RSS

Category Archives: Working Class

Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) (2003)

11 Nov

Director: Rahul Roy
English (subtitled), 78 min, 2003, India
http://magiclanternmovies.in/film/city-beautiful

Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) is a small working class colony on the margins of India’s capital city, Delhi. Most families residing here come from a community of weavers. The last ten years have seen a gradual disintegration of the handloom tradition of this community under the globalisation regime. The families have to cope with change as well as reinvent themselves to eke out a living.

Radha and Bal Krishan are at a critical point in their relationship. Bal Krishan is underemployed and constantly cheated. They are in disagreement about Radha going out to work. However, through all their ups and downs they retain the ability to laugh.Shakuntla and Hira Lal hardly communicate. They live under one roof with their children but are locked in their own sense of personal tragedies.

Producer: Rahul Roy
Creative Crew
Camera: Rahul Roy
Editing: Reena Mohan
Sound: Asheesh Pandya

Rahul is a noted documentary filmmaker who has widely worked on the issues of labor and gender in India. His film The City Beautiful masterfully depicts the life of two families in an Indian working-class colony, focussing on the decline of traditional handloom industry because of globalization. His recent work The Factory (2015) is about the struggle of Maruti automobile workers in New Delhi. For more than two years, 147 workers from the Maruti Suzuki plant were kept behind bars without bail or any charge sheet being presented to the defence counsel. Rahul has followed their crisis and struggle from 2013 to 2015. Read more about the film in this Indian Express piece.

Director contact info: rahulroy63@gmail.com

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Class, Documentary, Global Economy, Manufacturing, Technology, Textile Industry, Women, Working Class

 

Precious Memories (2015)

11 Nov

Precious Memories has one act, 84 minutes long.  I wrote the script but not the songs, which are by Sarah Ogan Gunning (“I Hate the Capitalist System”); her brother Jim Garland (“I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” the real point of which is that we do); and her half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson (“I Am A Union Woman”), plus two traditional ballads and excerpts from three gospel songs.
THE PLAY: Part memory play, part eulogy, part concert, this one-woman show written by legendary folk singer and community organizer Si Kahn traces the life of Sarah Ogan Gunning, an unsung hero of American folk/labor music history.  The play finds Sarah alone in her Detroit basement apartment on the evening after her sister Aunt Molly Jackson’s funeral, as she attempts to set the record straight and say goodbye.  Although Sarah Ogan Gunning is a name almost unknown to us today, her powerful songs about the coal mining region of Eastern Kentucky in the 1930’s were an influence on Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other famous folk singers of her day.

Si Kahn <sikahn36@gmail.com

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Entertainment Industry, Labor History, Musical, Women, Working Class

 

7 Chinese Brothers (2015)

11 Nov

76 min  |  Comedy  |  28 August 2015 (USA)

Director/writer: Bob Byington

Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Stephen Root, Olympia Dukakis
Larry (Jason Schwartzman) is content with his dog Arrow and booze, barely tolerating anything or anyone else. His marginally successful relationships include his grandmother, who keeps him afloat financially, and his best friend Norwood, who provides him with pharmaceuticals. But a chance encounter at a Jiffy Lube gives Larry a beguiling new boss and the impetus to head in another direction for a while. This movie showcases all that may be needed to help a person get unstuck in life: love (or an unrequited crush), friendship (or someone your family likes better than you) and family (or in this case a grandmother who will support you whenever you get fired from a job).

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/movies/review-7-chinese-brothers-a-slacker-comedy-starring-jason-schwartzman-and-his-dog.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

This droll film, written and directed by Bob Byington, drifts aimlessly but appealingly with Mr. Schwartzman as its lost hero.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Comedy, Philosophy, Self-Employed/Freelance, Working Class

 

Labour in a Single Shot

11 Nov

http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net

Starting in 2011 artist, curator, and author Antje Ehmann and filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki initiated video production workshops in 15 cities around the world in which participants were to engage with the subject of ‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, traditional or new. The videos could not be longer than two minutes and they had to be taken in a single shot. The camera could be static, panning or travelling but cuts were not allowed. This concept references the Brother Lumière’s famous film Workers Leaving the Factory which was filmed in one continuous take from a fixed camera position.

The result of these workshops, which were organised together with local branches of the Goethe-Institut, are 400 films which show people engaged in all kinds of work, each film taking a different stance, literally and figuratively, towards its subject while also recording the diverse mental attitudes and bodily relation people have to their work.

Facing the challenge of filming something that might be essentially repetitive, continuous and boring, the films also foreground the work of the camera operator and his or her aesthetic decisions. In the multitude and diversity the films form a visual compendium and an archive of labour and cinema in the 21st century that is never boring or repetitive but enhances and simultaneously questions our perception and understanding of work.

All the films can be watched on a dedicated website, at random, or sorted by city, colour or type of work. A selection of 90 films was shown as an installation at the House of World Culture in Berlin from 27 February to 6 April 2015 with an accompanying conference. This exhibition also presented the project ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in 15 Cities’ (2011 – 2014), consisting of contemporary remakes of the famous film by the Lumière Brothers which were shot in 15 cities all over the world. Also included in the exhibition was the installation ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades’ (2006), which showed scenes of workers leaving the factory throughout the history of cinema, from the Lumière Brothers (1895) to Lars van Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).

