French studies: film studies

Martin O’Shaughnessy, ‘Putting the Dead to Work: Making Sense of Worker Suicide in Contemporary French and Francophone Belgian Film’, Studies in French Cinema, 19:314–334, looks at the phenomenon of worker suicides in contemporary French and Francophone Belgian cinema. This article discusses the significance of this phenomenon in the context of neo-liberalism and develops an analytical framework for making sense of it, suggesting a tripartite understanding of violence which includes the subjective, the symbolic and the systemic. Taking its main theoretical inspirations from Slavoj Žižek’s theorization of violence and Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s analysis of worker