10.54103/2036-461X/20145
Over the last couple of decades film scholars have begun building a critical vocabulary to theorize the new kinds of social relations depicted in the new European cinema of precarity, from “flexible solidarity” and “precarious intimacies” to “the gift economy” and “cruel optimism”. Although the European cinema of precarity continues the legacy of older film traditions like French poetic realism, Italian neorealism and British kitchen sink realism, thus inscribing itself within a well-established European tradition of social realism, the realism of precarity films is often refracted through specific genre tropes or filmic devices—e.g., allegory, experimental cinema techniques, black comedy, cinema verité cinematography etc.—as though social realism is no longer able to render visual the hidden pathologies of neoliberalism or to capture the complexity of Europe’s current political, economic, and moral crisis.
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Temenuga Trifonova
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Genre
Neoliberalism and the Mutations of Social Realism in Contemporary European Cinema
Text.Serial.Journal
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2024-04-05
2023-05-10
2024-04-05
2024-04-05
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Temenuga Trifonova
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Wayne, Mike. 2001. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press.
Neoliberalism and the Mutations of Social Realism in Contemporary European Cinema
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                                                                                       Neoliberalism and the
                                                                                       Mutation of Social Realism
                                                                                       in Contemporary
                                                                                       European Cinema
                                                                                       Temenuga Trifonova, University College London



                                                                                       Over the last couple of decades film scholars have begun building a critical vocabulary                 Keywords
                                                                                       to theorize the new kinds of social relations depicted in the new European cinema of                     Precarity
                                                                                       precarity, from “flexible solidarity” and “precarious intimacies” to “the gift economy”
                                                                                       and “cruel optimism”. Although the European cinema of precarity continues the legacy
                                                                                                                                                                                         European Cinema
                                                                                       of older film traditions like French poetic realism, Italian neorealism and British kitchen         Social Realism
                                                                                       sink realism, thus inscribing itself within a well-established European tradition of social                  Work
                                                                                       realism, the realism of precarity films is often refracted through specific genre tropes                     Genre
                                                                                       or filmic devices—e.g., allegory, experimental cinema techniques, black comedy, cinema                         DOI
                                                                                       verité cinematography etc.—as though social realism is no longer able to render visual                https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       the hidden pathologies of neoliberalism or to capture the complexity of Europe’s current      org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       political, economic, and moral crisis.
                                                                                                                                                                                             461X/20145




                                                                                       DEFINING NEOLIBERALISM
                                                                                         The difficulty of defining “neoliberalism” has less to do with the fact that it is
                                                                                       an abstract concept and more with the fact that it has become common sense,
                                                                                       fully ingrained in our daily lives: think, for instance, of slogans like “design
                                                                                       your thinking”, “design your life”, concepts like “the creative entrepreneur”
                                                                                       and, of course, the economics of well-being, from step counter apps to tools
                                                                                       for measuring emotional and mental health and the ever-expanding market for
                                                                                       self-help books. It is helpful to distinguish between three main approaches to
                                                                                       neoliberalism: Foucauldian, Marxist, and epochalist (Hardin 2014). In theorizing
                                                                                       neoliberalism, Foucauldians like Wendy Brown and Maurizio Lazzarato
                                                                                       draw on Foucault’s fourth lecture in The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault 2008).
                                                                                       Brown (2003) defines neoliberalism as a political rationality that extends and
                                                                                       disseminates market values to all institutions and social action. Similarly,
                                                                                       and contrary to the common but erroneous view of neoliberalism as a form of
                                                                                       market fundamentalism, Lazzarato insists that “for neoliberalism, the market is
                                                                                       not the spontaneous or anthropological expression of the tendency of human
                                                                                       beings to exchange, as Adam Smith believed. […] [C]ompetition, like the market,
                                                                                       is not the result of the ‘natural play’ of appetites, instincts, or behaviours. It


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                            21
     is rather a ‘formal play’ of inequalities that must be instituted and constantly
     nourished and maintained” (Lazzarato 2009, 116–17). Marxists like David Harvey
     dismiss the idea of neoliberalism as “a new economic theory or organization of
     world power [seeing it instead] as a variant of a very old concept: the current
     version of the dominant ideology that serves the class in power” (Harvey 2005,
     160). Unlike Foucauldians and Marxists, epochalists use neoliberalism as one
     of a set of epochal concepts to describe recent economic developments in
     conceptual terms. Here neoliberalism loses some of its specificity as a term
     insofar as epochalists attribute different political, economic, cultural and
     social phenomena—e.g., globalization, financialization, deregulation, economic
     inequality, individualization, entrepreneurialism—to neoliberalism (Hardin 2014).
     The differences between these definitions notwithstanding, most scholars agree
     that neoliberalism, understood as a politico-epistemological program rather than
     simply free-market fundamentalism, as a particular production of subjectivity
     that constitutes individual subjects as “human capital” rather than simply as a
     way of governing economies or states, has led to the profound destruction of
     social bonds and to the production of economic, social, and political vulnerability
     and precarity.
        Originally signifying a social condition linked to poverty, “precarity” refers to
     the reduction of welfare state provisions, the suppression of unions, the growth
     of the knowledge economy, and the rise in flexible and precarious forms of
     labour. The concept of “precarity” has become widespread in debates about
     labor conditions in the creative industries, e.g. the rise of “immaterial labor”
     (Lazzarato 1996), the collaboration between regional policymakers and global
     film industry corporations to use film and television production as a cure for
     sluggish economies by providing a steady stream of transient, low-wage workers
     for location shooting through legislated incentives (Mayer 2016), Hollywood’s
     outsourcing of production to developing countries to realize cost advantages
     via flexible labor, low wages and tax incentives (Miller and Leger 2001), and
     the general exploitation of creative workers in the gig economy (Morgan and
     Nelligan 2018).
        The term “precariat”, on the other hand, was popularized by Guy Standing (2014),
     who argued that the restructuring of global and national economies in the last
     40 years has produced a new global class characterised by chronic insecurity.
     While scholars initially welcomed “the precariat” as the latest incarnation of the
     “subaltern”, a term that has allegedly lost its analytical power, “the precariat”
     remains a heavily contested concept because it “attempts to bring together too
     many different heterogeneous strata of the population and because it excludes
     segments of what Standing defines (too narrowly) as the working class, which
     still enjoys relatively stable and protected employment situations” (Frase 2013,
     11), in short, because it fails to acknowledge the various ways in which class is
     increasingly displaced by new modes of collectivization and social organization.
     Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “the multitude” (2005), which
     includes not only blue-collar labour traditionally associated with the working
     class but new forms of labour that have emerged in post-industrial society,



