Like any creative art, cinema is not separate from, and shouldn’t try to be separate from, the world in which it exists. At a time when work has become a mere synonym for effort, and when some people feel we must “make work more worthwhile” -a simple expression that belies the vagueness of its meaning- it is interesting to note how much the cinematic vision of work and of individual accomplishment differs from one continent to another.

Self-Made Men

There are fundamental and recurrent themes. The place of the individual in a society defined by his or her profession, and his or her rise or fall, is the ideal basis for a screenplay, allowing for a snapshot of social life in a specific country or for the creation of a tale or a fable from scratch. With the beginning of talking movies, American cinema established a double-edged model of fear of upward social mobility. The historic foundation of the United States gave rise to the archetype of the self-made man, a natural extension of the myth of the pioneer leaving the Old Country with nothing and creating a new life on a virgin continent. Much of American cinema has approached individual accomplishment via social mobility in this way. The gangster is probably the most emblematic figure; but from Capra to the Yuppies, different models exist.
Consider Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). A British butler is “lost” in a gambling bet by his employer, a Lord, and must follow his new master to the U.S. He is torn between his new boss, a sort of cowboy, rough at the edges, who has become a successful businessman, and the mistress of the manor who dreams of importing the European art de vivre to her American hometown and of making her husband a civilized man. In a struggle to stand apart, Ruggles ends up opening a business and gives a brilliant lesson to the natives by reciting the Declaration of Independence. Ruggles is the archetype of the individual who, by breaking the class barrier, attains freedom at the same time he becomes a success. The American persona is built for success.

Naturalism and Farce

While American movies are marked by the myth of the conquering pioneer, European cinema broaches the subject of breaking through class barriers from a completely different angle. Upward social mobility is not such a fundamental theme as it is in American cinema. With a vision inherited from feudalism, and with class struggle as a reference point, upward social mobility is considered in French, Italian and English cinema as impossible, or even as a personal defect. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (1939), to take the most famous example, depicts French society in the stranglehold of a caste system. European cinema, from Italian neo-realism to English working-class cinema, has long praised the dignity of the working class imprisoned by its social status. The Italian proletariat suffers from its social status, but doesn’t wish to join the bourgeoisie, described as superficial, out of touch with the genuine pleasures of life and tainted by money and power. The goal is not to change camps, but to promote the value of the living conditions and the work of an entire class. In Italy, the bourgeoisie is ridiculed, in line with the great tradition of the commedia del’arte, and neo-realism tried to point out the hermetic nature of social classes, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, where a wealthy couple vacationing in an Italian villa decide to separate, and the wife is driven into the tumultuous reality of the people.

Asian Monsters

While literature from the industrial age still has a lasting impact on Western screenplays, with Dickens and Zola as critical influences on French and English cinema, Asian culture is based on a continuous vision of history, and less affected by epistemological shifts. The caste system in China and the feudal state in Japan are still present in the minds of movie heroes in Asia. In Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi and his screenwriter, Yoshikata Yoda, recount a potter’s thirst for recognition: when he is highly praised by a rich woman, he doesn’t realize that she is a ghost. In this adventure, the potter eventually abandons the dead woman and child he finds when the illusion vanishes. Respect for one’s condition is a critical factor and hubris is systematically sanctioned in fables. Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern is the perfect example: one of a powerful man’s four wives punishes her servant for decorating her own apartment with the ornaments of a veritable concubine’s.
Without going so far as to effacing the individual within the State –a method specific to propaganda cinema in certain totalitarian regimes–, characters in Asia are often so remote from the structures of power that decisions seem to come down upon them from nowhere. In The President’s Last Bang, by Sang-soo Im, the last days of the Korean president in 1979 are recounted as a farce, a chain of grotesque and incomprehensible decisions, since such a distance deforms reality. In this way, economic self-sufficiency and injustice in the spheres of power may, in cinema, be comparable to no-law zones. Capitalism is even more savage in Asia than elsewhere and the tendency in American film to present upward social mobility as a cutthroat, predatory sport is found in Hong Kong and Japan as well. One recurring word is often uttered by Asian filmmakers when characterizing the empire built by their forefathers: monstrosity. Blood and Bones by Yoichi Sai, for example, relates the growing influence of a Korean immigrant in a Japanese neighborhood, as he slowly becomes a loan shark, striking fear with his erratic behavior and violence. With power being mingled with the symbol of the father, upward mobility is often impeded by a violent and unfair state of affairs.

The Latest Rung

Today, American cinema is turning somewhat back to models of the 80s: easy money and immoral golden boys, and successful women, working girls who can be mothers and highly-trained agents, as in Renny Harlin’s delightful The Long Kiss Goodbye. But the 80s are not the only reference: cinema since 2000 draws heavily on its first century of existence. Scorsese’s The Departed brings back the 30s mob film, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster recalls gangster flics of the 70s, Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can resurrects the archetype of the 60s smooth talker, …. But cinema this decade does not recycle and parody its ancestors as it did in the 90s, with a suspended moral, historic and esthetic lightness. There’s no more need to mimic the wear and tear of time and the corniness of former codes. Cinema in the 2000s re-reads the masters of the last century not to impose a moral judgment, but rather, for the time being, to find new fathers, new heroes and new devils. As for French cinema, many have accused it of abandoning the working class and of privileging the malaise of upper-middle-class –and mostly Parisian– society, but it too is moving further away from the naturalist tradition and towards alternative outlets, whether they be aesthetic (by establishing a connection with American cinema that is not mere imitation –see the article about Angels and Predators) or political as with Pierre Carles’, who proposes alternative models -read the interview of his producer: Annie Gonzalez- or especially as specific ‘world’ cinemas that are so deeply rooted in realities, whether political/economic/social/geographical/cultural, that their destinies seem to be doomed to an ‘alternative’ model way ahead (The Take by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, Me You Them by Andrucha Waddington, Tinpis Run by Nengo Pengau, Qiu Ju by Zhang Yimou, Atanarjuat by Zacharias Kunuk or The Lip by Christian Rouaud).

Bastien Hader & Francis Chérasse