From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema 9780748656479

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From Empire to the World

From Empire to the World Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema

Malini Guha

© Malini Guha, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 5646 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5647 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5649 3 (epub) The right of Malini Guha to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Aspects of Chapter 2 were published as “ ‘Have you been Told, the Streets of London Are Paved With Gold’: Rethinking the Motif of the Cinematic Street Within a Post-Imperial Context”, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6.2 (2009), pp. 178–89.

Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1  Global Paris: Topographies and Dwelling Spaces 1.1 At a Historical Crossroads: Revisiting Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) 1.2 Parisian Networks Old and New: Topographical Journeys Through the City 1.3 Dwelling Space as City Space

39 52 86

Chapter 2  Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places 2.1 Dirty Pretty London: The Global Story 2.2 The “World” In Dirty Pretty Things 2.3 High and Low London 2.4 London Places, London Spaces

126 135 138 148

Chapter 3  The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures 3.1 Movements of Passage 180 3.2 Migrants on the Road: Spatial Ambivalence in Winterbottom’s In This World 184 3.3 On the Road to History: Space and Place in Tony Gatlif ’s Exils 196 Conclusion 213 Select Bibliography 227 Index 238

Figures

I.1 Playtime: “Iconic” London. 2 I.2 Barbara finally locates the Eiffel Tower, but only as an image. 3 1.1  Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle: the Périphérique under construction. 42 1.2 Deux ou trois choses: interview with an Algerian boy. 50 1.3 Camille and Daiga’s hands brush in a fleeting moment of connection. 75 1.4 Caché: the Laurent home. 91 2.1 An urban crossroads: Pat and Johnny in Pool of London. 141 3.1 In This World: Shamshatoo Refugee Camp. 188 3.2 Exils: a glimpse of the banlieue. 199

Acknowledgements

This book first began as a dissertation completed at the University of Warwick. Many, many thanks to my supervisor Charlotte Brunsdon, whose support, understanding and guidance have proved invaluable to the initial shape of this project in dissertation form and its transformation into this book. Additional thanks go to my examiners Alastair Phillips and Mark Shiel, whose deeply insightful comments have remained with me during the revision process and to Arun Kumar Chaudhuri for his astute advice in the early stages of this book project. I am grateful for the continuing support of the wonderful colleagues and friends I met during my time at Warwick, including Chris Meir, Amy Holdsworth, Laura OrtizGarrett, Faye Woods, Sarah Thomas and Tracey McVey. And I thank my early mentors Kass Banning and Bart Testa, whose respective passions served as the initial inspiration for my scholarly endeavors. I am very thankful to my editors at EUP, including Gillian Leslie and Richard Strachan. Their efficiency in all book-related matters strikes me as unparalled. Many thanks to Rebecca Mackenzie for her help in the cover design of the book. A heartfelt thank you goes out to my colleagues in Film Studies at Carleton University, particularly to my former colleague and friend Erika Balsom and to John Osborne, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. This project would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of Warwick, The Overseas Research Council and Carleton University. I am grateful for the support of my family, including my parents, Dave and Supriya Guha, and my late grandmother, Renu Guha. A very special thank you to my Aunt Sibani Pal for her constant encouragement, affection and care. Her work ethic and perseverance have always proved inspirational to all of my endeavors, scholarly or otherwise. Additional thanks goes to my UK family, Piali Ray and Niltu Raymahasay, whose

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c­ ompanionship and humor were very much appreciated during my PhD days. Without the love, strength and guidance of my family, nothing is possible. This book is dedicated to my uncle, Saibal Guha, who left this world far before his time.

Introduction

With a little optimism, we might consider it quite normal that the big cities of today should look like the rest of the world; their rapid spread also allows us to think that the world looks like a large city. Marc Augé1

The Time of the “Past-Present” Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) is notorious for having bankrupted its director for many reasons, not the least of which includes the building of its elaborate set, affectionately known as “Tativille”. Tativille constitutes Tati’s city-of-the-future, a Parisian cityscape comprised of high-rise modernist buildings decked in glass and in various shades of gray.2 This is the Paris that a group of American tourists in the film have apparently come to see. But Playtime situates the rise of generic urban architecture as a phenomenon that is, in fact, global in its orientation. Barbara, one of a group of these American tourists, enters a building that houses an airline ticket counter where she gazes at a series of advertisements on the wall. These advertisements promote destination locations such as the US, Hawaii, Mexico and Stockholm. Each poster contains nearly identical images of a gray high-rise building, so that cities and nations the world over seem to have fallen in step with Paris (Figure I.1) This is also true of London, as Barbara views a poster of the city earlier in the film pictured as a gray high-rise flanked by a double-decker red bus on one side, while an image of Big Ben peeks out from the other. Following on from anthropologist Marc Augé’s observations that open this book, it is entirely possible to view these elements of the film as a nascent, largely satirical anticipation of the homogenizing effects of globalization as witnessed within the built form of the global cityscape, where the world is seemingly transformed into one large city and the city itself indexes the transformation of the world.

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Figure I.1  Playtime: “Iconic” London.

While the city that Barbara traverses in the film is unfamiliar, generic and the abode of all manner of technological gadgetry that Tati, in the guise of Monsieur Hulot, subjects to innumerable forms of playful subversion, there is more than one urban story to be found in the film.3 In an exemplary and well-cited instance of Tati’s deployment of the visual gag, Barbara is brought to a standstill while moving through a gray-glass building as she is confronted with a tantalizing view of the Eiffel Tower reflected on a glass door (Figure I.2) She turns, attempting to locate the elusive source of the image, but to no avail. While Barbara catches a fleeting glimpse of the iconic and intensely familiar Paris, she can only experience it as image. There is something incredibly filmic about this brief sighting of the Eiffel Tower, as though it were being projected onto the door, its referent cloaked in invisibility. In this instance Tati partially fulfills Barbara’s desires and perhaps even our own, for a recognizable image of one of the most photographed and filmed cities in the world. Here, the Eiffel Tower elicits an image of Paris as “capital of modernity” while the high-rise ridden landscape is emblematic of a second wave of modernity that descends upon the city in the post-war, post-imperial period. This link to the urban past is even more pronounced as Barbara and Monsieur Hulot spend a significant portion of the film moving through an exhibition, implicitly evoking the Parisian Exhibition of 1900 where the Eiffel Tower made its very first appearance. Through the juxtaposition of urban images corresponding to two distinct periods of modernization, Tati offers a depiction of Paris that blurs the boundaries between the urban past and its imagined future.4 In these

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Figure I.2  Barbara finally locates the Eiffel Tower, but only as an image.

moments, Tati’s city gives rise to a visual experience of temporal and spatial hybridity, derived from the juxtaposition and co-existence of old and new. As such, Playtime operates in accordance with a prevalent thesis concerning cities more broadly; as Ben Highmore has observed, cities are always marked by a certain density, as sites of the accumulation of urban histories made manifest within the built environment but also through numerous modalities of cultural production.5 Turning more specifically to Playtime and to the historical moment of its production, the film features the rise of Paris as generic city, a subject broached and explored through very different means in other films of the period, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Yet Playtime is intent on showing us that cities essentially operate as palimpsests so that they retain their historical density, even in a film where iconic images of the cityscape have been largely relegated to the status of image. The irony here is unmistakable: that the image of the Eiffel Tower has circulated as “Paris” itself is rendered in this film as just that, simply an image. Yet Playtime suggests that a new iconicity is taking hold of the city, of all cities even, that are being superimposed over familiar images of cities that continue to denote a certain specificity, even in the face of their overexposure. In taking us from modernist skyscrapers to the Eiffel Tower and back again, this brief moment from Playtime offers up a visual corollary for the impetus of this study while also pointing towards one of of its central interventions. If the founding narrative of the study of cinematic city rests upon a particular configuration of nineteenth century modernity,

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urbanization and the birth of cinema, in this book I investigate a second such configuration that brings together globalization, urban space and the cinema, taking a series of contemporary films set in London and Paris as primary case studies. These films include: Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (2000) and Caché (2005), Claire Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil (1994) Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) and Tony Gatlif ’s Exils (2004). What these films have in common is that all of them feature migrant mobilities of various types, extending from asylum seekers and clandestine migrants to the first generation of settled migrants as well as economic migrants. These films have been chosen as the basis of this study because their textual properties facilitate the exploration of two, intertwined facets of globalization that remain on the margins of the literature on global cities and cinema; one pertains to the significance of the historical past upon contemporary understandings of globalization, while the other refers to the transgressive nature of globalization in its ability to reconfigure established modes of classification and categorization. Existing studies of global cities and cinema, including Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in the Digital Age as well as Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context frame their arguments in accordance with the paradoxical nature of globalization, as a phenomenon marked by ever increasing modes of differentiation that continue to persist, despite its homogenizing tendencies. The global city itself subsequently emerges as a Janus-faced entity. On the one hand, the global city is defined by increased economic polarization, due in part to the pervasiveness of low-wage jobs required for the sustenance of the luxury-based economies that make global cities run.6 Economic unevenness, coupled with faster modes of mobility attributed to internet-based forms of communication and transaction, has escalated the experience of fragmentation and ephemerality within global cities, two characteristics that are similarly associated with nineteenth-century urban modernity.7 As a result, global cities partake of a central contradiction of globalization more broadly, where numerous forms of differentiation exist in tension with the production of highly unified global systems of economic flow. And yet it remains the case that certain aspects of the contradictory conditions of globalization are explored to a lesser degree than others, particularly those invested in unearthing potentially discomforting imbrications between historical past and global present. In “Notes on Globalisation and Ambivalence”, Homi K. Bhabha offers a model for thinking through these difficulties that takes the aftermath of World War II as its point of departure. Bhabha traces a genealogy of ambivalence that

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lies at the very heart of the “One World” enterprise by meditating upon a visit he took to Nuremberg, setting the stage for revisiting the pioneering work of Hannah Arendt regarding the fate of the stateless, displaced peoples of the post World War II period. As Bhabha observes, a perverse and enduring consequence of various state-driven quests for global integration is the lack of what he terms a “free space” for the stateless, including figures such as the migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker, minorities and the undocumented worker.8 Bhabha refers to this as a “double-bind” between the principles of universality that are a constitutive feature of the dream of global integration and the contingent experiences of exclusion, discrimination, injustice and violence that emerge, crucially for Bhabha, within the midst of international polity geared towards globalization.9 And while the differences between the figures listed above do rest upon who is able to obtain citizenship and who is denied this right, Bhabha carefully insists that even those who are citizens of the nation state within which they reside can suddenly end up on the wrong side of state policies, depending on how migration is viewed by the state in any given historical moment.10 The stateless in particular, often deemed a “surplus” population as Bhabha tells us, are the very embodiment of the unevenness of global flows, as it is they that comprise the work force that plays a pivotal role in the daily functioning of the global city while rarely reaping any of its rewards.11 Bhabha makes the case for ambivalence, of a clear recognition of the contradictory and unresolved divides fostered by globalization, as the primary means to establish ethically and politically motivated negotiations of the contemporary world.12 What is intriguing about this conclusion is that Bhabha credits a visit to Nuremberg, and the corresponding difficulties of this encounter with both the tangible and largely intangible horrors of the past, as his primary inspiration. As Bhabha writes: The life of memory exceeds the historic event by keeping alive the traces of images and words. Cultural memory, however, is only partially a mirror, cracked and encrusted, that sheds its light on the dark places of the present, waking a witness here, quickening a hidden fact there, bringing you face-to-face with that anxious and impossible temporality, the past-present.13

Bhabha insists that the workings of cultural memory, as that which simultaneously reflect and refract the lingering traces of historical events, are integral to a view of globalization intent on wrestling with its ambivalences and contradictions. To claim the events of the past as instrumental in understanding the workings of the global present and possibly its future is a reading of global circumstances that is often neglected in favor of what

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Saskia Sassen describes as its master image, which is that of accelerated time.14 Building upon Bhabha’s observations, going back to the past produces a very different view of time and also of space, one that corresponds to the metaphor of the Moebius strip that Bhabha also draws upon to describe the way in which this mode of historical thinking bends time into a series of unusual shapes and formations.15 And while Playtime does not hold up a mirror to past traumas, Tati employs reflective surfaces to offer glimpses of the urban past that open a gateway, however brief, between the generic present of the film and an earlier phase of Parisian modernity. The recognition of the time of the past-present assumes a critical function in Bhabha’s work, as a way of enabling the interrogation of the processes of globalization from the perspective of its ambivalences and difficulties, especially as they relate to migrant and disaporic populations. The act of migration, which we might prosaically describe as “leaving one place for another”, is often temporary in its orientation, as can be the case with economic migrants, or illegal modes of migration. These forms of mobility can, of course, also result in more permanent modes of settlement closely associated with the formation of diasporas and also with the condition of exile, which denotes a banishment from home that is either forced or voluntary.16 Nomadism, in contrast, is about finding home everywhere without being bound by the fixed notions of location.17 The “stateless”, as Bhabha describes them, denote a complex set of possible conditions that may drive such populations to migrate, including movement that is forced as a result of political turmoil in the home nation, as it often the case with refugees or asylum seekers, but may also include economic forms of migration, equally “forced” into being as a result of urban impoverishment. These are the figures that fall under the heading of “global migrant” as their mobilities are either crucially linked to the forms of labor integral to the functioning of globalization, as manifested in cities and nations the world over, or their movement from impoverished nations to wealthy global cities is emblematic of economic unevenness on a global scale. The prevalent discourse of “Fortress Europe” is precisely about keeping these populations “out”, which rests upon the disavowal of the significance of these populations to any contemporary notion of Europe or Europe’s global cities, such as Paris and London. In this study, I extend Bhabha’s observations regarding the temporal register of the past-present to the examination of Paris and London as global cinematic cities that similarly give rise to a state of ambivalence in their depiction of migrant mobilities, returning us to the past in ways that are often unexpected and wide ranging in their implications. While all of the forms of migration noted above seem easily differentiated

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from one another, what proves interesting is that sometimes the films themselves trouble these strict distinctions, as will be explored in depth throughout the book. As such, the series of films that constitute the core corpus of From Empire to the World offer cinematic variants of precisely what Bhabha advocates, which is a politics grounded within a historically complex view of globalization that challenges its normative affiliations with speed, incessant mobility and progress. It must be noted that these films are also not devoid of ambivalence, which this book will employ in service of a productive engagement with globalization as it pertains to a certain strand of “world cinema”, a claim that will be substantiated later in the Introduction. Bhabha’s notion of the “past-present” proves instrumental in developing my approach to the spatial politics of the case study films, which parts ways with much of the existing scholarship that centers on the representation of the city. Much of this literature reads the city in these films as illustrations of classic non-places in Marc Augé’s sense of the term; for Augé, non-places are defined by their lack of relationality, identity and history.18 Non-places are transitory in their orientation, designed to either facilitate passage or as temporary dwelling spaces. Phrases such as “blank city” or “non-place” are often called upon to describe the cinematic cities in these films; as the story goes, migrant narratives, especially those that feature stateless populations, transpire primarily across non-places that both literally and metaphorically gesture towards their inability to belong.19 Certainly, both cities do exemplify the trend towards generic architecture at the start of their respective globalizing phases, as structural markers of their new-found status. Global city architecture tends to be generic by default; as Saskia Sassen states, high-rise structures dominate certain areas of global cities as they have been built to accommodate the proliferation of new firms.20 The London skyline began to show evidence of this generic and gentrified turn toward the global during the 1980s, as the redevelopment of the Docklands into Canary Wharf involved the building of a series of non-descript skyscrapers that Peter Wollen has referred to as “citadels of international capital”.21 A similar kind of financial hub, made up of its own citadels, overtakes Paris much earlier through the building of La Défense between 1958 and 1969 in the western part of the city, which similarly provides Paris with a new skyline dedicated to its burgeoning global identity.22 These buildings are illustrations of the type of architectural development that Sassen famously discusses with regard to global cities, where the built form of the city is made to accommodate its changing financial status as nodal points within a global, capitalist economy. The dominant approach to these case study films are immensely

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v­ aluable in their emphasis on the generic space that migrant figures are often made to occupy. These spaces, which are the abode of labor and exploitation, often function as a hidden lining just underneath the glittering façades of the global cityscape. However, I am interested in unearthing the often subtle interventions on offer in these films that contest the nearly automatic associations between certain kinds of migrant stories and nonplaces as the only urban setting within which such narratives can unfold.23 This book will demonstrate that much more complex views of urban space can be found in these films, once they are situated within a historical context that invests in teasing out the links between past and present.

The Flâneur and the Migrant In centering this book upon films that feature migrant narratives, my intention is to focus on mobilities that show up the contradictions of the globalizing process while also contesting a view of city space in these films as non-places. Just as crucially, my work on these films entails yet another return to the past by enabling us to revisit the early scholarly trends on the cinematic city and its central preoccupation with European modernity, the city and the cinema. The lines of argumentation developed by the pioneering work of Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as carried through to numerous contemporary scholars, presents us with the now familiar “modernity thesis”; this thesis establishes a relationship of homology between the birth of the cinema and nineteenth-century urban modernity whereby the cinema embodies the characteristics of shock, fragmentation and intensified modes of mobility that comprise the experiential textures of modern urban life.24 Some of this scholarship, as it pertains specifically to the cinematic city, situates the mobilities of the flâneur, the legendary urban stroller, as akin to that of the cinematic spectator herself. The work of Giuliana Bruno is exemplary in this regard, as she claims: In more particular ways, film viewing inhabits the moving urban culture of modernity: it is an imaginary form of flânerie. A relative of the railway passenger and the urban stroller, the film spectator – today’s flâneur – travels through time in architectural montage.25

Bruno’s claims in this regard return us to the work of Siegfried Kracauer, who declares the film spectator as akin to the flâneur in their incessant attraction to the “transient real-life phenomena that crowd the screen”; for Kracauer, locations such as bar interiors, buildings, and the city street, in conjunction with the use of montage which moves us from one scene

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intr o duc t ion 9 to the next, produce the effect of chance, coincidence and possibility that enchants both the filmic spectator and the flâneur before him/her.26 In a conversation with film scholar Karen Lurey titled “Making Connections”, cultural geographer Doreen Massey offers an important intervention in response to the preoccupation with the figure of the flâneur in much of this early literature on the filmic city. As she observes: It is not just city spaces which were “of transit” or even transitory. Empirically, one might (perhaps should) point to that other set of mobilities – the massive mobilities of imperialism and colonialism – which were underway – beyond, way beyond, the little worlds of flânerie, at the same period of history.27

Massey’s comments not only pose a juxtaposition between two contrasting modes of mobility but do so along the lines of scale, suggesting the global reach of imperial and colonial mobilities ultimately overshadows those of flânerie. An appeal to this history facilitates a reconsideration of the prominent position the mobilities of the flâneur have come to occupy within early scholarship on the cinematic city. While much of this work has proved essential in rethinking the origins and formal attributes of the cinema from the perspective of urban modernity, this study situates itself within a burgeoning strand of literature in the field intent on mobilizing other narratives and ways of thinking about the interrelationships between cities and the cinema. The configurations of the past-present that can be gleaned in the films examined in this book take us back to the history of empire, as traces of this past are what linger in the seemingly generic global present. As such, Massey’s claims concerning the often marginalized place of empire within considerations of European modernity have a special relevance for this study. Scholars have argued, more specifically than Bhabha does in this piece, that the history of empire is often what remains obscured in scholarly assessments of globalization, particularly when it comes to the fate of nations that were once at the apex of the colonial world order. Political philosopher Etienne Balibar for instance, argues that the politics of exclusion between so-called “majorities” and “minorities” plaguing a variety of European nations were “reinforced by the history of colonization and decolonization and that in this time of globalization, they have become the seed of violent tensions”.28 Scholars like Timothy Brennan have boldly made the claim that considerations of the imperial past remain on the edges of contemporary accounts of globalization due to the discomforting continuities that can be grasped between the imperial world order and present day circumstances, particularly with regard to the current reign

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of the US as informal global empire. As Balibar and Brennan actively suggest, going back to the imperial past is a salient method, although by no means the only one, that can bring numerous genealogies of global ambivalence into being. This book will argue that the case study films are marked by a similar gesture, enabling a cinematic version of this particular thesis on globalization to come into the light. Rather than presenting the city as a kind of generic or even blank slate, these films illustrate the often uncomfortable affinities, continuities and frictions between imperial past and global present that come to surface through the depiction of a number of migrant mobilities that feature settled populations, illegal economic migrants as well asylum seekers. As such, what this book will trace is the persistence of distinct urban imaginaries as gleaned across this corpus, ones that contest notions of the global city as lacking in specificity or as obliterating all historical markers in its wake. The migrant is not only a figure intimately associated with a view of globalization steeped in ambivalence but the act of migration is also what transformed post-imperial London and Paris into an earlier phase of spatial and temporal hybridity, attesting to the legacies of empire in the contemporary, global moment. In their Introduction to Imperial Cities, David Gilbert and Felix Driver, drawing explicitly from the work of postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and others, state: While the cities of Europe have provided homes for non-Europeans for as long as they have been cities, it is in the social composition of the post-imperial city – in Glasgow and Marseilles as much as London and Paris – that the impact of empire can most readily be appreciated. The hybridity of these places, their overlapping territories and intertwined histories, testifies to the enduring legacy of empire.29

This observation leads Gilbert and Driver to proffer a view of the city as a site of intersection, rather than an origin, as a crossroads, rather than a center.30 This view of the urban, one that privileges the fluidity of exchanges and encounters that encompass both the built form of the city as well as its inhabitants, shares an affinity with the case study films. The city as site of intersection and even of a crossroads between past and present is most suited to a consideration of the urban in these films, in a way that is demonstrative of Bhabha’s description of cultural memory as partially encrusted mirror where reflection meets refraction on an equal footing. It should also be made clear at the outset that this book does not pose an unshakable binary between the mobilities of the flâneur and that of the migrant, even if my leanings towards Massey’s intervention suggest the

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opposite. On the contrary, the films under examination in this book often present intersecting modes of mobility, some of which evoke notions of flânerie and idealized versions of urban strolling right alongside the kinds of difficult and traumatic movements associated with various forms of migration. As Mark Betz argues in his ground breaking book Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema, part of the idealization of the mobility of the flâneur rests on how this figure both revels in the commodified nature of urban life and stands outside of its speedy pace. Here, of course, Betz draws from Charles Baudelaire, whose flâneur is only immersed in the crowd as a condition of his anonymity within it, whose aim is to observe without attachment, in a direct echo of the ephemeral and contingent qualities of modern urban life. The flâneur retains a productive position both within the phantasmagorias of the arcades and other urban sites of commodification by also standing outside of these arenas in the guise of the observer.31 A similar argument can be made about the figure of the migrant but only in reverse; migrant figures, whether related to the mobilities of the stateless or even those of the privileged, are a constitutive part of the globalizing process whom are often made to occupy its underside, in varying degrees, as a result of class, racial or gender difference.32 And yet, there remains something curious about the way in which the flâneur, who is by all accounts a largely marginal urban figure in terms of the way he (and crucially she) experiences city life, has assumed a position of such centrality within the literature on cinematic cities when the flâneur also might share more commonalities with the equally marginal figure of the migrant than is readily apparent.33 For instance, the flâneur is also a figure imbued within the time-space of the past-present; as Benjamin remarks “We know that in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment”, a condition that Benjamin, appropriately for this study, links to the viewing of “mechanical pictures”.34 For Benjamin, the flâneur’s wandering through the streets, which can trigger an association with any number of mythical or historical pasts, is also a source of intoxication, alongside that of being lost in the crowd.35 As the flâneur stands apart from the rapid pace of nineteenthcentury modernity while remaining a constitutive part of it through his enjoyment of commodity and leisure culture, so too do the mobilites of the migrant, particularly of the stateless variety, signify outside of the conventional narratives of globalization that center around the image of accelerated time. Similarly, these films can also be positioned both “inside” and “outside”; as will be elucidated in further detail later in the Introduction, the directors of these films work within an auteurist tradition, making films about various types of migrants with different degrees of privilege, often

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within the same film. The productive tensions produced by these and other variations of being “inside” and “outside” might allow us to see some of the points of intersection between these two modes of urban mobility. The links between cinema and migration are longstanding and wide ranging in their historical contexts. As filmmaker Patrick Keiller notes in an essay titled “City of the Future” that concerns the relationship between migration from Europe to overseas nations between 1816 and 1915 and the birth of the cinema: the coincidence of cinema and emigration is particularly intriguing when one considers how much of the cinema came from the major destinations of emigrants, and that both might be seen to offer the possibility of a “new” or other world.36

Keiller allows us to develop further links between cinema, migration and the world itself, signifying a correlation between material and the imagined transformations that a convergence between these three can bring. Given this context, there is surprisingly not an abundance of literature on either migrant London or Paris in the cinema that has its origins in the study of the cinematic city, although there is of course a plethora of literature on cinema and diaspora that touches on questions of space and place.37 This book seeks to make two interventions in this regard. The first is to bring together an attention to migrant mobilities characteristic of the study of diasporic or migrant cinemas with the methods of reading for urban space and place. The second intervention is to demonstrate that these case study films do not simply feature fictionalized narratives of global migrants in the global city but in fact can be situated within the long durée of migration and urban transformation that stretches back to the post-imperial histories of both cities.

“To those with eyes to see”38 The question of visibility looms large when attempting to determine the ways in which vestiges of the imperial past retain their hold upon the present, either through the cinema or beyond. As literary scholar Bill Schwarz observes, there was no fanfare involved when the British empire came tumbling down, there were no statues or monuments erected in London to celebrate this particular end, as is also the case in Paris.39 Drawing from the scholars mentioned above, the most visible trace of the history of imperialism in both a British and French context is that of migrant and settled populations from former colonies and the spatial formations that have developed in the wake of their arrival. The significance of migrant mobilities can be used to develop a line of continuity between

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intr o duc t ion 13 London and Paris at the end of empire and their incarnation into global cities; in both instances migrant figures, spatialities and topographies insistently yoke the past and present together so that one must be thought of in relationship to the other. This brings us to the second commonality among the case study films; while the emphasis in much current literature concerns their narrativization of the conditions of the global migrant, specters of the imperial past as related to an earlier phase of migration are also present in these films in a way that adds layers of historical density to their presentation of global London and Paris. Paris and London share a similar though not identical history of postwar migration in the 1950s stemming from former colonies as a result of labor shortages. In both cases, immigration policies become increasingly and severely restricted after these initial waves of migration. In the French context, as Carrie Tarr observes in Reframing Difference: Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France, Algerian men were recruited as “cheap, temporary labour to fuel French industry during the ‘trentes glorieues’ (the thirty ‘glorious’ years of postwar economic growth)”.40 From a socio-historical perspective, Kristin Ross notes in her canonical text about decolonization and post-war modernization, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture that: French immigration policies took their cue from the fluctuating labor needs: a relaxed, open-door policy greeted the onset of the period of economic growth and mushrooming urban renovation in 1954, whereas a new set of stringent immigration restrictions announced the arrival of economic recession twenty years later. French modernization, and the new capital city that crowned it, was built largely on the backs of Africans – Africans who found themselves progressively cordoned off in new forms of urban segregation as a result of the process.41

This particular history of post-imperial mobility is fueled by the capitalist aims of post-war modernization in France. The segregation of mainly Algerian and other North African migrants into the grands ensembles located in the Parisian banlieue continues to be relevant to the dynamics of the city in contemporary times, as evidenced by a series of well-known films about life in the banlieue such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995), as well as by Beur filmmakers including Abdellatif Kechiche, Malik Chibane and Mehdi Charef, among others. As will be explored in the Parisian sections of the book, what Ross deems as “the event” of French modernization in the post-war period had the effect of inscribing a set of “center-periphery” relations made manifest within the built form of the city that not only transformed the center of Paris into a tourist site for its own inhabitants but also created a series of class- and racially-based divisions between the

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center and the banlieue. Ross describes this spatial formation as a temporal lag, freezing into place relations of inequality that have yet to completely thaw out in the present.42 A second mode of mobility related to the end of empire is that of the pied-noirs, French settlers in Algeria, most of whom were repatriated back to France after the signing of the Evian Accords that granted Algeria independence in 1962.43 If the migration of Algerians ­following the end of French imperial rule can be classed in economic terms, that of the pied-noirs is frequently characterized as a form of exile.44 What followed the collapse of empire in the British context was a similar wave of migration from former colonies, one that became more pronounced beginning in the post-war period, although the migration and settlement of those from the colonies to Britain precedes the event often viewed as the moment of the arrival, which was the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948.45 As Paul Gilroy observes in Black Britain: A Photographic History, the arrival of the Windrush “appears as an occurrence drawn almost at random from deep in the middle of a stubbornly hidden but entire history”.46 The post-war labor shortage of 1948 in Britain sparked this particular pattern of migration, associated with both the end of the War but also the impending end of imperial rule.47 These migrants, traveling from African countries, the Caribbean and Asia, arrived as passport holding British citizens, a right that was slowly stripped away from them by various acts of legality, including the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 which restricted the flow of migration and finally the Immigration Act of 1971, which effectively put an end to this “primary migration”.48 The arrival and settlement of these migrants worked, as Gilroy observes, “to alter Britain’s bomb-battered cityscapes”.49 Within the context of West Indian migration, places such as Notting Hill and Brixton became prominent areas of settlement while Southall and Spitalfields became among the strongholds of Asian settlement.50 These Paris and London stories also diverge in very significant ways, establishing an enduring set of spatial formations that remain discernable within the case study films. London presents a somewhat different case from Paris. The diffuse nature of post-war modernity as experienced in London, particularly with regard to urban planning, is related to what Katherine Shonfield designates as the lack of centralized planning initiatives in the city.51 As Shonfield demonstrates in her work on the reconstruction and reinvention of London in the post-war period in relationship to cinema, London is a city without a definitive center.52 Migrant areas of settlement in the city did not correspond to a center-periphery model, whereas Ross argues that in the Parisian context migrants from

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North African countries in the immediate postcolonial period were mostly relegated to banlieues outside the city center. The migrant imaginary of post-imperial London, in topographical terms, is spread out across the city, but it is an imaginary that bears seemingly little relationship to London’s post-war modernity as detailed in either popular or official discourse, which often concentrates on the imagination of “swinging” or “underground” London. In moving from a topopographically inspired account of the transformations migrant mobilities have wrought upon the physical landscape of both cities, I now turn my attention to the work of scholars that develop theoretical and highly politicized interpretations of the impact of postimperial modes of migration upon these two cities in terms of their narration within official, public discourse. While there is a vast literature on this subject as it pertains to both cities, which spans across numerous disciplinary contexts, I have narrowed my focus to insights gleaned from the work of Bill Schwarz and Kristin Ross because they offer readings of this history that not only resonate with one another, but also with the way in which the films chosen for this study conjure particular figurations of the post-imperial past in the present. As such, a correlation can be posed between the work of these authors and the work of the films on this subject. In The White Man’s World, the first installment of Bill Schwarz’s expansive and magisterial book series on memories of empire as lived and experienced within post-imperial Britain, he delves into the darker narrative of post-imperial reinvention in the London context, arguing that England was essentially re-made as “a white man’s country”; one of his central claims is that the figure of the white man emerges in all of his prowess at the exact historical moment of his supposed demise, alongside the gradual eradication of the imperial world.53 Schwarz positions the black migrant as the figure who brings the colonial past back into the former heart of empire, disrupting the view of British decolonization as a largely exterior experience.54 Ross makes a parallel assertion in the French context, arguing that France did indeed experience the effects of decolonization, firstly through the fact of migration from Algeria and other North African nations whose labor made aspects of France’s modernization possible, but also through a particular mode of displacement-cum-substitution as the former imperial glory of the nation is replaced by the new-found splendor of post-war modernity.55 The question of visibility returns once more; not only was the end of empire not memorialized as such but the process of decolonization was rendered through official discourse as an anterior experience, only affecting the colonies themselves but not their colonizers.

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Migrant narratives tell us a different but interrelated story with that of post-war modernity, as it appeared in both cities. These histories of migration unveil the forms of labor that made the splendors of post-war urban modernity a reality while also acting as a testament to the histories of empire that made such forms of migration possible in the first place. These narratives then gesture towards the imperial past as much as they do towards the post-imperial present and future that we have termed “global”. In accounting for the complex reasons why the case study films lead us back to histories of empire while seemingly only telling the story of the contemporary global city, Schwarz again offers an explanation that resonates with considerations of the cinema in this vein. He makes a number of observations concerning how memories of empire are triggered in the present moment that allow us to think through the question of not only why traces of the past remerge in the present but, even more significantly, how this might take place. Schwarz notes that the experience of empire in the former imperial nation is not necessarily one of forgetfulness, but one where certain desires, fears, anxieties and even longings for empire are simply not named as such.56 Schwarz makes a compelling argument for the act of displacement as one of the key ways in which markers of the imperial past are made manifest in the present. As Schwarz states: Forgetfulness might seem to suggest that memories of empire have been forever obliterated, nowhere to be heard or seen. Yet as I suggest later, if an entire historical experience has disappeared from contemporary memory, or by some means has been repressed so that it has little or no purchase on current public discussion, traces of this history may enter popular consciousness through more surreptitious means. Memories of that history may be displaced, appearing in unlikely forms or locations where they may not seem to belong. These memories do not simply vanish from the social landscape, but appear – unasked – at unexpected moments. They can be discerned too in other stories, which on the surface may seem to have little to do with the imperial past.57

A number of salient assertions can be discerned from this extended passage from Schwarz, which dovetails with Ross’ claims regarding a similar experience in the French context. The first is that signs of the imperial past retain an elusive quality within the contemporary moment due to the unduly popular notion that the process of decolonization only occurred in the colonies themselves and not in former imperial nations.58 Following on from the first assertion, when signs of the imperial past do force their way into the present, they do so in unexpected ways and, crucially for this inquiry, sometimes in narratives that, on the surface, have nothing to do with the imperial past. To draw upon the invaluable work of Stuart Hall in this regard, “‘the colonial’ is not dead since it lives on in its

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‘after effects’, but these ‘after-effects’ are not identical to the past, but bear an affinity to it in reconfigured form”.59 While traces of empire often appear in displaced fashion in the contemporary moment, what Hall allows us to add to these observations made by Schwarz and others is that these vestiges of the past may also be viewed through the lens of affinity, even in the face of their alteration. It is these insights that prove critical in making the argument that the six case study films about global cities also tell us narratives of the aftermath of the imperial past and, in doing so, ultimately narrativize the conditions of the global city in largely unfamiliar terms. Raymond Williams’ conceptualization of the relationship between art and historical reality are illuminating in this respect and I draw upon his observations here as a way of connecting the assertions by Schawrz and Hall very specifically to workings of artistic production: as he writes, “art reflects its society and works a social character through to its reality in experience. But also, art creates, by new perceptions and responses, elements which the society as such, is not able to recognize”.60 The difficulty of recognition emerges then not only as the outcome of historical repression but a very condition of artistic works, including the cinema, that attempt to engage with the complexities of these social and historical realities. As such, this book draws upon the notions of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration as conceptual tools to examine the myriad ways in which the ambivalent nature of the global city is brought to life by these films. Bhabha’s notion of the “past-present” is also employed as a structuring principle for the entire book. These six texts operate as points of departure, as each film leads outwards, towards either older or contemporaneous films that allow for the examination of a broader history of representation, rather than the examination of individual films in isolation. As such, this book proposes revisionist readings of a number of canonical films while also drawing upon those same films to provoke unexpected interpretations of the six case study films. It is clear that the end of empire was experienced in a similar though not identical manner in both Paris and London, the effects of which continue to resonate in the global present. Paris and London have been subjected to innumerable forms of comparative study, which is inclusive of recent work on the nature of imperial cities, on post-war housing projects, as well as scholarship pertaining to the cinema, including comparative research on British and French national cinemas.61 What warrants bringing these two cities together for the purposes of this study returns us to the films themselves; through narrational and stylistic means, these films crystallize the conditions and, ultimately, the politics of displacement, affinity and

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reconfiguration that scholars such as Ross and Schwarz have delineated as specific to London and Paris in their post-imperial and now global guise. The ghosts of the imperial past continue to haunt these global metropolises due to the inability of their nation states to bring about a true reckoning with the history of empire. And yet what proves equally interesting are the divergences between these particular Paris and London stories that enable us to consider different ways in which global cities are still imbued with traces of the recent imperial past, as discerned through cinematic means and within a corpus of work that features a wide variety of migrant mobilities that relate to the post-imperial past as well as the global present. The cinema and the city converge in both instances, as these films offer representational counterparts to an experience of the urban that bears a relationship to its past that is, in effect, difficult to see. This book unabashedly engages in close visual and auditory analysis of the films in question, where London and Paris as “cities of the crossroads” emerge through usages of sound, mise en scène, color and narrative encounters. My central contention is that it is only through the work of close analysis that the spatio-temporal dynamics of the past-present lend themselves to visibility. But this type of textual analysis is made complex in this book as I also draw upon the work of cultural geographers and anthropologists, including the work of Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, among others, in an effort to “translate” their methods of reading actual spaces and places as applicable to the cinema. This aspect of the book brings me in line with what I see as the reinvigoration of close visual analysis in recent years, where complex theoretical and historical frameworks involving broader forms of cultural analysis are made specific and concrete in their emphasis on the details of the films in question.62

Around the World While this book engages with one facet of the globalizing experience in relationship to the neglected temporalities of the “past-present”, there is a second constitutive feature of globalization explored in this book. This relates to the inherently transgressive nature of globalization, in breaking down boundaries that extend beyond those that stand in the way of the movement of capital across the globe. As Frederic Jameson has argued early on, the study of globalization, in keeping with the phenomenon itself, disrupts disciplinary boundaries in often productive ways, by fostering interdisciplinary research methods that prove necessary to the comprehension of its complexities.63 A complementary line of investigation, one that runs parallel to my consideration of the depiction of the city

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in these films, accounts for what I delineate as the “world cinema” status of these texts. While bringing together material grounded in the study of the cinematic city with that pertaining to the “world cinema turn” in film studies is not a form of disciplinary disruption, it still constitutes a “path not taken” in most studies on either subject. It is my contention that these particular films not only allow us to interrogate more commonplace conceptions of the global that render the imperial past mute but that these films also enable an inquiry into yet a second iteration of “the global” infiltrating film studies through the category of world cinema. It is safe to say that a world cinema turn has slowly but surely begun to overtake the branch of cinema studies previously concerned with the study of both national and transnational cinemas, while also extending its reach towards even broader disciplinary matters related to the naming of university courses and degree programs, conference calls for papers, and institutions as well as publisher book series.64 While there are continuities as well as overlaps between each of the three categories, one of which concerns the differentiation between films of this type and Hollywood cinema writ large, there are also significant differences. With regard to world cinema in particular, the notion of circulation has gradually emerged as one of its central leitmotifs. As Lúcia Nagib claims in her “positive” definition of world cinema, “world cinema, like the word itself, is circulation”.65 Her assertions in this regard build upon the framework established by Dudley Andrew, among others; in an “Atlas of World Cinema” for example, Andrew establishes an analytical atlas of various forms of mapping as a way of charting what he refers to as a “process of cross-polination” that moves beyond the confines of national cinemas.66 As is clear from the observations outlined above, the emphasis on circulation plays a central role in the desires of a number of scholars writing about world cinema to expand the parameters of national cinema studies to more accurately reflect and engage with the global nature of film production, distribution and exhibition. The politicized impetus of this analytical expansion involves seeking out the circulatory routes of a variety of film cultures that may indeed bypass Hollywood cinema altogether and its designation as touchstone for the entirely of the world’s cinema.67 It is also the case that the rise of specifically digital modes of distribution and exhibition are responsible for the degree to which circulation is poised as a definitive optic through which world cinema should be viewed, practices that perhaps the term “transnational” does not always adequately encompass. For instance, in a second piece on this topic, Dudley Andrew points to the way in which digital models of circulation contribute to a culture of simultaneity within what he terms “the global

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sublime”, whereby everything seems to be available at all times, working to banish any form of temporal delay.68 The emphasis on circulation in some of this discourse on world cinema resonates with what are considered to be the transgressive qualities of globalization as related to mobilization. But there are scholars who have expressed reservations about the questions and concerns that fail to retain a foothold within current trajectories of world cinema scholarship. In Screening World Cinema, an early edited collection on the subject, editors Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn foreground the ambivalent nature of the term “world cinema” that rests on its collusion with marketing strategies that often use the category as a branding tool intended to market difference in its most palatable form.69 While the authors find ways to retain a usefulness for the category, as that which can be attuned to the dynamics of both inclusivity and distinctiveness as related to cinema very specifically, they still sound warning alarms when it comes to the politics of the discourse; as they note, the kinds of political and ethical questions that were once an integral component of the study of third cinema, for example, seldom make their way in discussions and debates on world cinema. As they state, “the rise of world systems and global capitalism has tended to place issues of exploitation, dependency and power differences between regions outside the discursive frame”.70 It would seem that the genealogy of global ambivalence deftly illuminated by the work of Bhabha is matched by an analogous current of ambivalence that runs through the world cinema enterprise, where political and ethical questions concerning power and privilege between regions are not prioritized as the question of circulation takes center stage. But even more to the point, perhaps we can stipulate that the world cinema turn in film studies is itself a symptom of globalization and not merely a methodological tool designed to register and interrogate globalizing effects upon the cinema. This claim is inspired by the work of John Mowitt who argues in his Introduction to Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages that an earlier turn towards media within film studies operates as a symptom of globalization in posing a definitive challenge to the postcolonial by “offering to better name the world historical situation that has arisen at the so-called end of history, that is, in the wake of both colonialism and as the official story has it, empire”.71 Following on from Mowitt’s observations to this effect, perhaps the turn towards world cinema also aims to “name” the current world order and the place of cinema within this order “better” than the national and even than the transnational. What makes this analogy even more intriguing is that certain film scholars advocated for a transnational view of cinema as a direct challenge to the

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relevance of the postcolonial.72 And yet we have arrived at a juncture where perhaps even the transnational is now already ripe for replacement. In the case of world cinema, what might this turn be symptomatic of? If we build on the observations made by Grant and Kuhn, the argument can be made that the homogenizing tendencies of globalization do indeed render its differentiating effects less than visible and perhaps it comes as little surprise that a similar argument can be made about studies of world cinema that marginalize more difficult political questions. If we continue in this vein, there is a scholarly trend within the study of migrant and diasporic cinema that might also be rather symptomatic of this particular face of globalization. Historically, scholarship on migration and cinema as it relates specifically to questions of racial difference vis-à-vis the conditions of exile and diaspora, draws much of its fodder from a cultural studies approach.73 Such an approach focuses intently on identity politics and its attendant concerns with hybridity and difference, as heavily influenced by the central tenets of postcolonial theorists including, but not limited to, the canonical work of Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy. Indeed, as is already apparent and will become more so, this book also draws some of its conceptual fodder from the insights of these scholars. Certainly, many studies on migrant and disaporic cinema continue to operate from a cultural studies perspective, a pertinent example of which is Yosefa Loshitzy’s Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema.74 However, a recently edited collection might be suggestive of an impending “world cinema turn” within studies of migration and cinema. In Migrant Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, editors Claudia Sternberg and Daniela Berghahn develop broad links between migrant cinema, Europe and the category of world cinema  that situates contemporary migrant cinema at the interface of European cinema and world cinema as discursive entities. They pronounce European migrant cinema as that which has, in fact, precipitated the “world cinema turn” for European cinema, in its redefinition of what counts as European cinema in the first place.75 Migrant and diasporic cinema attests to the histories of migratory movements to Europe, and as such, to the shifting nature of Europe in response to these mobilities, one that acknowledges the presence of the world within and constitutive of Europe itself. Sternberg and Berghahn then situate migrant and diasporic cinema as a kind of catalyst for thinking about European cinema in global terms. What is perhaps startling is their sidestepping of the ambivalence that accompanies any designation of world cinema by claiming that European

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cinema should openly embrace its increasing world cinema status by “utilizing the exotic appeal of the other to rebrand itself”.76 While the authors make ample mention of many of the ambivalences of the term touched upon in this Introduction, their conclusions simply reinforce a view of world cinema, in its European variation, in market driven terms. It is a view of European cinema that privileges its ability to circulate, one that, for Sternberg and Berghahn is enhanced by its migrant content in forging links with more than one area of the globe. It is almost too easy to see how such a pronouncement is rather symptomatic of the logic of late capitalism as the lever of globalization, where the demands of the market take precedence over politics or other ethically driven considerations. In these few sections, I have sketched seemingly competing views of world cinema, where the emphasis on circulation can be placed in opposition to the political concerns raised by Grant and Kuhn that enable us to view some of the borders that might very well stand in the way of the circulatory prowess of world cinema. They also allow us to pose the question of just how “worldly” world cinema as a category is, as some scholars have gone as far as to simply situate the category as Western in its scope, while others like Sternberg and Berghahn view the category in terms of its use-value for rebranding European cinema in global terms.77 And yet, there is no reason why these two approaches to the topic cannot be merged in a way that might attend productively to the very contradictions that the conditions of globalization presents. The question of circulation must be addressed within any concept of cinema that is global in its orientation and especially given the networked, as well as increasingly digital, modes of circulation and distribution that have come to define the cinematic experience of our times.78 But an emphasis on circulation does not necessarily preclude a simultaneous emphasis on politics. Dudley Andrew’s concept of décalage for instance combines the two approaches into a kind of politics of circulation, whereby the prevailing notion of the global sublime is reworked by considerations of various temporal delays that are still inherent to the process of cinema, including the gap between production and distribution, those that exist between different spectators located the world over and, also, through the often belated discovery of filmmakers that continually renew historical accounts of the cinema.79 This book offers another such model for bringing an attention to circulation together with its political implications in my consideration of the case study films as instantiations of world cinema, one that runs alongside the methodology devised for considerations of urban space outlined earlier in the Introduction. In the same way that Bhabha’s notion

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of the ­past-present facilitates a historicized view of the contradictory circumstances of the global, these observations can also be extended to the working concept of world cinema that I adopt in this book. To start, what constitutes the world cinema status of these films? Certainly, these films do not fall into the category of “cinemas outside of the West”, for which the term “world cinema” is often used as shorthand. But if circulation is our initial optic, then we can begin with their primary exhibition context, which is that of the film festival. After all, world cinema is first and foremost, a festival category.80 Each film has made the rounds on the festival circuit, having been screened at Cannes, London, Toronto, and Berlin, to name a few. Many of these films have won prizes at such festivals.81 Some of these films are also co-productions that have transpired across a variety of national contexts, solidifying their global affiliation in economic terms.82 All of the case study films confirm their links to both Europe and “the world” by foregrounding various facets of migration that extend from the content of their narratives, to their exhibition contexts and in some cases, their funding. These filmmakers, which include Haneke, Denis, Winterbottom, Gatlif and Frears, all operate within an auteurist tradition, to varying degrees of fidelity.83 While there is no question that each of these directors can be described using the phrase, “global film auteur”, it is also the case that their films are not global in quite the same way. Haneke and Denis are the filmmaking successors to a long legacy of European modernist cinema, as exemplified in their aesthetic choices, modes of storytelling and auteurist status. Indeed, much of the scholarship on the films of both Denis and Haneke cannot help but rehearse certain biographical details, designed to illuminate their central thematic and formal preoccupations.84 While Chocolat (1988), Denis’ first film, is what garnered her international attention and recognition, so that J’ai pas sommeil does not inaugurate a significantly new moment in her career, the same cannot be said about Code inconnu. As noted by Peter Brunette, Code inconnu is Haneke’s first French film and one that Brunette speculates was intended, on the heels of the mixed reception of Funny Games (1997), to expand his art house audience.85 While the submerged presence of colonial history has always granted Denis’ films a certain global orientation, Haneke’s work begins to take on a global resonance through his migration dramas, which coincide with the dawn of his French language films and international recognition on an increasingly wider scale. Winterbottom and Frears present a different case from Haneke and Denis. Winterbottom and Frears’ “migrant films” resurrect traces of an older, canonical, and distinctly British form of social realist cinema in

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order to tell the tales of the new “social problem”, that of the refugee or asylum seeker making their way to the British Isles. As such, the migrant content of some these films, in addition to their exhibition context, is where a global turn can be discerned. Gatlif presents yet a third case. Exils is the film that garners Gatlif recognition on the film festival circuit and is also a film that marks a significant departure from his previous work that centers on Romany or Gypsy culture. Scholar Sylvie Blum-Reid positions Exils as a film that brings “the world” to the domain of French filmmaking and I would add that the film achieves this goal through a reconfigured version of Gatlif ’s reliance on the generic category of the road movie as storytelling framework.86 And yet, as will be argued in the third chapter of the book, in this film Gatlif also employs methods of narration that are more abstract than his previous films, bringing him in line with some of the recognizable tenets of European modernist filmmaking. What is immediately apparent are certain ambivalences that are tied to the narratives of circulation that I have devised concerning these films. To draw upon Bill Nichols’ early work on festival films, their circulation at major festivals might ensure that they are received within a “humanist” rather than explicitly politicized framework, one more invested in teasing out their universal appeal rather than their regional distinctiveness.87 In the case of some of these films, they are not explicitly migrant-authored, leading to further speculations regarding their authenticity and even the motivations of their directors in presenting migrant narratives. These ambivalences are precisely what make these particular films ideal world cinema texts, as films that mobilize the very tensions that are a constitutive feature of the category itself. There is then the question of exactly what is mobilized by these films, one that takes us from context back to text. This book develops an expanded account of “world cinema as circulation” by turning its attention to the forms of filmmaking mobilized by these texts. Each chapter of the book explores the way in which certain modalities of filmmaking, modernist art cinema in the French context and social realism in the British context, are reconfigured in the case study films not only in light of their migrant content but also in ways that attest to their world cinema status, or as films destined for global consumption. It is here that the transgressive constituents of globalization become relevant to the practice of textual analysis of films that themselves narrativize the conditions of the global. Bhabha’s notion of the pastpresent assumes a renewed significance in this context, as a concept that draws our attention to the shifting nature of certain forms of filmmaking that, at least in part, can be said to index the world cinema turn within

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intr o duc t ion 25 European filmmaking. As Thomas Elsaesser and others have observed, the traditional lines between commercial cinema and art cinema, as well as those between national and international cinemas, are increasingly blurred and it is precisely these forms of transgression that will be explored in each chapter as that which signifies the “world cinema” status of certain European films and their directors.88 While the rubric of circulation currently employed within world cinema discourse does not necessarily preclude the expanded usage that I propose in this book, its typical deployment does suggest that the notion of circulation refers more directly to the mobility of texts around the world and not what is necessarily mobilized by these texts.89 As such, this book makes the case for the significance of viewing formal characteristics of the cinema as an integral component of the narratives of circulation currently in vogue among world cinema scholars. A major contention of this study is that the circulation of the case study films only tells half their story, if we do not wed our consideration of the routes along which these films travel with a view to their textual properties. Furthermore it is only within the texts themselves, in conjunction with their movement across the globe, where the ambivalences inherent to the very concept of world cinema can be discerned. These ambivalences are not just related to the evocation of the past-present as manifested within the narrational content of these films, but also the modalities of filmmaking utilized in the telling of these migrant stories. Finally, rather than viewing migrant cinema as a subset of world cinema that can revitalize European filmmaking along the lines of the exotic, films featuring migrant mobilities are often marked by contradictions and ambivalences that are entirely in keeping with the status of minorities, as well as the stateless across much of the Western world. It is this recognition that catapults us into the domain of the political, so that studies of world cinema with a specifically textual focus do not have to be written out of the narrative of “world cinema as circulation”. There is a further question of why I have chosen to work with such a small corpus of films, given the broad scope of this project. In part, my emphasis on a limited number of films is a response to the often unwieldy nature of the term world cinema. If we take Elsaesser’s work on this subject as an illustration of this tendency, he offers a list of topics that a world cinema text can potentially address. This list runs the gamut from films that tackle human rights issues or diasporic identities, to those that assume an ethnographic stance through the mobilization of fantasy or folklore, as well as politically militant films that operate within a third cinema vein, to those that deal with postcolonial histories and so on.90 This

