FEBRUARY's SCREENING - Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 28th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave
by Alexander Kluge, 1973 (91 mins)

Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (German with English subtitles)













Roswitha (Alexandra Kluge) has been supporting her family, including her student husband, by performing illegal abortions. Police pressure makes it too dangerous for her to continue doing this, and her husband is forced to go to work in a factory. When she hears that the factory is about to be closed and moved to Portugal (an early example of a cheaper-labor move), she attempts to rally the workers of the factory....


The sixth feature film by Alexander Kluge, architect of the New German Cinema, is also one of his most remarkable. Once again, Kluge works with Godardian distanciation devices (voice-over commentary, intertitles) to playfully examine a social problem, specifically women's liberation. The director's sister, Alexandra, plays the titular domestic slave, a young housewife, mother, part-time abortionist, and would-be labor activist who is repressed by the strictures of family, society, and history.














Through the presentation of women in his films, Kluge hopes to present an alternative mode of production. This is based not on rationalised modes of industrial production that have come to govern our lives since the advent of the industrial and technological revolutions, but on a female productive force (not to be equated with pure biological reproduction). He believes this force is manifested by women in their constant struggle against patriarchal social and political structures such as archaic laws that effectively maintain control over, and attempt to contain and limit, women's bodies and desires. (18) Kluge's theorisation of a female productive force and his female protagonists, I believe, serve as a refreshing antidote to the dominant cinema's representation of active, desiring women as evil femmes fatales simultaneously desired and feared by men. Kluge's women possess agency as they playfully negotiate their own way through the public sphere on their own terms.














[From: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/kluge.html]

Film Times: Doors open 5pm - All films begin at 5.30pm!!

56a Infoshop
56 Crampton Street
London
SE17 3AE

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Suggested reading:

Extract from
Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint
by Silvia Federici


Feminists in the seventies tried to understand the roots of women’s oppression, of women’s exploitation and gender hierarchies. They describe them as stemming from a unequal division of labor forcing women to work for the reproduction of the working class. This analysis was basis of a radical social critique, the implications of which still have to be understood and developed to their full potential.

When we said that housework is actually work for capital, that although it is unpaid work it contributes to the accumulation of capital, we established something extremely important about the nature of capitalism as a system of production. We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave -like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised.

Also, when we said that housework is the work that reproduces not just “life,” but “labor-power,” we began to separate two different spheres of our lives and work that seemed inextricably connected. We became able to conceive of a fight against housework now understood as the reproduction of labor-power, the reproduction of the most important commodity capital has: the worker’s “capacity to work,” the worker’s capacity to be exploited. In other words, by recognizing that what we call “reproductive labor” is a terrain of accumulation and therefore a terrain of exploitation, we were able to also see reproduction as a terrain of struggle, and, very important, conceive of an anti-capitalist struggle against reproductive labor that would not destroy ourselves or our communities.

How do you struggle over/against reproductive work? It is not the same as struggling in the traditional factory setting, against for instance the speed of an assembly line, because at the other end of your struggle there are people not things. Once we say that reproductive work is a terrain of struggle, we have to first immediately confront the question of how we struggle on this terrain without destroying the people you care for. This is a problem mothers as well as teachers and nurses, know very well.

This is why it is crucial to be able to make a separation between the creation of human beings and our reproduction of them as labor-power, as future workers, who therefore have to be trained, not necessarily according to their needs and desires, to be disciplined and regimented in a particular fashion.

It was important for feminists to see, for example, that much housework and child rearing is work of policing our children, so that they will conform to a particular work discipline. We thus began to see that by refusing broad areas of work, we not only could liberate ourselves but could also liberate our children. We saw that our struggle was not at the expense of the people we cared for, though we may skip preparing some meals or cleaning the floor. Actually our refusal opened the way for their refusal and the process of their liberation.

Once we saw that rather than reproducing life we were expanding capitalist accumulation and began to define reproductive labor as work for capital, we also opened the possibility of a process of re-composition among women.

Of Interest: THE FILM SERIES - "ITALIAN CINEMA AT WORK"

THE FILM SERIES - "ITALIAN CINEMA AT WORK"

The European Studies Research Students Seminar is glad to invite you to the screening of:

### Accattone ("The Procurer") - by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1961)
### Original Italian version with English subtitles

### Monday, 22. February 2010, 5pm
### Room FS2, Film Studies Department, Strand Campus


COMING NEXT...


