The Proletariat is Missing:

Representations of the Proletariat in Cinema

Interview with Ramin Alaei of Culture Today Magazine (Iran)

Benjamin Noys and Ramin Alaei (2016)

What kind of artistic-cinematic approach can be used to consider the proletariat as a

point which has been excluded from the system, so that its political possibilities are not

repressed in the cinematic totality? How can representing the excluded, have a political

potential? For example the Pasolinian approach regarding the excluded or the direct

approach of Mike Leigh or the Pedro Costa approach?

This is a very insightful question. This problem is not only a problem of cinema. Commonly

a distinction is drawn between the proletariat, which is nothing according to Marx, the point

of exclusion as you put it, and the working class, which is the empirical set of workers that

can be represented by the usual forms of social and statistical measurement. The problem for

cinema is how to represent this nothing, the proletariat? Arent we only capable of

representing the working class? I dont believe a strict division between the proletariat as a

concept, or as what Lyotard called a Kantian Idea, a regulative notion not empirically present,

and the working class as real holds up. This is the problem cinema confronts.

In terms of cinema, I find both lines of approach you suggest problematic. In the case of

Pasolini he deliberately selects the lumpen or sub proletariat as the truly excluded. He is

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making, as you suggest, the attempt to represent the proletariat as nothing. For him, at least

in several of his films, it is those who are outside the usual system of work and labour who

represent the real excluded. The danger here, as several critics pointed out, is a romanticism

of revolt. Political potential is seen as belonging to those who dont belong, who incarnate a

life outside the system. Certainly it is important to give flesh and life to the excluded, which

is an important political gesture. These are still, however, representations and representations

that tend to offer an ideal subject of revolt, one who is supposedly totally outside. As Pasolini

saw capitalism in Italy becoming more dominant, with what he called the anthropological

mutation, his analysis was there was no alternative. This results in the pessimism of Sal, in

which the agents are the fascist aristocrats disporting themselves with the bodies of the

young.

In the case of Mike Leigh we might say the approach is to the working class, not the

proletariat, and I find this approach patronising. While his films at least feature working-class

people, which is a significant difference to most cinema, their portrayal still seems to me

from the point-of-view of the middle class. The working class are treated as comic salt of the

earth types, at least certainly in a film like Life is Sweet. Here we find the working class but

no real sense of the proletariat. In Leighs work we could say this only emerges in the

nihilistic and self-destructive rage of Naked. There is a strange convergence with Pasolini

here!

While I see these approaches as problematic I do not think there is an ideal solution. Instead,

cinema must confront the messy boundaries between the proletariat and the working class.

We cannot simply have the emptiness of a purified proletariat, an ideal class subject, nor can

we simply have the vision of the subjected working class, as a kind of ideal suffering subject.

I think the political potential of cinematic representation lies in this engagement with that

boundary, with the lives and experiences of those that are excluded a category that shifts

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and changes, including for individuals (for example, in the experience of unemployment). At

least the directors you have mentioned take the risk. What is lacking today is that risk of

representation and so the disappearance of the proletariat and the working class from

representation. We are all middle class now has been a powerful political slogan of

neoliberalism, driven by increasing debt, and cinema has struggled to escape this crisis of

representation.

On the border that separates proletariat and working class, when there is a nothingness

on one side, do not the various and countless interpretations of this nothingness weaken

the power of political action?

To finish Marxs statement, he says the proletariat is a nothing than should become

everything. I am sceptical about his short-hand notion of a radical reversal from the position

of powerlessness into power, something that I find often characterises the thought of Giorgio

Agamben. It seems, at times, in Agambens work that the more bare life becomes destitute

of qualities the more it promises a messianic reversal into a new form of potential. Marxs

chapter on the working day in Capital relies on the reports of factory inspectors to chart the

actual miseries of working-class life, from industrial accidents to the adulteration of food. I

think this more specific analysis of how the proletariat is produced and reduced to nothing

gives us a better notion of what strategic political possibilities remain.

In terms of cinema, as Ive suggested, the fact that it is forced into representation means that

it cannot simply leave the proletariat as nothing. Something has to appear: bodies,

experiences, thoughts, and lives. In this way cinema can form an image or set of images that

can help us to see these situations, to grasp what is usually not allowed to appear. Like I said,

this can never be a pure appearance, but this is a necessary part of the problem of grasping

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political possibilities. Class has not disappeared. Class is complex, and certainly always has

been; what are lacking are new modes of analysis and new ways of seeing. Go to a second-

hand bookshop in the UK and in the sociology section you will see many books on class from

the 1970s. Similarly, cinema of that period is often engaged with class. We have given-up

class analysis, but class remains and remains in cinema, including in its absence. Even this

absence, which is true of much contemporary cinema, is visible as a distortion of the world:

the absence of work, of the workers. Brecht wrote Those who sat on golden chairs to write /

Will be questioned about those who / Wove their coats. We can say the same about those

who sit in directors chairs.

Considering the Kantian idea... the thing as the thing itself is regarded ingraspable but

the transcendental turn in Kant puts the noumen in the transcendental realm not the

transcendent in order to create an idea for regulating the syntheses of understanding.

