with personal relationship problems and a maverick approach and applies this to issues affecting Indigenous people across Australia.

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Realism and Implied Politics (Beneath Clouds, Toomelah) Ivan Sen utilised the road film trope in his earlier film Beneath Clouds (his first feature, released in 2001), but in Beneath Clouds and his later film Toomelah (2011), he uses realism as his chosen form and creates gritty dramas with documentary aesthetics. Both films are very political, but the politics is embedded into the world of each film and is mostly implied rather than explicit. Beneath Clouds follows two Indigenous teenagers, Lena (Dannielle Hall) and Vaughn (Damian Pitt) as they try to reach the city. Lena wants to escape her rural working-class New South Wales Indigenous family and find her white Irish father who lives in Sydney. She does not feel connected to her Indigenous heritage, and her fair skins means she can ‘pass’ as white, which provides her with some privilege not afforded to Indigenous people with darker skin. Vaughn is on the run from a rural correctional facility—he has heard that his mother is sick and wants to see her. The teens form an initially reluctant friendship but help each other on their journey. They realise that they need to rely on each other because they are likely to be treated with suspicion by the white people they encounter (they are helped by some Indigenous people they meet on the way). Sen treats the landscape and the road they travel as a character in the film—the landscape is filled with reminders of colonisation such as wheat silos, and corn fields. The road is dangerous for Lena and Vaughn, they do not find redemption and escape, they must constantly evade the police and other white people who intend them harm. The clouded sky looms large throughout the film, and Lena and Vaughn are effectively trapped by the landscape, partly because they are not connected with their country. They have no resources and must hustle their way to their destination and rely on their wits and the occasional kindness of people along the way. There is very little dialogue in the film, and Sen uses the visual elements to convey the themes, and while there is one moment in the film when Vaughn shouts at a farmer that the land he farms has been stolen, the politics is implied in Lena and Vaughn’s experiences of alienation and discrimination along the road. In Toomelah, Sen ramps up the realism with a hand-held shooting style and a loose narrative. Toomelah is set in on Toomelah Station which is a former Aboriginal mission in rural New South Wales. Aboriginal missions were Indigenous communities established by the Australian authorities and churches to house and educate Indigenous people and assimilate

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Indigenous people into white culture. Many former missions such as the one in Toomelah have become neglected by the government and have decaying infrastructure, inadequate housing and lack of local jobs for residents. Toomelah has been the subject of sensationalised news reporting and Sen’s film operates as a counter to some of this reporting. While the overall tone of the film is quite grim, there is no judgement cast at the characters, and the main protagonist, young resident Daniel (Daniel Conners) is treated with sympathy. Daniel is a ten-year old Indigenous boy who is not managing well at school and is becoming alienated from his peers. He forms a friendship with a local drug dealer, Linden (Christopher Edwards) and becomes part of the dealer’s ‘family’. Daniel finds friendship and acceptance in Linden’s gang and it becomes an escape from his troubles at school and at home. Daniel’s mother is addicted to drugs, and his father is an alcoholic. He is also troubled by the return of an elderly aunt, who is a member of the Stolen Generations, and who has been clearly traumatised by her experience. Daniel is in danger of becoming increasingly involved in criminal activity and violence himself, particularly when a rival gang leader comes to the town, but in the end Daniel chooses to reject violence, which despite the overall bleak tone, does suggest some hope for his future. The film was a one-man operation, with Sen entering the community by himself and winning the trust of the local people who act in the film (Woodhead 2011, 38). He has a family connection with Toomelah, and this is how he gained entry and acceptance (Al-Janabi 2012, 32). The community were happy with the final film (Al-Janabi 2012, 33) and a group of people from Toomelah travelled to Sydney to attend the film’s Australian premier at the Sydney Film Festival. I was in the audience that evening and at the Q&A session following the screening, Ivan Sen was told (by a non-Indigenous audience member) that his film was ‘very confronting’ and was asked for his response to that statement. Sen replied that it may have been confronting for the non-­ Indigenous viewer, but for the community from Toomelah the film represented how life is—an everyday reality. In many ways this counters the criticisms levelled at social realist working-class films for being overly focused on dysfunction.

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Adaptation (Bran Nue Dae, Jasper Jones) The focus of this section is the Indigenous filmmaker Rachel Perkins, and two films she has made which are adaptations—one from a stage musical and the other from a novel. Both stories and Perkins’ adaptations for the screen include working-class characters. Bran Nue Dae was released in 2009 and is an adaptation of the musical of the same name written by Indigenous playwright Jimmy Chi in 1990. The film is set in Broome in Western Australia in 1969 and tells the story of Indigenous teenager Willie Johnson (Rocky McKenzie), who is sent to a Christian boarding school in Perth by his mother who wants him to train to be a priest. The boarding school is a strict and restrictive institution run by Father Benedictus (Geoffrey Rush). Father Benedictus wants Willie to assimilate into white culture and to aspire for a life away from Broome. Willie runs away from the school and during his journey back to Broome he meets and is helped by Uncle Tadpole (Ernie Dingo), an old homeless Indigenous man. They both hitch a ride with a pair of white tourists, German ‘Slippery’ (Tom Budge) and Australian Annie (Missy Higgins). Eventually they make it back to Broome, but along the way they encounter various characters and several setbacks, including a night spent in jail. The film is a musical comedy and there are musical numbers throughout. Most of the songs are upbeat and sonically cheerful but have lyrics with a political message that creates an incongruity. This is especially the case with the film’s centre piece, the song ‘Nothing I would rather be’, which includes the chorus, ‘there’s nothing I would rather be/than to be an Aborigine/and watch you take my precious land away/ For nothing gives me greater joy/than to watch you fill each girl and boy/with superficial, existential shit’. This is sung by Willie and the other boys in the boarding school during a school assembly and it is accompanied by a dance routine performed by the boys. The result is somewhat discomforting—it is hard not to sing along to the catchy and chirpy tune, but the lyric of the song points to stolen land and the forced assimilation of Indigenous people into white culture. While many of the songs have upbeat compositions, there is a change of tone in the song ‘Listen to the News’ sung by Uncle Tadpole while he and Willie are in jail for the night. This is a poignant song relating to the issues faced by Indigenous people when their culture is under attack and can also be related to the intense sorrow and depression that has led Indigenous people (mostly men) to take their own lives while in prison. Deaths in custody is a very serious issue in Australia, with a large number of Indigenous

