Jonathan BIGNELL
Professor of Television and Film, University of Reading (UK)
Authenticity and the performance of class in British factual TV series
The paper will focus on recent programmes including The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea and other examples of non-scripted (but closely-controlled) factual programmes which might fall into the broad category of Reality TV (but could also be called observational documentary). As well as talking about how class is represented via discourses on taste and gender, for example, it will be argued that performance and narrative (which we might normally associate more with drama than with factual TV) and their relationship with the “authentic” presentation of self, are crucial to the ways that class is mediated in the programmes. I plan to outline a very brief history of how these programmes evolve out of earlier forms of documentary, and borrow from scripted drama genres too, as well as offering some specific analysis of the main, recent, examples in the main body of the talk.

Richard BUTSCH
Professor of Sociology, American Studies and Film & Media Studies, Rider University (USA)
Representations of social class in US radio and television through the twentieth century
The paper will explore representations of social class in US radio and television through the twentieth century. The core of this presentation will be my research on six decades of television situation comedies that reveals a remarkably persistent contrast of working class to middle class males, and gender reversals in the two classes serve to reinforce the contrast in class. To extend this work back in time, I will compare TV representations to those of US radio based on some of my preliminary findings on radio comedies of the 1930s and 1940s that were the precursors to TV sitcoms. I will also include as context my preliminary findings about representations of manual labor in public art and architecture before, during and after the Great Depression.

Wendy EVERETT
Reader in Film, University of Bath (UK)
Ken Loach and the geographies of class
If the issue of class has always structured and fragmented British society, its treatment in British cinema has tended to be partial, often simplistic. Perhaps nowhere can this phenomenon be more clearly observed than in filmic representations of working-class life. However, since the 1960s, it is precisely this area that has been the focus of all of Loach’s work. Refusing to patronise or stereotype, his films occupy the spaces between documentary and fiction, tragedy and farce, the didactic and the comedic; they give direct voice to the marginalised, and empower the dispossessed. In this way, not only do Loach’s films openly remap the contours of class, but also the geographies of British cinema itself. Within these wider parameters, this paper will examine Loach’s notion of democratic filmmaking, and will assess its social and theoretical significance for contemporary film.

Michael T. MARTIN
Professor of Communication and Culture, Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University (USA)
Locating Class in the African American Cinematographic Archive
That corpus of cine-memories and trauma, the African American cinematic archive is prefigured by defining cultural precedents of racial disparagement, reductive archetypes first evinced in literature, artistic renderings, popular lore, minstrels, encyclopedic entries endorsed by the scientific community, illustrations in venerated national digests, and the ramblings and rants that passed for raced discourses of the day. These memorializing artifacts of popularized beliefs in the cultural marketplace of the early 20^th century framed debates about the “Negro problem” during the era of mass entertainment and “public amusements” and endure to this day in the national psyche.
In counterpoint, consider that from 1909 to 1948 more than 150 independent companies endeavored to make, distribute, and exhibit race movies—that distinctive aggregate of films crossing all manner of genres and that, oriented to and shown largely in segregated theaters, featured all-black casts. Ironically a palliative to Jim Crow and an implicit challenge to black disenfranchisement, such films engaged with the spectrum of African American life and social class and constitute the first counter-historical readings in American cinema. Moreover, as they comprised a range of visual and narrative styles, artisanal modes of production, and a fluid division of labor, these early productions bore traces of what would later become an African American cinematic tradition.
Broadly speaking, this address engages with the construct of social class and its location and reading in African American cinema—a designation and critical category itself compromised by the ever fading practical distinction between Hollywood and independent film. For the purpose of this conversation, I understand class to be a real and defining formation whose temporality evokes distinctive incarnations in cinema and social structure.
My project then is to discern class formation in the American cinematic dossier, map its raced trajectory in the long history and struggle for black representation, and speculate on its embodiment in the first half of the 21th century, however much the presumptions of a post-racial America suggest otherwise.

