The film also has a pedagogic point to make. Most documentaries of the time, including the ones we saw on British TV on the Czech rebellion, worked really hard to make their depictions seem realistic. In the process, they reproduce an ideological ‘reality’, for marxists. One way to show this ideological effect is to break the usual conventions, which is what Pravda does in a determined way. In the most-often quoted scene, some Czech workers appear on screen, speaking Czech. No subtitling or dubbing is provided for the viewer, unlike in the usual documentary – ‘Vladimir’ tells ‘Rosa’ ‘If you don’t speak Czech, you had better learn fast!’

The work scene is also disturbingly unusual (forward to 46min 30 seconds in this version). We see a young man tending a large rotary cutting machine in the Skoda factory (which made weapons as well as cars, the commentary reminds us). The machine cutters move slowly up and down the piece they are working on. We get extremely noisy natural sound. There are no edits or shifts in camera position, and no other sound for 5 or 6 minutes(a very long time in cinema). The worker tends the machine, lubricating it occasionally, but largely just watching it as it does its job. There are no ear defenders, no guard rails, and no other workers to talk to. After a couple of minutes, we are all longing for it to end.

My students often nominated this scene as the most annoying and challenging in the whole of a very unenjoyable film (but it did them good!). That was the whole point, of course. They found 5 minutes enough, so what of the poor guy who spent 8 hours a day doing that?

References

1. Monaco, J ( 1976) New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arriving at the Port of Felixstowe

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felixstowe (on the Suffolk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself trying to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for directions at the security gate (where the men were very friendly and helpful), several lorries came and went, apparently disappearing into the unending stretch of the Port ahead of me. What goes on in all that space? I wondered, so a couple of weeks later, my friend and I joined the ‘ship-spotters’ at the Landguard Terminal viewing area. I had no idea what a pleasure that could be! You can watch the ships arrive into port (with the help of a marine pilot and tugs), ‘park’ (a process which looks especially tricky), and after a few hours, leave again with a different cargo (or with empty boxes given the discrepancy between imports and exports in the UK). It’s hard to grasp the sheer expanse of the site from any vantage point on the ground – at close to 200 hectares, it’s the size of about 185 football pitches. Still, after driving along the perimeter fence for about 10 minutes and seeing little other than containers (and not a single person!), I did get a sense of this space of the physical redistribution of goods in ‘a flow of dispersion-concentration-dispersion’ (Mark Harvey et al, 2002: 202–5).

It’s worth giving some details about the Port itself to begin to understand its significance, locally and globally. Privately owned by the Hutchison Port Holdings Group, according to the Port of Felixstowe website, Felixstowe is the largest and busiest container port in the UK, amongst the largest in Europe, and ranked 33 by container traffic in the World Port Ranking (2008). In one year, it handles over 3 million TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units – containers are either 20 or 40 feet long), 4000 ships, and over 40% of the UK’s import and export trade. It’s hard to overstate the impact of containerisation which transformed cargo shipping in the second half of the 20th Century (Levinson, 2006). Felixstowe, with its offer of deep water next to the quay (up to 15m maintained by dredging) and its location close to the open sea, was just right for a container terminal (built in 1966). It usurped Liverpool, London and other urban ports in the UK, as those sites were less convenient and couldn’t handle the size of these new ships. (See Ports of Call for memories of the communities surrounding the Royal Docks in London.)

Transport connections

The minimal cost of transporting goods in containers means that it’s not only cheaper to produce a flat-screen TV in China, it’s cheaper to move it half way around the world to the UK coast than to deliver it from South to North within Britain for example (BBC4, 2010). The spatial arrangements of these complex global distribution networks reflect the current logic of commodity production and consumption where distance is no obstacle since space is overcome by time (David Harvey, 1992). The success of keeping things moving also relies on a broader infrastructure of rail and road and at Felixstowe, some rail lines are owned by the Port connecting with those of other Train Operating Companies in order that boxes can be directly loaded onto trucks or trains. So in addition to shipping lines, the whole process requires rails companies, forwarding and line agents, and logistics and distribution companies.