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people either dying as a result of injuries sustained during arrest or while in prison, or due to prisoners taking their own lives. Indigenous people are overrepresented in Australian prisons and as a group, are one of the most incarcerated in the world (Russell and Cunneen 2018, para. 6). The film’s narrative contains a number of twists too that relate to identity and which contribute to the film’s screwball comedy elements. Father Benedictus turns out to be the father of Slippery, and Willie’s mother is Slippery’s mother (and Slippery is therefore Willie’s half-brother). Tadpole is revealed as Willie’s father and eventually after the initial shock, the newly formed family join together and celebrate their Indigenous identities. The colourful tone of the film and the song and dance numbers belie the political messages at the heart of the film about the ways in which Indigenous identity has been compromised by colonialism and the importance of reconnecting with family, culture and country. And the characters within the film are all working class—although Father Benedictus’ class status as a priest and school principle is more ambiguous, none of the other characters are middle or upper class—this is a steadfastly working-class story and setting. Jasper Jones is Perkins’ adaptation of a best-selling novel written by Craig Silvey and published in 2009. Silvey is not an Indigenous author but he created an Indigenous character, Jasper Jones who is wrongfully accused of murdering his white girlfriend in his small 1965 Western Australian town and is helped by his white friend Charlie Bucktin. The book and the film version are examples of Australian Gothic—a genre first used by white colonial writers who viewed rural Australia as ‘unsettling and sinister’ (White 2018, 119). These writers did not understand the Australian environment and felt threatened by their ignorance—particularly because this ignorance (of how to survive) could be deadly. Colonial writers were also unsettled by the presence of Indigenous people and developed ‘secrets, fears and paranoias’ about the landscape and the people who occupied it (Barnes 2017, 160). Perkin’s maintains the novel’s plot but increases the references to racism in the small timber town—not just that directed at Jasper (Aaron L.  McGrath), but also experienced by Charlie’s friend Jeffrey (Kevin Long) who is of Vietnamese background. Charlie (Levi Miller) is not working class. He lives in a respectable middle-class family and it is arguably his class background and his white privilege that leads Jasper to seek his help. There are overt displays of racism from some of the town’s working-­ class residents, but there is also sexual abuse perpetrated by

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another ‘respectable’ middle-class man (which is the reason for Jasper’s girlfriend Laura’s death—she has taken her own life due to her father raping her). Jasper is Indigenous and working class and he lacks the resources and the educational capital of Charlie to be able to solve the crime himself. And he remains the outsider (White 2018, 119). While the crime is solved by Charlie, there is no justice for either Laura or Jasper and only further complications for Jasper when he discovers that the town madman is actually his grandfather, a white man who had rejected his daughter when she revealed she was expecting a child fathered by an Indigenous man. Charlie’s future looks bright—he is smart, resourceful and is on track to benefit from an education, but the secret of Laura’s death is not revealed to the authorities, leaving Jasper with an uncertain future and a continued struggle against racism and discrimination (Van Neerven 2017, 11). The ending suggests the reality for working-class Indigenous people accused of crimes and with no resources to clear their names—a situation that is not confined to the particular time setting of the film. The films discussed in this section are examples of Indigenous self-­ representation and show how important is it that Indigenous stories and histories are told by Indigenous people—challenging the coloniser’s dominance. Thornton’s continuing focus on stories about Indigenous people in remote communities and working on the land also represents the ways in which Indigenous people have been, and continue to be, marginalised by the class system and show how class intersects with race and gender. Indigenous scholars have suggested that films such as Sweet Country should be compulsory viewing for all Australians. Despite the genre being employed, all of these stories exist in the context of a political and social reality: the political reality being the legacy of colonisation and the continuing marginalisation of Indigenous people in Australia, and the social reality being the ways in which everyday life is affected, including the depiction of poverty and hardship. The wave of Indigenous film and TV being produced in Australia at the moment is leading to a shift in the wider public’s understanding of Indigenous issues. The cultural products create empowerment for Indigenous people and force non-Indigenous Australians to acknowledge their continuing role in the oppression of Indigenous people and show that history is not confined to the past. The films made, so far, have certainly been doing what Marcia Langton was calling for in 1993.

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References Al-Janabi, Fay. 2012. Toomelah: From the Outback to Cannes. Inside Film 144: 32–33. Ashuri, Tamar. 2010. I Witness: Re-Presenting Trauma in and By Cinema. The Communication Review 13: 171–192. Barnes, Ann. 2017. Mapping the Landscape with Sound: Tracking the Soundscape for Australian Colonial Gothic Literature to Australian Cinema and Australian Transcultural Cinema. Critical Arts 31 (5): 156–170. Blackmore, Ernie. 2015. ‘Speakin’ Out Blak: New and Emergent Aboriginal Filmmakers Finding Their Voices. In Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, ed. Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, 61–80. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Buckmaster, Luke. 2009. Interview with Warwick Thornton, writer/director of Samson and Delilah. Crikey, May 12. https://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2009/05/12/interview-with-warwick-thornton-writerdirector-ofsamson-delilah/. Casey, Patrick, and Jason Di Rosso. 2018. Indigenous Director Warwick Thornton Invites Australia to Learn More about Its History on January 26. ABC News, February 19. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-25/warwick-thorntonon-sweet-country/9352156. Collins, Felicity. 2010. After the Apology: Reframing Violence and Suffering in First Australians, Australia and Samson and Delilah. Continuum 24 (1): 65–77. Davis, Therese. 2009. Love and Social Marginality in Samson and Delilah. Senses of Cinema, July. http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/samsonand-delilah/. Dawson, Nick. 2012. Five Questions with Satellite Boy Director Catriona McKenzie. Filmmaker Magazine, September 10. https://filmmakermagazine. com/51563-five-questions-with-satellite-boy-director-catriona-mckenzie/#. XliIW5Nuai4. Dolgopolov, Greg. 2013. Dances with Genre: Mystery Road. Metro Magazine (177): 8–14. ———. 2014. Beyond Black and White: Indigenous Cinema and the Mainstream. Metro Magazine (181): 78–83. ———. 2016. Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and Outback Noir. Metro Magazine (190): 7–13. Gall, Adam, and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey. 2006. Ivan Sen and the Art of the Road. Screen 47 (4): 425–439.