22                          Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
including “affective labour” and “immaterial labour”, offers an alternative way of
thinking precarity beyond the type of identitarian or representationalist politics
that Isabell Lorey criticizes in her compelling account of precarity as a form of
political mobilization, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (2015).



“UNBELONGING”: THE NEW EUROPEAN
CINEMA OF PRECARITY
   In line with these developments in political and economic theory, over the last
couple of decades film scholars have begun building a critical vocabulary to
theorize the new kinds of social relations that define our neoliberal age, from
Michael Gott’s “flexible solidarity” (2018), and Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber’s
“precarious intimacies” (2020) to Martin O’Shaughnessy’s “gift economy” (2020).
This new vocabulary of social relations is part of a more general tendency to
rethink precarity as a political tool rather than a socioeconomic condition from
which there is no escape, and thus to envision new forms of solidarity and
collectivity, as Martin O’Shaughnessy does in Looking Beyond Neoliberalism:
French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis (2022), or as Francesco
Sticchi does in Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television (2022),
in which he tries to identify ethical alternatives to the risk-taking, self-optimizing
neoliberal “entrepreneur of the self”.
   My aim in this article is not to discuss precarity in terms of government policies
or changes in the conditions of film production but rather to consider some of the
stylistic shifts in the representation of precarity in what has come to be known
as “the new European cinema of precarity”, a term that might, at first glance,
seem to resurrect a now obsolete notion of “European identity” which, up until
the 1990s, still figured in studies of European cinema. However, recent studies of
European cinema (Morgan-Tamosunas and Rings 2003; Berghahn and Sternberg
2010; Harrod, Liz, and Timoshkina 2015; Ravetto-Biagioli 2017; Trifonova 2020)
have sought to rethink the idea of “European identity” and “European cinema”
and to refigure positively the decline of “national cinema”—one of the three main
categories through which European cinema has traditionally been theorized, the
other two being “art cinema” and “auteur cinema”—as an opportunity rather than
a sign of what Thomas Elsaesser calls European cinema’s “new marginality”
(Elsaesser 2018).
   For film scholars who explore European cinema in terms of different affective
responses to the growing ethnic, racial, cultural and religious diversity in Europe,
the question of identity (national and/or trans-national)—i.e., the constant writing
and rewriting of the self, and thus the ongoing exploration of identity’s conditions
of possibility—continues to be one of the distinguishing features of European
cinema. However, in a growing number of recent European films, largely in
response to what Lauren Berlant describes as the attrition of social fantasies
like upward mobility, job security, meritocracy, and political and social equality,


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                        23
     questions of national and trans-national identity and belonging are increasingly
     displaced by a sense of unbelonging experienced by a growing number of
     Europeans, regardless of their national or citizenship status. This profound sense
     of unbelonging finds expression in the affective language of anxiety, contingency
     and precarity that pervades different national cinemas, both within Europe and
     beyond it, giving rise to a “cinema of precarity”, whose precarious protagonists
     constitute a new “affective class” (Berlant 2011, 72). Importantly, in the films
     Berlant discusses precarity extends beyond the expression of an economic
     condition—and thus beyond a particular social class—to indicate an entire
     “affective environment” (2011, 201–02), a sense of individualised insecurity, and
     the loss of social and existential status. Ultimately, Berlant remains ambivalent
     about the political potential of the cinema of precarity: while she acknowledges
     the ways in which these films investigate “new potential conditions of solidarity
     emerging from subjects not with similar historical identities or social locations
     but with similar adjustment styles to the pressures of the emergent new
     ordinariness” (2011, 202), she is skeptical of the perverse adjustment strategy of
     “cruel optimism” that she locates at the centre of these films.



