1 Introduction

The practice of workers filming their own conditions has long existed within the sphere of political documentary. At times this has sparked fierce debate, as for instance in the cultures of Cinéma Militant in France. Filmmaking groups such as Ligne Rouge saw the practice as a naïve form of workerism, arguing that the negation of the role of the committed director would ultimately lead to reactionary films (Grant 2016: 51-2). Similarly, filmmakers within the Cinélutte group argued against the idea that giving workers cameras would necessarily produce politically productive kinds of images. Rather, they perceived the practice as part of a broader valorisation of spontaneity that “sidestepped the real problem of representing the experience of the working class” (Grant 2016: 87).

Others, such as Les groupes Medvedkine, argued by contrast that decentring the filmmaker was something to aspire to (Grant 2016: 121; Adamson 2018: 43). For these practitioners, putting the camera in the hands of the workers was a way to move away from (individualist) auterism towards more collective filmmaking cultures which would “abolish the separation between expert and amateur” (Stark 2012: 127-33). Their attempts to establish collectivist and non-hierarchical relationships within the filmic production process were closely tied to their desire to refigure the social relations that pervade society more broadly. Cinematically, they emphasised a “conception of cinema as a dialogic relation between the film and the filmed” (Stark 2012: 133), and ultimately perceived elements of revolutionary potential in the practice of self-filming. Such polarised theorisations may seem out of place in the filmmaking cultures of the present day, but serve as an important starting point for my arguments below. This is because, as documentary production becomes ever more accessible, the boundaries between worker and filmmaker are frequently blurred or non-existent. As a result, “putting the camera in the hands of the workers” (Grant 2016: 4) is an increasingly common practice that emerges in response to the precarisation of contemporary work.

The current article analyses two films in which workers play a prominent role in filming their own conditions. Le Kiosque (The Kiosk, 2020) is filmed and directed by Alexandra Pianelli, the primary worker within the newsstand around which the film centres. In La Base (The Base, 2023), taxi drivers both film themselves and are filmed by the director and camera operator, Vadim Dumesh. The films engage with precarity both in terms of their production practices and their subject matter. Made on very limited budgets, they frequently rely upon low-cost recording means such as mobile phones; directors work without the assistance of supplementary film crews. In terms of the work depicted, the films centre around typically precarious employment situations characterised by instability and flux. In what follows, I draw upon original interviews with filmmakers and close readings of the films to interrogate the politics of self-filming work in the current conjuncture. Moving beyond deterministic arguments, I am interested in the ways that this practice engages with its historical and technological context; the forms and aesthetics that it gives rise to; and the ways in which it might affect the power relations that emerge in documentary production. In the final part of my argument, I direct my analyses towards a broader theorisation of this practice.

2 Disappearing work

The film makes clear from early on that the employment centred around news kiosks is in the process of disappearing, or at least changing shape significantly. The nature of the work itself is presented ambivalently. In some parts, kiosk work is shown simply to be boring, with long periods of waiting around, reading the magazines. In others, physical demands are brought to the surface. For instance, there is no toilet in the kiosk, a fact that is dealt with humorously but which highlights the cramped and limiting working environment. Later, Pianelli describes suffering repeated illnesses from working through the winter in an environment that provides only limited shelter. Both she and her mother also emphasise the general embodied demands which require one to behave like “a machine”. On a related note, the film draws our attention to the physical elements of the affective labour that service work requires. A sequence depicting a sexist monologue by a kiosk regular is followed by one in which Pianelli describes the gendered obligation to constantly smile on voiceover. The video track features a montage of women’s magazines, the glamorous covers of which serve as an ironic juxtaposition to Pianelli’s description of her fatigue, and the need to physically force a smile which “at its foundations is a grimace”. While service sector work is sometimes counterposed with manual labour, the film therefore suggests that divisions between the two are in reality more fluid.²