BARON Ava (Rider University, USA)
Vanishing Act in Television Dramas: How the Sexualization of Work Made Class Disappear
A significant body of literature in American media and film studies has pointed to two trends since the mid-1990s – increased representation of women workers in, and increased sexualization of, television programs. However, there has been very little attention to the relationship between these two.  The ways in which sexual relations are represented, and specifically the ways in which sexual harassment of women workers is fictionalized in television programs, provide a window into understanding how these trends are linked, and points to class as a silent subtext in this fiction.
The sexualization of work and the representation of women workers in television programs contribute to the discourses that mask the ways class issues are implicated in gender inequality at the workplace, and the ways gender continues to be used to naturalize hierarchical work relations between classes. I will explore this process by examining a sample of American television drama programs over the past two decades. Remarkably there has been little scholarly attention to these issues. This silence has left the issues unproblematized and have further contributed to a discourse about sex at work in which class appears not to matter.
Representations of the sexualization of work fall into four broad themes: 1) mutual sexual tensions between male and female workers that are an integral component of the plot; 2) men and women working together in an atmosphere in which there is no sexual relationship or  attraction, or in which negative, or sexually inappropriate remarks or behavior occur; 3) women using their sexual attractiveness as a “tool” to help them at the workplace; 4) hostile work environment sexual harassment explicitly referenced, but in ways that trivialize (e.g. as comic or as referring to “innocent” or insignificant words or deeds) and/or demonize it (e.g. law suits which will yield horrific, unjust consequences, such as shutting down a company). The more widely opposed sexual harassment involving quid pro quo of job benefits for sex is rarely even referenced in television dramas.
These four themes, taken together, depict sexual relations between men and women workers based on the natural attraction between sexes and nothing more, and therefore unavoidable. From this perspective, sexual politics at the workplace has everything to do with gender hierarchy and nothing to do with how work is organized in a capitalist society. The logical conclusion drawn from this depiction of sexual harassment is that it can be, indeed it has been, eradicated. The only television series drama found that seriously addresses sexual harassment was “Mad Men.” Since the show concerns the early 1960s, prior to the “naming” of sexual harassment by the women’s movement or its legal recognition by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986, the series actually underscores the contrast of the “bad old days” to the contemporary era.
Who are the “victims” of sexual harassment? A significant body of scholarly literature documents that “bodies” are viewed not only in terms of sex, but also in terms of class and race, and that particular cultural notions of sexual attractiveness, desirability, availability and vulnerability, are inscribed on different women’s bodies. Unsurprisingly, there is a clear relationship of sexual abuse not only to one’s sex, but to one’s class and race as well. However, the television fiction of sexual harassment is that neither class, nor race are salient to how women are viewed and treated at the workplace. Typically the class background of female lead characters is left ambiguous. Sexual attractions and attentions (wanted or not) are portrayed as uniformly applicable to women be they black, Asian or white, or upper-class, middle-class or working-class. Issues of power are portrayed as linked to gender, but not class.
Building on a central tenet of the capitalist work organization as “gender neutral”, the sexualization of the workplace is depicted as something that is a consequence of gender relations that seep into the workplace and “taint” work relations (Baron 2012). Class power remains a silent force, as the power operating through the sexualization of the workplace is constructed from gender, not class relations.
In sum, class is made to “disappear” by making workplace hierarchy appear as a gender problem that either has been resolved, or as an irresolvable issue of “natural proclivities,” as one American federal judge had described it. Media representations thus distort our understanding of work relations by masking the ways class is implicated in gender relations at the workplace.
This project builds on my past research on discourses about gender, sex and bodies and how they have operated to naturalize class relations and shape how work is organized. It demonstrates that explorations of media representations can enhance our understanding of how class is interwoven with, and dependent upon, other axes of inequality even when class is invisible.

BILLI Manuel (Paris 3)
L’espace socioculturel de l’autre : Minorités ethniques et classes sociales dans le cinéma anglais des années 90 et 2000.
La communication vise à rendre compte de la relation entre le « social » et le « culturel » dans la construction de l’identité de personnages appartenant à une minorité ethnique. Le cinéma identitaire anglais contemporain amène le spectateur au sein de microcosmes communautaires, par l’intermédiaire d’un personnage-paradigme de la communauté d’appartenance. La présence d’objets culturels ou d’objets socioéconomiques fait de la diégèse un espace socioculturel. Si les objets culturels, micro ou macro, dénotent la culture et connotent la condition socioéconomique du personnage, les objets socioéconomiques dénotent sa condition sociale et connotent sa culture d’appartenance. Le lien entre ces deux ensembles d’objets qualificatifs est donc très étroit : tous les deux contribuent à faire la différence du personnage, à marquer sa distinction, à définir son habitus et celui de sa communauté. Tout conflit, interne à la communauté et même externe, est ancré dans cet espace socioculturel, en fonction duquel le personnage-paradigme agit, (se) dit, s’identifie et se rend identifiable, dans sa différence, aux yeux du spectateur. Suivant Pierre Bourdieu (Cf. Raisons pratiques), la notion de différence, d’écart, est liée à celle d’espace. L'espace social est construit de telle manière que les agents ou les groupes y sont distribués « selon les deux principes de différenciation […] : le capital économique et le capital symbolique » (Bourdieu, 20). Brothers in Trouble (U. Prasad, 1995), My Son the Fanatic (U. Prasad, 1997), Beautiful People (J. Dizdar, 1999), Dirty Pretty Things (S. Fears, 2002) et Ae Fond Kiss (K. Loach, 2004) sont parsemés justement de ces « stigmates » du capital économique et symbolique, qui cristallisent la différence et rendent visible une « réalité invisible », « que l'on ne peut ni montrer ni toucher du doigt » (P. Bourdieu, 25).

CAVITCH Max (University of Pennsylvania, USA) – Panel with François Massonnat
Class, Crime and the Long Kill in Gus Van Sant's Gerry
Our panel explores the use of the long take in depictions of crime and class in the British TV series Prime Suspect and Gus Van Sant’s 2002 film Gerry. We’re interested in how the long take conspires, as it were, with the temporal and spatial disruptions of crime, and in how these disruptions impact the viewer’s sense of social hierarchies and structures of the unequal. Thanks to the lasting influence of Bazin, the long take is still strongly associated with the priorities of socialist realism. Yet, one effect of the long take may be to assert the pressure of the world, to force the viewer to linger and to scrutinize, while also being asked to hold on to the sense of watching something happen in “real time”. But, as Bazin himself would agree, generally speaking, the longer the take, the less the take’s time feels like the time of the event. Anticipation mounts to the point of discomfort; boredom or frustration set in; the propensity for distraction intensifies; absorption generates reverie. Moreover, if the event involves a crime, or the anticipation of a crime, then these effects may not only be exacerbated, but also strongly linked, in the viewer’s experience, with the dramatic disruptions to social hierarchy and structures of the unequal that crime commonly entails. In his paper, François Massonnat shows how the long take in Prime Suspect exacerbates viewers’ awareness of socio-economic and gender clashes. In contrast, Max Cavitch’s essay highlights how Gerry seems to erode their very existence while making both the culminating crime and the return to middle-class normalcy no less brutal.

