MAINTENANCE IS A DRAG

Still image from the film Saute Ma Ville by Chantal Akerman

This screening is part of a monthly film series presented by Soctalk and hosted and co-curated by WORM, exploring cinema through the lens of social reproduction feminism. In the words of Cindi Katz (2001), social reproduction is the fleshy and messy stuff of everyday life. The program invites audiences to look at film as a way of understanding the structures of regular practices that make life possible, while questioning whose labour remains unseen. Across four screenings, we explore how capitalist relations profit from the status quo and depend on keeping much of this work hidden.

The final screening focuses on domestic labour and housework, forms of maintenance work that are repetitive, gendered, and systematically undervalued. Cooking, cleaning, and caring are essential to everyday life, yet often naturalized into invisibility. This program highlights both the necessity and the frustration of domestic labour, exposing the social systems that rely on its continual erasure.

Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle by Jean-Luc Godard 1967, France, 90 min, French with English subtitles Through a fragmented portrait of a woman navigating domestic labour, consumer culture, and sex work in Paris, the film exposes how gendered labour is commodified and embodied. Repetition structures everyday life in a society that refuses to acknowledge the work it depends on.

Saute ma ville by Chantal Akerman 1968, Belgium, 13 min Shot in her mother’s kitchen, Akerman’s short film follows a young woman performing an increasingly frantic routine of cleaning, cooking, and dancing. Both comic and ominous, the film turns domestic labour into an explosive gesture of excess and refusal.

Soctalk is a junior staff initiative within the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The collective organizes workshops and courses both inside and outside the university. Soctalk aims to foster a culture of care that critically engages with institutional structures, while redistributing and collectivizing resources to support communities and initiatives in the city of Rotterdam.

Cineville valid at the door and online on the day itself!