While the labour itself is not romanticised, the film can be read as a kind of elegy for the kiosk as a social institution. The social nature of the kiosk was the primary factor that impelled Pianelli to begin filming the project. Indeed, it is almost the perfect environment for a humanistic documentary filmmaker, bringing people from diverse backgrounds into a shared space. While some customers prove frustrating, camaraderie between Pianelli and the community more frequently rises to the surface. Some of the most poignant moments centre on Damien, a homeless man who shelters opposite the kiosk and shares a close bond with Pianelli, but who later dies. Other scenes focus on Islam, an asylum seeker who sells vegetables near the kiosk. These confrontations between filmmaker and other embody an ethically motivated framing that is typical of twenty-first century French documentary (see Cooper 2010; Evrard 2022). Significantly, they also prompt us to consider the ways in which Pianelli’s precarious work is embedded in a broader landscape characterised by precarious relationships, and indeed precarious life.

It is important now to address the aesthetics and production of the film in more detail. Pianelli explains the rationale behind her use of a mobile phone in several respects. The most obvious pertains to the limited means available to her as a filmmaker. In turn, she relates this to the subject matter of the film. The limited means are borne out in a style of filmmaking that is technically quite crude. This is most evident at moments when hands enter the frame, or during a scene in which Pianelli jokes with a customer about a “divine light” that emerges in the backlit shot of him due to the rudimentary aperture control on the phone camera. Pianelli describes an instinctive connection between these aesthetics and kiosk work: “[g]iven the smallness of the workplace and the sort of poverty of the place, it [the aesthetic] fitted in well, and it linked to the discussions happening in the street”.³ Beyond this, the film’s dispositif can also be interpreted as an attempt to come to terms with technological change. First, its production process aims to work through the implications of digital technologies for documentary filmmaking (something to which the film sometimes draws attention, as described above). This forms part of a more general attempt to understand the effects of technological change upon the sphere of employment (using the example of kiosk work as a hermeneutic). At times this takes on a playful tone, but it also responds to a more deeply-felt uncertainty (see Steyerl 2011) that is embodied in the limited amount of information made legible by the low-resolution imagery. What therefore emerges is an intertwinement of production processes, aesthetics, and narrative preoccupations in their relation to precarity.

The film’s engagement with the more general field of mobile phone footage also deserves attention. While such footage is frequently associated with immediacy and directness (Jouini 2025; Ruchel-Stockmans 2021: 143, for instance), the film’s use of phone footage conveys a different impression.⁴ Part of this is due to the temporal distance between the closure of the kiosk (2008) and the release of the film (2020), but Pianelli also describes the long duration over which filming took place, which enables the film to develop narrative arcs which reach beyond the immediate present and, relatedly, to situate itself within a much broader context (of which more shortly). We should also consider how the static camera – frequently positioned behind the kiosk counter – contrasts with the handheld nature of much mobile phone footage. For commentators such as Thomas Nail, digital images have a fundamentally “migratory” (2019: 67) or mobile nature. These are ideas that Angela Jouini (2025) channels in her discussion of the close relationship between spatial mobility and mobile phone filmmaking. Le Kiosque, on the other hand, frequently uses static mobile phone footage, while also operating within a very confined space. Indeed, at one point when the camera does leave the confines of the kiosk, it stops working – leaving us with only a blank screen. The film’s relative immobility can be interpreted in two ways. Partially, the lack of movement and very limited framing can be seen to reflect and implicitly critique the limited horizons of an increasingly precarious present. On the other hand, this immobility could also be interpreted as an attempt to re-ground a sense of stability in a world in flux. In any case, the film shows us that deterministic narratives are insufficient to explain the relations between technology, aesthetics and politics.

