Film, Class, Society – serie

This volume brings together renowned scholars and early career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema —whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working with traditional or new media— engages with phenomena of precarity, poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the representation of social class in contemporary visual culture. Watch our book talk with the editors Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel here: https://youtu.be/lKpD1NFAx2o

In the past decade, spanning from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, rural poverty in the United States has risen dramatically. The impact of the pandemic is set to intensify these inequalities as the decades of neoliberal dismantling of public healthcare and other social institutions leave inhabitants of impoverished rural areas particularly vulnerable.Even before this current exacerbation, representations of rural landscape in American cinema have sought to spatially visualize the country’s social inequalities and focus on the victims of poverty and marginalization. The films discussed in this monograph, Ballast (2008), Winter’s Bone (2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and Leave No Trace (2018), address deep rural poverty in a complex manner and facilitate an interactive, social understanding of landscape.New Rural Cinema suggest a novel way of looking at landscape in cinema that responds to and guides its readers through this recent development in American Independent film. It views the chosen films as expressions of a growing awareness of the dire inequality caused by neoliberal capitalism in the United States and the role landscape plays both in its mechanisms of social exclusion as well as in its collective contestation.

This volume brings together renowned scholars and early career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema —whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working with traditional or new media— engages with phenomena of precarity, poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the representation of social class in contemporary visual culture. Watch our book talk with the editors Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and Hanna Prenzel here: https://youtu.be/lKpD1NFAx2o