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Griffin, Lynn, Steven Griffin, and Michelle Trudgett. 2017. At the Movies: Contemporary Australian Indigenous Cultural Expressions Transforming the Australian Story. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 47 (2): 131–138. Haskins, Victoria, and Anne Scrimgeour. 2015. ‘Strike Strike, We Strike’: Making Aboriginal Domestic Labor Visible in the Pilbara Pastoral Workers’ Strike, Western Australia, 1946–1952. International Labor and Working Class History 88: 87–108. Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. 1991. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hokari, Minoru. 2000. From Wattie Creek to Wattie Creek: An Oral Historical Approach to the Gurindji Walk-Off. Aboriginal History 24: 98–116. Kaplan, E.  Ann. 2000. Aborigines, Film, and Moffatt’s Night Cries—A Rural Tragedy: An Outsider’s Perspectives. In Picturing the ‘Primitif:’ Images of Race in Daily Life, ed. Julie Marcus, 61–73. NSW: LHR Press. Kaplan, E. Ann, and Ban Wang, eds. 2004. Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Langton, Marcia. 1993. ‘Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things. North Sydney: The Commission. Lines, Alex. 2018. Interview with Warwick Thornton, Director of Sweet Country. Film Inquiry, February 6. https://www.filminquiry.com/interviewwarwick-thornton-director-sweet-country/. McNiven, Liz. N.D. Curator’s notes: Torres Strait Islanders 1898. Australian Screen Online. https://aso.gov.au/titles/historical/torres-strait-islanders/notes/. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2004. Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation. In Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 75–88. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Phillips, Richard. 2009. ‘Cinema Is a Lie That Tells the Truth about Life’ Warwick Thornton Discusses Samson and Delilah with the WSWS. World Socialist Website, May 14. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/inte-m14.html. Porter, Amanda. 2015. Riotous or Righteous Behavior? Representations of Subaltern Resistance in the Australian Mainstream Media. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 26 (3): 289–304. Rekhari, Suneeti. 2008. The ‘Other’ in Film: Exclusions of Aboriginal Identity from Australian Cinema. Visual Anthropology 21: 125–135. Russell, Sophie, and Cunneen, Chris. 2018. As Indigenous incarceration rates keep rising, justice reinvestment offers a solution. The Conversation, December 11. https://theconversation.com/asindigenous-incarceration-rates-keeprising-justice-reinvestment-offers-a-solution-107610. Stefanoff, Lisa. 2006. Making Whites Obsolete. Meanjin 65 (1): 114–121.

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Stratton, Jon. 2015. The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes: Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires. Continuum 29 (1): 17–31. Van Neerven, Ellen. 2017. Through the Window: The Trap of Curiosity in Rachel Perkins. Jasper Jones. Metro Magazine (193): 7–11. Ward, Sarah. 2016. Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia. Screen Education (81): 110–115. White, Claire. 2018. ‘Can’t Be in This Place Anymore’: The Australian Gothic and the Oppressive Home in Jasper Jones. Screen Education (88): 118–123. Woodhead, Jacinda. 2011. A Remote Possibility? The Uncomfortable Realities of Toomelah. Metro Magazine (170): 38–40.

CHAPTER 7

Afterword

In February 2020, Bong Joon-ho’s satirical drama, Parasite, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This was a significant moment for world film because the award put the South Korean filmmaker on the map (at least as far as the English-speaking world is concerned) and opened up interest in films in languages other than English. But it was also significant because of the film’s commentary on class structures in South Korea. Bong’s film is a biting satire that cuts into the hierarchies within South Korean culture. Parasite is a critique of class, and the attention provided by the Oscar win brought discussions of class into the open too. Bong’s film is beautifully made—it is hard to fault its structure, pacing, use of mise en scène, performances and music. But there was something about the film that made me uncomfortable. While Bong does portray the rich family (the Parks) as shallow and ultimately only interested in themselves, he also represents the working-class family (the Kims) as devious and prepared to ruin the livelihoods of other working-class people in their efforts to be employed by the Park family. There is something pathological about the Kim family—their class status, the fact that they live in a sub-basement that at one point is filled with sewerage renders them as lesser human than the refined Parks. They will do anything to better their situation, even if that means deceiving their employers and resorting to violence to maintain their employment. When they are left in charge of the Park’s pristine home, they are reduced to stealing the boss’ alcohol and acting slovenly, making a mess with their snacks. They are uncouth, prone to aggression © The Author(s) 2020 S. Attfield, Class on Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7_7

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and untrustworthy. While this is a satire, this representation reinforces stereotypes of working-class people, and despite some class snobbery shown by the Park family, it is hard to empathise with the Kims. They are survivors, but at any cost, it would seem. There is no sense of solidarity between them and any other working-class people in the same situation. Most of the reviews of the film have lauded Bong’s representation, but I did find one that shared my sentiment. Yoon (2020) states that Bong ‘misses the mark in his portrayal of the country’s economic crisis and plays on stereotypes of the working class in an attempt to critique capitalism (para. 1). I agree with Yoon—this review suggests an understanding working-­class life from the inside and dismay at the stereotypical representations. I hope that Parasite has sparked interest in films that explore class, but like Yoon (2020, para. 6), I would like to see more films that acknowledge the structures of inequality rather than focus on individual behaviours or responses. To set out to survey film from around the world is ambitious and bound to lead to many omissions. And to suggest that there are commonalities between people from different countries and cultures based on their class positions is also bold. It is bold because there are disagreements about class; what it means, and how it works. Some might suggest that it isn’t possible to compare the life of a British retail worker with an Indian farmer. And of course, there are lots of differences in terms of the levels of poverty and of oppression and so on. But I am arguing that there are commonalities and these commonalities make it possible to group films together regardless of the country that produced them. This is not to homogenise experience, and it is very important to acknowledge that oppression is layered and intersectional. As noted throughout this book, there are people who suffer more because their class position is combined with their marginalised position as a woman, a person of colour, a queer person and so on. The commonalities are around the experience of powerlessness—of being oppressed by systems and structures of exclusion, of not having a voice or of being dismissed and ignored when trying to speak up. There are commonalities linked to the experience of economic hardship and its physical and psychological toll. Poverty is not a competition, and it should be possible to empathise with anyone experiencing hardship, regardless of who they are or where they live. Other commonalities are more positive— the understanding of the importance of community and family to provide support and comfort, the resilience and strength of working-class people around the world and the ability to use humour as a survival tool. And

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there is the shared desire for representation—for people to see themselves, or people they can relate to, on screen, in varied and diverse forms, to have lives and experiences validated and to be empowered by good representation. There is the understanding that such representations can shift opinion—they can challenge stereotypes and can lead people to act differently and to demand those in power to act differently too. I hope that this book illustrates these possibilities, at least a little. But there is plenty that this book has not done, and there is more work in various areas. There could be more on the relevance of a filmmaker’s background. While I have touched on this in some chapters, I have not fully analysed the differences in representations that can occur depending on whether a filmmaker is working class or not. And how far-removed from a working-class context can a filmmaker be and still claim to be working class? If a grandparent was working class or a great-grandparent? Does it depend on the understanding of that working-class background? Is it enough for a middle-class filmmaker to be a Marxist—to be interested in making art that serves those who are marginalised, or does a direct link to working-class life make for a better representation? There needs to be more research on the middle-class domination of the creative arts and the barriers faced by working-class people wanting to get into filmmaking. While the advent of video and technology such as smartphones may have democratised filmmaking to some extent, the majority of people who go to film school and who make films are still middle class. Can the barriers be overcome? Are they due to lack of infrastructure and resources or are they also psychological, in that working-class people do not feel ‘smart’ enough to become filmmakers. Or is that they do not think it is worthwhile because films are not about working-class people? I have not investigated the working-class audience, and there are many questions left unanswered. Do working-class audiences around the world want to watch films that reflect their lives, especially if those lives are hard? Or would they prefer to escape, to enter the cinema and be removed from their hardships for a couple of hours? If working-class audiences are not watching art films is this because they might perceive them as too ‘difficult’ based on a perception that art films require formal levels of education to be enjoyed? If many of the films mentioned in this book are really only watched by middle-class people, what is the point of making them? What are they really for? I have had the experience of watching a working-class film in a cinema full of middle-class patrons—this was an alienating experience and brought my own working-class background and understanding