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list inadvertently begs the question then of what isn’t a world cinema film. But conversely and productively, what Elsaesser’s list simultaneously foregrounds is the notion of a multiplicity of “world cinemas”. As such, this book engages in the exploration of one of the many types of world cinema in existence, in accordance with a depth, rather than breadth, model. The significance of the book’s title, From Empire to the World, has finally come into focus. Moving from “empire to the world” denotes a historical shift towards the global, one that pertains in equal measure to cityscapes and their representation as world cinema texts. But this shift, importantly for this study, is accompanied by ambivalence, some of which concerns traces of the imperial past that refuse to disappear and remain present in unlikely forms and iterations. To return to the motif of the crossroads, these films not only depict the city at a crossroads but also exhibit these tendencies at the level of form, where established modes of filmmaking are crossed with other genres in the telling of other stories. Migrant figures and their corresponding narratives prove crucial not only in relating the experience of the global city “from below” in all of its historical density but also in thinking more expansively about the changing face of what counts as European cinema in its current global phase. This book not only explores the lingering traces of older urban imaginaries as they appear within these contemporary global city films, but also the conventions of longstanding filmmaking traditions that appear in these films, often in reconfigured form. The ambitiousness of this project, in my attempt to bring together what are normatively viewed as two separate modes of inquiry, may lead to more questions than answers, and to perhaps a messier kind of methodology in place of precision. I hope what is gained are insights that can only be produced by forging unexpected connections, leading to alternate ways of thinking about the notion of the global, as it continues to transform the way we think about cities, about spaces and about the cinema itself. The shape and scope of this book is derived from my desire to conceptualize alternative models of the global cinematic city, in alignment with ­scholarship that posits a series of counter-narratives of globalization, while also wanting to contribute to ensuing debates on world cinema, as a recent example of a global turn transpiring within film studies. This book is organized into three chapters. The first chapter, “Global Paris: Topographies and Dwelling Spaces”, is divided into three subsections. The first part, “At a Historical Crossroads: Revisiting Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967)”, engages in a brief meditation on Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, situating the film as “master text”

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intr o duc t ion 27 for the chapter as its preoccupations and staging of the spatial dynamics of the modernized post-war Paris lays a foundation for the analysis of topographical space and dwelling space that will consume the following two subsections. The second part of the chapter, “Parisian Networks Old and New: Topographical Journeys Through the City” develops a reading of J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu as “network narratives” in their urban variation. The network narrative is something of a global form that can be located across a variety of world cinema texts but in these films I argue that the network narrative is subject to particular modes of reconfiguration in order to tell a series of migrant narratives that bring the past and present together through encounters and collisions. In both films, the network narrative, as rendered in its modernist, art cinema form, gives rise to an exorbitant experience of the global city. While the notion of the exorbitant city, coined by Ackbar Abbas, is often used to describe the current state of Asian cities, I will argue that exorbitance in the case of these two films is one way of grasping the kinds of relationships they develop between the imperial past and the global present as they emerge through distinctly topographical means.91 The last section of this first chapter, “Dwelling Space as City Space”, takes a different tack, investigating the way in which Haneke’s Caché seemingly takes a generic, global Paris as its backdrop, only to plunge us into a much more specific, detailed and historical narrative of the city’s division into center and periphery during the post-war period. This “other story” comes to life in the film through contrasting dwelling spaces that make room for the significance of both the exterior and the interior to the study of the cinematic city. A coda near the end of the chapter investigates the relevance of Haneke’s depiction of “polarized Paris” through a comparison with Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive (2003) and Claire Denis’ 35 rhums (2008). The second chapter of the book turns its attention to cinematic London. Entitled “Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places”, this chapter takes Dirty Pretty Things as its central focus in order to situate the film within a wider historical continuum of “migrant London” cinema. This chapter zooms in on the continuities as well as salient differences Dirty Pretty Things presents with earlier films featuring migrant London. In doing so, this chapter examines the longevity of social realist modes of storytelling and its “global turn” as evidenced by films like Dirty Pretty Things and a number of its contemporaries. The first part of the chapter, “Dirty Pretty London: The Global Story”, provides an introduction to some of the existing literature on the

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film, particularly in relation to the kinds of anxieties that have lead to its pronouncement as a near textbook illustration of a global city film. The second subsection, “The ‘World’ in Dirty Pretty Things”, establishes a reading of the film as “world cinema text” in light of its generic hybridity. “High and Low London”, the third subsection, moves in the opposite direction by placing Dirty Pretty Things in relation to a series of “end of empire” films from the 1950s. As such, this section stages a departure from an interpretation of Dirty Pretty Things as a film that allegorizes the conditions of global London in order to chart a history of representation of post-imperial migration to the city, vestiges of which retain their place in this contemporary film. More specifically, this section takes its cue from the film itself in investigating the concept of the “dirty/pretty” as a bifurcated understanding of city space, one that scholars argue has its origins in a Victorian imaginary of the city but is subsequently re-tooled in the telling of other urban stories. Basil Dearden’s Pool of London (1950) assumes the role of “master text” in this subsection, as I take the reader through an analysis of this film, wherein its “race-relations” storyline forges a divide between iconic or high London and its low or migrant counterpart, an opposition explicitly mobilized by Dirty Pretty Things, but also an earlier Frears migrant drama, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). A second line of continuity can be sketched in formal terms as generic hybridity looms large across these films, extending to Dirty Pretty Things whereby the film’s “Londons” are differentiated through stylistic as well as narrational means. The final subsection, “London Places, London Spaces”, draws on the work of Doreen Massey in order to establish a contrast between the reading of the spaces of London in Dirty Pretty Things and its contemporaries, including Last Resort (2002) and the representation of London as “place” that emerges from a consideration of films about Caribbean migration and settlement including a number of “social problem films” including Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959), Roy Ward Baker’s Flame in the Streets (1961), as well as a grouping of films made in the 1970s and 1980s such as Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975), Anthony Simmons’ Black Joy (1975 ), Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980) and Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981). The significance of interior space to narratives of global migration to London is matched by the significance of the street to that of the post-imperial migrant, as will be examined in the chapter. The third chapter, “The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures”, operates as an addendum to this book in its aim to offer a wider applicability for the methods of reading for city space developed in the previous chapters. This chapter positions the journey narrative of the cinematic

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intr o duc t ion 29 city as integral to the larger story of migrancy and the city. Narratives of migration have always been a feature of cinematic cities, as conjured through the depiction of the journey from the country to the city in films such as Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) or Ruttman’s Berlin Symphony of a City (1927), as well as journeys that are transnational in their scope. As one of the key tropes of migrancy is that of mobility, sketched specifically in relation to post-imperial London and Paris earlier in the Introduction, narratives of arrivals and departures are just as significant for the purposes of analysis as those set within the space of the city. As such, movement both away and towards urban spaces can be theorized as part of the cinematic story of the migrant in the city. This chapter, in focusing on In This World and Exils, essentially brings together the two urban narratives of global migration that have been explored in separate chapters throughout this book. What warrants bringing the two films together in a single chapter is that journeys to or from cities is a shared narrative not only between global London and Paris, but many other global cities. It is the processes of globalization that drive migrants to the global city so that the journey itself is just as significant as the moment of arrival or that of departure. In addition to this, the generic context of both films takes us back to different incarnations of the road movie genre, which we can postulate as a global form. As Timothy Corrigan argues, the road isn’t just an American setting for symbolic enactments of male hysteria but is also a path leading to the discovery of other rituals, geographies and subjectivities.92 As I will argue in different ways with regard to these films, both of them position the journey toward and away from the global city as journeys of ambivalence. Notes   1. Marc Augé, “Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World”, in: Michael Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Field (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 179.   2. As is well known, the structural design of “Tativille”, the name given to Tati’s set of Paris, was based on a number of architectural sources, including the Esso Building, found in the Parisian financial sector, built in the 1960s and known as La Défense. This is a particularly pronounced example of the confluence between the material city and its cinematic counterpart.  3. For an analysis of Playtime’s indulgence in the comedic potentialities of  modern architecture, see: Iain Borden, “Playtime: ‘Tativille’ and Paris”, in: Neil Leach (ed.), The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing  the  Modern Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 217–35.

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 4. As Iain Borden notes, “Tativille Paris is one Paris-world among many others . . .” (p. 231).   5. Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 5.   6. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 8, 13, 328.  7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 295–6; M. Castells, “Space of Flows”, p. 316.   8. Homi K. Bhabha, “Notes on Globalization and Ambivalence”, in: David Held and Henrietta L. Moore (eds.), Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), pp. 38–9.   9. Ibid. p. 41. 10. Ibid. p. 40. 11. Ibid. p. 39. 12. Ibid. p. 43. 13. Ibid. p.43. 14. S. Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization”, Public Culture, 12.1 (Winter 2000), p. 213. 15. H. K. Bhabha, “Notes on Globalization”, p. 43. 16. In my differentiation between these terms, I follow in the footsteps of John Durham Peters in “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora”. For Peters, both diaspora and exile are marked by displacement, but diaspora lacks the kind of anguish that accompanies notions of exile, which constitutes a form of punitive banishment, whether voluntary or forced (pp. 19–20). Diaspora is always collective in its scope, but exile may be solitary (p. 20). While this is not the place to offer an extensive review of the literature of all of these terms, Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg provide a useful overview in their introduction to European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Filmmaking in Contemporary Europe. See: Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds.), “Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe” in: European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Filmmaking in Contemporary Europe (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 12–49; John Durham Peters, “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon”, in: Hamid Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 17–41. A classic text in this regard is of course, Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 17. J. D. Peters, “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora”, p. 21. 18. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 77–8. 19. To take one example, when writing about Dirty Pretty Things and other films in a similar vein, Yosefa Loshitzky notes that they “persistently deconstruct iconic images of the classical European cities that make for easily consumed

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picture postcards views. The famous monuments and landmarks of these cities are either absent from the films or stripped of their traditional cultural capital, assuming the role of outdated icons in an impoverished urban fabric, a non-place” (p. 746). One of the central arguments that this book will make concerns a certain nuancing of the use of “non-place” as a term too often used to describe places that are not simply not iconographic in their orientation. Other examples of this nature will be cited throughout the book. See: Yosefa Loshitzky, “Journeys of Hope to Fortress Europe”, Third Text 20.6 (November 2006), pp. 745–54. A second example that explores the role of non-places in the films In This World, Dirty Pretty Things and Io, l’atro is Sandra Pozanesi’s, “The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe”, Third Text 26.6 (November 2012), pp. 675–90. 20. S. Sassen, The Global City, p. 328. 21. Peter Wollen, “The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era”, in: Lester D. Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 31. 22. Christopher Darke, Alphaville (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 31. 23. Interestingly enough, scholars such as Manuel Castells who write extensively about the global city also argue that declarations concerning the loss of place are premature. For Castells place remains as significant as it ever was, retaining the promise of the global city to facilitate new alliances that can flourish across various forms of urban culture and activism. See: Manuel Castells, “Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age”, in: Stephen Graham (ed.), The Cybercities Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 82–93. 24. See: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in: Hannah Adrendt (ed.), trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 217–51; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London: Oxford University Press, 1960); Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in: Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.), The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994); Tom Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology”, Screen 32.2 (1991), pp. 184–96; Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism”, in: Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 72–99; Giluana Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric”, in

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Andrew Weber and Emma Wilson (eds.), Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), pp. 14–28; Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 25. G. Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric”, p. 14. 26. S. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 170. 27. Karen Lurey and Doreen Massey, “Making Connections”, Screen 40.3 (Autumn, 1999), p. 231. 28. Etienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 8. 29. Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 15. 30. F. Driver and D. Gilbert, Imperial Cities, p. 5. 31. Charles Baudelaire (trans. Jonathan Mayne), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966), p. 9. To also draw upon Walter Benjamin’s infamous work on the flâneur in this regard, in Arcades Projects, he writes “In 1839 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of flânerie in the arcades” (p. 422). 32. Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 132. 33. This valuable insight is indebted to one of the anonymous readers of the book. I also make this argument in full recognition of the class affiliations of the flâneur, as inherently bourgeoisie, as that which tempers a reading of this figure as marginal in every respect. It is the status of the flâneur as “outsider”, whose activities place him at the remove with the speedy pace of modernity where we might be able to establish links between this figure and that of the migrant, particularly as they relate to the case study films. 34. W. Benjamin, “The Flâneur”, pp. 419–20. 35. Ibid. pp. 416–17. 36. Patrick Keiller, “The City of the Future”, in: Patrick Keiller, From The View From The Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London and New York: Verso, 2013), p. 135. 37. Giluana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari is a cogent example of some of the scholarship on migration and early cinema more specifically. With respect to literature on migration, exilic and diasporic cinema, Hamid Naficy’s foundational text, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, often engages in a distinctly spatialized analysis. 38. This is a phrase excerpted from a longer phrase by Bill Schwarz in “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible” where he writes, “to those with eyes to see, the urban formations of our own times hold together

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many inchoate traces of competing historical times, all jumbled together”. See: Bill Schwarz, “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible”, in: Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 269. 39. Bill Schwarz, “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible”, p. 272. 40. Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference: Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 5. 41. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (London and Boston: MIT Press, 1995), pp.151–2. 42. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 12. 43. Alex C. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds.), Postcolonial Cultures in France (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 18. 44. Ibid. p. 18. 45. Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of MultiRacial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 1. 46. Paul Gilroy, Black Britain: A Photographic History (London: Saqi, 2007), p. 77. 47. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 133. 48. Peter Freyer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 373. 49. P. Gilroy, Black Britain, p. 63. 50. P. Gilroy, Black Britain, p. 68; J. White, London in the Twentieth Century, p. 138. 51. Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 146. 52. Also see: Matthew Taunton, Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 53. B. Schwarz, “Postcolonial Times”, p. 271. 54. B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World, p. 11. 55. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 78. 56. B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World, p. 31. 57. Ibid. p. 54. 58. Ibid. p. 5. 59. Stuart Hall, “When was ‘the postcolonial’? Thinking at the limit”, in: Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York: Routledge,1996), p. 248. 60. Raymond Williams, “On Structure of Feeling”, in: Jennifer Harding and E. Deirdre Pribam (eds.), Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 42. 61. While comparative work on London and Paris as imperial and post-imperial cities will be elaborated upon shortly, a cogent example of a recent comparative text in the film studies vein is: Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley

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(eds.), Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). 62. In particular, I am inspired by the recent work of Mark Betz and Rosalind Galt in this regard. See: Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Cinema; Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing The Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 63. Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. xi. 64. There are a pleathora of edited collections on the topic of world cinema that span the late 1990s to the present day. The following texts, which constitute the early literature in the field, follow a “national cinemas” approach to the topic by including sections from major national cinemas around the world: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); John Hill and Pamela Church-Gibson (eds.), World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer, Traditions in World Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Martha P. Nochimson, World on Film: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). A second strand in the literature seeks to problematize the “national cinemas” approach through a variety of means, including the championing of circulation as analytical optic that is in keeping with with transnational studies of cinema but also by narrowing their focus to specific topics rather than surveying broad film movements. This particular strand of the scholarship on this subject leans toward a theorization of some of the conceptual difficulties raised by the term “world cinema”. These texts and articles include: Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 45.2 (Fall 2004), pp. 9–23; Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (eds.), Screening World Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema: Identity,Culture and Politics in Film (New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2006) Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Lúcia Nagib, Realism in World Cinema (New York: Continuum Press, 2011); Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds.), Theorizing World Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012); Tiago de Luca, Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013). Numerous presses have a world cinema series, including Edinburgh University Press, Anthem Press, I. B. Tauris, among others. In terms of institutional adoptions of world cinema, the Film Studies Program at Carleton University (my institution) contains The World Cinema

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Forum, intended to showcase filmmakers from around the world as well as a second year undergraduate course on world cinema. The introduction to Remappping World Cinema also contains a meditation on the MA programme in World Cinema at the University of Leeds (p. 8). 65. Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema”, in: Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 35. 66. Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema”, p. 10. It should also be noted that his approach to this topic, like others writing in this field of study, draws upon some of the central conceits of Franco Moretti’s work, including his article “Conjectures of World Literature”, New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000), pp. 54–68. For instance, Andrew employs the metaphor of “trees” to describe the way in which national cinemas are generally discussed, versus the metaphor of waves that is conducive to the study of the global influence of certain film movements (p. 12). This corresponds to Moretti’s use of the tree as an analogy for the study of national literature, while he reserves the wave for those wishing to specialize in world literature (p. 68). 67. As Bhaskar Sarkar argues in “Tracking ‘Global Media’ in the Outposts of Globalization”, it is only by exploring alternate routes of circulation that a truly global media theory can come into being, one, as Sakar puts it, “that does not take Hollywood as its presumed epicenter and reduce all other cultural industries to its satellites” (p. 53). See: Bhaskar Sarkar, “Tracking ‘Global Media’ in the Outposts of Globalization” in: Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 34–58. Lúcia Nagib makes a similar argument in “Towards a positive definition of World Cinema” when she argues viewing world cinema through the lens of circulation allows Hollywood cinema to emerge as one cinema among others rather than residing at the apex of film history (p. 34). 68. Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema”, in: Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 82. 69. Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (eds.), Screening World Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1. 70. Ibid. p. 5. 71. John Mowitt, Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xv. 72. A cogent example lies in the work of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their now canonical text, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (deemed by Dudely Andrew as the first “world cinema text”), part of a larger trend involved in displacing the centrality of the postcolonial as historical

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and theoretical tool for the reading of more recent migrant and diasporic cinema often associated with notions of globalization. For Shohat and Stam, the postcolonial is characterized by its homogenizing tendencies that work to disavow distinctions between different colonial formations. A second example can be located in the introduction to Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Editors Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden posit the transnational as a more flexible term, more appropriately suited to the study of phenomenon not explicitly tied to imperial or colonial pasts. See: Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (eds.), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). 73. A pertinent example is Lola Young’s Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 74. As she notes in the introductory chapter, Screening Strangers draws from a cultural studies approach employed to further her aims regarding the study of European identity as it pertains to a specific grouping of films (p.  10). See: Yosefa Loshitzky, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 75. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 37. 76. Ibid. p. 40. 77. An example of the former takes us to the introduction of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. Editors Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim delineate world cinema as a category that refers to “cultural products and practices that are mainly non-Western”, in concert with “world music” and “world literature” (p. 1). This claim is of course in opposition to the arguments made by Sternberg and Berghahn, whereby European cinema can take up residence within world cinema at large due to the forms of migrant and diasporic cinema that originate within the continent. These are just two examples of a wide range of conceptual difficulties the term world cinema raises, as “the world” itself seems to elude the forms of totalization that the very notion of world cinema seems to initially imply. 78. I use the term “networked” in this context to refer to the festival circuit. 79. D. Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema”, pp. 81–6. 80. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 504. 81. Gatlif, for instance, won the Best Director’s Prize at Cannes in 2004 for Exils while Haneke won the same prize for Caché in 2005. In This World was awarded the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003.

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82. Co-production details are as follows: J’ai pas sommeil is a French/German/ Swiss co-production; Code inconnu is a French/German/Romanian co-production; Caché is a French/Austrian/German/Italy/American co-­ production; Exils is a French/Japanese co-production. 83. While the label of auteur is irrefutable with regard to Haneke, Gatlif and Denis, both Frears and Winterbottom present a somewhat different case, as the latter work across a wide variety of genres. There are, however, discernable consistencies across their respective bodies of work, making the label of “auteur” also applicable in both cases. For Frears, social realism remains the central touchstone informing the stylistic aspects of all of his films, while for Winterbottom there are central thematic and stylistic preoccupations that recur throughout his career, including a definitive interest in the reflexive blurring of the boundaries between the fictional and the real that pertain quite strongly to his War on Terror trilogy, of which In This World is the first installment. 84. While some scholarship on Haneke’s films draws upon his own writings or statements about his films with great frequency, some of which I will utilize in Chapter 1 of the book, Denis presents a different case. Authors including Judith Mayne, Martine Beugnet and Janet Bergstrom offer accounts of Denis’ childhood, as the daughter of a colonial officer, who grew up in a variety of West African colonies before moving to France at a young age. What is exemplified in their writings on the subject is often an attempt to explicate the difficult nature of Denis’ filmmaking through recourse to her biography, which is situated within a wider historical, colonial context. See: Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004); Janet Bergstrom, “Opacity in the Films of Claire Denis”, in: Tyler Stovell and Georges Van Den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 69–102. 85. Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p. 72. 86. Sylvie Blum-Reid, “Away from Home? Two French Directors in Search of their Identity”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26 (2009), p. 1. 87. Bill Nichols, “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit”, Film Quarterly 47.3 (1994), p. 20. 88. T. Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 498. 89. A good example of an author invested in the analysis of filmic texts is Dudley Andrew. In “An Atlas of World Cinema”, he argues that individual films should be examined as “maps” of any number of geopolitical co-ordinates, which manifest themselves both thematically and stylistically, that can then be placed on a map (p. 16). In this case and as Andrew himself states, he operates against Franco Moretti’s conception of “distant reading”, where the text itself diminishes in importance to what is larger than itself, which may include the charting of genres or systems or that which is smaller than itself, which includes the analysis of tropes, or devices.

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90. Ibid. p. 509. 91. Ackbar Abbas, “Cinema, The City and The Cinematic”, in: Linda Krause and Patrice Petro (eds.), Global Cities in Cinema: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in a Digital Age (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 145. 92. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (London and New York, Routledge,1992), p. 160.

C H A PT E R 1

Global Paris: Topographies and Dwelling Spaces

1.1  AT A HISTORICAL CROSSROADS: REVISITING DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE (1967) I begin this chapter with a rumination on Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), his cinematic treatise on the transformation of Paris in the 1960s. Godard’s city is one that is slowly being made to the measure of late capitalism, as is also suggested by Tati’s Playtime and other films of the period including Godard’s own Alphaville. What makes Deux ou trois choses unique in this regard is its reflexive rendering of the modes of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration already outlined in the Introduction as three ways of discerning the traces of empire within the post-imperial landscape. Paris in this film is depicted in what Timothy Corrigan has denoted as the essayistic version of the classic “city symphony” film, which explicitly stages the very problem of the post-war, post-imperial modernization of Paris while also gesturing obliquely towards its impending transformation into global city.1 My approach to this exceptionally canonical film will explore these suppositions while further determining how some of the cast of characters affiliated with ninteenth-century urban modernity, including the figure of the flâneuse, make significant appearances in this film in a way that tells the story of Paris in the post-imperial moment, in a rather fitting renewal of the city symphony genre. My brief meditation on this film, which I take as exemplary of a number of films of the period, serves three overarching purposes as a prologue to this chapter. The first is that the reflexive nature of Deux ou trois choses allows it to assume the status of “theoretical document”, a term that I borrow from D. N. Rodowick, in order to situate the film as a cinematic counterpart to much of the scholarly material that resurrects the submerged nature of the imperial past in its pivotal role in the transformation of the Parisian cityscape at this historical juncture.2 As such, Godard’s

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Paris emerges as a city of the crossroads, hovering somewhere between past and future. Viewing the film as theoretical document enables the structuring principle of the past-present, as outlined in the Introduction, to come to fruition, which is the second purpose my consideration of this film will serve. Deux ou trois choses poses ways of rendering and, subsequently, reading the transformation of Paris in the late 1960s, all of which assume a central role in the depiction of the city in the recent case study films under examination in the chapter. The “blurring” of the city space as a transitory phase in its eventual generic formation, as well as topographical journeys from the center of the city to the banlieue are two important features of the spatial politics of Deux ou trois choses that remain visible within the current case study films in reconfigured form. But there is a rather obvious twist that returns us once again to the vexed question of classification. Deux ou trois choses is a cogent example of a specifically European wave of political modernist filmmaking that reaches its apogee in this period. In the cases of Denis and Haneke, their mostly modernist sensibility, veering more towards the explicitly political when it comes to Haneke, gives rise to what I delineate here as the “world cinema” variation of the kinds of spatial politics similarly broached by Deux ou trois choses in its more militant form. While these differences will be explored, I am also interested in examining what I see as an implicit question that runs across these three films. This is the question of what transpires in the space and time of the crossroads, the brief moments where past and present are brought together in productive as well as ambivalent tension. Lastly, what will become evident through my reading of the film is that Godard holds in tension the modes of urbanization that seek to fortify the city in various ways with an expanded view of Paris that simultaneously situates the city within and against political struggles transpiring around the world. This tension between “inside” and “outside”, between the city and the world, is also a feature of all three contemporary films. In effect, I draw upon these films, in addition to some of their cinematic foils, in order to sketch the beginnings of a representational history of a Parisian imaginary, poised between “inside” and “outside”, that is specific to the periodization of this book.

One Empire for Another: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation and Displacement Deux ou trois choses is a film about “Her”, the title character whom Godard presents as Juliette Jansen/actress Marina Vlady, in addition to a series

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of micro-narratives of other female figures. The film is also about “Her” as in the Paris region. Deux ou trois choses opens in the grands ensembles and ends there, with an interlude to central Paris where Juliette engages in acts of prostitution. In narrative terms, the film chronicles a day in the life of Juliette, which is interwoven with meditations on building projects and urban life within a capitalist, industrial context. These meditations are located within images of the city itself, within Juliette’s monologues that signify outside of the fiction and most prominently through Godard’s whispered, almost furtive voice-over narration. Deux ou trois choses is often hailed as the film where the “research” side of Godard’s filmmaking practice begins to intrude upon the fiction, as is clear from this litany of filmic techniques utilized in the film. The film is punctuated with direct visual and aural citations of ­building  projects that altered the Parisian cityscape in the post-war period. Part of this transformation is linked to the division between the banlieue and central Paris, a divide that constitutes the core narrative thread of the film. Katherine Shonfield elaborates upon the effects that the building of the Périphérique ring road has had upon the lived ­experience of the city: In the second half of the 20th century, the giant ring-road called the Périphérique, which now defines “central” Paris, was under construction. This road deliberately isolated the sites of working-class occupation in the suburbs in a bid to sanitize the city centre, partly in response to the riots against the Algerian War of the early 1960s.3

For Shonfield, the building of this particular roadway is partially where the distinction between central Paris and the banlieue, as it relates very specifically to the post-war, post-imperial period, is born. Shonfield argues further that the construction of the Périphérique worked to “commodify Paris itself. It has made Paris into a distinct and separate object that Parisians themselves have to arrange to visit”.4 Following Shonfield, the building of this roadway can be read as a form of fortification, where the center of the city is distanced, in architectural terms, from its less than desirable suburban inhabitants. This notion of the newly commodified Paris is precisely what is under interrogation in this film. In addition to the use of voice-over narration, which details the way in which the city is being tailored for capitalist ends, there are also aesthetic strategies utilized by Godard that produce a visual image of the commodified city. Godard’s Paris is largely fragmented in its presentation. More specifically, it is often the “new” Paris that is shot in this manner. The earliest representation of a city image in the film is a high

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Figure 1.1  Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle: the Périphérique under construction.

angle shot that partially reveals the Périphérique under construction (Figure 1.1). The roadway takes up half the frame, while the other half reveals more construction taking place below. This type of shot makes it impossible to discern exactly where the roadway is situated within city space so that it appears as an isolated object. Godard’s objectification of city space occurs again and again as he continually shoots around the same spatial parameters, providing the spectator with alternate perspectives of the same space. It is this type of fragmentation and objectification that foregrounds the process of how a city can slowly be drained of any semblance of a “sense of place”. In this way, Godard’s shooting style operates as the formal counterpart to Shonfield’s notion of the commodification of the city. Commodification and the corresponding reinvention of the city in its modernist guise are completely linked by certain scholars writing about the significance of urban upheavals in this period; Ross, for example, argues that imperialism abroad was replaced by colonization at home as “the city itself became the new site for a generalized exploitation of the daily life of its inhabitants through the management of space”.5 For Ross and Shonfield, among others, the building of the grands ensembles, which constitute the principle form of social housing during the post-war period, function as a form of spatial management along both class and racialized fault lines.6 Godard’s cinematic contribution to this discourse demonstrates the gendered nature of this form of spatial management as Juliette engages in acts of prostitution in order to support her lifestyle in the banlieue. Godard’s much discussed rendering of the banlieue in a circular shot that spans the length of a huge tower block in both directions, has been interpreted as an ironic representation of the displacement of ­imperial grandeur abroad to a new brand of monumentality at home.7

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glo b a l p a r i s 43 As Susan Hayward argues in “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French Cinema (1950s–1990s)”, the film points already to the effect of collective monumental housing. From the very opening title sequence, the monumental crushes any sense of the communal; the space is empty city space – no trees, no community in the streets (no streets to be seen, only through ways).8

Within this interpretive framework, colonization at home can be read as yet another imperial gesture, but of the “post” variety. Traces of empire can be located in the imperialist gestures of the building projects, which find resonance in Godard’s cinematic study of the period as well as in relation to the notion of displacement put forth by Ross, whereby monumentality and other elements of colonialism are transferred onto the suburbs in a material and symbolic “colonization” of Paris. Godard’s dystopian vision of the recolonization of Paris doesn’t end with his depiction of a newly fragmented and commodified city as a displaced representation of the city’s former imperial glory. Deux ou trois choses is a film that engages directly with the politics of empire. However, it is not the French imperial past, but the new “American imperialism”, as relayed through citations of the Vietnam War, that pervade the film. The most prominent example of this is the “re-enactment” of the Vietnam War in the interior of Juliette’s apartment. In situating Paris as a site where major global events of the time, such as the Vietnam War, can be discerned, Godard insists on viewing the city in relational terms, with regard to the city’s place within the world at large. As Matthew Taunton argues, Godard is intent on illustrating that the Vietnam War and the building frenzy that coalesces around the rise of the grands ensembles as the principle form of social housing in the period are essentially part of the same “political reality”.9 The film’s fragmentary structure, however, simultaneously underscores the difficulty of making these events fit within the same political reality, as they are kept apart by time, space and circumstance. As noted earlier, Deux ou trois choses activates a certain tension between the city and the world where the two are brought together in a way that simultaneously is demonstrative of their distance from one another. As scholars such as Jill Forbes argue, Godard’s indictment of the new “American imperialism” is crucially linked to France’s own colonial history. Forbes observes, “for Godard, as for many French people of his generation who were deeply scarred by the Algerian crisis of the 1950s, the question of imperialism – American or Soviet – was often as important as French domestic politics”.10 She implies that Godard’s preoccupation

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with American imperialism stems from France’s own colonial past and as such, displaced vestiges of the French imperial legacy can only be found in what perhaps implicitly underscores Godard’s representational interest in indicting the new, de facto American empire. Godard’s censure of the rise of America as informal, imperial power in the post-war period, in retrospect, can be viewed as an early critique of the onset of globalization, which many continue to view as synonymous with “Americanization”. However, there is a second interpretation of this gesture that returns us to France’s own imperial past. Ross ends off her text by suggesting that France’s perception of American influence as a form of imperialism has something to do with the denial and repression of France’s own colonial history.11 This ambivalence is similarly felt in Godard’s work as France is never indicted for its imperialist past in the way that America is continually evoked as the imperial future. Deux ou trois choses is inadvertently enmeshed within imperialist ideologies, particularly those that appear in the early decades following the collapse of the French empire. In many ways then, the French imperial past remains the repressed term, while capitalism, commodification and American imperialism take center stage. Dialectical tensions between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, distance and proximity are made manifest in this instance; Godard situates Paris as part of major global events through myriad forms of relationality, including re-enactments and editing techniques, while oblique renderings of architectural developments and urban planning tell a second, submerged story of the ramifications of the displacement of imperial grandeur. Here, looking outwards, and more specifically, towards America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, obscures the view inwards, toward France’s own imperial sojourns.

The Generic and the Specific: The Blurred Image of the City As is evident from the analysis of the urban imagery of the film thus far, the Paris of Deux ou trois choses is predominantly that of the suburbs, whose iconography is comprised of partial images of roadways, cranes, tall modernist skyscrapers, circular pans of the grands ensembles and gas stations. When Juliette enters central Paris, it is largely a city of cafés and hotel rooms.12 It is only when Juliette enters the café that we realize she has moved from the grands ensembles to the center of the city, thereby turning the café into a sign of the iconic Paris. Deux ou trois choses straddles the divide between two antithetical depictions of cities that can be mapped across European modernist cinema of the

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1950s to the late 1960s. Mark Betz notes that space in European art cinema is not only specific, but is also ostensibly urban during its high point in this historical period.13 However, in a chapter entitled “The Blurred Image of Cities”, Pierre Sorlin argues that certain types of European art cinema in the 1960s participated in “the destruction of the city” in the cinema; he states that “after 1965 or so, other cinematographers were no longer able to tell or see what towns were and created a blurred image of cities”.14 For Sorlin, “such notions as urban atmosphere, and city life, which were central to the cinema of the 1950s, are abolished. Cities have vanished, leaving behind them only monotonous lines of dwellings”.15 Deux ou trois choses is both specific about its location, taking the Paris region as its subject, while also enacting the process of “blurring” that begins to overtake cities like Paris during this time period through particular stylistic and narrational strategies. Godard’s aesthetic of fragmentation and abstraction render the city as a series of objects. Part of this “blurring” of the city in Deux ou trois choses, in addition to other films made by Godard in this period, is also due to the prominence given to interior spaces.16 In La Ville au Cinéma, Thierry Jousse and Thierry Paquot write, “Godard a été le premier a donner forme cinematographie a une nouvelle façon de penser et d’habiter l’espace interieur des appartements”.17 They note that Godard’s interiors are often composed of white walls, with posters that are saturated in color, which is an apt description of the interiors of Deux ou trois choses. Beyond Godard’s interest in the space of the interior, his Paris is comprised of places and spaces that belong to the realm of the everyday. As they state, “L’essential de l’urbanité, pour Godard, est ailleurs, dans quelques lieux communs, anonyms et generiques; dans les bistros, les brasseries (cafés), les petits hotels minables, les petites salles de cinema de quartier, les rues ordinaries”.18 Godard films in and around quotidian rather than monumental city spaces, as indicated in the blurred cityscape of Paris that stars in Deux ou trois choses, while also rendering quotidian spaces like the grands ensembles in an ironically monumental fashion, as observed previously. The division this film establishes between the banlieue and central Paris, the latter rendered into a site of visitation for Juliette and others to prostitute themselves, contributes to the lack of recognizably iconographic representation in the film as much of it transpires within suburban regions. If iconographic images and spaces constitute Sorlin’s notion of “urban atmosphere”, then images of the Parisian suburbs in these films signify as blurred images of the city. Within this analytic context, this largely unfamiliar depiction of the city, stemming from its redesign during this historical period, can be understood as a nascent marker of global Paris

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in the cinema, one that will be explored in relationship to all three films comprising the French corpus of this book.

The Post-Imperial Flâneuse: Topography as Narration In Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth Century Paris and London, Sharon Marcus provides an illuminating definition of topography in dialectical terms: “By topography I mean the ways that narration itself (and not simply the events narrated) inscribes spatial relations – the ways that narration establishes zones as exterior and interior, mobile and fixed, global and local, publicly open and privately opaque”.19 Marcus’ notion of the topographical accounts for the primacy of narration in the construction of spatial dynamics. It is a definition that is particularly well suited to the study of cinematic topographies in urging the analyst to examine cinematic spaces, whether investigating urban interiors or tropes of mobility, not simply in relationship to their presence on screen but in terms of the meanings such spaces accumulate through modes of narration. There is a topographical journey embarked upon by Juliette, which is clearly discernable in the film, even though it is interrupted at various points by Godard’s furtive voice-overs and the inclusion of inserts, images, monologues, and episodic events. If these other elements of the film are set aside for the moment, there is an unmissable trajectory of movement from the banlieue to central Paris and back to the banlieue, as manifested in the mobility of Juliette from one end of the city to the other. Juliette’s movements render her into a flâneuse, a figure resurrected in the guise of the prostitute in this particular film. This assertion immediately recalls a series of notoriously complex debates concerning the very possibility of female flânerie by scholars including Janet Wolff, Anke Gleber and Anne Friedberg.20 While I cannot do justice to the complexity of these debates in this chapter, the question of whether or not the activity of female flânerie did exist within the same historical period that gave rise to the figure of the flâneur, has taken scholars down a number of paths. Anke Gleber for instance privileges the cinema itself as the true locus of female flânerie, drawing upon Berlin: The Symphony of a City, which abounds with images of the “new woman” on the streets of the city.21 She turns to the cinema, in effect, because it is only through representational means that a female flâneur, one whose only purpose is to stroll through the city streets, can come into being.22 Juliette is also one of a long line of wandering women to be found in post-war European cinema, as thoroughly investigated by Betz.23 We can add Playtime’s Barbara to this list, whose wanderings across “Tativille”

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falls in line with one of Betz’s key postulations regarding the recurring presence of the flâneuse within certain trajectories of modernist European filmmaking; the wandering woman, through her sometimes seemingly purposeless streetwalks, functions as an embodiment of the tensions and contradictions of the modernizing project undertaken by various post-war European cities and nations.24 Barbara’s continuous search for the “real” Paris, comprised of flower-sellers and the Eiffel tower, within the midst of Tati’s generic city brings these tensions between old and new to the surface. As Betz argues, drawing upon a wide range of filmic examples that include several films by Godard, the female flâneuse is rendered as both object and subject of a certain discourse of post-war modernity. As such, the flâneuse, a neglected urban figure who is nevertheless intimately tied to the ebbs and flows of urban modernity, is reconfigured in these instances, in line with her wanderings through the post-war urban landscape. This is also true of Deux ou trois choses, but it is a particularly reflexive illustration of this contradiction, in keeping with Godard’s transition to political modernist filmmaking that begins in earnest with this film. Godard’s voice-over narration suggests that this particular narrative of female mobility is in fact produced by the spatial geometries of the new Paris. Juliette’s acts of prostitution, as well as those committed by some of the other women that appear briefly in the film, are interwoven with images of the grands ensembles and the Périphérique in addition to Godard’s “lessons on industrial society” that relate the manner in which Paris is being redesigned for capitalist ends. There is a narrative told by Godard over the image of a woman smoking against a wall, who is soon met by a man. This story, which Godard begins with the phrase “always the same story”, is one where the woman meets a few men, becomes pregnant and is then forced to work as a prostitute by night to make ends meet. She later meets a “nice man”, whom she marries and sets up house with. However, the home is too expensive for their income and the woman is told by her husband to take to the streets. While this narrative is told over the image of a single couple, the collective nature of Godard’s address renders this as the story of a certain type of bourgeois couple, living through this ­particular ­historical moment. This interweaving of what Chris Darke argues is Godard’s highly reflexive interrogation of the less than ideal effects of life in the banlieue with Juliette’s venture into the city, as well as that of the other women whose stories are inserted into the film, illustrate how it is in fact the post-war redesign of Paris that brings forth these new, and specifically gendered forms of mobility across the city.25 Following Ross’ assertions to

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this effect, Juliette’s mobility is constructed, in part, through what Ross terms “colonization at home”, as induced by the post-war wave of modernization that transforms her into a prostitute. While Juliette’s monologues grant her a degree of subjectivity in the film, it is Godard’s periodic use of voice-over narration, in addition to the way in which her topographical journey through the city signifies as essential to the maintenance of her life within the banlieue, that contributes to her objectification. The very title of the film positions Godard as the authorial figure who produces a form of partial knowledge, only two or three things, about the Paris region and Juliette Jansen. The opening images of the film literalize the dialectical relationship between subjectivity and objectivity that Juliette is caught within by framing her against a portion of the grands ensembles, where she speaks on her behalf as does Godard, reflexively hinting towards the position of the woman as both subject and object of the city. A second manifestation of this contradiction occurs during the film’s often discussed coffee sequence where, over a close-up of the substance, Godard says since I cannot tear myself from the objectivity that crushes me nor from the subjectivity that exiles me, since I am permitted neither to lift myself to being nor fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around me more than ever at the world, my likeness, my brother.

While these words perhaps signify as Godard’s views on modern Parisian life as imparted through the voice of the auteur, they are brought to life within the film’s visual and narrational schema through a number of means; the monumental rendering of the grands ensembles, which retains its position as documentary image, takes on the role of “crushing objectivity”; Juliette’s voice-over ruminations convey a sense of exile in their complete separation from her interactions with others in the film; finally the presence of the Vietnam War constitutes a form of “looking at the world”. This phrase then can be read as a condensed version of the various threads and arguments made explicit throughout the entire film. In keeping with the parameters of signification that the wandering woman assumes within European modernist cinema, Juliette personifies Paris at a crossroads. Her journey across the city speaks to Paris in a state of transition or what Godard has referred to as “mutation”, its former imperial glory replaced by its new found modernity. Godard also situates Paris at a crossroads within a world that is similarly in a period of transition, as Godard’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War gives voice to shifting geopolitical formations that place America, and not Europe, as its apex.

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Urban Juxtapositions: The Flâneuse and Migrant The question of scale is paramount to Godard’s aesthetic rendering of the city at a crossroads. Michael Taunton, for example, interprets the use of the grands ensembles as backdrop for Juliette’s monologues and Godard’s meditations on the nature of knowing “Her” as the means through which Godard illustrates his central thesis on the inhuman scale of the new building developments.26 However, I read the question of scale in a slightly different light by returning to a pertinent assertion made by Doreen Massey to Karen Lurey, as cited in the Introduction, where Massey argues that the tiny “worlds of flânerie” were matched by the “massive mobilities of imperialism and colonialism” within the same historical moment. Massey’s comments not only juxtapose two contrasting modes of mobility, but do so along the lines of scale, as noted previously. In a parallel historical moment of tumultuous change and upheaval, Godard brings together the trope of flânerie with the massive mobilites of post-war relocation and settlement through the figure of Juliette, who resides in the banlieue. It is the rendering of the grands ensembles in such monumental fashion that allows these images to operate as a stand-in for the populations that they house and for the empire that is no more, especially when coupled with the micro-narratives of the other women in the film that lend weight and breadth to Juliette’s narrative. And yet, when it comes to the figure of the Algerian migrant, Godard reverses the relation. The film contains a brief interview with an Algerian boy, who remains off-screen (Figure 1.2). The child is asked if he prefers living in France and he says no. The image that corresponds to this interview is that of a reflective glass surface through which the grands ensembles are visible. The “absence presence’”of the boy implicitly refers to the most significant form of mobility to accompany the collapse of the colonial empire, which is the migration of Algerian immigrants to France.27 The film does not make the mobility of Juliette visible at the expense of the Algerian migrant, this much is certain. However, a definitive sign of the imperial past, which is the figure of the migrant, remains obscured. Here, the use of a reflective surface reveals exactly as much as it conceals. This mode of repression, as exemplified in the substitution of the grands ensembles for the image of the boy, can perhaps be read as a commentary upon a more general negation of a migrant presence in the city, particularly with respect to this historical time period. This analysis is not one that implies there is a misplaced emphasis upon the figure of the woman or that there should be more of an Algerian presence in the film. However, it does point to the way in which Juliette, as emissary of a specifically gendered relation

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Figure 1.2  Deux ou trois choses: interview with an Algerian boy.

to the ­banlieue, assumes more prominence in the film than the Algerian migrant, who remains something of an absence/presence within some of the modernist cinema of the period.28 While Deux ou trois choses does draw together the story of Parisian modernization with that of decolonization explicitly in this very brief instance, the obliqueness of the gesture cannot be superseded. While Juliette is visible and mobile, the child is not visible and as such, remains stationary, like the building within which he is ensconced.

Deux ou trois choses: Some Conclusions Much of Betz’s argumentation concerning the manner in which the study of wandering women in post-war Italian and French cinema unearths a largely buried history of decolonization hinges on a significant assertion, whereby the birth of European modernism coincides not only with the end of the European imperial order but also with the dawn of post-war modernization. Deux ou trois choses is a film that takes Godard from modernist filmmaking to the domain of political modernism, as is borne out much more fully in a grouping of his later films. For Betz, European modernist filmmaking registers the contradictions of a period of great transition and upheaval in many European nations and cities. This is certainly true of Deux ou trois choses, particularly with respect to the notions of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration outlined in the Introduction. Deux ou trois choses features a specifically post-imperial mode of displacement, where Parisian monumentality, as embedded in the grandiose depiction of social housing, signifies as an ironic form of colonization at home rather than abroad. Godard’s indictment of the Vietnam War as the most stringent marker of a new American imperialism bears a largely unexplored affinity with France’s imperial past. And

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glo b a l p a r i s 51 finally, the figure of the flâneuse is reconfigured in this instance as a way of bringing the tensions of post-war modernization to the surface. By employing a retrospective gaze, I have also suggested that Deux out trois choses could be read as a nascent global city film, one that treads the line between the imperial past and the dawn of the informal American empire. Godard’s “in between city” comes alive through formal means, including the use of a fragmentary narrative structure that highlights the difficulty of cohesion that this transformation of the city presents. In this respect, this film serves as a kind of city symphony film, but one tailored to showcasing Paris in a transitional phase where Godard forces the city into a relationship with the world, as achieved through the Vietnam sequences for example, while also showing us how this new post-war Paris induces the alienation of its inhabitants from their own city. In other words, this is a symphony of a city that stages the problem of Paris in this historical period of reinvention. In situating Deux ou trois choses as the cinematic past of J’ai pas sommeil, Code inconnu and Caché, I am making a number of propositions. The first is to argue that in textual terms, all three films follow in the footsteps of European modernist filmmaking. The blurred representation of cities that Sorlin links to the decline of urban atmosphere and specificity to urban representations within European cinema is in evidence in these films. Deux ou trois choses resides at the cusp of this decline, where Godard combines a modernist approach with his increasing political militancy that charts the dawn of generic Paris. The film’s emphasis on the divisions between center and banlieue as a constitutive feature of the identity and decline of the post-war, post-imperial city remains potent in the contemporary city and some of its cinema, including a film such as Caché. But what Godard’s film ultimately provides is a cinematic template for thinking through the difficulties of the city at the crossroads, precariously balanced between the modes of fortification that work to separate the city from banlieue and an expanded view of Paris that insists on its relationality to global events. Part of this difficulty extends to the submerged signs of the imperial past, which lie at the very heart of these gestures of fortification, that are difficult to discern without the aid of extra-cinematic sources, such as the insights made by Shonfield and Ross. While Godard explicitly inserts references to the Vietnam War in Deux ou trois, as is also the case with the earlier Pierrot le fou (1965), the French imperial legacies with regard to either Vietnam or Algeria, for example, are not given the same direct treatment. To take another brief but exceptionally well-known example from another Paris-set film of the period, in Agnes Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, signs of the Algerian War are made manifest throughout the film. These signs

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extend from radio transmissions that mention the casualty figures from riots transpiring in Algeria, as well as the prison sentence of a commander charged with participating in the Algerian uprising, to the presence of Antoine near the end of the film, the conscript on leave but set to return to Algeria.29 But in terms of specifically displaced signs of empire, the scene that comes to mind is the moment when Cléo admits to her taxi-cab driver that it is in fact her voice that they hear on the radio; Cléo gazes outside the window, the camera following, which rests on the series of masks displayed in a glass case. This type of sequence occurs once more, when Cléo observes a second grouping of masks, followed by a series of inserts of these masks. The masks and Cléo are brought together in this journey through the city in a way that draws a parallel between the two along the lines of objectification and containment, two patterns of being that Cléo tries to circumvent near the end of the film when she transforms herself into a fláneuse of the city. While a subtle critique of the Algerian War is discernable in this sequence, it only emerges, in narrational terms, as that which is analogous to the ­situation faced by the film’s white, French heroine. A similar kind of cinematic city appears in these later case study films, accompanied by a more obvious and visible reckoning with the imperial past but one that also remains abstract to a large degree. A line of continuity emerges here that allows us to chart a kind of abstraction at work within a certain strand of French modernist cinema in dealing with the imperial past, one that is attenuated by the use of modernist filmmaking techniques. And yet, there are of course significant differences between these films that stem back to Godard’s political militancy versus the brand of politics practiced by Haneke and Denis vis-à-vis their imbrication within the funding and distribution networks of contemporary world cinema. The following subsection examines the versions of modernist filmmaking practiced by Haneke and Denis that I relate back to the decidedly global climate of film circulation, exhibition and spectatorship within which these particular films must thrive. As such, abstract methods of engaging with the imperial past, while partially consistent with a film such as Deux ou trois choses and, by extension, a certain strand of French modernist cinema, takes on a very specific resonance with Denis’ and Haneke’s “world cinema” films. 1.2  PARISIAN NETWORKS, OLD AND NEW: TOPOGRAPHICAL JOURNEYS THROUGH THE CITY This section continues to explore ways of reading urban space established in the previous section with regard to Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil and

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glo b a l p a r i s 53 Haneke’s Code inconnu. What is striking about J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu is the similar cast of migrant characters in each, stemming from post-imperial forms of migration and those from Eastern Europe, so that migrants that signify with respect to imperial history and the global present occupy the same city spaces. As such, this section examines the way in which these two films, like Deux ou trois choses before them, give rise to a contemporary view of Paris at a crossroads through a detailed consideration of Denis’ and Haneke’s deployment and reconfiguration of modernist techniques. I begin this line of inquiry with a series of provocative statements made by French film critic Frédéric Strauss about the place of geography in French cinema. In “Féminin colonial”, Strauss writes: Le cinéma français n’est pas très bon en géographie. Ses parcours manquent généralment d’inventivité sur son proper territoire et frôlent l’errance touristique désoeuvrée dès qu’on s’éloigne de l’Hexagone. Ce n’est pas simplement le signe d’un manqué de curiosité de l’oeil. Si le cinéma français n’est pas bon en géographie, c’est qu’il est également assez cancre en histoire, et précisément sur la question de l’histoire de sa géographie. Passer le frontière, c’est prendre le risqué de recontrer les fantômes d’un ailleurs refoulé: l’impérialisme et son image taboue, le colonie.30

Strauss’ postulations concerning the lack of geographical inventiveness in French cinema rest upon his assertion that French cinema fails to provide a meeting ground for geography and history. He takes this claim a step further by noting that a “forgetting” of history and, in the case of recent French cinema, a repression of the history of imperialism, underpins the lack of geographical representation both within as well as beyond the “frontier of the Hexagone”. The repression of imperial history and of the “taboo” image of the colony is the mechanism by which a direct confrontation with the ghosts of the past are steadily avoided. To return to the motif of fortification developed in the previous section, Strauss positions French cinema itself within the rubric of insularity that cuts itself off from its darker history, at the cost of geographical inventiveness or innovation. Investigating whether or not Strauss’ assessment of the geographical poverty of French cinema is accurate, if applied to certain types of filmmaking or is entirely hyperbolic, is beyond the scope of this book. Rather than trying to ascertain the veracity of his blanket assessment of French cinema, I utilize this quote to open up a series of questions concerning the relationship between geography and history and whether or not the interdependence of the two, in whatever guise, is indeed the recipe for “good geography”. More to the point, are Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil and Haneke’s Code inconnu in fact, “good on geography”? Do these films offer

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up innovative depictions of global Paris through their evocations of traces of the French imperial past? J’ai pas sommeil commences with Daiga’s arrival in Paris from Lithuania, armed with the address of her aunt Ira, in hopes of pursuing an acting career with a director named Alexander. Daiga eventually ends up working and living in a hotel in Montmartre, owned by Ninon and her elderly mother. Daiga’s storyline is interwoven with that of Camille and Théo, two brothers whose family hails from Martinique. Théo, a musician, dreams of leaving Paris to return to Martinique with his family. His wife, Mona, however, wants to remain in Paris. Denis gradually reveals that Camille and his lover Raphaël are the two serial killers who murder elderly women in the film, which is loosely based upon an actual case where two Caribbean migrants, Thierry Paulin, dubbed the “Monster of Montmartre” and his lover Jean-Thierry Mathurin, were arrested for robbing and murdering a large number of elderly women in this area of the city.31 Eventually, Camille is arrested, while Daiga, who has access to his room in the hotel, steals his money and leaves Paris. In Code inconnu, Haneke intersperses a series of narrational trajectories, which are fragmented in their presentation. Anne is a white bourgeois actress and her boyfriend Georges is a photographer who was stationed in Kosovo, among other places. Georges’ younger brother Jean leaves the French countryside to reside in Paris to the dismay of his father, who wants him to run the family farm. There are also several narrational trajectories involving a family from Mali and from Romania; Amadou is arrested after defending Maria, a Romanian migrant, who begs on the streets of Paris while his father, Youseff, decides to return to Mali. Maria is deported to Romania after the incident but returns to find work in Paris. J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, despite their incontrovertible status as high art cinema made by two critically respected European auteurs, can nevertheless be described under the slightly prosaic heading of “network narrative”, a type of film that circumvents the threshold between high and low, the highbrow and the popular, art cinema and Hollywood. A form that goes by many different names, including the puzzle film, the mindgame film, fractal films, and the hyperlink film, the network narrative is identified as an aesthetic trend of contemporary world cinema, rising to the fore as something of a generic narrative structure in the 1990s. While Code inconnu is occasionally described as “network narrative” or “fractal film”, this is not the case with J’ai pas sommeil, although the term equally applies. Scholars including David Bordwell, Leisa Rothlisberger, Wendy Everett, and Paul Kerr view the recent and entirely global resurgence

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of this older, modernist form of storytelling as an indirect response to the conditions of globalization in formal terms, holding in tension the chief dialectic between homogenization and differentiation through fragmentary, multi-strand narrative templates that foreground simultaneity, chance, intersectionality and relationality.32 Bordwell, in a thorough and historicized dissection of the form, proffers a loose definition of these films; the network narrative features multiple narrative trajectories that are often interwoven with one other yet retain their distinctiveness in a way that encourages the spectator to be attentive to how the stories in these particular films are told.33 Bordwell further notes that there is a choreographic element to this mode of storytelling, as the structure of the narrative achieves as much prominence as its content.34 As Paul Kerr has argued specifically with respect to the art cinema market, the accelerating pace of the globalization of art cinemas through interconnected festival circuits, co-productions and international distribution networks contributes to what he refers to as the “mainstreaming of network narratives in the 1990s”.35 Certainly, Haneke is no stranger to the network narrative, as 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) is easily subsumed under this category, laying the groundwork for Code inconnu, his second film of this type. A number of Denis’ city films, including Trouble Every Day (2001) and 35 rhums (2008), feature intersecting narrative trajectories but, beyond this, one of Denis’ authorial signatures involves the deployment of fragmented modes of storytelling. This signature remains in effect well beyond her Paris-based “network” films, including Chocolat (1988) and Beau Travail (1990), both of which deal with the legacies of French colonialism. Both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu exude traces of the thriller genre, which is overtly pronounced in J’ai pas sommeil, which centers upon the eventual discovery and capture of a serial killer, while Anne in Code inconnu stars in The Collector, scenes of which feature Anne acting out the role of a woman trapped within a bourgeois home. In keeping with the network narrative’s balance between “high” and “low”, both films evoke thriller elements but ultimately for the purposes of deconstruction. J’ai pas sommeil offers a largely blasé rendering of this narrative; as Cynthia Marker has noted, the film evokes film noir archetypes largely in an effort to deconstruct both their sensationalism and their typical gender associations.36 In keeping with Haneke’s renowned penchant for reflexivity, the staging of the thriller narrative in Code inconnu operates as a form of commentary upon the modes of fortification that characters like Anne engage in outside of the “film within the film”.