The history of containerisation is however also a history of the demise of the dockworker, a painful transition whereby metal boxes and software replaced the dockers’ hook and their physical labour. As Marc Levinson puts it,

‘The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of will-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories.’ (2006: 2)

In BBC4’s ‘The Box that Changed Britain’ which aired earlier this month, we see a single person overseeing a computer-allocated process of unloading and reloading by crane, doing what tens of thousands of men (and it is all men in these stories) previously did. This dramatic reduction of labour is also mirrored by the handful of men who now work on the massive container ships themselves.

Another representation of contemporary dock work can be seen in The Wire. Moving freight in containers that generally don’t get opened is a widely recognised opportunity for the informal economy – both in The Wire and in the real life presence of the UK Border Agency at Felixstowe with its designated spaces to examine the contents of the containers. The boxes are all uniquely coded, but at the same time, anonymised and opaque. In the police investigation into irregular practices in Baltimore in the second series of The Wire, it is the computer representation of their movement in space that finally reveals the ‘disappearance’ of boxes and their goods. Albeit a fictionalised depiction, it presents the understanding and practice of the work of managing the physical distribution of goods to the viewer as mediated by how it’s depicted on the computer screen.

Waiting containers

The current Port of Felixstowe is quite a setup, with around 40 shipping lines operating from the site. Open for business 24 hours a day, (almost) every day (see the sailing schedule here), there is a workforce of close to 3000. The range of what they do is striking: there’s lots of engineering of course, plus systems development and planning, rail operations, yard control and stevedoring. And the Port has its own dedicated police, fire and ambulance services. On the Port website (from which this information is taken), the list of ‘ancillary services’ also indicates the variety of associated work activities which wouldn’t happen without it – chauffeurs, marine surveyors and ship repairs, financial services, IT, and many more, plus of course all the domestic labour that must remain flexible to support a 24 hour operation. And the primary activity they are all there to carry out or support is to move things around. That’s really the thing that struck me most; the enormous amount of stuff there is in this ‘holding space’ — and one that many commercial organisations effectively use as a de facto mobile storage facility — that marks the landscape with its presence.

References
1. BBC4 ‘The Box that Changed Britain’, 9 May 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00scpzn.
2. Harvey, D. (1992) The Limits to Capital, Basil Blackwell (Oxford) and University of Chicago.
3. Harvey, M., S. Quilley and H. Beynon (2002) Exploring the Tomato, Transformations of Nature, Society and Economy, Edward Elgar.
4. Levinson, M. (2006) The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, Princeton University Press.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

But during Public Enemy Number 1, despite several more robberies, shootings, a kidnapping and prison escapes, I did start to shift in my seat, yawning. It turns out the mid-life career of a professional bank robber is only little more exciting than the mid-life career of the professional bank clerk. The routinisation of Mesrine’s criminal life serves as warning against crime, not because of the danger, but because of the tedium.

References

1. Hobbs, D. (2006) ‘The Nature and Representation of Organised Crime in the United Kingdom’ in Fijnaut, C. and Paoli, L. Organised Crime in Europe: concepts, patterns and control policies in the European Union and beyond. Springer.

No way to make a living loves it for talking about work. The Wire portrays work in a way that makes sense to people who’ve had a job. It’s not like other shows: the key tension is not who will shag whom, (as in Grey’s Anatomy, which Dawn intends to discuss at length on this site), nor is work a conveniently located site for the continuation of ongoing local stories (like the factory in Coronation Street). It offers a series of workplaces, at varying levels of formality, where people are competent or incompetent, good, bossy, well-meaning, faceless or charismatic; and where the individual is constrained by an organisational structure within which he or she can struggle or shine, and by work colleagues who can enable, intervene and obstruct. The Wire is the best portrayal of work you’ll see on TV and there will be an occasional strand to this blog to discuss …

• Corner boys and starting work; the division of labour
• ‘an inelastic product’ – formal education, skills and employability
• masculinity and the police force
• unionisation and brotherhood
• politics a work
• crusaders and volunteers
• Templetons and how to deal with them.
• Office spaces
• The relationship between inside and outside,
• sociality around work … and so on. OK, I’ll shut up.

I will be talking about some of this at The Wire as Social Science Fiction conference, where Ewen Speed and I are giving a paper on ‘Mutualism and Markets: An Exploration of Moral Regulation in The Wire; http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/Wireconference.html