The paradoxes of precarious labour in observational documentaries today

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine contemporary observational filmmaking and its efforts to reconfigure the themes and style of direct cinema for a present-day actuality. I begin by revisiting the earliest works of American direct cinema, but I resituate their overriding preoccupation with self-realizing figures (musicians, actors, politicians) as a determined investigation of labour and workers. These documentaries, I argue, implicitly establish models and narrowly framed prescriptions for modern work; having been conceived within the individualized terms of direct cinema’s obsession with self-expression, the classic observational films inevitably highlight a self-directed, autonomous form of labour. As a result, the original exemplars of American direct cinema have created a durable site for the figuration of such work, and their familiar observational approach is purposely deployed in recent films such as American Movie (1999), Beauty Day (2011), and Weiner (2016). These documentaries, I maintain, provide distinctive analyses of precarious producers; or rather, they transform direct cinema’s emphasis on self-realization into a preoccupation with today’s precarious, autonomous work and its significant conundrums. In short, these films recognize the utility of an observational approach to the task of representing present-day work, and together they chronicle the grim fate of today’s new model worker.