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.”

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.”