Film and the Working Class

Film and the Working Class PDF Author: Peter Stead
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317928423
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney. Reviews of the original edition: ‘...fills a gap in film studies...the study of social and labour history, and the development of popular culture in Britain and the United States.’

Film and the Working Class

Film and the Working Class PDF Author: Peter Stead
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317928423
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney. Reviews of the original edition: ‘...fills a gap in film studies...the study of social and labour history, and the development of popular culture in Britain and the United States.’

Working-Class Hollywood

Working-Class Hollywood PDF Author: Steven J. Ross
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214646
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.

Class on Screen

Class on Screen PDF Author: Sarah Attfield
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030459012
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book provides an analysis of the global working class on film and considers the ways in which working-class experience is represented in film around the world. The book argues that representation is important because it shapes the way people understand working-class experience and can either reinforce or challenge stereotypical depictions. Film can shape and shift discussions of class, and this book provides an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which working-class experience is portrayed through this medium. It analyses the impact of contemporary films such as Sorry To Bother You, This is England and Le Harve that focus on working class life. Attfield demonstrates that the global working class are characterised by diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality but that there are commonalities of experience despite geographical distance and cultural difference. The book is structured around themes such as work, culture, diasporas, gender and sexuality, and race.

The Making of the English Working Class

The Making of the English Working Class PDF Author: Edward Palmer Thompson
Publisher: IICA
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 862

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Book Description


The Representation of the Working Class in the Films Brassed Off and The Full Monty

The Representation of the Working Class in the Films Brassed Off and The Full Monty PDF Author: Alena Friedrich
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638643492
Category : Brassed off (Motion picture)
Languages : en
Pages : 65

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7 (A-), University of Leipzig (Anglistics), course: Screening Britain: British History and Society in Recent Films, language: English, abstract: Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Darstellung der britischen Arbeiterklasse in den beiden Filmen 'Brassed Off' (Mark Herman, 1996) und 'The Full Monty' (Peter Cattaneo, 1997) zu analysieren. Insbesondere soll dabei auf die sozio-ökonomische Situation der Charaktere, deren soziale Beziehungen untereinander, den 'Working Class Pride and Traditionalism', die männliche Identifikation der Figuren und ihre regionale Verwurzelung eingegangen werden. Die zentralen Fragen, die sich dahingehend stellen, sind: Wie werden diese Aspekte in den Filmen dargestellt? Und inwiefern werden sie stereotypisiert dargestellt? Diese Arbeit beruht auf der Annahme, dass die meisten Stereotype auf das traditionelle Bild der 'working class' des beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts zurückgreifen. Aus diesem Grund wird diese Ära und ihr Einfluss auf das Leben der Arbeiter näher betrachtet, um dann Rückschlüsse auf die Repräsentation der Arbeiterklasse in 'Brassed Off' und 'The Full Monty' ziehen zu können. This essay, which is going to analyse the representation of class in 'Brassed Off' and 'The Full Monty', will particularly focus on the typicality of the representations. It will analyse the characters' socio-economic situation, their social bonds, the 'working class pride and traditionalism', the workers' male identity and their regional identity. The central question will be, in which ways the films can be seen as "typical" working class motion pictures. In this respect, the stereotyping of the social classes in these two films will particularly be focused on. This essay is based on the assumption that most stereotypes refer back to the traditional image of the working class as it existed at the beginning of the 20th century. In

A Kestrel for a Knave

A Kestrel for a Knave PDF Author: Barry Hines
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014190383X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a disillusioned teenager growing up in a small Yorkshire mining town. Violence is commonplace and he is frequently cold and hungry. Yet he is determined to be a survivor and when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk he discovers a passion in life. Billy identifies with her proud silence and she inspired in him the trust and love that nothing else can. Intense and raw and bitingly honest, A KETREL FOR A KNAVE was first published in 1968 and was also madeinto a highly acclaimed film, 'Kes', directed by Ken Loach.

The Melancholia of Class

The Melancholia of Class PDF Author: Cynthia Cruz
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1913462277
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation. To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost. Excluded, marginalised, and subjected to violence, the working class is also deemed by those in power to not exist. We are left with a choice between assimilation into middle-class values and culture, leaving our working-class origins behind, or total annihilation. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how this choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers — including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more — and the resultant Freudian melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to “become someone,” only to find that they lose themselves in the process. Part memoir, part cultural theory, and part polemic, The Melancholia of Class shows us how we can resist assimilation, uplifting and carrying our working-class origins and communities with us, as we break the barriers of the middle-class world. There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.

New Working-Class Studies

New Working-Class Studies PDF Author: John Russo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718576
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
"We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the 'new economy' whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class."—from the Introduction In John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon's book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class life.

Filming Politics

Filming Politics PDF Author: Malek Khouri
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
ISBN: 1552381994
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was created in 1939 to produce, distribute, and promote Canadian cinema both domestically and abroad. In Filming Politics, author Malek Khouri explores the work of the NFB during this period and argues that the political discourse of the films produced by this institution offered a counter-hegemonic portrayal of working class people and presented them as agents of social change. Filming Politics brings to light a number of films from the early years of the NFB, most of which have long been forgotten.

The Long Deep Grudge

The Long Deep Grudge PDF Author: Toni Gilpin
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642590894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
“The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism.” —Ahmed A. White, author of The Last Great Strike This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester—and the McCormick family that largely controlled it—garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the twentieth century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late twentieth-century industrial decline. “A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done—Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.” —John Sayles