LABRST 2M03 Lecture 2: 08:05 2M03
18 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
6/20/18
Picturing Work: Visual Culture an FilmTill the Mid 20th
Century
Film Review
-Choose film from list one and one from list 2 based on both write comparative review of
around 1000 - 1250 — compare and contrast how class, work and trade unions are health w in
both films
-how are they representing working class folks? What are they not? How are they portraying
them
-think abut genre, style, the time they were set in
-pick two/three themes that were talked about in your notes that work across both movies
-1000-1250 word limit, add word count, don’t make a cover page
-can be first person
-draw on lectures and readings to connect to films — clarity and logic of assignment
Visualizing Labour & Class: late 19th and 20th centuries
-2 broad approaches to visually representing labour prior to the advent of film
•A ‘realist’ emphasis on the dignity of working people and indignity if their conditions, iden-
tified with artists who were sympathetic to working-class communities
•A ‘conservative’ disdain for anything ‘popular’, ‘lower-class’, or related to ‘organized
labour’. Unions were portrayed as threatening to the social order
-anti democratic, anti popular way of justifying the denial of vote to people
-there were good workers who listened to the rules, did their job and never complained
and then there were people who would speak out and were seen as needing to be kicked
out of the work force
Realism: Paintings
-The Stone Breakers (Courbet, 1849)
•hands on physical labour, clothes torn and dirty
•Can’t see their faces, no identity
•the young guy has boots and the older guy is wearing clogs
•Why was this Revolutionary in 1849?
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find more resources at oneclass.com
6/20/18
-paintings during this time were usually of landscapes or the upper class but the
subject of this painting is of an ordinary person (they are not in the background)
-and you can see that their clothes are torn so then people will ask, well their hard
working why are their clothes torn?
-if you are use to see royalty on paintings then people are portrayed that bring up
questions, that becomes an issue
•working class poor, part of mass, seen as revolutionary b/c showed mass
-The Cleaners (Millet, 1857)
•women of colour
•hidden faces; could be anyone, any men, any women
•the faceless masses
•in the field trying to get what little is left to bring home (says it in the name if the ti-
tle)
•hard physical work, looking down, bent over
•the workers have darker skin
•a guy on a horse standing in the background beside a nice house
•working and living conditions of actual people
Conservative Approaches: The Popular Press at the Turn of the 20th Century
-in the late-19th to early-20th century, segments of the press began to portray the labour move-
ment as:
•inherently violent
-seen IWW as threatening violent bad guy, unions there to stir trouble
-foreign organizer seen as zombie a knife and torch
•Irrational and self-destructive
-because of lack of reason lead to destruction
-see strikes as only hurting working people
•Unpatriotic and seditious
-workers against unions (against foreigners)
•Infiltrated by ‘foreign agitators’
-trying to spread chaos as they are foreigners
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
6/20/18
-the cartoons of this era established many of the stereotypes that later reappear in the film in-
dustry — formed deep foundations of labour movement today and showing the foreign life of
workers in society
-the dominant fame was that unions were inherently violent, a giant monster who is stirring this
volcano of sabotage, hatred and bringing chaos into society
-“put them out and keep them out” image - Trump talks like this now of days
-another stereotype is that unions are unpatriotic and seditious
-idea the union agitators are foreign agitators that create chaos
Early Film and the Worker
-The Lumiere Brothers
•Workers leaving factory —
-all leaving at diff times leaving each other
-mainly women, animals etc.
•the first motion picture ever made was produced by the Lumiere Brothers. The piece was
entitled “Workers Leaving the Factory in Lyon” (1895), featuring a mostly female work-
force leading the brothers’ factory in Lyon (France)
•at the first public screening of their film, the Lumiere brothers also screened movies abut
blacksmiths, fishermen, gardeners, and also made a short movie about construction workers
•the world of work was thus an important focus of early motion-pictures
-Anti-Union Propaganda in North American Film
•the National Association of Manufactures (NAM) was instrumental in generating some of
the first anti- union films in the period between 1907-1911
•many of these films repeated the earlier anti-union stereotypes promoted by the print media
of the era and which would later reappear in Hollywood productions as well
-“Uncle Sam and the Bolshevik-IWW Rat” the rat which says “Bolsheviki CIWW” threat-
ens the American Institution
•making seem as though american institutions will protect the public from unions
-“Alices Egg Plant” (Disney, 1925) -> the business is portrayed as an innocent little girl
who needs her eggs, the hens are violent and self destructive (throwing their own eggs),
mob mentality (takes one speech to fire them up), the agitator is foreign (says Moscow on
his thing)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
