APRIL's SCREENING: Don’t Touch The White Woman!

Sunday 12th APRIL
3pm at 56a Infoshop

Paris no longer exists. The destruction of Paris is only one striking example of the fatal illness that is currently wiping out all the major cities, and that illness is in turn only one of the numerous symptoms of the material decay of this society. But Paris had more to lose than any other. Bliss it was to be young in this city when for the last time it glowed with so intense a flame.
- Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni



******THIS FILM IS ALSO BEING SHOWN 21st MARCH 2PM AT THE RIO CINEMA WITH GUEST SPEAKER (WRITER/FILM-MAKER) NEIL GRAY******


Marco Ferreri, Touche Pas a La Femme Blanche / Don’t Touch The White Woman! (FR, 1973) 109 mins.

Following in the wake of his first considerable success, La Grande Bouffe (1973), Italian filmmaker Marco Ferreri decided to reunite

his ensemble cast and commence filming his next feature, Don’t Touch The White Woman!, right in middle of “le trou des Halles”, a crater formed by the demolition of the ancient market quarter in the centre of Paris. The crater, with its jagged precipices, sculpted by excavation machinery and dynamite, oddly resembled the panoramic canyons depicted in classical westerns.

The plot revolves around a droll and war-crazed General Custer (Marcello Mastroianni), arriving in France with the mission of “pacifying” and removing the natives, in order to clear the area for the construction of railroads (which happens to be the same reason for the actual dismantling of old Les Halles). The location’s particularity provided the locus for Ferreri to apply his particular vision of combined histories by overlapping alternate times and spaces in recent U.S and French history. Thus the natives stand in for the poor inhabitants of Paris, but also refer to the insurgent Vietnamese and Algerians fighting colonial power. War and capitalism, financial speculation and state intervention are connected in a farcical costume drama enacted in midst of the very present creative destruction of urban Paris.

">An essay on the film by Miljenko Skoknic:
http://marcoferreri.weebly.com/ferreri-femme-blanche.html

Script of Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum.htm

An invisible world of work?

I made this pamphlet to accompany Sunday's screening, but unfortunately ran out of time to print it in sufficient copies to distribute on the day. It will be available to download here and may be distributed at future screenings.

Michael Glawogger's film, Workingman's Death, makes the argument that in the 21st Century gruelling physical work has not disappeared completely but rather, by a post-fordist sleight of hand capital has shifted East and South away from a de-industrialising West to seek out cheaper labour in unregulated, non-unionised markets.

This online pamphlet seeks to raise the question of the representation of work. Bringing together two texts, one by Richard Pithouse and one by Sergio Bologna, each with completely opposing views of work, representation and social reproduction, this pamphlet is intended to critically question assumptions about an invisible but 'hegemonic' cognitariat labouring in the service economies of the Global North and an impoverished and aestheticised sub-proletariat labouring in the Global South.

Download the pamphlet
http://www.divshare.com/i/6813821-aab

MARCH's SCREENING: WORKING MAN'S DEATH

SUNDAY 15th MARCH
3pm at 56A Infoshop










Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?
Where can we still find it in the 21st century?
Workingman's Death follows the trail of the HEROES in the illegal mines of the Ukraine, sniffs out GHOST among the sulfur workers in Indonesia, finds itself face to face with LIONS at a slaughterhouse in Nigeria, mingles with BROTHERS as they cut a huge oil tanker into pieces in Pakistan, and joins Chinese steel workers in hoping for a glorious FUTURE.

Meanwhile, the future is now in Germany, where a major smelting plant
of bygone days has been converted into a bright and shiny leisure park.




Work can be many things. Often it is barely visible; sometimes,
difficult to explain;and in many cases, impossible to portray.
Hard manual labor is visible, explainable, portrayable.
This is why I often think of it as the only real work.
Michael Glawogger






Concept and Realization: Michael Glawogger (FILMOGRAPHY)
Austria/Germany 2005 / 122 Min. / 35mm / 1:1,85 / color / DOLBY SRD-EX
Produced by: Lotus Film GmbH/Vienna and Quinte Film/Freiburg
with arte G.E.I.E.


http://www.workingmansdeath.com

Our list of films is long

Here is a rough working list of films that we are interested screening. We'll add details, link to information and make additions to the films listed here:

Blue Collar, 1978 Paul Schrader
The Spook Who Sat by the Door - feature by Ivan Dixon, 1973
Harlan County USA - Barbara Kopple 1976
Tatooed Life - Seijan Suzuki
Pitfall - Hiroshi Teshigara, 1962
Various docs - Frederick Wiseman
Grunwick Affair doc -
Pressure - Horace Ove
Sir, No, Sir - doc on Vietnam refusnik soldiers, David Zeiger, 2005
http://www.sirnosir.com/ and http://militarylies.typepad.com/
Les Hommes du port, Alain Tanner (1995)
WorkingMans Death
Do buy Dubai - short Documentary on Dubai lots of good interviews
Megacities - as above but global
Chop Shop - 2004? film on LA 12year old stakhanovite mechanic/hustler
Salt of the Earth (Union of Mine and Smelter) US Heroic Labour film 1950s
on Mexican mining labour organising - proposed by audience member)
A Man is Not a bird - Dusan Makavejev (lyrical film about Yugoslavian mining town by the director more famous for W.R. Mysteries of the Organism good on worker bureaucracy/theft at work/aristocracy of labour
match factory girl by Kaurismaki)
time out by Laurent cantet
Blue Collar, feature on Detroit auto-workers in the 1980s
Harlan County usa by Barbara Kopple
Frederick Wiseman's docs
Pressure by Horace Ove (1st UK black filmmaker's feature - on kid's search
for work and radicalisation through defeat/disaffection with work) Stewart Home review
documentary 'Workingmans Death' (2005), which is about the non-
disapearance of dangerous, all too material labour,
Seafarers (2004) documentary on sea-faring labour by Jason Massot - http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/74179/seafarers.html

