53.1

CONTENTS

Drake Stutesman
Editorial

John Thomas McGuire
Rending the Veils of Illusion: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and Its Two Definitive Film Interpretations

Ewa Mazierska
Retelling Polish History through the “Soft Avant-Garde” Films of the 1960s

Mrinalini Chakravorty
Picturing The Postmaster: Tagore, Ray, and the Making of an Uncanny Modernity

DOSSIER

The Work of The Image: Cinema, Labor, Aesthetic 

Elena Gorfinkel, Guest Editor
Introduction

John David Rhodes
Belabored: Style as Work

Karl Schoonover
Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer

Elena Gorfinkel
The Body’s Failed Labor: Performance Work in Sexploitation Cinema

Kay Dickinson
The State of Labor and Labor for the State: Syrian and Egyptian Cinema beyond the 2011 Uprisings

DOSSIER

Working Life Now and Then

Ewa Mazierska, Guest Editor
Introduction: Cinema and the Realities of Work

Martin O’Shaughnessy
French Film and Work: The Work Done by Work-Centered Films

Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan
Cinema, the Post-Fordist Worker, and Immaterial Labor: From Post-Hollywood to the European Art Film

Jonathan Owen
“Heroes of the Working Class”? Work in Czechoslovak Films of the New-Wave and Postcommunist Years

Ewa Mazierska
What Happened to the Polish Multitude Representation of Working People in Polish Postcommunist Cinema 

EDITORIAL

This issue’s dossiers focus on labor and film—onscreen and offscreen, above and below the line. Labor is an easily abstracted word, and the two dossiers—“The Work of the Image: Cinema, Labor, Aesthetics,” guest edited by Elena Gorfinkel, and “Working Life Now and Then,” guest edited by Ewa Mazierska—offer complex perspectives on what labor is and how it is treated. Labor is viewed through ways in which cinema refashions actual work with an intention to disguise, ignore, aestheticize, laud, or make blatant. Both guest editors cite Lumiere’s actualité Workers Leaving the Factory (FR, 1895) as a starting point, but each dossier diverges its focus. “The Work of the Image” examines labor within the industry of cinema itself and “Working Life Now and Then” examines depictions of labor by cinema. Each dossier emphasizes labor’s “screen presence” and discusses it as laborious and everyday, but also as something subtle and critical. Gorfinkel describes it as “ambiguously central” to film. Yet the nature of that centrality is in question because, in Mazierska’s words, there is so little in film to “account for the true, living experience of work.”

Another elusive state is discussed in the three additional essays—what happens to history when a story is retold. Ewa Mazierska’s essay “Retelling Polish History through the ‘Soft Avant-Garde’ Films of the 1960s” newly interprets the codes in Poland’s experimental cinema. John Thomas McGuire’s “Rending the Veils of Illusion: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and Its Two Definitive Film Interpretations” and Mrinalini Chakravorty’s “Picturing The Postmaster: Tagore, Ray, and the Making of an Uncanny Modernity” analyze the symbiosis of a writer’s writing and its visualization—as painting, theater, film, or acting—and how that affects its era.

—Drake Stutesman