Film, Class, Society
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Edited by:
Elisa Cuter
The book series Film, Class, Society explores the ways in which social inequality, the division of labor, and exploitation are depicted in film. More specifically, it provides a platform for research into the various cinematic discourses surrounding poverty, precarity, and social exclusion. The research published in the Film, Class, Society series analyzes how films translate social structures into visual narratives, how they portray characters suffering from precarious working and living conditions, and how they reflect the roots and causes of those conditions. The volumes in the series interrogate stereotypes of poor, precarious, and marginalized people, discuss how films elicit viewers’ emotions, and examine how films can empower their viewers to question social injustice and take collective action against it.
Editors
Elisa Cuter, Daniel Fairfax, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel
Advisory Board
Constanza Burucua, Sabine Hake, Gertrud Koch, Sieglinde Lemke, Philip Rosen, Mike Wayne
Even before this current exacerbation, representations of rural landscape in American cinema have sought to spatially visualize the country’s social inequalities and focus on the victims of poverty and marginalization. The films discussed in this monograph, Ballast (2008), Winter’s Bone (2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Leave No Trace (2018), address deep rural poverty in a complex manner and facilitate an interactive, social understanding of landscape.
New Rural Cinema suggest a novel way of looking at landscape in cinema that responds to and guides its readers through this recent development in American Independent film. It views the chosen films as expressions of a growing awareness of the dire inequality caused by neoliberal capitalism in the United States and the role landscape plays both in its mechanisms of social exclusion as well as in its collective contestation.
This volume brings together renowned scholars and early career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema —whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working with traditional or new media— engages with phenomena of precarity, poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the representation of social class in contemporary visual culture.
Watch our book talk with the editors Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel here: https://youtu.be/lKpD1NFAx2o
