This book explores the new European cinema of precarity, with a particular focus on Western European films, by revisiting some of its most important precursors, including 1930s Popular Front films and 1990s French New Realism, Italian neorealism, and the British New Wave. It identifies dominant themes and motifs in contemporary films and their precursors, as well as important continuities and discontinuities between earlier and later representations of work, class, class struggle, solidarity, precarity, the moral economy of capitalism and neoliberalism and their affective pathologies. Trifonova examines the ways in which the cinema of precarity mediates economic and social capital in the age of neoliberalism and considers whether these films lend validity to Guy Standing’s idea of the precariat as “the new dangerous class.”

Screening the Art World explores the ways in which artists and the art world more generally have been represented in cinema. Contributors address a rarely explored subject – art in cinema, rather than the art of cinema – by considering films across genres, historical periods, and national cinemas in order to reflect on cinema's fluctuating imaginary of art and the art world. The book examines the intersection of art history with history in cinema; cinema’s simultaneous affirmation and denigration of the idea of art as "truth"; the dominant, often contradictory ways in which artists have been represented on screen; and cinematic representations of the art world's tenuous position between commercial good and cultural capital.