Female Industrial Labor in Contemporary European Cinema

My presentation focuses on current European films that depict industrial labor. I argue that because our ideas about worker's 'alienation' have been shaped by the industrial era, European films continue to focus on factory labor when depicting work. Yet, an important shift has occurred. In contemporary European cinema about factory work, female characters play the main roles, while historically a masculine factory worker with a raised fist in a strike symbolized labor. My talk discusses the contradiction between the current increase of flexible, immaterial, or creative work, often captured by the term 'the feminization of labor,' and the industrial environments in which these recent films are set. I will refer to four contemporary European feature films that depict women working in factories: Dancer in the Dark (Lars van Trier, 2000), Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010), The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990), and I Love Budapest (Agnes Incze, 2001). My talk will address the following questions: do filmmakers use female characters to capture newly dominant forms of labor? How do these films mobilize images of labor for feminist arguments? Has industrial labor itself become a sign for alienation? Do these films depict factory work through a nostalgic lens? I conclude by focusing on the contradiction between our cultural understanding of work shaped by film conventions of the past and our need to create a new film language for a vision of work for a European future.