Are we witnessing a kind of transcendental turn in cinema? Can this turn from

transcendent to transcendental create a change in the possibilities of cinema to

intervene in the relationship between the proletariat and the working class? Is this

relationship in the transcendental realm a political act in the ontological realm?

The problem with Lyotards Kantian definition of the proletariat as idea is that it leaves it as

unknowable. I would agree with Hegels critique of Kant, which is that to posit something us

unknowable presumes you know it as unknowable and so sets an unnecessary limit on

knowledge. I am not sure if we are witnessing a transcendental turn in cinema, this kind of

terminology was used by Paul Schrader to describe the spiritual cinema of Ozu, Bresson,

and Dreyer. It could be extended to someone like Tarkovsky, a filmmaker I love, but

precisely because of the problems his spiritual cinema causes for me. This kind of cinema

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might, as you suggest, be seen as more transcendent than transcendental. I would say a

cinema that engaged with the problem of knowing, with the unstable line between the

proletariat and the working class, would offer us a political act. I am afraid I have not

encountered this often in contemporary cinema. In fact, inspired by the work of my friend

Johanna Isaacson and her comrades in the Blindfield journal (https://blindfieldjournal.com/),

it is contemporary horror cinema that I have found most useful for posing this problem.

Dont you think this will reduce cinema to a device for reporting? Wont this repress

the creative possibilities of cinema? Does cinema have a way to get out of this reporting?

I think it would only be reporting if we assumed in advance we knew what the working class

and the proletariat are and then set out to film them. In fact, I think this is a much more

experimental process and also, obviously, not the only thing cinema has to do. We have seen

a recent interest in forms of realism and in forms of mapping to orient ourselves, but this

cartographic turn has tended to be focused on the representation of capitalism. While

capitalism obviously includes the working class, as the motor that generates surplus value,

there can be a tendency to focus on the apocalyptic or sublime elements of capital. Instead, I

think creative possibilities of cinema can be found in exploring the relation of the working

class and the proletariat. To adapt a phrase of Deleuze on political cinema, the proletariat is

missing. The role of cinema is not simply to fill in this gap, to create a substantial

representation, but to engage with what is missing. Obviously, as in the work of Glauber

Rocha, that Deleuze also references, such an engagement can also be an engagement with

trance and with the spiritual. We should not assume or reduce the global working class or

proletariat to its material destitution, reserving all other artistic possibilities for bourgeois

culture. Also, we should not romanticise this process, as we have seen recently in Europe the

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issue of class is often at stake in reactionary and nationalist movements. This can be

overblown, in blaming the working class for reactionary views and movements, but it is also

something that has to be engaged with. A neoliberal capitalism that violently imposes

competition over scant resources also generates xenophobia and racism. These are also part

of what we must struggle with.

About Brecht, I think what Brecht said about the bourgeois doesnt have anything to do

with representing the working class. His ideas [Distancing effect] finally flowed into

avant-garde art in ways that was useful to the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, reporting

representation is reductive and, on the other hand, creating new ways can make it

unintelligible to the working class. What is your way out of this dualism?

I like a remark by Guy Debord that avant-gardes are made to die in their own time. There is

no one strategy that remains immune from capitalist culture, but at the same time I dont

think all strategies remain fatally compromised. It is also a struggle within and against the

usual forms of capitalist representation. In this sense, I dont think there is a simple choice

between realism or reporting and the avant-garde. I think, in line with the overlap of working

class and proletariat, there are different forms and strategies that emerge to creative probe this

absence. Mainstream cinema has adopted many avant-garde strategies, from increasingly

rapid cutting to what is called post-continuity cinema, the breakdown of intelligible relations

between shots and situations (for example, in the cinema of Michael Bay). So, I dont think

we should underestimate peoples visual intelligence. At the same time, the lived experience

of the working-class condition doesnt entail a desire to see that on screen. It was Preston

Sturges, in his satire Sullivans Travels, who mocked the left-wing filmmakers desire to

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represent the working class and suggested that what the working class wanted was escapism

from their misery. That is a convenient argument, but one that should make us think. Again, I

dont have a simple answer, and the constriction of cinema makes it hard to imagine, for me.

I would suggest that there are multiple resources still available in cinema for representation

that need to be drawn on to create an experimental practice that is not avant-garde in the

usual sense. I wasnt suggesting Brecht as an answer, although his own film and drama

practice does engage with both realism and more avant-garde techniques. I dont think we

should forget those debates and resources, even if it is very difficult to imagine those in

practice today.

You wrote: it is contemporary horror cinema that I have found most useful for posing

this problem. Can you please explain more about this? I am highly interested in horror

cinema. Your response in this case will be very informative for me.

Ive always been a fan of horror cinema, growing up in the 1980s I was lucky enough to

experience a wave of iconic horror films, especially John Carpenters The Thing and the early

works of David Cronenberg. Recently I was interested to familiarise myself with more recent

work, as I had my problems with the works focused around torture (Hostel, the Saw series).