     THE POETICS OF THE NEW EUROPEAN
     CINEMA OF PRECARITY
       The question what makes a film political has always preoccupied film scholars.
     While some locate the political significance of a film in its formal properties—e.g.,
     the blurring of fiction and documentary techniques in Life Is Ours (La vie est à
     nous, Jean Renoir, 1936) is said to account for the importance of that film in the
     history of Left filmmaking in France (Buchsbaum 1988, 283)—others caution that
     an excessive focus on aesthetic form might divert attention from the political
     issues a film sets out to explore (Wayne 2001, 58). In the long history of this
     debate realism, specifically “social realism”, has enjoyed a privileged status:
     to categorize a film as an example of “social realism” has generally meant to
     see the film as socially and/or politically engaged. The “new European cinema
     of precarity” (Bardan and O’Healy 2013) clearly inscribes itself within a long-
     standing European tradition of socially conscious realist cinema, building upon
     the legacy of late 1920s–1930s British documentaries of working-class life, 1930s
     French poetic realist films permeated by a sense of pessimism and fatalism,
     postwar Italian neorealist films featuring working-class characters, real locations
     and documentary style, 1930s and 1940s Hollywood melodramas populated
     by suffering protagonists dealing with conflicts between personal desires and
     mounting social pressures, the British New Wave, particularly kitchen sink films
     exploring the fragmentation of the working class, and French “New Realism”.
       Yet the realism of the new cinema of precarity is often refracted through
     particular genre tropes or filmic devices—e.g., allegory, experimental cinema
     techniques, black comedy, cinema vérité cinematography—suggesting



24                           Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
that traditional social realism might no longer be sufficient to capture the           Fig. 1
complexity of Europe’s political and moral crisis. The post-industrial nostalgia       Early One Morning (De
                                                                                       bon matin, Jean-Marc
that permeates much of the new cinema of precarity points to the vanishing—            Moutot, 2011)
or, more precisely, the mutation—of both the traditional working class, whose
experiences and struggles used to constitute the main subject of social realist
cinema, and of the tradition of social realist cinema itself now that the latter
has lost its main subject. Furthermore, films centered around white-collar
protagonists tend to explore the reasons for, and the experience of, precarity
not within the framework of social realism but rather through the conventions of
what appears to be an emerging hybrid genre—what I would call the “workplace
thriller” or “corporate psycho-thriller”—which combines elements of film noir,
psychological thrillers and corporate melodramas and privileges subjective
over objective approaches to storytelling. Think of the opening sequence of Early
One Morning (De bon matin, Jean-Marc Moutot, 2011), in which Paul, manager at
the International Credit and Trade Bank, arrives in the office as usual, takes out
a gun, shoots his boss and another employee, locks himself in his office and, as
he waits for the police to arrest him, reflects on the events leading up to this day
[Fig. 1]. The film engages directly with the 2008 financial crisis—the dialogue is
full of references to sub-prime loans, refinancing, and foreclosure—and reveals
the deepening psychopathologies of neoliberalism through the recurring motifs
of psychotic breakdown (Paul’s hallucinatory visions of his boss), suicide (Paul’s
suicidal thoughts following his demotion to another position in the “middle
office”), and murder (Paul’s murder of his boss). Like Early One Morning, films
made after the 2008 global financial crisis reflect the deepening pathologies of
neoliberalism: Vincent’s symbolic or metaphorical suicide in Time Out (L’Emploi
du temps, Laurent Cantet, 2001) gives way to Kessler’s psychotic breakdown in
Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine, Nicolas Klotz, 2007), Gregoire’s real
suicide in Father of My Children (Le Père de mes enfants, Mia Hansen-Love,
2009), Paul’s murder/suicide in Early One Morning.
  Many of the films representative of the new cinema of precarity hark back to


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                      25
     older film traditions that are not necessarily part of their own respective national
     film histories: e.g., Cornish director Mark Jenkins’ Bait (2019) invokes silent
     cinema, British kitchen sink realism and Luchino Visconti’s early neorealist film
     The Earth Trembles (La terra trema, 1948); Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice,
     Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) combines elements of time-travel and ghost story films
     with the magic neorealism of the Taviani brothers; White God (Fehér isten, Kornel
     Mundruczo, 2014) updates the tradition of allegorical, socially critical Hungarian
     films of the 1960s and 1970s with elements of fantasy and horror films; The
     Nothing Factory (A fábrica de nada, Pedro Pinho, 2017) combines British kitchen
     sink realism with French Nouvelle Vague influences; The Measure of a Man (La
     Loi du marché, Stéphane Brizé, 2015) and At War (En guerre, Stéphane Brizé,
     2018) recall neorealist working-class chronicles of unemployment; Glory (Slava,
     Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, 2016) continues the legacy of pre-1989
     subversive comedies while recalling the darkly absurdist films of the Czech New
     Wave. The particular way, in which these films imagine precarity—as a state,
     an event, or a process—has bearing on where the films locate the possibility
     for social and political transformation—in a particular class, in fighting for a
     particular good or cause, or in a particular political stance. For instance, while
     one film might present precarity as a historical contingency, a consequence of the
     replacement of one political utopia (communism) with another (capitalism)—e.g.,
     Glory—, another might depict precarity as an endless, sustainable apocalypse
     (The Nothing Factory).



     BEYOND SOCIAL REALISM
        The new European cinema of precarity is thus distinguished by a wider range
     of genre and stylistic responses to the precarity of life under neoliberalism: from
     allegory and magical realism (White God; Happy as Lazzaro; Transit, Christian
     Petzold, 2018), experimental films (Bait), comedies (Glory; My Piece of the
     Pie, Ma part du gâteau, Cédric Klapisch, 2011; Crash Test Aglaé, Eric Gravel,
     2017), social dramas (The Measure of a Man; At War), psycho-thrillers (Early
     One Morning; The Origin of Evil, L’Origine du mal, Sebastien Marnier, 2022) and
     factory musicals (The Nothing Factory).
        In Kornel Mundruczo’s White God 13-year-old Lili and her mixed-breed dog
     Hagen are subject to a large mongrel fee imposed by the Hungarian government,
     which permits only pure “Hungarian” breeds. Lili’s estranged father refuses
     to pay the fee, drives Hagen to the outskirts of Budapest and abandons him
     there. The film follows Hagen’s journey through the city as he befriends other
     street dogs before being caught by a homeless man who sells him to a dog
     fighting ring. During his first fight Hagen kills his opponent and runs away but is
     caught by animal control officers and taken to the city dog pound, from where
     he eventually escapes but not before freeing the other dogs, who follow him
     into the city, where Hagen methodically kills everyone who had harmed him.
     In the film’s climactic scene Hagen is about to kill Lili and her father when



