French Documentary Perspectives on the Collective Politics of the Atlantic Shipyards, a Global Workplace

What is it about?

Focusing on three French documentaries filmed at French shipyards—Le dernier navire (Jean-Marc Moutout, 2000), Les prolos (Marcel Trillat, 2002) and Un monde moderne (Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier, 2005)—this article addresses the impact of subcontracting, particularly the growing presence of temporary migrant workers, on labor collective organization and on the aesthetic of socially and politically committed documentary. Drawing from recent research conducted by French sociologists of labor and film analysis, it approaches these three films as a coherent corpus that manifests the erosion of twentieth-century working-class struggles, discourses, bodies, and sites but, most importantly, as a corpus that empowers early twenty-first-century migrant subcontracted labor, a category of workers typically lacking political representation and legal protections. Michel De Certeau's concepts of strategy and tactics provide a useful model to assess the changing nature of collective politics in the globalized workplace, from the power struggles of clearly identified classes during the twentieth century to the tactical reassemblage of contiguous but dispersed labor trajectories in the context of intensified economic globalization.

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