One film, which I then wrote on, was Brad Andersons 2001 film Session 9

(https://blindfieldjournal.com/2015/11/10/weak-and-wounded-session-9-work-and-insurgent-

femininity/). The film portrays workers removing asbestos from an abandoned mental

hospital and one of them gradually succumbing to possession by one of the evil spirits of the

place. What was interesting for me was the film portrayed work and also work that is in

process of disappearing. Once the asbestos is removed from buildings then these workers will

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have no jobs. It seemed to me appropriate that a horror film should be a place to think about

the disappearance of the working class.

In general, this experience of horror is one that is associated with work, as the site of

subjection to value and extraction of value. Horror films often feature industrial or rural sites

that are in the process of abandonment and become sites of horror. Horror is also a site

focused on gender and sexuality as source and object of horror, and so horror can actually

explore the intersections of these forms in relation to class. This may seem to lot to claim,

and I wouldnt say horror is the only genre that can ask these questions, but it seems to me

that horror is one of the few genres asking these questions.

A general questions; what does it mean that Pasolinis point of view to the working class

is from the working classs point of view and Mike Leighs from the middle class? Is

there a substance that we can base on this identification to divide original and pure

films from non-original ones?

Here I should have been more specific. I do not think Pasolinis viewpoint is that of the

working class. His films tend to adopt the viewpoint of the lumpen or as he preferred sub-

proletariat, but this is still a viewpoint adopted from his class position. It remains a middle

class or bourgeois point of view, which is likely to be the case with most filmmakers (and

other artists and academics). My point is that there is no point of purity from which to begin

or end, no class origin guarantees authenticity nor does any class identification. Instead, I am

suggesting that in both cases there is a complex attempt to reconstruct certain forms of truth

about working class life that both fail in different and interesting ways. This is not to say we

cant imagine or produce a form of truth, otherwise we leave matters back in non-

representation and the sublime. The very notion of adopting and shifting class positions is

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essential, not only to cinematic representation but also to working class experience, which is

shaped by the resistance to being working class. This desire for escape, this resistance, is

something that any representation of the working class has to acknowledge and, in fact, runs

through these works. My problem with Leigh is while in a film like Life is Sweet he presents

modes of class aspiration, but adopts, I think, a patronising view of them. In the guise of

realism he produces caricature. As I say, in the case of Pasolini, one could level charges of

romanticism.

In terms of substance, there are different class experiences and modes of life, we live class,

we have ingrained and bodily experiences of class (what Bourdieu called a habitus). While

the experience of class is fractured and complex I dont think we should deny these

experiences and how they impact on us, along with, in complex ways, other experiences of

identity formation and modes of oppression. So, I dont think we can say starting from a

certain point of experience guarantees a representation, but I would say denying or

misreading those experiences can be criticised and analysed.

This inevitable plurality of viewpoints, which is strengthened by the autonomy of the

authors in cinema, makes problems for achieving your ideals in representing the

workers?

To use, ironically, a phrase of Maos, I would like a thousand flowers to bloom. I wouldnt

deny this plurality or say cinema only had to be about class, or the working class, which in

one sense would merely reinforce a class society. That said, cinema is, whether it likes it or

not, engaged with this problem. Even the most escapist works are escaping from something,

and even the most non-naturalist works bear the traces and forms of the social conflicts and

structures from which they emerge. I am not trying to police filmmakers. I am arguing that

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we need this plurality, including beyond the few examples we have discussed. It is the lack of

plurality which concerns me. As a viewer and critic of cinema I think that my right is to

comment on this.

I hope I dont have ideals; I certainly have been trying to argue against the notion that there is

an ideal worker, the one most representative of the class. This used to be commonly seen as

the male factory worker, today various replacements are offered: the cognitive worker or

cognitariat, the precarious worker or precariat, or the multitude. These are all efforts to trace

new forms of working class and proletarian existence, but what concerns me is the singling

out and potential idealising one form of worker as the revolutionary worker. In an ageing

Europe, what about the retired worker, do they remain working class? What about those

excluded from the wage globally, are they working class? These are the sorts of questions I

dont have answers to, but which I think cinema can pose.

What is your opinion about realization of the functional political most leftist movies

such as the militant Dziga Vertov Group after May 68?

Out of the films I have seen by the Dizga Vertov group my favourite is, unsurprisingly,

British Sounds. In particular, I find the opening tracking shot of the production line at the

Ford motor plant in Dagenham, with the deafening noise of the factory, an impressive

rendering of the drowning out of the sounds of the working class. This is matched, in the

film, by the discussions with the workers, which returns to them their voice. Obviously the

revolutionary optimism of the film now seems misplaced, what Tariq Ali called the coming

British revolution did not arrive, although the miners did topple a conservative government

in 1974 and were punished for his by the conservatives in their defeat in 1984. Also, the

strategies of the groups films are not without their problems. This is not simply my ideal or

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ideal film. I do think, however, it is something worth thinking about and from for the kinds of

problems it poses. We have different problems in representing the working class today. We

are in the context of a globally dominant capitalism with only a weak and fragmented

resistance. The urgency of resistance remains, but I think we should recognise our weakness

as our starting point. Perhaps cinema can also teach us about this weakness.

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