### La classe operaia va in paradiso ("The working class goes to heaven") - by Elio Petri (1971) ### Original Italian version with English subtitles

### Monday, 22. March 2010, 5pm
### Room FS2, Film Studies Department, Strand Campus


All welcome!

Please forward to interested people.

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THE MOVIE - "ACCATTONE"

Pasolini's first movie delves into the grey areas of the Italian "economic miracle" of the Fifties-Sixties. The pimp Vittorio Accattone has never worked a day in his life...

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Our new 2010 Film Series, "Italian Cinema at Work", aims to present a brief overview of how Italian Cinema has approached an important but too often neglected theme: work.

"Italian Cinema at Work" will thus try to show the way in which Italian film-makers have represented the thematic of work and labour from World War II to the present.

The series will be organised in three parts.

The first part will look at how Neo-realism investigated post-WWII Italian society, characterised by reconstruction, capitalistic economic development and the imposition of wage labour discipline (e.g. De Sica's "Ladri di Biciclette", 1948).

The second part will focus on Fordism and factory work, underlying how this affected the physical and mental conditions of the labour force and emphasising workers' militant response during the cycle of struggles of the sixties and seventies (e.g. Petri's "La classe operaia va in paradiso", 1971).

Finally, the third part will analyse how the working process has changed in recent decades, giving rise to the fragmentation and precarisation of labour and to new forms of protest, such as the experience of the workers of the call centre "Atesia" in the periphery of Rome (Celestini's "Parole Sante", 2007).

The transition from one period to the next will be carried out though an ‘intermezzo - movie’, where everyday difficulties are approached with irony (e.g. by the character interpreted by Paolo Villaggio in"Fantozzi", 1975), nevertheless maintaining an underlying critical attitude.

The movies will be screened every two weeks in original Italian version with English subtitles.

Due to the difficulties in finding English subtitles for all the movies, the program is likely subjected to change – we will however
do our best to maintain the original aim of the series intact.

JANUARY'S SCREENING - Bostrobalikara - Garment Girls of Bangladesh

SUNDAY JANUARY 31st at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

Bostrobalikara - Garment Girls of Bangladesh (60m) + other short clips
A documentary by Tanvir Mokammel

Plus introductory talk about the struggles in Bangladesh.

A common sight in the streets of Dhaka is the parade of young women and girls going to and from work in garment factories. These girls, who number about 2 million, work in the most successful manufacturing industry that Bangladesh has. Their labour brings in the biggest proportion of trade income. On their toil rests the livelihoods of millions of others. Their importance to the Bangladesh economy is incalculable.


This phenomenal success echoes Bengal of hundreds of years ago when its Muslin industry was ascendant. Nevertheless the garment industry is faced with uncertainties and difficulties. Most pressing are issues concerning wages and safe working conditions, future investment and the international trade environment. Symptomatic of these problems have been the long succession of factory catastrophes, and the widespread worker disturbances of May and June 2006. How will the various stakeholders, including the state, the foreign buyers and the successful entrepreneurs, respond to the challenges ahead? Will the industry lose its "sweatshop" image?


"What made you do a film on the garment workers?

I have been watching these garment girls for the last two decades. Like any conscientious person in contemporary Bangladesh, I have deep sympathy for this hardworking, silent army of working girls who walk up to their factories at dawn and return, often very late at time. They are very conspicuous as a social group on the streets of Dhaka, Narayanganj and Chittagong. We know they are very low paid, and they receive very little respect from the mainstream community. I once wrote a poem about these BOSTROBALIKARA. I wanted to make this film with the aim to sensitize concerned people about their plight, which, in turn, may help achieve better wages and more respect for these hapless girls."
From 'Interview with Tanvir Mokammel'


See here

Strike, Riot and Fire Among the Garment Workers - A Working Class Revolt in Bangladesh

Mass working class revolt has been raging in Bangladesh for several months: garment workers fighting for improved wages and conditions... Farmers fighting destruction of their livelihoods by open cast mining... Mass insurrection against power cuts...
This pamphlet attempts to cut through the dominant media chatter of ‘clash of civilizations/cultures’ and ‘religious resurgence/fundamentalism’ and to show instead the real substance of social conflict, where the exploited begin to actively control their struggles rather than just being pawns manipulated by various political or religious factions

A pamphlet published by 56a Infoshop in 2006

You can download this paginated background booklet here:



A 15 minute video; a workforce, 85% female, paid some of the lowest wages in the world; expressing some of the highest levels of class struggle in the world at present. Trade unions have very little influence or restraint on these struggles - they are self-organised by workers on the job. When strikes turn riotous, they often spread into the wider working class community.