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Both films also display characteristics of network narrative films in relationship to their funding and use of stars. As noted in the Introduction, both films are pan-European co-productions. For Bordwell, co-­productions serve as one of the most salient industrial preconditions for the contemporary rise of the network narrative, particularly across Europe, as they relate to increased sources of funding, and the use of multiple shooting locations, leading to the potential for wider distribution channels.37 The films also employ globally recognizable female leads, Juliette Binoche in the case of Code inconnu and the late Katerina Golubeva in J’ai pas sommeil. Both of these stars can easily be described as art cinema icons and, even more specifically, as icons of French art cinema, although Binoche eclipses Golubeva in her global popularity.38 As urban variations of the network form, J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu also hark back to the city symphony genre, which Bordwell identifies as an early, modernist predecessor of the network narrative.39 As mentioned previously, Deux ou trois choses is labeled by Timothy Corrigan as the essayistic version of the city symphony film, which allows us to draw an obvious link between Godard’s film and these two.40 As will be elucidated further in this section, both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, like Deux ou trois choses, foreground the problem of urban cohesion: the use of the network narrative in these two films illustrate how certain figures brought together by spaces in the city remain disconnected in a way that mirrors the fractured condition of the cityscapes themselves. It is perhaps not a stretch to also argue the inverse and suggest that Deux ou trois choses contains traces of a network narrative as the story of Juliette is intertwined and yet distinct from the narratives of other women demonstrating how this story is, to use Godard’s phrase, “always the same story”. And if most roads lead back to Playtime, in this book at least, Tati’s film functions as an instantiation of the network narrative in foregrounding relationships of intersection and interaction between Barbara and Monsieur Hulot, amongst other unnamed characters.41 The urban variation of the network narrative appears in two different forms in each case study film. In Code inconnu the device is used in a reflexive manner as each narrative installment is shot as a plan séquence, with cuts to black between each scene. The full title of the film, Code inconnu: recit incomplete de divers voyages, relates the narrational method by which the film tells its various stories to the spectator from the very beginning. While the film begins and ends in St. Germain in Paris, Haneke leaves the city to journey with characters that depart and to follow those who choose to return. J’ai pas sommeil, on the other hand, interweaves its numerous storylines but retains a continuity of place as

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the film is set entirely in Montmartre. While Haneke’s film constructs a fragmented geography comprised of different spaces and cities, Denis creates a cinematic portrait of Montmartre that develops through the use of recurring spaces. The distinctions between the two films can be traced back to the modes of representation in evidence within two canonical films of the city symphony genre, Walter Ruttman’s Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera, as examined by James Donald. In the case of Berlin, Donald describes the film’s mode of spatial construction as “montage mapping” based on the rhythms of editing that “presents urban space as fragmented and socially differentiated”.42 He argues that “Vertov’s film should be seen neither as a record nor a portrait but, following the precepts of formalism, as an analysis which makes our normal perceptions of the city strange by laying bare the device of cinema”.43 Donald’s distinction between “montage mapping” and “analysis” allows us to situate these films as inheritors of two different methods of rendering the city through cinematic means, only their subject is the global rather than modern city. Denis’ film offers a “montage mapping” of Montmartre as an ostensibly migrant space in the city. She employs the structure of “several days in the life of a city”, moving between the early morning and night, largely constructed around topographical journeys undertaken by characters. Haneke’s film is far more analytical in its depiction of space. Code inconnu displays a high degree of reflexivity achieved through its recurring cuts to black although, paradoxically, a certain unity of space and time is retained through the continuous use of the long take. As such, Code inconnu brings together two hallmarks of European modernism in the same film, reflexivity and realism. Haneke’s Paris, while not a composite of other cities, is explicitly situated in relation to other spaces through editing and of course, through the mobility of figures within and outside the city. In keeping with the relationship commonly developed between the global city and its cinema along the lines of fragmentation, ephemerality and non-specific methods of spatial representation, J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu seemingly fit the bill but, as I will argue in this section, there is much more to be said about the city in each film. Jean Ma offers a second optic through which considerations of the network narrative and its relationship to globalization can be viewed, one that accounts for the blurring of boundaries between cinematic forms separated by their distinctively different approaches to narration. When writing about the state of contemporary art cinema vis-à-vis other global cinematic cultures, Ma begs the question

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at a time when so many of the tactics that previously signified a rejection of representational norms have been appropriated and absorbed by the mainstream and Hollywood itself, does it make sense to speak of art film as constituting a distinct narrative approach?44

Echoing similar arguments made by Elsaesser that are cited in the Introduction, Ma raises the specter of convergence, which erodes the strict divisions between various forms of cinema and media practice, as a feature of contemporary global art cinemas that seem to have more in common with their mainstream counterparts than ever before.45 As Bordwell has argued, the rise of the network narrative across a wide variety of global cinemas may be attributed to the perceived need for constant novelty and innovation, two key ingredients for survival in the world cinema market.46 Does the narrative structure of J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu yield “geographical inventiveness” in the face of the network narrative’s status as a generic and even mainstream mode of storytelling? Some would argue no, especially in the case of Code inconnu. For Carrie Tarr, the fragmented narrative structure of Haneke’s film yields an image of the city as a blank postmodern space, devoid of any meaning. Tarr argues that Code inconnu is a film that could be set in any European capital that draws migrants as well as other travelers, thereby eschewing the importance of the specificity of place.47 In this chapter, I will make the opposite argument, one that pertains to both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu equally. Paris in these films is not so much blank or non- specific as much as it emerges as a largely opaque entity.48 This mode of opacity originates with the blurred representation of the cityscape in both films, extending toward the depiction of urban encounters, which are made difficult to read definitively in terms of their meaning. While the network narrative signifies a form of mainstreaming of global art cinema in our time, I will argue that these two films retain the possibility of innovation that the form once inspired in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in light of the representation of cities in the cinema in their modernist guise.49 Drawing upon the work of Ackbar Abbas on global cities in “Cinema, The City and the Cinematic”, we can say that J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu present us with illustrations of the exorbitance of cities. Abbas’ notion of the exorbitant city, which he develops by drawing upon the work of Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel and Italo Calvino, among others, denotes a contemporary version of an enduring paradox of urban modernity; while cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been subjected to ever increasing modes of surveillance, cities at their core remain stubbornly elusive as a result of the complexity and speed of the forms of mobility, interaction and exchange that are characteristic of

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any given metropolis. It is the dense circulatory networks of cities that produce the problem of legibility, allowing cities to evade most attempts to thoroughly survey them. What constitutes the exorbitance of cities, for Abbas, is precisely their inability to be contained by description, which poses, as he writes, a “challenge to representation”.50 When cities escalate in their exorbitance, they then have the potential to transition into generic cities. As Abbas argues via the work of Rem Koolhaus on this subject, the generic city poses yet another set of contradictions around the question of visuality; while the chief characteristic of the generic is what Abbas terms the hypervisibility of its iconic images, this form of hypervisibility doesn’t render the city any more legible than before.51 If anything, the hypervisiblity of a city’s iconic images works to obscure its complexity as only a handful of images operate as stand-ins for an entire city. To return to Playtime, part of the film’s humor rests on mobilizing generic images of gray buildings as the new iconicity of cityscapes the world over. In this context, this gesture can be viewed as Tati’s little joke on this matter of hypervisibility, where overexposed, hypervisible icons of the city, such as the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, assume the status of obscurity. With regard to the cinema, the exorbitance of cities emerges in films that allow urban settings to exceed their role as mere backdrop for the unfolding of the narrative.52 The city in these types of films doesn’t emerge so much through the use of distinct and recognizable urban imagery but in the film’s ability to emulate the experience of shock, ephemerality and contingency that lie at the very heart of the urban experience. As Abbas puts it, “the great promise of the cinema is that it does not have to give us ‘pictures’ of the city, although this promise is not always kept”.53 I will make the case that an exorbitant sensibility, as opposed to a generic one, can be traced across both films, forcing us to think through the contradictions of the global city as they relate to a certain tension between legibility and opacity. Rather then reveling in their generic status, which Koolhaus provocatively situates as a response to the straitjacket of identity, the city in these films can be read in light of the problem of legibility, a story as old as the onset of modernity itself, but one that is reconfigured in the rendering of migrant experiences in a global Paris.54 Rather than giving us just “pictures” of the city, the use of the fragmentary aesthetic of the network narrative across both films mobilizes familiar but, as I will argue, also nonfamiliar views of the global cityscape that emerge through narrative events characterized by chance, intersection and ephemerality. The version of the network narrative found in both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu gives rise to a central contradiction. As Bordwell describes

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it, network narratives tend towards omniscience in their depiction of a multiplicity of narrative threads that transcend certain forms of subjective representation.55 And yet in these two films omniscience ultimately takes a back seat to a depiction of urban life that emphasizes difficulty, ambivalence and ambiguity, not only with respect to content but in their very form. Haneke’s comments regarding the relationship between visibility and the real can be called upon in this instance. As he observes, “a total reality cannot be seized in the cinema or in real life. We know so little”.56 Here Haneke reveals the epistemological underpinnings of his own use of a fragmentary aesthetic that only yields partial knowledge, an assertion that can also be applied to Denis’ films and her body of work more broadly. And of course, this takes us back to Godard, who is only willing to impart “two or three” things about Her. While ambiguity is an inherent feature of art cinema as a practice, highlighted in Bordwell’s pioneering taxonomic assessment of the form, the ambiguous nature of these films bear a complex relationship to the contemporary conditions of globalization.57 If the recent rise of the network narrative in most critical research is understood as both symptom and product of globalization, J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu utilize the  format to also stage a series of intersections, confrontations and ­collisions that return us to the past in more ways than one. In the case of both films, the iconic figures of urban modernity, including the flâneur/flânuse, make an appearance, but in a reconfigured form, in keeping with Abbas’ notion of the contemporary exorbitance of cities. My reading strategies will delve into the cinematic as well as urban past of these films that mark a return to the classic tropes of the modern European city in addition to drawing links to Deux ou trois choses more specifically along the lines of differentiated modes of mobility, expressed through a number of intersecting topographical journeys. These films stage a second instance of return. Both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, to borrow Bhabha’s metaphorical description of the pastpresent, hold up a mirror to the colonial past, in its encrusted and obscure form, that comes to the surface through associational means. This study adds a further dimension to Abbas’ notion of the exorbitance of cities as it relates very specifically to the evocation of the imperial past in these particular films. I read this aspect of the films through the lens of allegory or, to be more precise, what I refer to as “allegory by association”. I use this term to unpack the ambiguous nature of specifically racialized encounters staged across both films that lend themselves to allegorical interpretations that are associational rather than direct, submerged rather than obvious. This mode of allegorical depiction is fueled by the network structure of

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glo b a l p a r i s 61 the films themselves that develop associational relations at the level of both form and content. While J’ai pas sommeil privileges subtle forms of differentiation that coalesce around gender and race, Code inconnu utilizes much more forceful, even didactic means of depiction. In the case of both films, traces of the imperial past emerge in displaced fashion. This form of displacement is not only in keeping with certain modalities of art cinema that tend to treat politics in a more abstract manner, which includes the work of Claire Denis, but also provides us with cinematic examples of Schwarz’s assertions regarding the way in which traces of empire surface in narratives that, at first glance, appear to have very little to do with those histories. This section comprises three parts. The first introduces Jean Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) as a foil text, intended to operate as an illustration of one method of depicting global Paris through recourse to the past, the antithesis of which is on offer in J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu. Investigating these three films in a comparative fashion paves the way for a consideration of how some of the iconic spaces of the city, including its cafés and apartments, signify differently in each text, essentially pitting Amélie against the other two. While the temporal and spatial register of Bhabha’s conception of the past-present resonates with the narratives of global Paris found in Denis’s and Haneke’s films, Amélie, on the other hand, overlays a series cinematic pasts upon a contemporary Parisian cityscape, failing to produce the forms of tension between past and present so crucial to gleaning the persistence of the historical within present-tense conceptions of globalization. The second section, while continuing to make reference to Amélie, excavates a recognizable deployment of the contemporary network narrative in J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu that lends itself to a reading of the form as symptom and product of globalization. This transpires in the way in which the films foreground largely familiar narratives of the plight of different types of migrant figures in the global metropolis. The final section draws directly upon Abbas’ conception of the exorbitant city in order to illustrate the more complex use of the network narrative in these films, as it pertains to the question of urban legibility outlined previously.

The Communal Versus Fractured City: Jean Jeunet’s Amélie as Foil Text A possible comparison between Amélie, J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, all released within several years of each other, is hinted at in Ginette Vincendeau’s aptly titled “Café Society” article about Amélie, where she

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observes that “compared with Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu or Claire Denis’ Montmartre-set J’ai pas sommeil, Amélie Poulain certainly presents an ethnically cleansed vision of Paris in which all the characters except Lucien, the downtrodden green-grocer’s assist, are white”.58 Both Amélie and J’ai pas sommeil, are set exclusively in Montmartre, while Code inconnu’s Parisian geography is more expansive, including scenes that transpire in St. Germain and La Défense, among other interior locations that remain unidentifiable. Like Code inconnu and J’ai pas sommeil, Amélie is also a European co-production.59 But what makes this three-way comparison all the more apt is that, like J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, Amélie can easily be subsumed under the label of network narrative as the film presents both a spectacular and simultaneously ­nostalgic symphony of Montmartre.60 Amélie Poulain, who works as a waitress in a café situated in Montmartre, acts as a “guardian angel” of sorts, in her attempts to improve the lives of a host of characters in the film, such as reuniting a character named Bretodeau with a box of mementos that she finds in a wall in her apartment or bringing together Joseph, an obsessive customer in the café, with Gina, a lonely hypochondriac waitress. She also playfully punishes unpleasant characters, such as Collignon the grocer, who is consistently horrible to his employee, Lucien, by sneaking into his apartment and changing aspects of its interior. Eventually, Amélie makes herself happy by forging a romantic relationship with Nino. Interestingly enough, Amélie is also a film that engages in a fairly complex form of reconfiguration, in its combination of two distinct traditions of French cinema. Both Vincendeau and Isabelle Vanderschelden trace Jeunet’s picturesque use of urban iconography and character depiction in Amélie back to French Poetic Realist cinema of the 1930s.61 For instance, Vincendeau describes Amélie’s Montmartre as picturesque, encompassing, “cobbled streets and steep steps, corner shops and street markets follow; postcard views of Notre-Dame, the Sacré-Coeur and the Pont des Arts alternate with Parisian rooftops, cafés and art-nouveau metro stations” as well as centering on the iconographic setting of the French café. The film’s staging of the city as communal playground constitutes its homage to French cinema of the 1930s. In addition to René Clair’s Hôtel du nord (1931), which shares a Montmartre setting with Amélie, films such as Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (1930) and Le million (1931) feature apartment narratives that render these spaces as communal in their orientation, a similar attribute of Amélie as will be elaborated upon in subsequent paragraphs. Sous le toits de Paris, for instance, makes use of vertical crane shots

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to demonstrate the communal nature of its primary apartment space while both this film and Le Million make ample use of corridors and stairwells to initiate encounters among inhabitants of the apartments. Vanderschelden also makes note of Jeunet’s fascination with the films of Marcel Carné of the period, including Jour se lève and Le quai des brumes, while also observing that, unlike these films, Amélie does not go down the path of the doomed romance that is a key characteristic of many Poetic Realist films.62 However, the aesthetic palette of the film, including its use of color and style, falls in accordance with the popular cinéma du look films of the 1980s and 1990s, characterized by their specular usages of color and, more often than not, their equally spectacular forms of narrative action. As authors including Phil Powrie and Guy Austin-Smith have noted, cinéma du look is primarily comprised of the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Leos Carax, its unofficial inauguration commencing with the release of Beineix’s Diva (1980).63 A number of these early, specifically Parisianbased films including Diva, Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986) and Bessson’s Subway (1985) are all crime films, although Subway operates in far more comedic and populist vein than the other two. While the aesthetic choices made by all three directors are marked by the use of color, and by lavishly designed interior loft spaces in the case of Diva, Mauvais Sang is characterized by formal innovation including the use of still photos, unusual usages of framing as well as an intensely elliptical and kinesthetic mode of narration. This is very much in keeping with Carax’s films that center upon Denis Lavant, including Les amants du pont-neuf (1991) and most recently, Holy Motors (2012). While the work of these three directors is hardly identical, as my very brief consideration above suggests, they are all characterized by different forms of stylistic excess. Vincendeau argues that Amélie provides a digital updating of some of these kinds of effects, including making Amélie’s heart visible as it beats underneath her clothes and so on.64 In reconfiguring the aesthetic and narrational properties of these two distinctly different modes of French cinema, Amélie seems to offer “lite” variations of both. In line with Vincendeau’s assertions, Michelle Scatton-Tessier and Vanderschelden both view Amélie’s retreat into the annals of French cinema as that which forecloses an engagement with the contemporary circumstances of a globalizing France.65 Jeunet’s Montmartre is devoid of crime, of social tension, of the strangeness of city and, crucially, of an urban imagery that speaks directly to the present, a series of similar charges lauded against certain practitioners of cinéma du look.66 Vanderschelden illustrates the paradoxical nature of Jeunet’s use of setting in this regard. The film is shot on location in Montmartre,

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endowing its locations with a certain authenticity, which are then subject to various forms of stylization that remove temporal markers of both contemporary as well as historical Montmartre.67 Amélie returns to a mythical and cinematic rather than historical past, which reverberates with Strauss’ argument regarding French cinema’s penchant for “uninventive geographical representation” that results from an insular view of the nation and by extension, the city. In this case, “uninventive” is synonymous with “overly familiar”. In contrast, both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu exude a realist ethos as location shot imagery in both films remains muted and is not remade in order to serve a fantastic nor stereotypical purpose.68 Amélie’s foray into a specifically cinematic past is intimately tied to its depiction of the city’s public as well as private spaces in largely communal terms. An illustration of this particular brand of urban nostalgia is elucidated through a consideration of the film’s numerous café and apartment scenes. Cafés, of course, have come to constitute part of the iconographic repertoire of Paris, traced back at least to nineteenth-century modernity. The mise-en-scène of the café in this film exudes warmth as it is bathed in yellow light. Vanderschelden notes that the dominant color scheme of the film is comprised of reds, greens and golden tones, contrasting with the “gritty realism” of other 1990s French films.69 The interior of the café is rendered in exactly these colors as the waiting staff wear red and the surrounding décor is green and golden. Our first introduction to this space commences with the use of voice-over narration that introduces the spectator to each character, complete with a visual montage of their backstories and eccentricities. What we have is the presentation of what Vincendeau terms “the little people” of Paris, including the failed writer, owner of the café, resident hypochondriac and the stalker.70 This mode of depicting space is linked to characters who are de-anonymized through such introductions. A sense of the urban as akin to the communal is developed in this manner. Apartments also retain a certain specificity with regard to the urban imaginary of the city. Sharon Marcus argues that apartments, as a specifically urbanized form of housing that began to dominate the Parisian cityscape during the nineteenth century, embody a series of dialectical tensions: as a then unique form of urban housing that combined the relatively private spaces of individual apartment units with the common spaces of shared entrances, staircases and party walls, the apartment house embodied the continuity between domestic and urban, private and public spaces.71

She also details an “apartment plot” found in some of the literature of the period: “although highly episodic, apartment-house plots nonetheless

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glo b a l p a r i s 65 followed a strict narrative sequence: the conversion of strangers into kin, either by marriage or the revelation of prior relationships and the corollary transformation of randomness into structure”.72 In Amélie, this “plot” revolves around Amélie’s interactions with Raymond Dufayel and Madelaine Wallace, as well as other characters who enter the apartment such as Lucien. The apartment serves as the catalyst for all ensuing narrative action as Amélie’s discovery of the memory box posits her as an agent of intersection. As such, the apartment is a space that sparks interaction across the city, implicitly bridging the gap between the domestic and the urban along the lines of memory. The gaze is exceptionally significant to this plot as it unfolds across the film. During an early apartment scene, we see Amélie gazing down at Raymond Dufayal, who lives in the apartment below hers. She utilizes a looking device to achieve a closer view of his painting, as the voice-over narrates his story. Dufayal has a congenital bone disease that prevents him from leaving the apartment. During the course of the film, the two characters move from being strangers to kin. Jeunet situates Amélie as a lonely figure who, after gazing into Dufayal’s apartment for the second time, says that she “can’t relate to others”. She is transformed from a voyeur to participant in these moments of interaction with various characters. Amélie and Raymond help one another as she brings the outside world in by making Raymond videotapes while he utilizes his Renoir painting to illustrate to Amélie that she needs to take a risk with Nino. Like the café, the apartment is another space that embodies a sense of the communal. Code inconnu does not contain a comparable “café sequence”, but J’ai pas sommeil does. While the sequence begins by also providing us with a “picturesque” Montmartre, embodied in images of the Basilica, alienation rather than communalism is what looms large in Denis’ version of this scene. When Daiga, seated in a café in Montmartre, as indicated through the presence of the Sacré-Coeur in previous sequences, requests a coffee, she gestures “grand”, with her hands, already implying that her knowledge of French is rudimentary. This becomes explicit when Daiga attempts to pay for her bill and asks the bartender to write down what she owes. The bartender simply takes her money and says “It’s always like that, it was like that on St. Germain”. The migrant experience of the iconic Parisian space is one where she disrupts the order of things, and the bartender’s comments imply that this disruption is all too common in the touristic spaces of the city. The café is also transformed into a site of surveillance, as Daiga is observed by two undercover officers who follow her outside. When they tell her that she cannot park on the street, as France is not Lithuania, she tells one of them to “Clam up, seal dick” in Lithuanian.

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If the café scene in Amélie is one where nostalgic notions of the local are produced, this scene in J’ai pas sommeil is one where the migrant figure is rendered as Other because the localness of the space is made foreign by her presence. Code inconnu and J’ai pas sommeil, in an uncanny instance of convergence, relay a similar version of the “apartment plot”. The apartment sub-plot of J’ai pas sommeil concerns the character of Théo, who longs to return to Martinique. The interior of his apartment is comprised of warm colors including bright orange walls and motifs of Martinique found in wall hangings and bed covers, emblematic of his desire for departure rather than stasis. The apartment sub-plot in this film is a matter of interest, mainly as the relationship between inhabitants is depicted as the antithesis of the communal. There are scenes during which Théo hears a woman screaming in the apartment next door. The staircases and corridors function as public spaces, where Théo often passes this woman and her husband. At one point, Théo investigates the interior of their apartment when he sees the couple walking outside with some friends. The camera slowly tracks over his discovery of a dog chain and other devices of sexual torture. Anne in Code inconnu also hears sounds of domestic violence occurring in an adjacent apartment. There is a sequence, subject to much critical commentary, where Anne watches the television while ironing, during which she hears the sounds of a child screaming. In a later segment, she receives a letter regarding the child and walks next door to ask the elderly women if she is the author. As is the case in J’ai pas sommeil, apartment interiors both reveal and conceal domestic horrors through walls that are both permeable and impermeable to the exterior. Anne’s inability to act with regard to the child is met with her death, as indicated in a funeral sequence attended by Anne with her neighbor. Unlike Amélie, voyeurism in Denis’ and Haneke’s films has its limitations, where only so much is visible to the eye and the rest, only envisioned or heard. The archetypal Parisian spaces that make an appearance in Amélie signify inwards, particularly in their evocation of various myths of the city revolving around the construction of community and of public spaces as congenial to character interaction. These seemingly minor moments in both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, on the other hand, raise the specter of relationality on a global rather than local scale while simultaneously dismantling the mythology of the Parisian café and apartment building upheld in Amélie. In J’ai pas sommeil the café is not a space that brings people together and the apartments in both films operate as spaces of concealment, often of violence. Not only do apartment interiors contain dark

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glo b a l p a r i s 67 sexual secrets but it is also the space within which Camille and Raphaël kill their victims in Denis’ film.

Differentiated Mobilities Both Denis’ and Haneke’s Paris functions as the locus of differentiated mobility so that its network structure doesn’t give rise to communal resolution, as is the case with Amélie, but instead signals its complexity by bringing a series of productive tensions related to class, race and gender to bear upon one another. Unlike the “ethnically cleansed” version of Paris that serves as the setting of Amélie, Haneke’s and Denis’ city is peopled with migrant figures that signal Paris’ historical as well as contemporary connection to the world itself. While there is something of a migrant narrative in Amélie, it concerns an internal form of migration, where Amélie herself migrates from the French countryside to the city. The modes of mobility presented in J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu are differentiated in their presentation, as the counterpointing of characters occur across as well as within the same sequences. In these instances, the films fall in line with a prevalent thesis regarding the increased modes of differentiation that have arisen across global cities, as outlined in the Introduction. As such, these narrative events signify in accordance with the notion of the contemporary network narrative as both symptom and product of globalization as it relates specifically to migrant experiences. Denis develops a number of affinities between Daiga and Théo although, as Judith Mayne notes, the two never cross paths in the film. Daiga is subject to police surveillance near the start of the film, as mentioned previously. The sequence where Théo is asked to build a bookshelf for a white woman can also be read through the lens of racial prejudice, adding more fuel to his desire for Martinique as espoused at different points in the film.73 There are several suggestions of a racialized reading of the sequence, beginning with the woman refusing to give Théo a beer and then her indecision as to which wall the bookshelf looks better against, with complete disregard for the labor required to move it. Finally, the woman tries to her best not to pay Théo fully in cash, eventually remarking that for the price he charged, “I could have had a professional . . . I mean it’s like the black market, if I can put it that way”. There is an explicit indication that the city is not necessarily “migrant friendly”, especially to those whose appearance and language connotes their ethnicity. Ironically, near the end of the film, Camille is stopped for an identity check, a reference to the actual case where as Mayne notes, “in the real Paulin case, the murderer is stopped by police for an identity check, quite common for black

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and Arab men in Paris”.74 These instances are examples of allegories by association, where narrative events lend themselves to oblique rather than overt allegories of racialized prejudice. The “crushing of migrant dreams” scenario, which is a common feature of many films made about the migrant experience, is enacted in two ways in J’ai pas sommeil. For Daiga, her dream to work as an actress in Paris is deflated by Alexander’s refusal to hire her. Théo’s desire to return to Martinique is tempered by Mona’s refusal to go and perhaps by Camille’s arrest, although this remains ambiguous. The final long shot of Théo walking away from the police station renders him as a streetwalker. For Mayne, his departure down the street, coupled with Daiga’s departure at the end of the film signifies “that Théo’s dreams of movement, of returning to Martinique, have been dramatically foreclosed or at least deferred . . . we are left with the haunting sense that the price paid for her [Daiga] mobility is the foreclosure of the dreams of Théo”.75 This interpretation rests on the notion that Daiga informed the police about Camille’s whereabouts although this reading is unsubstantiated as such a scene is not present in the film and there are no direct allusions to such an event having taken place. Regardless, Daiga is able to simply leave and to keep moving as she has no ties in the city, while Théo’s departure cannot occur with the same degree of ease. The film differentiates between the condition of migrants that descend from the remains of the French colonial empire and relatively newer forms of migration from Eastern Europe. Haneke offers more charged and elaborate instances of differentiated mobility that echo observations made by both Zygmunt Bauman and Etienne Balibar concerning the unevenness of circulatory flows that ultimately deflate the promises of globalization as the great equalizer. For Balibar, strong differences exist between different kinds of circuitous paths that we have come to associate with globalization. As he writes: Nothing could be more wrong than the idea that globalization would be accompanied by a parallel growth of the material, immaterial and human circulatory flows. Where information has become practically “ubiquitous” and whereas the circulation of goods and currency conversions have become almost entirely “liberalized”, the movements of men are the object of heavier and heavier limitations.76

Some of Bauman’s arguments center upon this “heaviness” that Balibar describes, as viewed alongside the fortification of the elite in global cities. The effect of what Bauman refers to as “territoriality games” in the city, results in “the new fragmentation of the city space, the shrinkage and disappearance of public space, the falling apart of urban community,

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separation and segregation – and above all, the exterritoriality of the new elite and the forced territoriality of the rest”.77 The “shrinkage” of public space dovetails with Haneke’s pairing of street scenes, both of which result in the removal of migrant figures from the street, as will be discussed in more detail in subsequent paragraphs. In addition to depicting the “forced territoriality of the rest”, Haneke also gives us a figure of extraterritoriality in Georges, the white bourgeois war photographer who is given virtually unfettered mobility across the globe. While Code inconnu does not contain a flâneuse proper, the trope of the walking woman makes a sustained appearance in this film in the form of an illegal migrant, Maria, and the bourgeois French woman, Anne. Both figures are counterpointed with Georges at various points in the film. Georges’ identity as globetrotter is closely aligned with the photographic image. Our first filmic segment with Georges is constructed through a series of photographs from the Kosovo War and voice-over narration, which is in fact a letter to Anne. Kosovo appears in the film through a series of still images taken from a photojournalist. In an oftenquoted interview conducted by Nick James in Sight and Sound, Haneke speaks about Georges and the photographs of Kosovo: I wanted to show both sides of the ecology of images . . . on the one hand you have the photographer being praised for his war photography and on the other you have Arisinee Khanjian’s character Francine, who says his pictures are not necessary. So it’s all very ambiguous and I want the public to decide on a solution.78

Georges embodies the figure of the cosmopolitan elite in this film, granted access to the horrors of the world, but one from which he can return. A sequence that takes place between Anne, Georges and his father, in which the latter accuses Georges of being a trailblazer for Jean’s own departure to the city, confirms a reading of Georges as the urban cosmopolite. The cosmopolitan figure of this kind is always steeped in ambiguity as they can tell the stories of those who are oppressed and yet they are not oppressed themselves; it is an ambiguity that rests on class and racial privilege. The film grants us two kinds of images of Eastern Europe, one of wartorn Kosovo and that of Romania.79 The cinematic underside of Georges’ mobility is, of course, Maria, who is forced to return to Romania and can only move again via illegal means. Georges’ voice-over narration begins by detailing his experiences in Kosovo and ends by him speaking about his son and wishing Anne the best of luck for her film. However, the images on screen are that of the war, subtly revealing the class-based disconnect

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between sound and image. Bauman posits a distinction between those who live in “time” and those who reside in “space” within the parameters of the globalized world. He writes, residents of the first world live in time; space does not matter for them, since spanning every distance is instantaneous . . . residents of the second world, on the contrary, live in space: heavy, resilient, untouchable, which ties down time and keeps it beyond the residents’ control.80

Bauman elaborates upon some of the characteristics of this space, including “walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies”.81 Bauman’s claim regarding differential experiences of time and space are an apt description of the distinction the film makes between Georges’ mobility, governed by a freedom to move through time, and that of Maria, irrevocably tied to space. Maria in fact brings the heaviness of her second world mobilities into the first world, when she takes up residence on the streets of Paris. The final street scene in the film cements this relationship between those who live in time and those who reside in space; Georges, after being denied entry to Anne’s apartment, simply hails a taxi, while Maria, when displaced from her corner of the street where she begs in front of a shop, simply keeps walking. The non-diegetic sounds of drumming that pervade the scene set an uneasy, insistent and unharmonious rhythm to their movements, an apt soundtrack for differentiated modes of displacement.82 Georges operates in the guise of a flâneur of the Metro in scenes that are presented as counterpoint to Anne’s experience of the Metro later in the film. There are three segments that comprise this particular narrative thread. The first is structured as an insert where Georges places his camera on his chest and gazes at himself in the mirror. During the second segment, Georges wanders through the Metro with the camera on his chest. The final segment constructs Georges as an ethnographer of urban space as we see a series of still images of faces, which operates as a crosssection of the city. Georges narrates against the series of images as he speaks about being kidnapped by the Taliban, where at one point he was given a guard who could only say “what can I do for you?”, an empty gesture as the guard could neither say anything else nor understand the meaning of what he was uttering. At the end of this story, Georges says “Phil got us out by using his contacts at CNN”. Again, this story is representative of a mobility that is relatively unbounded and in fact inadvertently connects to the images on screen as they are the result of his unfettered voyeurism across the Metro. The very use of the photographs, in conjunction with

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glo b a l p a r i s 71 v­ oice-over narration, constructs Georges’ gaze as one that is decorporealized while that of Maria, for instance, is rendered as intensely corporeal. In keeping with Haneke’s reading of his own film, Georges meditates upon his role as photographer at the end of the sequence and wonders whether or not Francine could be right. Even this form of wavering is in keeping with the qualities of a cosmopolitan figure, who is generally aware of his/her own privilege. The still images of the inhabitants on the Metro recall the use of photographs in Amélie as a way of constructing the city as multitude. Nino’s scrapbook of faces, compiled from remnants of photo booth forays, is itself a representation of the city, which the voice-over labels as “some family album”. In Amélie, the multitude is recast as a family, in a communal Paris. But in this film there is nothing necessarily communal about these images, as they are derived from a voyeuristic perspective and not as a collection of urban artifacts. And yet, the sequence is an interesting instance of relationality, as the story of the Taliban is made to signify both within and against those of Paris. Haneke connects the city to larger global conflicts and implicitly insists on the need to see Paris in relation to the “world out there” that figures as disparate as Georges, Amadou and Maria bring home. This is reminiscent of a tactic employed by Godard in Deux ou trois choses, pointing towards an alternative urban imaginary of Paris that is invested in ascertaining the place of the city within the world and the presence of the world within the city. Anne functions as Georges’ bourgeois counterpart and yet she does not fare as well on a trip to the metro. She is sexually harassed by two Beur youths in a scene constructed as an associational allegory. This scene features Maurice Benichou, who almost seems to reprise his role in Caché in his cameo appearance in this film, as the figure of the noble migrant. By including two Metro scenes, the film implicitly asks the spectator to view them in relation to each other. While Georges remains the solitary voyeur in his flânerie of the space, Anne’s mobility is rendered less than easy even though she is also white and bourgeois. Anne is incessantly harassed by these two youths, one of whom explicitly identifies as Beur; as he says, “I’m just a little Beur looking for a little affection”. The youth who speaks to Anne is played by Walid Afkir, who also plays Majid’s son in Caché. At one point, the youth spits on her and Benichou’s unnamed character trips him up as he attempts to run off the train. Afkir returns to confront Benichou, who gives his glasses to Anne and tells him he should be ashamed. Haneke engages in the dismantling of a utopic view of public space, where it is only congenial for some. The Metro scene intertwines issues

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of race, gender and mobility in a complicated manner, visualizing the difficulty of both experiencing and interpreting urban encounters in gendered and racialized terms. In this scene, gendered forms of oppression take precedence over those associated with race. As such, Anne falls in line with a host of wandering women in European modernist cinema who embody the central ambivalences of the times. In this case, Anne resides on the threshold of both privilege and oppression in a way that illustrates the complexity of her gendered experience of public space within a context is simultaneously racialized. The “good” and “bad” Algerian are also counterpointed in this scene. Haneke seems keen to illustrate that class privilege as well as racial and gendered forms of identity are subject to shifting power dynamics, so that in this scene for example, Anne’s gender is what leads to her victimization, despite her class and racial privilege. Haneke eschews political correctness in favor of demonstrating a certain equality regarding who can assume a position of power, dependent entirely upon social context and irrespective of established notions of who should be a victim and who should assume the role of oppressor. In his refusal to choose sides, Haneke’s strategy of representation produces a sense of ambivalence, which is what partially leads to the kind of scholarly discomfort evidenced by Carrie Tarr for instance, who wants the film to construct a more explicit critique of the difficulties faced by West and North African characters. The modes of mobilization on display in the film, as embodied by various figures including migrants past and present as well as the bourgeois subject, construct an image of Paris in relational terms so that the city is situated in terms of its connection to other spaces. Haneke’s Paris is depicted as a global space while paradoxically also containing the seeds of a “Fortress” European city, so that insularity versus an expanded view of the city constitutes the central tension of the film. A similar claim can be made for J’ai pas sommeil, but in keeping with Denis’ auteurist signatures, her depiction of Parisian hierarchies are more subtle and restrained in their presentation.

Exorbitant Encounters The network narrative’s inherent ability to gesture towards differentiation through methods of parallelism are in effect in both films. While the depiction of differentiated mobility is perhaps a recognizable narrative of the kinds of inequality and unevenness generated by global cities like Paris, these films are also imbued with an exorbitant sensibility, which takes us beyond a familiar global city story into the domain of opacity.

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glo b a l p a r i s 73 Returning to the parameters of the network narrative, Amélie’s brand of intersection privileges legibility, as urban encounters signify within the vein of wish fulfillment and resolution. And Amélie herself is the agent of intersection, a flâneuse who orchestrates chance encounters across the city. Jeunet situates her as an all-seeing urban figure, who studies individual topographies in the city and then performs her acts of goodness. Amélie’s mode of flânerie facilitates collision in the city, by either bringing individuals together or illustrating to them that they must change their behavior. While in both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu part of the work that the film imparts upon the spectator is the gradual discovery of the connections between characters, Amélie performs this work for us as the narratives of characters are related in comedic fashion, often drawing upon a magic realist style of depiction. As such, exorbitancy is exactly what Amélie works to overcome, in its portrait of a very localized, yet magical Montmartre. The film’s ending seals its nostalgic utopianism as we receive a montage of Amélie’s newly revived Montmartre where various characters have either received their wishes or are living different lives. The failed writer Hipolito is cheered by seeing a quote of his on a wall, Bretodeau now makes a roast chicken for the grandson he has not seen in years, Raymond continues to paint while Amélie’s father finally goes abroad. Yet the film also posits a regressive divide between seeing and living. During the scene where Amélie and Nino finally connect in her apartment, Amélie first views a videotape from Raymond instructing her not to miss her chance. Raymond is transformed into a voyeur while Amélie begins to “live”. There is a shot of Raymond and Lucien observing Amélie with Nino in her apartment, which constitutes a reversal of the gaze. The film ends by depicting a new mode of mobility, where Amélie is on the back seat of Nino’s bike, and Nino is now in control of their movements in Montmartre. According to this narrative logic, in order to live, Amélie must cease to look. Similar kinds of chance encounters in both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu that bring together disparate characters in moments of intersection and interaction, transform Paris into an exorbitant city that revels in the difficulty of interpretation but in a way that corresponds to the directorial signatures of their respective directors. The most enigmatic of such encounters in J’ai pas sommeil concerns the brief meeting between Daiga and Camille, preceded by Daiga’s investigation of Camille that takes her into his hotel room. In her guise as walking woman, Daiga, like Anne, also joins the litany of wandering women located in the annals of post-war European modernist filmmaking. But in a significant twist, Denis renders

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Daiga and Camille as parallel figures in this film, so that the mobility of one has to be conceptualized in relationship to the mobility of the other.83 The exorbitance of Denis’ Paris makes itself evident in the opening of the film, where Daiga drives into the city from Lithuania, undetected by the police helicopter patrolling the motorway below. Daiga’s arrival to the city is intercut with Camille’s wanderings on the stairs of Montmartre and his attack on Raphaël in the street. What becomes clear early on in the film is that both characters are largely nomadic. Both are prominent within the film’s “streetwalking scenes”. “Home” for both figures is the hotel where Daiga works. The hotel lobby and stairs, its main public spaces, function as the site of character intersections, particularly between Daiga, Camille and Raphaël. A significant difference between the two characters lies in the depiction of their respective gazes. As Judith Mayne has observed, there is a reversal of the gaze as is revealed during interactions between Daiga and Camille, as he is often the object of her gaze and never the other way around.84 This form of association reverses the position of the male and female streetwalker, as it is the flâneuse who is granted the power of the look. Another reversal concerns the fact that Camille is subjected to the fetishistic gaze of men in this film, while Daiga assumes a degree of androgyny, as noted by several scholars. These forms of gender-based reversal are in keeping with a significant attribute of Denis’ filmmaking, as she frequently positions mobile women as active bearers of the look.85 Both Camille and Daiga are granted a number of streetwalking scenes, most of which carry little narrative purpose but rather exhibit different rhythms of the street as related to character mobility. Most of Camille’s streetwalking scenes function as inserts between longer sequences, set to the non-diegetic beat of the Tindersticks score. These brief inserts construct Camille as a transitory figure, who flits between spaces, occasionally stopping at Théo’s but either residing in transitional spaces, such as the hotel or walking the streets. Camille embodies the figure of the stranger in the film, which is how Théo refers to him after his arrest. In yet another form of reversal, Camille is more of a stranger than Daiga, even though he is a resident of the city. The tones of the music add to his enigmatic presence, differentiating his streetwalking from that of Daiga’s, although ostensibly, she is also a stranger in the city. Daiga’s second streetwalking scene in the film involves tailing Camille. This sequence takes place after Daiga views the mug shots of Camille and Raphaël in the police station. This walk takes us into the darker edges of Montmartre, as they move past several porn shops. The music stops as the pair enter the café, with Camille paying for her coffee. The brushing

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Figure 1.3  Camille and Daiga’s hands brush in a fleeting moment of connection.

of their hands in close-up marks the extent of their interaction in the film (Figure 1.3). The film’s two nomadic figures, rendered as outsiders in the city, stand side by side in the café. What we have here is a kind of choreography of the crossroads as migration past and present collide in this moment of detection, surveillance and touch that resists definitive interpretation. While Daiga easily follows Camille in a way that suggests the success of detection and surveillance, this brief encounter is quite literally “off the map”, its possible meanings extending beyond their cartographic co-ordinates. Returning to the work of Abbas on the exorbitance of cities, he identifies an erotic component to this particular image of the urban. This brand of eroticism exceeds its traditional affiliations to envelop what Abbas refers to as the “uncertain sociality” of cities, of encounters with others that offer a heady mix of desire, mystery and bewilderment.86 I link this mode of eroticism with the experiential textures of fragmentation and ephemerality that can be induced through the network narrative as it is governed by the logistics of intersection. This form of eroticism, however, is singularly diluted in a film like Amélie, partly because Jeunet’s cinematic Montmartre is devoid of the figure of the stranger. All of the characters are eventually transformed into kin, so that the film as a whole confirms Paris as a place of community. This is a film that seeks to restore its initially fractured urban community. But paradoxically, Jeunet’s Montmartre also signifies as closed, shut off from the possibilities that the contemporary

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mélange of the city can bring, and encased as an image of the city as depicted in its cinematic past. The atmosphere of uncertainty and enigma that Abbas links to the exorbitant city has no place in Amélie’s Paris, the erotics of intersection resolving itself in romantic cliché. The fleeting nature of urban intersections and interactions take on a fixed quality in this film, solidified in the definitive transformations of each character and in the relationship of Amélie and Nino. J’ai pas sommeil, however, fully indulges in the possibilities of the erotics of intersection, its point of culmination resting on the brushing of Camille and Daiga’s hands in the café. This moment holds in tension the sense of artifice that underpins the network narrative as form, brought out forcefully here through the choreographed nature of this movement, with an equally pronounced sensibility of ephemerality that a fleeting touch between strangers can bring. There is a certain perversity to this sequence as Daiga is essentially brushing hands with a serial killer. The setting of this momentary connection, the café, is a quintessential space belonging to the modern identity of the city, facilitating moments of connection. This modern setting however is where a global encounter occurs, between figures signifying migration old and new; Camille’s identity extends beyond his status as “granny killer” as he is also emblematic of settled migrant communities in France that descend from the shards of empire while Daiga signifies as an emissary of contemporary forms of economic migration from Eastern to Western Europe. Just how are we to understand this sequence? If I wish to read it as an instance of an “allegory by association”, whereby two migrant figures are brought together in order to demonstrate the affinity of their plight, this assessment of events leads in a series of unexpected directions. Camille is not presented as a victim of the city or of racial prejudice in any overt way. If anything, the district of Montmartre is at his mercy. While Daiga is Otherized on account of her gender and ethnicity at times, she isn’t a victim any more than Camille is, even if her Parisian dreams for an acting career are completely destroyed. In some respects, it is Camille who is her victim as she takes his money in order to leave Paris. Under the mantle of an authorial interpretation, this sequence points to a recurring characteristic of Denis’ filmmaking where her emphasis on the interaction between bodies, residing in the use of gesture, touch and the gaze, renders these intersections difficult to read through a single optic. Perhaps we can read this difficulty as a further variation of the allegory by association, one concerning the potentially opaque nature of the global city, its complexities standing in the way of its legibility, the questions it raises superseding any answers that can be provided. Part of this complexity is related to the

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glo b a l p a r i s 77 fact that Denis’ Montmartre, unlike Jeunet’s, is peopled with strangers who wear their darkness on their sleeve. A second complexity in this case also concerns the different modes of signification that can be attached to Daiga’s mobility, some related to discourses of “walking women”, others related to her migrant status in the city, and a further one that engages in a reversal of gender-based signification. Code inconnu provides us with a second model of Paris as exorbitant city, even in the face of what many view as its obvious legibility. Like J’ai pas sommeil, the question of exorbitance is raised at the very start of the film, but unlike the former, this sense of exorbitance revolves around the question of communication. The film opens with its first “code unknown” where a deaf girl attempts to communicate something to her classmates through a game of charades, but no one can understand what she is trying to say. This is the first of other similar moments in the film that emphasize the difficulty of communication as the source of a particular form of exorbitance, one that is then projected onto the city and its encounters in subsequent sequences. If Denis’ films can be subsumed, in part, under the aegis of modernist filmmaking, resulting from aesthetic choices that foreground ambiguity, opacity and mystery, Haneke’s cinema leans towards political modernism, as Catherine Wheatley argues. For Rosalind Galt, Haneke’s insistence on viewing himself as European auteur, embattled in a crusade against the mind-numbing practices of Hollywood cinema, necessarily validates the continuing significance of modernist filmmaking as an oppositional practice.87 Haneke’s “oppositional aesthetic” has come under critique, especially with regard to sequences that feature urban encounters underwritten by anger and violence. A case in point is the first street sequence in the film, which begins with Anne, who leaves her apartment and then immediately runs into Jean, who says he failed to gain access to the apartment because she changed the door code. Jean is the first arrival to the city, having decided to move to Paris from the countryside, as he tells Anne. Jean’s arrival functions as a citation of a generic narrative of the city, which is that of the migration from the countryside to the city. The façade of Anne’s residence does not resemble an apartment but simply blends into the mise-en-scène of the surrounding buildings. As numerous scholars have observed, the door code, which functions in both a literal and metaphorical fashion, constructs the apartment as a fortress, as clearly divisible from the street. The mythology of the Parisian apartment sketched in Amélie is now an emblem of a closed rather than a communal city. This sense of Paris as a fortified city becomes stronger as the film progresses, but is held

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at a tense counterpoint with its porosity as indicated through the mobility of migrant figures. The sense of space that emerges in this sequence is profoundly lateral, moving along a single axis, either right or left depending on character mobility. The use of the long take preserves the continuity of action and as such, mobility across the space of the scene is emphasized. The first street scene brings together several important figures in a form of collision that is reminiscent of Siegfried Kracauer’s well-known conceptualization of the street as a site of possibility and connection.88 And yet, as Catherine Wheatley has observed, the use of the long take in these instances also operates in the opposite fashion of the Bazinian long-take, as the characters on this street are abstract and objectified, operating as obvious stand-ins for a well-known discourse concerning “Fortress Europe”; Jean throws a paper bag on Maria, who sits on the street corner begging, and is then stopped by Amadou as he tries to force Jean to apologize.89 This moment of interaction constitutes the third “unknown code” because at this point, we do not have any information regarding the “backstory” of either Maria or Amadou. Gradually, more pieces of narrative and character information emerge, allowing us to ascertain the fate of each character. The notion of a choreographed crossroads is also a feature of this film, as indicated through this street scene, among other similar scenes, including the film’s final street sequence. There is a certain tension between the realism of the scene, which comes across through the use of location shooting, the movement of other passers-by on the street and consistent sonic allusions to the space outside the frame, and the choreographed nature of this encounter. Haneke brings together these particular characters, whose movements along St. Germain speak to the present but also quite subtly to the past, in a way that the mise-en-scène of the scene does not. While Tom Conley subjects this particular scene to an illuminating analysis of some of its less visible details, in a way, this is part of the point; the street is generic in its presentation and for some its location might only become evident in the moment that Anne asks Jean when he arrived in Paris.90 This is in keeping with the iconographic parameters of global cities more broadly, but the actual figures in the scene suggest a more complex reading of space and history. An allegory by association emerges here, raising the question of whether or not this scene leads to unequivocal modes of interpretation. Certainly, the scene contains allegorical associations that lead to a racialized reading of the particular sequence, but the sequence itself cannot be deemed a racial incident as such. The only overtly racialized comment uttered by a character in the scene is a shopkeeper who glances at Amadou and says,

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“It’s typical”. Otherwise, the allegory is shaped by how the incident ends for each character. Jean is given back his identity card while Maria is taken away. Amadou does not receive his identity card when he asks and also insists that he go to the police station on his own accord. The scene ends as a struggle breaks out between him and the police. Fatima Navqi views this scene as “glibly multicultural” as it contains “representatives of target groups”.91 In sympathy with Navqi, Rosalind Galt reads the film’s discourse on “Europe” as that which is often depicted in didactic fashion.92 While the sequence’s surface obviousness is readily apparent, there are further layers of signification that open up this street scene to alternative readings. While Galt argues that this sequence tells the story of “the expanded European Union”, detailing its long list of social problems that concern racism, immigration, and economic polarization, I suggest that this scene takes us beyond the confines of the EU.93 The lack of backstory contributes to a reading of the scene as an associational rather than direct allegory. It is only later in the film that we realize Maria is an illegal migrant from Romania trying to work in Paris and that Amadou is a member of a family from Mali, a former French colony. It is the settled migrant who intervenes on behalf of the contemporary migrant, a reading that is only possible in retrospect. As is the case in Denis’ film, Haneke similarly constructs moments of interaction and intersection between migration past and present. This particular collision then does not simply signify within the present tense of Paris as global city, or even as part of the social ills of the European Union but stretches even further back in offering a comparative lens through which to view the treatment of Amadou and Maria, whereby the two figures are ostensibly treated in the same manner, even though the former is presumed as a “national” while the latter is an member of the “sans-papier”. As Balibar argues with respect to “foreigners” residing in France, irrespective of whether or not they have their papers, their presence emblematizes citizenship at a crossroads, a notion that Haneke brings to life in a three-way comparison that can be enacted between the treatment of Jean versus that of Maria and Amadou.94 Rather than engaging in the depiction of a kind of leveling of difference, mirrored through the film’s insistence on the horizontal nature of its street-based setting, this scene is suggestive of an affinity between past and the present.95 While Navqi argues that the illustration of contrasting modes of mobility in this scene establishes a sense of verticality despite the West’s disavowal of its importance, this reading fails to take into account France’s longstanding history regarding the difficulties of integration that remain very much on the surface of its political discourse.96 What is implied by the end of the sequence is a kind of cleansing of the street of

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what signifies as an undesirable migrant/diasporic presence. If Amélie’s Paris is largely stripped of an ethnic or racialized presence, Code inconnu stages the way in which such “cleansing” can transpire within the space of the city. Galt argues that the complexity of this sequence doesn’t rely on much other than “liberal guilt on the part of the audience”.97 However, I would argue that the effects of the sequence extend beyond the evocation of leftliberal guilt. The difficulty Amadou experiences when trying to explain what has transpired to Anne and then to the police is key to the fraught nature of this encounter; in fact, we never hear what Amadou tells the police about the incident as the camera follows a second officer who hauls Maria back to the scene. While all seems straightforward enough, the sequence brings to life the difficulty of naming incidents in all of their complexity and, more significantly, that such complexity exceeds its attempts at legibility through communication. Amadou’s rage at Jean is clearly based on his humiliating treatment of a woman who constitutes the underclass of French society, as he himself eventually states. As such, Amadou assumes the role of “the good civilian” in the city. And yet Haneke demonstrates how such an encounter immediately becomes racialized by default, by bystanders and the police, even if race was not a primary factor in Amadou’s initial confrontation with Jean. It is this overdetermination of the incident by the police and other characters that accounts for Amadou’s later difficulty in explaining the situation and for the scene’s resolution that only sees Jean walk away with his identification card in hand. A second ambivalence emerges as Amadou’s well-intended actions have dire consequences, the price that is paid for visibility. In defending Maria, Amadou renders himself and her visible to the authoritarian regimes of the city, resulting in her deportation and his own arrest. While Denis shrouds the exorbitant encounters of global Montmartre in enigma for the spectator, Haneke reflexively illustrates the struggles of interpretation and its consequences that the global city itself engenders among its inhabitants, temporary or otherwise. It is this difficulty that constructs Haneke’s city not only as a differentiated space but also one that leans toward the exorbitant. In doing so, Haneke’s city, like Denis’, lies at a crossroads between various forms of fortification and the impossibility of insulating the city from its migratory history, taking us from the French countryside all the way to the former colonies of the French empire. As such, what Code inconnu illustrates is the impossibility of an image of Paris as a coherent place. This sense of “impossibility” emerges from the film’s formal qualities where Paris is constituted as a series of cinematic

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glo b a l p a r i s 81 fragments that represent the city as a relational space, resulting specifically from the fact of migration, in its various incarnations.