CHICK-MACLEOD Kristine (Toulouse)
Exploring social boundaries in British Cinema 2001-2012
In this paper I will examine filmic representations of several social groups who are defined by poverty, ethnicity, or religion (or a combination of the three) through an analysis that includes, but is not limited to, three recent films set in Britain: Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) Neds (Peter Mullen, 2010) and Ae Fond Kiss/Just a Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004).
Recognizing the richness and diversity of British society and culture, focus here is voluntarily primarily limited to just two specific geographical locations: Glasgow and Essex, and the communities represented therein. In the first part of this paper I will study social groups defined largely by poverty and denominated by labels such as ‘chavs’, ‘tinks’ and ‘neds’, in the cities of Essex and Glasgow. Then, in the second part of this paper I will study social groups defined by their ethnicity and/or religion, again in the post-industrial city of Glasgow, where the dynamic between Pakistani Muslims and Irish Catholics in Just a Kiss will be analyzed.
Acknowledging the complexity of this area of research, particular interest will be given to questions of identity, as the films can be situated within the wider debate concerning labelling, addressing questions such as which groups are subjected to terms designating deviance from social norms, why they are portrayed as such, and what the consequences of these denominative trends are. Accordingly attention will be paid to the role of film in subverting, reinforcing, or even moulding stereotypical representations of different social groups.
Two further and related research objectives of this paper are to explore the interface between physical ‘external’ borders and symbolic ‘internal’ boundaries in British society, whilst also maintaining awareness that some groups are not merely victims of labelling or ‘targeted’ by labels but may also actively appropriate these identifiers and, more controversially, simultaneously consciously reject aspects of British society’s value system. Added to this, especially in the case of second and third generation Pakistani Muslims, but also relevant to those of other faiths and members of the working class and unemployed, is the complication of pressure to conform exerted not only externally from mainstream culture but also counter-pressure from within the ‘marginal’ or marginalized communities. 

CLOAREC Nicole (Rennes 1)
In praise of the working poor: archeology of class struggle through the arts of representation in Comrades (Bill Douglas, 1987) and The Fool (Christine Edzard, 1990)
While dealing with the representation of social inequalities in 19th century Britain, the two films studied here eschew the disturbing grittiness of social realism as well as the more comfortable nostalgic outlook of the costume drama that both prevailed in British film production in the late 1980s. Although they are both based on historical records (the Tolpuddle Martyrs in Comrades and the thoroughly detailed investigations of Henry Mayhew’s chronicles London Labour and the London Poor in The Fool, the two films are characterized by art house aesthetics, a superb cinematography and most specifically a highly reflexive mise en scène that questions the relationship between social classes and the arts of representation, be it the magic lantern or the stage. In both films the very artificiality of the arts of representation comments on and ultimately exposes the arbitrariness of the social class system. However, one may eventually wonder to what extent the celebration of popular entertainment remains “popular” in such two uncompromising art-house films.

DELAPORTE Chloé (Paris 3)
Les rapports de classe dans le cinéma américain : des indicateurs du genre ?
Constatant que les modalités (esthétiques, narratives, discursives) de représentation des rapports de classe dans le cinéma américain diffèrent considérablement d’une œuvre à l’autre, mais présentent cependant certaines similarités, nous proposons dans cette communication de réfléchir au lien entre ces modalités figuratives et l’inscription générique des films. En effet, il apparaît que les rapports de classe ne sont pas illustrés de la même manière selon le genre audiovisuel dont se revendique l’œuvre, et que la typologie que l’on peut dresser de ces modalités semble dessiner une cartographie générique. Certaines « formules » sont ainsi particulièrement investies par des genres spécifiques : on peut penser, par exemple, à l’importance de l’origine sociale (souvent modeste) des soldats dans les films de guerre, opposés à leur hiérarchie (souvent bourgeoise et aristocratique), ou encore aux antagonismes mis en scène dans la screwball comedy autour de couples improbables. Ainsi, les codes représentatifs des rapports de classe en viennent à jouer le rôle de « marqueurs génériques », ou d’« indicateurs du genre » : ils permettent au spectateur de reconnaître et d’attribuer une généricité au film. Par la présentation d’exemples choisis et l’analyse de séquences filmiques empruntées à la cinématographique états-unienne, cette communication déplace ainsi le point de vue de l’analyse des représentations à leur usage social et cinéphilique, soit leur appropriation par le spectateur pour attribuer du sens à l’œuvre.

DUCRAY Amandine (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)
Whatever happened to the working class sitcom? Représentations sociales, mutations et transferts d'un genre télévisuel dans le nouveau millénaire
En août 2010, le directeur du BBC College of Comedy Michéal Jacob ravive une polémique en déclarant que la BBC s’avère une impasse pour tout scénariste qui n’est ni blanc, ni issu de classe moyenne, un constat réitéré quelques mois plus tard par Danny Cohen, responsable des programmes pour BBC1, qui encourage la création de sitcoms « ouvrières », destinées à refléter la diversité du public, et critique la surreprésentation de sitcoms « de classe moyenne » sur le petit écran britannique. Au tournant du nouveau millénaire, l’avènement de comédies télévisées telles que My Family (BBC1, 2000-11) et Outnumbered (BBC1, 2007-2012) paraît en effet avoir progressivement entériné la fin d’un genre durablement populaire outre-Manche, de Steptoe and Son (BBC1, 1962-74) à Only Fools and Horses (BBC1, 1981-91). Le fait que cette dernière série ait été désignée meilleure sitcom par les téléspectateurs de la BBC plus d’une décennie après la fin de sa diffusion atteste néanmoins d’une affection toute particulière pour ces héros ouvriers du passé que plusieurs acteurs de la sphère télévisuelle souhaitent à présent remettre au goût du jour.
Partant du postulat que les comédies télévisées captent un certain air du temps relativement aux représentations sociales, dont elles se nourrissent et qu’elles interrogent, on observera d’abord les mutations de la sitcom britannique d’un profil « ouvrier » à un ancrage « classe moyenne ». Adoptant une perspective comparatiste, on se tournera ensuite vers les Etats-Unis où, sur fond de crise financière, et après diverses adaptations ratées de Britcoms, la blue collar sitcom à la sauce américaine paraît désormais en plein essor.