The short compilation of clips with commentary is available here: http://libcom.org/history/video-machinists-against-machine-bangladeshi-garment-workers-struggles

DECEMBER'S SCREENING - Wages of Fear

SUNDAY DECEMBER 20th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

WAGES OF FEAR, Henri Georges Clouzot , 1953 (131m)

“It’s like prison here. Easy to get in. ‘Make yourself at home.’ But there’s no way out.”

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) is a 1953 drama film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Yves Montand, and based on a 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud.

When a South American oil well owned by an American company catches fire, the company hires four European men, down on their luck, to drive two trucks over mountain dirt roads, while carrying the nitroglycerine needed to extinguish the fire.

The film centers on the fates of a handful of men who are stuck in a South American town. The town, Las Piedras, is isolated due to the surrounding desert but it maintains contact with the outside world through a small airport. The airfare, however, is beyond the means of the main characters (many of whom are also noncitizens without proper paperwork for work or travel). There is little opportunity for employment aside from the American corporation that dominates the town. The company, Southern Oil Company, called SOC, operates the nearby oil fields and owns a walled compound within the town. SOC is accused of unethical practices such as exploiting local workers and taking the law into its own hands.

The catalyst to the film’s action sequence is a massive fire at one of the SOC oil fields. The only means to extinguish the flames and cap the well is nitroglycerine. With short notice and lack of proper equipment, the only means of transportation are jerrycans placed in two large trucks. Due to the poor condition of the roads and the highly volatile nature of nitroglycerine, the job is considered too dangerous for the unionized SOC employees.

The company recruits drivers from the local community. Despite the dangers, many of the locals volunteer, lured by the high pay: US$2,000 per driver. This is a fortune to them, and the money is seen by some as the only way out of their dead-end lives.

NOVEMBER's SCREENING - Our Daily Bread

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 29th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

OUR DAILY BREAD, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005 (92m) + short

"Today, every worker is only working on one special part of the body, with always the same movement of the hand. There is no interference between the different sectors. For the workers it’s a normal work and most of them are happy to have a job".
Nikolaus Geyrhalter






Semen to pigs / Pigs to meat / Semen to cows / Cows to meat / Cows to milk / Eggs to chickens / Chickens to eggs / Chickens to meat / Fish / Crops and field harvests / Tomatoes in rock wool / Salads night harvest / Peppers / Cucumbers / Apples / Olives harvest / Salt from mines

Nikolaus Geyrhalter in an interview with Silvia Burner

OUR DAILY BREAD, like all your films, doesn’t have voice-over commentary, but in this case, there aren’t any interviews either.

I imagine my films mainly in continuous tracking shots which also contain scenes with interviews. In this case worlds of work which can stand alone are shown. The people work in spaces which are otherwise empty, and there’s not much talking while they work. At the beginning we conducted a number of interviews. During the editing, which Wolfgang Widerhofer started while shooting was still going on, it turned out that these interviews tend to disturb, and interrupt, the perception of the film. We then decided on the more radical form as it’s more appropriate for the way the footage was shot. The intention is to show actual working situations and provide enough space for thoughts and associations in long sequences. The viewers should just plunge into this world and form their own opinions.

There’s no information about specific companies or data.

It’s irrelevant for this film whether a company that produces baby chicks is located in Austria, Spain or Poland, or how many pigs are processed every year in the big slaughterhouse that’s shown. In my opinion that’s done by journalists and television, not a feature film. I also think that things are made too easy for me as a viewer when I’m spoon fed information. That moves me briefly, gets me worked up, but then it can be put into perspective quickly, and it works like all the other sensational news that bombards us day after day because that kind of thing sells newspapers - and it also dulls our perception of the world. In this film a look behind the structures is permitted, time’s provided to take in sounds and images, and it’s possible to think about the world where our basic foodstuffs are produced, which is normally ignored.