How does the small-scale production impact the film otherwise? Firstly, the collapse of the boundary between filmmaker and worker allows for an intimate exploration of the labouring process. To emphasise the mechanical nature of kiosk work, for instance, the camera focuses closely on the coin trays behind the counter, to show how generations of hands have marked them. Without wanting to fetishise an uncritical conception of “authenticity” or “truth”, it is clear that this approach gives rise to a different perspective than the classic workplace documentary formats – the interview or the labour process film – both of which typically separate worker and filmmaker. This is a concern I will develop in my analysis of La Base, which draws extensively on footage shot by its worker-participants.

Pianelli also notes that the small camera setup puts participants at ease. In doing so, she acknowledges the ways in which her work resonates closely with one of documentary film’s primary concerns: the relationship between filmmaker and Other. In our discussion of the power relations between documentary participant and filmmaker, Pianelli expresses a position which resonates with the broadly Levinasian ethics that inform a significant strain of contemporary documentary filmmaking and theory (Rangan 2017: 12-14; Nash 2011; Renov 2004: 148-67). She states, “I always put myself on the same level as the people I film”, and that, as a filmmaker, “your responsibility is […] to film [the participant] in their alterity”. An important scene casts further light on these issues. A conversation is taking place between Pianelli and Islam, the asylum seeker. When he asks if the film will be published online, he quickly hides his face, presumably concerned about the possibility of being apprehended by the police. This fleeting moment highlights the contradictory nature of the close forms of access made possible by these filming practices, resonating within and beyond the ethical field. While they offer the potential of filming the Other in a relatively uninhibited way, they may also give rise to material consequences that escape the confines of an ethical contract defined by respect for the Other’s alterity. Again, the political nature of the relations between filmmaker and (worker-)participant becomes a closer object of my analysis below.

3 The possibilities of precarious documentary

So far, I have emphasised the narrow spatial and compositional focus of the film, as well as the sense of uncertainty that its aesthetics embody. However, the film’s focus is not myopic, nor is it overwhelmed by its uncertainty. This is because it also situates its action rigorously within a broader sociopolitical context, something which is most evident in the animated sequences that intersperse the mobile phone and GoPro footage (see Fig. 3). These sections cast light upon the unequal power relations between press companies and the kiosk operators, the latter of whom are unable to choose the products they sell and are constantly owed money by the wealthier companies that supply their products. By using jerky stop-motion techniques and cardboard models, Pianelli aimed to “stay in the paper universe – in the poor universe of the kiosk”, but the sequences clearly reach beyond the confines of the individual kiosk, towards the more general economic contours of the neoliberal present.

Elsewhere, the film draws attention to the rise of far-right politics through a series of intradiegetic news headlines; the impact of internet shopping upon the broader sphere of work; the precarious situation of retirees; and strike action at the press companies. Its final moments also pay tribute to “those who fight”, including most obviously Damien and Islam. The film’s critique of precarity is closely bound up with precarious aesthetics, but it also shows that limited means implicit in low-budget documentary practice do not necessarily imply a turn away from the broader situation. While its political charge is often secondary to its exploration of the interpersonal, the film draws attention to the interrelations of multiple socioeconomic forces, developing a nuanced understanding of both precarious work and its enabling context. However, the question of how the situation might change remains out of reach.

4 Work and non-work

The film is much more interested in the disappearance of work than the specifics of the labouring process. Indeed, paying customers are entirely absent from the diegesis, and the primary working activities we see are therefore adjacent to the labour of driving (washing cars; waiting for customers, for instance). In this regard, the film’s action resonates with classic examples of workplace documentary, in which the downing of tools during strike activity allowed for the workers’ voices to be heard. An important difference is that a strike constitutes a deliberate and agential halt to production, whereas the taxi drivers have little choice but to not work, something which reflects the fraught political situation that they find themselves in. While taxi work itself is shown to be an isolating activity, the long periods spent not working allow for various forms of collective behaviours to emerge. For instance, drivers play pétanque, grow vegetables on a shared patch, and pray together. The first base seems almost like a micro-society with markets, a makeshift gym and a busy canteen, inhabited by workers from diverse cultures.⁵ The liminal situation of the base – somewhere between work and non-work, where drivers can do what they want but are constantly watched over – was the primary factor that attracted Dumesh to film there.