EGERT Charles (LASCO Univ. Paris Descartes / Institut des Mines-Télécom, Evry)
A Surrealist Country: Visual reconnaissance in American beauty
Among the many observations contained in Sontag’s book about photography for me one succinctly concerns the film American beauty. She closes a chapter by claiming that American culture in general “has given itself over to the consolations of Surrealism and America has been discovered as the quintessential Surrealist country” (48). In contrast, Goudreau (2006) considers the suburban setting as part of a system of cultural constraints in a film that generally denounces American use of technology as alienating. If the beginning is indeed filmed as kitsch, given the visual references to Kubrick’s Lolita, nevertheless, along with the filming of life in a “Surrealist country” American beauty can be said, first, to be acting as a mirror of the middle class American suburban (sur)reality in order, afterwards, to formulate alternatives. What is actually at stake is the quality of the self image, as well as the values sought by various characters that seem to be guided by visual reconnaissance such as already viewed in film narratives such as Easy Rider or the 1974 book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. The periodic visual framing of the setting suggests that the grid work of suburban roads constitutes an image of modernist technology, but, as in another television series written by Alan Ball, Six feet under, the story contains various acts of visual reconnaissance. The information assembled permits some characters to adjust to reality, or at least, permits them to be saved from becoming lost in the illusionary aspects of American middle class suburban culture.

FLINT-NICOL Katerina (University of Kent, UK)
Horrising the Hoodie: Underclass and urban terror in the British Hoodie Horror
After reporting  the ban on ‘hoodies’ by Bluewater shopping centre in May 2005, the British mainstream press suddenly began running stories of youths involved in anti-social behaviour and senseless violent offences. The ‘hoodie’ has since become an icon of dissolute adolescence, otherness and terror, representing the Broken Britain the Conservative party vowed to fix in the 2010 election. The ‘hoodie’ has also become a symbol for the supposed burgeoning “underclass” of families and communities who hold a life-long reliance on the welfare state. Following on from the critical success of Kidulthood (Noel Clarke, 2006), the image of the hoodie began to be exploited and increasingly demonized in a sub genre of films that have been labelled, hoodie horrors. Mirroring the media images and stories of a feral Britain, these films appear to address the moral and ideological climate of contemporary Britain and our anxiety over this apparent underclass. This cycle largely refrains from the usual recognized horror tropes, rather, they contend that the real terror is to be found in a far more realistic setting; that of the urban. Focusing on how these films have horrised and demonised a supposed British underclass, this paper seeks to explore how a new urban horror film was born as the urban setting of the council estate – so long a vanguard for the aesthetics of British realism – was transfigured into a setting of fear and terror, over which gangs of hoodies reign.

GIRARD Gaïd (University of Western Brittany, UBO)
Les contre-starlettes d’Andrea Arnold (Wasp, 2003 et Fishtank, 2009)
Cette communication cherchera à rendre compte de la façon dont Andrea Arnold, cinéaste britannique primée par deux fois au festival de Cannes, parvient à mettre en scène des personnages féminins jeunes, pauvres et solitaires, sans les enfermer dans des représentations stéréotypées du prolétariat britannique auquel ils appartiennent. Dans Wasp (2003) et Fish Tank (2009), ses choix esthétiques (qui la feront rejoindre un projet du Dogma 95 en 2006 pour Red Road) en font une artiste à part dans le paysage de la cinématographie britannique. A la fois héritière de l’école du Free Cinema à la Karel Reiz et proche du lyrisme d’un Lars Von Trier, Andrea Arnold met en place une écriture cinématographique qui transcende le genre du documentaire. Elle construit des représentations toujours conscientes de l’acte filmique mais aussi toujours proches de l’âpre poésie du réel. Nous verrons comment elle fait appel au monde sensible et à une caméra très mobile pour échapper aux images toutes faites des classes laborieuses, et introduire une dimension d’étrangeté dans ses récits.

HILLEN Sabine (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Working class in the 7UP documentaries
According to Owen Jones, the demonization of working class started at the end of the seventies with the politics of Thatcher.  In his recent work he is stating that her promotion of individual effort caused the destruction of the community feeling among the miners. We would like to investigate if this demonization of workers was really absent before Thatcher’s access to Downing Street in 1979.
To do so, we will focus on one particular case: the 7UP-documentaries which started in 1964 and followed fourteen British children when they were seven years old: “The children were selected to represent a broad range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future”. The original hypothesis of 7UP was that class structure was so strong in the UK that a person’s life path was already set at birth.
By analyzing several parts of the series (1964, 1970 and 1977) I would first make a description of all facts and opinions that portray working class and migrants in this documentary and question if the image we see is indeed as positive as Owen Jones wants us to believe. After this I would investigate if the opposition between “aspirational” and “non-aspirational” is really absent during the period 1964-77; and finally, if the community feeling Owen Jones is referring to was indeed obvious. This research topic is rather new and would place The demonization of working class into a new perspective. Even if it seems true that nowadays industrial manufacturing jobs tend to disappear to make place for a new kind of working class, I don’t think the irony used in series like Little Brittain is fundamentally a sing of “demonization” and aggression.