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of hardship into sharp focus. As far as I was concerned, the people in that cinema didn’t really ‘get’ the film—not in the same way I did, not as a physical punch in the guts. But they liked and appreciated the film and thought it was powerful and important. If the cinema had been full of people who knew what poverty felt like, how would they have reacted? Maybe with the silence and knot in the stomach that I did? This book also has not engaged with the invisible labour of filmmaking. I have focused on the film directors (with passing mention here and there to a writer or cinematographer), which assumes the position of the filmmaker as auteur and there is no examination here of the collaborative nature of filmmaking—not just of the artistic side, but of the film product as a whole. A film set consists of many workers. There are set builders— carpenters, electricians, painters, dressmakers and so on. People on set need to be fed, and so there are caterers and wait staff. Cleaners are employed. Drivers are needed. The lists are long, and while some of these workers might have their names included in the credits, many will not, and only the most dedicated film buffs stay to read all of the credits. The filmmakers and the actors may also be employing working-class people to take on tasks/work that facilitates their presence on set. They might employ childminders or house cleaners and gardeners. There is more needed on the labour involved and the kinds of hierarchies that exist among film crews and on set. There are many films not included in this book, purely because there just was not enough space to include them all. Choosing which ones not to write about was difficult, and more films would come to mind as I decided what to include. I’ve tried to list some further films in each chapter, but if I were to provide a list of all the working-class films I’ve seen, it would stretch over several pages. Omissions mean opportunities, and the work that is still to be done will hopefully be taken up by other scholars. And I hope that these scholars will be committed to advocating for working-­class people and in the process, doing their small bit to dismantle class structures and create a more equal world. Students often ask me what my favourite film is, and I tell them that it has not been made yet. When it is made, it will be about a working-class girl from a council estate who loves to watch films.

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Reference Yoon, Hahna. 2020. Why Parasite Misses the Mark as a Commentary on South Korean Society. Guardian, February 5. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2020/feb/05/why-parasite-misses-mark-commentar y-southkorean-society.

Filmography

Abu-Assad, Hany, dir. 2005. Paradise Now. Germany: Razor Film Produktion GmbH. ———, dir. 2013 Omar. Palestine/USA: ZBROS. Akin, Faith, dir. 2004. Head-On. Germany: Bavaria Film International. Almodóvar, Pedro, dir. 1984. What Have I Done to Deserve This?. Tesauro, Spain: Kaktus Producciones Cinematográficas. ———, dir. 2000. All About My Mother. Spain: El Deseo. ———, dir. 2006. Volver. Spain: El Deseo. Antoine, André, dir. 1918. Les Travailleurs de la Mer. France: SCAGL. Arnold, Andrea, dir. 2009. Fish Tank. England: UK Film Council. Asante, Ama, dir. 2004. A Way of Life. England: AWOL Films Ltd. Ayres, Tony, dir. 2007. The Home Song Stories. Australia: Film Victoria. Bahrani, Ramin, dir. 2005. Man Push Cart. USA: Noruz Films. Baker, Sean, dir. 2015. Tangerine; USA: Duplass Brothers Productions. Barker, Reginald, dir. 1915. The Italian. New York: New York Motion Picture Corp. Barnaby, Jeff, dir. 2014. Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Canada: Prospector Films. Barnard, Clio, dir. 2010. The Arbor. London: Artangel Media. Begic, Aida, dir. 2008. Snow. Paris: Les Films de l’Après-Midi. Blair, Wayne, dir. 2012. The Sapphires. Australia: Goalpost Pictures ———, dir. 2019. Top End Wedding. Australia: Goalpost Pictures. Boo, Ji-young, dir. 2015. Cart. South Korea: Myung Films. Broomfield, Nick, dir. 2006. Ghosts. England: Film4. Burnat, Emad, and Guy, Davidi, dirs. 2011. Five Broken Cameras. Paris: Alegria Productions. Bustamante, Jayro, dir. 2015. Ixcanul. Guatemala: La Casa de Production.

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Caradee, Serhat, dir. 2009. Cedar Boys. NSW: Screen Australia. Chadha, Gurinder, dir. 2002. Bend it Like Beckham. England: Bend it Films. ———, dir. 2019. Blinded by the Light. New York: New Line Cinema. Chan, Ching-lin, dir. 2016. The Island that All Flow By. Taiwan: Greener Grass Productions. Chaplin, Charlie, dir. 1917. The Immigrant. USA: Lone Star Corporation. Chow, Stephen, dir. 2001. Shaolin Soccer. Hong Kong: Star Overseas Ltd. Constantine, Elaine, dir. 2014. Northern Soul. England: Stubborn Heart Films. Cronenberg, David, dir. 2007. Eastern Promises, London: Kudos Film and Television. Cuarón, Carlos, dir. 2008. Rudo y Cursi. Mexico: Cha Cha Cha Films. Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre, Dardenne, dirs. 2014. Two Days, One Night. Paris: Archipel 35. De Sica, Vittorio, dir. 1948. The Bicycle Thieves. Italy: Produzioni De Sica. Dibb, Saul, dir. 2005. Bullet Boy. London: Shine Limited. Do, Khoa, dir. 2009. Mother Fish. Australia: Imaginefly. Eisenstein, Sergei, dir. 1825. The Battleship Potemkin. Russia: Mosfilm. ———, dir. 1925. The Strike. Russia: Goskino Proletkult. Ekaragha, Destiny, dir. 2013. Gone Too Far!. London: Poisson Rouge Pictures. El Hosaini, Sally, dir. 2012. My Brother the Devil. London: Rooks Nest Entertainment. Ermler, Fridrikh, dir. 1926. Katka the Appleselle. Soviet Union: Sovkino. Fan, Lixin, dir. 2009. Last Train Home. Montreal: EyeSteelFilm. Faye, Safi, dir. 1975. Kaddu Beykat. Senegal: Safi. Field, David, dir. 2009. The Combination. NSW: See Thru Films. Flaherty, Robert, dir. 1932. Industrial Britain. England: Empire Marketing Board Film Unit Frankland, Richard, dir. 2009. Stone Bros. Australia: Screen West. Gal, Irit, dir. 2012. White Night. Israel: Go2Films. Gavron, Sarah, dir. 2007. Brick Lane. England: Film4 Productions. Geara, Fernández, dir. 2015. Nana. Dominican Republic: Cine Carmelita. Gnadt, Philip, and Mickey, Yamine, dirs. 2017. Gaza Surf Club. Germany: Little Bridge Pictures. Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 1960. À bout de soufflé. France: Les Films Impéria. Gowariker, Ashutosh, dir. 2001. Lagaan. India: Aamir Khan Productions. Granik, Debra, dir. 2010. Winter’s Bone. Los Angeles: Anonymous Content. Grierson, John, dir. 1929. Drifters. England: New Era Films. Haigh, Andrew, dir. 2011. Weekend. Scotland: Synchronicity Films. Hunt, Courtney, dir. 2008. Frozen River. USA: Cohen Media Group. Hüseyin, Metin, dir. 2002. Anita and Me. USA: EM Media. Iñárritu, Alejandro González, dir. 2010. Biutiful. Mexico: Cha Cha Cha Films Jasset, Victorin-Hippolyte, dir. 1913. La Terre. France: Éclair.

