Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television: Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction

by Francesco Sticchi

Overview

This book examines a corpus of films and TV series released since the global financial crisis, addressing them as emblematic expressions of our age of precarity. The analysis of the motifs and characters of these case studies is built around notions originating from Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and, in particular, the concept of chronotope, affirming the material and dynamic connection between form and content in artistic experience. This book observes how precarious lives are enacted in forms of spatio-temporal compositions which carry conceptual and ethical challenges for their viewers. This book falls within the film-philosophy framework and, although primarily directed to an academic audience, it provides an interdisciplinary account of the notion of cinematic precarity. It puts the embodied analysis of viewers’ ethical participation in close dialogical relationship with a philosophical and sociological examination of current dynamics of inequality and exclusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030632632
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	02/12/2021
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	261
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Francesco Sticchi works as Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and at the SAE Institute. He is the author of Melancholy Emotion in Contemporary Cinema: A Spinozian Analysis of Film Experience (2019).

Table of Contents

Introduction.- A Film-Philosophy for the Age of Precarity.- The Economy of Precarity.- Anxious, Depressed, Disposable/Extinct Lives on Screen.- Is There Something Our Bodies Can Do?.- Chapter Outlines and Limitations.- Part 1: Anxiety.- 1.1 Visualising the (Embodied) Soul at Work.- 1.2 From Welfare to Workfare Through Cinema.- 1.3 Cinematic Performances of Femininity.- 1.4 I Can Be the Best of ‘Me’.- 1.5 Becoming Algorithm.- Part 2: Depression.- 2.1 Film Chronotopes of the Precarious Northwest.- 2.2 Italian Peripheral Cinema.- 2.3 Gig Workers and Emotional Labour.- 2.4 Social Reproduction in Cinematic Care-Work.- 2.5 China is Purest Capitalism.- Part 3: Expulsion/Extinction.- 3.1 The Economy of Massacre at the Movies.- 3.2 Precarious Cinematic Citizenship.- 3.3 Differential Inclusion in TV series.- 3.4 Expulsed Childhoods.- 3.5 Visual Memories of a Dead World.- Conclusion: Cinematic Futures.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This is a book of our times. Terrifying global times, where different intersectional forms of the modern precariat struggle against the sad passions that capitalist structures of domination and extraction transmit their way: anxiety, guilt, depression, exhaustion, isolation, confinement, expulsion, migration, ghettoization, debt and extinction. Against such, Sticchi creates an eye-opening trans-border map of critical media productions that strive to carve out new ethical opportunities and critical openings. Guided by an accessible screen philosophy style, this wide ranging political book explores a complex of media forms from Europe, Asia and the Americas that try to creatively ignite vital impulses during this dark global winter of discontent.” (David H. Fleming, Senior Lecturer in Film & Media, University of Stirling)