Screening (at) the Workplace. Postwar Non-Fiction Cinema and the Gendered and Political Spaces of Labor

The chapter focuses on the role played by cinema in postwar labor governmentality across Eastern and Western Europe. It considers recruitment, career choice, and instructional films within the wider category of "work-motivated films" - films that provide both a representation of and a social guidance to the working world. These films tended to anchor the representation of labor to differently nuanced "senses of place", reinterpreting the workplace in terms of social belonging, living conditions and spatial materiality. Following this threefold characterization, the chapter aims to provide an overview on how film and media intersected labor policies of productivity and of mobilization of workforce, questioning whether the postwar period established a specific mode of presenting men and women at work.