The road as the (non-)place of masculinity: L'Emploi du temps

Abstract

AbstractLaurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps (2001) figures the nominally transitional spaces of cinema—the road, the motor car, the service station—as central to its narrative and its protagonist's response to crisis. Reflecting and developing Marc Auge's concept of the non-lieu, the road and the car in Cantet's film become sites where the male subject simultaneously evades and performs the tasks of familial responsibility. The film can therefore be seen as a critique of the world of work as one constructed on illusory foundations; one which examines the disguised reiteration of masculine codes within the practice of commuting and the objects of everyday working life, and as such, suggests masculine crisis as deferred or repressed rather than resolved. Ultimately, then, the film can be read as one which engages critically with the use of cultural and narrative systems as sustaining, in concealed ways, dominant orders.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.