Films at the Whitney: Work/Place

4K restoration | 1987 | Directed by Luc Moullet | France | 88 minutes| French with English subtitles

Free admission. No registration required. 

In this playful comedy about the absurdities of the labor market, Sylvain Berg, an unemployed mountain climber, and Benoît Constant, a bank employee embarrassed to admit he lost his job, find themselves in the office of job counselor Françoise Duru. Filled with gags typical of Luc Moullet’s zany comedic style, THE COMEDY OF WORK (LA COMÉDIE DU TRAVAIL) satirizes the neoliberal turn of the 1980s by examining the daily indignities we face in the modern workplace—and in modern relationships. Described by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as the “Agent Provocateur of the French New Wave,” the oft-overlooked Moullet consistently delivers the “tenderness of François Truffaut’s films of that period as well as some of the boorish satirical humor of Jean-Luc Godard’s … with a sense of small moments worthy of Jacques Tati.”

This screening will also feature a short film: 

PAY DAY (1922, directed by Charlie Chaplin, United States, 22 minutes, silent with English intertitles, 35mm)

Work/Place traces the cinematic relationship between labor and its environments, from salt mines and city streets to harbors and factories. With features and shorts from thirteen countries, including France, China, Mali, the United States, and Mexico, this five-night series depicts what the place of work has been—and could be—in the lives of people around the globe.  

Series curated by Annie Berman and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson