Trifonova, Temenuga; (2023) Screening Neoliberalism: Precarious Lives: The Deepening Pathologies of Neoliberalism in French Cinema (1980-present). [Lecture]. Presented at: Rethinking Neoliberalism on Screen: International Symposium, Paris, France.

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Abstract

The ‘precariat’ might encompass only “people whose lives are precarious because they have little or no job security,” but inasmuch as neoliberalism is “a political rationality that extends and disseminates market values to all institutions and social action” the logic of precarity pervades the entirety of society. Accordingly, most recent scholarship approaches precarity as extending beyond the expression of an economic condition to indicate an entire ‘affective environment’—consider, for instance, Sianne Ngai’s discussion of envy, anxiety, irritation, resentment and paranoia in Ugly Feelings (2007), Guy Standing’s attentiveness to the precariat’s anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Lauren Berlant’s analysis of ‘post-Fordist affect’, the affective language of anxiety, contingency and precarity in Cruel Optimism (2011), and Francesco Sticchi’s examination of precarity’s ‘chronotopes’ of anxiety, depression, and expulsion/extinction’ in Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television (2021). How neoliberal affects are theorized, however, varies widely: for instance, Lauren Berlant deems ‘cruel optimism’ an apolitical or politically regressive affective strategy of adjustment in response to the attrition of social fantasies like upward mobility, job security, meritocracy, political and social equality; Guido Kirsten denies that Berlant’s “relations of cruel optimism” are an essential or necessary part of all films belonging to the ‘cinema of precarity’ and instead invites us to rethink the cinema of precarity not as films about neoliberalism’s victims addressed to a liberal minded middle-class audience, whose primary intended affects are pity and guilt, but as attempts to imagine a radically new relationship to work; finally, Ngai urges us to consider the potentially political work of ‘ugly feelings’, arguing that it is these feelings—rather than the grander passions from which utopian, universalizing projects or ideals are born—that define the age of neoliberalism. What has come to be known as ‘the new European cinema of precarity’ builds upon, while also diverging from, the legacy of late 1920s-1930s British documentaries of working-class life, 1930s French poetic realist films permeated by a sense of pessimism and fatalism, postwar Italian neorealist films featuring working-class characters, real locations and documentary style, 1930s and 1940s Hollywood melodramas populated by suffering protagonists dealing with conflicts between personal desires and mounting social pressures, the British New Wave, particularly ‘kitchen sink’ films exploring the fragmentation of the working class, and French ‘New Realism’. Martin O’Shaughnessy underscores the importance of evaluating the political significance of contemporary French cinema in its present context rather than comparing it to previous forms of political cinema (e.g., post-1968 cinema). Post-1995 political cinema, he avers, operates “in the shadow of a massive defeat” and “in the difficult space between the politics that was and an emergent new politics,” which accounts for the mostly compensatory nature of its “melodramatic politics” that seeks “to restore eloquence and significance to struggles seemingly condemned to silence and meaninglessness.” In this paper I will consider what form neoliberal affects and “an emergent new politics” take in contemporary French cinema by looking at several representative films that reflect important shifts in our understanding of work, precarity and class struggle and point to the deepening pathologies of neoliberalism.

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