Before looking at workers as subject and audience of films in the essays that follow, it seems essential to ask some important questions to define the relationship of films to history per se. Can films teach us history? Can they in any way, comparable to printed scholarship, recreate the past in all its complexities and incompleteness? The attempt to integrate films into historical studies is quite recent. The main direction of such efforts has been to examine present and past films dealing with historical themes or episodes and to judge their historical accuracy to determine if the films taught us history the way printed studies do. One consequence of such exercises has been to dismiss film makers as ignorant of their “historical subject” and their films as misleading if not downright falsifications of the past.

The portrayal of the working classes has always been an element of British popular film from the comic music hall stereotypes in the era of Gracie Fields and George Formby in the 1930s to the more gritty realism of the “Angry Young Man” films that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Curiously, in the last thirty years, the portrayal of the working classes in popular film has become somewhat less sharply drawn and more indistinct. In an odd way, these changes may parallel criticisms directed toward politicians about a declining sense of working-class unity and purpose in the wake of the Margaret Thatcher and post-Thatcher eras.

The characters portrayed by Jean Gabin, a true star of 1930s films, are from the working class but lack the usual attributes; they are more part of the popular classes but without political identities. They are vividly urban, masculine, and individualistically French. Their antisocial tendencies and their helplessness in the face of outside forces beyond their control leading to violent escapes into oblivion made them seem heroic. Their often dual existence as criminal/legionnaire and worker played on the frissons long associated in France with the combination “working classes, dangerous classes.” These attributes made the Gabin characters more than members of the working or popular classes and gave them a classless appeal as “everyman,” with much the same universal appeal as Charlie Chaplin had for his audience. The collective psychological profile of the Gabin-everyman includes: alienation, depression, entrapment, helplessness, and escapes into nostalgia ending in violence and self- destruction. In his nine films from 1935 to 1939, there are eight murders and seven suicides! The atmosphere of Gabin's environment is one of doomed destiny, a fate created by forces beyond his control. The fate of Gabin's characters is in part inspired by an existing climate of hopelessness in French society and at the same time amplifies and reinforces it. The crisis in French society at which this study is directed had its denouement in the collapse of France in June 1940, resulting from immediate temporal and long-range structural problems. By 1939 France had become a stalemated society. Gabin's imagined presence at the side of his popular audience in its experience of these difficult times suggests a bonding between audience and star whereby the performance of the latter and the daily struggles of the former become one (the kind of convergence all film makers strive for but very rarely achieve).

This essay examines representations of the Italian working class from the 1930s through the 1970s. I analyze four films produced at four crucial moments in Italian labor and film history (Gli uomini, che mascalzoni!, Mario Camerini, 1932; Ladri di biciclette, Vittorio De Sica, 1946; Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Luchino Visconti, 1960; and Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore, Lina Wertmuller, 1972). I discuss the specific political climates that shaped these films' production and reception, paying attention to the role workers were to play as audiences in Communist and Catholic strategies of mass organization. I also highlight continuities of theme and attitude in Italian movies about the working class. A preoccupation with the maintenance of family structures links films by Camerini, De Sica, and Visconti—directors of different cinematic styles, political affiliations, and generations. Only after 1968 do directors such as Wertmuller subject such mindsets and their attendant social practices to sustained critique.

“Farewell to the Working Class?” was the title of a scholarly controversy in a recent issue of ILWCH. The title could also serve to introduce an aspect of modern Russian cinema, in both its Soviet and post-Soviet forms—the disappearance of the working class and working-class heroes from their once prominent place on Soviet screens. This is an impression gleaned from a sampling of recent films, probably the best, most important ones by any measure, and not from an exhaustive survey based on a statistical and content analysis of the whole Russian film corpus turned out over the last two decades. (Soviet film production was substantial during the first part of that period, peaking at over three hundred titles in 1991, but has since plummeted to double digits in the post-Soviet years.) Would such a survey confirm or disprove the impression? This “Note,” a preliminary probe, stresses the disappearing act and offers some possible explanations. When workers reappear, they are far from heroic. In some sense, Russian cinema has been a parallel universe to the course of Soviet life and society, from beginning to end, and after.

