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


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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)