Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in Contemporary Cinema

216 Pages·2020·1.925 MB·English

by  Sarah Attfield

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
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A
cknowledgements
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 sud-
den, mass unemployment as businesses and whole industries closed in
attempts to reduce the spread of the virus. The pandemic threw the pre-
cariousness 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 resur-
gence 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
vi 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 encour-
agement 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 working-
class 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 working-
class 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 pas-
sion 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
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
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-s tanding 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 knowl-
edge 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.
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 Work and Unemployment 27
3 Working-Class Culture 59
4 Immigration and Diaspora 89
5 Gender and Sexualities 123
6 Race and Class in Australian Indigenous Film 167
7 Afterword 195
Filmography 201
Index 207
ix
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 cen-
tral 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 stud-
ies and introduce to students some of the films I loved so much as a teen-
aged 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 1
S. Attfield, Class on Screen,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45901-7_1
2 S. ATTFIELD
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 opportuni-
ties 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 dif-
ferences 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 major-
ity 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 autobio-
graphical note. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of autobiog-
raphy 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,