In 1979, film-maker Leon Hirszman (1937–1987) collaborated with playwright Gianfrancesco Guarnieri on a film adaption of Guarnieri's famous play about Brazilian working-class life, They Don't Wear Black-Tie.They Don't Wear Black-Tie is available in the United States, with English subtitles, from New Yorker Films, www.newyorkerfilms.com. The resulting film, released in 1981, reconfigured the politics and content of the 1958 play to fit the new era of the late 1970s when dramatic metalworkers' strikes placed São Paulo on the front lines in the fight against the Brazilian military dictatorship. Using biography and the dramatic and cinematic texts, this article traces the political and aesthetic challenges facing these two important cultural figures and their generation of radical intellectuals. In particular, the article will explain why an image of “workers” proved so central in the making of modern Brazilian theater and film since the late 1950s, while exploring the changing configuration of intellectual and povo (common people) between the late Populist Republic and the remaking of the Brazilian working class during the late 1970s. Throughout, it will ask: What is the cultural, political, and historical substance or significance of the presentation of workers in Black-Tie? Does it represent an expression of social reality? And if so, what reality, and whose vision?

“American Workers, American Movies: Historiography and Methodology” surveys the ways in which scholars have examined the relationship between workers and movies. For many years, scholarship about movies and workers took one of two basic approaches: Cinema scholars wrote about images of workers in films, while labor historians wrote histories of union activity within the movie industry. The two schools were usually quite distinct. In the last twenty years, a burst of scholarship in both fields has broadened our understandings of the images that appeared on the screen and, in some cases, how those images were constructed in the first place. The goal of this essay is twofold: to review key themes and recent works in the field, and to suggest ways in which working-class historians might approach and incorporate studies of film into their own work. Indeed, the author calls upon scholars to go beyond simply deconstructing images, and to explore more complicated questions involving the forces responsible for shaping the ideology and class focus on American cinema.

he Depression and movies with sound changed movie audiences of the 1930s from those of the 1920s and earlier. Sound silenced audiences, discouraging the sociability that had marked working-class audiences before. The Depression led movie companies to change marketing strategies and construction plans. They stopped selling luxury and building movie palaces. Instead, they expanded their operation of neighborhood theaters, displacing independents that had been more worker friendly, and instituted centrally controlled show bills and policies. Audiences also appear to have become more heterogeneous. All this, too, discouraged the voluble behavior of working-class people. Ironically, in this era of labor activism, workers and their families seem to have become quieter in movie theaters, satisfied with the convenience of chain-operated movie houses.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Barcelona became a hub of working-class radicalism. In particular, workers and intellectuals in the Catalan capital were instrumental in the spread of anarchist and socialist praxis and thought to Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Lima, although, of course, their influence was felt beyond Latin America. Today, however, Barcelona is a city undergoing an acute process of gentrification. Working-class districts have been refashioned to house the new Catalan well to do. On the Ramblas, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT, or National Labor Confederation) militants who sell old syndicalist texts and Gabriel Jackson's histories of the Civil War seem particularly out of place, yet another curiosity for the tourists to gape at, like the kiosks that sell live animals and the street artists. For this reason alone, the exhibition “Les cultures del treball” (Cultures of Work) at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona was a timely reminder of the role work, and particularly manual work, has played in shaping recent history in Catalunya, Europe, and beyond. It served, moreover, to encourage reflection on how work continues to shape, and will shape in the future, the societies in which we live. “Cultures of Work” was exhibited from May 24 to September 17, 2000. It was shown simultaneously at Forbach, France, in the town's colliery, now in disuse. Curated by Josep Ramoneda, the exhibition drew on the expertise of a “scientific committee” that included Manuel Castells and Jacques Thevenot.

The labor movement or, more specifically, the trade union movement has always embraced the principle of internationalism. From the start, unions have not only strived to develop their national structures, but have also aimed at international cooperation. Accordingly, there has existed a socialist, a Christian, a communist, and a free international trade union federation. While the international trade union movement continues to pursue these aims, globalization gives rise to new challenges. Some of these challenges were examined and discussed at “The Past and Future of International Trade Unionism,” an international conference organized in Ghent, Belgium, on May 19–20, 2000. The event was organized by AMSAB-Institute of Social History, in collaboration with the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG, Amsterdam), the University of Ghent, and the International Association of Labour History Associations (IALHA).

The title above was not, of course, that of either the conference held or the book launched at an academic-cum-union event in Ghent, Belgium, May 19–20, 2000. The conference was entitled, interestingly, “The Past and Future of International Trade Unionism.” The book (edited by Marcel van der Linden) is blandly called The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Bern, 2000). Jointly, here we have something of a milestone in the history of the international labor movement. The book, weighing in at 624 pages—a milestone indeed—is the first history of this organization. It is; in fact, the first book of any kind devoted to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) that I have ever come across. The conference, which involved major national and international labor history institutes, the ICFTU, and other specialists on international labor, was also unique in looking at the future of the international labor movement in the light of this history.

