Introduction Work, Struggle, and Cinema Ewa Mazierska We agree that we can live without love, friendship, or art, however impoverished our life then can be, but we cannot live without work, either our own work, or of other people, whose efforts, paid in money, allow us to buy our daily bread, as well as more lofty goods, such as books and tickets to concerts. One thus expects that what is most important for our material and cultural survival, would also be a privileged topic for cinema. Work and Labor However, in the seminal essays and introductions to collections devoted to the representation of work in film we find an opinion that cinema shuns work or represents it in an incorrect way. 1 For example, Jean-Louis Comolli, the veteran critic and filmmaker, points to the fact that the first-known film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory ( La sortie des usines Lumière, 1895, France ) by the Lumière brothers, shows workers leaving the factory, not entering it or working there. In Comolli’s view, cinema fails to account for the true, living experi- ence of work: When it shows work, cinema is drawn to its spectacular dimension, the dance of body and machine that obscures salaried labor’s oppressive nature. This is the typical fodder of the kind of films that companies make about themselves which concentrate on work’s choreographed gestures to the exclusion of its duration, its harshness, its wear and tear 9781137370853_02_int.indd 1 9781137370853_02_int.indd 1 10/28/2013 7:50:12 PM 10/28/2013 7:50:12 PM