The quotidian activities at the base often seem banal, but are underpinned by profound socioeconomic change. The most abrupt change within the film’s narrative is the move from one base to the other, which constitutes an uprooting of the drivers’ community. A more insidious development is the growth of platform-based taxi services (technically known as private hire services). At a key moment, a driver receives a phone call attempting to convince him to move to Uber. A subsequent conversation encapsulates the more general situation: the licensed taxi drivers at the base undergo significant training to “learn Paris by heart”, and have the right to determined hours of work. Uber drivers, on the other hand, operate on a self-employed basis, lacking the protections implicit in a more regular employment contract (see Dubal 2017a; 2017b on self-employment). The taxi drivers’ rates are set centrally, according to local legislation, whereas private hire drivers are able to undercut those rates. The growth of platforms therefore constitutes a significant precarisation of the drivers’ profession, undermining their working conditions as the platforms engage in a race to the bottom (Ravenelle 2019; Rosenblat 2018; Gazier 2020). The film sometimes gives an impression of resistance to this change. A sequence homes in on posters protesting the “Americanisation” of Europe, for instance, and at one point drivers assemble around a speaker with a megaphone, attempting to establish some kind of solution to their forced displacement. These moments are only fleeting, however, and fail to cohere into a greater force.

The film’s concern with these workplace developments gives rise to a broader questioning of an increasingly precarious human condition. Fear of human obsolescence is repeated at several points, notably during the film’s opening sequence. On voiceover, a driver describes an imagined future in which the earth is populated by ghosts, with machines having taken over the activity of work.⁶ This resonates with the concerns about the fragility of life expressed in Le Kiosque, but takes on a more existential tone here. Ominous electronic music plays in the background, while the video track features a tracking shot that circles around the airport (filmed on a professional camera, rather than a phone). The movement of this shot can be interpreted as an embodiment of the kinds of change described on voiceover, but it remains unclear what is driving that change, as the camera operator remains anonymous. On a formal basis, this opening scene captures the way in which precarity is experienced as a loss of control over one’s situation, setting the stage for the action which propels the film. A later sequence follows the same formal pattern, but this time depicts a COVID-stricken base that has been emptied of drivers, thereby implicitly affirming the narrative introduced in the opening moments. Like Pianelli’s film, then, La Base generally suggests that there is little prospect of halting the descent into precarity. As indicated, traces of political resistance do emerge at points, but any question of collective action is effectively absent by the end of the film, as work seems to be dematerialising before the drivers’ eyes. The precise causes of precarisation are difficult to grasp, but for many of the drivers, the mobile phone serves as a pertinent emblem of the seemingly unstoppable change that they experience. This leads us towards a more detailed discussion of the film’s engagement with technology.

5 The dialectics of technology

Dumesh notes that the use of mobile phones in the production of the film was initially dictated by practical concerns: filming is not permitted on the base, so it was necessary to be able to do so on a clandestine basis. As the filming progressed, the participatory format began to take root, enabled by the ease of use and ubiquity of phone cameras. A fortuitous coincidence is that, as in Le Kiosque, the use of mobile phones in the production process relates closely to the subject matter of the film. In a similar way to Pianelli’s film, many scenes self-reflexively foreground the role of the phone as a recording apparatus. At several points, for instance, workers ask Dumesh how to frame a shot, or whether the phone is recording. These moments allegorise their broader efforts to come to terms with technological and sociopolitical upheaval.

