Precarity in Western European Cinema

This book explores the new European cinema of precarity, with a particular focus on Western European films, by revisiting some of its most important precursors, including 1930s Popular Front films and 1990s French New Realism, Italian neorealism, and the British New Wave. It identifies dominant themes and motifs in contemporary films and their precursors, as well as important continuities and discontinuities between earlier and later representations of work, class, class struggle, solidarity, precarity, the moral economy of capitalism and neoliberalism and their affective pathologies. Trifonova examines the ways in which the cinema of precarity mediates economic and social capital in the age of neoliberalism and considers whether these films lend validity to Guy Standing's idea of the precariat as "the new dangerous class."

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in Creative Arts and Humanities at University College London. She is the author of Screening the Art World, The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema, Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, European Film Theory, The Image in French Philosophy, and the novels Tourist and Rewrite.

Introduction, Chapter 1: The New European Cinema of Precarity, Chapter 2: Out of the Past: Precursors to the New European Cinema of Precarity, Chapter 3: From Class Struggle to Ethical Dilemmas, Chapter 4: Men at Work: Stéphane Brizé's Work Trilogy, Chapter 5: Performing the Neoliberal Self: Sébastien Marnier's Impostor Heroines, Chapter 6: The Moralization of Precarity, Chapter 7: The Gender Politics and Ethical Stakes of Falling Apart, Chapter 8: The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class?, Chapter 9: Fake It till You Make It: Class Struggle as Class-Passing, Conclusion, Index