26                          Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
she decides to play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody on her trumpet, bringing
Hagen and the other dogs to their knees. White God continues the tradition
of allegorical, socially critical Hungarian films of the 1960s and 1970s, but it
expands the genre palette to include elements of revenge fantasy, adventure
film, melodrama, Soviet cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, and post-colonial literature (it
was inspired by Coetzee’s Disgrace). The film received mixed reviews: e.g., while
Michael Sragow objected to the hypocritical depiction of Hungary’s and Europe’s
outcasts as both “naturally loyal and affectionate” (like dogs) and as potential
terrorists once they decide to rebel,1 Samuel La France pointed to Mundruczo’s
ignorance of the implications of his choice of Liszt’s piece—written by a German
composer who “infamously overstated the piece’s roots in Gypsy folk songs
and downplayed its actual heritage in Hungarian verbunkos, recruitment songs
used for nationalistic-militaristic ends”—as evidence of “the wrongheadedness
of his allegorical construction”.2 Mundruczo has spoken at length about his
dissatisfaction with what he calls dismissively “sociological films”: “I couldn’t tell
the story of a gypsy family in Hungary even if I wanted to. I think that if you make
a sociological film, you move even farther away from the truth. […] [F]olktales
and fables say more about our reality and life than realism can. Of course, I
can watch a realist, minimalist movie, but I always have a sense of ‘Yes, but
that’s journalism.’”3 Mundruczo’s words, which recall Michelangelo Antonioni’s
reflections on his break from neorealism—“Nowadays it’s no longer important
to make a film about a man whose bicycle has been stolen. It’s important to see
what is inside this man whose bicycle was stolen, what are his thoughts, his
feelings”4—suggest that it’s no longer sufficient to make a social problem film
about the precarious lives of minorities. Leaving aside Mundruczo’s reluctance
(or inability?) to distinguish “realism” from “reality”, one wonders whether by
leaving the terms of his allegory about racial relations and rising nationalism in
Eastern Europe broad enough to accommodate any marginalized, dispossessed
and victimized group—including the “precariat”, Hungarian ethnic minorities,
migrants, refugees, and the homeless—the director invites us to see them as
interchangeable. The allegorical approach to precarity—a subject Mundruczo
apparently sees as interchangeable with related subjects like immigration
policies, racism, colonialism, and class struggle—ultimately determines the
film’s vision of a possible response to the political and ethical crisis the film
depicts. Insofar as allegories, like fables and parables, have a pedagogical value,
they appeal to common sense and presuppose the existence of shared universal


1        https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/white-god-kornel-mundruczo-review/
(accessed March 1, 2023).
2        https://cinema-scope.com/currency/white-god-kornel-mundruczo-hungary-
germanysweden/. On how Hungarian Liszt actually is, see http://faculty.ce.berkeley.
edu/coby/essays/liszt.htm (accessed March 1, 2023).
3        https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/ndnf-interview-kornel-mundruczo-whi-
te-god/ (accessed March 1, 2023).
4        http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/directors-antonioni/ (accessed
March 1, 2023).



Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                        27
Fig. 2.
Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)




                           values like “humanity”, “hospitality”, and “love”; yet it is precisely the absence
                           of such shared values that the film seeks to expose. Ironically, Mundruczo’s
                           allegorical approach, which deliberately challenges traditional social realism’s
                           implicit didactic tendency, ends up simply rendering that tendency explicit.
                              If Mundruczo’s reluctance to make “a social problem film” pushes him in the
                           direction of allegory, Mark Jenkin’s strategy of escaping the social problem film
                           “ghetto” in the visually experimental Bait is to tap into the melodramatic address
                           of silent cinema (expressive close ups, Eisenstein-inspired editing, post-dubbed
                           dialogues), the mythic quality of The Earth Trembles, the visual poetry of Robert
                           Bresson’s partial images, and the realism of British kitchen sink drama, and to
                           refract the “social problem”—the disappearance of Cornwall’s traditional way of
                           life—through an aesthetic one, the obsolescence of 16mm film. Shot on 16mm
                           film and hand-processed, Bait centers on Martin Ward, a taciturn fisherman who
                           resents the gentrifying intruders taking over his once-thriving Cornish fishing
                           village. Martin and his brother Steven have been forced to sell their father’s
                           harborside cottage to the Leighs, posh Londoners who have transformed it into
                           a holiday retreat. While Martin still scrapes a living selling his catch of fish and
                           lobster door-to-door, Steven has adapted to the new times by using their father’s
                           boat for sightseeing trips. The escalating tensions between the two brothers,
                           and between Martin and the incomers, threaten to boil over into physical
                           violence, while the Leighs’ daughter Katie hooks up with Steven’s son Neil, with
                           tragic consequences. Unlike Mundruczo’s allegory, which distances us from the
                           story and the characters insofar as it asks us to split our attention between
                           the story and the allegorical frame, Jenkin’s marriage of form and content—the
                           fishermen’s precarious life is rendered visual through the precarious status of
                           film in the digital era—is both aesthetically and narratively satisfying.
                              The post-industrial nostalgia that permeates Bait—numerous close ups



