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Film and the Working Class

Author: Peter Stead

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-13

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1317928423

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

Author: Steven J. Ross

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0691214646

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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.

The Melancholia of Class

Author: Cynthia Cruz

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1913462277

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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.

A Kestrel for a Knave

Author: Barry Hines

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2000-05-25

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 014190383X

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

Author: Alena Friedrich

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2007-07

Total Pages: 65

ISBN-13: 3638643492

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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

Blue-Collar Hollywood

Author: John Bodnar

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-09-26

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 080188537X

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Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion—sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative—from the realities of their own lives. In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre—among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood—this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy. Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.

The British working class in postwar film

Author: Philip Gillett

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1526141809

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An incidental pleasure of watching a film is what it tells us about the society in which it is made. Using a sociological model, The British working class in postwar film looks at how working-class people were portrayed in British feature films in the decade after the Second World War. Though some of the films examined are well known, others have been forgotten and deserve reassessment. Original statistical data is used to assess the popularity of the films with audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach and the avoidance of jargon, this book seeks to broaden the approach to film studies. Students of media and cultural studies are introduced to the skills of other disciplines, while sociologists and historians are encouraged to consider the value of film evidence in their own fields. This work should appeal to all readers interested in social history and in how cinema and society works.