Neoliberalism and Global Cinema by Kapur Jyotsna; Wagner Keith B.;

Author:Kapur, Jyotsna; Wagner, Keith B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

From Exploitation to Playful Exploits

In 2009 filmmaker SABU (Tanaka Hiroyuki) filmed Kani kōsen/The Crab Cannery Ship (2009), a black comic version of a 1929 proletarian novel about the inescapable exploitation of workers on a crab-canning factory ship operating near Soviet waters. Subject neither to international maritime law nor factory regulation, the workers toil in the hellish bowels of a factory ship under a brutal and authoritarian company manager who expects the workers to sacrifice their lives in order to maintain production levels. Given the changed conditions of today’s precarious workers, a proletarian novel written over eighty years ago is an unlikely choice for a film script. How can a novel about exploited workers who toil under brutal conditions together in a factory ship be superimposed on the present situation of a new class of largely dispersed part-time and dispatch workers? And why would a proletarian novel be chosen to serve this purpose?

The film, like recent manga versions of the story, capitalizes on the “Crab Cannery Ship boom” of the previous year that saw sales of Takiji Kobayashi’s proletarian classic novel rise to more than five hundred thousand copies in 2008 alone from an average of five thousand copies a year. The “boom” was the result of a fortuitous convergence of the long-standing efforts of leftists publishers and activists, the sensational attention of the mass media, and the resonance of the novel for irregularly employed dispatch and contract workers who now form over a third of the Japanese workforce.13 One of the key players in this revival was the young, rightwing punk-rocker-turned-labor-activist Karin Amamiya, whose book, Let Us Live! The Refuge-ization of Young People, quickly become a manual for understanding the contemporary conditions facing today’s precarious proletariat or precariat (purekariaato from the Italian precario + proletariato).14 Since the 2007 publication of Let Us Live! the term precariat, originally adopted from European and North American precarity movements to describe the vulnerable position of exploited flexible labor, has gained increasing currency.15

Amamiya cuts a striking figure in her Gothic Lolita (gosu lori) outfits and possesses a fluency with varied media and subcultural forms—she was the lead singer of a punk rock band, is a recognized writer in several genres, and has become a frequent collaborator on film projects with her partner Yutaka Tsuchiya, the founder of the video collective Video Act.16 Her fluid negotiation of the normally bounded worlds of the Old Left, the New Left and the New New Left opened up a dialogue between distinct forms of cultural expression that accompany these worlds. In a conversation with established novelist Genichiro Takahashi, published in the progressive daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun on January 9, 2008, Amamiya remarked on the similarly desperate situation of young workers in the contemporary moment to those depicted in Kobayashi’s 1929 Crab Cannery Ship. The resulting chain of print and televised media coverage led not only to the revival of the novel but also to an unprecedented surge in Communist Party membership as over one thousand mostly young precarious workers began to join the party every month.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.