The working class in contemporary British cinema

Abstract

This article examines depictions of class and precarity in a number of representative films, including TwentyFourSeven (Meadows 1997), The Navigators (Loach 2001), This Is England (Meadows 2006), It’s a Free World (Loach 2007), Fish Tank (Arnold 2009), I, Daniel Blake (Loach 2016), Ray & Liz (Billingham 2018), Sorry We Missed You (Loach 2019) and Bait (Jenkin 2019) in order to illuminate the subtle changes that the tradition of British social realism has undergone over the last few decades and to rethink its political potential. The article poses the following questions: do social realist films endow their precarious subjects with agency or do they depict them as passive victims of socio-economic and political forces beyond their control? What new potential conditions of solidarity (if any) do the films envision? What are the dominant affective states that capture the dynamic of precarity in these films: anxiety, frustration, depression, anger, resentment or resignation?