Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century (French and Francophone Studies)

A study of how French social documentary engages our precarious world. An exploration of turn-of-the-century French documentary cinema, Precarious Sociality explores how filmmakers engage and resist the ways finance capitalism has violently reshaped reality since the late 1990s. Audrey Evrard traces the dissolution of twentieth-century class narratives into a more complete recognition of difference empowering new solidarity grounded in economic, social, and ecological precariousness. Placing well-known auteurs side by side with less canonical filmmakers, Precarious Sociality reaffirms the enduring power of long-form documentaries in a political landscape reshaped by social media clips. "Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century brings an original perspective on French cinema's 'return to work' in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the transformation of cinematic activism in view of the rapid dissolution of class narratives and solidarities. It is argued that, reckoning with widespread anxieties about job insecurity, social uncertainty, loss and invisibility in French society, filmmakers catalysed new modes of intervention, best described as embodied praxes of sociality. Combining rigorous film analyses with concepts borrowed from philosophy, sociology, geography and political theory, this study positions documentary as a privileged point of articulation between aesthetics, politics and ethics. The wide-ranging film corpus features well-established auteurs (Agnès Varda, Raymond Depardon, Denis Gheerbrant) and less canonical filmmakers to celebrate the vitality of contemporary French documentary cinema and its creative contributions to international discussions about work, precarity and social resilience." -- Page 4 of cover