‘Labour in a Single Shot’ is a co-production of the Harun Farocki Filmproduktion with the Goethe-Institut.

www.harunfarocki.de

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Communications, Construction Trades, Documentary, Education, Entertainment Industry, Farm & Food, Finance, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Migrant workers, Philosophy, Public Sector, Retail, Self-Employed/Freelance, Service Workers, Technology, Textile Industry, Transportation, White Collar, Working Class

 

Mother Jones: ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America’

27 Jan

9 minutes
by Jeff Manning

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 27, 2015 in Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Women, Working Class

 

Bread and Roses: The Lawrence Textile Strike

27 Jan

6:17m

The Lawrence Textile Strike was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by one mill owner’s decision to lower wages when a new law shortening the workweek went into effect in January, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers at nearly every mill within a week. The strike, which lasted more than two months and which defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized, was successful; within a year, however, the union had largely collapsed and most of the gains achieved by the workers were lost.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 27, 2015 in Immigrants/Immigration, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Textile Industry, Women, Working Class

 

Century of Women

27 Jan

on garment workers, 1909 strike, Triangle, 15 minutes

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 27, 2015 in Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Textile Industry, Women, Working Class

 

Northern Light (2013)

27 Jan

105 min  –  Documentary | Drama | Family  –  1 March 2013 (USA)
Directors:  Nick Bentgen, Lisa Kjerulff
Writers:  Nick Bentgen, Lisa Kjerulff

Set against the backdrop of a town’s annual snowmobile race, this cinematic, observational documentary explores the American working class experience.

NORTHERN LIGHT interweaves the lives of three families in the northwoods of Michigan. Set against the backdrop of a town’s annual snowmobile race, this cinematic, observational documentary explores the American working class experience. As racers and their families pin their hopes to a 500 mile-long test of endurance, small triumphs and giant sacrifices are made along the way. From a frozen corner of the country emerge three American families.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 27, 2015 in Class, Drama, Unemployment-Wages, Women, Working Class

 

The Song of the Shirt (1979)

27 Jan

song-of-the-shirt

16mm, 135 min, black & white
Directors Sue Clayton
Jonathan Curling
Production Company Film & History Project
BFI Production Board
Script Sue Clayton
Jonathan Curling
Music Lindsay Cooper

Cast: Martha Gibson, Geraldine Pilgrim, Anna McNiff, Liz Myers, Jill Greenhalgh, Sally Cranfield, Alfred Molina

Show full cast and credits

An investigation into the position of working women in the 1840s, the effects of protectionist ‘philanthropy’ and the resistance to it. Explores the plight of a group of women working in the new ‘sweated’ clothes trade in London.

Show full synopsis
Originally intended as a history of the welfare state, as well as a contribution to debates on feminist history, issues of free trade against philanthropy and capitalist expansion against protectionism, The Song of the Shirt became a subject of debate in itself, not least thanks to its four-year gestation.Many different groups, including Women’s Aid and the Feminist History Project, were involved during this long production period, and as a result the final film had a broader agenda (and therefore audience) than was originally planned. While it still addresses ideas of feminist history and Marxist theory, it can also be read as a rather more ambitious project that fuses the history of fashion, literacy and sexuality.

It is constructed as a documentary, although the use of multiple-screen effects, monitors displaying text and projected backdrops constantly disrupts the flow of information. Few dates are revealed in the film, forcing us to address the arguments rather than the chronology. It moves back and forth between locations and eras, juxtaposed in such a way as to highlight the contradictions in the labour market. Close-ups of women and characters in the dramatised scenes are avoided, and in the tribunal sequence the figure-of-eight camera movements suggest aimlessness.

The women’s readings, both singly and in groups, are based on a story that appeared in the magazine Notes to the People. ‘A Page for the Ladies’ argues that all classes of women are oppressed. Women of different classes read the text in different ways, with other voices of workers and political writers given equal footing with the text.

The Song of the Shirt‘s combination of relentless political content and a dislocated and disruptive presentation makes it stand out from its contemporaries in its ambition to present a genuinely feminist independent film. Co-director Sue Clayton, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, has continued to explore these themes through her work with the Independent Filmmakers’ Association and Screen magazine.

Emma Hedditch
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/496441/

 

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 27, 2015 in Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Experimental, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Textile Industry, Women, Working Class

 

Still the Enemy Within (AKA “The Enemy Within”)

26 Jan

2014 * Documentary * England * 112 minutes
Director/writer: Owen Gower
Sinead Kirwan, Producer: sinead.kirwan@bad-bonobo.com
Tel: 00447914412037 or 004915902169012
Skype: sineadrk
Follow us on Twitter @enemywithin1984
http://www.facebook.com/stilltheenemywithin

This riveting documentary revisits the front lines of one of the most bitterly fought strikes of the late 20th century—the 1984-1985 British Miners’ Strike. Told from the perspectives of the miners, their families and supporters, it incorporates rarely used archival footage with interviews, providing fresh insights to a dramatic, brutal, and heartbreaking yet inspiring struggle. Thirty years after the strike to prevent mine closures and the decimation of miners’ communities, Still the Enemy Within is a compelling reminder of everyday people’s power through organization and collective action—and the limitations when confronted by the force of the Thatcher administration and the British government.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 26, 2015 in Big Business/Corporations, Collective Bargaining, Documentary, Genre, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Legal System, Manufacturing, Occupation/Type of Work, Organizing, Politics, Safety & Health, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Themes, Women, Working Class

 
← Older posts
Newer posts →