Interview with Wolfgang Widerhofer, Editor

"The film isn’t held together by people or places, it follows a different logic. It’s more of an episodic kind of thinking, an inspection, in both a spatial and temporal sense. An inspection that also comprises various cycles. The film includes themes without mentioning them explicitly: repetitive labour, automation, industrial production, and the brutality that it involves, the morality which comes into play when animals are killed, and so on. A number of discourses and approaches are set up in the film, but not so that the audience can leave the theater and say, “I learned this and that and this is what I have to do.”

OCTOBER's SCREENING - Harlan County USA

SUNDAY OCTOBER 25th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

HARLAN COUNTY USA, Barbara Kopple, 1976 (103m) + US labour short tbc

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a gruelling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack – with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning, and Florence Reece – the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.







Essay by Paul Arthur 'Harlan County USA: No Neutrals There', http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/422

A history of strikes at Harlan County from Labor Notes
http://labornotes.org/node/1385



From Cinemension blog - Harlan County USA trailer at this link: http://cinemension.blogspot.com/2009/02/harlan-county-usa.html

"These people worked for pennies, no benefits, no indoor plumbing, no medical or dental insurance (most of their teeth are rotting and falling out) and their homes would be considered condemned in any "normal" city...Basically all these people are fighting for are their basic, human rights. Coal mining is definitely one of the most dangerous and toughest jobs imaginable. The working conditions are unsafe, atrocious, filthy and miserable".

SEPTEMBER's SCREENING - Men With Carts Double Bill!!

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 27th at 6pm
At 56a Infoshop

MAN PUSH CART, Ramin Bahrani, 2005 (87mins)

Man Push Cart is a 2005 American independent film by Ramin Bahrani that tells the story of a former Pakistani rock star who now sells coffee and donuts from his push cart on the streets of Manhattan.



Every night while the city sleeps, Ahmad, a Pakistani immigrant, struggles to drag his heavy cart along the streets of New York to his corner in Midtown Manhattan. And every morning, from inside his cart he sells coffee and donuts to a city he cannot call his own. On his free time Ahmad Razvi sells pornographic DVDs. He lives a hard life, drinks Heineken and smokes Parliament cigarettes and goes to clubs. Like the workers found on every street corner in every city, he is a man who wonders if he will ever escape his fate.






BOROM SARRET, Ousmane Sembene (20mins)



Borom Sarret was the cinematic debut of Senegalese novelist and Moscow-trained filmmaker Ousmane Sembene - and also represents the earliest film directed by an indigenous filmmaker in sub-Sahara Africa.



Borom Sarret opens to the stark emptiness of a black screen, evocatively filled by the sound of a solemn, mystical tribal chant incanted amid the asynchrony of a blunt, rhythmic beat. The darkness subsequently reveals a high contrast, daylight shot of the impoverished native quarters, cutting to a shot of the supplicant (Ly Abdoulaye) praying for benediction in the foreground with his wife silently toiling in the background, as the pair assiduously perform their disparate (and intrinsically revelatory) rituals at the break of dawn.

Retrieving his family's sole possession - the horse Albourah - from a clearing, the unnamed man then leaves to fetch his wooden cart in order to earn a paltry income as a borom sarret, (a derivative of the French term bonhomme charret), a horse-cart driver for hire operating around the native quarters of Dakar, often picking up equally destitute passengers who can only offer an indebted (and indefinite) promise of payment or a wordless, ambiguous handshake in lieu of the fare. Nevertheless, the day seemingly turns auspicious as actual paying customers begin to hire his services - an overloaded delivery of construction concrete blocks and an expectant couple hurrying to the hospital for the birth of their child - begin to replace the destitute early morning commuters (and presumptuous hitchhikers) catching a free ride to the main town square.

With earned money in hand, he decides to stop at an intersection in order to enjoy the idyllic morning, eat his meager kola nut lunch, and tend to a persistently squeaking wheel on his cart before being distracted by the uplifting voice of a traditional singer performing on the street. The singer's ancient tales enhearten the borom sarret, evoking images of his ancestral family's nobility and former glory, and in an act of impulsive and negligent pride, magnanimously hands over his entire earnings to the charismatic singer. Now running out of time and anxious to recuperate his lost income, the desperate borom sarret begins to accept a series of desperate and dubious passengers, and soon finds himself driving his outmoded, derelict cart into the modernized - and forbidden - hillside colonial-era community appropriately called the Heights.