While the mobile phone is pinpointed as the embodiment of enforced and unwelcome change, it also functions as an important means of expression for the workers, thereby taking on a dialectical quality. Specifically, many of the workers were attracted to participate in the documentary by the opportunity to build an archive of their work before it disappears. Jean-Jacques, one of the most prominent characters, argues that “we need to film everything because this really will be demolished”, for instance. This introduces a further dialectical tension. As we have seen, digital imagery has frequently been associated with “mobility” (Nail 2019). Many have also argued that the proliferation of images throughout society contributes to a broadly-felt sense of their transience and ephemerality (Hight 2018: 26).⁷ However, the imagery also embodies the promise of stability and permanence by giving the drivers the opportunity to reassert ownership over their memories of work. While the recording apparatus has arguably become more immaterial, registering images in binary code rather than on physical film, La Base suggests that the material connotations of the digital image have not been left behind but rather continue to play an important role within the cultural imaginary (see also Martínez Luna 2019; Hight 2018: 23-5).

Another significant tension emerges through the film’s engagement with the mobile phone as a device which facilitates both individualism and collectivism. Mobile phones are personal devices (as opposed to the traditional phone situated within a collective space), and the film is arguably constituted of a series of individual narratives. Within the diegesis, the ubiquity of the mobile phone facilitates the individualisation of (self-)employment that is foundational to the growth of the platforms. Yet the mobile is also “a social object”, as Roger Odin (2012: 164) reminds us, facilitating connections as well as individuations. The film’s construction reflects this, assembling its individual narratives into something approaching a collective experience.

How does this relate to the film’s more general engagement with work? We have seen that the film often foregrounds technologically deterministic narratives of decline: fears that machines will render workers redundant and, in more extreme fashion, eventually displace humanity altogether. By contrast, the dialectical tensions I have identified suggest that these technological developments are open to contestation and change, embodying latent potential as well as a threat. The drivers’ time spent not working is often experienced as boring and frustrating, as well as reflecting a broader situation of political weakness. Yet it also enables them, armed with their phones, to engage in forms of collective self-expression which perhaps carry the potential – however obliquely – for a different organisation of society. The film clearly does not resemble the kind of revolutionary cinema that Les groups Medvedkine had in mind; in fact, its overall tone is markedly pessimistic. However, it also shows that the practice of “putting the camera in the hands of the workers” carries with it an element of potential.

6 Power and production

It is important to qualify some of these points by addressing the power dynamics implicated by the more active role of participants within the production. We have already encountered both celebratory (Sasse; Vickers) and more cautionary (Rangan) accounts of documentary participation. I will return to each of these perspectives at points, but it is also worth introducing two further points of view which more explicitly confront the power dynamics of documentary. The filmmaker-theorist Jean-Louis Comolli, who has written extensively on the question of filming work, argues that “the cinematic relation is always somewhat playful” (1998: 24). He contends that in documentary production,

[a] ‘two of us’ is created, an ensemble that’s not stated as such. If we come to use the term ‘contract,’ it is understood as a ‘moral contract’ that should and does remain implicit, tacit, unspoken. For in this ‘contract’—which is not one in any legal or commercial sense of the word—lies the whole documentary relation (1999: 45, emphasis mine).

By contrast, Silke Panse perceives the work of the documentary protagonist as a value-productive activity, founded upon pronounced inequalities of power:

Marx observed that in capitalism the worker loses the right to control the value and the product of her labour. This lack of rights extends to the working documentary protagonist in the image. By working materially and immaterially in images, we not only produce a product that we do not own, or generate a smile we would otherwise not have, but our image is also exploitable as a product we do not own. (2014: 187)

While Comolli warns against the use of juridical or contractual means within documentary production, Panse advocates for greater legal rights for documentary participants so that their labour is recognised as such.

