No Way To Make A Living » film

The Poet

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:09:44 +0000

Early in the film of Blake Morrison’s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father (dir Anand Tucker, 2007), Blake (Colin Firth) accepts an award for his poetry (it might be that the definition of ‘real’ work is that it’s the sort of activity you’d never attend an award ceremony to mark).

At the risk of getting sentimental, I’d like to say thank-you to my wife, Kathy. Not only for all her support
and encouragement, but because she asked me to mention her.

My dad always used to say, and I’m sure he’ll say it again before the night’s out,

“Being a writer, in particular a poet, is all well and good. But it’s no way to make a living.”

Of course, as in most other things, he’s absolutely right.

Work and Realism

David Harris — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:08:46 +0000

One of the most effective and realistic depictions of manual work in cinema is found in a scene in the avant-garde film Pravda (1970) by Jean-Luc Godard (officially by the Groupe Dziga Vertov), well-described in Monaco (1976). This is a short piece about the events in May 1968 in what was then Czechoslovakia. Whereas most people in Britain and the USA saw the uprising as gallant little Czechs making a bid for freedom from the Soviet Empire, Godard took a more critical line, as did the French Communist Party. For them, the uprising was a bourgeois humanist one based on promoting the illusory individual freedoms of capitalism. A stern marxist (Maoist in places) commentary makes up the soundtrack while the camera shows a clandestine series of scenes of life in Czechoslovakia. Godard himself later dismissed the piece as ‘Leninist garbage’.

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

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

Mesrine: the career of a killer

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:42:20 +0000

Dawn and I recently watched Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most famous bank robber. Apart from a brief period working in an architect’s practice, Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel) made a living from illegal activities. A professional criminal has to do more than rob one bank, kill one thug. He must commit to the life, wear the bullet scars and break out of the prisons that try to contain him. Dick Hobbs says a professional criminal isn’t one who works full time as a criminal, but one who accesses a criminal knowledge base and infrastructure to faciliate their work (2006: 421). Mesrine does all this. In Killer Instinct, Guido (Gérard Depardieu) is the gangster boss who trains Mesrine and inculcates him into the professional code. This code is illustrated most notably when Mesrine returns to the Canadian jail he escaped from, to spring the other inhabitants. It’s all very exciting.

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

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.