KENNEDY Ann (University of Maine-Farmington, USA)
U.S. Feminism and the Class Politics of Social Realism in The Wire
In this essay, I examine the class and gender politics of the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire and argue that the show illustrates the limits of social realism for reimagining gendered class struggle in late capitalism. There are two widely accepted scholarly perspectives on The Wire: its stature as a visual novel representing television’s greatest example of social realism and the exclusion of feminist politics from that social realist vision. In this way, the series creators’ construct class struggle within a nostalgic masculine frame that continues a long tradition within U.S. popular culture of imagining the working class as white and male. While the series represents a range of masculinities over the course its five-year run, it does not examine the social, economic, and representational history that structures its own alignment of class struggle with masculinity. I argue that this demonstrates the limits of social realism as a genre for the representation of the intersection of gender and class conflict, but I also argue that this representation helps maintain the rhetoric of postfeminism that dominates popular culture in the United States.  Therefore, it is useful to explore The Wire’s exclusions of feminism because it can help us better understand how the rhetorics of postfeminism are situated within late capitalist discourses of class in U.S. popular culture.

LE CORFF Isabelle (University of Western Brittany, UBO)
Classes sociales et Esthétique du Kitsch dans les comédies irlandaises des années 1990 et 2000
Partant d’une interrogation commune à la notion de classes sociales et à l’esthétique du kitsch, nous analyserons l’évolution des représentations sociales dans les comédies irlandaises depuis le début des années 1990. À partir d’exemples aussi variés que The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993), The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996) mais aussi Breakfast on Pluto (Neil Jordan, 2005), Goldfish Memory (Elizabeth Gill, 2003) ou encore The Guard (John Michael McDonagh, 2011), nous testerons la pertinence de l’axe urbain-rural dans la pensée des classes sociales irlandaises. Par une approche comparée de ces comédies, nous interrogerons l’hypothèse selon laquelle la société irlandaise aurait quitté sa quête identitaire pour rejoindre une civilisation confondant l’authentique et le frelaté, en l’opposant à l’hypothèse d’une outrance volontaire comme marque d’une nouvelle authenticité culturelle hybride. Dans chaque exemple, il sera question de discerner entre les objets et les stratégies culturelles qui les produisent pour mettre en évidence la circulation des valeurs à l’œuvre.

LEMONNIER-TEXIER Delphine (Rennes 2)
Esthétique de la verticalité et mise en perspective de l'identité sociale féminine dans Upstairs Downstairs (1971 et 2010)
Dans la culture anglophone, le lien entre espace et identité est particulièrement fort. Il n’est que de songer aux métaphores de la marge et du centre, ou encore de l’identité féminine, comme chez Virginia Woolf avec A Room of One’s Own. Dans la fiction, l’espace est l’un des outils privilégiés pour représenter l’identité du sujet ou du groupe, en particulier dans la fiction télévisuelle qui, à l’image du roman gothique ou romantique, s’appuie fortement sur un lieu et son architecture afin de constituer un espace à la fois mimétique (ou pseudo-réaliste) et symbolique dont le personnage est indissociable.
La série télévisée britannique Upstairs Downstairs est héritière de cette tradition culturelle, et l’historique de sa création permet de tracer un cheminement qui part de l’intention de représenter un espace féminin et subalterne, celui de deux servantes, pour être ensuite « complété » par une famille et d’autres figures de serviteurs (Richard Marson, Inside Updown. The Story of Upstairs Downstairs). Retracer ce processus de création permet de cerner la manière dont cette dichotomie spatiale a progressivement émergé dans la première série, avec la construction des espaces symboliques de la chambre et du lit des servantes, de l’escalier et de la cuisine, et la thématique de l’appropriation transgressive et temporaire par les serviteurs des espaces laissés vacants par l’absence des maîtres. Devenues centrales dans la reprise, ces scènes de construction et de jeu avec les codes identitaires spatiaux sont déterminées par une esthétique de la verticalité dans la prise de vues, transposition filmique de la dichotomie spatiale devenue emblématique de la première série à travers son titre, cependant que la question du statut de la représentation esthétique, présente dans les deux séries, avec le tableau (1971, season 1, episode 2, « The Mistress and the Maids »), ou la photographie d’art (2010, series 1, episode 3, « The Cuckoo ») souligne la permanence du questionnement esthétique autour de l’identité sociale féminine à travers le recours à l’artefact.
L’étude envisagée s’efforcera donc de montrer comment, tant dans la première série que dans la reprise, Upstairs Downstairs affirme la validité esthétique de la servante en tant que sujet de l’œuvre, et lui construit un espace spécifique, a room of her own.

LETORT Delphine (University of Le Mans)
Screening race and class: Land of Opportunity (Luisa Dantas, 2010-2011)
Luisa Dantas’s Land of Opportunity (2010-2011) traces the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc across the Gulf Coast, causing the levees to break and the Big Easy to flood, revealing the historical legacy of race on the disproportionate number of African Americans among the dead and the displaced. Land of Opportunity is comprised of a documentary film and an internet multi-platform project, which highlight the social consequences of reconstruction in the five-year time span that followed Katrina. The filmmaker investigates the landscape of the city, which contributes to shaping the narrative structure of the film insofar as it reflects the power relations within New Orleans, dividing it into various quarters according to class dynamics. Through the images of reconstruction which emphasize the emergence of a rejuvenated landscape, Dantas interrogates the economic debate that undergirds urban policies. The film offers a platform to concerned citizens whose experience of Katrina was shaped by two entwined factors: their social status and their home location. The study of the city’s reconstruction not only impacts the city’s geography, but it also transforms its social fabric. Through an analysis of the film and its connection to the website that furthers the viewing experience, we will ponder whether the “new New Orleans” has become a “land of opportunity” for everybody.

