BB: The Precariat in European Cinema: The New Dangerous Class?

This lecture will explore the psychic and affective pathologies motivated by the political and economic transformation of labor regimes and registered by what has been called ‘new European cinema of precarity’. Does the new European cinema of precarity endow its precarious subjects with agency, or does it depict them as passive victims of socio-economic and political forces beyond their control? What new potential conditions of solidarity does this cinema envision? What are the dominant affective states that capture the dynamic of precarity in these films: anxiety, frustration, depression, anger, resentment, or resignation? My analysis of representative European films will be rooted in the assumption that the value of precarity as an analytical concept lies in its ability to bring together concrete experiences of insecurity and vulnerability, and their cinematic representations, with larger social and political debates about the psychological and physical effects of neoliberalism and the possibilities for resistance to it. While the heterogeneity of the concept of precarity as a continuum of insecure conditions is reflected in the heterogeneity of the films representative of the new European cinema of precarity, what brings these films together is the affective dimension of precarity—ranging from alienation through mental and nervous breakdown to imposterism—and the fact that they are all produced in response to a common climate, and motivated by shared concerns and challenges.

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Creative Arts and Humanities at University College London. She is the author of The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (Amsterdam UP, 2014), The Image in French Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007), and the edited volumes Screening the Art World (Amsterdam UP, 2022), Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (Routledge, 2017) and European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008). In the summer term 2025 she is Senior Visiting Fellow in the cluster Inequqlities in the context of social transformation processes (focus on Southeast and Central Europe).