Welcome to Labour of Love!

Having over a decade of work in the creative industries between us, we're of course very familiar with the idea that a job in the arts is a 'labour of love.' Work of everyone from emerging artists doing underpaid, unrecognised labour to facilitate creative work to the senior executives exploiting their employees as a prerequisite to achieving greatness is done under the guise that the enjoyment of artistic production is enough for all of us. Our newsletter, Labour of Love, was born out of our frustration and impatience with this idea.

We - Keno and Mayanne - had always been interested in the material conditions of art, but as we entered the creative sector, working in film and the fine arts respectively, we started to experience these pressures of creative production firsthand. The two of us met while studying History of Art in university and became fast friends. We connected over a shared interest in classes that engaged with the politics of art-making, which encouraged us to consider how broader contexts intersect with the creative process, aesthetic choices, and emotional impact, which extended to our thoughts on film and TV.

After graduating, our friendship continued cross-continentally, but we continued to share our thoughts over texts and calls, reflecting on how the politics of work shaped both representations of film and TV and how they were made. The lines between what appeared onscreen versus what happened on-set became more blurred, but we struggled to find writing in mainstream media that resonated with this analysis. We felt a gap between outlets focusing purely on aesthetic criticism of media and trade publications concerned with industry matters like box office records and corporate deals. Though these categories aren't unimportant, what we wanted were perspectives outside of academic writing that engaged with the divide between what happened onscreen versus offscreen and engaged with labour specifically. Answers to questions like: Why does our culture have such a fixation on the working process of directors and actors, but not on sound recordists, gaffers, and production assistants? What kind of labour is hidden when we talk about creative production for film and TV? How do changes in the workplace affect the craft of filmmaking itself? And more broadly, what do we conceive as labour, and how are onscreen narratives representing and reinforcing these beliefs?

Labour of Love is a product of our experiments in trying to understand these questions as students, researchers, writers, and most importantly, as art workers ourselves. We will be publishing an essay every other Wednesday, exploring a different aspect of labour in filmic culture.

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