Weary and exhausted: precarious workers in Brazilian fiction cinema

Abstract

The article identifies figures of weariness and its paroxysmal stage, exhaustion, in recent Brazilian fiction film on precarious workers. It is argued that such bodily states, through the filmic form, materially announce the mechanisms of power inflicted on workers. In order to reveal the nexus between body and social experience, the article elaborates an introductory conceptual framework which is able to analyze fatigue as an aesthetic-political category whose predicates comprise an ongoing action, an idea of duration, and a way of enduring what affects the subject. In the light of this reference and the analysis of Araby (Affonso Uchôa and João Dumans, 2017), Burning Night (Eryk Rocha, 2019) and Mascarados (Marcela and Henrique Borela, 2020), the figures of worker weariness are discussed from the serialization practices, spatial-visual compression devices and residual instant of posture.

Keywords
weariness; body; worker; Brazilian fictional films