ABSTRACT
This essay evaluates the success of the Labour project in supplying what its German title punningly claims to be – a new Einstellung (attitude towards, cinematic shot of) labour – by situating its visual strategies within a longer historical series of ways of imaging labour in the West, in each case assessing how historical conventions of representation have reflected and helped to shape contemporary attitudes towards work. Moving from images of labour on ancient Roman calendars through medieval breviaries and books of hours, early modern and nineteenth-century “books of trades,” the Encyclopédie of d’Alembert and Diderot, the protocinematographic investigations of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, early cinema, the ideas of early twentieth-century labour psychologists, and Soviet and National Socialist propaganda, Schwartz describes how the Labour project’s aesthetic and technical constraints encourage productive departures from traditional ways of representing, imagining, and valuing labour.
