Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, UK, 2010)

Wrapped in a wee yellow dressing gown, Sandra makes her way onto one of the vast shop floors at Ford’s Dagenham plant. The space is empty and silent, save for a small corner set up for a photoshoot. Car production at Dagenham has ground to a halt, the entire workforce sent home by the management in the wake of strike action by the female sewing machinists. ‘There she is’ leers the photographer, ‘drape yourself across this vehicle.’ Sandra slowly allows the dressing gown slip from her shoulders, revealing the latest in 1960s beach fashion, a risqué electric blue bikini. The film cuts to a close-up. Across her belly, written in red lipstick, are the words EQUAL PAY.  Cutting back to a wide shot, Sandra asks: ‘How does this look?’ Yet it is Sandra who is looking, first at the silenced photographer; then, eyes moving, with a confrontational stare, out of the frame. Another cut: up above the shop floor in a glass fronted office complex, Ford’s American boss (flown in to break the strike by any means necessary), turns and walks away. Sandra: ‘Nah?’

Made in Dagenham has all the attendant, complex pleasures of cinematic realism. The film recounts the story of a strike at Ford’s main UK plant in 1968. One of hundreds in the emancipatory climate of the 1960s, it was, however, an almost unique event: a strike by working women for working women. Caused by a management decision to downgrade the female labour from semi-skilled to unskilled status, the true aim was to enact a brutal wage cut on a group with seemingly little recourse to action. During the strike, and not in small measure a consequence of the unsupportive male dominated union, the walk-out transformed to encompass the rights of working women in general: equal pay for the same jobs as men. The strike was successful in that it resulted in a change in the law. And, as the film points out, this inspired similar laws across ‘most’ industrialised nations. Made in Dagenham tells this story through a number of the women characters who rise up against the encompassing patriarchal order of management, union and husbands – focusing upon Rita O'Grady, a worker who becomes the voice and champion for the sewing machinists. A wonderfully enjoyable film, Made in Dagenham creates these characters – who do not exist in the real – in order to explores a situation by way of capturing up an audience through the pleasures of the mainstream movie, through the entertainment of cinematic realism...

Made in Dagenham is at the centre of the movement-image, a (large form) action-image, a realist film par excellence, the most distinctive sign of which is the binomial. Here we encounter a filmic structure that proceeds through a conflict, by two dominant lines of force devolving from a situation and embodied in characters who express their relation through the duel. These duels will be romantic, as much as violent or indeed political (and Made in Dagenham explores all these manifestations)...

To read the full exploration of Made in Dagenham through the Deleuze's sign of the 'binomial,' see Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images...