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Jaugery, Florence, dir. 2009. La Yuma. Nicaragua: Ivania Films. Jenkins, Barry, dir. 2016. Moonlight. New York: A24. Jia Zhangke. 2001. Unknown Pleasures. Hong Kong: Hu Tong Communication. Kader, Karzan, dir. 2012. Bekas. Sweden: Sonet Film AB. Kári, Dagur, dir. 2003. Nói the Albino. Iceland: Zik Zak Kvikmyndir. Kaurismäki, Aki, dir. 2011. Le Harve. Germany: Pandora Film. Kechiche, Abdellatif, dir. 2013. Blue Is the Warmest Colour. France: Quat’sous Films. Khomsiri, Kongkiat, dir. 2007. Muay Thai Chaiya. Thailand: Five Star Production Co. Ltd. Kongara, Sudha, dir. 2016. Irudhi Suttru. India: Y NOT Studios. Labaki, Nadine, dir. 2007. Caramel. Lebanon: Les Films de Beyrouth. Lee, Ang, dir. 2005. Brokeback Mountain. USA: River Road Entertainment. Lee, Francis, dir. 2017. God’s Own Country. London: British Film Institute. Lim, Lung-Yin, dir. 2019. Ohong Village. Taiwan: Mirror Stage Films. Lioret, Philippe, dir. 2009. Welcome. France: Nord-Ouest Productions. Loach, Ken, dir. 1966. Cathy Come Home. England: BBC1. ———, dir. 1967. Poor Cow. England: Vic Films Productions. ———, dir. 1969. Kes. Woodfall Film Productions. ———, dir. 2001. The Navigators. Spain Alta Films. ———, dir. 2016. I, Daniel Blake. England: Sixteen Films. ———, dir. 2019. Sorry We Missed You. England: Sixteen Films. Longford, Raymond, dir. 1918. The Sentimental Bloke. Adelaide: Southern Cross Feature Film Company. Lumière, Louis, dir. 1896. Carmaux, défournage du coke. France: Lumière. Maidi, Majid, dir. 2001. Baran. Iran: Fouad Nahas. Maneglia, Juan Carlos, and Tana, Schémbori, dirs. 2012. 7 Boxes. Paraguay: Maneglia—Schémbori Realizadores. Marshall, Garry, dir. 1990. Pretty Woman. USA: Touchstone Pictures. Marston, Joshua, dir. 2005. Maria Full of Grace. USA: HBO Films. Martens, Magnus, dir. 2003. United. Norway: 4 1/2 Film. McKenzie, Catriona, dir. 2012. Satellite Boy. Australia: Satellite Films. Meadows, Shane, dir. 2006. This is England. Sheffield: Warp Films. Meirelles, Fernando, and Katia, Lund, dirs. 2003. City of God. Brazil: O2 Films. de Mille, William C., dir. 1916. The Blacklist. California: Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Nibley, Lydia, dir. 2009. Two Spirits. USA: Say Yes Quickly Productions. Nyoni, Rungano, dir. 2017. I Am Not a Witch. England: BFI Film Fund. Onwubolu, Andrew, dir. 2019. Blue Story. London: Joi Productions. Park, Jung-bum, dir. 2010. The Journals of Musan. South Korea: Secondwind Film. Perkins, Rachel, dir. 2009. Bran Nue Dae. Australia: Robyn Kershaw Productions. ———, dir. 2017. Jasper Jones. Australia: Bunya Productions. Pesonen, Antti Heikki, dir. 2014. Head First. Finland: Helsinki-Filmi.

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Protazanov, Yakov, dir. 1917. The Man from the Restaurant. Moscow: Mezhrabpomfilm. Pyr’ev, Ivan, dir. 1939. Tractor Drivers. Ukraine: Dovzhenko Film Studios Rasquin, Marcel, dir. 2012. Hermano. Venezuela: A&B Producciones. Ray, Satyajit, dir. 1955. Pather Panchali. India: Government of West Bengal. Rees, Dee, dir. 2011. Pariah. USA: Chicken And Egg Pictures. Reichardt, Kelly, dir. 2008. Wendy and Lucy. USA: Film Science. Reisz, Karel, dir. 1960. Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. England: Woodfall Film Productions. Renoir Jean, dir. 1936. Toni. France: Films Marcel Pagnol. ———, dir. 1938. La Bête Humaine. France: Paris Film. Richardson, Tony, dir. 1959. Look Back in Anger. England: Orion. ———, dir. 1962. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. England: Woodfall Film Productions. Riley, Boots, dir. 2018. Sorry to Bother You. USA: Significant Productions. Rizvi, Anusha, dir. 2010. Peepli Live. India: Aamir Khan Productions. Rocha, Glauber, dir. 1964. Black God, White Devil. Brazil: Copacabana Filmes. Rondon, Mariana, dir. 2013. Pelo Malo. Venezuela: Artefactos S.F. Roy, Bimal, dir. 1953. Do Bigha Zamin. India: Bimal Roy Productions. Sciamma, Céline, dir. 2014. Girlhood. France: Hold Up Films. Sembène, Ousmane, dir. 1963. Borom Sarret. Senegal: Filmi Domirev. ———, dir. 2004. Moolaadé; Senegal: Filmi Doomireew. Sen, Ian, dir. 2002. Beneath Clouds. Australia: Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC). ———, dir. 2011. Toomelah. Australia: Bunya Productions. ———, dir. 2013. Mystery Road. Australia: Bunya Productions. Shanmugam, Devanand, dir. 2013. The Gangs of Tooting Broadway. London: Indian Summer Films. Sobel, Adam, dir. 2017. The Workers Cup. Vienna: Autlook Film Sales. Surya, Mouly, dir. 2017. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts. Indonesia: Cinesurya Pictures. Tait, Charles, dir. 1906. The Story of the Kelly Gang; Melbourne: J & N Nevin Tait. Take, Masaharu, dir. 2014. 100 Yen Love. Japan: Toei Video Company. Tamasese, Tusi, dir. 2011. The Orator. New Zealand: Blueskin Films Ltd. Thornton, Warwick, dir. 2009. Samson and Delilah. Alice Springs: CAAMA Productions. ———, dir. 2018. Sweet Country. Australia: Bunya Productions. Truffaut, François, dir. 1959. Les Quatre Cents Coups. France: Les Films du Carrosse. Tsai, Ming-liang, dir. 2006. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. Taiwan: Homegreen Films. ———, dir. 2013. Stray Dogs. Taipei: Homegreen Films. Varda, Agnès, dir. 1954. La Pointe Courte. France: Ciné Tamaris.

