Political depression and working practices in recent French cinema

Abstract

This article will address the concept of political depression, as defined by Anne Cvetkovich in her 2012 work Depression: A Public Feeling. Drawing comparisons between Cvetkovich and the more extended interrogation of capitalist working practices in the sociology of Alain Ehrenberg, the article will then explore how recent French film depictions of the workplace have created representations of loss that can be construed as images of political depression. These include a parallel (established in one of the chosen films and in the wider discourse) between French corporate working practices and the Holocaust. The films under analysis are Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines (1999) and L’Emploi du temps (2001), along with Nicolas Klotz’s La Question humaine (2007).