LEWIS Carys (University of Caen)
“Giz a job! I can do that!”: The Unmaking of the British Working Class in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)
Bleasdale’s five-part television drama hit the screens in October/November 1982 and soon established itself as “the TV drama event of the eighties”. The grim landscapes of the decaying Liverpool of the times, filmed using the innovative technique of the Light Mobile Control Room, form a backdrop for the unfolding drama of how five working men cope with unemployment and subsequent loss of identity. The present paper endeavours to explore how the representation of working-class men mobilizes a collective structure of feeling around notions of working-class culture and what Raymond Williams has termed a “knowable community” of working-class solidarity. We shall also analyse how the drama moves beyond dominant conventions of realism and disrupts naturalistic representation in a process akin to Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’. The resulting distancing between viewer and viewed encourages a more active ‘complex seeing’ in which the changeable and discontinuous nature of reality is emphasized. Finally, we shall show how Boys from the Blackstuff succeeded at once in confusing and sharpening the viewer’s identification with and understanding of the characters’ plight, in what many have deemed to be an elegy for a working-class culture that was fast becoming a thing of the past.

MAGUIRE Lori (Paris 8)
From The Goldbergs to All in the Family: Social Class in American Sitcoms from the 1950s to the 1970s
Much has been made of the American tendency to imagine the nation as overwhelmingly middle class or, indeed, even classless. However, the American Dream has always been based on the idea that someone must start from rags before arriving at riches. In the same way, social class has never been entirely absent from American television. It has, though, been frequently linked to questions of race and ethnicity. This paper proposes to analyze the presentation of social class in sitcoms from the 1950s to the 1970s. It will examine the ethnic working class series of the early 1950s (The Goldbergs, The Life of Riley, etc) as well as the white non-immigrant working class sitcom The Honeymooners. It will then turn to the 1960s with Hazel (based on the relationship between a (white) maid and her upper class employers) and, more importantly, the large number of series that portrayed the (white) rural underclass in relation to an urban upper class (The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, etc). Finally, the paper will finish by looking at the renewed popularity of the urban working class in All in the Family (significantly based on a British series).

MARIN-LAMELLET Anne-Lise (University Jean Monnet – Saint Etienne)
La grève à l’écran : La représentation des conflits sociaux dans le cinéma britannique de 1956 à nos jours
Bien qu’il se soit depuis longtemps intéressé à la représentation de la classe ouvrière, le cinéma britannique n’offre que de rares exemples de représentation de conflits sociaux, puisqu’on ne compte qu’une dizaine de films traitant véritablement de la grève sur les cinquante dernières années. Ce corpus restreint est cependant très révélateur des différentes conceptions et idéologies en vogue quant à la représentation de la classe ouvrière en lutte. L’avènement du thatchérisme et plus généralement les profonds changements socioéconomiques induits par l’adoption du néolibéralisme semblent marquer un tournant dans cette représentation : la grève, décriée jusque dans les années 1970, est désormais défendue à l’écran. Néanmoins l’évolution des genres de films retenus (de la satire à la chronique) et le changement de point de vue opéré en fonction du choix du héros pour traiter de la grève montrent, à travers les décennies, un cinéma toujours très critique, même si sa cible varie selon le rapport de force supposé en vigueur à l’époque de production. Ouvriers grévistes ou briseurs de grève, syndicalistes, hommes politiques, médias, forces de l’ordre sont tous, à différents degrés, jugés responsables de la fragmentation et de la dépolitisation de la classe ouvrière britannique. L’accent mis sur la montée en puissance des revendications féministes et ethniques dans un monde jusque-là essentiellement masculin et blanc révèle parallèlement un changement d’époque que vient renforcer une nouvelle conception de la défense des droits des travailleurs qui ne se pensent plus/ne sont plus forcément appréhendés par le prisme de la classe sociale (vision marxiste) mais par celui des minorités (vision postmarxiste) dans une interaction permanente entre cinéma et société.

MASSONNAT François (Villanova University, USA) – Panel with Max Cavitch
Class, Crime, and the Long Take in Prime Suspect
Our panel explores the use of the long take in depictions of crime and class in the British TV series Prime Suspect and Gus Van Sant’s 2002 film Gerry. We’re interested in how the long take conspires, as it were, with the temporal and spatial disruptions of crime, and in how these disruptions impact the viewer’s sense of social hierarchies and structures of the unequal. Thanks to the lasting influence of Bazin, the long take is still strongly associated with the priorities of socialist realism. Yet, one effect of the long take may be to assert the pressure of the world, to force the viewer to linger and to scrutinize, while also being asked to hold on to the sense of watching something happen in “real time”. But, as Bazin himself would agree, generally speaking, the longer the take, the less the take’s time feels like the time of the event. Anticipation mounts to the point of discomfort; boredom or frustration set in; the propensity for distraction intensifies; absorption generates reverie. Moreover, if the event involves a crime, or the anticipation of a crime, then these effects may not only be exacerbated, but also strongly linked, in the viewer’s experience, with the dramatic disruptions to social hierarchy and structures of the unequal that crime commonly entails. In his paper, François Massonnat shows how the long take in Prime Suspect exacerbates viewers’ awareness of socio-economic and gender clashes. In contrast, Max Cavitch’s essay highlights how Gerry seems to erode their very existence while making both the culminating crime and the return to middle-class normalcy no less brutal.