Paris and the World: Some Conclusions The template of the network narrative, a form with modernist roots, undergoes a significant reworking in both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, leading to what I consider to be both recognizable depictions of global cities in addition to more inventive representations of the city. In this way, both films fulfill the criteria of the ideal “world cinema” text, one that offers a balance between sameness and difference, as well as familiarity and unfamiliarity. Part of the inventiveness of these films lies in their downplaying of archetypal depictions of the city; Amélie’s status as foil text in this chapter serves a number of purposes, not the least of which is to hold up a well worn image of the city for comparison, one that emerges through a version of the network narrative invested in the depiction of connection and resolution. To draw upon Abbas’ terminology, Amélie offers a Paris of familiar and largely static “pictures” while J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu foreground narrative events that are distinctly urban in their depiction of ephemeral encounters and the complexities of unexpected moments of intersection. The form of reconfiguration on offer in Amélie returns us to an idealized cinematic past in its retreat from the contemporary conditions of the global city, while J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu feature a global present where such traces of imperial past are made visible through character interaction. Denis’ Paris, as is the case in a number of her films, treads the line between the specific and the generic; for example touristic images of Notre-Dame are interwoven with sequences in a hotel that transform this space into a scene of horror in Trouble Every Day (2001), and a picturesque image of the Parisian skyline opens Vendredi soir (2002) before plunging into an unfamiliar, nocturnal city. J’ai pas sommeil is set in a Montmartre that is recognizable through certain iconographic markers but, ultimately, made strange and unfamiliar. This strangeness is not just related to what many have viewed as its largely banal depiction of urban violence in the figure of Camille, or other forms of de-spectacularization, but through moments of intersection and interaction that bring two different historical moments of urban migration together in ways that trouble attempts at definitive interpretation. Denis’ relational aesthetic in this film, one that involves intersection, interaction and parallels, is the source of its exorbitancy. While

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J’ai pas sommeil is set entirely in Montmartre, specters of elsewhere abound in this film. The most prominent of these references are those to Martinique, as mentioned previously, which are evoked through visual as well as narrational means. Théo’s desire to return home implicitly raises the question of colonialism and exile even though these issues are not worked out in narrative terms. Théo sarcastically presents a Eurocentric view of Martinique to Mona and her mother during a dinner conversation, in which he describes “a day in the life of Martinique”, where Théo will go fishing and Mona will fetch water from the house in the nude as no one wears clothes. That Martinique remains under French governance signifies as an enduring trace of French imperial history, and as such, the inclusion of a family from Martinique does testify to a certain insistence on the part of Denis to view Paris in relation to its colonial past, a past that continues to structure the contemporary desires of characters. Haneke’s Paris, in contrast, is barely recognizable, containing no iconographic markers of the city to speak of. Haneke’s city is a far more insistently relational and referential space than the city in J’ai pas sommeil, signifying outward rather than inward and, as such, making it rather difficult to view the city as a “blank canvas” in the way that Tarr does. What the film illustrates is the impossibility of an image of Paris as a coherent place. While Michael Cowan’s insightful piece on the film delves into its depiction of relationality at the level of form, whereby the prominent use of off-space and sound continually points beyond the confines of the frame, this extends to a view of the city and its place in the world.98 Haneke’s mode of relationality involves situating the city in terms of its internal past, which is that of the countryside, its imperial past, as materialized through the narrative of Amadou and his family and finally, in relation to its global present, as embodied in the movements of the Eastern European migrant. Even the displaced presence of Eastern Europe in Code inconnu but also J’ai pas sommeil speaks to the past as much as it does to the contemporary moment as its evocation through migratory figures can be taken up as a reference to the end of the Soviet Bloc and what scholars including Jonathan Crary have delineated as the event that facilitated the “final globalization of the West”.99 The pairing of certain scenes, along with echoes and reverberations that are present across numerous sequences are also what render Haneke’s topographical depiction of space as an analysis of Paris as both a relational and hierarchical city. Relationality in this film is similarly what leads to an exorbitant image of the city, but through more politically charged and reflexive means. His city is insistently positioned in a milieu of urban crisis that resides at the level of civilian action and

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non-action. Haneke’s narrative approach in this film is very much in keeping with his auteurist signatures. The network narrative then, rather than just operating a formal corollary to the experiences of globalization in the present tense, occasionally gives rise to the experience of the past-present in these films. Amélie, on the other hand, gives us a city where the past is the present, a method of depicting urban space that actively denies the contemporary state of the city by erasing its traces through digital means. While neither J’ai pas sommeil nor Code inconnu literalizes the presence of the past in the present through the use of flashback storytelling for example, such interpretations are subtly suggested by characters’ trajectories. Both films open up the possibility of viewing these particular urban encounters as allegories of the elusive and exorbitant nature of the global city, its dynamics giving rise to tensions and contradictions in place of legibility and clarity. I view the network narratives in these films in their diagnostic capacity, speaking to the difficulties of the present as they relate to the past and also, to the world at large. It is this ambiguity that safeguards the use of the network narrative by these directors from its mainstreaming tendencies, in ­evidence in a film such as Amélie. The narrative trajectories of these films are very much in keeping with the notions of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration that were previously delineated as the ways by which the imperial past often surreptitiously makes its way into narratives that seemingly have nothing to do with those histories. It is the presence of these histories, displaced onto character trajectories in ways that stage the difficulty of interpretation, that allow the network narratives of these films to retain the promise of innovation in resisting dominant ways of handling cities and their stories. The moments of “choreographed crossroads” traced across both films are exactly the points at which it becomes difficult to discern whether or not encounters between characters render them similar to or different from each other. A key question that is suggested but remains unanswered in both films is whether or not there is in fact any measure of continuity between the treatment of migrants from former imperial colonies and of newer forms of economic migration from Eastern Europe. Such difficulties have to do with what I posit here as the “global uncanny”, an experience of intense familiarity that is channeled through these meetings that more obviously foreground the fact of difference. In beginning this chapter by revisiting Deux ou trois choses, I set the stage for the consideration of a distinct imaginary of the city, one that stages the kinds of tensions that arise from a city seemingly closing it on itself, matched by an equal insistence on the city’s relationship to global

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events. If there is a history of representation to be sketched in this regard, this chapter takes the first steps in doing so. But is there a further continuity we can trace here, linking these films and Deux ou trois choses before them, back to the dawn of European post-war modernist cinema? Barring of course the explicitly political films by Chris Marker, Alain Renais and others that we can file under the heading of political modernism, Mark Betz has shed light on the way in which the imperial past assumes a displaced presence within European modernism proper, in the guise of the walking woman whose movements allude to the socio-political and economic tensions of their time. While the walking woman retains a strong presence in all of the films discussed thus far, in addition to the use of a fragmented narrative aesthetic that is also a feature of certain kinds of art cinema, a far more significant and overarching continuity concerns the visibility of signs of empire, made manifest through implicit rather than explicit means. As such, the films’ relational gestures, especially as they pertain to the imperial past, are limited to the degree to which they become recognizable. This is even true of Deux ou trois choses, its politics focalized more intently and directly upon the dawn of the American empire than on France’s imperial past. But in the case of films such as J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, there are further considerations of how we relate the dynamics of these films, which lie at the threshold between specific and more displaced representations of the imperial past, to what I have deemed their world cinema status. This leads to a consideration of the potential political ambivalences of these films. There are many ways of framing this discussion, but I delve into this matter by working within the parameters of “Haneke criticism” first, teasing out two poles of a significant debate. Rosalind Galt for instance charges Haneke with the crime of Eurocentrism, of which he perhaps cannot be entirely exonerated.100 Galt astutely points out that Haneke’s recycled use of the well-known formulas of European art cinema is most probably linked to his mode of address, which is to a European audience or at the very least, spectators well-versed in the mores of European art cinema.101 Wheatley takes a very different tack when discussing the political value of Haneke’s work, arguing that the fundamental problem with both left- and right-wing appropriations of Haneke’s films, particularly in the case of Code inconnu, is that they often eschew the way in which Haneke’s reflexive techniques “call into question everything that we see and hear, and which should foreclose the possibility of the film being ‘read’ as a clear statement”.102 Denis’ work is haunted by a comparable insinuation to the one Galt levels at Haneke, where scholars have questioned her representational

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glo b a l p a r i s 85 practices in terms of whether or not she should be making films about the topics of colonialism and postcolonialism that originate from a white, French perspective. Stuart Hall for instance views Denis’ first feature film, Chocolat, as postcolonial “by default”, and more to the point, as an illustration of the type of film that Europeans should be making about imperialism, that “confronts what colonization has done to them”.103 Haneke’s view of himself, as a filmmaker working in opposition to Hollywood, as well as his use of reflexivity as a political tool, differentiates him from Denis, whose interviews convey a more exploratory tone and whose work emanates an ambiguous sensibility that oscillates between pleasure and perversity.104 Nonetheless, the politics of location remain central to both directors as it relates to their critical reception. A tension emerges here between Denis’ and Haneke’s positioning as European directors and these two films, among others, that depict migratory experiences that move beyond Europe in their evocation of imperial histories as well as more contemporary experiences of the Balkans War and transnational terrorism. What these criticisms of Haneke’s and Denis’ cinema enforce are the potential limitations of the very relationality that they seek to represent, ones that Denis points towards more liberally than Haneke through interviews. We can take this very specific example as indicative of the kind of tensions that lie at the heart of notions of world cinema as outlined in the Introduction; as the commentary on these films suggest, there is the question of just how global are the films that we most often christen “world cinema”? While French films made between 1954 and 1962 were prevented from making direct allusions to the Algerian War as a result of strict censorship policies, there is no such reason standing in the way of either Denis or Haneke choosing to take a less oblique path in their depiction of “migrant Paris”. The argument that I have made in this section involves viewing these films through the lens of exorbitancy, as a way of claiming that the ambivalence they facilitate, both within the films themselves that extends to the critical discourse about them, seems to be the point. Both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu narrate the kinds of contradictions that have come to define the experience of the global city. These concern confrontations around class, race and gender that raise the question of difference in highlighting the politics of exclusion and of alienation. In recalling the imperial past, the films also concretize global Paris as a historical space, despite the fact that the urban imagery of their cities appears to tell the opposite story. In holding up both ends of the global spectrum, where the often blurred images of the city of these films serves as the backdrop for insistently embodied forms of difference,

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a dialectical gesture emerges, one where tensions between sameness and difference are made palpable and unresolved. Opening up room for contemplation, debate and even ambivalence is perhaps the manner in which a European director should address the topic of migrancy and the city, rather than speaking definitively on behalf of anyone. This is in effect what modernist filmmaking, in all of its ambiguity, allows for. The cost of this particular brand of politics involves the negation of a certain specificity, which is a treasured hallmark of more overt forms of political filmmaking such as Third Cinema. But there is then also the question of what is gained. Denis and Haneke develop modes of representation that capture the difficulty of navigating through the maze of differentiation of the global that extends to the complexity of its politics and to the kinds of uncertainties that cloud easy judgments over what differences matter the most. If this is where the possible political utility of the films lie, it is similarly impossible to ignore their easy circulation that results from their recognition as world cinema texts made by world cinema directors that perhaps retain the luxury of ambivalence. And yet, engaging with the question of difference, even if obliquely, makes the Paris of these films signify in opposition from the static, self-referential and insular nature of the city in Amélie. That these contradictions cannot be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction gives rise to exactly the kind of global dynamics that should make their way more actively into world cinema discourse, in a way that allows us to glimpse the reconfiguration of different filmic forms into their global guise and to think more carefully about the kinds of politics and critical responses that such reworkings engender. What is at stake is the very notion of the world in “world cinema”. 1.3  DWELLING SPACE AS CITY SPACE In “The Functionary of Mankind: Michael Haneke and Europe”, Rosalind Galt ends her critique of what she sees as the limitations of Haneke’s Eurocentric perspective by making a significant claim concerning the way in which “we”, meaning both film theorists and filmmakers, have moved past the valorization of Brechtian aesthetics as the ultimate political gesture that severs ties between the aesthetic attributes of Hollywood cinema and its channeling of the so-called “dominant ideology”. Turning to Haneke more specifically, she argues that his presentation of migrant and excluded figures needs to move past the abstract figuration of their trauma in order to position them as active agents of political change and transformation.105

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For Galt then, Haneke’s aesthetic project, and more to the point, the way in which his films offer a continuation of some of the tenets of European modernist filmmaking, is decidedly dated; rather than falling in line with recent postulations concerning the importance of identification and empathy as mechanisms for generating a progressive politics through the cinema, Haneke’s films hark back to an older vanguard of political filmmaking in his often brutal interrogation of the perils of identification. While Galt’s comments to this effect are both valuable and valid, they don’t quite explain the plethora of literature on Haneke’s cinema, much of its emerging within the last five years or so, and much of it centered on Caché. If film theory has truly gotten over its central preoccupation with the politics of form, scholarly interest in Haneke’s work would seem to suggest otherwise. Caché, in keeping with the bulk of Haneke’s films, takes the bourgeois family as its primary subject and its central target. Anne and Georges (not the last incarnation of characters previously named as such as Haneke’s Amour (2012) continues this tradition), along with their son Pierrot, are terrorized by an unknown stalker who leaves videotapes on their doorstep, and sends them unsettling drawings. Gradually, the tapes and drawings expose elements of Georges’ childhood regarding his ill treatment of Majid, an Algerian boy whom his parents were planning to adopt until Georges complained that Majid was coughing up blood. Georges’ past with Majid is also tied to the massacre of Algerian protesters on the streets of Paris on 17 October 1961, which is where Majid’s parents, who worked for Georges’ family, presumably died. The slow revelation of this secret leads to a further unraveling of the bourgeois unit, as Pierrot disappears for an evening and Anne becomes increasingly incensed at Georges’ silence. Georges accuses the now adult Majid of sending the tapes, and later of kidnapping his son, which eventually leads to Majid’s suicide. Forced into being a witness to Majid’s death, Georges is first confronted with Majid’s son and then eventually retreats into his home. The film ends on a now infamously ambiguous note with a meeting between Pierrot and Majid’s son, the contents of which are not revealed to the spectator as it is rendered in long shot. For Catherine Wheatley, the ever expanding literature on the film rests upon the multiplicity of readings that it invites, the logical consequence of what she refers to as Haneke’s “just enough” strategy; as she puts it, “according to its director this is a film about Algeria that really has nothing to do with Algeria, a whodunit whose riddle has no answer and for which any hypothesis that we might offer in any case would be irrelevant”.106 The existing body of scholarship on Caché bears testament to this claim, much of it involving a veritable resurrection of longstanding theoretical

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investigations. These concern the question of identification/complicity/ ethics of spectatorship, the ontological status of the image, the use of self-reflexivity, and the power of the gaze, mixed in with contemporary concerns related to technologies of surveillance, to French brands of historical amnesia and racism, and even the transition from analogue to digital imagery.107 In response to Galt, it seems to me that Haneke’s work in general, and especially Caché, allow film scholars still invested in the lessons of high modernism to flex their analytical muscles within wellknown territory. My approach to this film takes us down a different path, which is why I justify its inclusion in this book and, more broadly, justify its existence as one more contribution to what we can refer to in jest as “Haneke studies”. Caché reveals yet another paradigm for a study of the “past-present”, where an overwhelming sense of affinity between past and present circumstances presides. If the network narrative was the primary focus of the previous section, a mode of storytelling that serves as a diagnostic tool for the analysis of contemporary conditions of globalization and its imbrication with the past, this section turns its attention to the use of setting in Caché, in order to demonstrate that the film’s generic surfaces are anything but. More specifically, this section examines dwelling spaces, including a special focus on the domain of interior space as meeting ground between past and present. While the film’s nondescript Parisian setting evokes a reading of the city in its global guise, when the film is situated and examined within a number of historical contexts, ranging from socio-political narratives of the period detailed by Kristin Ross to a number of cinematic trajectories related to two distinct manifestations of cinéma de banlieue, its underlying specificity with respect to the story of urban planning in 1960s Paris and migration begins to emerge with a vengeance. A reading of the film’s interior spaces in this light provides yet another angle through which to grasp its thematization of the complex relationship between past and present, the topic investigated by most analytical inquiries of the film. In an astute analysis of the film, Ipek A. Celik utilizes the tapes that Georges receives to demonstrate how the film gives rise to a multiplicity of temporalities, in both its referencing of the past and the manner in which the tapes fuel Georges actions towards Majid.108 I am interested in thinking specifically about how the dwelling spaces in the film, their exteriors but perhaps, more crucially, their interiors, achieve a similar feat. In doing so, I not only offer an analysis of Paris in this film at a crossroads between its imperial past and its global present, but also a view of the cinematic city that is the sum of both its exterior and its interior spaces. In several passages across The Arcades Project, Benjamin observes

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glo b a l p a r i s 89 that the figure of the flâneur treats the city of Paris as though it were one large interior, where the city’s quartiers are akin to rooms.109 As Benjamin notes, for the flâneur, the city is both landscape and room, and he speculates that such blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior may be responsible for the décor of the department store, the “last precincts of flânerie”.110 The question that guides my analytical framework, in keeping with the porous boundaries between urban interiors and exteriors, is what happens if we reverse the relation and treat the interior as a form of urban space? What can the interior tell us about the city within which it resides? A final question is reserved for the end of this section that takes us back to some of Galt’s observations, as tailored specifically to the parameters of my inquiry. How do we assess the political significance of Haneke’s depiction of Paris in this film, particularly when the film is situated within and against a number of contemporary banlieue films that suggest alternate ways of imagining migrant life in the city? Is there something retrograde about Haneke’s distinctly modernist approach to representation or does this film address the problem of historical amnesia that perhaps continues to plague the city and, by extension, the nation?

In Search of The City In a much-cited interview with Richard Porton in Cineaste, Haneke relates a narrative of origins regarding Caché’s address of the events of October 17 1961, which culminated in the massacre of approximately 200 Algerian immigrants on the streets of Paris. Haneke discusses his viewing of an ARTE documentary on the subject, where he describes being “shocked” to have never heard of the incident. He observes that, “It’s stunning that, in a country like France that prides itself on a free press, such an event could have been suppressed for forty years”.111 In reference to two other films about the Algerian War, namely Alain Tasma’s La Nuit Noire (2005) and Philippe Faucon’s Le Trahison (2005), which all screened together at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, he says “I think it’s great that this piece of history is finally being addressed”.112 He further states: At the same time, I don’t want my film to be seen specifically as a French problem. It seems to me that, in every country, there are dark corners – dark stains where questions of collective guilt become important. I’m sure in the United States there are other parallel examples of dark stains on the collective unconscious [Laughs].113

Two somewhat antithetical ideas emerge from Haneke’s comments. He initially details a narrative of historical repression that is addressed and

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ultimately memorialized by a number of filmmakers in the contemporary moment. This narrative of repression, one that centers very precisely on the decolonization of Algeria, has a long history that has been charted by film scholars including Naomi Greene. While depictions of the Algerian War were subject to strict French censorship policies that were put into place in July 1945, long before the start of the war, Greene argues that these polices were both a “product and reflection” of the desire to repress memories of this historical event, a mode of amnesia that enveloped the French nation for two decades following the end of World War II.114 Greene’s comments allude to the specificity of this type of repression within the French post-war context. Porton makes a claim towards the film’s allegorical specificity along similar lines, noting that to a certain extent, the emphasis is on the repression of historical memory and its relationship to the repression of personal memories. While the metaphor could be extended to other countries, given the suppression of the Algerian War, it works particularly well in the French context.115

Haneke responds with “Yes”, followed by a comparative statement concerning his observation that similarly, no one in Austria today admits to being a Nazi.116 As Wheatley has demonstrated in her full-length book on his cinema, Haneke consistently undermines the allegorical resonances of his film that signify within a national context in an appeal to a transnational mode of address. This gesture can be related to Haneke’s world cinema status, as a director whose aim regarding the circulation of his films extends beyond their national or linguistic affiliations. His choice of stars in this film, which again features Juliette Binoche but also revered French actor Daniel Auteuil, is indicative of a kind of balancing act between the national and the transnational, where Auteuil perhaps speaks to the former and Binoche to the former as well as the latter. Descriptions of Haneke’s depiction of the city, as traced across the critical literature on the film, runs the gamut from pronouncements of its location as “unnamed French city”, to a “European city”, an “ahistorical and heremetic” city and “unmistakably Paris”.117 The blurred image of the city in this film appears to correspond quite directly to its blurred allegorical intentions, occupying something of a middle ground between specificity and universalism, the national and the global. These dynamics, as outlined earlier, are activated in the categorical imperatives of “world cinema” and their presence in Caché leads me to situate the film as a world cinema text. The opening sequence is indicative of the modes of abstraction that the city in the film is continually subject to. This sequence, a three-minute

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static long take of the Laurent home, has been thoroughly dissected by scholars and critics for the way in which Haneke allows the spectator to believe that the shot of the home is unfolding within the “present tense” of the film, right up until we hear Georges say “Well?”, and Anne’s response “Nothing”. This sequence is followed by a cut where Georges exits the home, clearly later in the day than is presented in the video footage. While Celik aptly describes this strategy, one employed at various points through the film, as a “temporal rupture perceived as continuity”, it is Michel Chion who takes the effects produced by this aesthetic to their disturbing conclusion.118 For Chion, the absence of music contributes to the sense that all images in the film, whether they are part of the diegetic present, part of the tapes being sent to Georges, or whether the images comprise a dream or fantasy sequence have the exact same status, further reinforced by the fact that all of the images are of the same visual quality.119 This equalizing maneuver leads Chion to observe that “it is as if all places and times were one, which is terrifying”.120 This opening sequence formally lays the groundwork for the difficulty of distinguishing between past and present, leading outwards to considerations of other aspects of the film, including the representation of the city. If we return to the opening sequence once more, and this time scrutinizing the details of the image, the shot of the Laurent home neither overtly signifies as Paris nor does it actively circumvent such a reading (Figure 1.4). The street sign of the perpendicular road, of what many a scholar has deemed the aptly named Rue des Irises, is slightly out of focus, but still

Figure 1.4  Caché: the Laurent home.

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visible. The sign of the street on which the Laurent home is situated is not legible. While the street sign situates the dwelling squarely in Paris, this shot can equally function as a generic image of an affluent home on a quiet city street as there are no other markers of place present in the image and those that are there are not made obvious for the spectator. As such, the urban corollary for the film’s deliberate slippage between past and present is a depiction of Paris that treads the line between a generic and a specific portrayal of place. The depiction of Majid’s highrise apartment signifies in similar terms. In another reflexive move, we hear and see Georges and Anne perform an analysis of the surveillance footage of the apartment later during the opening sequence, by rewinding and attempting to pause the tape on the street sign, which is Rue de Lenine. At this point, very specific details regarding the location of the flat are provided, as Anne obtains a map and explains to Georges that the apartment is situated by the Mairie des Lilas Metro station, line 11 in Romainville. While Paris as such is a repressed term, enough extra-textual information is provided so that spectators familiar with the city will immediately connect the references to Paris or that spectators interested in discovering the “city in the film” can do so. Majid’s apartment is depicted in precisely the same manner as the Laurent home, establishing a contrast between the two along the lines of class difference. The apartment is rendered in long shot, which encompasses the bottom half of the high-rise, filling up the screen entirely. The second recurring image associated with Majid’s dwelling is the brown, dark corridor through which the camera follows Georges during his visits with Majid. During the scene in which Georges and Anne decode the surveillance footage, Georges refers to this space as a “low rent hallway”. From the point of the view of the exterior, Haneke’s Paris emerges through the recurring appearance of these contrasting shots of Georges’ and Majid’s home. In this sense, Paris itself resides largely in the domain of off-screen space.121 The difference between the Laurent home and Majid’s apartment translates into a familiar dichotomy between bourgeois affluence and abject poverty. The framing devices utilized by Haneke, by which the Laurent home is flanked on either side by two buildings, rendering the space only partially visible and the way in which Majid’s apartment is represented in similar terms creates a sense of abstraction with regard to the depiction of the city. These spaces are presented not as dwellings embedded within the fabric of a cityscape, but that which can be located both somewhere and anywhere. Celik notices a certain difference between early Anglophone and French

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criticism of the film, whereby French reviewers refrain from delving into allegorical readings that relate specifically to French colonial history and its relationship to contemporary France, mirroring the modes of repression that the memory of the Algerian War has been historically subject to.122 As true as this may be, it is in the early French criticism where the ostensibly generic spaces of the film begin to reveal a great deal of specificity, a reading that was largely absent within early Anglophone criticism and scholarship on the film. In his review of Caché in Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Pierre Rehm identifies the spatial journey undertaken in the film utilizing language associated specifically with cinéma de banlieue. He writes “tourné à Paris, en proche banlieue à Romainville avenue Lénine, et en province”.123 Rehm also specifies the type of banlieue housing within which Majid resides: Le second (Benichou) subit, jusque dans sa mort se dans les balafres qui couvrent le visage de son fils, le rejet dont sa survie d’homme invisible, banni en HLM, s’entête à faire témoignage silencieux.124

Within this context, the contrast the film establishes between the Laurent home and Majid’s apartment also maps onto the division between central Paris and the banlieue. Although the division is never named as such, the master shot of the HLM building where Majid lives has an unmistakable significance within the discourse of banlieue cinema as one of its strongest iconographic markers.

Interiors – Modernity and its Opposite Moving from the outside to the inside, this section connects the opposition between Georges’ and Majid’s dwelling spaces to a reading of the significance of interior space. If one can argue that the city of Paris, in iconographic terms, is mainly left “off screen”, then there is a question of whether interior spaces can be read as a form of urban space, as part of the texture of the cinematic city in the way that exterior shots of streets and landmarks are considered to be. Can an examination of interior spaces, in conjunction with their exteriors, provide more material for a specific rather than generic reading of the city in the film? This method of reading takes its cues from the film itself; characters and spectators alike are made to inspect the details of the image, either testing its veracity or investigating the taped footage for clues. As such, the film sends us an open invitation to look more carefully at its detailed and meticulous use of mise-en-scène. However, my starting point for this inquiry

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­ ecessitates a return to the work of Kristin Ross on the decolonization n process of France in the 1960s that transforms the city’s identity from capital of the French empire to the newly modernized capital of the post-war, post-imperial nation. Ross takes us back to the city’s past, the first of a number of brief detours that will eventually bring us back to the interior spaces of the film. As mentioned previously, Ross writes the narrative of French modernization during this period of upheaval and change. Ross’ contribution to the discourse lies in her refusal to tell the story of French modernity in the 1960s separately from the fall of the French Empire as specifically related to the decolonization of Algeria.125 In holding the two narratives together, she addresses the myth of decolonization where “France’s colonial history was nothing more than an ‘exterior’ experience that somehow came to an abrupt end, cleanly, in 1962”.126 Ross positions interiority as a motif of this historical moment. In the broadest sense, Ross views the building of the grands ensembles and the “cordoning off of immigrants” and other undesirables to the banlieue as symptomatic of a broader move towards interiorization, one that also plays out with regard to a bourgeois experience of the post-war city; as she argues, “On the national level, France retreats within the hexagon, withdraws from empire, retrenches within its borders”.127 As such, the banlieue in this historical moment operates as the domain of the ­“elsewhere”, ­enabling Paris to insulate itself, to borrow an apt phrase from Haneke, from the dark stains of its historical past. On a micro-level, Ross argues that this form of interiority extended to the domain of the quotidian as: The movement inward . . . is a movement echoed on the level of everyday life by the withdrawal of the new middle classes to their newly comfortable domestic interiors, to the electric kitchens, to the enclosure of private automobiles, to the interior of a new vision of conjugality and an ideology of happiness built around the new unit of middle-class consumption, the couple, and to depoliticization.128

Ross details the significance of the interior within the spatial discourse of post-war Paris, whereby the newly technologized space of the home, as the domain of the middle classes, functions not only as a retreat from history but also as a signifier of the modern. As she puts it, “If Algeria is becoming an independent nation, then France must become a modern nation: some distinction between the two must still prevail. France must, so to speak, clean house; reinventing the home is reinventing the nation”.129 Following Ross, interior spaces and especially that of the home, can be recouped as part of the modern identity of the city, which is re-invented in the post-war period. In this sense, the interior is significant as both a

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motif and a space of repression; for Ross, the move “inward” is a movement away from the events of decolonization and that of history. Of course, there are more easily identifiable gestures toward the repression of these events; as noted earlier, Greene outlines the way in which this form of repression also extended to cinematic depictions, or lack thereof, of these events in the films of the period. However, Ross’ narrative points towards a new-found significance for the interior, along both racial and class lines, within Paris of the 1950s and 1960s. What Ross makes clear is that a distinction between the modern and the unmodern begins to take shape in this era, along a class and racialized axis, whereby the domain of the latter is in fact the banlieue, while Paris proper revels once more in its modern glory, but now severed from its imperial past.130 This particular opposition between the modern and the unmodern can be extended to the difference between the depiction of the Laurent home and Majid’s apartment, as another way of reading interior space in light of a spatial formation specific to post-imperial identity of the city that is alive and well within Haneke’s depiction of contemporary Paris. Where does the “modernity” of the Laurent home lie, with respect to the use of mise-en-scène? It is here that I draw upon the pioneering work of Charles Affron and Mierella Jona Affron on the signifying power of set design and connect this work to an interpretation of the role that interior space plays in this film. In Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative, Affron and Affron focus their attention on the role of art direction as it pertains to set design and décor in narrative filmmaking. Their particular interest lies in set design whose denotative function contributes to a sense of verisimilitude while also exceeding this role to various degrees.131 Affron and Affron demonstrate that set design and décor can transcend its positioning from background to foreground, extending from its ability to punctuate the narrative to operating as a quasi character in its own right. Affron and Affron’s notion of set as punctuation corresponds most strongly to Haneke’s use of mise-en-scène in Caché but also to his previous films that detail the unraveling of the bourgeois family unit. Set as punctuation refers to modalities of set design and décor that assume an expressive role at different points within the narrative, moving past its purely denotative functionality while not entirely sacrificing its otherwise realist demeanor.132 Sets assume the power of punctuation through a careful balancing act, just one of the many balancing acts that Haneke deftly maintains throughout the entirety of Caché. Catherine Wheatley in particular has commented on Haneke’s use of mise-en-scène, pointing towards its recurring characteristics across a number of his films that are suggestive of its expressive potentialities.

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For instance, she describes the Laurent home as a “bourgeois-bohemian universe” which “shares the same palette of greys, browns and beiges” as the interiors of several of his other films, including Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994).133 And in fact, this is even true of the Parisian apartment in Haneke’s latest film, Amour, which strongly resembles the interior of the Laurent home with its floor to ceiling bookcases, quasi-antique furniture and so on. For Wheatley, Haneke’s minimalist and largely sparse aesthetic, complete with its few antiques and large book collection, is nearly akin to the expressive interiors of a Douglas Sirk melodrama in its depiction of a milieu of complete alienation.134 Haneke’s use of repetition is key to viewing his aesthetic choices in their expressive capacity, adding an auteurist dimension to Affron and Affron’s category of set as punctuation. Discussions of the interior of Majid’s flat tend to be less descriptive. Wheatley characterizes his dwelling as a “run-down apartment”.135 Similarly, in an early review of the film in Film Quarterly, Ara Osterweil refers to Majid’s apartment as “impoverished” and also notes that it is suggestively located on “Rue de Lenine on the outskirts of Paris”.136 Although Osterweil hints at a possible allegorical reading, she does not elaborate further. The interior of the Laurent home is an emblem of bourgeois modernity while the interior of Majid’s apartment signifies in the opposite direction. The mise-en-scène of both spaces occupies middle ground between punctuation and denotation and, in doing so, allows us to situate a reading of the strict opposition between the Laurent home and Majid’ apartment as an instantiation of the temporality of past-present. As such, I am claiming that one can read Haneke’s interiors in this particular film within a double register, one that complies with an auteurist analysis and a second that takes us back to an enduring spatial opposition between central Paris and its banlieue. If we begin with the Laurent home, its interior doesn’t merely speak to bourgeois affluence, but acquires further layers of historical specificity. In an interview with Positif, Haneke states that the interior of the house chosen to be the Laurent home was designed in the Art Deco style of the 1930s.137 Art Deco, its heyday running from 1910 to 1935, is historically something of a hybrid style that is both entirely modern in its sensibility but also inflected with attributes of so-called traditional or “primitive forms”. Its origins lie with the Parisian Exposition of 1925, the launching point for the evolution of Deco into an international style.138 Lucy Fischer offers a detailed cinematic history of the infiltration of Art Deco into the sets, décor, costuming and depiction of stars of Hollywood studio

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glo b a l p a r i s 97 production. Fischer notes that the futuristic tendencies of Art Deco were counterpointed with what she delineates as nostalgia for the “exotic” or the “Oriental”.139 However, to view the Orientalist motifs of the Deco style through the lens of nostalgia denies the fact that the imperial world was very much intact during this time period and that crucially, exoticism and primitivism were dominant ways of representing colonized nations that were contemporary to the period. In their work on Art Deco, Bevis Hillier and Stephen Escritt note that Art Deco “adapted to existing practices” that stretch back to Orientalist imagery that could be found amongst exhibition practices in Britain for example, before Art Deco was named as such.140 Traces of a Deco style can be discerned throughout elements of the mise-en-scène of the Laurent home, extending from the presence of streamlined décor and furniture, their kitchen in particular bearing the traditional color scheme belonging to the style with its use of black, silver and red, to the use of spotlights in the kitchen and living room area that provide a shadowy depiction of interior space. African and Orientalist motifs also adorn the interior spaces of the home, including the rug in their living room, carved stone elephants on their fireplace, as well as sculptures held within glass cases. The argument I want to make here is the Deco style of the Laurent home implicitly evokes the modernist guise of the city, and one that incorporates specifically decorative traces of the imperial past. The modernism of the interior not only works in conjunction with the bourgeois qualities of the space, as it relates to class identity, but also to the genre of melodrama. The generic elements of Haneke’s filmmaking practices are always a source of interest, particularly in his later films, where generic codes are employed within films that are not ostensibly genre films, a key example of which is Caché. While the obvious generic context for Caché is the thriller or “whodunit”, even though Wheatley has pointed out that the film is a whodunit without a resolution, a secondary generic context is that of melodrama. In the case of this film, Haneke’s modernist practices are reconfigured through the inclusion of a melodramatic visual aesthetic. The film appears to be its most melodramatic in its depiction of interiors, which crosses into expressive territory not only through its evocation of Deco, but also through various emblems of fortification. Most scholarship on the film touches upon the significance of the imposing wall- to-wall bookcase that frames the dinning room, as a visualization of fortification complemented by the use of a dwelling space that only contains a single line of windows that are blocked by plants in the front. In the Positif interview, Haneke remarks upon the lack of windows,

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which make it impossible to film the exterior from the space of the interior.141 Both elements of mise-en-scène contribute to the claustrophobic, closed ambience of the interior. In these instances, mise-en-scène is not just relegated to its denotative status but instead punctuates the narrative in way that privileges space in expressive and I would argue, melodramatic ways. This is further reinforced by the fact that Georges and Anne essentially blend into the mise-en-scène, signifying as emblems of their space. This is an illustration of Haneke’s penchant for abstraction at its finest. Thomas Elsaesser’s canonical piece on the family melodrama, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” situates the “complex handling of interior” space as the locus of repression and therefore, of meaning.142 While the depiction of claustrophobic interiors is a characteristic of the family melodrama, and certainly a feature of the Laurent home, the exterior is equally complicit in the depiction of the home as fortified space; the gate barricades the home and the bush conceals the house from the outside while the bookcases and lack of windows on the inside can be read as a form of thematic displacement, a trademark of the family melodrama. The shadowy interior is yet another way in which the theme of repression is materialized and literally spills out into the décor of the space. In the “Trauma Dossier” in Screen, E. Ann Kaplan makes a statement regarding trauma and melodrama that seems to have been written for a film such as Caché. She writes, “As a genre occupying the space between history and the unconscious, melodrama offers an imaginary focused on the private sphere of the family – where traumas are secret, hidden – yet an arena structured by male power in the public sphere”.143 Caché straddles the divide between history and the unconscious, between a private “family” matter and a larger historical narrative, both of which signify along the lines of repression and concealment. Georges functions in exactly the way that Kaplan describes, whose public persona speaks to a degree of power and control but one that does not extend to the private arena, where he is at the mercy of the “stalker”. The traces of melodrama that can be attached to the film build upon a reading of the interior as a specifically bourgeois space made by Wheatley and others. At such, this interior, in its confluence of the modern, the bourgeois and the melodramatic, speaks to a generic mode of depiction that Haneke utilizes to varying degrees across his body of work. Simultaneously, this interior also speaks to the significance of the motif of interiority to the history of French decolonization as it pertains to the collective fortification of the French middle-classes during the exact historical period that is evoked in the film through the citation of the “Battle of Paris”. In the shadow of this

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history, Georges escapes into the domain of the domestic interior following Majid’s death, to sleep away the traumas of the past and present. In an appropriate Freudian twist, he encounters Majid once more in his dreams, demonstrating the fallacy of such a gesture. As such, bourgeois interiority in this film moves beyond what Brigitte Peucker has identified as a parodic deployment of melodrama in films such as The Piano Teacher (2001), which involves removing the excessive attributes of a melodramatic visual style and leaving in its place “a cool modernist” detachment that is then often punctuated by an excess of violence.144 For Peucker, Haneke’s use of an expressive rather than excessive mise-en-scène critiques the logic of self-containment within the domain of the personal, the quintessential bourgeois mode of being. While Peucker’s arguments are entirely relevant to Caché, the expressive mise-en-scène of the film acquires a certain historical density in its ability to simultaneously tell the story of the difficulties of integration in France through a further contrast between the Laurent interior and Majid’s domestic domain. In this instance, while representational violence as figured through violation enters the Laurent home via tapes and drawings, actual violence is reserved for Majid’s interior. The interior of Majid’s flat signifies as the antithesis of bourgeois modernity. A recurring spatial motif associated with Majid’s flat, as mentioned previously, is the trek down the dark brown hallway that Georges undertakes when visiting him. The exterior of the apartment, with its “low-rent status”, provides a clue to the nature of the interior. The apartment interior is the opposite of the streamlined, sparse, modern interior of the Laurent home. The interior of Majid’s dwelling consists of a single room, cluttered with objects that are functional rather than decorative, including boxes, an ironing board and so on. The walls are lined with two different types of beige wallpaper with contrasting designs. With respect to costume, Majid matches his milieu as he is dressed in a stained, beige shirt and dark pants so that he is also defined, in part, through his associations with space. The areas that surround the apartment are equally decrepit. Another recurring space is that of the dark, virtually empty, littered shop across the street from the HLM where Georges obtains coffee from a machine. This is in sharp contrast to the typically Parisian café encounter between Anne and her boss, Pierre. The opposition between the two homes extends to the use value of various types of space. Unlike the interior of Majid’s flat, the Laurent home is compartmentalized into distinctly different kinds of spaces. There is an intermediary space in the Laurent home between the front door and the living room. This area functions as a screening space, the

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door to which can be locked, barricading the interior even further from the exterior. This intermediary space is where a videotape is left during the “dinner sequence”, after Georges walks out into the street, searching for the stalker. The space leads to the front door and then to a gate that Georges must open into order to find his way onto the street, further espousing a sense of the home as fortress, a gesture that is similar in its signification to the depiction of Anne’s apartment in Code inconnu. The impossibility of a stalker literally finding his or her way into the house, without having passed Georges, points toward a conflation between stalker and Haneke himself that critics such as Wheatley pose. While the ground floor contains traces of the Deco style, Pierrot’s bedroom does not contain any of the qualities of a bourgeois interior. His room is that of a teenager, utterly contemporary in its décor, including posters of Eminem and the film Van Helsing (2004). Perhaps Pierrot’s space, in its “antibourgeois-ness”, is also indicative of what some critics view as the “hope of the next generation”, embodied in the meeting between Pierrot and Majid’s son at the end of the film.145 The film’s own citation of the historical past suggests the opposition between the two homes is not simply class-based but also functions as a trace of the post-imperial past. Haneke’s film, as a memory text, links the past to the present in order to illustrate how vestiges of empire are reactivated within the domain of the family and home. The contrast the film poses between the modern bourgeois home, and the decrepit HLM is one with clear historical connotations as well as contemporary ones. In its spatial geography, this film can be viewed as a pertinent example of what Ross has characterized as a “frozen temporal lag” that “appears as a spatial configuration: the white, upper-class city intra muros, surrounded by islands of immigrant communities a long RER ride away”.146 Chion’s observations concerning the way in which Caché suggests that all times and places are one can be extended to a reading of the city in the film, where the inability of characters to transcend these urban polarities is similarly terrifying in its implication that the imperial past remains such a potent force in the global present. Majid’s suicide in particular, occurring as it does within the walls of the banlieue, forges the crucial link between space and history, setting and narrative, along the lines of trauma and colonial violence.147 The one character who is able to cross over, in addition to Georges of course, is Majid’s son, who confronts Georges at his place of work. This is an encounter that Georges tries his best to avoid, leading Majid’s son to follow him into his work area. When asked by Georges as to why he is there, he tellingly asks if Georges would have let him into his house.

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glo b a l p a r i s 101 The scars on Majid’s son’s face, perhaps signs of a traumatic upbringing, return us to the trauma of Majid’s death. The film never allows us to see Majid outside of his apartment, so that its sad, dilapidated interior is expressive of the way in which he is encased within the traumas of the past that can only be transcended through death. What the stalker, whether it is Haneke himself or another, forces into the space of the Laurent home, is the violent history of decolonization, but only through narrational means. During the scene where a large chunk of Majid’s past is revealed and quite literally “comes to light” visually in a fully lit sequence in the living room, the story of the “Battle of Paris” is told; Georges tells Anne that Majid’s parents must have drowned in the Seine because they did not return from Paris back to their country home. Haneke incorporates this event into the fiction so that history is brought “back home”. The only marker of historical time in the film is 17 October 1961, other than the shots of news footage on the television in the Laurent home, confirming that the film transpires in the contemporary moment. In Caché, it is the settled migrant figure, as embodied in Majid, who also constitutes the presence of history in the narrative. The presence of the migrant and the facts of decolonization disrupt and ultimately unravel this otherwise bourgeois melodrama of a dysfunctional family. Haneke’s city is constructed through the use of contrasting dwellingscapes, which are far less “blurred” than they initially appear. The close textual reading of the mise-en-scène of both Majid’s flat and the Laurent home illustrates how interior spaces, in conjunction with exterior ones, can be made to tell a certain narrative about the city of Paris that has clear historical as well as contemporary connotations. To return briefly to Deux ou trois choses, Godard transforms the interior of Juliette’s dwelling space into a site where major global events of the period, as related to the Vietnam War, can be staged. This strategy produces an explicit commentary upon the impossibility of fortification, as it relates to Godard’s central thesis concerning the commodification of Paris. Something similar transpires in Caché but far less explicitly, in keeping with Haneke’s modernist leanings. Interior spaces are made to embody some of the film’s central thematic registers, such as that of repression, as well as implicitly relating a certain narrative about space, the end of empire and the persistence of history. Rather than viewing the film solely from within the context of its often veiled socio-political content, Caché can also be understood from within the parameters of a post-war and post-imperial story of the re-­configuration of the city, one that has been represented in the cinema since the 1960s. It is perhaps not the most visible narrative that is articulated by the film but it is one that

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essentially “supports” the larger thematic explored explicitly by Haneke, which is the way the past continues to infiltrate the present. As such, the city in this film emerges as that which is polarized between the modern, ­bourgeois Paris and its banlieue.