 FILMOGRAPHY 

205

Waititi, Taika, dir. 2010. Boy. New Zealand: Whenua Films. Warchus, Matthew, dir. 2014. Pride. UK: Pathe UK. Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, dir. 2004. Tropical Malady. France: Backup Media. Welham, Leanne, dir. 2018. Pili. London: Studio Soho Films Yukisada, Isao, dir. 2001. Go!. Japan: Toei Tokyo.

Index1

A Aboriginal, 167, 171, 181, 186 Abstract, 48 Abu-Assad, Hany, 117–119 Accented cinema, 91, 92 Adaptation, 9, 11, 13, 19, 85, 95, 101, 104, 147, 188–190 Aesthetic of hunger, 15 Affect, 29–31, 55, 93, 117, 128, 170, 174 Africa, 16 Afro-Caribbean, 90, 97, 99–101, 120 Agency, 13, 30, 45, 49, 123, 127, 168, 181, 183 Akin, Faith, 114 Akingbade, Ayo, 100 Akinola Davies Jr., 100 Almodóvar, Pedro, 1, 126–131, 149 America, 8–9, 14–15, 41, 63, 81, 89, 117, 157 Ammo, Shola, 100 Animation, 61–63 Arab, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 117

Arnold, Andrea, 49, 136–139 Asante, Ama, 101, 137 Asylum seeker, 20, 90, 106–112, 119, 120 Australia, 9, 17, 32, 49, 76, 90, 93, 101, 102, 107, 109, 114, 115, 167–173, 175–178, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188–190 Australian gothic, 189 Authenticity, 12, 17, 28, 30, 53, 78, 85, 102, 109, 127, 145, 171 B Bahrani, Ramin, 20, 41, 42, 90 Baker, Sean, 21, 154 Barnaby, Jeff, 140, 141 Barnard, Clio, 137, 144, 145 Begic, Aida, 55 Biopic, 21, 63–65, 71 Black, 16, 66, 68, 70, 77, 78, 90, 95, 97, 99–101, 118, 120, 125, 136, 151–154

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Attfield, Class on Screen, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7

207

208 

INDEX

Black British, 99, 101, 103 Blair, Wayne, 21, 181, 183 Blue-collar, 6, 28 Borders, 39–41, 81, 107, 108, 111, 112, 116, 157 Bourdieu, Pierre, 4–6, 70, 137, 141 Boxing, 21, 71, 75, 76, 134, 135 Brazil, 77–80 Broomfield, Nick, 113, 114 Burnat, Emad, 119 Bushranger films, 9 Bustamante, Jayro, 55 C Canada, 37, 38, 112, 140, 141 Caradee, Serhat, 20, 101, 102 Chadha, Gurinder, 103, 105, 106 China, 38, 39, 74, 75, 83, 85, 114 Chinese-Australian, 90, 114 Ching-lin, Chan, 142, 143 Chow, Stephen, 75 Cinematography, 83, 98, 138, 151, 152 Collective action, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43–45, 161 Colonial violence, 102 Colonisation, 15, 112, 168–170, 172, 174, 180, 181, 184, 186, 190 Columbia, 49 Comedy, 18, 21, 34, 35, 55, 61, 73–75, 100, 103–105, 113, 124, 128, 129, 131, 135, 143, 149, 176, 181, 183, 184, 188, 189 Community, 2, 6, 11, 13, 20, 21, 30, 37, 52, 53, 55, 59–62, 64, 65, 70–72, 76–79, 83, 84, 90–92, 96–98, 100–106, 108–110, 113, 115, 126, 134, 136, 139, 140, 146, 151, 152, 159, 160, 168, 169, 171–173, 175, 176, 182, 185–187, 190, 196

Constantine, Elaine, 70 Council estates, 1, 2, 94–97, 100, 105, 137–139, 139n2, 144, 198 Country, 5, 6, 14, 17–19, 38, 41, 46, 72–74, 78, 83, 85, 89–93, 107, 114, 115, 134, 173, 176, 177, 179–182, 184, 186, 189, 196 Crime, 9, 78, 79, 90, 93–103, 132, 153–156, 184, 185, 190 Critique, 12, 29, 39, 45, 46, 72, 78, 90, 118, 139, 150, 156, 161, 170, 195, 196 Cronenberg, David, 113 Cuarón, Carlos, 73, 74 Cultural capital, 4–6, 98, 182 Cultural memory, 92, 93 Culture, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12–15, 18, 20, 50, 52n1, 53, 59–85, 89–95, 100, 103–107, 112, 115, 117, 130, 136, 140–142, 152, 155, 156, 160, 169–173, 176, 177, 180, 183, 187–189, 195, 196 D Dardenne brothers, 43 Davidi, Guy, 119 de Mille, William C., 9 De Sica, Vittorio, 11, 42, 83 Deleuze, Gilles, 51, 52 Diaspora, 20, 89–120 Dibb, Saul, 97, 98 Discourse, 12, 67, 69, 71, 93, 102, 112, 123, 125, 146, 150, 170 Discrimination, 2, 21, 35, 90, 92, 98, 101, 114, 115, 119, 125, 126, 134, 141, 151, 184–186, 190 Dispossession, 168, 169, 173, 174, 184 Do, Khoa, 109 Doco-drama, 117

