The cinema of the servants

Aquí una traducción de mi amigo Fernando Álvarez Rebeil.

 

 

The cinema of the servants

To my godson: Matías

 

«Few things are more pleasant in the life of a city Mexican than the infinite indulgence of making himself being served by a fellow citizen.»

 

 

 

Salvador Elizondo

During the last years in Mexico several films have been made with a shared characteristic: people employed to do the housework for the director are placed in front of the camera. And so we have seen chauffeurs, gardeners and housekeepers being the protagonists of art films.

I am not condemning the existing relationships with the houseworkers, what I am looking for is to think what kind of relationships are established when this goes from the domestic tasks to the of the artistic field.

Art, by nature, and by luck, is an activity that does not find its explanation in the law of market, so reducing an artistic collaboration to a contractual agreement, seems to me insufficient. However, the domestic worker is, indeed, submitted to the law of market in his work relationship with his employer. This is to say, the employee depends on the employer to earn his living and if he does not do his job well, he gets fired; at the same time, if the employer does not pay the employee, he will leave him. The transition from a relationship of this kind (merely a labour one) to another in the artistic field is complex.

Lets imagine the owner of Bimbo (a transnational Mexican enterprise) asking one of his employees: «I would love you to come to my daughter’s party so that you sing her a song». It is true that the employee can accept or not, but nobody can be so naive to obviate that asking something to somebody while being his employer has certain implications.

Lets get back to Marx, who is (once again) in fashion:

«In capitalism, a worker seems to sell an exact, determined amount of concrete work, but in fact he sells potential creative labour power that can be manipulated by the capitalist to obtain the surplus value».
The servant sells his abstract labour power for the film and with this the director and the producers get profits. This surplus value (the «not payed» labour power appropriated by the capitalist) in the case of films is enormous. The directors and the producers build their lives based on films that give, almost, nothing to others.

Do servants benefit in any way by having been part of an artistic research project? While acting in a film, do they appreciate the knowledge that can be obtained from it?
Does the experience makes them learn something about themselves?
Are the benefits obtained by a person comparable with regard to the others? Should they be? Is their monetary reward fair? Can they ask for a salary increase if they do not find it adequate?
Do the employers respect their right to strike? Is the director open to proposals of these creatives? Do they eat together? Do they eat separately? Why aren’t there films in which the director’s employers act? Do they themselves not have employers?

Beyond these considerations, what is interesting to me is not the feeble position in which the worker is found, but in the relationship generated and established for the art’s production; an asymmetric relationship where only one of the parts has the power because: the servant depends economically of the employer’s humors, which are generally the director’s or the producer’s parents, and even more interesting, the servant does not know either the mechanism or the representation codes to which he is submitted.

What is lost is the relationship of «equality» (impossible by definition but presumably pursuit) between the one who films and the one who is filmed, because while not knowing the second of the representative schemes in which such fictions are inserted, it is reproduced in the relationship with the actor, the same relationship of subjugation involved with servants. It seems to me that this scheme is poor in economical terms and limited in artistic terms.

I do not pretend to make workers look exploited, but I suppose that artistic production could aspire to an ethics of its own and be a model of relationships between people different from the usual one, maybe some kind of emancipatory program inside the film that could allow the subjects filmed to be benefitted by it. Or that at least could problematize if they should get a benefit from it.

I do not pretend to get this problem solved, but I think that it is worth setting it out. It is curious, at the same time, that these collaborations have gotten so interesting results.

But I, to whom the means are more important that the ends, am interested in the solution proposed by Renzo Martens in the work he did in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There he formed a local team of improvised photographers for documenting the humanitarian disaster in which they live, with the condition that they should inform their neighbors that they would not pay them for taking pictures of them, and that they would profit with their image and their poverty, in exchange for nothing.

Gabino Rodríguez.

Translated by Fernando Álvarez Rebeil.