MILLOT Agnès (University of Reims)
Domination et soumission dans le monde secret des Public Schools
« Arguing with the umpire is not school practice », déclare l’arbitre sur le terrain de cricket dans une scène tirée du film « Another Country » primé lors du Festival de Cannes en 1984.  Ce film relate de façon très réaliste le système éducatif anglais dans les années 30 au sein de Eton College, célèbre internat privé et sélectif. A l’instar des autres Public Schools, la vocation d’Eton est d’éduquer et de former le caractère des fils de l’aristocratie et des classes moyennes supérieures, transformer de jeunes garçons en futurs gentlemen aptes à diriger la nation. Tout un système était mis en place dans ces écoles afin d’atteindre cet objectif. Ce système consistait à privilégier un enseignement classique et la pratique du sport, notamment le cricket, le sport du gentleman par excellence, la vie en internat, accepter la pratique des châtiments corporels qui n’avaient pas uniquement pour but de punir les élèves pour leurs écarts de conduite et tout acte de désobéissance, mais qui permettaient également de montrer son endurance et sa virilité en subissant la punition sans ciller. Et surtout accepter le système de la hiérarchie. A Eton, il fallait souscrire au système des fags et des prefects, les élèves les plus âgés qui avaient tout pouvoir sur les plus jeunes. L’objectif de tout fag était de devenir un jour prefect, de devenir un « dieu » (« god »). Ainsi, accepter les décisions prises par l’umpire revenait à accepter la hiérarchie et, à une plus grand échelle, accepter les décisions de l’empire. Enfin, les garçons devaient être loyaux envers leur école, signe qu’ils l’étaient envers leur pays, et ne devaient rien révéler de ce qui se passait en son enceinte.
Tous ces ingrédients essentiels au système des Public Schools anglaises apparaissent dans « Another Country » qui dépeint ces écoles comme hypocrites et snobs, met en lumière la réalité sociale des inégalités entretenues par leur système éducatif. Il dénonce en outre le sentiment de supériorité de ses élèves, soumis à l’ambition et à la hiérarchie et l’impossibilité de quelques rares garçons (présentés comme des outsiders de par leur non-conformité aux règles de l’école) de se conformer au système et qui n’ont d’autre choix que de commettre l’irréparable : trahir leur institution et par là même leur pays.

PIMPARE Stephen (Columbia/City University of New York)
Evils of the City: Images of the American ghetto on film
As part of an ongoing book-length project investigating images of poverty and homelessness in American film, this paper will focus on the “ghetto”, or the geography of poverty. From the earliest silent shorts produced by the Russell Sage Foundation and D.W. Griffith about immigrant communities on New York's Lower East Side, to the Bowery Boys and East Side Kids series of the 1930s and 1940s, to the "gangster" movies about violent NY and LA hellscapes in the 1980s, to more recent efforts like Precious, the ghetto has regularly occupied space on the American screen. This paper proposes to answer some ostensibly simple questions about those representations: What can we say about how the Hollywood image of poor communities, and especially poor communities of color, has changed over time, and how might we connect that to changes in the national political economy, the transformation of the urban landscape, the fortunes of the middle- and upper-classes (and their relationship to the city), to national social policy as it affects the poorest populations, and to the culture itself? That is, the endeavor is both descriptive and analytic: what has the ghetto looked like in the movies, and what might that mean?

RAOULX Benoit (University of Caen) & AMATO Fabio (Naples)
New Orleans

ROBLIN Isabelle (University Littoral-Côte d'Opale, ULCO)
From the marble palaces of I, Claudius (1976) to the mean streets of Rome (2005): The rise of the common man in the historical drama television series
On top of their arguably philosophical and/or pedagogical intentions, the representations of Ancient Rome in literature and film have always conveyed much about the ideology of periods in which they were written or filmed: Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788 is a case in point. Another would be the comparison between two critically acclaimed BBC television series: the 1976 I, Claudius, an adaptation of Robert Graves’ 1934 historical novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935) and the 2005 Rome, a BBC-HBO coproduction. Between the two, the social focus has radically altered, for whereas I, Claudius, as its very title indicates, is set almost exclusively within the ruling Imperial family and the corridors of power of Roman palaces, Rome on the other hand clearly plays on the “fascination for class distinctions”, for example by deliberately using the actors' regional British accents, in sharp contrast with the overall R.P. accents of the cast of I, Claudius. The very notion of social classes is also built into Rome’s structure, as the lives of two common soldiers are intertwined with major historical events and characters, giving a new perspective on well-known occurrences and “document[ing] a social reality that in return seeps into [its] narrative”.

SOUQUET Lionel (University of Western Brittany, UBO)
Kitsch, classes sociales et multiculturalité dans My Beautiful Laundrette de Stephen Frears
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), deuxième film de Stephen Frears (scénario de Hanif Kureishi), démontre déjà – avec un petit budget – toute l’audace de ce réalisateur qui deviendra mondialement célèbre, trois ans plus tard, avec sa somptueuse adaptation des Liaisons dangereuses. Inaugurant la veine sociale de The Snapper (1993) et The Van (1996), My Beautiful Laundrette dresse un portrait original et iconoclaste de l’Angleterre de l’ère Thatcher : Omar (Gordon Warnecke), un jeune anglo-pakistanais issu de la bourgeoisie intellectuelle et commerçante, dont la famille flirte aussi avec la pègre, décide de monter une laverie avec l’aide de celui qui deviendra son amant, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), un jeune prolétaire marginalisé, membre d’une bande de skinheads-punks racistes qui, à leurs heures perdues, pratiquent le « paki bashing ». Mais qui sont donc les dominants et les dominés de ce jeu de dupes ? Conjuguant les problématiques socio-culturelles, ethniques (y compris religieuses et linguistiques) et féministes à la question de l’homosexualité, Frears et Kureishi interrogent les capacités d’une société en crise à accepter ou simplement tolérer toutes les formes de différence. L’esthétique kitsch – ou camp ? – qui caractérise ce film invite à une réflexion sur les liens entre goût et statut social, comme un écho implicite et non théorique à La culture du pauvre (The Uses of Literacy, 1957) de Richard Hoggart, étude sociologique sur la culture ouvrière dans l’Angleterre des années 1950, ou aux analyses de Pierre Bourdieu dans La Distinction, 1979. Mais, ici, le kitsch – qui résonne jusque dans la musique « glougloutante » de Myers et Zimmer – fonctionne aussi comme un baume contre la violence sociale. Les britanniques apprendront-ils enfin, grâce à l’humour « décapant » de My Beautiful Laundrette, à laver leur linge sale en famille ?

