Post-Fordism in Active Life, Industrial Revolution and The Nothing Factory

Abstract

I discuss in detail three films produced by Terratreme, a Portuguese film cooperative: Vida Activa (Active Life, Susana Nobre, 2013), Revolução Industrial (Industrial Revolution , Tiago Hespanha and Frederico Lobo, 2014) and A Fábrica do Nada (The Nothing Factory, Pedro Pinho, 2017). Because these three films address the economic/debt crisis vis-à-vis industrial labour, they appear to belong to a long tradition of militant cinema, which, according to Manuel Ramos Martínez, attempts to make ‘visible exploitative working conditions and the brutality of industrial transformations’ as well as ‘make visible and audible the figure of the worker’ (2013: 123). Yet the focus of these films is de-industrialisation, so they more appropriately fit into Martínez’s category of post-Fordist cinema, which refers to films that emerged after ‘the crisis of the Fordist model in the 1970s’ as well as films that are ‘critical of the factory as a site of exploitation and of cinema itself as a medium of audio-visual exploitation’ (Ramos Martínez 2013: 124).