 INDEX 

Documentary, 11–13, 20, 29, 31, 37–39, 41, 44, 72–74, 76, 78, 83, 100, 106, 117, 119, 147–149, 155, 159, 169, 171, 186 Dominican Republic, 20, 40 Drama, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37–39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 52, 70, 75, 81, 83, 97, 99–101, 103–105, 108–110, 113–115, 117, 124, 126, 134, 135, 139, 150–152, 154, 155, 158–162, 171, 180, 181, 186, 195 Drug dealers, 28, 46, 94, 109, 136, 141, 153, 187 Dysfunction, 62, 63, 77, 96, 115, 138, 139, 144–146, 153, 174, 183, 187 E Eastern European, 112–115 Eisenstein, Sergei, 10 Ekaragha, Destiny, 100 El Hosaini, Sally, 94, 97, 98 Empathy, 32, 39, 47, 128, 170, 174 Ethnic minority, 20, 93, 97, 99, 100, 102 Ethnographic, 42, 169, 172 Exile, 115 Experimental, 10, 15, 92, 93, 100, 124, 144, 145, 147, 148 Exploitation, 3, 35, 37, 46–48, 60, 90, 114, 133, 176–179, 185 F Fable, 133 Family, 5, 9, 11, 21, 29–31, 33, 37–41, 43, 46, 47, 49, 53, 55, 61, 65, 66, 72, 91, 100, 103–107, 109–111, 114, 115, 127–129, 134–136, 139, 139n2, 140, 142–146, 151,

209

152, 155, 156, 159, 160, 171, 174, 178, 182–184, 186, 187, 189, 195, 196 Fanon, Franzt, 14, 141 Fantasy, 35, 48, 61–63, 74, 75, 83, 84 Femi, Caleb, 100 Feminist, 3, 41, 69, 103, 123–126, 128, 131, 133, 152, 157 Feminist film, 41, 123–125, 131 Fernandez Geara, Tatiana, 40, 41 Field, David, 101 Football, 20, 54, 59, 72–75, 103 Formal economy, 28, 45–49 Framing, 79, 97 France, 10, 11, 108, 112–115 Frankland, Richard, 183, 184 Free cinema, 12 French New Wave, 11, 14 G Gal, Irit, 39 Gangs, 9, 64, 77, 82, 93–99, 114, 131, 132, 135, 136, 187 Gavron, Sarah, 104 Gay, 21, 94, 102, 146–150, 153, 154, 158–160 Gay gaze, 146–150 Gender roles, 67, 125, 134, 142 Genre, 10, 11, 15, 18, 21, 33, 34, 71, 75, 78, 80, 99, 100, 102–104, 109, 127–129, 141, 145, 177, 178, 181–185, 189, 190 Gig economy, 6, 12, 29 Global south, 19, 90, 91, 123 Global working class, 3, 5–6, 59 Gnadt, Philip, 76 Godard, Jean-Luc, 11 Golden age of Indian cinema, 15 Gowariker, Ashutosh, 75 Granik, Debra, 49, 139, 140 Grierson, John, 12

210 

INDEX

H Haigh, Andrew, 158 Hall, Stuart, 7, 66, 67, 69 Hegemony, 103 History, 3, 8–15, 32, 62, 63, 90, 95, 100, 101, 116, 117, 141, 146–148, 150, 156, 168, 170, 178, 182–185, 190 HIV, 53, 54 Hollywood, 1, 9, 14, 17, 32, 33, 42, 50, 71, 73, 79, 103, 113, 124, 125, 128–131, 141, 142, 147–150, 157, 159, 185 Homophobia, 21, 152, 160 Hong Kong, 74, 75, 114 hooks, bell, 7, 8, 125, 151 Humour, 45, 61–63, 74, 82, 83, 118, 127, 131, 133, 144, 176, 182, 196 Hunt, Courtney, 111 Hüseyin, Metin, 104 I Iceland, 82, 83 Identity, 21, 48, 53, 64, 68, 70, 75, 91, 92, 94, 100, 115, 117, 127, 130, 134, 135, 145, 147, 152, 154–156, 160, 171, 182, 183, 189 Illegal immigrants, 46, 108, 112 Immigrant, 9, 20, 21, 37, 41–43, 46–48, 72, 89–93, 95, 108, 109, 111–115, 119, 120, 136, 167 Imperfect cinema, 14, 156 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 46 Inbetweenness, 92, 94 India, 4, 15, 55, 75, 161 Indigenous, 21, 55, 102, 140–142, 167–190 Indigenous Canadian, 140, 141

Indigenous culture, 140, 170–173, 176, 177 Individualism, 44 Indonesia, 131 Industrial disputes, 32–37 Inequalities, 5, 13, 15, 35, 46–48, 90, 98, 139, 196 Informal economy, 28, 45–49 Intercultural cinema, 92, 93 Iran, 107, 110, 111, 161 Iraq, 81 Israel, 39, 76, 116–119 Italian Neo-realism, 129 J Japan, 50, 112–115 Jaugery, Florence, 49, 76 Jenkins, Barry, 21, 151 Ji-young, Boo, 20, 32–34, 36 Job insecurity, 29, 45 Judgement, 21, 74, 98, 137, 141, 143, 155, 173, 181, 187 Jung-bum, Park, 20, 110 K Kári, Dagur, 82, 83 Kaurismäki, Aki, 20, 83, 107–109 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 159, 160 Khomsiri, Kongkiat, 76 Kitchen sink drama, 13, 70 Kongara, Sudha, 76 Kung Fu, 74, 75 L Labaki, Nadine, 161 Latin America, 14–15, 41 Lebanese-Australian, 90, 102 Lebanon, 161 Lee, Ang, 113, 157, 158

 INDEX 

Lee, Francis, 113 Lesbian, 21, 146–148, 151, 159, 160 Lioret, Philippe, 20, 108 Lixin, Fan, 37–39 Loach, Ken, 13, 20, 29–31, 33, 45, 80, 96, 136, 137 Longford, Raymond, 9 Lund, Katia, 77, 78, 80 Lung-Yin, Lim, 52, 52n1 M Maidi, Majid, 110 Male gaze, 124, 159 Maneglia, Juan Carlos, 81 Maori, 20, 61–63 Marks, Laura, 92 Marston, Joshua, 49 Martens, Magnus, 75 Marxism, 3, 5 Masculinity, 27, 93–103, 152, 153, 158 McKenzie, Catriona, 21, 180 McQueen, Steve, 101 Meadows, Shane, 20, 65, 137 Meirelles, Fernando, 77, 78, 80 Melodrama, 10, 32–34, 54, 114, 124, 128–130, 158, 159 Mexico, 72, 73 Middle-class, 1, 5, 9, 13, 33, 41, 70, 77, 98, 120, 123, 134, 137, 138, 151, 152, 156, 160, 183, 189, 197 Migrant, 11, 37–43, 91, 162 Mise-en-scene, 19, 39, 130 Moral judgement, 74, 98 Multicultural London English (MLE), 99, 100 Music, 5, 19, 20, 59–70, 76, 77, 80, 84, 85, 95, 98, 100, 105–107, 118, 129, 130, 139, 175–177, 182, 195