STARFIELD Penny (University of Caen)
Striking women: Salt of the Earth, Norma Rae and Bread and Roses
Taking examples from three films in which women play a leading role in industrial conflict, the paper will address the issues of class, gender and ethnicity. Filmed in secret at the height of the McCarthy witch hunt, Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1953) adopts a semi-documentary style, to describe a Mexican American miners’ strike in the South of the United States. When the men are threatened with losing their jobs, the women take over the strike, proving even more tenacious. Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979) and Bread and Roses (Ken Loach, 2000) adopt more mainstream fictional modes, describing how women workers are gradually led into the struggle to defend their rights. During the course of this study, the different paths to empowerment of these women will be discussed, pointing out narrative similarities as well as differences in setting, characterization and era.

TRECH Caroline (University Littoral-Côte d'Opale, ULCO)
British identity in British-Asian films, 1997-2007
Caroline Trech will present her research on British cinema and Indian cinema in connection with the South-Asian diaspora.

TREMBLAY Gabrielle (Paris 3)
Un reflet critique de l’Angleterre populaire du début des années 1980 : Le film This is England (2006) de Shane Meadows
Le film This is England (2006) de Shane Meadows cerne et illustre de grands pans de la culture ouvrière de l’Angleterre du début des années 1980. Pour rendre compte de ce fait, je convoque principalement les avancées de Richard Hoggart, Dick Hebdige et Denys Cuche. Dans le cadre de ma présentation, j’établis quelques repères sociopolitiques des années 1980, je pose ensuite certains jalons quant aux notions de culture et d’identité en lien avec les classes ouvrières britanniques, puis je dresse un bref historique du mouvement skinhead. Cette démarche a pour objectif de démontrer à quel point la mise en fiction qu’opère le film étudié est marquée par un haut degré de fidélité à l’époque et au milieu qu’elle s’applique pourtant à dépeindre dans une perspective critique. Selon les avancées de Cuche, les communautés ouvrières telles que scrutées par Hoggart se font plutôt rares de nos jours. Cela dit, l’influence du « particularisme culturel ouvrier » peut encore se faire sentir au sein des milieux populaires britanniques au début des années 1980. On observe notamment la survivance de l’opposition socialement structurante entre le « eux » et le « nous » qu’éprouvait jadis, tout au long de sa vie, le type ouvrier étudié par Hoggart. This is England rend compte de la mutation de la figure du « eux » à l’aube des années 1980, de même que de la mouvance idéologique responsable de sa dérive xénophobe. Alors qu’au temps de Hoggart le « nous » désignait tout autant la famille « tissée serrée » que l’univers solidaire du quartier, voire la classe ouvrière au sens large, ce qui se construit par le biais du milieu skinhead et de la bande d’amis dans le film de Meadows s’apparente plutôt à un « nous de secours », soit un « nous » symbolique, palliatif, prenant forme dans un milieu populaire socialement éprouvé. Le film semble d’ailleurs faire triompher (malgré quelques violents sursauts) le « nous » syncrétique de la fratrie skinhead et la solidarité d’un groupe donné. À plusieurs égards, les personnages incarnent ainsi le mixte culturel et le pluriel identitaire caractérisant dorénavant les milieux ouvriers britanniques. En faisant également appel aux travaux de Guillaume Soulez et son approche renouvelée de la sémio-pragmatique, notamment en ce qui a trait à la fonction délibérative des formes audiovisuelles, je souhaite réfléchir la rhétorique qu’articule le film étudié et la manière dont ce dernier « nous parle » depuis sa sortie en salles.

WACOGNE Emilie (University of Lyon)
Emilie Wacogne will present her research on the representation of citizens of foreign origin in European cinema.

ZALMANOVICH Tal (Rutgers University, USA)
“The Great Unwashed! That’s what we are, mate”: Class and Social Mobility in Postwar Sitcoms
As a genre, early television sitcom attracted British writers enthralled by its potential to engage in social critique. Many of the leading figures of this genre hail from working class families, and were anxious to communicate their ‘truth’ about living in Britain. Inspired and emboldened by the post-war British movement of social realism in the arts, writers such as Alan Simpson and Ray Galton confronted in their work the specter of class and the frustrations of working-class men. Another writer, Johnny Speight, forced viewers to acknowledge racism and prejudice at the forefront of their society.
In this paper I argue that although sitcoms often camouflaged as frivolous entertainment, writers working between 1955 and 1980 were able to question the most fundamental structures of their society. Using the language of social realism they probed at the postwar promise of greater social mobility. By revealing the subtle apparatuses of exclusion and differentiation in British society, they exposed the limitations of postwar settlements. Their incredible outreach extended the debate across the nation, and enabled conversation that took place in the privacy of the home to resonant in the public sphere. Sitcoms contributed a singular idiom made of catchphrases and stereotypes to Britons.