Few issues have occupied the attention of academics, analysts and activists more closely than those on the role of South Africa's labor movement in the transition to democracy. Most commentators place the beginning of this transition to former President F. W. De Klerk's February 1990 decision to repeal the ban on liberation movements and release Nelson Mandela and other prisoners from incarceration. However, it would be more accurate to think of the transition as beginning in 1973 in the industrial and port city of Durban, where thousands of workers shook the quiet confidence of South Africa's racial capitalist regime through a series of spontaneous and prolonged strikes that changed the context of South African labor and politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

These two works make for marvellously complementary reading on the current transformation of the local Chinese state. Both are written by distinguished China scholars who include a range of locations to which repeated research visits were made in the 1980s and 1990s. Both stress the institutional legacy of the Maoist state amid the changing external environment of marketization as a key explanatory factor in state behavior and outcomes. Neither hesitates to ask “big questions” relevant to both the China field and the issue of local state capacity. In terms of subject matter, however, the two could hardly be more different. Rural China Takes Off is, at heart, about success: how the local state from the county level down to the village so keenly and successfully sponsored rural industrialization and development in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China is largely, although not exclusively, about relative failure: the local state's ongoing reluctance to fully incorporate internal migrants from the countryside as urban residents and the migrants' resulting survival strategies.

Whatever credit Britain might take for having given birth to the subject of cultural studies must, ironically enough, be attributed largely to its receptivity to outside influences in the 1970s and beyond. Its originators in the New Left were unusual in British terms by being both unashamedly intellectual and open to Continental theorizing. Its relationship to the common-sensical homegrown tradition of cultural criticism of George Orwell and Richard Hoggart was accordingly double-edged: at once acknowledging its influence and criticizing its rigid empiricism. Its subjects were those subcultures which refracted American pop culture through the peculiarities of the British class structure. Immigration not only provided cultural studies with its big stars in Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy but also demanded that reassessment of national identity which the discipline was alone prepared to undertake.

n this snapshot of London in 1900, Jonathan Schneer has found an original and intriguing project. Emphasizing the indubitable role of British imperialism in shaping and influencing the city, Schneer examines aspects of London life in a series of vignettes, each of which can successfully stand alone. He moves from the lives of some of London's most celebrated laborers, the dock workers, to the businessmen who peopled the City of London near the docks where goods were literally exported and imported, hauled on and off the huge cargo vessels by the dockers. London's political hostesses enjoy a chapter almost of their own before Schneer moves to the circles of London radicalism in its various and imperial guises: the London Irish, and the Indians, Africans, and Caribbeans who peopled the city.

Carolyn Tuttle has thoroughly researched children's labor, and, in the process, women's labor, in the factories and mines of industrializing Britain. While some of her interpretations will leave questions in the minds of historians, her work makes an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century women's and children's labor.

Le monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot opens with a challenge that Alain Corbin, one of France's preeminent historians of the nineteenth century, made to himself. This challenge was born of the critique directed at the collective volume to which he had contributed, Histoire de la vie privée, that it was concerned solely with the private life of social elites (Corbin, Historien du sensible [Paris, 2000] 157–158). In May 1995, Corbin—professor at the Sorbonne and author of innovative, highly praised studies of the effect of migration on the area which supplies labor, and of prostitution, odor, the idea and experience of the shore, leisure, belfries, and more—walked into the archives of the Orne, the department where he grew up. He took the list of villages in the department, closed his eyes and let his fingers pick one. Then he went to the records of this tiny commune, closed his eyes again, and picked Louis-François Pinagot (1798–1876), maker of wooden shoes (sabots). For the next two and one-half years, Corbin set out in quest of Pinagot.

“Global 1968” is rarely considered to be a series of events and processes of relevance to the lifeworld of Catholicism or, for that matter, to the reality of any other religion experiencing the various contestations of that turbulent year. This vision of “1968” as an entirely secular event is reinforced by the prominence of various tendencies and manifestations of the political Left, the latter more often than not ignoring, or in open conflict with, religious authorities and religious beliefs. But for some time now, particularly in the Italian context, the contributions of a Catholic Left to that “moment of madness” most closely associated with “May 68” have become the topic of scholarly and activist concern. This book under review goes a long way to suggest that Left Catholicism in the late 1960s was not only an Italian peculiarity but also a French phenomenon.

In this book, Michael Torigian sets out to describe the travails of French labor and left-wing politics in the interwar period. Focusing very specifically on the relations of metalworkers with the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU), and the French Communist party, the author examines the internal workings of the labor movement in the years 1934–40.

Specters haunt capitalist globalization—the specters of balkanization and multiculturalism. Although this is not the subject of Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity 1870–1939, it provides the historical context in which the project took shape. If the ideology of market capitalism was conceived in universalist terms, so were most of the socialist responses. For this reason, Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer's early twentieth-century writings on nationalism stand out as a fascinating precursor to contemporary expositions of multiculturalism.