28                                                Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
of Martin’s hands lowering lobster traps, coded visually as “authentic” and                             Fig. 3.
                                                                                      Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019)
“beautiful”, are repeatedly contrasted with shots of Steven’s boat full of drunken
tourists [Fig. 2 e Fig. 3]—is a recurring motif in the new European cinema of
precarity, which repeatedly imagines class solidarity in the narrow context of
manual or industrial labour posited as the last outpost in the struggle against the
neoliberal technocratic order. Charity Scribner reads post-industrial nostalgia as
a response to the waning of the collective and of labour solidarity, as well as to
the waning of material history in the age of the virtual, which leaves us “longing
for History itself—for the touch of the real that post-industrialist virtualization
threatens to subsume” (Scribner 2005, 9). A distinguishing feature of the new
European cinema of precarity is the consistency with which it maps two different
conceptions of work—work as a core part of one’s sense of identity versus work
as mere occupation—onto two different types of labour: manufacturing labour,
whose decline is linked to moral and spiritual decline and, on the other hand,
service sector occupations, which are generally depicted as inauthentic and
degrading.
 This is evident in the Bulgarian black comedy Glory, which begins with the
stuttering railroad technician Tsanko coming upon a large amount of money on
the tracks and duly notifying the local authorities. The cynical, ambitious, and
literally and symbolically impotent PR executive Julia (who is undergoing IVF
treatment) jumps on this opportunity to use the country bumpkin’s good deed


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                        29
Fig. 4.                  to distract the public attention from a corruption scandal involving Bulgaria’s
Glory (Slava, Kristina
                         Minister of Transport. Her PR team organizes a sham ceremony in honor of
Grozeva and Petar
Valchanov, 2016)         Tsanko’s working-class hero [Fig. 4], at which he is rewarded with a digital
                         watch, while his own Russian Glory/Slava-brand watch—a gift from his deceased
                         father—is taken away from him. The rest of the film alternates between Tsanko’s
                         unsuccessful attempts to reclaim his watch and Julia’s attempts to prevent
                         him from exposing the corruption scandal at all costs (including blackmail).
                         After a series of absurd situations, the abrupt and tragic end (Tsanko kills Julia
                         with an axe) comes as a shock. Here post-industrial nostalgia—evident in the
                         contrast between Tsanko’s “honest” manual labor and Julia’s PR shenanigans—
                         is complicated by post-communist nostalgia for communism’s stereotype of “the
                         ordinary man” (Tsanko) who used to be “one of us” and who is now no more
                         than a relic from another era, a part of Bulgarian history of which the neoliberal
                         present is a malformation, “a misshapen branch extending far beyond the trunk”.5
                         The film suggests that the communist past is not dead but simply “dressed up”
                         in neoliberal garb: the award ceremony sequence, “curated” in exactly same
                         way as communist ceremonies, shows that “Big Brother” is still watching, party
                         politics giving way to the politics of the image (PR). The parallels with Bait are
                         unmistakable: there the brothers’ family cottage is sold to wealthy Londoners,
                         forcing Steven to abandon fishing and sell his soul to the tourist industry; here
                         an “honest and poor” railway technician is deprived of his family heirloom and
                         offered, as part of a cunning PR campaign, a “better” digital watch, which has no


                         5       https://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/glory-review-slava-1201831700/ (ac-
                         cessed March 1, 2023).



30                                              Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
personal value for him. While Glory continues the legacy of Bulgarian pre-1989
subversive comedies, the film’s re-coding or re-enchantment of the communist
past from “authoritarian” and “ideological” to “authentic” and “real”—in contrast to
the morally and spiritually sterile and precarious neoliberal present—betrays the
nostalgia of many post-communist Bulgarian films for the supposedly classless
communist past.6 Ultimately, while the potential of genres like black comedy and
satire to engage critically with the neoliberal present is unquestionable, the risk
of re-mythologizing the past—whether the past in question is a communist one,
or one that represents an earlier stage of capitalism—is equally real.
  Populated by nonprofessional actors, Pedro Pinho’s quasi-musical The Nothing
Factory, an unlikely mix of avant-garde and neorealist elements, explores the
struggle of workers in an elevator factory on the outskirts of Lisbon after they
learn that the factory is about to be closed. The film calls to mind kitchen sink
dramas like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), but while
Reisz’s film depicts manufacturing work as dehumanizing and oppressive, Pinho
presents it as something to fight for, rather than fight against, and as constitutive
of personal identity, with workers speaking of “their” machines as extensions of
their bodies (“Factory, your neck veins are here, pulsating”) or addressing them
as interlocutors (“Machine, you are going to get out of this torpor and get back to
work”). As the workers debate possible lines of action—strike, occupation, or self-
management—the factory, with its imposing silent machines, transforms into a
surreal space in which to revisit the history of labor, the legacy of communism
and trade unions, and the after-effects of postcolonialism. In a series of
Godardian voiceovers Daniele, an Italian filmmaker interested in documenting
the workers’ strike, discusses precarity as the legacy of Cold War politics (the
welfare state was merely an ideological response to the “threat of Communism”)
and colonialism (“The present crisis is not a classic crisis [but] an endless end,
a sustainable apocalypse. […] 200 years ago, European elites accepted the
end of slavery only because capitalism promised much cheaper and better
qualified labor”). Importantly, in the film “precarity” refers not just to precarious
employment in Portugal and beyond (an Argentinian factory, also self-managed
by workers, calls to place an order) but also to precarious intimacies (Zé’s
relationship with his Brazilian girlfriend disintegrates) and precarious national
identities (there is a discussion of the decline in fertility rates across Europe and
the increasing reliance on Danish sperm banks). Like the other films discussed
above, The Nothing Factory departs from the conventions of social realism,
alternating between Godard-like sequences, in which a voiceover comments on
the social, economic and political effects of neoliberalism, extended dialogue
scenes reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s chamber dramas, and hyper self-aware
scenes in which the workers burst (unnaturally) into song. There is no attempt
to synthesize these very different—stylistically, tonally, and narratively—parts
of the film; instead, the director foregrounds the Frankensteinian, collage-like



6       https://vagabond.bg/sweet-power-nostalgia-854 (accessed March 1, 2023).



