The labour of age: the AGE-C team at BAFTSS Conference 2024

Last week, Gloria Dagnino, Boglárka Angéla Farkas and I attended the 12^th BAFTSS Conference that took place at the University of Sussex between the 3^rd and the 5^th of April; the AGE-C team had put together a panel entitled The Labour of Age in European Film Representations and Productions, chaired by our very own Belén Vidal. Our interventions were designed to complement one another in order to examine what we proposed to define as ‘the labour of age’ across a selection of European film cultures. Gloria’s paper explored how labour practices and beliefs of Italian casting directors contributed to shape on-screen representations of age, and how this, in turns, affected job opportunities and career trajectories of Italian actors of different genders. In my paper, the labour of age was addressed through the study of how age, as a gendered aesthetic category, was performed on screen through the creative labour practices of French female actors. Finally, Boglárka’s paper examined the on-screen representations of the labour performed by healthcare professionals in Romania and the ‘dangerous’ status of retired citizens within that system.

Gloria’s talk interrogated the key concept of screen age (also known as playing age) which, despite of its frequent use in screen and stage production, has received surprisingly limited attention by media industry scholars, as well as practitioners. Her interviews with two Italian casting directors showed that screen age functions as a visual signpost: it positions the character on the chronological age spectrum through the association with an actor that displays certain outwardly features that are generally attributed to that age. But the attribution of an age to a character through the casting of a particular actor is neither a natural nor an ideologically neutral practice: the age norms that govern screen production seem to be carrying ageist traits that, unsurprisingly, affect women more than men. This in turn carries gendered implications for the ways in which the audiences experience and makes sense of age, ageing and the life course both in themselves and others. Moreover, Gloria showed that, apart from being a visual signpost for the viewers, screen age also functions as a segmentation criterion of the acting labour market. Screen age circumscribes groups of actors who, mainly by virtue of their outwardly features, can aspire to, and compete for certain types of screen roles. Therefore, it is in the actor’s interest to position themselves in as wide a screen age spectrum a possible, to increase their job opportunities. This explains recent legal actions carried over by actors’ guilds against websites like IMDb in order for their dates of birth to be taken down, as they can lead to ageist discrimination.

My paper interrogated a paradox that appeared during the building of our dataset: the fact that most French films of the last two decades featuring actors above 55 don’t actually deal with ageing. France hasn’t lacked for older leading stars –the generation that rose to fame in 1970s (Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Auteuil, Nathalie Baye, Christian Clavier, Fanny Ardant, etc.) have sustained fruitful careers, despite reaching old age in the early half of the noughties. But while most of them are now over 70, they often portray characters 10 to 20 years younger than their actual age. Meanwhile, since Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-awarded turn in Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en rose (La Môme, 2007), French cinema’s newfound interest for biopics has led to a more a frequent use of what Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie coined as ‘grayface’ performances – meaning those films in which a younger performer impersonates an ageing character. In somewhat illogical fashion, several of the most striking portrayals of old age in recent French films (for instance, Alex Lutz’s Guy) have been helmed by 40 year-old actors and actresses while many stars in their 70s, especially female stars, have been mostly impersonating characters in their early to late 50s. In my paper, I confronted the uncanny practices of artificial ageing (Cotillard in La Môme) or artificial rejuvenation (using recent controversies involving Isabelle Adjani and Isabelle Huppert) and the way they shine a light on the contradictory injunctions to which female stars are subjected to in order to sustain their career through old age. Most of those techniques used to blatant effect in order to age actors are the very same tools used secretly by stars in order to make themselves look younger: makeup, hairstyling, choice of clothing, use of prosthetics or CGIs. But while the ostentatious quality of grayface performances is often celebrated, stars are publicly shamed whenever their efforts to appear younger become too visible. Both strategies of playing older or playing younger draw attention to the paradox at play between the labour asked from ageing female stars who, as Josephine Dolan puts it, are expected “to simultaneously achieve the artifice of rejuvenation and to conceal the signs of its efforts” and the labour of younger actresses who get rewarded for performing the artifice of prosthetic ageing by proudly displaying signs of spectacular decay.

Finally, Boglárka’s paper aimed to analyse two films of the New Romanian Cinema, both of which taking place mostly in hospital environments and presenting older patients who are already in or getting closer to retirement: Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) and Adrian Sitaru’s Best Intentions (2011). What interested her in this comparison was how the status of retirement seemed to influence the politics of care, the power dynamics between healthcare workers and patients, and the overall quality of the provided healthcare services. While the title character of The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, an elderly, retired, isolated man, is dismissed as a second class citizen and maltreated by the medical staff, the mother of the hero of Best Intentions, a well-regarded school teacher and director, is treated with almost too-extraordinary care – but she is very anxious about her upcoming retirement and the possibility of her  transfer to a city hospital where she could be treated as any other retired old woman. Both films reflect on the prevailing conditions of the Romanian healthcare system with much poignancy and with a prominent emphasis on the ageing body and contextualize retirement as a critically endangered status for older patients, validating the affirmations and concerns of scientific literature. Considering population ageing in Romania and all over Europe, Boglárka argued that a cultural shift was therefore much needed, divesting the age of retirement from stigmatizing notions such as ‘passivity,’ ‘non-productivity’ and ‘social waste’ hence improving healthcare provision for Third Age-patients. Films such as Puiu’s and Sitaru’s are therefore crucial for laying down the cultural groundwork behind this long-awaited shift.

Written by: Alexandre Moussa