Caché as Reverse Banlieue Narrative Caché can also be taken as a banlieue narrative, but one that transpires in reverse, a reading of the film that will be developed with special reference to Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995). La haine revolves around a triad made up of Vinz, a Jewish character, Hubert, who is black African and Said, a Beur youth who spend the early half of the film wandering through the banlieue together. The film begins with television footage of a riot, fueled by a police attack on Abdel, a friend to all three characters, who lies in a coma in the hospital and soon after, dies. During the second half of the film, the three figures take the train to Paris where, among a series of narrative events, Said and Hubert are briefly detained and terrorized by the police. Eventually, they all return to the banlieue, where Vinz is ­accidentally shot by a local policeman and the film ends with Hubert holding a gun to the officer, while Said watches on in horror. Given that there is such a large body of specifically migrant directed banlieue films, written about eloquently by a variety of authors including Carrie Tarr, a question one might ask is why chose the non-migrant authored La haine as the key text in this regard? The reason concerns the parallels that can be drawn between the two films that lend themselves to a comparative undertaking. La haine and Caché have been taken up in similar terms with respect to their reception on the festival circuit and within critical discourse. Kassovitz was awarded the Best Director Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. Similarly, Haneke was also awarded the Best Director Prize at Cannes exactly ten years later, in addition to the FIPRESCI Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Both films were nominated for the Palme D’Or. The awards that were lavished upon these films are indicative of the kind of critical success they have received on the global film scene as the definitive text regarding their respective topics. As Vincendeau notes, La haine achieved a largely positive critical consensus that honed in on the film’s cinematic style, Kassovitz’s new-found status as auteur and as a “‘correct’ and novel representation of the social issues the film deals with”.148 Vincendeau notes that “above all, Kassovitz is praised for adopting an ‘uncompromising’ and ‘truthful’ approach to the socially deprived youth of the Parisian banlieue, and more widely, the

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glo b a l p a r i s 103 f­ racture sociale endemic in the mid 1990s”.149 In her review of the literature on the film, Vincendeau concludes that the originality of La haine was also seen to present its picture of the fracture sociale in a radically different way from the naturalistic or documentary style adopted by most filmmakers of “social” subjects.150

Kassovitz’s wedding of a new style to the topic in this respect is clearly behind much of this critical praise. Some of the Anglophone criticism concerning Caché in either its critical or scholarly form performs a similar feat. The film is largely praised for its allegorical address of one of the most repressed events of the decolonization process in French history. For instance, an early Sight and Sound review of the film notes that “Hidden accuses the French intelligentsia – and, by extension, Western society – of a concerted denial of political and social reality”.151 For Florence Jacobowitz, “Caché raises historical strains that not only refuse to disappear (France’s notorious oppression of its citizens of North African descent in the 60s) but have reemerged with a vengeance in the new millennium”.152 Osterweil reads the film in relation Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers – “Broaching post-colonial themes forty years after Gillo Pontecorvo brilliantly documented the resistance to the French regime in The Battle of Algiers, Haneke indicates that the legacy of injustice remains an open wound in the national psyche”.153 As these quotations demonstrate, the film is applauded for its ability to link the past to the present and to demonstrate a certain continuity between the process of decolonization in the 1960s and contemporary racial politics in France. As Wheatley has observed, against Haneke’s publicly proclaimed wishes, the film is continually praised for its political specificity. Like La haine, Caché provides a similar confluence of cinematic style and “correctness” of representation that may account for its success on festival and academic circles alike. If La haine offers a kind of reconfiguration of the typical visual style of the banlieue film by refraining from the use of a realist, documentary-like aesthetic, Caché’s modernist bent is inflected with traces of both the thriller and melodrama genres that, as Wheatley has argued, produces a “just enough” strategy. This strategy falls in line with the particular balancing acts characteristic of the type of world cinema text investigated in this book. The success of these films on the world cinema circuit can also be gauged through the question of circulation, extending beyond the confines of the film festival; La haine for instance, is subtitled, making the film easier to access around the world, as opposed to other Beur-authored banlieue films of the 1990s, not all of

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which are subtitled. In the case of Caché, the films that screened alongside it at the Toronto International Film Festival, La trahison and La nuit noire, are not readily available for viewing, having been eclipsed not only by the circulatory prowess of Caché, but also by the way in which critics have heralded the film at the near apex of a small grouping of significant films about the decolonization of Algeria and its repression within the French national imaginary. Interestingly enough, neither La haine nor Caché is migrant authored or an identifiably “authentic” depiction of either subject. In this sense, the two films make an unexpected yet perfect analytical fit; it seems that it is precisely the aesthetic treatment of their subject matter that accounts for the critical success and easy circulation of both works. While Vincendeau argues that La haine is a far less politically correct representation of the banlieue than it appears, and I will be arguing along similar lines with respect to Caché’s allegorical project, these films, alongside some of the films discussed in the previous section including Deux ou trois choses, J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, can be grouped together under the heading of a “cinematic spatial history” of Paris that display a number of similar traits with regard to their status as a­ uteurist works and in terms of their particular combination of an “aesthetic agenda” and political subject matter. Caché implicitly provides us with the spatial co-ordinates of the banlieue in relation to other types of space. Myrto Konstantarakos notes that “the banlieue is still the city, but at the same time it is outside the city, at its edge, halfway between the city and countryside”.154 The presence of the home is the prime signifier of urban space; as demonstrated earlier, the bourgeois home is representative of central Paris while the HLM is part of the iconography of the banlieue. We also have a third home that functions as an evocation of the countryside, which is Georges’ childhood home. Georges visits his mother after receiving the videotape of the “stalker’s” trek to the countryside. One of the shots of the living room in this home reveals a decadent interior space, furnished with a chandelier, a large painting on the wall and a piano. This space resembles neither the modern interior of the Laurent home nor its opposite, which is Majid’s apartment. It is another version of a bourgeois space, whose objects are central to the identification of place in the flashback sequences. All three spaces operate as markers of racial, cultural and class-based polarizations. When Georges tells Anne the story of Majid, he says that Majid’s parents were laborers on his family’s farm, recalling the surge in migrant labor that followed the post-war period. Caché contains a series of historical footnotes and references to the post-imperial period, embedded within seemingly banal and generic depictions of space. The inclusion of

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these three distinct spaces construct a landscape where past and present collide, in both a narrational and allegorical sense. The differentiation of space is a key component of the cinematic city found across banlieue cinema. A salient narrative event within this type of filmmaking is the journey undertaken by characters from the banlieue to Paris proper. Vincendeau argues that these visits to the heart of the city work to sharpen the divide between the depiction of the gritty, ugly banlieue, with its staircases and rooftop encounters, and modern, glamorous Paris, full of café- and restaurant-based meetings between characters.155 La haine is no exception, as Vinz, Hubert and Said trek to the city on the train. In La haine, the trip to Paris also presents us with modernist, sleek interiors, filled with glass tables, and sparse empty spaces that include the apartment of the drug dealer (Asterix) who owes Vinz money, and the art gallery in Paris. In Caché, it is the bourgeois figure who makes the journey to the banlieue. As mentioned previously, the iconography of the banlieue makes an appearance in Caché through the incessant shots of the “low-rent hallway”, the master shots of the HLM and the deserted, run-down coffee shop. There is also a gas station around the premises that is clearly visible in the background of the scene in which Georges speaks to Anne on the phone after instigating the arrest of Majid and his son. The gas station is also part of the iconography of the banlieue film of the 1960s as it is featured to a large degree in Deux ou trois choses, the mobilities of the car constituting a central component of post-war Parisian modernity. Again, we find spaces and images in Caché that can be traced back to an entire history of banlieue cinema. Konstantarakos notes that the journey from the banlieue to the center of the city featured in these films “is never easy, as if the distance between the two places were immense”.156 There is a certain arduousness linked to the journey of the characters in La haine to Paris; once they miss the train back, they have no other way of returning home and are forced to roam the city streets. It is the difficulty of the return journey that creates a sense of distance between Paris and its suburbs, a claim echoed by socio-historical scholars such as Ross. The ease of Georges’ trip to the banlieue, that he undertakes with his own car, thus controlling when and where he arrives and departs, is a class- and race-based inversion of this particular narrative, in keeping with Haneke’s depiction of a bourgeois encounter with the banlieue, in its contemporary and historicized gaze. These encounters between Majid and Georges are situated at a crossroads between past and present, offering Georges the possibility to make amends for his past behavior. But the inability of these encounters to forge a new path for

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these characters is echoed by the depiction of the city itself, seemingly frozen in its stark differentiation between Paris and banlieue. What is left offscreen are the events that would be pertinent to this type of narrative, which is that of the charged and often volatile encounter between the police and the banlieue characters that we find in La haine and other films in this cycle. Instead, we follow Georges back to the comfort of his home. For Vincendeau, La haine “foregrounds its cohesive black blanc beur central trio against the police and ‘bourgeois society’”.157 In the bourgeois version of this narrative, Georges is presented as the instigator of police injustice and possible brutality who is able to return to the safety of “fortress Paris”. The cycle of cinéma de banlieue of the 1980s and 1990s are a grouping of films that are not necessarily migrant narratives in the literal sense of narrativizing acts of migration but relate stories of first and second generation Algerians, as well as other impoverished ethnic groups in strictly spatial terms.158 While Caché is certainly not a banlieue narrative, as demonstrated above, the film contains traces of a reverse banlieue narrative that brings forth aspects of a post-imperial urban formation between Paris proper and its suburbs. It is a division that stems back to the Parisian cityscape of Deux ou trois choses, which Vincendeau links to the “aesthetic tendency” of banlieue filmmaking, which often foregrounds aesthetic concerns against the backdrop of the banlieue.159 As mentioned earlier, Paris in Godard’s film is constituted as a place that the inhabitants of the banlieue visit, in order to “supplement” their incomes. Both Deux ou trois choses and La haine often make a dual appearance in literature about Paris as cinematic city or within the context of cinéma de banlieue. For example, Susan Hayward constructs a link between Deux ou trois choses and La haine based upon the depiction of monumental social housing that dehumanizes its inhabitants.160 She sees a continuity between the two films based on the “crisis of monumentality” that originated in the 1960s re-modernization of Paris that persists in the present moment; as she puts it, although the residents present in both films are quite different, the films taken together are an illustration of “change with no change”.161 Konstantarakos also mentions Deux ou trois choses as a historical antecedent to La haine.162 From this perspective, Godard’s film can be viewed as the cinematic past of a film like La haine and, by extension, of Caché. A polarized representation of the city of Paris emerges as a persistent theme across all three incarnations of “the banlieue narrative”.

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Alternative Paradigms of Cinéma de Banlieue Many critics have come to view Caché as a “timely film”, released right before the 2005 riots broke out in a number of Parisian banlieues, and a few years prior to former French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s controversial comments that squarely assign the blame of contemporary racial tensions to its migrant population, resulting from their inability to put the colonial past behind them.163 What makes this film timely, ironically, is its timelessness, in reinforcing the notion that the imperial past continues to play its part in contemporary racialized and class-based divisions in the city. To return to the question posed at the start of this section, is Haneke’s representation of the stark polarities between Paris and its banlieue “timely” or does Haneke’s Paris offer an abstract setting for what Galt views as his equally abstract depiction of migrant characters as emblems of trauma rather than active agents of social progress? If we follow in Galt’s footsteps, clearly Paris in this film is subjected to a process of abstraction, distilled into a series of interiors, which can be mapped onto the axis of modern and unmodern. To borrow a phrase from Bill Schwarz, the historical specificity of the city in this film begins to emerge only if “you have the eyes to see”. In order to think more expansively about Haneke’s politics in this regard, it is instructive to open up my consideration of this film as banlieue narrative to an analysis of some of its cinematic contemporaries. As alluded to previously, Ginette Vincendeau offers a productive method of categorizing two dominant modes of cinéma de banlieue from the 1960s onwards, one strand that corresponds to an aesthetic tendency and the other, to a sociological one. While the aesthetic tendency, practiced mainly by French auteur filmmakers including Godard, position the banlieue as both a sign of modernity and as the backdrop for the unfolding of other thematic concerns, the sociological strand encompasses films generally made by directors whose origins lie in the banlieue. The narrative trajectories of this second strand of cinéma de banlieue propel the banlieue from background to foreground in their emphasis on its architecture, ethnic populations and social problems.164 Two recent banlieue films, namely L’esquive (2003) by Abdellatif Kechiche and 35 rhums (2008) by Claire Denis, are roughly contemporaneous with Caché, with the former operating as an instance of the sociological tendency and the latter as an apt illustration of its aesthetic counterpart. I have chosen these two films as comparative texts for a number of reasons. As argued previously, both Denis and Haneke are recognizable figures within a global landscape of art cinema, their respective

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statuses offering viable avenues of comparison as explored in the previous section. Kechiche proves interesting in this regard, as some make much of his Tunisian background, while others, such as Panivong Norindr, situate him as a contemporary French auteur; L’esquive, for instance, won four coveted César awards in France, which speaks to its reception, not to mention its popularity, as a French film.165 It is perhaps his latest film, Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), that has catapulted him into the ranks of global auteur, garnering him the Palme d’Or at Cannes. While L’esquive and 35 rhums exemplify two different modes of cinéma de banlieue, their representations of the banlieue unexpectedly end up signifying in a similar vein and in quite the opposite direction of Caché. L’esquive is characterized by a gritty realist style. The predominance of an observational aesthetic in conjunction with the use of natural lighting, location shooting and the use of mainly non-actors who speak in verlan, or French slang, lend the film a degree of authenticity that operates as a kind of aesthetic disjunction with the film’s otherwise thematic emphasis on the nature of performativity. Kechiche’s film centers upon a group of adolescents who reside in banlieue of Franc-Moisin and are caught up in various dramatic situations, including an actual one where several of the central characters, including Lydia, Rachid and Frida, are actors in a high school performance of Marivaux’s eighteenth-century classic play, Le jeu de l’amour et du hazard (1730). Krimo, a student in their class, decides to involve himself in the production as a way of getting close to Lydia, whom he wants to date, after having broken up with his girlfriend Magali. L’esquive utilizes Marivaux’s play as an analogy to what transpires between the characters in the fiction but also in contrast to their situation, opening up a modality of the past-present centered upon the relationship between identity and space that is similarly a central concern in Caché. In the first instance, as pointed out by Vinay Swami and others, Marivaux’s play brings the question of language to the surface of the film, its use of classical French counterpointed with the slang spoken by the characters.166 The significance of place in relationship to identity, linguistic or otherwise, comes to the fore when their teacher at school explains the implicit role that location plays in Marivaux’s play. As she says, the impoverished masquerade as the rich and vice-versa in the play, but they are never able to be completely convincing in these roles and as such, “it shows that we are prisoners of our social condition”, that one’s manners, gestures and expressions inevitably function as indices of place. And the film itself never lets us forget the space within which narrative action transpires. The architecture of the banlieue, comprised of its tall, gray HLM structures, looms in the background of nearly every shot, including

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sequences that take place in the school. While the buildings never exceed their status as backdrop, they still constitute a proclamation of place by virtue of recurrence. In the scene described above, the teacher explicates what is situated as the inextricable link between social class, its articulation through language and other means of expression and location in Marivaux’s play. Yet the film offers a corrective to this very idea by demonstrating that linguistic performativity is simply an inherent feature of social class, period. Perhaps the best example is found at the very start of the film, where a group of boys discuss someone that they want to kill because a second group of boys from a neighboring banlieue stole one of the boy’s things. One schooled in the narrative events that comprise the sociological strand of cinéma de banlieue might expect this opening scene to pave the way for a second scene of violence. Yet, this “second scene” never materializes. Krimo says he will get his nunchucks and races off, while the group of boys move in the opposite direction. In the following scene, Krimo speaks to his girlfriend, resulting in their break-up and, in a subsequent scene, he returns home where we learn that his mother plans to visit his father in prison. This opening sequence is complex in its meaning. On the one hand, the conversation between the boys who plan a violent form of revenge is a narrative event that one expects to find in a film of this type, demonstrative of not just the violence of the banlieue but also its particular brand of machismo that has been critiqued by scholars such as Carrie Tarr. Other citations of a classic banlieue film emerge throughout, including references to Krimo’s father and others in prison and a sequence near the end of the film where Krimo, Lydia and other characters are brutalized by the police after it is discovered that one of them has stolen a car. While there is no confirmation as to whether or not the act of violence suggested in the opening sequence comes to fruition, the fact that it is not depicted onscreen already begins to differentiate this film from others in the genre. Swami notes the importance of not including a trip to central Paris, a notable feature of most banlieue cinema of either tendency outlined earlier, which doesn’t allow for the contrast between high and low, the modern and the unmodern to map onto a stark contrast between central Paris and its banlieue; rather, “high culture”, in the form of Marivaux’s play, is taken up and negotiated within the banlieue itself, disrupting the one-way ­movement of protagonists to Paris in search of this very thing.167 Kechiche has gone on record saying that he considers the characters in L’esquive to not simply be of the banlieue but members of “the French polity” in the broadest sense.168 In an interview with Richard Porton in Cineaste, Kechiche claims that with L’esquive his intention was to move

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away from what he refers to as the “caricatured” portrayals of inhabitants of the banlieue in the French media, “sensationalized” with references to their social problems, and offer in its place a more complex mode of representation.169 While the film doesn’t shy away from the occasional suggestion that these characters are in some ways victims of socialization that has relegated them to the outskirts of the city, Kechiche also depicts life in the banlieue in quotidian fashion, as figured through teenage romance, interaction and antics. Kechiche holds these two poles in tension up until the very end of the film. The performance of the play by the very same characters involved in the altercation with the police in the previous sequence indicates that no serious consequences have resulted from that encounter. As such, this is a telling instance of what we can see as the overarching aim of the film, to engage in a depiction of teenage life in the banlieue that is normative and recognizable. Or, there is perhaps a more insidious implication, one that emerges in Porton’s interview with Kechiche and in some of the literature on the film, that police harassment constitutes the norm in the banlieue.170 However, Krimo’s inability to return to the regular state of things, as suggested when he pauses to see the play through the school window but doesn’t walk inside and subsequently fails to respond to Lydia when she later yells for him outside his apartment, can be taken as signs of the trauma of the event for this particular character. Denis’ 35 rhums falls in line with Vincendeau’s description of the aesthetic trend of banlieue filmmaking, as it situates the banlieue as backdrop for the unfolding of a recognizable “Claire Denis” film, with all of her auteurist signatures, including her characteristic emphasis on bodily interaction as a mode of storytelling as well as a manifestation of her thematic interest in the intricacies of desire. In a moving homage to Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), 35 rhums centers on the relationship between Lionel and his daughter Josephine, a story of intimacy that Denis tells through recurring depictions of their domestic rituals. They also have a makeshift family that includes Lionel’s ex-girlfriend Gabrielle and Noé, all of whom live in the same apartment. As such, an apartment plot is also a feature of this film, but one that emphasizes transformation rather than the formation of a community. Through the course of the film, the relationships between the characters are disrupted and, by the time we reach the end, they are completely altered by what we assume is the marriage of Josephine and Noé. In typical Denis fashion, the narrative is fragmented in its presentation, leaving key narrative events, such as the wedding, offscreen in order to privilege the understated and yet profound interaction between characters within quotidian settings.

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glo b a l p a r i s 111 As a banlieue film, 35 rhums is not overrun with traditional banlieue imagery that often ends up conveying an ethos of decline, decay and neglect. It is easy to miss the fact that this is a banlieue film at all; there are a handful of images throughout that show us that these characters live in the grands ensembles but this is the extent to which Denis foregrounds the role of place. The interior of the HLM building they reside in does not feature a “low rent” hallway or ramshackle interior spaces that signify impoverishment; corridors in this film are often used expressively in order to illustrate the extent to which other characters remain outside of the father-daughter dyad, where Gabrielle and Noé are often consigned to the hallway, while interiors are similarly expressive of either domestic tranquility or of careless neglect, as is the case with Noé. Images of the commuter train that appear throughout the film can be taken as markers of location, but they end up also functioning in an expressive manner, as representations of the relentless movement forward that characters in the film cannot help but get caught up in, even while trying to stand still, as is the case with Josephine, emblematized in her initial reluctance to leave Lionel on his own. These representational strategies, if we turn to Denis’ own take on this film, contain something of a political significance, one that unexpectedly resonates with Kechiche’s commentary on the aims of L’esquive. As she states in interviews: my main desire was to make it simple and solid . . . calm, since all the characters are black, and I wanted to make it very clear that they don’t live as clandestines. They have real lives, they are settled, they are French.171

Denis’ comments are indicative of her engagement in a complex and subtly politicized method of depiction, where her characters are not just black, but French, a status that has been historically denied to migrant populations. This is one way of interpreting the film’s downplaying of the significance of the racial identities of its various characters in narrational terms, but in ways that do not entirely negate a reading of city space in light of its well-known racial dynamics; the film is still set in the banlieue and Lionel’s job as engine driver for the RER trains destined for the banlieue is yet another marker of location, even if the recurring images of tracks assume an expressionistic function in the film. The imperial past is also evoked as Frantz Fanon is made mention of during a scene in the University, when Josephine leads the class. As one of her classmates remarks, according to Fanon, revolution happens when one can no longer breathe. But in not

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drawing attention to the racial riots and other conflicts typically associated with the banlieue, Denis succeeds in suggesting that those that reside within the outskirts of the city are as French as those who inhabit the center. I have taken L’esquive and 35 rhums as illustrations of contemporary cinéma de banlieue that, despite their differences with regard to form and content, operate from a similar political position that gives rise to a less familiar side of life in the banlieue, one that receives less coverage in cinema and the media. While the characters in these films are not figures of radical social change, they also operate as more than just allegories of past traumas and injustices. Both films take place entirely within the banlieue, eschewing the kinds of polarizations between the banlieue and central Paris that have assumed such a recognizable function within these two strands of the cinéma de banlieue. By retaining the autonomy of the banlieue, as a form of city space that need not be held up in opposition to the center, the characters in both films signify as French, transcending their status as either pathologized or marginalized migrant figures. By extension, the banlieue itself serves as the setting for narratives other than those pertaining to racialized forms of violence and impoverishment. Within this context, of films that push the conventions of cinéma de banlieue in a completely different direction, what can we make of Caché as a “reverse banlieue narrative”? Does Haneke’s representation of the stark divisions between Paris and the banlieue deny a contemporary image of the city by demonstrating just how rooted in the past this opposition is, even though its generic cityscape seems to tell a global story? Does the activation of the temporality of the past-present in this film end up negating the present, only offering a glimpse of its possibilities in that final, ambiguous shot of the meeting between Pierrot and Majid’s son? For Galt, as noted previously, the North African characters in both Code inconnu and Caché are abstract figurations of the past, although she notes that Majid’s suicide runs against the current of abstraction in forcing the spectator to contend with the materiality of his loss. Haneke’s migrant figures can be recouped under the representational tradition of the ‘noble migrant’, embodying injustice, loss and trauma, but as such, fail to function as narrational agents. In this instance, we can draw on a provocative observation made by Kechiche that suggests an alternate interpretation. When discussing the fact that some French audiences had difficulty following L’esquive due to the pronounced use of verlan in the film, Kechiche’s response is as follows:

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glo b a l p a r i s 113 Outside of their claustrophobic little world are large groups of people who speak this sort of slang. Paris consists of two million inhabitants. But the suburbs are home to twelve million inhabitants. And if these Parisians were put in the middle of the majority population in the suburbs, they wouldn’t be understood either.172

Kechiche’s comments return us to the question of scale, of the smallness of the world of the French bourgeoisie in comparison to the world that other French citizens and migrants reside within, a staunch reversal of the privileging of the center of the city over and above its margins. His description of this world as “claustrophobic” is uncanny in its application to Caché and of the bourgeois fortress that is the Laurent home, its claustrophobia looming large, in spite of the tapes and the use of the television screen as ways of bringing the outside in. Within this vein, the representation of city space in Caché seems more relevant than ever, as a kind of mirror that can be held up for a middle class audience that Haneke primarily seeks to unsettle with his representational strategies. Georges then, is the character around whom the narrative must center, whose active role in the narration is the only vehicle through which such a critique can be forged. To draw once again from Stuart Hall, perhaps this is exactly the type of film that a European filmmaker should be making about the banlieue, if the filmmaker’s intention lies within the domain of explicit and recognizable forms of political critique. It would seem that Caché has a contemporary relevance, alongside films such as L’esquive and 35 rhums, even if the film’s politics lean more towards the past than the present.

Conclusion: History as Trace While displaced representations of politically charged events are a feature of films made by both Denis and Haneke, Haneke in particular has undermined the allegorical specificity of his own work time and again in interviews. With respect to all three films, history appears as trace. These traces of the past are displaced onto characters, particular depictions of urban space and through topographical journeys through the city. This mode of depiction is very much in keeping with the parameters of postwar European modernist filmmaking but an assessment of how the reconfigured modernist strategies of these particular films engender a particular kind of cinematic city lead to a surprising conclusion – in these films, global Paris is a space rife with history, even if held in tension with the abstract tendencies of its directors. While Paris as relational and thereby exorbitant city is what dominates J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu, a

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very different model of global Paris comes to the surface in Caché, one that is implicitly insistent upon the historicity of its geography and the ­consequences of the potency of the past upon the present. In all three case study films, the unexpected and often enigmatic presence of the imperial past is rendered through narrational means; urban encounters in J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu signify as exorbitant precisely because the collisions between past and present give rise to rupture and affinity in the same moment. The unexpected and inexplicable presence of the videotapes and drawings in Caché exemplify the strangeness of the past coming back to haunt the present. These strategies offer a glimpse of what Bhabha delineates as the impossible and anxious temporality of the past-present. And yet the kinds of ambivalences that haunt films such as J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu in their veiled address of the imperial past also make themselves felt in Caché, even in the face of the film’s explicit consideration of the enduring history of empire. This argument extends beyond Haneke’s repeated denials of the film’s specificity to the film itself. As with the case study films considered in the previous section, the nature of the associative allegory in this film operates as one of the sources of its ambivalence. There is the now infamous “cycle” scene in Caché, which is reminiscent of the nature of the street scenes in Code iconnu in its presentation of a particularly volatile urban encounter. In this scene, Georges is nearly run down by a cyclist while he and Anne are exiting a police station. Georges yells at the cyclist, referring to him as an idiot, while the cyclist tells Georges to continue to yell. Anne deescalates the situation, stating that neither the cyclist nor Georges were paying attention. A conversation between Anne and Georges in the car just after the incident reveals that they reported the tapes and cards that they had received to the police, without receiving any assurances of support. Many critics have argued that the scene is an obvious commentary upon contemporary racism in France, as rendered through incivility and the threat of violence seething just underneath the surface. For Jacobowitz, Georges’ eruption of anger at the cyclist: is not attributed simply to his frustration with the police’s indifference; his eruption and lack of civility evidence a racist attitude. It implies a link between the experience of harassment through the tapes and his perception of race and the outsider in French society and culture, undermining the myth of integration, equality and an acceptance of diversity. 173

But I would like to propose that perhaps the obviousness of the meaning of this scene is exaggerated and doesn’t quite account for why Haneke

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might chose such an indirect mode of representation. There are no racial slurs uttered by Georges, who only refers to the cyclist as an “idiot”. It is the presence of the black cyclist having a confrontation with a bourgeois French couple that lends itself to an allegorical reading but it is also nonspecific as nothing transpires in the sequence that can be overtly coded as racist. While an argument can be made that suggests that this is how racism happens in contemporary Western cities, these scenes still remain shrouded in a certain ambivalence. Similarly, the link between the film’s citation of 17 October 1961, and Georges’ personal memories of Majid operate as another allegory by association. When Georges and Majid discuss their past, Georges says, “You were stronger than I was. I didn’t have a choice”. Again, there are no overtly racist overtones to these incidents but Haneke’s sophisticated weaving of history and fiction allows traces of other narratives to emerge, as was illustrated through a consideration of the film’s depiction of urban space. Rather than a direct allegory, what we find are traces of historical narratives that are interwoven with and essentially inflect the fiction. But the oblique nature of the mode of address in these particular sequences can be filed under the heading of ambivalence; what is it that prevents Haneke from engaging more directly with the problem of racism in the contemporary nation state? With regard to La haine, Vincendeau notes that “Contrary to the common perception of La haine as a trenchant expose of banlieue life, the social issues are hinted at rather than explored”.174 As with La haine, critics want to view Caché as an inherently political text, as a contemporary Battle of Algiers. However, social issues as related to the violence and repression of the Algerian War, the trauma experienced by migrants on the streets of Paris in the 1960s, and the continuity of imperialist ideologies in the present are alluded to rather than explored. When Georges tells Majid’s son that he isn’t to blame, in some respects, the narrative does exonerate him. In an early review of the film, Catherine Wheatley alludes to such an interpretation when she notes that the bourgeois characters in Haneke’s films are forced to endure cruel and excessive forms of punishment. While she notes that Georges is perhaps the most deserving of such treatment, she tempers this claim by writing “But after all, this is a child’s act, and as John Rawls states in ‘A Theory of Justice’, a child cannot fully understand the principle of guilt”.175 Similarly, the logic of citation, what we can situate here as a second way in which traces of history make an appearance in these films, can be subject to critique. In the case of Caché more specifically, Gilroy takes Haneke to task for what he views as the “overly casual citation of the 1961

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anti-Arab pogrom by Papon’s police in Paris”.176 Citation is not an equivalent for engagement, and it remains true that the films under examination in this chapter do not facilitate a direct or sustained engagement with the colonial past. While there is an obvious rigor to Haneke’s filmmaking practices, his politics are modernist rather than militant in their orientation, an observation that applies in equal measure to Denis. But it is perhaps their balancing of aesthetics and politics that accounts for their popularity among festival audiences and scholars in providing cinematic work that is formally and politically intricate for their contemplation, expanding in richness for those, as Schwarz would say, “have the eyes to see”. This is primarily how these films diverge from what I have construed as their “master text” of Deux ou trois choses, where the balance tips in favor of the political. In using Godard’s film as historical and theoretical document, I have attempted to provoke less than conventional readings of these contemporary Parisian films whereby the cinematic city proves to be anything but generic, illuminating the methodological gains of going back to the past. What has been charted across this chapter is an imaginary of the city that is demonstrative of the tensions that arise from insularity and fortification on the one hand, and the unsustainability of such gestures within a global cityscape, and one with an imperial past. These tensions are accompanied by ambivalences that are held at a counterpoint with the film’s equally progressive moves in their engagement with histories that lie forgotten if not actively repressed. While the cityscape in Code inconnu, J’ai pa sommeil and Caché are largely blurred in their presentation, they enter into a dialectical relationship with exorbitant, fraught and occasionally volatile encounters that lend a great deal of specificity not only to the urban images made visible within the films but also the histories that reside at their edges. While there is a certain continuity between all of these films that demonstrates the enduring legacy of European modernist filmmaking, Denis’ and Haneke’s cinema are indicative of the kind of balancing acts that operate as a “good recipe” not only for geography, as Strauss might argue, but also for the world cinema market. The aestheticized approach to difficult and highly politicized subject matter allows these films to hover between specificity and universality, while their evocation of generic conventions also allows them to straddle the divide between familiarity and unfamiliarity. My methodological approach enables us to consider what it is about these films in terms of their aesthetic properties that might bear an indirect relationship to their particular routes of circulation. The notion of the cinematic city is also expanded upon in this instance, so that the films

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glo b a l p a r i s 117 in question are not simply related back to a certain imaginary of the city but enriched by meditations on exactly how this imaginary is produced through specifically cinematic means, within films destined for certain arenas of decidedly global circulation. Notes 1. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 51. 2. D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. x. 3. K. Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings, p. 112. 4. Ibid. p. 112. 5. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 8. 6. Also see Taunton’s sections on Parisian social housing in Fictions of the City. 7. Alfred Guzetti, Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Analysis of A Film by Godard (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 16. 8. Susan Hayward, “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French Cinema (1950s–1990s)” in: Myrto Konstantrakos (ed.), Spaces in European Cinema (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), pp. 29–30. 9. M. Taunton, Fictions of Class, p. 128. 10. Jill Forbes, “Pierrot le fou and Post-New Wave French Cinema” in: David Willis (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 110. 11. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 196. 12. Godard critic Richard Roud provides a list of the spaces that comprise Godard’s cinematic city of choice, “including hotel rooms, chambers de bonnes, and above all, cafés, with their pin-ball machines, and the endless conversations nursing the lait chaud against the inevitable moment when one has to go out on the streets or back to the dreary hotel room”. See: Richard Roud, Cinema One: Jean-Luc Godard (London: British Film Institute, 2006), p. 16. 13. M. Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 38. 14. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 1939–1990 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 130. 15. Ibid. p. 134. 16. A key example here is Alphaville (1965), which is mostly shot on location in the banlieue and is essentially a film about Paris as mechanized future city under a totalitarian regime. Paris of the future, for Godard, was the city of the present and, more precisely, the city of new forms of capitalist ­ development that are the explicit subject of Deux ou trois choses. 17. “Godard was one of the first to develop a form of cinematography that ­provides a new way of thinking about living spaces and the interiors of

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apartments”. See: Thierry Jouse and Thierry Paquot, La ville au cinéma (Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005), p. 712. 18. “The essence of urbanity, for Godard, resides in common spaces, anonymous and generic; in bistros, in cafés, in small hotels, small cinema halls in neighbourhoods, in ordinary streets”. Ibid. p. 712. 19. Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth Century London and Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 10. 20. See Janet Wolf, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity”, Theory, Culture and Society 2 (November 1985), pp. 37–46; Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking A Walk: Flânerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1998); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping. 21. A. Gleber, The Art of Taking A Walk, p. 180. 22. Ibid. p. 181. 23. M. Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, pp. 93–178. 24. Ibid. p. 159. 25. C. Darke, Alphaville, p. 31. 26. M. Taunton, Fictions of Class, p. 124. 27. K. Ross, Fast Cars, p. 151. 28. Here, I am thinking of the displaced signs of the French imperial past that can be traced across films such as Agnes Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, Godard’s Le petit soldat (1963) and Jacque Rozier’s Adieu Phillipine (1961), among others, which are of course very different from the overt address of this history in some of Chris Marker’s films of the period, including Le joli mai (1963) or his earlier film with Alain Renais’s Les statues meurent aussi (1953). Renais’ Muriel (1963) contains a more explicit address of these events, particularly in their reference to the clandestine use of torture by the French military in Algeria. 29. There is an extensive literature on this film from a specifically feminist viewpoint, but for an assessment of the film’s referencing of colonial strife, see Betz’s assessments of the film in Beyond the Subtitle (pp. 136–40). 30. As translated by Martine Beugnet in her book Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) who draws upon Strauss in a rather different way in her work on Denis’ films, in her exploration of Denis’ penchant for the representation of repressed memories: “French cinema is not very good on geography. Generally speaking, explorations of its own territory lack inventiveness, and as soon as it leaves France, it starts to resemble tourism’s idle wanderings. It does not merely signal the absence of a curious eye. If French cinema is not good on geography, it is because it is rather hopeless on history, and more precisely, on the history of its geography. To go across the frontier is to take a risk to meet the ghosts of an elsewhere that has been repressed: imperialism and its taboo, the colony” (p. 46). 31. Cynthia Marker, “Sleepless in Paris: J’ai pas sommeil (Denis, 1993)” in: Phil Powrie (ed.), French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 137.

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glo b a l p a r i s 119 32. See David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 191–221; Wendy Everett “Fractal Films and the Architecture of Complexity”, Studies in European Cinema 2.3 (2005), pp. 159–71; Leisa Rothlisberger, “Babel’s National Frames in Global Hollywood”, Jump Cut 54 (Fall 2012). 33. D. Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, p. 193. 34. Ibid. p. 193. 35. Paul Kerr, “Babel’s Network Narrative: Packaging a Globalized Art Cinema”, Transnational Cinemas 1.1 (2010), p. 46. 36. C. Marker, “Sleepless in Paris”, pp. 136–46. 37. D. Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, p. 198. 38. Golubeva is rumored to have committed suicide in 2011. Both actresses, of course, starred in the films of Leos Carax. In terms of her work in French cinema, Golubeva is mostly known for her roles in the films of Carax, Denis and Bruno Dumont. 39. Ibid. p. 197. 40. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne to Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 51. 41. In his work on the network narrative, Bordwell cites Playtime as an extreme illustration of both “routine and wayward convergences” (p. 200). 42. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 77. 43. Ibid. p. 79. 44. Jean Ma, “Tsai Ming-Liang’s Haunted Movie Theatre” in: Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds.), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 343. 45. In “Mind Games”, Thomas Elsaesser makes a similar claim, stating that “there is a clear evidence that cinematic storytelling has in general become more intricate, complex, unsettling, and this not only in the traditionally difficult categories of European auteur and art films, but right across the spectrum of mainstream cinema, event-movies/blockbusters, indiefilms, not forgetting (HBO-financed) television” (p. 19). See: Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film” in: Warren Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 13–41. 46. D. Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, p. 191. 47. Carrie Tarr, “Transnational Identities, Transnational Spaces: West Africans in Paris in Contemporary French Cinema”, Modern and Contemporary France 15.1 (February 2007) p. 69. 48. Janet Bergstrom makes an eloquent case for the opaque nature of Denis’ films, but at the level of character and not with regard to the depiction of the city in her films, nor in a way that engages with the traces of empire that make their way into a film such as J’ai pas sommeil. 49. P. Kerr, “Babel’s network narrative”, p. 38.

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50. A. Abbas, “Cinema, The City, The Cinematic”, p. 148. 51. Ibid. p. 146. 52. Ibid. p. 145. 53. Ibid. p. 145. 54. Rem Koolhass, “The Generic City” in: Jennifer Sigler, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 1249–50. 55. D. Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, p. 200. 56. P. Brunette, Michael Haneke, p. 77. 57. D. Bordwell, “Art Cinema as Mode of Practice”, Film Criticism 4.1 (Fall 1979), pp. 55–64. 58. Ginette Vincendeau, “Café Society”, Sight and Sound 11.8 (August 2001), p. 24. 59. Amélie is a Franco-German co-production. 60. Wendy Everett, for example, refers to Amélie as “fractal film” (p. 163). 61. G. Vincendeau, p. 23. 62. Isabelle Vanderschelden, Amélie. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 37. 63. See: Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 144–54; Phil Powrie, The Cinema of France (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 153–62. 64. G. Vincendeau, “Café Society”, p. 24. 65. See: Michelle Scatton-Tessier, “Le Petisme: Flirting with the Sordid in Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain”, Studies in French Cinema 4.3 (2004), p. 197; I. Vanderschelden, Amélie, pp. 69–70. 66. As Guy Austin notes, Cahiers du Cinéma largely engaged in a critique of these films (apart from those made by Carax) in light of what their writers viewed as their disavowal of political or social concerns (p. 145). 67. I. Vanderschelden, Amélie, pp. 69–70. 68. Genre certainly does play a part in these differences, as Amélie explicitly adopts a postmodern version of “network narrative”, while both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu ground themselves in the modernist rendition of this type of story. 69. I. Vanderschelden, Amélie, p. 52. 70. G. Vincendeau, p. 23. 71. S. Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 2. 72. Ibid. p. 11. 73. Martinique retains a place of significance in Denis’ oeuvre as her second feature film S’en fout la mort (1990) also features Alex Decas playing the role of Jocelyn, who hails from Martinique. S’en fout la mort suggests that Jocelyn is never able to fully belong in France, as figured through his overattachment to the cocks that he trains in addition to his and his partner Dah’s obvious exclusion from the white businessmen that they work for. This separation is both physical, as Jocelyn and Dah inhabit the subterranean domain of the Ardennes restaurant and sexual, as Jocelyn’s desire for Toni, wife of their boss Ardennes, goes unfulfilled. In J’ai pas sommeil,

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glo b a l p a r i s 121 Denis offers both a continuation and departure from this story; Théo does not belong in France, but unlike Jocelyn, the film doesn’t end with his death but with a form of nomadism that is subtly but similarly indicative of his inability to put down roots in his adopted country as a result of racial prejudice. It is also perhaps no coincidence that Martinique, the point of origin for these characters in the films, remains part of France, to this day. 74. J. Mayne, p. 87. 75. Ibid. pp. 89–92. 76. E. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p. 113. 77. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), p. 23. 78. Nick James, “Code Uncracked”, Sight and Sound 11.6 (January 2001), p. 8. 79. It should be noted that some scholars find fault with Haneke’s representation of Eastern Europe. Rosalind Galt, for instance, views Haneke’s citational use of Eastern Europe as a form of “troubling shorthand” that doesn’t engage with the socio-political circumstances of the Balkans but simply with the rhetoric of “Balkanism” (p. 225). Temenuga Trifonova also argues that the representation of the Balkans in this film doesn’t move much past stereotypes of its status as a “pre-agrarian, pre-modern part of Europe” (p. 73). See: Rosalind Galt, “The Functionary of Mankind: Haneke and Europe” in: Brian Price (ed.), On Michael Haneke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 221–44; Temenuga Trifonova, “Michael Haneke and the Politics of Film Form”, in: Ben McCann and David Sorfa (eds.), The Cinema of Michael Haneke (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2011), pp. 65–84. 80. Z. Bauman, p. 88. 81. Ibid. p. 89. 82. The sounds of the drumming are carried over from the previous scene, where a group of children are drumming, lead by Amadou, in what ­iconographically appears to be La Défense. 83. Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 90. 84. Ibid. p. 86. 85. France in Denis’ Chocolat is a good illustration of an early incarnation of this type of figure; as mobile observer, France is able to move freely between her colonial home and the servants quarters as a child, a position she similarly retains as an adult, in sharp contrast to other black characters, including her man-servant Protée. 86. A. Abbas, p.145. 87. R. Galt, “The Functionary of Mankind”, p. 222. 88. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 72–3. 89. Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), p. 120.

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90. Tom Conley, “Tracking Code Unknown” in: Roy Grundman (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 113–23. 91. Fatima Navqi, “The Politics of Contempt and the Ecology of Images” in Stephen K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (eds.), The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 237. 92. R. Galt, p. 224. 93. Ibid. p.224. 94. E. Balibar, We, The People of Europe?, p. 33. 95. F. Navqi, “The Politics of Contempt”, p. 237. 96. Ibid. p. 240. 97. R. Galt, p. 225. 98. Michael Cowan, “Between the Street and the Apartment: Disturbing the Space of Fortress Europe in Michael Haneke”, Studies in European Cinema 5.2 (February 2009), p. 123. 99. Jonathan Crary, 24/7:Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013), p. 122. 100. R. Galt, p. 237. 101. Ibid. p. 234. 102. C. Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, pp. 123–4. 103. Stuart Hall, “European cinema on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in Duncan Petrie (ed.), Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema. (London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. 51. 104. Mayne quotes from an interview with Denis where she recounts understanding, even as a child growing up in former French colonies, that there “was something ‘perverse’ about the relationship between whites and blacks” (p. 11), a sentiment that certainly comes to fruition in many of her films, including Chocolat and S’en fout la mort. 105. R. Galt, p. 239. 106. Catherine Wheatley, Caché (London: British Film Institute, 2012), p. 85. 107. All of these historical and theoretical approaches to the subject of Haneke’s cinema can be found across all of the edited collections previously mentioned, in addition to: Ben McCann and David Sorfa (eds.), The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia (New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2011); Alexander D. Ornella and Stephanie Knauss (eds.), Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke’s Cinema (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2010). 108. Ipek A. Celik, “I Want You to Be Present: Guilt and the History of Violence in Michael Haneke’s Caché”, Cinema Journal 50.1 (Fall 2011), p. 71. 109. W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 422. 110. Ibid. p. 21. 111. Richard Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke”, Cineaste 31.1 (Winter 2005), p. 50. For Rosalind Galt, Haneke’s comments in this regard operate as a performance

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glo b a l p a r i s 123 of “faux naïveté”, in an effort to downplay the film’s national specificity, a topic that I address in this chapter from a different angle (p. 228). 112. Ibid. p. 50. 113. Ibid. p. 50. 114. Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: the National Past in Postwar French (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 35. 115. R. Porton, p. 50. 116. Ibid. p. 50. 117. Paul Arthur in an early review of Caché in Film Comment for example refers to the city in the film as unnamed, while Rosalind Galt, in response to Elizabeth Ezra and Jane Sillars’ description of the city in Caché as “European”, claims that this is an odd interpretation given that the setting is “immediately recognizable as Paris” (p. 228). Nancy E. Virtue describes Paris in this film as ahistorical and hermetic (p. 286). See: Paul Arthur “Endgame”, Film Comment 41.6 (November–December 2005), pp. 24–8; Elizabeth Ezra and Jane Silliars, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Bringing Terror Home”, Screen 48.2 (2007), p. 215; Nancy E. Virtue, “Memory, Trauma and the French-Algerian War: Michael Haneke’s Caché, Modern and Contemporary France” 19. 3 (August 2011), pp. 281–96. 118. Ipek A. Celik, p. 71. 119. Michel Chion, “Without Music: On Caché” in: Roy Grundman (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 165. 120. Ibid. p. 165. 121. See Libby Saxon, “Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)”, Studies in Cinema 7.1 (February 2007) pp. 5–17 for an analysis of the significance, both aesthetically and thematically, of the prominent use of off-screen space in the film. 122. Ipek A. Celik, p. 67. 123. “Filmed in Paris, at the banlieue in Romainville, near Lenin Avenue and in the provinces”. See: Jean Rehm, “Juste sous la surface”, Cahiers du Cinéma 605 (October 2005), p. 31. 124. “The second (Benichou) suffers, until his death, and in the gashes that cover his son’s face, the rejection through which his survival as an invisible man, banished in HLM, continues to provide a silent testimony to” (Rehm, p. 31). 125. K. Ross, Fast Cars, p. 7. 126. Ibid. p. 9. 127. Ibid. p. 11. 128. Ibid. p. 11. 129. Ibid. p. 78. 130. Ibid. p. 9. 131. Charles Affron and Mierella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 42.

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1 32. Ibid. p. 35. 133. C. Wheatley, “Secrets, Lies and Videotape”, Sight and Sound 16. 2 (February 2006), p. 32. 134. Ibid. p. 32 135. Ibid. p. 34. 136. Ara Osterweil, “Caché”, Film Quarterly 59.4 (June 2006), p. 36. 137. Michel Cieutat and Phillipe Royer, “Entretien avec Michael Haneke: On ne montre pas la réalité, juste son image manipulée”, Positif 536 (October 2005), p. 23. 138. Bevis Hillier and Stephen Escritt, The Deco Style (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p. 28. 139. Lucy Fischer, “Greta Garbo and the Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon”, Camera Obscura 48 16.3 (2001), p. 86. 140. B. Hillier and S. Escritt, pp. 37–8. 141. M. Cieutat and P. Royer, pp. 22–3. 142. Thomas Elsqesser “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” in: Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), p. 301. 143. E. Ann Kaplan, “Melodrama, cinema and trauma”, Screen 42.2 (Summer 2001), p. 202. 144. Brigette Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 133. 145. For example, see Max Silverman, “The empire looks back”, Screen 48.2 (Summer 2007), pp. 245–9 for an analysis of the ending in this vein. 146. K. Ross, Fast Cars, p. 12. 147. In his reading of the film, Guy Austin refers to Majid’s dwelling space as a “pseudo-colonial universe” where his suicide signifies the final residual trace of the traumas of October 1961. See: Guy Austin, “Drawing trauma: visual testimony in Caché and J’ai 8 ans”, Screen 48.4 (Winter 2007), pp. 529–36. 148. Ginette Vincendeau, La haine (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 85. 149. Ibid. p. 86. 150. Ibid. p. 86. 151. Jonathan Romney, “Caché ”, Sight and Sound 16.2 (February, 2006), p. 64. 152. Florence Jacobowitz, “Caché ”, CineAction 68 (January 2006), p. 63. 153. A. Osterweil, p. 36. 154. Myrto Konstantarakos, “Which Mapping of the City? La haine (Kassovitz, 1995) and the cinéma de banalieue” in Phil Powrie (ed.), French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 169. 155. G. Vincendeau, p. 23. 156. M. Konstantarakos, p. 162. 157. G. Vincendeau, p. 27.

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glo b a l p a r i s 125 158. C. Tarr, Reframing Difference, p. 15. 159. G. Vincendeau, pp. 20–3. 160. Susan Hayward, “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French Cinema (1950s–1990s)” in: Myrto Konstantarakos (ed.), Spaces in European Cinema. (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), p. 30. 161. Ibid. p. 30. 162. M. Konstantarakos, p. 160. 163. Ipek A. Celik, p. 60. 164. G. Vincendeau, La haine, p. 22. 165. Panivong Norindr, “The Cinematic Practice of a ‘Cineaste Ordinaire’: Abdellatif Kechiche and French Political Cinema”, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16.1 (January 2012), p. 56. 166. See: Swami Vinay, “Marivaux in the Suburbs: Reframing Language in Kechiche’s L’esquive (2003)”, Studies in French Cinema 7.1 (2007), pp. 57–68. 167. S. Vinay, “Marivaux in the Suburbs”, p. 61. 168. Quoted in P. Norindr, p. 60 169. Richard Porton, “Marivaux in the ‘Hood’: An Interview with Abdellatif Kechiche”, Cineaste 31.1 (Winter 2005), p. 47. 170. S. Vinay, p. 63. 171. Quoted in Yvette Biro, “A Subtle Story: 35 Shots of Rum”, Film Quarterly 63.2 (Winter 2009), p. 38. 172. R. Porton, p. 48. 173. Florence Jacobowitz, “Caché”, p. 63. 174. G. Vincendeau, pp. 68–9. 175. C. Wheatley, “Secrets, Lies and Videotape”, p. 36. 176. Paul Gilroy, “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel”, Screen 48.2 (Summer 2007), p. 233.

