Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

What is it about?

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Following late nineteenth-century pamphleteer Paul Lafargue’s advocacy for “the right to be lazy” and the enjoyment of the flourishing society of leisure, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the filmmakers’ project a celebration of idleness. Rather, as they strive to restore the productive value of individuals unable and unwilling to enter the labor market, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) reject what the filmmakers see as leftist politics’ complacency with capitalism’s promotion of work as an ethics of self-realization. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on the proletariat’s self-identification and incidental political inscription in late 19th century society, this analysis argues that the two films discussed here operate therefore a political and aesthetic shift away from twentieth-century militant cinema by replacing the figure of political consciousness commonly associated with the industrial, capitalist society, namely the worker, with the unemployed post-industrial subjects of late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, these two films disrupt dominant narratives; by giving authority to the refusal of work as a legitimate experience, they allow the sharing and debating of these experiences to produce ‘disturbances’ in such public discourse. Entertainment and didacticism are thus intricately interwoven in these films.

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