Abstract
When Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy: The Last Revolution (Cover Boy: L’ultima rivoluzione, 2006) was released in Italy in 2006, the film was advertised with the tag line, “Love and Anger of a ‘Precarious Generation’” (Amore e rabbia di una ‘generazione precaria). Cover Boy is one of several recent Italian films that focus on the perplexity of a new generation of Italians who are unable to find the kind of work opportunities, economic security, and benefits that were taken for granted by their parents. I chose to begin my chapter with this tag line because even if it grounds the meaning of precarity in the present, it also references an established tradition of cinematic attempts to engage pressing social issues and political change. As Amoroso points out in an interview, even if the issue of precariousness is hardly new, it has now become “a sort of brand or logo” (qtd. in Povoledo 2008). “Amore e rabbia” alludes to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s much celebrated film La rabbia (Anger, 1963, Italy), a collage of documentary footage assembled as a critique of contemporary political circumstances. Moreover, it also references a well-known 1969 Franco-Italian collective production titled Amore e rabbia, which contains five episodes by Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Carlo Lizzani, Marco Bellocchio, and Bernardo Bertolucci on the subjects of love, democracy, May 1968, and revolution.1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ackerman, Emily. 2011. “An Interview with Eva Mulvad.” Tribecafilm.com. http://www.tribecafilm.com/news-features/news/The_Good_Life_ Eva_Mulvad.html.
Bardan, Alice and Aine O’Healy. 2013. “Transnational Mobility and Precarious Labor in Post-Cold War Europe: The Spectral Disruptions of Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy.” In The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, edited by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkle, 69–90. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Translated by Richard Nice, 81–93. New York: Norton.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foti, Alex. 2004. “Precarity and n/european Identity: (an interview with Alex Foti (ChainWorkers).” Interview by Merijn Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan. Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net Oct. 5. http://www.metamute.org/en/Precarity-european-Identity-Alex-Foti-ChainWorkers.Accessed June 12, 2012.
Garcés, Marina. 2009. “To Embody Critique: Some Theses, Some Examples.” In Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, 203–10. London: MayFlyBooks.
Gill, Rosalind and Andy Pratt. 2008. “Precarity and Cultural Work In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work.” Theory Culture and Society 25 (7–8): 1–30.
Horning, Rob. 2012. “We Are All Precarious-On the Concept of the ‘Precariat’ and its Misuses.” New Left Project, February 12. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_n_the_concept_of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses. Accessed June 12, 2012.
Jansen, Monica. July 2010. “Reconstructing the ‘Bond’ of Labour Through Stories of Precarietà: Storytelling According to Beppe Grillo, Aldo Nove, and Ascanio Celestini.” Romance Studies, 28 (3): 194–205.
Kanngieser, Anja. 2008. “The Production of Disruption: The Subversive Potential of Play and Desire in the Actions of Berlin and Hamburg Umsonst.” In Aesthetics and Radical Politics, edited by Gavin Grindon, 1–25. Newcastle Upon Thyme: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Loshitzky, Yosefa. Nov. 2006. “Journeys of Hope to Fortress Europe.” Third Text 20 (6): 745–54.
Malone, Mark. 2010. “Mayday Had Become Like a Funeral-Interview with Alex Foti.” Workers Solidarity Movement May 21. http://www.wsm.ie/c/mayday-interview-alex-foti. Accessed January 12, 2013.
Molé, Noelle J. 2010. Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy: Mobbing, Well-Being, and the Workplace. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Neilson, Brett and Ned Rossiter. 2008. “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception.” Theory Culture and Society 25 (7–8): 51–72.
Pikner, Tarmo. 2011. “Contingent Spaces of Collective Action: Evoking Translocal Concerns.” M/C 14 (12):.
Perez-Lanzac, Carmen. 2012. “1000 euro a month? Dream on …” El Pais March 12. http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/03/12/inenglish/1331575980_208983.html. Accessed June 12, 2012.
Povoledo, Elisabetta. 2008. “All Italy is Singing the Call-Center Blues.” The International Herald Tribune (April 11): 12.
Ross, Steven J. 1998. Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: A New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Trifonova, Temenuga. 2007. “Code Unknown: European Identity in Cinema.” Scope (8): 1–20. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article. php?issue=8&id=243. Accessed January 11, 2013.
Underhill, William. 2007. “The Lost Youth of Europe.” Newsweek, March 11. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/03/11/the-lost-youth-of-europe.html. Accessed May 13, 2013.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. On Belief. London: Routledge.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Ewa Mazierska
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bardan, A. (2013). The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective. In: Mazierska, E. (eds) Work in Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370860_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370860_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47544-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37086-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)