C HA P TER 2

Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places

2.1  DIRTY PRETTY LONDON: THE GLOBAL STORY On 26 July 2013, journalist Zoe Williams wrote a story in The Guardian about a little known campaign, spearheaded by the British Home Office, that involved vans being driven around certain areas of London upon which anti-immigration billboards were displayed.1 So clandestine was this pilot campaign that local councils as well as the police professed to know nothing of its existence. Slogans on these billboards included: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest”, followed by a number one could text if instigating deportation happened to land on someone’s “to do list”. When Williams asked the Home Office when this campaign might lose its pilot status, the response was that its success needed to be assessed on several levels. The ludicrous nature of this reply was hardly lost on Williams, who asked whether or not the success of the campaign would be based on just how many migrants voluntarily chose to return to their nation of origin. On 3 August 2013, a second immigration-related controversy broke in The Guardian, this time concerning random spot checks that were being conducted by Home Office officials and the police across railway stations in Britain, under the aegis of Home Secretary Theresa May.2 These news stories are a stark reminder of the way in which immigration to Britain is continually narrated as a social problem that needs to be solved, taking us back to Margaret Thatcher’s anti-immigration policies and even further back to the treatment of migrants arriving from former colonies after the end of empire, who slowly but surely lost their rights to British citizenship. Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech as well as Thatcher’s slightly more subdued articulation of the anxieties generated from feeling as though “one’s culture is begin overtaken by another” are carried through to this latest wave of anti-immigration sentiment.3 The tragic London bombings of 5 July 2005, addressed in Rachid

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Bouchareb’s London River (2009), is one fairly recent event that can be pulled out of this long history that leads to the vilification of refugees and asylum seekers in particular, culminating in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian migrant, in Stockwell Tube station. Dirty Pretty Things is often lauded one of the first British films to tackle the subject of global migration to the city of London. Dirty Pretty Things contains the initial trappings of a network narrative but the film can be more accurately described using the term “intersecting narrative” as the film’s distinct narrative trajectories do eventually converge. The film concerns the plight of Okwe, a Nigerian political refugee, and Senay, a Turkish immigrant. Okwe and Senay become embroiled in the London underworld, a world characterized by illegal forms of “global trade”, including the selling of kidneys, which occurs within the walls of the Baltic Hotel run by a Spanish character named Juan. Okwe virtually runs on a twenty-four-hour time cycle, as he drives a taxi during the day and works at the hotel at night. One night, Okwe finds a human heart in the lavatory in one of the rooms, which eventually leads to his discovery of the organ trade flourishing behind the closed doors of the hotel. Other characters include Ivan, a Russian figure who works in the hotel as well as Juliette, a black British character who is a prostitute, also based in the hotel. Okwe’s only friend, Guo Li, is a Chinese immigrant who works in the morgue. While Senay is the victim of sexual exploitation, at the hands of both Juan and her boss at the sweatshop, the former attempts to draw Okwe into the kidney transplant scheme. Eventually, Juan receives his come-uppance at the hands of the various characters, as they harvest his kidney for the purposes of trade, resulting in Senay’s departure for New York and Okwe’s impending return to Nigeria. As is suggested in my opening meditation on the “problem of migration” to Britain, an argument can be made concerning a certain affinity between the treatment of migrants that descend from the aftermath of British imperial rule and those that now fall under the category of the “global migrant”. Laila Amine for instance, claims that very little has changed in geographical terms as the areas of the city once inhabited by settled migration populations is similarly “home” to the global migrant employed within a similar economy of low-wage, physically demanding work.4 In her piece on Dirty Pretty Things, Sarah Gibson develops an argument along similar lines. Gibson frames her discussion of the film by noting a certain abstraction that has overtaken official discourse on migration in Britain, whereby the stigmatization of the “black” migrant has given way to a general disdain for foreigners of any kind, grounded in cultural rather than biological differences.5

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Conversely, others have claimed that key distinctions must be made between the experience of post-imperial migrant populations and their global counterparts. This latter argument has been mobilized by a number of scholars writing about Dirty Pretty Things specifically but also by Stephen Frears himself. In an interview with Cineaste, Frears is asked to discuss the relationship between Dirty Pretty Things and his previous films, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), both of which engage with the conditions of settled migrant communities in Thatcher’s Britain. His response is that the situations on offer in his earlier films are not “remotely comparable” to Dirty Pretty Things, which engages with the flow of migrants entering Britain within the decade of its release, including figures like the asylum seeker and the refugee.6 For James Graham, Dirty Pretty Things details the exploitative nature of the relationship of the global migrant to Britain’s underground economy, a significant shift from the relationship of post-imperial migrants to Britain, brought over voluntarily as a result of labor shortages.7 Essentially, this chapter offers an exploration of both sides of this debate, taking affinity and difference as its central leitmotifs in its examination of Dirty Pretty Things as “global London” film and as world cinema text. As is the case with the previous chapter, I situate Dirty Pretty Things within a cinematic past that is largely absent within existing discussions of the film in order to stimulate alternate readings of the city in the film, ones that operate as a corollary to Bhabha’s notion of the “past-present”. This is a social realist and social problem past and one specifically centered upon a range of films that have given voice to the struggles of post-imperial migrants in an often inhospitable London since the 1950s. If the legacies of post-war European modernism remain prevalent in discussions of its contemporary counterparts, social realist cinema that indexes Britain’s recent migratory past takes its place in the second chapter. The specter of social realism is immediately raised in conjunction with the name “Stephen Frears”, someone who began working at the BBC in the heyday of 1960s social realist cinema and whose two previous films, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid are categorized as two of the most significant social realist films of the 1980s. Even if Frears himself downplays the connection between Dirty Pretty Things and its predecessors, many a critic has moved in the opposite direction. Nick James, for example, states that Dirty Pretty Things seems to have risen from the ashes of television-financed cinema of the 1980s, geared towards the depiction of present day affairs.8 James is, of course, talking about Channel 4, which financed both Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie as part of its Film on Four series. In his scathing review of Dirty Pretty Things,

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writer and filmmaker Ian Sinclair refers to Okwe’s ability to get by “on a Thatcheresque dole of sleep”, which is telling in this respect.9 Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment provide a succinct definition of the aims and parameters of social realist cinema, British or otherwise; as they state, “social realism is a discursive term used by film critics and reviewers to describe films that aim to show the effects of environmental factors on the development of character through depictions that emphasize the relationship between location and identity”.10 It is a form of filmmaking that has historically embraced a marginal cast of societal characters situated or even contained within environments that are often urban in their orientation.11 These observations are in keeping with a number of Raymond Williams’ classic observations concerning recurring attributes of realist forms of artistic production, some of which are entirely relevant to the subject of this chapter. For Williams, realist works are imbued with what he describes as “social extension”, whereby the artistic work extends its reach towards the marginal while also engaging in the depiction of resolutely contemporary action and circumstances.12 The correspondence between location and identity within social realist modes of cinema as well as Williams’ conception of social extension constitute two ways of connecting the diverse films under examination in this chapter within a distinctly spatialized analytic framework. To some extent, all of these films place emphasis on the intricate relationships between location, contemporary social and political circumstances and marginal racialized identities, but to varying degrees and through numerous means. As Hallam and Marshment note, contemporary social realist films utilize a varied stylistic template, one that doesn’t necessarily conform to its traditional affiliations with observational camerawork and “slice of life” narrative structures as discerned among British “kitchen sink” dramas and other such films of the late 1950s and early 1960s.13 These newer films are often hybrids, incorporating modernist or generic elements with a realist film style.14 According to Paul Dave, contemporary British social realist cinema can also be defined by its reconfigured and expanded purview, one that embraces the figure of the migrant, the child and the “rough” working class, all part of a broader turn towards the depiction of the underclasses within recent incarnations of the form.15 Dave’s observation draws attention to the seemingly neglected global orientation of recent British social realist cinema, as some of its longstanding conventions are drawn upon in the narrativization of Britain’s contemporary relationship to the world, particularly as it relates to patterns of global migration. In this way, as all of the authors mentioned above suggest, social realism, like all other

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realisms, is an essentially flexible form, subject to a wide variety of transfigurations and permutations. Dave’s comments can be further complemented by Sarah Lay’s observations to this effect, in order to develop a thesis concerning the “world cinema” turn that has overtaken certain trajectories of British social realist cinema. Lay argues that during the 1990s, British social realist films were marketed on the basis of their authorship, orchestrated to attract “art house” audiences at home and abroad.16 Stephen Frears, among others including Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, are key figures in the “authorial turn”, as a form of branding attractive to global film channels. Following Andrew Higson, we can also argue that such a movement was already in evidence in the poetic realist films of specifically British New Wave incarnations of social realism, especially evident in their aestheticization of landscape in films such as A Taste of Honey (1961) or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). The modes of aestheticization found in these films are held in tension with what Higson delineates as their “moral realism”, in espousing a commitment to telling the narratives of particular social groups.17 Higson’s notion of moral realism makes its way into Dirty Pretty Things, in its revised form; as will be elucidated in subsequent sections, reflexivity in this film is in service to the perpetuation of its urbanbased allegory of the horrors of global London for the global migrant, but it is combined with a certain flippancy of tone that adds a second layer of complexity to its meaning. As such, Dirty Pretty Things can be said to conform to at least some of the parameters of contemporary social realist cinema, in terms of the relationship the film develops between the city of London and the marginal status of the global migrant and its orientation towards both a local and international audience, as evidenced by its circulation across a variety of film festivals. And yet, a source of anxiety among critics and scholars writing about the film has to do with its generic hybridity, its mixture of serious social realist content with the trappings of the thriller genre, topped with instances of irreverent humour.18 Frears himself pays little heed to such concerns, stating that “it suits me to be both serious and frivolous at the same time”.19 The film actively inscribes itself with a thriller context and, more specifically, seems to actively reference Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986). In this film, George, who has just been released from prison, becomes involved with a prostitute named Simone. At first, his relationship with Simone is “work related”, as he is hired by Mortwell to drive her to her various clients. As the film progresses however, he comes to care for Simone and helps her to find Cathy, who is also a prostitute, drug addict and Simone’s

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lover. The thriller elements of the film center on Mortwell and his overtly violent sidekick Anderson, who pursue George, Simone and Cathy when they head to Brighton. Sinclair makes the link between the two films when writing about Juliette, whom he describes as “a prostitute (zestfully impersonated by Sophie Okonedo) moonlighting from Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa”.20 In Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema, Young points towards the class politics and “racialization” of London’s underworld of Mona Lisa, “led by working class villains and fed on by ‘foreigners’ is in control”.21 There are moments of narrative action in Dirty Pretty Things that can be read as vestiges, or traces of Mona Lisa. For example, Juliette sprays a client with mace in the hotel. In Mona Lisa, Simone sprays the manager of the Ritz with mace as she and George try to escape. As Charlotte Brunsdon argues in her seminal book on London in cinema, what further unites the two films apart from plot details is that they are both defined by a certain generic hybridity and expressionistic use of color; both genre and expressionism are points of analysis that will continually crop up throughout this chapter, as ways of connecting as well as differentiating between British migrant cinema of the past and of the contemporary moment.22 Generic hybridity, or “inventiveness” as Dave refers to it, has historically been a component of social realist cinema across both its documentary and fictional variations but the anxiety it generates in this particular context is not just related to the film’s tone and evocation of a so-called “low genre” but also to what some see as its dubious characterization as London film.23 In the way that the film reflexively situates itself with the thriller genre, Dirty Pretty Things is perhaps even more self-conscious about its status as ‘London film’. References to London abound in the Dirty Pretty Things, commencing with the opening sequence. When Okwe tries to solicit potential passengers at Stansted airport, he says “You want a car? Ten Pounds. You want a car? London”. After a cut to the credits, the film returns to a second shot of Okwe as he continues to solicit passengers, saying “You want a taxi? Buckingham Palace”. Iconic landmarks of the city that are mentioned in this sequence actively recall a familiar image of place before the film descends into the realm of the unfamiliar, unknown city. This is how Dirty Pretty Things establishes itself as a “London film” without visually depicting a recognizable image of the city. There are more disparaging assessments of the city articulated by various characters throughout, including Guo Li who claims that London is a “weird city” after Okwe discovers the heart in the toilet of the Baltic hotel, and Okwe’s boss who exclaims “this shit dust-bin city” after being told by Okwe that he has a venereal disease. There is also the evocation of a certain

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geography of the city that is achieved through the use of dialogue, but never complemented through visual means. Okwe’s boss at the minicab office threatens to give him “all the jobs in south London” if he does not provide him with medicine to treat his disease. When Senay is forced to leave her apartment, Okwe finds her a place in Chinatown, noting that “the immigration police do not dare go into Chinatown”. Reflexivity in these instances is not in service to the rigors of modernist filmmaking, as is the case with Haneke’s films, but rather draws attention to its allegorizing imperative and one that marshals familiar tropes of the city balanced precariously between high and low, or more obviously, “dirty” and “pretty”. While some critics and scholars are unconcerned about the non-specific, largely unrecognizable London of this film, James going as far as stating that its unfamiliarity is simply part of its appeal, Sinclair is troubled not only by the film’s frivolity but also by its lack of referentiality; as he says “this is an unreferenced city, memories are all of elsewhere”.24 However, contemporary, global London is rife with the presence, signifiers and images of elsewhere so that the city Sinclair mourns the absence of is no longer present in the way that it once was, if indeed it ever was. For authors like Sinclair, Dirty Pretty Things is both troubling in its displacement of some of the moral seriousness of the social realist tradition and in its depiction of an unreferenced and non-specific London. Within the context of the conceptual framework developed in this book, the turn towards the depiction of London as global city and a second move that reorients the film’s social realist bent towards the categorical imperatives of world cinema is another way of naming the anxieties expressed by Sinclair. It is precisely these ambivalences that underlie the analytical approach of this chapter. With respect to the structure of this chapter, I adopt a different strategy from the one utilized in the previous chapter by employing Dirty Pretty Things as an analytical springboard. As such, I continually circle back to this film, using aspects of it to launch investigations of other groupings of London films in order to establish the ways in which Dirty Pretty Things offers both a reconfiguration of its social realist and social problem antecedents in a way that chimes with its “world cinema status” while also demonstrating that this seemingly unreferenced city in the film is anything but. This chapter is roughly divided into three sections. The first section examines the way in which Dirty Pretty Things crosses its social realist impetus with the devices of the thriller narrative in offering up a city made to the measure of “world cinema”. The final two sections of the chapter offer an alternative reading of the city in the film by situating it within a

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 133 longer trajectory of British “migrant” cinema. The first of these two sections takes its cue from the film’s title as I work with its own mobilization of a dichotomous understanding of London as “dirty pretty city”. While this opposition has been drawn upon by some scholars in their analysis of the city in the film, it has only been used in its affiliation with the contemporary state of the city. My proposition is that this particular opposition can be traced back to an enduring, Victorian imaginary of the city that is reworked within the post-imperial era in accordance with the modes of migration and settlement transpiring after the end of empire. This historically specific image of a “high” and “low” London makes its way into Dirty Pretty Things and is altered further in light of the narrative of global migration that is depicted in the film. Rather than returning to the British New Wave, a gesture that would be analogous to the return to Deux ou trois choses as a late addition to the French New Wave in Chapter 1, I instead take us back to Basil Dearden’s Pool of London (1951), an Ealing Production that stars Earl Cameron in his first feature film role. Pool of London takes on the role of “master text” in this subsection for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its generic hybridity. As noted by Andrew Higson, Pool of London is “noirish crime thriller embedded in an Ealing story documentary-cumsoap opera, saturated with picturesque location photography of London’s streets and docklands, with a story-line about race relations, thrown in for good measure”.25 Higson’s description of the film captures its oscillation between a realist style of filmmaking and something that is akin to the expressionistic, a duality that maps onto the image of “high and low London” in a way that can be charted all the way down to Dirty Pretty Things. Generic hybridity then, a key feature of social realist filmmaking in the broadest of terms, acquires a certain valency when the story in question centers on migrant mobilites and spaces. As this section will demonstrate, the dialectic between high and low is as relevant to the evocation of so-called “low genres” within a social realist framework as it is to the view of the city itself in these films. The second section of the chapter stages a second form of return, this time to a series of films featuring Caribbean migration and settlement in the city stemming from social problem films of the 1950s, including Sapphire (1959) and Flame in the Streets (1961), to a number of black British films of the 1970s and early 1980s such as Horace Ové’s canonical Pressure (1975), Anthony Simmons’ Black Joy (1975), Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980) and Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981). Lay, among other scholars writing about specifically about migrant cinema, has stated that the British social realist tradition has rarely addressed

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racism despite riots in Brixton and Broadwater Farm in London during the 1980s.26 Such a blanket statement negates the presence of an entire corpus of such films, stemming from the social problem films of the 1950s all the way to a body of films made between the 1970s to the early 1980s that give rise to a distinctly Caribbean imaginary of migration and settlement to London.27 It is within and against this grouping of films that the specificity of the city in Dirty Pretty Things begins to take shape through two distinct forms. In For Space, cultural geographer Doreen Massey poses a distinction between space and place in accordance with a notion of specificity. She writes: If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting and what it is made up of them. And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place.28

Dirty Pretty Things and some of its “companion pieces” including Last Resort (2000) espouse an image of space “in the process of becoming”, a reading of urban images that materializes when these films are compared to those that chronicle Caribbean migration and settlement in London where an overwhelming sense of place presides. This opposition between a cinematic sense of space and place is central to my reading of London in historical terms while also constituting a key difference between London and Paris. While within the Parisian context the building of the Périphérique roadway results in a spatial configuration of exclusion, no such boundary is erected within the context of post-imperial London. In London, both within the context of the historical circumstances of postwar, post-imperial black settlement and in terms of the representation of space in the films themselves, integration was a battle that took place in the streets. As Paul Gilroy remarks in Black Britain: A Photographic History: The long, slow process, which would culminate in the assimilation of Caribbean settlers and their descendents into the mainstream currents of British social life, can be thought of as beginning in those everyday street-level encounters between black and white working people.29

As a correlation to this history, I make the case that in these films there is an analogous emphasis on the “making of place” and what we can perhaps see as an inability to transform space into place in the global London films. Correspondingly, the presence of street imagery in the

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 135 films of the past is matched by the significance of interior space in Dirty Pretty Things and in some of its contemporaries. While the interior emerges in its urban and historical capacity in Caché, in this context, the role and prominence of interior space is in fact a mark of the contemporaneity of Dirty Pretty Things, where we can locate both its distinction from previous British films concerning migration and its specificity as a film about global London. 2.2  THE “WORLD” IN DIRTY PRETTY THINGS Returning to Jean Ma’s as well as Thomas Elsaesser’s observations regarding the difficulty of viewing art cinema as its own autonomous mode of filmmaking in recent years, a similar proposition is applicable to contemporary incarnations of British social realist films. As the consideration of some of the recent literature on this subject has suggested, we can argue that a world cinema turn has overtaken certain branches of British social realist filmmaking, both in its embrace of a new cast of characters and in the attempts to brand certain trajectories of this filmmaking as global in their auteurist affiliations. In terms of the film’s cast, Andrey Tautou, heroine of Amélie, stars as Senay in Dirty Pretty Things, which in and of itself is emblematic of the global nature of her stardom. Frears’ film also launched Chiwetel Ejiofer’s film career, in the role of Okwe, also a marker of the film’s circulation and recognition on a global scale. Dirty Pretty Things, in its fusion of various generic elements and urban themes revolving around migration, informal economies and globalization can be said to construct the city as a kind of labyrinth which both utilizes and transforms elements of the thriller genre. These elements of the thriller genre simultaneously reposition the film’s leanings towards the tradition of social realism. Generic hybridity, in this instance, isn’t just about the inclusion of unfamiliar marginal figures within a social realist repertoire, but also about making two recognizable forms of filmmaking appear strange in their combination. It is interesting to note that explicit mobilization of generic conventions in this film differentiates it from both My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In an instance of convergence, the film’s presentation of “global London” is achieved through a characteristic of contemporary global cinemas, which involves the erosion of the strict distinctions between “low” genres and their ­artisanal or auteurist counterparts. Dirty Pretty Things contains traces of a network narrative, but in its slightly impure form as distinct character trajectories collapse into one before diverging again near the end of the film. The “London” of Dirty

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Pretty Things is constructed through a series of character-based topographies, chiefly that of Okwe and Senay. The first few sequences in the film establish Okwe’s trajectory of spatial traversal that the film varies and occasionally deviates from but continually returns to. The opening sequence takes us from the minicab office in mid evening to the Baltic Hotel. During this same sequence, there is also an introduction to Senay’s spatial trajectory. There is a shot of her looking up at the surveillance camera as she arrives at the hotel. After she leaves for work, Okwe tells Ivan that “I rent her couch in the morning, when she’s working here. We’re never there at the same time, she has rules”. The trajectories of the two characters intersect, as is apparent in the sequence described above, but remain distinct from one another until the latter half of the film. The major disruption of linearity in the film is brought about by the immigration officials who introduce certain restrictions upon the mobility of the characters; Senay can no longer work at the Baltic Hotel, and is eventually forced to leave the sweatshop and her apartment. There is a shift in the time cycle as Senay goes to the sweatshop in the day and Okwe also makes a day-time appearance at the Baltic Hotel to obtain Senay’s money, which is what leads to the discovery of the “organ trade” as he encounters the Somalian men, one of whom suffers from a botched kidney operation, at a time when he is generally not in the hotel. In its interweaving of multiple and largely differentiated topographical journeys, Dirty Pretty Things produces a labyrinthine image of global London as shaped by the negative effects of globalization so that the city is the abode of sweatshops and a flourishing black market organ trade. This is of interest, as the thriller genre is often connected to the representation of the labyrinthine aspects of the city. The city as maze, or the often enigmatic and dangerous underbelly of the surveyable, legible city, is a dichotomy that has its roots in nineteenth-century urban modernity.30 But the global labyrinth, as it appears in this film, operates very much in accordance with the view of the global city as outlined in the pioneering work of Saskia Sassen and others. As noted earlier, Sassen’s view of the global city is one where urban landscapes function as sites of production; these cities induce particular forms of economic polarization that emerge as a byproduct of the substantial increase in low-wage jobs essential to producing the luxury commodities that are markers of these cities, the increase in specialized high-wage jobs, as well as forms of “spatial organization”, such as the building of high rises to accommodate the proliferation of new firms.31 This form of economic polarization is evoked in the film through its topography of marginal spaces and seemingly invisible forms of labor that support other luxury industries such as that of tourism and

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 137 the production of consumer goods. As was also the case with films studied in the previous chapter, longstanding tropes and spatial characteristics of European urban modernity retain their traces in these contemporary films, in their revised, newly global form. Dirty Pretty Things also provides an updated, distinctly migrant version of the thriller narrative that is also in some ways an updated version of a classic city narrative. While most of the literature on the film acknowledges the film’s crime plot, I would go as far to suggest that Dirty Pretty Things can be read as a contemporary film noir, with its emphasis on the happenings of the urban underworld; however, the figure of the detective is a migrant, while the femme fatale and noir “good girl” are replaced by the prostitute and the oppressed migrant woman. Certainly Okwe functions very much in the vein of the classic detective, a figure whose mobility rests upon his or her ability to walk the line between the “official” and “unofficial” city. The discovery of the heart fuels his quest, which is discouraged by Guo Yi and Ivan as they point out the difficulties posed by his migrant status. The mini narrative revolving around the British immigration officers intersects and momentarily supersedes the detection strand, which is resurrected once more when Okwe finds the Somalian migrants seated in Senor Juan’s office. If Okwe can be read as a remnant of the noir detective, than Senay is akin to the noir “good girl” who is recast as a migrant figure, oppressed by the horrors of the global city. The film is well aware of its evocation of the dichotomy between the “good girl” and Juliette, the urban “bad girl” as is apparent in the scene between the two after Juan’s sexual exploitation of Senay. As Juliette says, “What a pair. The virgin and the whore”. While some critics, like Sinclair, express a certain anxiety about the unfamiliarity of Frears’ London, this analysis has suggested that even if the city itself appears to be unreferenced in visual terms, both a familiar and unfamiliar London story emerges in this film through narrative means. This oscillation between what is recognizable and that which exudes novelty is one of the chief dialectics of the world cinema text. If some might want to claim that the generic conventions of the thriller offer a kind of mainstreaming of the social realist content of this film, we can also suggest that its social realist elements, as related to the film’s emphasis on the social problems generated by globalization, add an overtly allegorical dimension to the thriller narrative. David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007), penned by the scriptwriter of Dirty Pretty Things, Stephen Knight, similarly merges elements of the thriller genre with an emphasis on the social problem of sex trafficking from Russia to London. These two films, among some others that will be examined in subsequent

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sections, serve as illustrations of hybrid forms of social realist filmmaking, a modality of representation well suited to the depiction of the city in one of its many global guises. The following sections of this chapter will move in a different direction by exploring the way in which Dirty Pretty Things contains traces of an enduring imaginary of the city while also departing significantly from other films about migration and settlement that have preceded it. As such, the following sections unearth a second cinematic context to situate the film within, but one that charts the longue durée of migrant London in the cinema all the way to its global variants as embodied in Dirty Pretty Things, among other recent films. 2.3  HIGH AND LOW LONDON In “Architecture’s Urban Shine and Brutal Reality”, Murray Fraser details a narrative of architectural developments in London that speak to a longstanding imaginary of the city as the site of splendor and an almost preferable site of decline. He writes: It is easy to see where the current crop of anti-heroic architects draw inspiration for their mind-set. In a tradition that harks back to William Hogarth or Charles Dickens, the dominant strand of cultural analysts of London have preferred the gloomy and weighty and sardonic to the bright and light and shiny, the incomplete and unsatisfactory to the smooth and finished, the gritty and the multicultural to the happy and homogenous.32

We can find evidence in Fraser’s statements for a reading of Frears’ “dirty pretty” city as an opposition with a long history that is reconfigured into a divide between the gritty migrant city and its glamorous iconic counterpart. In “Scandalous Events: Metropolitan Culture and Moral Change in Post-Second World War London”, Frank Mort uncovers a similar opposition between “high” and “low” London in his exploration of the shifting moral terrain of the post-war and post-imperial city. He centers his analysis of larger sexual, racial and cultural anxieties, resulting from both the end of the war and that of empire, as they coalesce around the Rillington Place murders, which took place in north Kensington in 1953, and the figure of John Christie.33 As Mort describes it, the coverage inspired by these murders brought together “high” and “low” London, or “the juxtaposition of the sublime and the monstrous suggesting that these stories of majesty and murder existed in adjacent spaces of the capital city”.34 He argues that events like the Rillington murders and the Profumo affair work

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to reconfigure an older Victorian dichotomy of overworld/underworld.35 This division comes with its very own color palette; Mort observes that the area of north Kensington associated with Christie and the women he murdered was rendered in a kind of monochrome, in “chiaroscuro” tones against the bright Technicolor image of London linked to the coronation of 1953, where the city was represented as “a site of glamorous ­international and imperial spectacle”.36 This notion of a “high” and ‘low” London was not simply forged along class lines, but also along those of race and sexual deviancy. As Mort notes, north Kensington became an area of Caribbean migration and settlement after the end of empire.37 The discursive registers of race and space associated with this form of post-imperial settlement, which presented these areas of the city as sites of decay, filth, and moral degradation, were utilized to defend Christie’s actions as those incited by the pressures of his changing environment.38 He notes that the coverage of the Mau Mau raids in Kenya also shaped the way in which Caribbean migrants and settlers in London were viewed, particularly in terms of fears surrounding sexual violence.39 Mort illustrates how a mythological strand of Victorian London is reworked in a way that is indicative of the changes and corresponding anxieties related to the onset of the post-imperial era: The symbolic interaction between images of the disintegration of British colonialism and the domestic world of inner city areas like north Kensington produced fears of cultural and sexual disturbance that would reshape the boundaries between black and white. In microcosm, Christie’s trial represented an early working through of these newly racialized urban faultlines.40

The motif of proximity, as a source of fear and anxiety, assumes a prominent presence in this distinction between high and low London. This is quite different from the opposition between central Paris and its banlieue that is predicated on distance, stemming back to two different modes of urban planning upon which the post-imperial imaginaries of both cities are partially indebted. Mort’s analysis also points towards the expressionistic nature of this opposition whereby “Landmark London’, to borrow an apt phrase from Brunsdon, assumes the splendor of color while its gritty underside is articulated using terminology commonly used to describe the lighting schema of film noir.41 Not surprisingly, Mort draws his terminology from the cinema, referring to a series of thriller films made in the late 1940s and early 1950s that utilize rather monochromatic imagery, “where the capital was imaged as a city of gray shadows, derelict bomb sites and treacherous

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moral ­quicksand”.42 In a footnote, the films listed include Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Greville’s Noose (1948), and Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp (1949).43 What Mort raises is the specter of genre, one that is closely associated with the representation of the city in Dirty Pretty Things and perhaps more generally with a certain kind of representation of urban life related to the figure of the migrant. If “pretty” London can be linked to either iconic images of the city or those of a glamorous variety, then perhaps ‘dirty” London is comprised of the spaces, settings and topographies associated with the thriller genre as these kinds of films often detail narratives about the happenings of the urban underworld. While Mort mentions The Blue Lamp, Dearden’s Pool of London (1950) is in some ways a better illustration of his dichotomous understanding of high and low London, especially as part of the imaging of the underside of the city as profoundly racialized. Pool of London chronicles the activities of a group of seamen and crew on a ship, the HMS Dunbar, which docks in London over the span of a weekend. There is a narrative about race, empire and the city embedded within this film that revolves around Johnny, played by Earl Cameron, who, like his character, first arrived to Britain as a sailor.44 Johnny, who is friends with a Canadian sailor on board the ship named Dan, becomes inadvertently involved in a diamond robbery, instigated by Dan’s associations with the London underworld. Johnny also meets Pat, a young white woman, with whom a romantic relationship is suggested but never comes to fruition. By the end of the film, Johnny departs once more on the Dunbar, while Dan remains behind, having saved Johnny from paying for his crime. There is moment in the film when the Captain, gazing out towards the city from the deck of the Dunbar, says to Johnny, “From afar it gleams like a jewel. But walk within the shadow of its walls and what do you find? Filth, squalor and misery”. What this character inadvertently points towards is how London signifies in dual fashion in this film, as a city of splendor that contains a far less appealing interior. Pool of London contains the trappings of a network narrative that work to bring disparate characters into close proximity; Higson’s descriptive term for this aspect of the film is “village London” characterized by chance encounters, which give rise to Siegfriend Kracauer’s well known formulation of the street as site of possibility and chance. As Kracauer observes in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, the cinema’s “affinity for the flow of life” explicates the medium’s attraction towards the representation of the street, the intoxicating domain of the flâneur, which surges with “the incessant flow of possibilities and near-intangible meanings”.45

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 141 Chance encounters between Pat and Johnny instigate the film’s brief but significant race-relations storyline, where they run into each other at the bus stop, after Johnny has been asked to leave the music hall where Pat works. Later meetings between the two include one that takes place in the dance club and an extended tour sequence, where Johnny and Pat visit the Maritime Museum and the Greenwich Observatory. The London streets in this film signify as sites of encounter, allowing the paths of characters from different walks of life to converge in a rendition of the modernist vision of city space. The tour sequence, shot in the day, is where iconic London makes a strong and sustained appearance, following from the opening sequence that dramatizes the spectacular arrival of the Dunbar underneath Tower Bridge. It is against the backdrop of the Greenwich Observatory, sign of the nation’s “seafaring” imperial history as Brunsdon puts it, where Johnny tells Pat that race continues to matter, a claim that she immediately refutes (Figure 2.1).46 Robert J. C. Young provides an eloquent meditation on Greenwich, marked as the “centre of the world” and of time itself, where one step on either side of the Prime Meridian will put you in the “East” or “West”; as Young suggests, ‘in that gesture, it was acknowledged that the totality, the sameness of the West will always be

Figure 2.1  An urban crossroads: Pat and Johnny in Pool of London.

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riven by difference”.47 In this sequence, monuments in service to the memorialization of British imperialism function as the background for an encounter that signifies in a post-imperial vein, raising the possibility of an inter-racial relationship that could hypothetically transform Johnny from sailor to “Londoner”. And yet the question of difference that is raised in the very setting of Greenwich, a far too apt location for this discussion between Pat and Johnny to take place, is badly suggestive of the inability to circumvent the potency of difference. The Observatory is site of both possibility and entrenched differentiation and, as such, a pertinent example of an urban crossroads. As such, the imperial past and the post-imperial present converge and yet remain distinct in the sequence, exemplifying a tension between background and foreground that is eventually resolved, but not in favor of the future. While “village London” can be linked to Kracauer’s conception of the street in its idealized guise, there is another kind of street that is tied to the thriller-esque dimension of the film. The “tour of London” sequence is counterpointed with a later sequence where Johnny is duped by a patron, with whom he drinks to excess, and who later steals his wallet. The location where the “hustle” takes place is a pub located below street level, which serves as a contrast to the well-lit, friendly local pub where Johnny and Dan frequently meet. Expressionistic techniques such as the use of low-key lighting and canted framing construct the space as part of a seedy underworld associated with the iconography of urban life in film noir. This incident ends on a racialized note as Johnny is thrown out of the pub, into the dark, sleek noirish streets as a patron remarks, “They’re all the same”. What sparks this incident is a somewhat chance encounter with Pat, where Johnny searches for her outside a club where he would have met her, had the ship not been slated to sail. The delayed departure of the Dunbar allows Johnny to find Pat, but the arrival of a group of her friends discourages him from approaching her. The street, in these examples, functions in an opposing manner to Kracauer’s theorization of it as well as in opposition to how it signifies in the first half of the film as the city is drained of all possibility for the character and ends with Johnny’s departure. Johnny’s desire for settlement, partially fueled by his interest in Pat, is denied by the film. As he says to Pat, “I want to go home. Now I don’t. Now I want to come back again. Back into the Pool, back to London”. Johnny’s London is both inviting, as embodied in his trysts with Pat, and inhospitable, as indicated through his darker encounters within the city walls. The noirish evocation of the street in Pool of London is where an

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 143 implicit narrative of the racialization of street life can be discerned, which operates not as a space that facilitates chance encounters or communal interaction, but one of potential danger. It is here that the film confirms Johnny’s assertion to Pat the race continues to matter and, by extension, reinforcing the notion that older racial prejudices stemming from the history of British imperialism cannot easily be overcome. If the film’s “race-relations” storyline, as Higson puts it, constitutes its affiliations with a social problem tradition, it is also inflected with traces of the thriller genre that generate an aesthetic of excess through the deployment of specifically expressionistic techniques. The form of excess in this scene, for instance, speaks symptomatically to anxieties concerning the difficulty of belonging within social and historical contexts that appear overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the imperial past. It is the persistence of this particular historical past that forecloses the possibility of a romantic, Londonbased future for Pat and Johnny. As such, Johnny’s London is fractured, rather than coherent, and consequently pushed to the foreground instead of retaining its position as background. The spaces associated with each image of the city in Pool of London correspond closely to Mort’s division between the London of landmarks and the London of shadows, as both tourism and the crime-ridden underworld feature in Johnny’s narrative. While the former London in its realist guise offers up possibilities for settlement, the latter, expressionistic London stages the difficulties that accompany such transgressive desires. While Johnny is not a migrant as such, the longing for migration permeates the film. The character of Johnny is emblematic of a form of mobility available to individuals from former colonies, particularly those arriving from the Caribbean in the late 1940s and 1950s. As Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips note in Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, “the wartime experience of the Caribbean servicemen was complex and variable, but it is also clear that it was the experience responsible for the structure and pace of Caribbean migration”.48 Flashforwarding to the 1980s, we have what John Orr has described as a revival of London in the cinema in the form of “a neo-Dickensian art of the city”.49 This city lies in close proximity to the rise of global London in this period, the skyscraper city of global finance that simultaneously makes room for a rich cast of urban characters including “the homeless, the casual, the migrant, the criminal, the creative, the rich, the ambitious and the terrorist”.50 While he cites two films made in the 1990s, namely Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) and Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997) as the “summation of London’s revival as cinematic city”, we can turn very briefly to the recent James Bond extravaganza Skyfall (2012) as a

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c­ ontemporary and rather unexpected example of a film that seemingly reconfigures a neo-Dickensian “art of the city” by forcing M16 to retreat from its modern ground-level structure underground, to the tunnels and archways traditionally associated with Victorian London. Skyfall’s London is the city of grit and grime, the use of its subterranean tunnel system as MI6 interim headquarters obviously intended as a stark and deliberate contrast to the Shanghai, among other glamour cities in the film, including Macau and Istanbul. The film’s explicit “back to basics” intentions also involve returning to an enduring imaginary of the city for the purposes of surveillance and legibility, actions actively thwarted by Bond villain Silva in a way that reinforces the opaque nature of “low London”. And yet London still assumes global city status in this film, as envisioned through its links to global terror networks. Skyfall reflexively mobilizes a certain tension between old and new across the entirety of the film so that old emerges as new, a revival project that not only includes the resurrection of Bond but by extension, the resurgence of older images of London. Dirty Pretty Things takes its place among these films as one that similarly espouses a neo-Dickensian image of the city in relation specifically to the representation of “high” and “low” London. The reflexive streak found across Dirty Pretty Things, as mentioned previously, is in evidence when Okwe tells Senor Juan about the heart in the lavatory. Juan says, “The hotel business is always about strangers and strangers always surprise you, you know? They come to hotels in the night and do dirty things. In the morning it’s your job to make things look pretty again”. This opposition between grit and glamour is made explicit in visual terms through the juxtaposition between the interior of the minicab office and that of the hotel. While the film does include location shot imagery, although none of it is ostensibly recognizable, it is the depiction of interior spaces where the use of expressionistic devices comes into play, as related to color and miseen-scène. As several scholars have noted, a particular lighting scheme is evoked in this distinction, bathing migrant spaces, including the minicab office and the subterranean spaces of the hotel, in eerie green light, while the Baltic Hotel basks in a warm, golden glow.51 The contrast between the dirt-splashed walls of the minicab office, offset by a painting on a wall of a couple dancing on a shore, and the burgundy colored hotel lobby with its streamlined geometrical décor could not be more pronounced, its implication could not be more obvious. But of course, the hotel is not shielded from the horrors of the organ trade, but made complicit in it, suggesting the close proximity of dirty and pretty London, as is similarly implied in the painting on the wall of the minicab office.

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This is not the first film within which Frears conjures a dichotomous depiction of the urban, in the name of bringing oppositions into proximity, through recourse to interior spaces. While Frears and Hanif Kureishi have discussed the realist qualities of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), leading Kureishi to state in interviews that what they wanted to convey was a “blast of the real”, scholars including John Hill, Christine Geraghty and Timothy Corrigan have noted the film’s expressionistic use of miseen-scène.52 In My Beautiful Laundrette, Johnny and Omar, who were once friends, are reunited when Omar’s uncle Nasser, a successful entrepreneur, allows Omar to revamp his nearly derelict launderette located in South London. Questions of race and identity are central to the narrative and emerge in a variety of ways, including through the romantic relationship that ensues between Omar and Johnny; Omar, a second generation Pakistani, is the son of a failed leftist journalist, known as Papa in the film, while Johnny continues to have associations with those involved in the National Front. While high and low London make an appearance across various spaces of My Beautiful Laundrette, there is a condensation of two that transpires in the transformation of the laundrette. Corrigan in particular notes the contrast between its South London location that exudes a documentary ethos and the spectacle of the laundrette, its gray, gritty walls sparkling in color and bathed in bubbles by the time Omar and Johnny are finished.53 The opposition between low and high remains, but in a way that demonstrates the artifice of the spectacle of the laundrette, similar to the surface splendor of the hotel lobby in Dirty Pretty Things. However, in this case, what is concealed is the transgressive relationship between Johnny and Omar, who have sex in the unfinished back room of the laundrette. Juxtaposition is key here as in one scene Frears intercuts Johnny and Omar in the backroom, with Nasser and his lover Rachel waltzing in the front during the grand opening of the laundrette. Johnny and Omar’s relationship in fact redeems “low” London as the site of progress, one that is fraught with ambivalence, but nevertheless constitutes a reversal of its status in Pool of London, where Johnny’s foray into the “dirty city” seals his fate as one who does not belong. As will be discussed more fully in subsequent sections, the interiors of Dirty Pretty Things do not simply conceal the horrors of the organ trade but are also ripe for subversion and for the ambivalent projection of new solidarities. The story that Frears, in collaboration with Kureishi, tells about Thatcher’s London is not entirely dissimilar from the story he tells about global London, even though the former features settled migrant communities and the latter concerns the plight of the global migrant.

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London Highs, London Lows: Some Conclusions The “dirty/pretty” city in Pool of London emerges through the juxtaposition of opposing elements, where the underside of Johnny’s experiences in the Maritime Museum as a tourist is his ill treatment at the hands of dubious patrons in the pub. This sense of juxtaposition is also a feature of Dirty Pretty Things, as the seemingly luxurious Baltic Hotel contains interior spaces full of horrors. The proximity of the ‘dirty/pretty” city is one that increases in the case of Frears’ film, as both qualities of the city appear within the same space. The city in Dirty Pretty Things moves from the background to foreground, as is similarly the case in Pool of London. While in Pool, London emerges as both a fractured site and one of negotiation with regard to Johnny’s storyline, in Dirty Pretty Things, Frears’ reflexive mobilization of its allegorical underpinnings is how the city is akin to character in the film. The realist aspects of both films are counterpointed with spaces that acquire meaning through expressive techniques that convey narrational content through visual means. It should also be noted that the films obviously espouse significant differences, especially with regard to tone. This particular difference allows us to ascertain something of a historical shift with regard to representational practices. As much as Pool of London pulls Johnny towards the darker side of the city, the film is always at pains to ensure that we understand that, in actuality, he belongs to “high” rather than “low” London. Johnny falls under the representational tradition of the “noble migrant”, a figure whose moral integrity is never in question. How this comes across in Pool is through his friendship with the Canadian sailor Dan who turns himself in near the end of the film in order to prevent Johnny from taking the fall for his crime. Early sequences in the film establish the relationship between the two as one of complete trust, leading Johnny to help Dan try to smuggle out the diamonds without knowing precisely what he is being asked to do. Earl Cameron will go on to reprise this role of “noble migrant” again and again in social problem films of the era including David Eady’s The Heart Within (1957), Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959) and Roy Ward Barker’s Flame in the Streets (1961). The latter two films will be discussed in more detail in later sections. During an interview conducted with Cameron by myself and Charlotte Brunsdon, he says that he accepted a small part in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005) because it allowed him to finally play a villainous character, a role that has been denied to him throughout his career.54 While both Senay and Okwe initially seem to embody the role of the “noble migrant”, an instance of what we can class as the film’s moral

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realist agenda, part of the film’s subversive tactics involve disrupting this reading, so that they don’t simply emerge as victims but as active participants in the transformation of their circumstances. It is almost as if Frears implicitly cites an older, historical mode of representation precisely in order to complicate it. As others have remarked, Dirty Pretty Things shows us how the path of the migrant male diverges from that of the female around issues of the use value and the subsequent exploitation of the female body. Okwe is able to cross the divide between “official” and “unofficial” spaces in the film, his mobility taking him from the topographies of “labor”, to those of detection that concern the heart in the lavatory and the discovery of Juan’s scheme and finally to those of subversion near the end of the film that enable him to perform the kidney operation on Juan in place of Senay. In contrast, Senay’s mobility is hampered by sexual exploitation at the hands of the owner of the sweatshop and by Juan. Restraints on her mobility are introduced in accordance with the arrival of the immigration officials who alter her trajectory, thereby functioning as the catalyst that pushes the narrative in a different direction. Senay’s journey is about the loss of space, of a diminishing topography that leads her away from the city in its entirety by the time we reach the end of the film. While Okwe initially assumes the role of “noble migrant”, his ability to simultaneously “play the system” near the end of the film enables the character to transcend his status as victim. In the interview in Cineaste with Frears, a comparison is developed between Chitwetel Ejiofor and Sidney Poitier but I would argue that we can return to the annals of British cinema in this regard and hold up the image of Earl Cameron, in terms of the frequency of his portrayal of the “noble migrant”, in an equally apt comparison.55 While the ethical implications of taking Juan’s kidney in place of Senay’s is up for debate, the point might be that Okwe is more than just a casualty of the global city. A similar argument can be made for Senay; while the film does not make light of her exploitation, her ability to crack a joke with Juliette about “the virgin and the whore” is more than just another instance of the film’s self-reflexivity coupled with irreverence. It also speaks to the resiliency of this character, who eventually departs for New York with the knowledge that her dreams for the city may be just that. Like Okwe, this character is not simply defined by the way in which she is victimized. While Johnny in Pool of London is similarly more than the sum of his moments of victimization, it is Dan who is rendered active in the film, charting a course that enables him to stay in the city while simultaneously allowing Johnny to leave. In contrast, Johnny’s attempts at forging his own path are explored and then completely stifled, so that

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race is lauded as the great stumbling block in this narrative. In his nobility, Johnny is forced to stay the course and not plot his own. Laila Amine argues that the danger Dirty Pretty Things presents comes from its reinforcement of stereotypical depictions of migrant figures that, in their “exoticism”, might give credence to the claims articulated by Enoch Powell concerning the flood of migration, and its corresponding “rivers of blood”.56 I would argue that the pleasures of subversion this film presents come to the fore precisely because of Frears’ mobilization of a rather stereotypical stock of characters that end up not falling in line with their representational histories; Okwe loses his noble status and Senay is not destroyed by her rape, which speaks to their resiliency and agency rather than their exoticization. However, one disturbing affinity between Pool of London and Dirty Pretty Things remains. By the end of both films, the characters are forced to leave London, signifying the triumph of the gritty city over its more glamorous counterpart. London is inhospitable both to the hypothetical migrant figure, as embodied in Johnny who is virtually expelled from the city as he leaves on the Dunbar, as well as to the global migrant, as Okwe will return home and Senay moves to yet another global city. This dichotomous rendition of cinematic London can be postulated as a particular modality of representation attached to a migrant experience of London, where the promises of the city are seemingly out of reach. By unearthing a longstanding imaginary of the city in Dirty Pretty Things, an unsettling affinity between past and present becomes visible. 2.4  LONDON PLACES, LONDON SPACES This section will explore the way in which a contrast can be developed between the cinematic London in Dirty Pretty Things as a series of spaces about “stories in the making” versus the representation of place that emerges from a consideration of films about Caribbean migration and settlement including a number of “social problem films” as well as a grouping of films made in the 1980s. Sapphire and Flame in the Streets, the two social problem films examined in this chapter, make allusions towards the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots of the late 1950s in terms of the depiction of certain narrative events revolving around riots or the dangerous potentiality of the street.57 The latter films work to narrativize both the forms of racism particular to Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s as well as modes of resistance to racial oppression. Charlotte Brunsdon argues that “the films speak from a post-imperial moment in which there is, or has been, an imagination of settlement, of accommodation, of coexistence,

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even if obstructed at every turn”.58 What also makes it viable to group these films together for the purpose of analysis is their impetus in articulating what Brunsdon terms a “narrative of entitlement”, or the desire to be recognized as being both black and British, which often fuels narrative trajectories and character motivation.59 Lastly, there is a recurring group of black actors that are featured across all of these works, as Cameron appears in both Sapphire and Flame in the Streets, while actors such as Norman Beaton, Victor Romero Evans, Trevor Laird and Brian Bovell play various characters in the latter films. When taken together, these films span a long history of post-imperial Caribbean settlement in the city, with a certain consistency regarding the presence of motifs and narrative events. While there have been films made about other experiences of migration and settlement in London, these films concerning Caribbean migration and settlement specifically function as a collection of stories in Massey’s sense of what constitutes a sense of place. The representational strategies found in this particular corpus provide a sharp contrast to a film such as Dirty Pretty Things and hence a productive way of gauging what exactly are the types of space associated with very different kinds of migrant narratives. This section therefore differentiates Dirty Pretty Things and its contemporaries from an earlier wave of London-set migrant cinema.

The Status of Place: London versus “Black London” For Jim Pines, while Pool of London is one of the first films to address the issue of racial intolerance in post-imperial Britain, social problem films including Sapphire and Flame in the Streets began to deal directly with racialized forms of conflict in the still newly minted post-imperial city.60 Both John Hill and Lola Young express reservations about these films; while they do not that deny that Sapphire and Flame in the Streets are grounded in liberalist discourse, they note the instances where the films regress into stereotypical depiction.61 Their respective analyses, Young’s in particular, are exemplary of the cultural studies approach to these films that engage with the subject of racialized and sexual identities. In moving away from this approach to these films, this section will investigate the recurring modes of spatial representation found across both Sapphire and, in the following subsection, Flame in the Streets, which make their way into the films made in the 1970s and 1980s. While still informed by the cultural studies paradigm in my emphasis on the racialization of space in these films, it is the depiction of place rather than identity that is ­privileged by my analysis.

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As noted previously, references to London abound in Dirty Pretty Things without an accompanying image of the city that signifies “London” in an overtly recognizable register. London is as visible in this film as it is invisible as a result, the latter hinging on its mobilization of a neo-­ Dickensian image of the city but one that still lacks any identifiable markers. In the corpus of films that index Caribbean migration and settlement, evocations of place resound in the use of location shot imagery but also through pronouncements of place that are indicative of the specificity of black urban settlement rather than to “London” as a whole. The work of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith offers a productive model for conceptualizing the relationships between location and narrative that are posed by this body of work. The emphasis on the specificity of the London-based location of these films brings them in line with a central tenet of social realist filmmaking. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s assessment concerning relationships between location, narrative setting and action allow us to theorize the implications of this particular confluence as it relates specifically to the cinematic city. In “Cities: Real and Imagined”, Nowell-Smith articulates two distinct imaginings of the city in the cinema, the second of which is comprised of “films which are mostly location-shot and happen in a place which is identifiable, very often named and where the name may even form part of the title”.62 This grouping of films produce a profound sense of verisimilitude through visual references of place that are specific to the location in which the film is both set and shot. In this vein, Nowell-Smith goes one step further in identifying a subset of films “one of whose characteristics is that they yield a sense of place that would have been impossible without the ontological link between nominal setting and actual location”.63 Nowell-Smith allows for a specifically cinematic understanding of space, narrative and location that operates as a compliment to the distinction that Massey develops between space and place. Furthermore, it is this latter relationship between actual place and its narrativization, as articulated by Nowell-Smith, that is encapsulated by the films examined below. A particularly intense form of verisimilitude is a feature of Sapphire. Sapphire, like Pool of London, revels in hybridity, as it is at once a thriller and a social problem film that concerns racial prejudice and violence. Sapphire is structured around the investigation of the death of a young woman of mixed race named Sapphire conducted by two detectives that takes them on a journey across London, from Hampstead Heath to Notting Hill. The investigation uncovers Sapphire’s dark past in literal and metaphorical terms, as the revelation of her racial identity is bound up with the discovery of her links to what is constructed in filmic terms

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 151 as the “black” areas of the city, places she frequented before she began to pass as white. What is eventually revealed is that Sapphire, both pregnant and engaged to a white man named David Harris, was killed by his sister Millie. Embedded within the larger narrative framework of the “search for Sapphire” is another minor narrative, where Johnny, a Caribbean migrant, is accused of her murder. Very specific references to place are discernable in this film, beginning with the opening sequence; a dead Sapphire enters the frame as she is thrown upon the ground, which is followed by a sequence containing a close-up of a sign that reads “Hampstead Heath”, where a woman and her sons find the body. A powerful sense of the real emerges from the conjunction between these signs of place and the use of location shooting. The investigative structure of the narrative, involving the search for material traces of Sapphire, take detectives Hazard and Learoyd across the city of London. The investigation implicitly develops what we can term a “power geometry” of the city. In Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey provides a template for a consideration of global flows and mobility in relation to power. She writes, Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effective imprisoned by it.64

Massey’s terminology can be used to describe and provide an analysis of the narrative of the city in this film that supports as well as signifies against the main narrative. The film begins in north London and moves to the west and to the south as Sapphire’s past and racial identity is reconstructed through a series of fragments located in specific spaces and times. Various clues lead the detectives to Babette’s on Shaftsbury Avenue and, more generally, to the locations of Sapphire’s past, including her apartment at Earls Court, the International club, and the Tulips nightclub at Shepard’s Bush. The search for Sapphire simultaneously tells a particular ­narrative about the city as these locations contain associations and significations of a power geometry of a migrant experience of urban life and settlement. This implicit urban narrative becomes quite apparent after Hazard and Learoyd make the trip to Johnny’s apartment. While the location of the flat itself is never disclosed, its position within the spatial schema of the film is made apparent when Hazard remarks, “It’s quite a long trip

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from here to Hampstead Heath. It’s the other side of London. How the devil did he get there?”. In terms of plotting, this geographical detail proves essential to the detective narrative as the question of plausibility is raised: Johnny could not have physically committed the crime. With respect to a reading of the film as a “power geometry” of spatial relations, this journey from north to south London mirrors the “racialization” of space in the film; as the detectives uncover traces of Sapphire’s past, they move progressively towards the West End to both the International Club and Tulips, which are both presented as overtly racialized spaces, and finally to the south. Hazard’s dialogue establishes the boundary spaces of the film where Hampstead Heath and the undisclosed location of Johnny’s flat operate as the extreme ends of the film’s geography of space and narrative events. While Dearden obviously constructs an imagined geography of the city and one that only emerges in conjunction with the narrative itself, the use of location shooting, visual markers of place and the realist style of the film are devices that signify outward to the layout of the material city of London. This topography of the city is solidified by an overt contrast between what is constituted in the film’s spatial schema as the “white” areas of the city and its black, more specifically, migrant counterpart. This cinematic geography of Sapphire, in its divide between north and south London, constitutes a coming together of the fiction and the real as areas of South London, including Brixton, were primary areas of black settlement. In the case of the 1970s and 1980s films, a similar gesture towards an explicit referencing of place is in effect. Ové’s Pressure, set in the vicinity of Ladbroke Grove, is structured around a series of narrative moments revolving around the “pressures” of settlement such as the difficulties Tony, a British-born black youth, experiences when trying to find work due to racial prejudice or when he is unjustly arrested during a Black Power meeting hosted by his militant older brother Colin. The streets and street life of Notting Dale are utilized for allegorical purposes, in order to tell the story of injustices faced by black-British youth. As Pines argues in his analysis of the film, “it can be read as a critique of British multiculturalism and institutionalized race relations”.65 In this sense, the real and the fictional are fused in relationship to setting, as the film transpires in the very spaces where events related to the resistance and politicization of black people were occurring. A number of these films perform a similar feat in their representation of Brixton, in all its iconicity. In “Brixton’s Aflame: Television History Workshop and the Battle for Britain”, Tara Brabazon posits the notion of a “literacy” of place which is a useful framework for conceiving of the

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 153 importance of Brixton in a series of films made in the 1970s. In the context of the Brixton riots in the 1980s, she writes, Like all sites, Brixton has a literacy. The urban semiotics of the riot resulted in a distinct reading of the events. Brixton, as a signifier, is an urban myth that resonates with the fear of the city; crime and the crowd.66

Lola Young argues along similar lines when she deconstructs a number of tropes that have come to be associated with migrant urban life. She writes: Urban dance music, the urban jungle, the ghetto, the inner city, these are all coded terms which are linked to the “teeming hordes” of immigrants in British cities. In modern times, black people have gravitated towards the cities for economic reasons and settlers have tended to move to these places where they know there is a probability of supportive networks of friends and relatives to set as a buttress against racial hostility.67

Black Joy, and Babylon evince an ethos of Brixton as place primarily through iconographic means. The declaration of Brixton is achieved in the films in similar ways as the opening sequences essentially take the spectator on a tour of its sights. Part of what is significant about these films is that they can be said to construct an alternate literacy and semiotics of the streets that move beyond racist discourses of “street trouble”. Black Joy is decidedly different in tone to both Pressure and Babylon as it charts the arrival and eventual settlement of Ben, who makes the journey from Guyana to Brixton after the death of his grandmother, through largely humorous means.68 The opening sequence begins with the descent of Ben’s plane into the airport and takes the spectator through iconic London and an equally iconic Brixton. This film enacts the classic “moment of arrival”. The specific nature of this arrival is raised early on in the narrative as a customs officer in the airport, upon hearing from Ben that his father lives in London, remarks, “London, that’s a big place”. This reference to the vastness of the city is tempered by the following narrative events that take Ben and subsequently the spectator from the center of London to the heart of Brixton. The journey to Brixton is shot entirely on location and as such exudes a sense of place that is derived from the convergence of plot and setting; as such, I interpret this sequence as a veritable “declaration of Brixton”. The opening of the film is comprised of a series of establishing shots of London and, crucially, of Brixton; the sequence contains images of a plane flying overhead, along with shots of the railway bridge. Later, Ben is framed

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against Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, an unmistakable emblem of the official, iconic London. This is followed by shots of Ben walking on the street to the beat of “Country Boy” and then by a zoom-in on the Brixton sign on the outside of the station stop. The bridge and the shots of the stalls and of the famed Brixton market, are images that recur in the other films, thereby constructing them as iconic markers of cinematic Brixton. There is also an extended sequence during which Ben wanders through the indoor Brixton market. Beyond the inclusion of these spatial features, the presence of street signs definitively announce to the spectator that they, along with Ben, have arrived in Brixton. When Ben asks a butcher for directions to Gladstone road, the latter says “My family has been living here for 130 years, before your lot moved in”. The grocer here evokes Brixton’s past, prior to its identification as a locus of settlement for black migrants and eventually, black Britons, in racist terms. This image of Brixton, as a space of Caribbean settlement, is reinforced when Ben asks a bartender in the Atlantic pub where Gladstone Road is or “where the Guyana people live”. As noted by Paul Dave in Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema, the Atlantic pub is a symbolic location in Brixton, a Jamaican pub made reference to by Patrick Keiller in London (1994) within the context of the arrival of the Windrush.69 While it is clear from these illustrations that the film indulges in its depiction of Brixton in all of its ontological glory, the question of what kind of place this is returns us to the realm of narrative action. Young and Brabazon both point towards a certain narrativization of Brixton and other “migrant” areas of London that are rife with connotations of danger, violence and street crime. What Black Joy offers is a migrant experience of Brixton that stems back to the classic “arrival to the city” narrative and, as such, serves its own political function by offering a discourse of place outside of its dominant associations. The narrative of arrival includes being lost in the city, as is exemplified in Ben’s fruitless search for Gladstone Road, which has been turned into a wasteland or “dirty London” at its finest. Devon refers to Ben as “country boy”, echoed by the use of the non-diegetic score and indeed the story of the duping of the boy from the country upon arrival to the city is given a migrant inflection as this general story is transfigured into a specific narrative of the arrival of a man from Guyana to Brixton. The final sequence of the film solidifies Ben’s transformation from the “country boy” to a “city boy” who has settled into the ways of urban life. Ben swindles both his friend Dave and Jomo into keeping Dave’s car for himself. Dave says to Ben, “You is King . . . where did that country boy

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 155 go?”. The character of Ben is reminiscent of Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things; both characters are noble in their initial dealings in the city and yet both are forced to adopt the sinister ways of urban life. The major difference between the two is that while Ben’s swindling leads him on a path of settlement, Okwe works the system in order to keep moving. This narrative difference has spatial ramifications as Black Joy engages in the depiction of an iconic Brixton while the space of the city in Dirty Pretty Things is far more generic in comparison. Like the opening sequence of Black Joy, Babylon also declares itself a “Brixton film”, in narrational and visual terms. In Babylon, the lead character, Blue, is the front man for a band called Ital Lion along with other prominent characters, including Dreadhead, who prepare for a sound system competition with Jah Shaka, who plays himself in the film. However, as the film progresses Blue and others are subjected to racial discrimination, which occurs verbally, but also physically as their sound system is destroyed. As a result, Blue becomes increasingly politicized. His politicization culminates in the stabbing of the man most probably responsible for the vandalism of their sound system. The film ends as Blue sings in the dancehall where the competition was supposed to take place, as riot police are on the verge of bursting in. When the character of Dreadhead visits Fat Larry in order to purchase a song that will allow Ital Lion to compete with Jah Shaka, the latter asks him to pay a large sum of money. As Dreadhead protests and is ultimately forced to give up his necklace, Larry says “This is Brixton”. When Dreadhead asks “Is Brixton like all this?”, Larry responds, “Brixton – take it or leave it”. While the statement “this is Brixton” clearly refers to the exchange between two characters, which is dependent upon material and monetary gain, it is simultaneously a proclamation of place. In a larger sense, what the film as a whole conveys is a sense of place that suggests “this is Brixton in this particular historical juncture”. The trip to the warehouse that appears during the opening sequence of the film includes recognizable images of Brixton such as the railway bridge. In terms of the film’s establishment of a topography of narrative action, the warehouse within which the band stores their musical equipment is located in the heart of Brixton. Images of a kind of “wasteland”, or elements of Brixton that are in the process of demolition and reconstruction, that are utilized as a setting for Ben’s search for Gladstone Road also make an appearance in Babylon. These are signs of Brixton that resonate within a cinematic context, as they appear in a number of films, including Horace Ové’s Playing Away (1987), made six years after Babylon. Babylon is not just a film about Brixton but one that performs an

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ode to South London as Lewisham is thanked in the credits. It is an ­acknowledgement of the role that a real location has played in the fiction, illustrating an interdependence between the narrative of the film and a larger historical narrative related quite specifically to certain spaces across London. While Black Joy presents a migrant experience of the space, Babylon explores the centrality of music and resistance to oppressive structures in what is construed as “the politically charged spaces” of Brixton, as will be explored below. The sense of place evoked in this film not only stems from its performance of key historical events of the period, but also in its gestures toward the real as embedded in its shooting style. This film proclaims “This is Brixton” in more ways than one. Blue’s refusal to stop singing at the end of the film, where he and others chant “We can’t take no more of that” even as riot police are about to charge the dancehall, is the means by which the film recoups Brixton as a place where resistance is staged and where the “right to entitlement” is declared. In Black Joy and Babylon, a sense of place is developed through the use of location shooting and a consistency in the depiction of an iconic representation of Brixton. Ové achieves a similar feat in his representation of Ladbroke Grove in Pressure, where the use of location and the content of the fiction converge in a single setting. In a sense, what we find is an “iconicity of the local”, that which belongs not to landmark London but to quotidian spaces in the city. While perhaps Sapphire is similarly not iconic in its depiction of London, the film draws upon an established geographical imaginary of the city in a way that supports the content of the narrative. These films announce their settings, either through the use of dialogue, street signs or recognizable imagery. A similar gesture can be detected in earlier Frears’ films, as he also engages in a “referencing of the real”. In Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real, Nezar AlSayyad subjects My Beautiful Laundrette to an act of location scouting, as he charts the various markers of South London that make an appearance in the film, including the presence of Battersea power station, which is situated near Papa’s flat in the film.70 South London, as constructed cinematically by Frears, is a space of grittiness and grime. As noted earlier, the launderette begins as a site of dereliction. The use of location shooting works to enhance the connotations of what Orr refers to as “a city in decline”, as the sequences shot outdoors are enveloped in a gray, gloomy atmosphere, which is equated with a sense of the real that pervades the film. In stark contrast, Nasser’s mansion assumes suburban connotations, in relation to the size and décor of the home and, crucially, not the same degree of specificity regarding location. The use of warm lighting distinguishes this space not simply

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 157 architecturally but also cinematically from the places situated in South London, which are all shot on location. As such, what we find again is a specificity of place which underlies this particular narrative about settled Pakistani figures and their dealings in the city. This specificity emerges through the “iconicity of the local” as visualized through the markers of South London in the film but also through announcements of place. For instance, Johnny refers to the launderette as a jewel of South London, which functions not simply as a referencing of place but also of imperial history, as it is an allusion to the television serialization of the novel Jewel in the Crown. In contrast to the corpus of films concerning Caribbean migration and settlement surveyed in this chapter, in addition to My Beautiful Laundrette, the London of Dirty Pretty Things is neither iconic nor is it local. The moment of arrival, as featured in a film such as Black Joy, undergoes something of a transformation in Dirty Pretty Things as it is presented in simulated fashion. The film opens in an unnamed airport and rather than documenting the arrival of the film’s major protagonists, we are presented with the arrival of anonymous tourists. While perhaps quoting the moment of “the arrival to the city”, Dirty Pretty Things simultaneously declares its interest not in those who arrive, but in those who facilitate the networks of arrival and remain behind the scenes as this is our first introduction to Okwe, whose taxi takes these tourists into the city. As noted earlier, Dirty Pretty Things contains several markers of place, such as the Baltic Hotel, which condense a specific imaginary of the city as “dirty/ pretty” into a single setting but not one that cannot be mapped directly back to any recognizable image of London. There is a question of exactly what is at stake in the kinds of relationships the earlier films develop between narrative and location. The film’s use of actual locations in the filming of the stories akin to those that have historically transpired within them is another way in which we can link these films back to a tradition of social realism. These films can be viewed as a tribute to neglected histories of racial integration in London. An engagement with place that references the real through imaginative means is also how the right to inhabit the city is staked in these films. Visibility is part and parcel of the right to the city and, more specifically, the right to access its streets and public spaces. This gesture towards indexicality or an engagement with the circumstances of the city through its documentation is how these films explicitly participate within larger discourses of entitlement, traces of which are also discernable in My Beautiful Laundrette. The right to the city is not a concern of Dirty Pretty Things or films like Last Resort as settlement remains out of reach for their characters. The

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lack of specificity with regard to the representation of the city in Frears’ film is related back to its content, which explores the plight of the global migrant as opposed to the settled migrant. While Dirty Pretty Things most certainly does engage with a certain discourse regarding the darker side of the global city, this engagement does not materialize into an indexical relationship to place. This is perhaps because place as such is not what is at stake. Instead, this story is best served through expressionistic depictions of place, through recourse to the interior, that endow the non-places of migrant habitation “once more with feeling”. This proposition will be explored below in a comparison between the motif of the street that ­proliferates the earlier films and that of the interior in the later ones.