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                        nature of his film to underscore the difficulty of producing an objective, logical,
                        coherent reading of our neoliberal present.
                          The tension between the tradition of social realism and the difficulty of
                        rendering visible the abstract logic of neoliberalism is particularly evident in the
                        recent films of Stéphane Brizé—often called “the French Ken Loach” because of
                        his dedication to stories about working-class struggles—especially in the trilogy
                        made up of The Measure of a Man (2015), At War (2018), and Another World (Un
                        autre monde, 2021).
                          In the first few scenes of The Measure of a Man Thierry, an unemployed factory
                        worker, meets with an unemployment agency employee, a financial advisor, who
                        tells him to sell his apartment so that his loved ones are taken care of “after he is
                        gone,” and a HR recruiter who confirms Thierry’s willingness to work flexible hours
                        for less money only to inform him that he has no chance of getting the job he is
                        interviewing for. Such scenes—already a genre trope of the new European cinema
                        of precarity—foreground the central role that formerly supporting characters—
                        bank advisers, unemployment agency employees, recruiters, often present as
                        nothing more than disembodied voices on phone/computer platforms—now play
                        in sustaining/determining our lives, while another scene, set at a performance
                        management workshop during which Thierry’s peers dutifully dissect his poor
                        body language, rhythm of speech and vocabulary, dramatizes the value of
                        “performance” i.e., the self-management and disciplining of the neoliberal self.
                        Once Thierry gets a job as a supermarket security guard [Fig. 5]—in another
                        instance of post-industrial nostalgia his personal crisis follows the loss of factory
                        work and his “demotion” to the service sector—his work life is presented as a
Fig. 5.                 series of ethical tests as he is asked to monitor and discipline both customers
The Measure of a Man    and co-workers, one of whom (Mrs. Anselmi) commits suicide after she is caught
(La Loi du marché,
Stéphane Brizé, 2015)   stealing coupons, or risk losing his job. The scene in which Mrs. Anselmi is fired




32                                              Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
(her dismissal is conveniently framed in psychological terms—she “betrayed”
the company’s trust—making downsizing appear no different from a “break up”),
and the scene in which HR organizes a grief management workshop to deal
with feelings of guilt among employees, give the lie to an earlier retirement
party scene, in which Management was seen sending off another worker with a
“heartfelt” goodbye. The HR Director’s speech seeks to psychologize away the
structural violence to which all employees are subjected: work did not define
Mrs. Anselmi’s identity, he tells them, and so no one can really know the reason
(i.e., be accountable for) for her decision to end her life. If the retirement scene
celebrates the importance of work to one’s sense of self, the grief management
session simply denies the feelings of dehumanization and derealization that
accompany the loss of work.
   Throughout the film Brizé’s hand-held camera follows Thierry from behind.
In the three crucial scenes set in a little back room in the store—where “store
thieves” are taken for “processing”—Thierry is positioned off to the side, the
camera remaining behind him, denying us access to his face and thus to his
reactions to what is happening. The camera puts the viewer in the position of an
observer, a position that mirrors Thierry’s own position in these scenes, forcing
us (just like Thierry) to ask ourselves what we would do in his situation. By
framing every encounter in the film as an ethical test Brizé’s camera provides
an alternative to neoliberalism’s reduction of social relations to quasi-metric
aggregates.
   The Measure of a Man is not “about” unemployment but about the human limits
or costs of neoliberalism: as Thierry tells the agent in the office of unemployment,
“You cannot treat people like this.” “You”, in this case, is not synonymous only
with “the boss” or “management”—it includes everyone: e.g., when Thierry and
his wife are forced to sell their mobile home by the sea, the family interested
in buying it try to get Thierry to lower the price, framing their demand as an
opportunity to “plan for the future, move on to other things”, echoing the way in
which management usually presents the loss of jobs as an exciting opportunity
to pursue new plans. Every conflict in the film is motivated by the extension of
economic logic and market values (such as “performance”) to social and personal
relations: selling the family mobile home at a heavily discounted price means
putting a price tag on the many happy years Thierry spent there with his family;
mock job interviews are about disciplining bodies to make them marketable
(measuring rhythm of speech, amiability, expression).
   In At War an automotive parts plant in Agen is deemed non-competitive and
ordered closed by its German CEO (Hauser). The workers, having agreed two
years prior to forego bonuses and work additional unpaid hours, vote to strike,
led by Laurent. Alternating between negotiation scenes filmed like TV debates,
protests and their news coverage [Fig. 6], and long stretches of waiting, the film
explores the nature of collective identity and solidarity under neoliberalism. One
of the biggest obstacles to the workers’ Kafkaesque struggle is identifying and
gaining access to the authorities before which they can make their demands:
they spend most of their time trying to identify the seats of real versus symbolic


