vol. 2, issue 2: labour Archives - cléo

Editor’s Note: Labour

kiva reardon — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:27:01 +0000

A few weeks back, I got into an argument about Marxism. Sitting on a park bench and enjoying the first warm evening of summer, the conversation with my friend turned to the state of capitalism. “Do you really think all this is going to disappear?” he asked, gesturing to the omnipresent free market. No, I […]

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Heavy Metal: Clio Barnard on Junkyards, Heroes, and Fairytales in The Selfish Giant

jutta sarhimaa — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:23:34 +0000

In 2010, Clio Barnard made her presence in the film world known with her bold and experimental debut film, The Arbor. A documentary tracing the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, The Arbor rejected conventional form, using actors to lip-synch interviews Barnard had conducted with her subject’s family and friends. The move was controversial—and raised questions regarding the role […]

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Voice(s) of the People: An Interview with Alanis Obomsawin

mallory andrews — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:20:11 +0000

To listen can be a powerful political act. Few filmmakers demonstrate this more than Alanis Obomsawin. Steeped in oral storytelling traditions, her world-renowned documentaries are not so much about giving voice to an issue, but allowing for the often muted voices of First Nations peoples to be heard. A member of the Abenaki nation, Obomsawin was raised […]

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Shear Work: The Global Labour Trade in Hair India

esther r. berry — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:18:03 +0000

The observational documentary Hair India (2008), which tracks the multibillion-dollar global industry in Indian hair, by Italian filmmakers Raffaele Brunetti and Marco Leopardi, moves dizzyingly between the subjects who sacrifice their hair in religious devotion and the women who buy it. Hair India mimics not only the rapid, peripatetic flow of global capital, but also the dynamic medium of […]

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The Art of (Feminist Film) Work in the Age of Digital Reproduction

so mayer — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:14:48 +0000

Some time in your life you will have occasion to say “What is this thing called time? What is that?” There’s the clock: you go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock, you get your coffee by the clock, you have to get on a plane at […]

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On the Job: Michael Glawogger’s Whores’ Glory

adam nayman — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:12:03 +0000

Eulogizing Michael Glawogger in Cinema Scope 59, Christoph Huber revealed that the late Austrian director—who died on April 23 in Liberia at the age of 55 after contracting malaria during a film shoot—was not a fan of the word “globalization.” This despite the fact that his documentaries Megacities (1998), Workingman’s Death (2005), and Whores’ Glory (2011) were frequently referred to—and upon the completion of […]

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“Something Happened”: Conversation and Connection in Butter on the Latch

jemma desai — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:09:37 +0000

Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch (2013) follows Sarah (Sarah Small) and Isolde (Isolde Chae-Lawrence), two old friends who reunite by chance at a Balkan music festival in the woods of Mendocino, California. The easy flow of their friendship seems intractable, until Steph (Charlie Hewson), a new male camper, arrives. As Sarah’s attraction to him becomes apparent, […]

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Lady Liberty’s Labours: James Gray’s The Immigrant

kiva reardon — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:06:32 +0000

How do you make it in America? Work. Work hard. Work harder. So goes the mantra upon which (until recently) the world’s greatest economy and dominant culture was built. But while work will supposedly set you free, what will it cost? Or, at what point does making it—to that ever-moving, unattainable finish line—mean breaking yourself? […]

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No Vagina in Sight: The Queer Case of Junior

julia cooper — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:58:29 +0000

Femininity, far from being nature, is the quality of the orgasmic force when it can be converted into merchandise, into an object of economic exchange, into work. –Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie (2013) When Junior debuted in 1994, it was not the first time Arnold Schwarzenegger had played opposite Danny DeVito in a film about motherhood, reproduction, […]

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Outside of the Box: A Roundtable on Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child

cléo journal — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:58:04 +0000

Earlier this year, Gillian Robespierre’s rom-com Obvious Child garnered much attention because, quite simply, it addressed abortion. In the film, Donna (Jenny Slate, of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and swearing on SNL fame) gets pregnant after a one-night stand and decides to terminate the pregnancy. While the conversations around Obvious Child ranged from […]

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