15 - Labour and Exploitation by Displacement in Recent European Film

Summary

The modus operandi of capitalism is one of constant disruptions and reconfigurations. Whether one envisions these as creative destruction (Schumpeter 1994: 82–3) or as cycles of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2007b: 153), dis- and re-embedding (Polanyi 1957: 71) or spectacularisation and profanation (Agamben 2007: 77), they refer to processes that generate ruptures in economic and cultural practices, which in turn create opportunity for some and updated forms of disenfranchisement for many others. Collaterally, these processes produce insides and outsides to the law, civilisation and quality of life, within or upon which capitalism can operate more ruthlessly. Various economic categories can become outsides: from land and individual savings to bodies and social relations. Capitalist disruptions operate upon them in terms of expropriations, uprooting, as well as by generating displaced, non-placed and over-placed labour groups, which may be, respectively, external to, in the blind spots of, or above the law.

This chapter analyses the presentation of these labour groups and their work at the geographical and social margins of European civilisation in four recent European films. It offers a commentary on the way these films invite viewers to reflect on practices of labour displacement, the opportunities for exploitation this displacement generates and, more generally, on the violence generated by what Marx calls the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations’ (1990: 899). The chapter draws on research by the contributors to the collection Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition (Mazierska 2013), as well as Ewa Mazierska's genealogy of the representation of work in the film of the twentieth century (Mazierska 2015). It advances this research by focusing on twenty-first-century texts and on the representation of practices of accumulation by dispossession and displacement. In this sense, it considers films presenting labour migration from the so-called Third World (Mediterranea [Jonas Carpignano, 2015]), exploitation on post-terrestrial frontiers of capitalist production practices (Moon [Duncan Jones, 2009]), as well as the psychological and moral hazard created by the geographical and social uprooting of the white-collar workforce (Toni Erdmann [Maren Ade, 2016] and Le Capital [Capital] [Costa-Gavras, 2012]).