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Fig. 6.                 power, demanding of various government officials: “What is your purpose?” It
At War (En guerre,      doesn’t take them long to find out that a CEO has more power than the president
Stéphane Brizé, 2018)
                        but, as their union rep argues, although the State might not be all powerful,
                        it has a moral right to side with the workers—it’s a matter of social dialogue,
                        which takes place outside the justice system. What is the ultimate authority,
                        the film asks, that dictates the resolution of such conflicts? Is it the Kantian
                        imperative, which describes how things ought to be, or the justice system, which
                        describes how things are? Hauser’s response is clear: he dismisses the workers’
                        demands as “fantasy” or “utopia”, preferring instead to “live in this world and
                        follow the rules of this world, not the utopian one you imagine”. But as Jean-
                        François Lyotard has argued (1989), this is not merely a matter of litigation, for
                        these two regimes—the unwritten moral law and the judicial system—can never
                        be reconciled.
                           In The Measure of a Man Thierry is fighting to put food on the table, while
                        preserving his personal integrity. In At War, when the workers finally meet
                        Hauser, Laurent declares forcefully that the aim of class war is not a paycheck
                        at the end of the month: “We have come here for money? No, we don’t care
                        about money. We want work!” Laurent is fighting for the fundamental right
                        to have rights, including the right to work i.e., for the workers’ right not to be
                        treated as second-hand citizens. While Brizé’s dynamic verité cinematography
                        paints the industrial debate as a class conflict, with workers and management
                        in a perpetual face off, he is attentive to the ways in which the nature of the
                        struggle has changed. In an early scene Laurent lectures another worker on the
                        importance of fighting “intelligently”, a strategy illustrated by numerous scenes
                        set in meeting rooms and hallways, during which Laurent demonstrates the
                        importance of knowledge capital: it is because he is knowledgeable about the



34                                             Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
company’s operations in a transnational context that he is able to argue that the
factory is not “non-competitive”, that the real reason for closing it is to relocate
operations to Romania, in a factory with fewer workers, working for less. In fact,
Hauser, the CEO of the German group Dimke, of which the French company is
a subsidiary, is so impressed by Laurent’s knowledge of “the Market” that he
tells him he would make a great CEO. To fight “intelligently” workers must think
like accountants and political economists and understand the workings of global
capitalism—la loi du marché. In fact, the failure of the strike and Laurent’s symbolic
act of self-immolation can be attributed precisely to the fact that the workers
understand all too well la loi du marché inasmuch as many of them see their
struggle in merely financial terms: having internalized the logic of neoliberalism,
they fight for a bigger paycheck or severance package, and see their relation to
other workers not in terms of a shared past, values and goals, but in economic
terms. Tellingly, in The Measure of a Man the depressing scenes dramatizing
the extension of the economic logic of neoliberalism to social and work relations
alternate with intimate family scenes, in which Thierry is seen preparing dinner,
dancing with his wife, and taking care of his disabled son. The absence of such
intimate scenes of care from At War points to a failure to imagine an alternative
to the cut-throat logic of neoliberalism. For a while, convivial scenes of workers
drinking or celebrating together suggest the possibility of such an alternative
realm of care and solidarity, but eventually even this realm is invaded by market
logic, splitting the workers into factions.
   Brizé closes his trilogy with Another World, which reverses the perspective
of the previous two films. Here Vincent Lindon (who also plays the protagonist
in the previous two films) plays Philippe, a regional plant’s Executive Manager
overseeing his multinational corporation’s new layoff plan. Philippe must
answer to the Paris office, whose efficiency-minded head Claire Bonnet-Guérin
has, in turn, to please her US-based conglomerate. The pressures at work that
Vincent Lindon’s character experiences in the first and last film of the trilogy
are strikingly similar: in The Measure of a Man a former factory worker-turned-
security guard must discipline and punish those whose precarious status he
himself shares; in Another World an executive manager is expected to act as
an enforcer, punishing rather than managing those under him. Opening with
a tense scene of domestic crisis, a divorce hearing, Another World brings the
personal front and center. Following years of marital discord, Philippe’s wife
(Anne) has finally asked for a divorce, with her lawyer demanding a payout of
€375,000. The couple’s lawyers’ heated deliberations about the proper way to
calculate the damages suffered by either party and properly “compensate” Anne
for sacrificing her career to motherhood set the tone for the film’s exploration of
the real human costs of neoliberal work practices.
   Narratively, Another World picks up the thread of the previous two films:
Thierry (The Measure of a Man) is happily married with a young disabled son;
Laurent (At War) is separated, his grown-up daughter living in another city;
Philippe (Another World) is in the process of a painful divorce while his disabled
son Lucas, who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, is recovering from


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                        mental fatigue in a mental health facility. There are also echoes of other films
                        dealing with precarity, notably the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night (Deux jours,
                        une nuit, 2014). Phillipe, essentially an honest man, tries to avoid downsizing
                        by developing a plan that would require all managers, including him, to give
                        up their bonuses, just as, in Two Days, One Night, Sandra can keep her job
                        only if her co-workers give up their bonuses. In both films sacrifice is defined
                        in utterly unheroic and literal—monetary—terms. Just as many European films
                        about migrants and refugees test the ethical limits of belonging to Europe by
                        presenting a white European citizen with the dilemma of evaluating, literally, the
                        value of a migrant’s or refugee’s life against that of their own, in the new cinema
                        of precarity the protagonist must often choose between themselves and another
                        European: Thierry is forced to spy both on his fellow workers and customers,
                        while Philippe is asked to denounce a colleague to prove his loyalty to the
                        corporation. The question of the “price” one has to pay to stay financially afloat
                        is framed in ethical or moral terms i.e., monetary debt is “translated” as ethical/
                        moral debt, highlighting the dependence of neoliberalism’s ostensibly objective,
                        empirical socio-economic nature on normative/ethical presuppositions. Of
                        course, the logic of neoliberalism is to deny the validity of any ethical limits to
                        the unbridled accumulation of capital: Claire informs Philippe, in response to his
                        critique of downsizing, that “everything is precarious: romance, love, and work”,
                        while the American corporate chief reminds him that “No one cares about your
                        attempt to act like a Samaritan. The only law is that of the market”.
                          The film follows the quasi-neorealist, ciné-vérité style of the previous two films
                        in the trilogy, while also departing from it, particularly in the extended scenes of
Fig. 7.                 characters arguing from behind conference tables [Fig. 7] and in the extensive
Another World (Un       use of close ups, which underscore the irreducibility of affective relationships
autre monde, Stéphane   to the logic of the market, but also prioritize a psychological over a social
Brizé, 2021)




