The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective

Briskness and fatigue:Le Père de mes enfantsas melodrama, precarity and impasse

“…In Singer's (2001) terms , they are pathetic melodramas. O'Shaughnessy's work also overlaps with two recent theorisations of the cinema of precarity, by Lauren Berlant (2011) and Alice Bardan (2013). In her s urvey of a cross-European cinema of precarity, Bardan notes the difficulties involved in making generalisations about these types of film.…”

“…As early as 1970, Austin notes, Toffler predicted that capitalist accumulation and societies based on flexibility, s hort-termism, choice and risk would engender a pervasive sense of fatigue, of dispossession, sadness and 'weariness of the present' (Cvetkovich, in Austin 2015, 157). Grégoire in this respect articulates the new subjectivities which Bardan (2013) and Berlant (2011) argue are manifest in the cinema of precarity.…”

“…In Le Père de mes enfants, the reticence is both the film's matter-of-fact resistance to melodramatic excess, and Sylvia's quiet, powerful response to her loss. However much it lacks a destiny, flirting only briefly with Bardan's (2013) transnational fantasy, Sylvia's grief has purpose and seeks 'an idiom that does not exist yet, an idiom of life tipped over in the impasse' (Berlant 2011, 214). This is what Le Père de mes enfants forces into visibility.…”

Can the Intern Resist? Precarity of Blue-Collar Labor and the Fragmented Resistance of the White-Collar Intern in Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources

“…Lauren Berlant situates Human Resources within the cinema of precarity, which has elements of melodrama “associated with Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s and postwar Italian neorealism.” Providing an extensive survey of the cinema of precarity in Europe, Alice Bardan (2013) argues this cinematic moment is “less about identifying a visible working class displaying typical working-class manners” (p. 85) and more open to questioning nationalism, the idea of work and ultimately create “transnational fantasies of a happier future and a common dream of overcoming the tough present” (p. 86). Cinema of precarity is conducive to providing creative and aesthetic outlets for resistance without necessarily reproducing the fantasies of a cohesive working class.…”

“…In this article, I examine Laurent Cantet’s (1999) Human Resources as a cinematic space that highlights how interns are not necessarily doomed to exploitation and can be productive for establishing solidarity between blue-collar and white-collar workers alike. I do this by drawing on the critical insights of media internship literature (de Peuter et al., 2015; Perlin, 2011), recent studies on the cinema of precarity and cinema indigne (Bardan, 2013; Berlant, 2011; Rachlin & Scullion, 2014), and Martin O’Shaugnessy’s work (2007, 2015a, 2015b) on French cinema.…”