211

Musicals, 10, 15, 21, 85, 105, 106, 153, 181, 182, 188 Muslim, 94, 95, 102 N Narrative, 12, 18, 19, 31, 32, 44, 50, 82, 92, 93, 97, 99, 102–104, 109, 113, 124, 131, 132, 141, 142, 152, 153, 155, 160, 181, 186, 189 Native American, 141, 142, 155, 156 Naturalism, 10, 11, 128, 138, 159 Neoliberalism, 29, 43–45 New Queer Cinema, 149 New Zealand, 20, 61, 63 Nibley, Lydia, 155, 156 Nicaragua, 21, 49, 76, 134 Nigeria, 100 North Korea, 110 Norwegian romantic comedy, 75 Nostalgia, 11, 61–63 Nyoni, Rungano, 21, 133 O Onwubolu, Andrew, 98 Outback noir, 184, 185 Ozu, Yasujirō , 50 P Pakistani, 42, 105, 106, 111, 145 Palestine, 40, 115–118, 174 Paraguyan film, 81 Pedagogical tool, 3, 9 Peirce, Kimberly, 154 Perkins, Rachel, 169, 188, 189 Pesonen, Antti Heikki, 143 Polish, 113 Political reality, 117, 137, 176, 190 Politics, 13, 31, 62, 95, 151, 186–187

212 

INDEX

Popular music, 20, 63, 85 Poverty, 2, 4, 13, 21, 47, 62, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 109, 114, 139, 143, 157, 161, 173, 190, 196, 198 Protazanov, Yakov, 10 Q Qatar, 72, 73 Queer film, 146–150, 157, 159 R Racism, 2, 20, 21, 35, 64, 69, 70, 78, 92, 98, 101, 104–106, 114, 119, 120, 142, 145, 151, 173, 177, 182, 185, 189, 190 Ray, Satyajit, 15 Realism, 10, 11, 13, 30, 33, 35, 42, 70, 118, 129, 141, 175, 181–187 Rees, Dee, 151, 152 Refugee, 20, 89–92, 106–112, 115, 119, 120 Reichardt, Kelly, 44 Renoir, Jean, 11 Representation, 2, 6–8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19–22, 27–29, 32, 39, 40, 42, 44, 48, 53, 55, 62, 63, 65, 67, 74, 75, 78, 79, 93–97, 99–106, 108, 113, 114, 116, 118, 124, 129, 134, 136, 139, 141–143, 145–149, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 161, 168, 170–173, 175, 180, 183, 185, 196, 197 Resilience, 2, 13, 44, 77, 110, 112, 130, 136, 141, 162, 196 Resistance, 14, 20, 60, 67, 75, 107, 114, 119, 151, 169 Riley, Boots, 20, 34–36

Rizvi, Anusha, 55 Road films, 183, 184, 186 Romance, 15, 84, 89, 158–161 Rondon, Mariana, 21, 155–157 Rural workers, 28, 49–55 S Samoa, 49 Sathe, Shrihari, 161 Satire, 61, 195, 196 Sciamma, Céline, 21, 135, 136 Self-representation, 78, 140, 167, 170, 172, 183, 190 Sembene, Ousmane, 16, 54, 55, 161 Sen, Ivan, 184–187 Sex, 21, 28, 46, 54, 68, 84, 100, 113, 127, 129, 131, 138, 142, 143, 154, 155, 157, 159 Sexism, 21 Shanmugam, Devanand, 99 Silent era, 8, 11 Slow cinema, 50 Sobel, Adam, 72–74 Socialist realism, 10 Social realism, 11, 13 Social reality, 80, 81, 190 Solidarity, 32, 35, 36, 42, 43, 129, 133, 135, 140, 155, 160–162, 196 Sound, 19, 54, 55, 63, 64, 76, 84, 147, 175, 177 South Asian, 90, 99, 103, 105 South Korea, 33 Spain, 46, 48, 127, 129, 130, 149 Sport, 20, 59, 71–77, 85, 104 Stereotypes, 22, 73, 74, 83, 93–95, 97, 101, 102, 104, 109, 113, 119, 120, 130, 131, 135, 140,

 INDEX 

153, 155, 159, 160, 170, 172, 175, 196, 197 Street kids, 80 Strikes, 9, 20, 21, 28, 32–34, 64, 125, 160, 179 Subcultures, 61–70 Surfing, 76 Surrealism, 35 Surya, Mouly, 131 Sweden, 108 Symbolic violence, 141, 142, 170 T Tait, Charles, 9 Taiwan, 52, 53, 142 Tanzania, 53 Thailand, 161 Third cinema, 14, 16 Thornton, Warwick, 21, 49, 70, 173–178, 190 Thriller, 81, 96, 112 Torres Strait Islander, 172 Transgender, 128, 146, 147, 154, 155 Transgression, 33, 131–135, 148 Trauma, 63, 81, 110, 117, 126, 132, 140, 141, 172–180, 183 Truffaut, Francois, 11 Tsai, Ming-liang, 19, 55, 162 Tucker Green, Debbie, 100 Turkish German, 90, 115 Tusi Tamasese, 49 Two Spirits, 155–157 U Unemployment, 6, 11–13, 20, 27–55, 59, 66, 76, 77, 84, 109, 146, 157 Unions, 27, 32–35, 37, 44, 45, 60, 125, 160, 179

213

United Kingdom, 4, 29, 49, 59, 90, 93, 100, 101, 107, 109, 113, 120, 136 V Varda, Agnes, 11 Venezuela, 20, 156, 157 Vietnamese, 109, 189 Violence, 14, 15, 32, 64, 70, 75, 78, 80, 82, 97, 98, 101, 102, 113, 116–118, 140–142, 145, 150, 153, 154, 157, 169, 175, 178, 184, 187, 195 W Waititi, Taika, 20, 61, 63 Warchus, Matthew, 21, 160 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 161, 162 Welham, Leanne, 53 Western, 4–6, 19, 27, 36, 38, 74, 76, 80, 82, 90, 101, 102, 107, 109, 123–125, 176, 177, 184 White-collar, 28 Women, 20, 32, 69, 102, 123, 173 Working class definition, 6, 59 feminism, 125–126 studies, 2, 3 Y Youth, 20, 65, 66, 77–85, 93, 95, 96, 100, 118, 135, 136 Yukisada, Isao, 115 Z Zhangke, Jia, 83