Structures of Unemployment and their Filmic Figuration: Towards a Political Poetics.

In this article, the author argues for an extension of David Bordwell's historical poetics in order to better understand cinema's politico-discursive dimension. Against too narrow a conception of filmmaking, which focuses exclusively on stylistic and narrative questions, cinema's social semantics should also be taken into consideration. Taking two films as examples, Kirsten demonstrates how a political poetics might can proceed without losing sight of formal devices. He demonstrates how découpage and montage work together in the first part of Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow, 1932) to suggest a certain reading of the young unemployed worker's suicide. Furthermore, he argues how the ordering of events - the early placement in the film of the suicide scene - is politically meaningful. Kirsten's second example, the Spanish film Los lunes al sol (Fernando Léon de Aranoa, 2002), also deals with the theme of unemployment, however the two films differ in both their historical context and in the chosen means of cinematic discourse. Less explicitly political than Kuhle Wampe, Arranoa's film nevertheless implies a fairly clear assessment of the protagonists' situation and its causes. Kirsten shows that the film, on the one hand, achieves an « sociography of unemployment in fictional-filmic form » with the help of a multiple protagonist ensemble, where each character stands for a different attitude towards their situation. On the other hand, however, it makes the most prominent and most sympathetic character the inner diegetic commentator of the events, thus suggesting a political evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]