Motifs
The working class and poverty
Labour, the factory and poverty as subject matter.
Bringing work into literature took an effort: for centuries the poor appear only in the background of the scene. The nineteenth century changed that, with a strike in a mine in the north of France, an orphan placed in a London workhouse, American farmers driven from their land by drought and by the bank. Cinema took up the subject with its own means: a worker swallowed by the cogs of a machine, a mutineer who refuses rotten meat, a Yorkshire boy who trains a kestrel to escape the pit.
works 10
- NovelOliver TwistCharles Dickens · 1838London, its workhouses and its gangs of child thieves, through the fate of an orphan.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelLes MisérablesVictor Hugo · 1862A former convict builds a new life under another name, and a policeman suspects him.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelGerminalÉmile Zola · 1885An unemployed worker goes down the mine and urges the starving miners to strike.Literature
- TheatreThe Lower DepthsНа днеMaxim Gorky · 1902A play of 1902 about the inhabitants of a night shelter, whose resignation is disturbed by an old pilgrim.Literature
- CinemaBattleship PotemkinБроненосец «Потёмкин»Sergei Eisenstein · 1925A silent film of 1925 about the mutiny of a Russian battleship during the first revolution, made for its twentieth anniversary.Cinema
- CinemaModern TimesCharlie Chaplin · 1936Regarded as the last great silent film, it was released in 1936 without synchronized dialogue: its author feared that the tramp, if he spoke, would lose the audience in non-English-speaking countries.Cinema
- NovelThe Grapes of WrathJohn Steinbeck · 1939The novel alternates the story of one family with short chapters on the exodus of farmers driven from their land.Literature
- CinemaBicycle ThievesLadri di bicicletteVittorio De Sica · 1948In postwar Rome, a father loses the bicycle on which his new job depends.Cinema
- CinemaLa terra tremaLuchino Visconti · 1948A family of Sicilian fishermen tries to escape the wholesalers who take their catch from them.Cinema