Labor In Nothing Film Analysis

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In order to understand how labor is invoked in film, it is imperative to provide context to how labor influenced the culture around filmmaking. Labor in itself refers to the act of work, especially hard physical work. There is a high propensity for labor to be exploited due to varying external factors like financial crises and Hollywood is no exception. With the onset of unionization, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences created by Louis B Meyer, which eventually gave way to the formation of guilds for actors writers and directors to protect them. With a granting of the right to unionize, Hollywood itself was going through the need to protect labor. This then manifested in the movies that were made around the nuances that influenced the …show more content…

The movie forces us to think about power dynamics that manifest on several fronts. On one hand Duff is faced with racial prejudice which is made worse by his structural employment, but on another, Duff shoves his pregnant wife to the floor as she comforts him when he can’t get a job. This scene amplifies not only his frustration with a racist world that he is forced to look for a job in, but also with himself. It also leads the audience to believe that even though she is a school teacher and a pregnant mother, she is still at the whims of her husband. This theme is again addressed in Salt of the Earth (Biberman, 1954). The intercutting between the scene of Esperanza giving birth and Ramon getting jailed shows how both genders are equally strong and vulnerable in the same space of time but that eventually Ramon still discredits her strength. As Esperanza tries to protect her husband from getting arrested by picketing for him, she is initially forbidden to picket by Ramon. This goes into the nuances of how wives taking their husband’s place in the picket line was met with notions of impropriety and

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