36                                             Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
reading of the film’s central conflicts. Thus, questions of class struggle become
subordinated to a character study: the film is mostly interested in what kind of
man Philippe is, rather than in questions of class interests and class struggle. In
the closing scene Philippe, reunited with his family, reads (in voiceover) a letter
he wrote to Claire, in which he rejects “the deal” she offered him: “What you call
‘courage’, the courage to do whatever is necessary to make a company profitable
for the shareholders, I call something else. The fact that you thought I would
accept your ‘deal’ means you assumed I had become the kind of man I would
not want to have as my father, son, or husband.” Like The Measure of a Man,
Another World ends with a gesture of refusal and redemption, affirming human
values and emotions, which cannot be monetized, over neoliberal logic, without
however exploring the very real and no doubt unpleasant consequences of the
protagonist’s moral victory.
   Although the second film in Brizé’s trilogy is inspired by a true story, the trilogy
stakes its claim to reality and authenticity not on this fact but rather on the
stylistic and ideological characteristics it shares with Italian neorealism: the
focus on ordinary people, the preoccupation with current socio-political events
and debates (the neoliberal restructuring of national economies, the 2007–2008
Great Recession and its repercussions), the abstention both from narrative
closure and facile moral judgments, the emphasis on emotions rather than
abstract ideas, the preference for a cine-verité style, and the use of the same
non-professional actors across all three films, who take turns impersonating
different government and corporate figures, as though Brizé meant to
suggest, through this intertextuality, the mutual imbrication of corporate and
state interests. Brizé’s trilogy shares the episodic structure of quintessential
neorealist films like Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, Vittorio De Sica, 1948). De
Sica’s film follows Antonio, played by a non-professional actor, as he searches
for the bike stolen from him on his first day of work. Structuring the film as a
(fruitless) search for the stolen bike allows De Sica to comment on various Italian
institutions, including government bureaucracy, political parties, the Church,
popular beliefs, the divisions within the postwar city, the decline of family values,
and even sports (soccer). The “search structure” of Brizé’s trilogy—the first film
follows Thierry’s search for a job, the second tracks Laurent’s attempts to secure
a meeting with the CEO of the company for which he works, and the third focuses
on Philippe’s attempts to negotiate between his employees and his bosses—
allows Brizé, like De Sica, to paint a detailed picture of life under neoliberalism
from the perspective of diverse players and institutions, from workers, trade
unions and unemployment agencies, to executive managers, corporate lawyers,
CEOs, and government officials.
   Yet Brizé’s films are no longer traditional social realist dramas. They are not
set on the shop floor, like earlier social realist chronicles of unemployment, but in
soulless boardrooms and various institutional settings, testifying to the director’s
awareness of the new context in which struggle takes place. Furthermore, while
Brizé’s cinema verité cinematography reveals his dedication to the search for
objectivity that has traditionally distinguished social realist films, the director’s


Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 41 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                         37
     decision to cast the same well-known actor (Vincent Lindon) alongside non-
     professional actors, to have him occupy what were previously assumed to be
     mutually opposed class positions—that of a working class man and that of an
     executive manager in the last film of the trilogy—and to create a thematically
     unified trilogy that invites us to read it as a self-contained commentary on the
     current stage of neoliberalism and underscores the parallels between different
     social classes’ experiences, ultimately endows the trilogy with a self-reflexivity
     that is not typical of traditional social realist dramas.



     CONCLUSION
       All the films considered here are concerned not so much with representing a
     particular social problem, along the lines of “social problem films”, but rather
     with exploring “adjustment strategies”—usually the failure to adjust—to “the
     new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). Regardless of whether
     they focus on office workers (e.g., in workplace thrillers) or on working-class
     protagonists, the films share a deepening concern about the ethical/moral/
     human costs of neoliberalism and a keen awareness of the dramatic ways in
     which the nature and the location of class struggle has changed. In the wake of
     the dissolution of the traditional working class, and the emergence of the new
     affective class of “the precariat”, which is difficult to define in classic Marxist
     terms, the generic/stylistic frame of “social realism” within which European films
     have traditionally explored pressing social issues is proving increasingly limiting,
     prompting filmmakers to bend it in new genre (and hybrid genre) directions. As
     a result, social realism has begun to mutate beyond its traditionally didactic
     model (exemplified by Ken Loach’s films) towards a more nuanced—although,
     as we have seen, not without its aesthetic problems and challenges—synthesis
     of genre cinema (including genres typically seen as un-realistic or anti-realistic
     e.g., black comedy, thriller, musical), art cinema, avant-garde cinema, allegory,
     and sociopolitical commentary.




38                          Trifonova, Neoliberalism and the Mutation of Social Realism
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