Author archives: Joerg Markowitsch
Erwin and Elvira, the butcher
Fassbinder's outstanding melodrama "In a Year of 13 Moons" (1978) is a consistently topical contribution to today's identity politics debate and a forceful exclamation mark for anti-stereotypical professions.
The old fear of the end of new work itself
We all look forward to the end of the working day, but not the end of work itself. The fear of automation and the end of work is an old topos, as evidenced by industrial films from the 1950s.
Superpowers on the job
What to do with superhuman abilities on the job? Superheroes don't give much information on this. A troll in one of the most extraordinary Swedish films of recent years (Border, 2018), on the other hand does.
When pictures of economy went into motion
A new book introduces us to the important epistemologist Michael Polanyi as a didactician of economics and recalls his educational film "Unemployment and Money" (1940), which is still worth seeing today.
Finding and Cultivating the Self in Hair: On the Wizardry of Hairdressers
The key to successfully creating a hairstyle is, of course, the hairdresser's skill. But the art of hair is not limited to instrumental skills, it also includes the 'culturality' of hair. A contemporary critique of a traditional profession.
The baker’s routine gestures: a professional ‘classic’?
In contemporary cinema, we often don’t question seemingly cliché images of bakers at work as seen in Antoine Fontaine's "Gemma Bovery" (2014) or Luke Jin's short film "La Boulangerie" (2017), but perhaps we should.
Essential Workers vs. Bullshit Jobs
How will the Covid-19 pandemic change the world of work? Will essential workers be more valued in the future or will ‘bullshit’ jobs continue to increase?
Plea for autochthone education systems
'In my blood it runs' (2019) is an intimate portrait of an Aboriginal boy and his family, as well as testimony to the glaring shortcomings of the Australian education system in dealing with their indigenous population.
The unsung sing
In the second part of his trilogy about people in unsung professions, "Secondo Me" (2016), Pavel Cuzuioc accompanies three cloakroom attendants at three European opera houses and welcomes the everyday to stage.
Comparative work studies with the camera: Darcy Lange
With his camera, the artist Darcy Lange provided important scientific material on work and education, which still begs to be analysed in social and educational research.