La Base is a film which casts light upon both of these perspectives. From its opening, we gain a sense of a playful kind of co-creation between Dumesh and the drivers. After the release of the film, participants were often present at screenings; during interview, Dumesh describes his ongoing relationships with them in ways which resonate with Comolli’s description of the collaborative and perhaps also solidaristic nature of the documentary relation. On the other hand, and coming closer to Panse’s perspective, the drivers clearly perform various kinds of work, without which the production would not exist: filming themselves, spending time with Dumesh, and so on. Dumesh works through closely related positions in our interview. First, he highlights “the power dynamic which I think cannot be escaped, even if you’re working […] in co-creation,” attributing this to class disparities, inequalities in technical prowess, and the fact that directors frequently represent an “outside gaze […] onto [a] community”. Subsequently, however, he rejects the kind of absolutist position taken by Panse: “it’s just condescending to say: these poor people, they don’t know anything. And we come with our cameras and we’re so powerful. That’s bullshit”.

Several strategies were put in place to attempt to mitigate some of the potentially exploitative aspects of the film’s production. First, participants were paid for their work in the film. Second, they were not asked to sign release forms until they had seen the final cut, so that, in the words of Dumesh, they could “exercise some control over […] the images they produced”. Participants were also able to withdraw from the production process (or simply to not show up to filming appointments), with minimal (if any) material consequences. This shows that attempts to transplant theories of the capitalist wage relation straightforwardly onto documentary production – as Panse does – are likely to fall short, as documentary participants typically have much greater freedoms than most waged workers (see also Comolli 1998: 22).⁸ On a slightly different note, it also bears mention that La Base avoids the obfuscatory tendency of participatory documentary to claim to reproduce an “unmediated reality” (Rangan 2017: 2). Rather, it clearly makes reference to documentary performance and construction: characters quite openly play roles for the camera (see Marquis 2013), and the interventionist presence of the director is not hidden.

Certain relationships within the film complicate this image of transparency, however. In particular, Dumesh describes conflicted feelings about his relationship with one character, Madame Vong, who features prominently in the film’s last third. Vong often films herself in selfie while describing her work as a taxi driver to an imagined audience, as if attempting to emulate the position of a social media influencer. Dumesh explains the semi-scripted nature of these scenes, but also acknowledges: “I’m still not sure whether she maybe believed that, you know, beyond the film, we would actually go out and build […] an online followership for her”. Ironically, this example points towards the deeply-embedded appeal of the kind of platform-based, entrepreneurial work that the film critiques. It also suggests that participants may project their desires onto documentary filmmakers in ways which can give rise to problematic and potentially exploitative relationships (see Piotrowska 2013: 45-53). More generally, Dumesh’s account exposes the difficulty of maintaining ethically and politically equitable relationships in documentary filmmaking, even where significant attention is paid to the ethico-political implications of production.

Ultimately, this leaves us in a situation where neither Comolli’s nor Panse’s theories are adequate on their own. On the one hand, the documentary relation is generally more equitable than the typical wage relation. In the case of La Base, for instance, the drivers hold much greater power as participants (in relation to Dumesh) than as workers (in relation to their employers and work-related institutions more generally). Further, the documentary contract (whether formal or informal) must allow for unexpected occurrences. The fact that participants’ behaviours and performances escape the boundaries of a strictly-enforced contract is an important aspect of documentary, as Comolli argues. This becomes particularly clear in the practice of “putting the camera in the hands of the workers”, which fosters a degree of autonomy which other methodologies often do not.

At the same time, documentary participation can clearly be exploitative, and a supposedly “playful” relation between filmmaker and participant can quite easily mask this. Putting the camera in the hands of participants under the guise of giving them autonomy might even be considered as a means of extracting free labour. While it would be dogmatic to argue that this is the case here, the connections between documentary participation and the kinds of “immaterial” or “affective” (Oksala 2015) labour increasingly demanded in the contemporary workplace should not be ignored altogether. In a more constructive sense, while a straightforward Marxist framework is not directly applicable to the documentary relation, the production of La Base also shows how foundational principles (payment of participants, for instance) can and should be implemented, even in low-budget productions. With these thoughts in mind, I will now angle my analysis towards a broader-reaching theorisation of “putting the camera in the hands of the workers”.