Street Chases and Labyrinthine Interiors The motif of the street chase and, more generally, the signification of the street as an arena for the enactment of racialized forms of violence, is staged and re-staged across the films concerning Caribbean migration and settlement. It is precisely this sense of recurrence, in addition to the historical specificity of the events made reference to, that facilitates an understanding of this work as that which produces an image of London as place, in conjunction with the proclamations of place that dominate these films. In contrast, the presence and signification of interior space is a key feature of Dirty Pretty Things and its companion pieces. My focus on the significance of the street as site of conflict and resistance in these films operates within and against the discursive construction of a homologous relationship between the rise of nineteenth-century urban modernity and the filmic city, where the space of the street assumes a prominent role. As noted earlier, Kracauer offers a distinct reading of street life in relation to film, or what he sees as the cinema’s affinity for capturing the life force of the modern city. Kracauer’s street is the domain of none other than the flâneur, characterized by “fleeing impressions”, possibility and intoxication that extends from the space of the literal street to all that constitutes the textures of street life, including dancehalls, railway stations, hotel lobbies and so forth.71 Following Kracauer and others on this subject, scholars such as Giuliana Bruno note that the cinema “is primarily of the street . . . the motion picture was largely born out of the pavement and has closely participated in its urban development”.72 As noted previously, Bruno similarly likens early cinematic spectatorship to streetwalking and, more specifically, to the act of flânerie; she argues that the exterior of the cinema hall of the 1920s resembled a storefront, so that “streetwalking” was made “modern” through the ability to stroll,

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shop and watch films, all by traversing the city streets.73 In moving away from the characterization of the street as the domain of the flâneur, this book argues that the space of the street can be utilized to chart a certain imaginary of the city in relation to another kind of figure, the Caribbean migrant or settler, arriving to and settling in Britain at the end of empire. In these instances, the ability of the street to bring disparate figures into proximity is often exactly what gives rise to containment and violence, as depicted across these films. In Sapphire, there is a chase sequence during which Johnny, pursued by the two detectives and other police officers, runs through labyrinthine streets which take the spectator through a veritable montage of moments that make explicit reference to events associated with the migration and settlement of West Indians in the city. In the backstreets and alleys outside the Tulips club, where the chase begins, Johnny initially runs into a black couple who refuse to help, stating that “you and your kind give respectable folks a bad name”. He then runs into a pub and a patron says “Get out nigger”. As he continues to evade the police, he stumbles upon a group of teddy boys, one of whom says “what’s the hurry nigger?” before he is attacked with bin lids. After receiving refuge briefly thanks to a shopkeeper, the chase ends as he is trapped in an alley on either side by the police. The sequence closes with his interrogation by the detectives, where the claustrophobic, close-up of his face jutting into the camera reads as a formal evocation of the thriller genre. This sequence is nearly autonomous; while it is linked to the larger investigation that dips into Sapphire’s past, it is clearly a moment where Dearden inserts visual and narrative references to wider historical traumas associated with West Indian settlement, including the Notting Hill race riots, largely unmotivated trouble with the police and so forth. The chase sequence is a recurring narrative event in these later films and in Sapphire it is one of the ways in which the film gestures towards the historical as the street is made to reveal the story of its racialized past. Like Sapphire, Flame in the Streets focuses upon the difficult nature of mixed-race relationships, including that which occurs between Kathie, who is white and a West Indian character named Peter, both of whom are school teachers. A second narrative thread revolves around a quest to break through the “color bar” as trade union activist Jacko fights on behalf of Gomez, a West Indian character played by Earl Cameron, to be allowed to work as a foreman. The nocturnal streets in the film serve as the setting for an attack on the black figures milling among the crowd during the Guy Fawkes celebration. A mob of men, fashioned in “teddy boy” attire, lurch themselves into the crowd, eventually dragging Gomez into

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the burning flames of the bonfire. This is in sharp contrast to the opening of the film, which begins in the daytime streets, where the camera follows Kathie and Peter as they walk to school together. If the streets in the day are spaces Kathie and Peter can inhabit together, even if made uncomfortable by the gaze of the white friends of the family in public places, the nighttime streets operate as spaces of danger and violence, particularly for West Indian figures. The street is where Gomez is effectively punished, forced to burn in the streets, for having asserted his authority over three members of the “teddy boy” gang at work during a scene that takes place earlier in the film. The cinematic landscapes within which these racialized encounters transpire, as found in both films, are dark city streets and alleyways. Rather than facilitating exorbitant encounters, these streets are all too legible in these films, making clear the distinction between black and white in threatening, often violent terms. Historically oriented scholarship concerning the state of post-imperial Britain in the wake of migration and settlement from former colonies also posit the street as a very significant place. Phillips and Phillips argue that the streets operated as settings for racial conflict, either in terms of verbal and/or physical abuse since WWII, which only intensified during the dawn of the post-imperial moment. As they state, At the start of the fifties racial superiority had been an incontestable plank in the platform of ideas about Empire and imperial destiny. By the time the decade was halfway through, the idea of race had become a personal threat, one of the demons which stalked the changing post-war world.74

Following Phillips and Phillips, the racialization of the street in these films is demonstrative of how traces of empire continue to persist. If, as Paul Gilroy argues in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, the streets in racist discourses of the period were characterized as the abode of “black street crime”, then these films, even when inadvertently succumbing to the parameters of racist discourses, also illustrate how the streets operate as spaces of peril for migrant figures.75 Street chase sequences are also a prominent feature of Pressure and Babylon. These sequences are visually quite similar to the one found in Sapphire, so that this particular narrative of the street recurs within a wider cinematic imaginary of “black London”. The police chase figures in Pressure after Tony and his friends escape following an attempted robbery of a supermarket. Set to a rhythmic drum-beat, the characters race down the narrow streets, which are constructed in labyrinthine fashion, and finally take refuge in a derelict home. When hiding in the

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house, one of the men says “This is Babylon”. When Tony asks, “Are we still in the Grove?”, another responds with “This is the Grove”. The term “pressure” is explicitly defined for the spectator as one of his friends says “Black people under pressure because of police surveillance”. From this perspective, “the Grove” is cast as Babylon, as a space of surveillance and pressure. The chase sequence in Pressure is given a distinct allegorical resonance through the use of dialogue. A similar sequence in Babylon looks as though it might have been transplanted directly from Sapphire. Blue is chased through a series of alleyways by an unmarked police car. The sequence begins as Blue takes to the streets at night, looking into shop windows as he proceeds. As Brunsdon observes, this moment of streetwalking is constituted as a form of “reverse flânerie” as it is followed by an unmotivated police chase and arrest.76 Like Johnny in Sapphire, Blue races through maze-like alleyways and is cut off by a wall, forcing him to jump over it. Blue receives a brief respite as he loses the police at one point, only to encounter them once more at daybreak as he is cornered in an alleyway. When arrested, Blue cries “I done nothing wrong”, to which the undercover officer responds, “You must be joking, at five in the morning?”, ending his tirade by referring to him as “dirty little slave, like the rest of his black mob”. The cinematic street signifies as an inhospitable place through surprisingly similar means for both the West Indian migrant, in the case of Sapphire and Flame in the Streets, as well as for black British figures in the other films. While a street chase does not make an appearance in Burning an Illusion, the nocturnal street still serves as the setting for racist ­activity as the character of Pat is shot while walking home. Her attacker, who shoots at her from the inside of a car, mutters racist comments, such as “black” and “kill” right before he pulls the trigger, coding the moment as a form of racialized violence. The pleasures of strolling along the modern street, of being lost among the crowds, are not granted to these figures, as the streets in these films are spaces that characters should avoid. The representation of the street as a space of trauma resonates within the wider history of the containment and surveillance of West Indian populations on the streets of London as realized through the limited and dangerous forms of mobility on offer in these films. The enactment of the “sus law”, much used during the 1970s, is particularly relevant to the form of street chase found in these films. As Paul Gilroy notes the “sus” law, whose enforcement entailed the aggressive policing of areas of black settlement, was used as a “policy of containment”.77 As he notes elsewhere, “the ‘sus’ law was really about trying to regulate and manage

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a location, to keep people who were deemed to be criminal out of certain locations and confine them to others”.78 The precise nature of this trauma is not only related to the boundaries placed upon the characters in terms of their enjoyment of the street but also in the manner in which the street functions as the setting for the performance of racialized forms of violence and oppression. Other forms of street-based oppression include the recurring trope of the police raid upon the space of the dancehall, which occurs in all three films.79 These unmotivated raids often have dire consequences for the characters. In Burning an Illusion, Pat’s partner Del is arrested while trying to defend himself from an officer and is then incarcerated, while in Pressure Colin is arrested after a Black Power meeting that had just turned into a dancehall event. In Pressure, the injustice of the raid is made explicit when Sister Louise asks if the officer has a warrant and he replies: “The laws are not concerned with you and your lot”. Babylon ends as the police are about to burst into the dancehall, while Blue and others continue to sing “We can’t take no more of that” as the film cuts to an ominous black. The raids, significant narrative events featured in all three films, have a wider historical importance. As Gilroy argues, the Notting Hill riots of the 1950s sparked an enduring “antagonistic relationship between black settlers and the police, who assumed that criminality was the natural disposition of immigrants and aliens and approached them accordingly”.80 He also notes elsewhere that during the 1970s a series of conflicts originated around what he terms “black culture institutions – the dancehalls and clubs where the bass-heavy beat of the sound systems pumped righteous blood to the political heart of the community”.81 Babylon in particular narrativises this sense of political resistance, as the song that ends the film is in protest to both police brutality and the other forms of racism experienced by the characters throughout the narrative. Again, the image of the street, along with its spaces and sounds, is consistently used in an allegorical fashion, which appeals to a wider history of post-imperial settlement in the city. While an inhospitable vision of the city permeates the films about Caribbean migration and settlement, going back home is rarely a suggestion posited by the films. However, in the “global migrant film”, London emerges a site of transition rather than settlement. As is indicated at the end of Dirty Pretty Things, the mobility of the global migrant is one without an end in sight, as Okwe and Senay simply keep moving. Within this framework of analysis, narratives concerning settled populations engage far more in specific depictions of place as

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 163 sites of transformation. These films also serve as sites of memory, of the narrativization of the historical circumstances of the making of “black London”. The emphasis on the space of the street and of street life, whether in relationship to the depiction of trauma, or resistance, rests on the question of visibility. In comparison, the story of the global migrant, often in the city as an illegal, pivots around the notion of invisibility, of remaining out of sight and hence out of harm’s way. What you find instead of a prominence of street imagery in these films is that of a series of interiors. London in Dirty Pretty Things is labyrinthine in its construction, but a labyrinth comprised almost entirely of interior spaces and the interiors themselves are constructed in such a fashion. Corridors are the main architectural feature of the labyrinthine interiors. The minicab office is a constricted, maze-like space, where the corridor leads to the back room and to yet a further room in the back. The shots of Okwe in this space are tightly framed, which add to its claustrophobic ambience. Senay’s apartment is located at the back of a supermarket, requiring one to walk through the shop and up the stairs to her place, which conveys the idea of an interior concealed within another interior. There is a long corridor outside the morgue, visible through the glass partitions within, which again conveys the sense of one space embedded in another. The sweatshop is constructed in similar terms, as its owner forces Senay into an enclave of clothing when he exploits her. Interiors in this film are subdivided into public and private areas, and the further inside one retreats, the more private these spaces become. The Baltic Hotel is also fractured along the lines of the public and the private. The hotel lobby, kept under constant surveillance by CCTV, belongs to the domain of the public. However, the rooms further into the interior are constituted as private spaces, where acts of prostitution and the organ trade thrive behind closed doors. The informal economy takes up residence within the interiors of an interior. There are sequences that depict Okwe walking down the corridors of the hotel that create a mazelike appearance through its homogeneous décor. The labyrinthine nature of the hotel also comes across through the sequences that take place en route to the underground parking lot, where characters walk through long corridors. In one such sequence, Juan propositions Okwe, offering him a passport in exchange for his operating skills. As such, movements in this film are often journeys that begin from the exterior to the interior, or most often from an interior to less accessible spaces embedded within those very interiors. Like the streets in the previous films, interiors in Dirty Pretty Things often operate as spaces of violence and invasion.

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Reclaiming the Streets, Reclaiming the Interiors The streets do not simply operate as a site of peril in films concerning Caribbean migration and settlement in the city but also function as spaces of resistance, ripe for being reclaimed. A parallel assertion can be made about Dirty Pretty Things and some of its companion pieces, where the interior is both remade and in some instances, reclaimed. Modes of resistance in films such as Pressure, Black Joy and Babylon are realized through the use of music. Music in these films works to make the space of the street expressive in relation to the larger story of the difficulties of migrancy and settlement so that its indexical qualities are overlaid with the sentiments of these particular historical narratives. What I label as sonic spaces, urban spaces overlaid with signification resulting from the use of music, are a recurring feature of these films that allow for readings of the street through a historically specific optic. Pressure, Babylon and Black Joy all feature modes of streetwalking during which the soundtrack can be read in metadiegetic terms, as an expression of character subjectivity, but also as a device which brings the historical circumstances of the period, related to both racialized forms of oppression and resistance, to bear upon the fiction.82 In Pressure, Tony takes to the streets after having been turned down for a job because of his racial identity. He walks by street shops, and like Blue in Babylon, only gazes from the outside without entering the spaces themselves. As Brunsdon observes, Tony is “excluded from the consumption he sees around him” in this sequence.83 The theme song “Pressure” is heard over the images. The lyrics, written by Ové, detail a narrative of pressure that begins with Tony’s entry into the world: “Out of my mother’s belly/Into a world so unfriendly”. The lyrics then elaborate upon his current condition, stating that those who add people like him to the workforce as a “favor” do not want him as a neighbor. The theme song is utilized initially during the opening credit sequence, during which we hear the first verse which narrates the pressures faced by the “Windrush generation”, visualized through a series of drawn images of Tony’s parents and brother, as they migrate from Trinidad to London. These pressures, as specifically related to racial prejudice, are chronicled through a conjunction between the images and lyrics, including scenes that illustrate the difficulties of finding work and housing. In fact, there is a drawn image of Tony’s mother, also gazing into shop windows from the street, which resonates with aspects of Tony’s walk. Tony’s story is told in a double register during his scene of streetwalking. The street, by virtue of the music, seems to bear the weight of

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racialized forms of injustice experienced by the character.84 From this perspective, the music creates an effect of subjectivity and hence takes on a metadiegetic function. However, the lyrics also point toward the collective implications of Tony’s rejection. When conceptualized in relationship to the use of the song in the opening sequence, along with the repetition of the imagery of exclusion from the pleasures of consumption, the music simultaneously assumes a historicizing function, illustrating threads of continuity between the Windrush generation and Tony’s generation of black Britons. A similar type of sonic space makes an appearance in Babylon. Blue’s second walk through the nighttime streets operates as transformative event for the character. Blue’s journey through the city includes a trip “Up West” to Soho, where he bears witness to a particularly sordid hustle. His protest to the incident marks, in narrational terms, his rejection of the “life of the hustle”. Back in Brixton, his encounter with a group of Rastafarians in a warehouse is partially where a moment of politicization transpires as the term “Babylon” is defined for the spectator as a “triangle of captivity”, extending from Africa, to Jamaica and finally England. After this encounter, he wanders back to the garage that houses the sound system belonging to him and his group, Ital Lion, only to find it completely vandalized, with racial slurs painted on the walls. If the “hustle” is rejected, then it is the politics of the Rastafari that are embraced in its stead by the time we reach the final scene, where Blue sings “Warrior Charge” in the dancehall, opening his set with an ode to Jah. This journey through the city marks a shift in characterization in specifically spatial terms, where a deflation of the “glamour and glitz” of the West End occurs and Blue returns once more to the politically charged spaces of Brixton. His politicization is fully realized when he stabs a man living above the garage who shouts racial slurs at him and his friends earlier in the film, and who is most likely responsible for the destruction of the sound system. The scene that follows is simply transitional, much like Tony’s street walk in Pressure, where Blue makes his way on the Tube to the dancehall in which the sound system competition takes place. Rosso employs the use of crosscutting as a member of Ital Lion sings “Babylon” in the dance hall, a scene that is intercut with Blue’s travels on the Tube. What links these two spaces together is the music, which is at once diegetic and non-diegetic, both rooted in the fiction and signifying outside of it. The music adds an ethos of resistance to an otherwise mundane scene on the underground, as it sonically situates Blue’s journey as one taking place within Babylon. Something very similar occurs at the end of Tony’s street walk in Pressure, as the lyrics are as follows: “And on top of all this pressure is a Babylon p ­ ressure”. As is

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the case with Pressure, the music in this scene is metadiegetic in its orientation, creating the effect of gaining access to Blue’s subjectivity or politicization, which is linked to earlier narrative events including the street chase, his second street walk, and the stabbing of the man. However, the music simultaneously relates a larger story as both “Pressure” and “Babylon” are very significant concepts that reverberate across historical narratives of black settlement and ones that recur in the music of the period as well as in some of its critical literature. The term “pressure” recurs in narratives about this period of black settlement. In Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, Phillips and Phillips include portions of interviews with dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who outlines the significance of music to the Caribbean settled communities in Britain. He notes: “It [music] takes us away. You needed something to then take you away from the pressures of the climate, the situation, the culture, the food, the hostility against you as a man of colour”.85 In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy also uses the term “pressure” to describe racism, displacement, exile and economic exploitation experienced by black disaporic communities situated in the West, including Britain.86 “Pressure” then is a term often used to denote the trials and tribulations of Caribbean migration and settlement during the 1970s. Gilroy notes that Babylon, a Rastafarian concept: Allowed disparate and apparently contradictory expressions of the national crisis to be seen as a complex, interrelated whole, a coherent structure of which racism was a primary characteristic, exemplifying and symbolizing the unacceptable nature of the entire authoritarian capitalist edifice.87

The music, in its evocation of “Babylon”, functions as a form of commentary as it situates narrative incidents within wider historical narratives of politicization and resistance. The music in Black Joy also works as a device that brings forth the allegorical resonances of the narrative. When Ben first arrives in London, the music that accompanies his walk is “Country Boy” by the Heptones. Characters in the film also refer to him as “country boy” so that the music bears a direct relationship to what transpires in the narrative. There is a sequence where Ben, while searching for his father’s residence in Brixton, instead finds houses in various states of demolition, located within a series of urban wastelands. The use of zoom is employed, sometimes to bring elements of demolition into focus, while the zoom-outs situate Ben more widely within the surrounding area. Some of the lyrics of the music that accompany his walk are as follows: “Have you been told/ the streets of London are paved with gold”. Later in the song, as he approaches a nearly

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 167 demolished home that might once have been the building in which his father lived, the lyrics elaborate upon the loneliness of the city. Although not an explicit reference to Sam Selvon’s literary text The Lonely Londoners, which revolves around the arrival and settlement of West Indian migrants in the city, the notion of a lonely London recurs within narratives of this historical period, as indicated through the title of Selvon’s book but also in the content of the films explored within this section of the book, as these characters are often isolated and left to face violent situations on their own. The myth of the enchanted, imperial city of London is evoked and then utterly deflated by both the music and the visual landscape that sets the stage for Ben’s street walk, as he essentially treks among the ruins of this particular area of Brixton. Again, the music is both metadiegetic, as it gives voice to Ben’s isolation in the city and also relates an urban myth through sonic means that belongs to the figure of the migrant, particularly within the context of migrants from former colonies, arriving to the “Motherland of hope and glory”, as stated in the lyrics of the Pressure theme song. In all three examples the soundtrack works to animate the space of the street, thereby making it expressive in particular ways, as the scenes are drained of diegetic sounds in favor of sonic allegories that give voice to the trials and tribulations of West Indian settlement in the city. As nothing of great significance occurs in any of these sequences in terms of plot development, the music is allowed to assume a narrational role and does so in a double register. The lyrics of the music endow the streets with a wider historical significance, while still retaining a metadiegetic function with respect to the presentation of character subjectivity, so that they become one in the same. The use of music evokes a specificity of place through allegorical means, which can be linked to the importance of music in black British cultures as related to the politics of reggae, of dub music, of the phenomenon of dancehall and of sound system competitions. In Babylon, Blue is played by Brinsley Forde, lead singer of Aswad, a reggae group specifically associated with this period of the black British and diasporic musical scene. Some of the music in the film, including the key track “Warrior Charge”, is played by Aswad. The integration of the historical and the fictional in this instance itself alludes to the importance that reggae music has within Caribbean migrant and diasporic cultures of Britain. As explored by Gilroy in a number of his writings, the popular musical traditions of the black diaspora retain a political function that is trans­ national in its scope, in its sonic articulation of the street-based struggles for recognition and racial equality that took place across British cities

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during this historical moment as well as those that were occurring within the Caribbean and the African continent. As he describes in Black Britain: A Photographic History, “the musical forms and styles that were popular right across the black world still suggest that listening and dancing together had, at that time, become connected to the possibility of acting and thinking in concert”.88 In Dangerous Crossroads, George Lipstiz argues that popular music in a British context often “comes to stand for the specificity of social experience in identifiable communities”.89 Lipstiz also notes that these particular forms of musical production have an overtly political dimension, as “these devices [sound systems] offered a focal point for social gatherings, allowed disc jockeys opportunities to display their skills, and provided a soundtrack to mark the experiences and aspirations of inner-city life”.90 The use of music in these films carries a great deal of significance in relationship to the making of place, both on and off screen. The allegorical imperative of their soundtracks is very much in keeping with the wider social significance of musical cultures within the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, often used to sonically relate narratives revolving around the act of migration and the pressures of settlement. Reclaiming interior space from its trauma-inducing status becomes a prerogative in Dirty Pretty Things, so that the significance of the interior in this film is similar to that of street explored in previous sections. But a major difference rests in the fact that space in Dirty Pretty Things corresponds to what Massey terms “stories so far”. While there is an established history concerning black migration to Britain that spans several generations, the story of the global migrant is still in its infancy, its narrational grammar is not yet fully developed and in fact, it may not develop in the same way given the transitory nature of these narratives. As such, “stories so far” seems an apt description of global London cinema, where the interior assumes a space of prominence and importance in regard to migrant narratives in particular that is akin though not identical to the significance of the street. As noted previously, Dirty Pretty Things presents us with a series of allegorical overtones, in keeping with the reflexive stance of the film as urban allegory. There are moments in the film where the double meaning of a phrase is unmistakable. For example, when Okwe approaches two men in the airport during the film’s opening segment, he says “I am not here to meet you in particular but I am here to rescue those that have been let down by the system”. The allegorical connotations of the film are established early on as statements such as these signify outside their immediate narrative context and this piece of dialogue in particular alludes to Okwe’s role in forming a collective endeavor that does indeed

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 169 “rescue those that have been let down by the system” of surveillance, immigration and sexual exploitation. When Okwe hands Juan’s kidney over to the middle-man in the parking lot of the hotel, he says “Because we are the people you don’t see. We are the ones who drive your cabs, we clean your rooms and suck your cocks”. Reclaiming interior space is key to the form of collective action that secures passports for Okwe and Senay, enabling them to leave the city. The collective of migrants formed at the end lends the film to a reading as a fable where the harvesting of Juan’s kidney fuels their escape.91 This form of subversion can be read as a fantasy of “a migrant uprising” against a repressive and exploitative “power geometry” of the city, one that has also assimilated migrants in positions of power. It also functions as a recouping of space as the migrant hierarchy is overturned precisely in the space in which it is reinforced, which is in the Baltic Hotel. What precedes this narrative event is a return to Okwe’s topography, in a slightly reduced form. Okwe’s standard topography no longer signifies as the timeline of labor but as the timeline of subversion. Okwe begins at the minicab office, where he obtains the company’s “good car”. Later, Guo Yi gives Okwe his badge so that he will be able to move through the space of the hospital more easily. In response to Okwe’s bewildered expression, Guo Li says “Black is back”. The use of humor, as well as the more rhythmic undercurrents to Okwe’s musical score in the film, works to reinforce the idea of subversion. Okwe, with the help of Guo Yi, collects surgical supplies. The final cut takes Okwe back to the kitchen of the hotel, where he sterilizes the equipment. The collective nature of this action is underscored through various means. All of the major migrant characters in the film, other than Ivan, are involved in the plot. Senay plays the anesthetized patient, while Juliette obtains ice cubes. Guo Yi remains outside with the car, to facilitate the getaway. The collective execution of the event is rife with elements of suspense and all of the trappings of a “crime well done”. The use of costume further reinforces the idea of collectivity, as all three characters wear a shade of blue during Okwe’s “invisibility speech” to the kidney harvester. In allegorical terms, this ending depicts the utopia of the migrant story that contains the promise of subversion and collective action. It is this sense of promise that leads me to postulate that the London of this film presents a “story so far”, of the possibility of collective action that works to subvert some of the oppressive attributes of the global city, in its limited form. This instance of subversion is profoundly spatialized as the topography of migrant labor established earlier in the film is made to serve an entirely different purpose. The collective nature of what transpires,

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where Juan, the organ harvester, has his own kidney removed, constructs a mode of relationality that is entirely connected to the spaces in which the event occurs. As such, the spaces themselves, including the minicab office, the morgue, and the Baltic Hotel, become relational spaces as the events that take place in each setting further this particular trajectory of subversion and subsequent departure for Okwe and Senay. A similar narrative event involving the remaking of space is found in Last Resort, a film often discussed alongside Dirty Pretty Things. In Last Resort, Tanya and her son Artyom, whose arrival from Moscow to London is based upon the dream of settlement with her fiancé Mark, return home by the end of the film, as does Okwe, after a period of internment at a detention facility at Margate. They are aided by Alfie, who works at a store in the center. Most of the film takes place in the refugee detention facility in Margate, which is comprised of a series of large generic tower blocks. The only glimpses of London in the film reside in the arrival of Tanya and her son Artyom to Gatwick airport and their departure at the end of the film, facilitated through illegal means by Alfie. This is similar to the structure of Dirty Pretty Things, which also begins and ends in an airport (Stansted). However, the desire for London and more specifically, for Mark, is what fuels Tanya’s attempts to escape from Margate. As such, Last Resort can be read as a “London” film. When Tanya and Artyom first arrive in Margate they make their way to their flat, which is located in one of the tower blocks. The interior of this flat can easily be labeled as a non-space. It is a bleak, empty interior with stained carpets. The beige coloring of the room, in addition to the use of natural lighting, adds to the dinginess of the space. A cut reveals a portion of wallpaper, nearly coming off the wall, which contains palm trees and a sunset. The wallpaper functions as a kitsch citation of the old Margate, once a seaside resort but now home to a displaced migrant population. However, the interior is re-made across several sequences. The first is when Artyom tries to put the wallpaper back onto wall again, as Alfie brings the pair a television set. Later, Alfie continues to alter the mise-en-scène of the space, as a surprise for Tanya, with Artyom’s help. The walls are painted blue, the flea-infested couch has been removed and a lampshade resembling a seashell is placed on the ceiling. As Alfie says, “I think it’s more like a home” – but a home that doesn’t look anything like an urban setting. In a later sequence, after Tanya and Alfie have gone out a few times, he and Artyom continue to redecorate the flat, putting up pictures, before the man who tried to induce Tanya to work for his internet porn site

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 171 arrives at her door, causing Alfie to walk away. Shortly after he finds a drunken Artyom outside, Alfie helps the pair escape. The sea-like qualities of the redecorated interior, which again can be read as citations of the old Margate, also perhaps anticipates their final journey across the sea back to Gatwick airport. The remaking of the interior is not a gesture of settlement in Last Resort. It is a mark of Alfie’s affection for the pair, tempered with an understanding that they must leave Margate. However, the mise-en-scène of the revamped Margate interior is a mark of relationality, of the connection between the three figures. As such, it signifies not as a non-space but as a “space in the making”, as a narrative of possibility that goes unfulfilled. In making a comparison between this film and The Last Resort, Phillip Drummond states that both films deal with Britain as a point of passage for migrants as they move on to new worlds (Senay) or return to build ties in their country of origin (Okwe, Tanya and Artyom). In both cases Britain has proved inhospitable.92

The notion of an inhospitable London comes across at other points in Dirty Pretty Things, prior to the ending. When speaking to Okwe about his shock concerning the presence of the organ trade in London, Guo Yi says, Here, what do you mean, here in London? You think it doesn’t happen because the Queen doesn’t approve? I heard in London it’s ten grand for a kidney. For that people take risks. If I had the courage, I’d sell my kidney. Just to get out of here.

Part of the dystopic undercurrent of the film, which tempers a utopic interpretation of the harvesting of Juan’s kidney, resides in that fact that the spaces and trades considered to be situated “out there” such as the proliferation of sweatshops and the organ trade, are brought home and integrated into London’s underworld. Senay’s departure to New York is simply about leaving one global city for another. While near the beginning of the film, she conveys a utopic image of New York with its parks and white horses, by the end she tells Okwe that she knows it will not be like that. The utopia of the formation of the collective, from this perspective, is undermined somewhat as it is a form of action that facilitates Okwe and Senay’s separation and departure. The pleasures provided by the ending, in addition to that of subversion, lie in Okwe’s impending return home and the continuation of the “global dream” for Senay. The fact that London can neither be home, nor the place where global dreams occur is perhaps a specifically migrant vision

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of the city, one that resurfaces in both Last Resort and In This World, as will be discussed in the following chapter, but stretches as far back as Pool of London. Rather than stories of arrival and settlement, Dirty Pretty Things as well as Last Resort signify as stories of departure. The narrational procedures of the films, as connected to the relationship forged between different characters through “networked” means, endow these spaces with the promise of relationality, even if it is only temporary. It is the tenuous nature of these relationships, formed and then disbanded as characters leave, alongside of the general lack of specific depictions of the city, which makes the spaces in the films fall under the category of that which is in the process of becoming.

“Only the Ghosts of Other Stories” In Black Audio Film Collective’s acclaimed film, Handsworth Songs (1986), there is a repeated refrain, originating from a black woman interviewed by a journalist in the aftermath of the Handsworth riots in 1985 that is related through the use of voice-over narration. As the narrator tells us, the black woman gazed across the debris-ridden streets and said “there are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories. Look there and you can see Enoch Powell telling us in 1969 that we don’t belong . . . ”. This phrase encapsulates the film’s formal and thematic exploration of the past-present, using a series of stylistic and narrational techniques which demonstrate the affinities between the “Windrush” generation and the plight of black Britons in Thacherite London as one of both “pressure” but also of political solidarities and alliances. Handsworth Songs also features a street chase where a lone black man runs through a street and is eventually cornered on all sides by a group of police encased in menacing riot gear. The second time we see this chase in the film it is slowed down, enabling the scene to stand as a corrective to a series of statements made by Margaret Thatcher in the previous sequence, where she says that once an immigrant minority threatens to become a majority, people become frightened. The scene is illustrative of how the solitary black man is the one who is frightened by a group of police officers, a complete reversal of Thatcher’s statements. It is the minority who lives in fear of an often hostile majority, a claim borne out through representational means as is illustrated in the films examined in this chapter. This street chase, set in the 1980s, recalls all such street chases and street-based events belonging to the politically charged imaginary of black London. A second refrain in the film, uttered by various figures where they say “something has gone terribly wrong”, can be related back

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 173 to the black woman’s statement to the journalist; what has gone wrong is that the ghosts of other stories have failed to be completely vanquished by alternative narratives of the migrant experience. While Sarah Lay counts Handsworth Songs among the few “social realist films” to address issues of racial inequality in Britain, this film cannot accurately be described in social realist terms.93 Handsworth Songs operates in the essay film tradition, in a way that brings the past and present into a dialectical relationship through the use of archival footage, interviews, and voice-over narration among a host of other techniques that fly in the face of any form of realism, despite the film’s use of documentary footage. What I have explored in this chapter are two separate groupings of films that do give voice to an entire history of migration as depicted in British cinema, something of an obscure trajectory in the scholarly accounts of British social realist filmmaking. The “ghosts of other stories” is a phrase that resonates with the aims of this chapter. While Dirty Pretty Things is most obviously about the difficulties faced by the global migrant in an equally global London, that is not the only “London story” to be found in the film, as traces of enduring narratives of the city, specifically related to the end of empire, make themselves present. This analysis has aimed to illustrate that the cinematic city in its global guise is not without history. I have also tried to demonstrate the manner in which the social realist tendencies of the film are reworked in a way that both chimes with Dirty Pretty Things as an example of contemporary world cinema but also takes us back to a much longer history of representation that shows us the changing face of migrant London as charted in cinema. That expressionism is often realism’s “partner in crime” in these films, either through the evocation of the thriller genre, or through expressionistic usages of music and finally through the use of mise-en-scène, is an intriguing and unexpected discovery. These expressionistic techniques operate in tension with the realist gestures the films make toward place, time and event, which is even the case in Dirty Pretty Things. I would argue that this tension is exceptionally productive; by bringing together the conventions of realist depiction with expressionistic variants, the real and the imaginary are made to co-mingle and essentially elucidate a popular thesis of the city as comprised of an indelible mixture of the material and the imagined. Expressionistic techniques, as used across many of these films, offer up a veritable archive of the emotional tenors of migrant journeys, marked by the proximity of high and low, of a sense of unease, fear and displacement, ultimately of all that can be expressed through the kind of stylistic excess generated by these devices.

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There are clear differences as well as affinities between the plight of migrants that descend from the imperial past and those of the global present that are registered through spatial and narrational means, as examined throughout this chapter. In bringing the past into dialogue with the present, this chapter has posited alternative ways of thinking about the global city film but also films such as Sapphire and Pressure, which have mainly been subjected to a “cultural studies” approach as exemplified in the work of scholars such as Pines and Young. This chapter also develops work on films without much existing critical literature, including Babylon and Black Joy. While the body of scholarship on these films offers valuable insight into the racial and gendered politics of these works, the specifically spatial qualities of these films, as related back to modes of narration and setting, remain ripe for exploration. And yet, despite these differences, it is the figure of Juliette in Dirty Pretty Things that can be utilized to bring together this film with the corpus of films about Caribbean migration and settlement more precisely. Most of the literature on Dirty Pretty Things, samples of which were surveyed earlier in the chapter, describes the London that we find in the film as a “city of migrants”. Juliette, of course, is not a migrant. She is black and she is British. As noted earlier, she is confined to the space of the hotel. She is a figure that is not granted a topography. Near the end of the film, when Okwe tells the man about to collect Senor Juan’s kidney that people such as himself constitute the unseen workers that make the city run, both Juliette and Senay stand with him. Juliette is often invisible to the scholars who write about the film as she does not feature in the literature at any great length nor do these scholars temper their migrant reading of the film in light of this character. Juliette can be viewed as a remnant of the earlier films about Caribbean migration and settlement. Her lack of topography links her back to the male figures in Sapphire, Pressure and Babylon, whose limited mobility is manifested through various narratives of the street. In keeping with the emphasis on interiors within the global migrant films analyzed in this chapter, Juliette remains tied to the hotel, which is her space of work. The narrative of entitlement that characterizes the impetus behind the films made in the 1970s and early 1980s about Caribbean settlement in the city is carried through to this new generation of migrants; as Okwe’s words make clear, those who make the global city tick remain invisible, illegal and unacknowledged. That Juliette is included among this cast of global economic migrants, in the guise of the invisible prostitute, can be read as an unsettling manifestation of the time of the ‘past-present’ as she is a figure who still waits for a measure of entitlement. It is in fact Juliette that

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gl o b a l l o ndo n 175 gives rise to a vision of London at a crossroads between imperial past and global present. Notes   1. Zoe Williams, “The Home Office Anti-Immigration Billboards are Just a Publicity Stunt”, The Guardian, 26 July 2013, available at http:// http://www.the guardian . com / theguardian / 2013 / jul / 26 / illegal - immigrant - billboard - stunt (last accessed 1 August 2013).  2. Daniel Boffey, “Government Advisor’s Warnings Over Spot Checks for Illegal Immigrants”, The Guardian, 3 August 2013, available at http:// http : / / www . theguardian . com / uk - news / 2013 / aug / 03 / government adviser-spot-checks-illegal-migrants (last accessed 3 August 2013).   3. This statement by Thatcher is found in a sequence in Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1987) that will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter.   4. Laila Amine, “A House with Two Doors? Creole Nationalism and Nomadism in Multicultural London”, Culture, Theory and Critique 48.1 (April 2007), p. 80.   5. Sarah Gibson, “’The Hotel Business is About Strangers’: Border Politics and hospitable Spaces in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things”, Third Text 20.6 (November 2006), p. 368.   6. Cynthia Lucia, “The Complexities of Cultural Change: An Interview with Stephen Frears”, Cineaste 28.4 (Fall 2003), p. 9.   7. James Graham, “Postcolonial Purgatory: The Space of Migrancy in Dirty Pretty Things”, in: Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone (eds.), Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 116.  8. Nick James, “Review of Dirty Pretty Things”, Sight and Sound 12.11 (November 2002), p. 23.   9. Ian Sinclair, “Heartsnatch Hotel”, Sight and Sound 12.12 (December 2002), p. 34. 10. Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, “Space, place and identity: re-­ viewing social realism”, in: Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 184. 11. Ibid. p. 190. 12. Raymond Williams, “A Lecture on Realism”, Screen 18.1 (1977), pp. 61–5. 13. J. Hallam and M. Marshment, “Space, place and identity”, p. 184. 14. Ibid. p. 192. 15. Paul Dave, “Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film”, in: David Tucker (ed.), British Social Realism in the Arts Since 1940 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 53. 16. Sarah Lay, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 102.

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17. Andrew Higson, “Space, Place and Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film”, in: Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Burns & Oates, 1996), pp. 136–8. 18. For a thorough assessment of the kind of generic anxiety this film engenders, see: Rebecca Prime, “Stranger than Fiction: Genre and Hybridity in the ‘Refugee Film’”, Postscript 25.2 (Winter 2006), pp. 56–66. 19. Erica Abeel, “Like Pulling Teeth (or Stealing Kidneys): Stephen Frears on Dirty Pretty Things”, IndieWire, 18 July 2003, available at http:// http:// www . indiewire . com / article / like _ pulling _ teeth _ or _ stealing _ kidneys _ stephen_frears_on_dirty_pretty_thing (last accessed 2 August 2013). 20. I. Sinclair, “Heartsnatch Hotel”, p. 33. 21. Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 168. 22. Charlotte Brunsdon, London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945 (London: British Film Institute, 2007), p. 116. 23. See A. Higson, “Space, Place and Spectacle”, whereby his notion of “moral realism” as applied to fictional films has its origins in Griersonian social realist documentary cinema of the 1930s. 24. I. Sinclair, “Heartsnatch Hotel”, p. 34. 25. Andrew Higson, “Pool of London” in Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds.), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 162. 26. S. Lay, British Social Realism, p. 86. 27. An exception to this tendency lies with the work of James Leggott, who makes some mention of black British cinema in this context. See: James Leggott, “Nothing to Do Around Here: British Realist Cinema in the 1970s”, in: Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 94–104. 28. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 130. 29. Paul Gilroy, Black Britain: A Photographic History (London: Saqi, 2007), p. 100. 30. For a thorough analysis of this particular view of urban space and modernity, see: James Donald, “The City, The Cinema: Modern Spaces”, in: Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 77–95. 31. S. Sassen, The Global City, p. 8;13; 328. 32. Murray Frazer, “Architecture’s Urban Shine and Brutal Reality”, in: Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (eds.), London From Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 263. 33. Frank Mort, “Scandalous Events: Metropolitan Culture and Moral Change in Post-Second World War London”, Representations 93 (Winter 2006), p. 107. 34. Ibid. p. 117. 35. Ibid. p. 120.

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36. Ibid. p. 122. 37. Ibid. p. 127. 38. Ibid. p. 129. 39. Ibid. p. 130. 40. Ibid. p. 130. 41. “Landmark London” denotes iconographic landmarks of the city utilized by films in order to signal their settings in the clearest possible terms. See “Landmark London” (chapter one), in: Brunsdon, London in Cinema, pp. 21–47. 42. Ibid. p. 122. 43. Ibid. p. 135. 44. Michael Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of MultiRacial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 120. 45. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film The Redemption of Physical Reality (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 72. 46. C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema, p. 192. 47. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire, p. 1. 48. M. Phillips and T. Phillips, Windrush, p. 126. 49. John Orr, “Traducing Realisms: Naked and Nil by Mouth”, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5 (2002), p. 105. 50. Ibid. p. 105. 51. See: Yosefa Loshitzky, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 65; Sandra Pozanesi, “The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe”, Third Text 26.6 (November 2012), p. 685. 52. Bart Moore-Gilbert, “London in Hanif Kureishi’s Films: Hanif Kureishi in interview with Bart Moore-Gilbert”, Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing XXI 2 (1999), p.13. Also, for scholarship that concerns the expressionistic qualities of My Beautiful Laundrette, see: Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Christine Geraghty, My Beautiful Laundrette (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). 53. T. Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls, p. 58. 54. See: Malini Guha and Charlotte Brunsdon, “‘The Colour of One’s Skin’: Earl Cameron” with Charlotte Brunsdon, Journal of British Cinema and Television. 6:1 (2009), pp. 122–33. 55. C. Lucia, “The Complexities of Cultural Change”, p. 12. 56. L. Amine, “A House with Two Doors”, p. 84. 57. Raymond Durgnat, “Two ‘social problem’ films: Sapphire and Victim”, in: Alan Burton, Tim O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds.), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), p. 59. 58. C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema, p. 69. 59. Ibid. p. 69.

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60. Jim Pines, “British Cinema and Black Representation”, in: Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 179. 61. For John Hill, the allusions the film makes towards the forms of violence enacted upon migrants during this historical period fail to supersede the associations they accumulate within the flow of the film’s narrative, which often falls back upon the logic of racial stereotyping. See: John Hill, Sex, Class, Realism: British Cinema 1956–64 (London: British Film Institute, 1987). Lola Young makes a similar argument about both Sapphire and Flame in the Streets, noting that “despite its containment in liberal discourse and social realism, inevitably, repressed racial anxiety seeps out from the edges of these texts, returning to defy its enclosure and that is where the contradictions arise”. See: L. Young, Fear of the Dark, p. 111. 62. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Cities Real and Imagined” in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 101. 63. Ibid. p. 103. 64. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), p. 149. 65. J. Pines, “British Cinema”, p. 140. 66. Tara Brabazon, “‘Brixton’s Aflame’: Television History Workshop and the Battle for Britain”, Limina 4 (1998), p. 54. 67. L. Young, Fear of the Dark, p. 163. 68. For an assessment of the reasons why Black Joy assumes such a humorous tone, see: Sally Shaw, “A ‘country-boy’ migrates to Brixton – re-examining agency, identity and memory in and through Black Joy”, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 3.2 (November 2012), pp. 271–82. Shaw identifies a series of conflicts between the film’s screenwriter, Jamal Ali, and its director, Anthony Simmons, which seem to have resulted in a watering-down of potentially radically political content. 69. Paul Dave, Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema. (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 26. 70. Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 71. S. Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 72–3. 72. G. Bruno, “Motion and emotion”, pp. 18–19. 73. Ibid. p. 19. 74. M. Phillips and T. Phillips, Windrush, p. 164. 75. P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), pp. 106–7. 76. C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema, p. 73. 77. P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, p. 97. 78. M. Phillips and T. Phillips, Windrush, p. 103. 79. In addition to the work of Gilroy, which I will employ extensively in this analysis, see Julian Henriques’ writings on dancehall cultures and the significance of these sonic spaces in both a British and Jamaican context as well

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as his dancehall film, Babymother (1998). For Henriques, Gilroy and others, the dancehall is a sonic space that constitutes a form of street-based culture within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora which is as technological as it is social and often times political. My argument regarding the iconicity of the dancehall within the cinematic streets in these films is indebted to their work on the subject. See: Julian Henriques, “Sonic dominance and reggae sound system sessions”, in: Michael Ball and Les Back (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 451–80; Julian Henriques, “The Jamaican sound system as commercial and social apparatus”, in: Gerry Bloustein, Margaret Peter and Susan Luckman (eds.), Sonic Energies: Music, Technology, Community Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 125–40. 80. P. Gilroy, Black Britain, p. 159. 81. P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, pp. 92–3. 82. See: Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987). Her definition of metadiegetic music is that which assumes a subjective function, or music conveys the effect of being able to obtain access to a character’s “musical thoughts”. 83. C. Brunsdon, London in Cinema, p. 70. 84. C. Brunsdon notes that the lyrics in this sequence “explicitly carry[ing] Tony’s experience of rejection and remake[ing] it as one of the sounds of Black London”. See: Ibid. p. 70. 85. M. Phillips and T. Phillips, p. 229. 86. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 83. 87. Ibid. p. 123. 88. P. Gilroy, Black Britain, p. 240. 89. George Lipstiz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994), p. 126. 90. Ibid. p. 128. 91. In his review, Ian Sinclair quotes from the production notes of the film that state “ “‘thriller with political subtext’ and not a Loach/Leigh lower-depths state-of-the-nation polemic. It’s a fairy story, a grimy fable” (p. 34). 92. Phillip Drummond, “London, Fortress Europe, and the Cinema of Migration”, Conference paper presented to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, London, 31 March–3 April 2005. 93. S. Lay, British Social Realism, p. 86.

