James Catano on MIA: Workers, Working, and Workplaces

Films about work shape our attitudes toward labor and laboring, often by inviting us to identify with individual characters. But what happens when film presents a more direct experience of what workers actually do?
In a column for the Working-Class Perspectives blog, James Catano considered three non-fiction films about the fishing industry: Drifters (1929), Pescherecci (1958), and Leviathan (2013).
On today’s show, Chris and Elise talk with Jim about how these films offer a brief overview of methods for portraying work, and they also help us think about a common format of reality television: the fishing program.

James Catano is producer/director of Enduring Legacy: Louisiana’s Croatian Americans and author of Ragged : Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man.
He’s Professor Emeritus of English and Screen Arts at Louisiana State University.

Produced by Chris Garlock

@dclabor @LaborHeritage1 @DCLaborFilmFest

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