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 able to analyze fatigue as an aesthetic-political category whose predicates comprise an ongoing action, an idea of duration, and a way of endure what affects the subject. In the light of this reference and the analysis of films by Marcela and Henrique Borela, Eryk Rocha, Affonso Uchôa and João Dumans, the figures of worker weariness are discussed from the residual instant of the posture, from spatial-visual compression devices and of serialization practices.