Useful Libcom list of workerist films:
http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/lumi%C3%A8re-first-filmed-workers-1895-1995-22042006

The list of films is from the book Desde que los Lumière filmaron a los obreros: el mundo del trabajo en el cine written by published by Nossa y Jara Editores, S.L. «Madre Tierra» connected to the CNT in Madrid.

This is where things get slightly insane, we have no interest in showing all these films nor producing a comprehensive or encyclopedic programme of films about work, nonetheless if anyone is interested in doing so or wanted to research this subject the resources are here for you. Good luck to ya. a

NOVEMBER's SCREENING: BITTER RICE

BITTER RICE
by Giuseppe de Santis

Date: Sunday 23 November, 2008
Time: 6 PM, film at 6.30 PM sharp!

Location: Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton Street - off Walworth Rd - Elephant and Castle SE17


**** ******* ***********
Bitter Rice is a classic of Italian neorealist cinema. Made in 1949, it is set amongst the mondine, the women rice pickers that every year migrated to the Po Valley from the rest of Italy to work in the rice paddies. Touching upon themes of work, struggle and the changing nature of resistance in post-war Italy, it is also a film rich in melodrama and love intrigue.

"Bitter Rice seems the closest that Italian popular culture of the immediate postwar years gets to making a film about class rather than national unity, about struggling against your class enemy rather than the foreign Nazi. What makes Bitter Rice different is the suggestion that Italy's future will not depend on providence alone but on a class based political struggle to be carried out in the present, within Italian society, against the land owning bosses. In other words, the national war must be followed and completed by the class war. Althought the military struggle is over, another much more domestic struggle remains against the enemy within. It is not fought by the military this time, but by the emerging proletarian masses. In fact, once the soldiers vacate the barracks house, their military function now complete, the rice pickers immediately occupy their place."
(from "Antifascism - cultural politics in italy 1943-46" by D. Ward)

Free Film Screening - Time Out

Full Unemployment Cinema - Free Film Screening


Date: Sunday 26 October, 2008
Time: 4.00pm

Location: The Pullens Centre, Crampton St, SE17


Programme: Time Out / L'Emploi du Temps by Laurent Cantet


I don't feel like a militant, but I'm involved in the world and what's happening. My films show feelings about things, not ideals. They're not very didactic, but Time Out is quite radical in its political meaning because it's revolutionary to try to think of a world without work. What would that world be like? I don't think the world can be without work, but I think some people who won't ever find their place in work should be allowed to live without work. I think people could choose to work for a while, then take a while to just think about what they want to do. – Laurent Cantet on Time Out interviewed by Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly Writern, April 19, 2002.

Time Out explores the alienation of work and the terrifying extent to which work and identity have collapsed into one another. The film draws partly on the case of Jean-Claude Romand, a doctor for the World Health Organization, who killed his wife and their two children, shot his parents, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, and torched his tony suburban Geneva mansion. Romand, it turned out, had never been a doctor, much less worked for the WHO. For 18 years, he had kept up the deception, piling lie upon lie until the money ran out – which is when he decided to take his family's life, as well as his own. Cantet: 'he preferred to kill them rather than be judged by them'.

Though less extreme than its real life inspiration, Time Out is a study of the haunted, paranoid life of a middle manager going through the motions. Vincent, spends his days and occasional nights touring the French highways, pretending to be employed. Vincent has lost his executive position, the kind that's provided his wife and three children a comfortable suburban house and a well-upholstered middle-class life, but he hasn't yet told anyone he's been cut loose. Initially, his silence comes across as evidence of shame and perhaps even moral cowardice, but as the story unwinds and Vincent puts more miles on his new life, it becomes clear that he doesn't fear life without work; he embraces it. What seemed pathetic now takes on the edge of rebellion – the man who wasn't there, it turns out, didn't want to be there at all.

Adapted from:
http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/t/time-out.shtml and http://linkme2.net/ex

Laurent Cantet, Time Out / L'Emploi du Temps (2001) 129 minutes.













Photograph of Serge Livrozet, former prison activist who plays Jean Michel in the film

The Working Class Goes to the Cinema

We've kicked off a series of films about work, non-work, slavery, shirking, sabotage, striking and more with two screenings, firstly of a film by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner produced in Association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Finally Got the News followed by a talk by former Ford Halewood worker Brian Ashton, secondly we screened Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven and Harun Farocki's Workers Leaving the Factory. We'll be continuing with more films and discussion SUNDAY 19th OCTOBER 2008 and approximately monthly thereafter. Watch this space for news of the coming programme