C HA P TER 3

The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures

3.1  MOVEMENTS OF PASSAGE Journeys that feature arrivals or departures to cities are modes of mobility that are characteristic of migrant stories of settlement or passage. John Akomfrah’s recent essay film The Nine Muses (2010) for example, presents one such journey narrative whereby the movement of two men into Alaska evokes the affective and sensorial memories of the journey and arrival of black migrants to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s; the Alaskan images, juxtaposed with archival images of arrival and settlement, conjure the mood of isolation, and of coldness, contributing to the depiction of how the journey felt in addition to how it was memorialized through archival imagery. The magisterial landscapes of Alaska, with their imposing natural structures, also endow this journey with an epic quality, reinforced through the use of quotations from canonical British literature in the telling of this story through voice-over narration. As noted in the Introduction, this chapter operates as an addendum to the narratives of cinematic Paris and London explored in this book. More specifically, this chapter establishes a wider applicability for the methods of reading for space and place developed in the previous chapters, as it pertains to the significance of arrivals and departures to and from cities. As such, this chapter brings together a consideration of In This World and Exils as two examples of films where the interpretive strategies of the earlier chapters provokes a distinctly spatialized analysis of what we can term very loosely here as “the migrant road movie”. The road movie is the generic context that is evoked and revised in these particular films, which is certainly not the case in a film such as The Nine Muses. As such, this chapter is invested in teasing out the forms of genre revisionism at work in both films, where their migrant content offers a substantial reconfiguration of a well-established, internationally practiced, popular genre of filmmaking. These films also serve as test cases for the examination of

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the road movie in accordance with the definition of world cinema adopted in this book, one that engenders an oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the specific and the universal. What will become increasingly apparent is that In This World offers a “social realist” version of the road movie while Exils can be classed as the modernist variant of the same genre, making both apt case studies for a coda to this book. In the case of the global migrant specifically, harrowing stories of arrival that have involved injury and death in addition to stories of departure from cities of potential settlement that are often forced rather than voluntary, constitute a key affective strand of the story of the global migrant, one that is as pertinent as what actually transpires in the actual city or place of one’s arrival or departure. As noted previously, the trope of mobility is central to the cinematic city paradigm, generally as it relates to the figure of the flâneur, but also in its connection to how the nineteenth-century city itself was instrumental in the production of new modes of seeing and movement. Examining films about “migrants on the move” paves the way for a re-consideration of the trope of mobility and, more specifically, that of arrivals and departures from a perspective not often found in the ­existing literature on the filmic city. Dimitris Eleftheoritis recounts an intriguing anecdote in the Introduction to his rich and evocative book on film movement titled Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement. Eleftheoritis notes the unfavorable response he received from his students when he asked them whether or not it was viable to view Samira Malkmabaf ’s Blackboards (2008), a film about a group of teachers wandering through war-torn landscapes of the Iran-Iraq border after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, as a road movie. As he writes, “the ‘road movie’, with its very specific set of pleasures is not seen as an appropriate generic framework for a film that is about continuous movement on roads and paths”.1 While a similar claim is not generally made on behalf of Tony Gatlif, perhaps because his films do partake of some of the pleasures of travel, there is some scholarly discomfort in evidence with discussing In This World or Road to Guantanamo, the second film in Winterbottom’s loose “War on Terror trilogy”, as road movies, despite Winterbottom’s comments to this effect. Some prefer the term “docudrama” to road movie for example.2 In these instances, a certain ambivalence in generated when “serious films” are described using terminology whose dominant affiliation is with the popular. Genre revisionism is the explicitly stated aim of Winterbottom with regard to In This World; he states in an interview that “I love road movies, and having done 24 Hour Party People on DV [digital video], it seemed that technology combined with a very long road would give you a slightly

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new perspective on the genre”.3 Gatlif also professes his love for the form in interviews but in a way that foregrounds the meaning of the journey as that which signifies above and beyond dreams of settlement; as he says, “I make films about the road for the road is my country”.4 In Winterbottom’s film the staples of the American version of the road movie genre, which include marginal protagonists and the American frontier, are replaced by two global migrants, Jamal and Enayat, who travel by land to London, their dream city of choice. In Exils, Zano and Naima embark on the journey that takes them back to Algeria, where their families once lived, a journey that is marked by encounters with two migrants from Algeria moving in the opposite direction. The nature of their quest dovetails strongly with the conventions of the European road movie that foreground introspection over flight. While the journey in Winterbottom’s film facilitates a movement toward the promise of a better future, the journey in Exils is about finding ways to connect to a place that embodies the past. Both Winterbottom and Gatlif offer up films about a “road less traveled”. They are also filmmakers with strong documentary leanings that emerge in different ways within these two films specifically. While In This World deliberately blurs the boundaries between the real and fictional, which stems back to its production context, Exils contains moments that hark back to ethnographic modes of depiction that might very well have something to do with Gatlif ’s background in documentary filmmaking.5 The gestures toward authenticity, made in different ways by both films, add a second dimension to their status as road movies, one that can be explored productively by drawing upon Giuliana Bruno’s postulations concerning the intricate relationships between space, film genres and mobility. While this chapter will also draw some of its fodder from bodies of scholarship on road movies, Bruno articulates the potential for cinema to operate as a form of cartography, an optic that bears a certain specificity to the films under examination in this chapter. In Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, Bruno establishes a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship between actual space and imagined space, where she claims that landscapes, including the means of traversing such spaces, generate certain genres, while genres in turn reproduce these very spaces cinematically. For Bruno, the car gives birth to the road movie for instance, while outer space and open landscapes are home to science fiction cinema and the Western.6 The interdependence of real space and its generic counterpart is certainly in evidence in both In This World and Exils; while the former is ostensibly a road movie generated from the power geometries of the War on Terror, the latter utilizes the template of the road movie

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to investigate the legacies of French colonial history in siring different modalities of exile. The use of digital video and the often-recounted tale of how Winterbottom and scriptwriter Toni Grisoni undertook a version of the journey before taking their protagonists, both non-actors, on the same journey, heightens its reality effect through extra-textual means. By extension, Bruno’s conceptualization of cinema as a form of cartography has a special relevance to the stories of global migration told in these films, perhaps extending beyond them to encompass others. Bruno draws a parallel between the pleasures of map viewing and that of the cinema; she writes, “like engaging with a map, experiencing film involves being passionately transported through a geography. One is carried away by this imaginary travel just as one is moved when one actually travels or moves (domestically) through architectural ensembles”.7 Her illustrations are drawn from early filmic travelogues that explore elements of the urban landscape as well as from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city plans and architectural models.8 While she appears to generalize the experience of cinema as one of vicarious travel and mobility that transpires not only by sight but through feeling, her re-thinking of the pleasures of the cinema is derived from a very specific, Westernized history of spatio-visual practices. In line with claims made by Laura Marks to this effect, Bruno’s model for cinema as a form of cartography can and in fact does have a wider application than might be readily apparent from the case studies that comprise her book.9 Bruno’s own views of cinema as cartography are in fact indicative of its broad scope; as she writes, “a frame for cultural mappings, film is modern cartography. It is a mobile map – a map of differences, a production of socio-sexual fragments and cross-cultural travel”.10 However, both Bruno’s illustrations and terminology, including phrases such as “site-seeing”, “travel-dwelling” and “dweller-voyageur” scattered throughout Atlas of Emotions are demonstrative of her alignment with the more sublime and pleasurable aspects of travel, cinematic or otherwise. The notion of mapping bears a complex relationship to the itineraries of migrant movement, particularly with regard to the global migrant, as these journeys are often quite literally “off the map”, transpiring through clandestine channels and routes. Films like In This World and Exils can themselves be situated as a form of cinematic mapping, as a way of making these journeys visible. We can in fact view the projects of both of these films as attempts to mobilize both historical and contemporary narratives of political strife through spatial means. Considerations of the formal, narrational and stylistic devices of these films highlights the affinities between them and the representational strategies excavated in the previous two chapters. In making In This World,

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Winterbottom engages directly with the processes and politics of globalization; certainly in interviews, he situates the film as a kind of intervention within a hegemonic discourse that demonizes illegal migrants, which is similar to Frears’ stated intentions regarding Dirty Pretty Things. In This World, like Dirty Pretty Things and a host of earlier films concerning migration to Britain, makes no secret of its allegorical intentions but, as I will argue, the allegorical resonances of In This World betray an unexpected form of ambivalence. Winterbottom’s film provides a reversal of what one might consider place and non-place, as theorized in the work of Marc Augé. This section, in keeping with the methods utilized in Chapter 2, continues to explore the construction of space and place in cinematic terms, which lead to a persistence of the representation of an “inhospitable London”. As is the case with all of the London films examined in this book, generic hybridity is also an attribute of Winterbottom’s filmmaking in general terms, as is the use of a realist style that places a number of films that he has made within a longer legacy of British social realist cinema.11 In the case of this film, the combination of road movie conventions and documentary realism allow motion to achieve the status of emotion, as outlined by Bruno. Exils is a film that straddles the divide between the generic and the specific, in referencing a broad spectrum of exile while also referring to the specificities of a Franco-Algerian history of exile involving both arrivals and departures. In this instance, Exils recalls the representational strategies of the three global Paris films examined in Chapter 1. Additionally, the significance of the encounter between “migration past and present” that assumes a prominent place within Haneke’s and Denis’ films, is equally important in this film, similarly mired by exorbitance and ambivalence. 3.2  MIGRANTS ON THE ROAD: SPATIAL AMBIVALENCE IN MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM’S IN THIS WORLD In This World presents a cinematic geography of migration where the semantic elements of the road movie are used to tell a story of the journey undertaken by two young boys, Jamal and Enayat, from a refugee camp in Peshawar to the city of London via the infamous Silk Road. While Jamal makes it to London, Enayat dies along the way as he suffocates in a freight container en route to Trieste. These semantic elements include the “event of flight” or search for a better life elsewhere that underscores the American incarnation of the road movie, as well as a visual topography of desolate landscapes traversed by vehicles sandwiched between market towns and, eventually, cities.12

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the jo urne y nar r a t i v e 185 The use of voice-over narration, however, is where generic hybridity begins to make its appearance, as the film’s documentary ethos is unmistakable. The opening voice-over, which accompanies images from the Shamshatoo refugee camp, relates the historical narrative of migration that has plagued Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the more recent US-led War on Terror starting in 2001. The voice-over strongly indicates the film’s political alignment with the plight of the Afghan refugee; for instance, the narrator says “it is estimated that 7.9 billion dollars were spent on bombing Afghanistan in 2001. Spending on refugees is less generous. The daily food ration is 480 grams of wheat flour, 25 grams of vegetable oil and 60 grams of puecil”. We are also told Jamal’s story, one of the many orphans who work for less than a dollar a day in the camp. Voice-over narration establishes a dialectical relationship between the real and the fictional, one that underscores the entirety of Winterbottom’s project in this film. The voice-over constitutes a form of direct spectatorial address that relates information about the historical world by detailing the narrative of Afghan migration in contemporary times, in addition to drawing attention to an overarching authorial presence. By juxtaposing the amount of money spent on the War on Terror with the list of what is rationed out to those displaced and impoverished as a result, Winterbottom sets up a dichotomy between the two that indicates the film’s sympathies toward the latter. The second instance of its usage occurs immediately after Jamal and Enayat leave Peshawar from the bus terminal. The film cuts from a close-up of Enayat’s father, watching his son and Jamal leave, to an image of a globe in motion, accompanied by the voice-over which states that over one million refugees turn to human smugglers each year. “Some arrive safely to their destination. Many get caught by the authorities. Some die along the way”. All three outcomes are present in the film as Jamal and Enayat are caught on their way to Tehran, Jamal arrives safely in London while Enayat suffocates in a freight compartment on the way from Turkey to Trieste. The use of voice-over narration, as an omniscient presence, relates directly to the depiction of space in the film. Cartography then, lies at the very heart of this film, in a way that coincides with Bruno’s desire to privilege cinematic mapping over traditional cartographies of space. The film cuts from the shot of the father, an image belonging to the diegetic world of the film, and returns to the non-diegetic realm of the narrator. During the latter voice-over segment, the image of the globe gives way to a map that zooms in on Peshawar. The map is superimposed over a shot of a bus on the road. A red line on the map charts Jamal and Enayat’s journey from Peshawar to their first stop, which is Quetta. The inclusion of the map

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reinforces the documentary impetus of the voice-over, as it implies the traversal of real space. The map is utilized periodically by Winterbottom as a guide for the spectator, allowing him/her to grasp the trajectory of the journey by land. This is the view that most vividly captures the transnational character of the road as each nation’s space is labeled and demarcated while the red line charts Jamal and Enayat’s movement in a clear and linear fashion. This sequence provides a visual juxtaposition of the opposing representations of space in the film, which oscillates between a cartographic perspective of space and the view on “the ground” or the spaces where narrative action transpires. The map, in addition to the use of voice-over narration, constitutes two of the three central non-diegetic elements utilized in the film, the last of which is the film’s signature musical score. Winterbottom aligns the map with the voice-over as both devices present an overarching view of the landscape and the historical context within which the film unfolds. The documentary overtones associated with both stylistic features are unmistakable. However, the two devices seem to signify in opposite directions. While the voice-over is clearly an extension of Winterbottom’s larger allegorical project, which will be elaborated upon later, the map, particularly when analyzed in relation to the diegetic space of narrative action, raises the great disparity between place and its imagined counterpart. The map functions as an imagined depiction of the journey that cannot account for the arduousness involved in the actual traversal of those spaces. Within this framework, the film’s diegetic world constructs a stronger ethos of the real than the map. Winterbottom enacts a reversal that renders the reality of the map a fiction, which, in turn, privileges the reality effect produced by the space of narrative action. The actual map in the film is static, a frozen version of the mobility found in the realm of narrative action. What moves on the map is the red line, representative of Jamal and Enayat’s trek across the globe. While the map renders space in a way that can be comprehended upon first glance, the view on the ground tells an entirely different story.

Place and Non-Place: The Ground View What this road movie offers on the ground is a representation of nonplaces. As mentioned previously, Augé describes non-place as the antithesis of place, where the former lacks relationality, history and identity.13 As such, non-places are generally spaces that are temporary, transient or solitary.14 For Augé, non-places are constituted in:

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the jo urne y nar r a t i v e 187 A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferated under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity).15

His list of non-places include hotel chains and shantytowns, which are often part of the topography of the road film as well as the refugee camp, where the narrative of In This World begins. However Augé simultaneously claims that ultimately, place and non-place are not mutually exclusive, despite their apparent differences; “we should add that the same things apply to the non-places as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it”.16 Following Augé, what is of particular interest is how Winterbottom reverses what we might consider to constitute place and non-place in the film. The topography of the road movie is largely comprised of non-places, including the road itself, motel rooms, and vehicles. The migrant version of the road movie presents a similar topography with certain differences. Interior spaces are privileged within the narrative as characters are constantly forced to retreat from view, in keeping with a similar depiction of interior space in Dirty Pretty Things. Many of these interiors serve as text-book illustrations of non-places. The motel room interiors that Jamal and Enayat stay in resemble one another as they have green walls and are largely nondescript in their décor. Vehicles of transport also function as interiors and extend beyond the passenger seats in cars; Jamal and Enayat are made to hide within crates of oranges that are transported across Iran, within the back of trucks and finally within a freight container that takes Enayat’s life. These vehicles of transportation are transformed into interior space as they are meant to conceal the mobility of the characters. These particular interiors of transit create a seriality of imagery that extends to the representation of the cities themselves. Each place represented in the film is comprised of a similar cluster of imagery, including the shots taken of our final destination, London. Peshawar, Quetta and Iran are characterized by shots of market spaces and restaurants where meetings with the human smugglers transpire. There is nothing particularly distinctive about any of these places other than the fact that Trieste is a more recognizably “European” cityscape than Tehran for instance. The very brief London sequence found at the end of the film features Jamal working in a restaurant, walking through an unnamed Portobello Road market and finally praying in a mosque. The only marker of specificity is the title “London” that appears over the opening scene of the sequence, as

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Figure 3.1  In This World: Shamshatoo Refugee Camp.

Jamal washes dishes in the restaurant. Otherwise, the images of the city in this film are largely generic. “London” then does not appear to be much different from any other city that Jamal and Enayat pass through in the film. The homogeneous nature of the imagery that characterizes the representation of each place in the film are in fact “blurred images” of cities, in Sorlin’s sense of the phrase, that revolve around non-places. That this mode of depiction extends to the representation of London in the film signifies in more than one direction. The film opens, as mentioned previously, with voice-over narration that relates both the history and the contemporary condition of Afghan migrants. However, the imagery that accompanies the narration signifies in a slightly different direction. While there are a few glimpses of barbed-wire fences, most of the shots are of children gazing directly into the camera and smiling (Figure 3.1). There is a brief shot of a makeshift children’s theme park ride. An ice cream seller makes an appearance and there are several shots of children eating ice cream while looking into the camera. These images run counter to the content of the voice-over that narrates the plight of Afghan refugees. Their impoverished condition comes across clearly as the landscape of the camp is quite barren and is much more permeable to the exterior as interiors are very small. The narrated list of single items granted to its inhabitants, such as one tent, one blanket and so on contributes to the visual depiction of their poverty. However, the images of smiling children lend a degree of poignancy to the sequence which creates an indefinable experience of “place” as such joy does not manifest itself anywhere else in the film. If non-places are generally those of transit, then places, as Augé notes, are relational. While the refugee camp is included among Augé’s list of

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non-places, and is one of the most transitory dwelling areas that can be imagined, Winterbottom infuses these non-places with a sense of place through the depiction of relationships between characters. When Jamal leaves the camp the first time, he is followed by the child Aman, who refuses to say good-bye until he can no longer keep up with Jamal’s pace. The sadness of the moment is reinforced through the use of the elegiac non-diegetic music that is the film’s signature score. The “Peshawar” sequence of the film is characterized by communal and family relationships; there is an extended dance sequence that takes place in the city, while the sweatshop sequence in Turkey is also defined by relationships as Jamal and Enayat form a friendship with the family traveling to Denmark. This sense of “community” is shattered after they are forced out of the sweatshop. When Jamal arrives in Sangatte, he develops a friendship with Yusif who ultimately helps him reach London. The end of the film returns the spectator back to the camp, which includes a repetition of the same image sequence used in the opening. The shots of children smiling into the camera are in stark contrast to the shots of Jamal in London, walking through the market and praying in the mosque alone. The refugee camps and the sweatshop are specific to the topography of migration and, more specifically, illegal forms of migration. They are spaces that remain on the margins of the cities and social contexts within which they reside. Yet these are the places that are distinctive in representational terms. The “blurred images” of the other cities in the film makes them fall on the side of globalization. While obviously Tehran does not reap the benefits of belonging to the global capitalist economy on the same scale as London, a major global city, refugee camps and particularly sweatshops, function as the underside of globalization. While each cityscape presented in the film retains their own differences in aesthetic terms, the repetition of imagery in each place contributes to an ethos of homogeneity that allows the camps and other migrant spaces to retain a sense of specificity and therefore of “place”. It is also the tenuous formation of migrant communities within such spaces that constitute them as places. Winterbottom enacts a reversal of what one would expect to be represented as place and non-place, thereby allowing marginal spaces to take on the status of place characterized by momentary joy and belonging. In a poem titled Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop asks “Think of the long trip home/Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”.17 This is exactly the question that the film inadvertently poses, even though, as Winterbottom has stated in interviews, the point of the film is to ­engender sympathy with the plight of the global migrant.

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Motion as Emotion In the London films examined in the previous chapter, various means of expressionism are called upon in order to generate an affective response to the difficulties faced by settled and global migrants alike. In this film, the journey itself achieves this aim. More to the point, the oscillation between an omniscient view of space and that of the diegesis is key to the production of affect in the film. Bruno’s meditation upon the term “emotion”, allows for a consideration of how the spectator is emotionally “moved” along with our migrant figures. She returns to the root meaning of the word, which has historically been connected to notions of “moving out, migration, transference from one place to another”.18 One of the central claims of her text is that “cinematic space moves not only through time and space or narrative development but through inner space. Film moves, and fundamentally ‘moves’ us, with its ability to render affects and in turn, to affect”.19 For Bruno, cinema moves us emotionally by transplanting us into the world of the film, which requires “movement”, both on the part of the film and the spectator. Whether or not Bruno’s claim is widely applicable to various kinds of cinema is a matter of debate and lies beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the notion that motion itself may be able to render emotive affects provides a way of thinking about how In This World solicits empathy from the viewer without necessarily resorting to the use of traditional devices of identification. This is significant as Bruno essentially argues that the production of mobility can move the spectator in ways that might be akin to the processes of identification generally ascribed to the use of the point-of-view (pov) shot and other modes of “suturing”. As noted by scholars and critics alike, the film very seldomly employs optical point-of-view shots, and when there is the occasional instance of implied pov shots, they rarely occur within the context of shot-reverseshot structures. The film is largely filmed in an observational mode; for instance, large group conversations, such as the initial one between Jamal, Enayat, Enayat’s relatives and the human smugglers, are generally framed in various medium shots. Rather than filming events from the optical perspective of characters, the camera remains with the characters and depicts events unfolding within the space of their occurrence. In what ways is the spectator “moved” by In This World? The film contains modes of non-diegetic address that are directed towards the spectator, above and beyond the “narrative” unfolding on the ground. In this sense, the spectator is not on quite the same journey as the characters. The use of the voice-over and the map are two such devices that f­ unction

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in allegorical terms. Both stylistic techniques potentially “move” the spectator to think about the plight of migrants not just in Afghanistan but all over the world. If identification with the characters is perhaps not what moves the spectator emotionally, then it is the journey itself that achieves this effect. The observational shooting style of the film is essential to thinking about spectatorial address, particularly in relation to the representation of trauma, as realized through the methods by which Jamal and Enayat are forced to travel. The documentary attributes of the film, reinforced through the use of DV cameras and location shooting, further intensify the experiences of travel, menace and trauma by blending what must be fictional with an equally definitive sense of the real. Both mobility and trauma are inscribed in corporeal terms in this film, as the journey of these characters is depicted as a fully embodied experience. In the most general sense, the characters in the film are commodified as they are moved from place to place by human smugglers, thereby constructing a line of human traffic along the once famous Silk Road. A particularly telling moment is when the human smugglers instruct Enayat’s relatives to save the receipt of their transaction. Enayat’s death is a result of a nearly impossible journey that his body simply cannot handle and as such, the means of migration are traumatically inscribed upon the body. E. Ann Kaplan outlines several positions that the spectator can assume within a film about trauma. The position that is constructed by In This World is that of the spectator as witness, which Kaplan sees as “the most politically useful position”.20 The observational style of the film aids in positioning the spectator as witness to the horror of the events, rather than a voyeur. A few sequences make this impact most readily. The use of night-sight shooting during the sequence where Jamal and Enayat attempt to walk across the mountains to Turkey involves the spectator as intimately as possible by re-creating the effect of wandering through dangerous, mountainous terrain in the dark. The sounds of gunshots from patrols, as well as heavy breathing on the part of the characters in conjunction with close-ups of their terrified faces visually reinforce the horror of the event. The sequence in the freight container achieves a similar feat as the camera remains with the characters and the focus is blurry, in keeping with the darkness of the environment and the disorientation experienced by the characters. The only light in the scene seems to come from a flashlight so characters are only occasionally visible. The darkness of the scene produces the effect of their confinement and claustrophobia. However, the actual horror of the freight journey becomes most potent when the camera leaves the characters; the film cuts to the map,

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in which the red line crosses the Aegean Sea, followed by a slow fade to a shot of the ship crossing the ocean as the title “40 hours later” appears on screen. This is information only the spectator has access to as the characters do not know where they are, where they are going and how long it will take them to get there. The cut is jarring in visual terms as we move from the dark space of the container to the bright outdoor light of the following scene, which heightens the contrast between the interior and the exterior and between the space of the characters and their vessel of transport. When the camera returns to the scene of terror and death unfolding in the container, the spectator is positioned in such a way as to be moved by the event itself as opposed to being moved by an identification motivated by the depiction of character subjectivity. The emotional impact of this sequence is achieved through the alternation of spaces, or the oscillation between an omniscient form of narration associated with the cartographic depiction of space and what transpires within the film’s diegetic realm. Bruno’s theoretical claim regarding the relationship between motion and affect finds a clear resonance in this sequence where mobility and space is used to facilitate an emotional response on the part of the spectator. And of course, there is a moment of identification with Jamal that does stem from the representation of character subjectivity. During the train ride from Trieste to France there is a shot of Jamal’s face that is upside down, as it is taken from the mirror located above his seat. The sounds of the banging and screaming from the freight container sequence accompany the shots of Jamal seated on the train. Sound is used to encourage the spectator to identify emotionally with Jamal, as the experience of entrapment continues to haunt him. The shot itself recreates the feeling of disorientation experienced by the characters within the freight. However, identification with his plight has occurred long before Winterbottom grants him a brief moment of interiority through our virtual backseat position on his and, up until this point, Enayat’s journey. Moving vicariously within the freight container, alongside the characters, functions as an emotional catalyst for the spectator. Again, the film privileges the journey itself, above and beyond the construction of a classical spectator-text relation, in creating modes of affect and identification. What the spectator ultimately witnesses is how these migrant figures, in an attempt to live the “global dream”, are subjected to the dangers of the journey by land and exploitation by human smugglers at every turn. By journeying with them, at both an omniscient standpoint and at ground level, Winterbottom constructs, to borrow a phrase from Massey, a “power geometry” of movement and of spaces.

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In This World as Geo-Cinema On the cover of the Sundance Film Series DVD of In This World, the tagline for the film is as follows: “the journey to freedom has no borders”. There is very little indication by the end of the film that Jamal has necessarily found freedom in his journey through a multiplicity of borders. In fact, as the epilogue tells us, Jamal cannot remain in London, a claim that extends both to the actor and the character.21 While Enayat dies along the way, Jamal has only found yet another temporary abode. What Winterbottom provides in this film for the spectator is a journey of ambivalence. In This World engages in the depiction of a specific “migrant moment”, which is that of the journey itself. Because the film revolves entirely around the trope of the journey, the notion of a cinematic cartography, or mobile mapping as Bruno puts it, is a suggestive way of thinking about the representation of space. If one reads the presentation of narrative space as a form of mapping, then the film itself, which mobilizes the spectator through a particular geo-cinematic rendering of migration, is more affective than the presence of the map. If we zoom in closer and examine the film’s presentation of space from both a non-diegetic, omniscient view and a diegetic, ground view, Winterbottom establishes a dialectical relation between the two within which the emotive, allegorical and memorial impulses of the film reside. In his reading of the film, David Farrier views the return to the refugee camp in Peshawar at the end of the film as the reinforcement of its status as site of perpetual displacement.22 However, the return to the camp also makes one wonder whether Jamal and Enayat were better off at home, particularly as the spectator has witnessed the horrors of the journey that lead to Enayat’s death as well as the sense of isolation that pervades the “London” sequence. When Jamal makes the phone call from London and tells Enayat’s father that his son is “no longer in this world”, there is a cut to a shot of the latter, as the film’s elegiac musical score comes on. The music reinforces a sense of pathos in the spectator. When we return to the camp, we are reminded of the joy and pleasures associated with that particular sequence earlier in the film. Kaplan, when writing specifically about trauma and the genre of melodrama, asks the question of whether or not an aesthetic genre such as melodrama is capable of bearing traces of cultural trauma.23 An expanded version of this question might ask the same of a genre like the road movie. To my mind, Winterbottom demonstrates that the generic framework of the road movie can indeed be made to signify in terms of a larger cultural trauma, which is that of illegal migration. The migrant content of the

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film in conjunction with Winterbottom’s use of techniques belonging to documentary cinema obviously point in an allegorical direction. The allegory is profoundly spatialized as we are taken through the topography of the migrant road. In positioning the spectator as a “witness” to the event, there are several questions the film raises. How truly “global” are the ebbs and flows of globalization? How does the “power geometry” of the War on Terror effect the movement or stasis of the displaced Afghan refugee? Are harsh immigration policies and the tightening of borders to blame for fueling the human smuggling industry and thereby facilitating the danger, trauma and death experienced by the most impoverished of migrants? And was it all worth it in the long run? Winterbottom does not provide a definitive answer to any of these questions but his ambivalent stance toward the journey and its outcome raises them nonetheless. Whether this sense of ambivalence is part and parcel of the film’s allegorical project or whether it is an unintentional byproduct of Winterbottom’s desire to construct an empathetic portrait of the migrant experience is difficult to discern. The voice-over segments of the film outline very clear reasons, such as poverty, displacement and ­confinement, for why Jamal and Enayat, symbolic of this particular strain of the migrant experience, choose to leave. However, the unfolding of the story in diegetic terms signifies in the opposite direction. Part of the film’s ambivalence rests in the depiction of the sheer difficulty of the journey that reaps very little reward; Enayat dies along the way, while Jamal has a temporary lease on “life in London” and, ultimately, will have to start the journey again. The other part of the film’s ambivalence resides in the fact that the refugee camps and sweatshops, perhaps the ultimate symbol of displacement, impoverishment and confinement, are rendered more hospitable than global London. In some ways, this film in particular recalls Bhabha’s statements noted in the Introduction regarding the way in which the figure of the stateless migrant emerges from “within the midst” of global ambivalence, where the dividing line between refugee camps and global London is definitively blurred. As mentioned previously, the methods developed in the analysis of the “London chapter” are entirely applicable to a reading of In This World, in light of its spatial attributes. As argued with respect to Dirty Pretty Things, the film is not necessarily comprised of non-spaces but rather spaces in the process of acquiring a certain “collective” signification. However, non-spaces do abound in In This World, in keeping with the film’s generic context. The seriality of imagery on the ground, where Jamal and Enayat are constantly mobilized across a range of similar spaces, cannot be described as anything other than non-places. The question in the case of

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the jo urne y nar r a t i v e 195 In This World has less to do with refuting the labeling of the film’s spaces as that which lack ‘identity or relationality” and more to do with the inadvertent way in which London emerges as an inhospitable space. The historical backdrop of Winterbottom’s film is of course the War on Terror. When Jamal and Enayat make their first phone call upon arrival in Quetta, there is a cut to a shot of three workers in a room and then one more cut to a shot of a poster on a wall that contains images of Tony Blair, George Bush, and Osama Bin Laden, all placed above an image of the destruction of the twin towers. This banal interior space is marked by a signifier of the global circumstances within which the film unfolds. This brief image, perhaps easily forgotten during a first viewing of the film, is a visual reminder of the socio-historical circumstances that comprise the underlying motivation for the journey of our migrant protagonists. As noted earlier, the voice-over narration, with which the film opens, details two distinct modes of displacement, resulting in Afghan refugees fleeing to the Shamshatoo camp. The first occurred during the Soviet invasion in 1979, while the second was due to the US-led bombing campaign that began in 2001. What these two events, alongside of what we might term the “British turf Wars” that occurred during the imperial era, when three wars were fought in Afghanistan in order to secure what was then colonial India against Russia, are understood by Derek Gregory in The Colonial Present, as a series of “intimate engagements” with “modern imperial power”.24 While not officially colonized, Afghanistan was often occupied in order to serve the interests of various imperial powers of the past and perhaps what we might term the “imperialism of the present”, as exemplified in American-led bombing campaigns. What Winterbottom leaves out, as such, is British involvement in the War on Terror. That Britain is engaged in the final stages of yet another war in Afghanistan at the present time is emblematic of how the latter remains embroiled within various imperialist maneuverings that fuel the displacement and migration of its people across the globe. In This World is a story about Afghan migrants who leave Afghanistan in order to live in the very country that is partially responsible for their need to depart. The “journey of ambivalence”, as charted in spatial terms, acquires yet a further resonance in this context. For Gregory, the devastating consequences of the War on Terror are an illustration of how “the imaginative geographies of a colonial past asserted themselves in the colonial present”.25 What underscores the migration of Jamal and Enayat in Winterbottom’s film is in fact a much longer history of imperialist entanglements predating the latest “War on Terror”. This is the context within which Winterbottom explicitly situates the film. As such, the

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register of the past-present makes a veiled appearance in Winterbottom’s evocation of a history inflected by imperialist geographies and tendencies that continue unabashed in the present day. 3.3  ON THE ROAD TO HISTORY: SPACE AND PLACE IN TONY GATLIF’S EXILS If the “road to London” in In This World is characterized by arduousness, the representation of the journey to the city of Algiers in Gatlif ’s Exils signifies in an entirely different manner, relating back to both the aesthetic attributes of the film as well as its socio-historical context. Exils is about two figures, Zano and Naima, who choose to walk to the city of Algiers, crossing through Spain and Andalusia en route. Zano is the orphan child of a pied-noir family while Naima’s family left Algeria for Paris, presumably after the signing of the Evian Accords in 1962. Gatlif presents us with two post-imperial figures, each of whom bears a different relationship to the end of French imperialism in an Algerian context. During their journey, Naima and Zano encounter economic migrants moving in the opposite direction; while they travel to Algeria, others make their way to cities including Paris and Amsterdam. While this film doesn’t present us with an actual map, Bruno’s notion of cinema as cartography is entirely relevant here as the journey narratives featured in Exils definitively mobilize cultural histories. Gatlif ’s representation of the “journey to Algiers” is fraught with complexity as it involves a consideration of the generic template of the road movie, elements of the travelogue as well as the narrative trajectory of the mobility of the illegal migrant, similar to the one presented in In This World. One of Gatlif ’s auteurist signatures involves utilizing the road movie template in order to tell a very different kind of story than is generally found in the American version of the genre. This has perhaps lead Sylvie Blum-Reid to see his earlier road films, such as Gadjo Dilo (1997), as more akin to a European road movie.26 As Gatlif states, “I make films about the road for the road is my country”.27 Is Exils a “European road movie”? The traversal of Europe is certainly part of the “road to Algiers” as depicted by Gatlif. However, perhaps it is more apt to describe Exils as a “transnational road movie”, which contains numerous affinities to the European road movie. For David Laderman: Overall the European road movie associates road travel with introspection rather than violence and danger. Put differently, traveling outside of a society becomes less important (and perhaps less possible) than traveling into the national culture,

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the jo urne y nar r a t i v e 197 tracing the meaning of citizenship as a journey . . . therefore, these non-American road movies tend toward the quest more than the flight, and imbue the quest with navigations of national identity and community – navigations that often take on sophisticated philosophical and political dimensions.28

Laderman’s distinction is significant in light of the two films examined in this chapter; while In This World is much more akin to the “flight” narrative underscoring a series of American road movies, Exils enacts a journey that takes the spectator into the domain of national cultures, belonging to both Spain and Algeria. In “Reflections on Exile”, Edward Said defines “exile” as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”.29 Such a rift between space and self is the subject of Exils. The word exile, in addition to its more general signification as outlined by Said, assumes specific meanings in relation to the history of the Algerian War and the waves of repatriation as well as migration that followed. The Algerian War, which occurred between 1954 and 1962, denotes a violent process of decolonization from the French colonial empire that took place largely on Algerian soil but events of which also transpired in the streets of Paris, such as the killing of Algerians during the “Battle of Paris”, elaborated upon in Chapter 1. The journey back to Algeria is one where elements of the history of empire and migration begin to take shape through the presence of traces and fragments of the past that emerge gradually, as the narrative unfolds. Motion in the case of this film brings the spectator further and further into historicized terrain, as the figures move closer to Algeria. This journey back to the past is in keeping with the introspective nature of the European rather than American road movie, as outlined by Laderman.30 The quest narrative is a feature of other Gatlif road movies, including Gadjo dilo and Transylvania (2006). The quest in Exils revolves entirely around the desire for place. The journey to Algeria is presented as a pilgrimage as Zano reveals more detail about his grandfather’s role in the struggle for independence, which culminates in Zano’s visit to his father’s home in Algiers. Naima’s quest, however, remains shrouded in mystery as the details of her “Algerian past” never fully surface. While Eleftheoritis, in his astute reading of the film, notes that “connotations of ‘bringing into light’ or ‘moving into view’” are phrases that lend themselves well to the film’s own narrational procedures and use of motifs, but Naima’s story never quite moves out of the darkness.31 Exils is shot entirely on location, as are the two films mentioned previously, which produces a powerful sense of verisimilitude. Gatlif ’s brand of realism is more in line with the pleasurable aesthetics of the travel film

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than it is with the kinds of techniques used by Winterbottom that position traumatic migrant journeys as necessarily fictional and real. The reason for this difference in tone between the two films lies in the fact that Naima and Zano’s journey is one of pilgrimage and of travel, while that of Jamal and Enayat operates as the underside of journeys motivated by the search for pleasure or transcendental meaning. A specific illustration of Gatlif ’s blending of an observational, quasidocumentary style with the fiction is found in the Seville sequence, where Zano and Naima stop on their way to Algiers. The sequence begins with shots of men singing in a bar as a woman dances in the flamenco style to their words and rhythm. There are numerous shots of the woman dancing, some of which are taken at a closer angle and others at a distance, which encompass the entirety of her body and movements. Gatlif includes other such moments where dance and music in the bar are given nearly as equal narrative weight as the sexual encounter between Naima and a man in the bar, which culminates off-screen. While these shots are always sutured back into the fiction, it is within these kinds of sequences that we can locate something akin to the aesthetics of the travel film, of a viewing of cultural practices and rituals that constitute the road to Algiers. Another example occurs near the film’s end, where Gatlif presents us with a close to ten-minute, uncut sequence where Zano and Naima, now in Algiers, participate in a Sufi trance ritual. The fact that it is comprised of a single take, shot in an observational style where the camera weaves its way through the characters participating in the trance, emphasizes that the ritual unfolds in real time. Moments such as these lend the film a near ethnographic quality so that Gatlif ’s brand of road movie contains remnants of the travel film.

The Doubling of Exile The film’s generic hybridity, which brings together elements of the travel film, road movie and migration drama, accounts in part for the way in which the film both raises and obscures a reading of its more specific evocations of exile as it relates to Franco-Algerian history. Again, an allegory by association is in evidence in the film, linking it back to the other films examined within the French corpus of this book. The opening sequence of the film, often analyzed as a result of its rich and complex nature by scholars and critics writing about the film, is a case in point. The film opens with a song entitled “Manifesto”. The song is rhythmic and the lyrics are decidedly political, urging the need to speak for those who are absent and for those who are without democracy. While the song

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begins in English, it is later heard in Spanish. The political is then merged with the erotic, as the camera reveals a naked Zano, gazing out the window. As he lets go of the beer in his hand, there is an extreme low angle shot of the glass falling alongside the length of a high-rise apartment. A little later in the sequence, we are shown Naima, similarly naked on the bed, devouring a bowl of ice cream as she moves to the rhythm of the music. While the music appears to be non-diegetic, we realize that it is in fact diegetic once Zano turns it off and asks Naima if she wants to go to Algeria. Her initial response is laughter, a recurring reaction as most characters in the film, when told that Zano and Naima are walking to Algeria, erupt with laughter. When she asks him why he wants to go, he turns the music back on. Naima then asks him what he plays, to which Zano responds, “I don’t play anymore”. The scene ends with a cut to what appears to be a mass exodus of people, walking through a desert-like landscape. It is at this point that the word “Exils”, in red, appears over the image. Our first introduction to Zano and Naima is rife with connotations of youth, as embodied in the music, and the eroticized manner in which they are depicted. However, it will become much clearer later in the film that Zano and Naima are no ordinary road movie couple. While some scholars such as Leonard Koos have read this sequence as indicative of the kinds of border crossings the film will engage in, involving language, space and even cinematic forms, I argue there is more to this opening sequence.32 At this point, there are suggestions of a more specific reading that can be attached to Zano’s desire to walk to Algeria. The shot of the high rise is an iconic image of the banlieue (Figure 3.2). In his review of the film in Sight

Figure 3.2  Exils: a glimpse of the banlieue.

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and Sound, Danny Leigh observes that the image of the banlieue functions as a citation of the type of film that Exils is not; as he writes, it seems likely that Tony Gatlif ’s vivid Exils will be taken in some quarters as an insight into the recent Paris riots, focusing on two young French Arabs estranged from a city they feel will never truly be theirs. Yet this is not a film of the banlieue.33

What is particularly telling is that he makes this observation without recourse to the image of the HLM found in the sequence. The word “banlieue” is not mentioned anywhere in the film so the full specificity and meaning of the image is only available to some spectators and not others. This constitutes an unexpected similarity between Exils and Caché in the way in which the HLM building, Majid’s abode, signifies as both a ­historically specific and generic image of urban impoverishment. This seemingly innocuous image of the building is a citation of an entire discourse revolving around the often inhospitable living conditions endured by Algerian immigrants in France as well as an entire corpus of cinema which explores life in the banlieue as experienced primarily by Algerian immigrants and diasporic populations. From within this context, Zano’s desire to go to Algeria, as might be assumed whether or not one reads for specificity, is hardly an innocent gesture. But is it one that only assumes its full signification once the identity of the film’s protagonists is revealed. While scholars writing about this film easily identify Naima as FrenchArab and Zano as pied-noir, it is worth noting that this distinction is not made glaring evident by the film itself and certainly not in the opening sequence. Early reviewers have referred to both characters as FrenchArab.34 Zano and Naima are emblematic of two distinctly different but intertwined post-imperial legacies, which involve the repatriation of the pied-noirs and the migration of Algerians to France that followed the decolonization of Algeria. As such, “Exils” refers to two different modes of exile, one related to “French Algerians” and the other related to Algerian migrants. There are other elements of this opening scene that signify in more than one direction. The music implicitly comments upon the fact of exile, in terms of the need to speak for those who are absent, but also works to infuse the opening with connotations of larger political struggles as is indicative of its titling as “Manifesto”. The lyrics also mention the need to talk about those without democracy, and those without freedom. These lyrics have a resonance in relation to French colonial history but also to various other forms of political and socio-economic oppression. The lyrics

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are not specific with respect to place or event. The final cut to the mass of people walking through the desert initially looks as though it were found footage of the masses of people who left Algeria after independence. However, upon arrival to Algeria, Zano and Naima encounter precisely this sea of people, leaving the country as a result of an earthquake. In fact, the same shot is used in both sequences. It is a form of “misreading” that Gatlif explicitly encourages as the word “Exils” appears over the image when it is utilized in the opening scene. If one is able to read the implicit references to imperial history that precede this shot, then one proceeds to interpret it from within the same framework, as yet another marker of the imperial past. It is a gesture that highlights the way in which an image belonging to the present can actually function as a signifier of the past, if placed within the right context.35 As noted by Eleftheoritis, the motif of excavation looms large in this film, revealing some, but not all of the secrets of the characters’ respective pasts.36 The scars on their bodies, Zano’s a result of the car accident that killed his parents en route to Algiers, and Naima’s, which remain mysterious in origin, are corporealized reminders of their past so that their histories are inscribed upon their bodies. The discussion concerning their scars transpires during a quasi “moment in paradise” as the diegetic sound of birds and insects provide the soundscape for Zano and Naima’s exploration of the scars left on their naked bodies. The sequence merges the erotic and the idyllic with the unpleasant scars of the past, which is indicative of the double register of the film. It is through the use of traces, fragments and shards of memories that Gatlif is able to convey a narrative of exile and loss in an Algerian context, a gesture very similar to the referencing of the imperial past within the case study films examined in Chapter 1. When stopping in Andalusia, Naima and Zano first encounter Leila and Habbib, two Algerian migrants making their way to Paris or Amsterdam in order to study. It is in the discussions between these characters and other moments of revelation that follow where more traces of the historical past come to the fore. When they first have tea together on the rocks, Leila identifies Naima as an Arab, based on her name. Naima’s response is “It’s just Naima”. Later, Leila asks Naima why she does not speak Arabic. Naima’s response constitutes another trace of the historical past as she says “No one taught me. My father wouldn’t speak it to us. He didn’t talk about his country”. These references articulate Naima’s ethnic identity, as the child of Algerian migrants in France. Her father’s silence is part of a larger historical phenomenon of silence that accompanied the migration of Algerian workers to France in the immediate post-colonial period.37 And yet Naima’s silence about her past, one that is never broken in the film,

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signals a continuation of this phenomenon in the present. This is perhaps one way of reading Gatlif ’s depiction of her narrative in historical terms rather than as just a form of exoticiziation reserved for the French-Arab woman. Zano’s identity as the son of a pied-noir family also comes to the surface during this sequence, during which a reflective surface is utilized. This recalls Bhabha’s motif of the partially encrusted mirror through which the time of the past-present can be visualized. In this particular scene, there is a shot of a reflection of a small pool of water onto a wall as Zano speaks to Naima and then there is a cut to Zano’s face, reflected in a pool of water. In this moment of self-revelation, Zano narrates a portion of his family history in Algeria; his grandfather was an anti-colonialist who was tortured and murdered in prison in 1959, at the height of the Algerian War. He says “In 1962 all the family was repatriated by boat”. Zano also says that it was en route to visit Algeria, a pilgrimage initiated by his father, that his parents died and he gave up playing music. These references recall French resistance to the Algerian War, perhaps most powerfully embodied in the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly through his scathing introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In France since 1945, Robert Gildea notes that several French lecturers and intellectuals were arrested and tortured by French paratroopers.38 As he observes, the attempt to cover up the scandals over torture in Algeria “was finally blown by a series of cause celebres, as French sympathizers as well as Algerians were subject to torture”.39 There is also a brief visual reference to Che Guevara, whose image is found on a handkerchief that Naima uses on the train that nearly takes them to Seville. Implicitly then, the film recalls both the history of French resistance to the Algerian War and, more broadly, other revolutionary figures associated with the “tri-continental revolutions” of the time period. These citations of a specific history of pied-noir resistance to the repressive measures adopted by French paratroopers in Algeria and of the signing of the Evian Accords in 1962 are traces of an imperial history that Gatlif positions as the backdrop for Naima and Zano’s quest. However, this history is represented in a rather non-specific fashion, which is what leads critics such as Leigh to refer to both Zano and Naima as French Arab. The word “repatriation” is what gives Zano’s pied-noir ancestry away. The very title of the film has a great deal of resonance in relation to the forms of migration following the granting of independence to Algeria. The word “exile” recurs again and again in the literature on the Algerian War as represented through various contexts, particularly with respect to the history of pied-noir repatriation. Naomi Greene articulates the sense

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of loss that accompanied the repatriation of the French Algerian: as she writes, “for the pied-noirs, the French defeat in Algeria represented the loss of home and country, the abrupt end of a cherished way of life”.40 In “Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria”, Ali Yedes outlines the ­“doubleness” of the condition of exile associated with the French Algerian; he states, “the prospect of abandoning the Algerian land was unbearable. Where else could the settlers go? France for them, was a place of exile, and post-war Algeria had become a place of turmoil”.41 The pied-noirs were doubly exiled, as they neither belonged entirely in France nor Algeria. Part of this sense of being a stranger in France that is characteristic of the pied-noir experience is derived from differences in social class. Yedes notes that French migration to Algeria, in the early days, was a form of escape from the difficult conditions of the Industrial Revolution.42 He writes that, “In the eyes of the conventional French, however, they were always those people who belonged to a low-class group who abandoned their country out of desperation”.43 The dual nature of this form of exile emerges very subtly during the moment in which Zano tells Leila that they left France because they had nothing. Similar to Algerian migrants and diasporic populations in France, the pied-noirs, because they were “alienated in Algeria, alienated in France, the European-Algerians were in the end perfect foreigners, both to themselves and to the spaces they inhabited, remaining in constant search for an ever-elusive identity”.44 Certain scholars also refer to the Algerian migrant in France as exiles. In Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1990–62, Neil MacMaster writes that the “coming of independence in 1962 did not bring what Algerian nationalists had long hoped for or expected, a slowdown in departures and even a return home of ‘exiles’ to help reconstruct a new society”.45 As Naima whispers to Zano upon arrival to Leila and Habbib’s family home in Algeria, “I’m a stranger everywhere”. What Gatlif achieves in his representation of these two figures is the sense of exile that accompanies them both, even though their stories, in a historical sense, remain differentiated.

Contrasting Mobilities The intersection of migrancy past and present, where Zano and Naima function as emblems of the enduring legacies of imperial rule and Leila and Habbib belong to the recent wave of global economic migration, is the strongest continuity that can be charted between this film and the modes of representation discerned in both J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu. Like the previous films, this type of encounter remains ambiguous in terms of

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its meaning. On the one hand, scholars such as Eleftheoritis categorize this particular encounter under the rubric of relationality, so that the concept of exile takes on what Eleftheoritis refers to as a kind of “semantic fluidity”.46 In this regard, the concept of exile operates as a means of bridging the mobilities of the past with those of the present through the lens of affinity. Simultaneously, the film is often at pains to demonstrate the stark differences between Zano and Naima’s pilgrimage to Algiers and Leila and Habbib’s trajectory of economic migration. These encounters operate as moments of intersection that raise a kind of crossroads between migration past and present. While Eleftheoritis unearths this particular ambivalence through a sophisticated analysis of the scene in which Leila and Habbib are seated in the back of truck, heading for Paris or Amsterdam while Zano and Naima walk away from them, there are other scenes that draw more explicit contrasts between the traveling pairs.47 This gap between travel and economic migration becomes more pronounced as the film progresses, reaching a point of culmination when Zano and Naima go on a “migrant journey” in order to reach Algiers. This journey foregrounds their privilege over and above their migrant counterparts. They adopt the methods needed to facilitate their journey when they join migrant workers, picking fruit in order to pay their way to different global cities. Two of the men picking fruit next to the pair engage in a conversation where one says, “we are going to France” while the other responds with “in Paris, you can work with fake papers”. The story of the economic migrant is juxtaposed with Zano and Naima frolicking with the fruit in an erotic fashion which ends with them having sex among the trees. Music is used in this sequence in a way that very explicitly tells the story of the workers trying to reach their dream city of choice. As Zano, Naima and the other workers walk back to their compound, the lyrics of the music playing over the scene are as follows: “You got your papers. And you left your village. You got your papers. And you’re an immigrant. You got your passport and you left. You’ve jumped the walls and you’ve left”. It is in this sequence that Zano and Naima meet Leila and Habbib once more, as they try to make enough money to pay for their trip to Paris. Is Gatlif ’s juxtaposition of these two forms of mobility also intended to illustrate how the global migrant is similarly an exilic figure and perhaps one that is placed in an even more difficult position than Zano and Naima, ostensibly the “children of Empire”? The lyrics of the song suggest such an interpretation. This sequence ends with two contrasting forms of departure. The music is used again for the “deportation scene”, where a worker is taken away from the compound in a police car. During this

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the jo urne y nar r a t i v e 205 scene there is a cut to a closer shot of a truck moving past the police car where we can see two workers hiding above the tires of the truck, as they narrowly escape the fate of the one who is deported. Zano and Naima also encounter the police, but simply show him their passports and walk away. As her passport is being examined, Naima says “I’m French, shit head”. Naima and Zano’s ability to officially be French allows their mobility to continue unhindered while that of the migrant workers is brought to a halt or made increasingly dangerous. The workers traveling underneath the truck is part of the template of the migrant journey found in In This World, as Jamal and Yusif travel in the exact same manner to reach London. The following sequence begins with a blue van that drives up to a port and into a ship. From above the blue van, emerge Zano and Naima, having smuggled themselves onto a ship that they believe is destined for Algeria. There is a cut to the pair running onto the deck of the ship, laughing. Zano says “Fuck, Algiers in eight hours” as he kisses Naima. As they run around the decks of the ship, the music again works to mirror their excitement in an incredibly explicit manner; the non-diegetic score is rhythmic and exuberant, as the word “Algeria” is repeated again and again. In In This World, travel by ship ends in tragedy as Enayat and others suffocate in the freight container before it reaches Trieste. Zano and Naima, aboard the wrong boat, end up in Morocco, where after their bus breaks down they make their way to a human smuggler who takes them to Algeria via the mountains. As they walk into Algeria, the smuggler tells them to visit the French Consulate in Algeria and state that they have lost their passports. The series of events described above comprise the “migrant leg” of Zano and Naima’s journey to Algiers. As is evident from the comparison of similar scenes in Winterbottom’s film, their journey is one of ease and privilege, while the journey of the illegal migrant is that of arduousness and danger. The instruction provided by the human smuggler in Exils is telling as it implies that their passports will be used to facilitate the journey of illegal migrants attempting to go to France from Algeria. In many ways, Gatlif problematizes simple associations one may attach to figures such as Zano and Naima in a state of exile. Although earlier in the film, Zano tells Leila that he and Naima have nothing in France, it is clear that what they do have is their French passports, allowing them to embark on the pilgrimage to Algeria with relative ease. In Exils, various forms of mobility overlap and slip into one another as the second generation figures “in exile” can travel in search of memories while the illegal migrant, perhaps not subsumed under the category of voluntary migration, has greater difficult in crossing borders. The tone of the film is not such that Gatlif produces a critique of Zano and Naima’s

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specifically French privilege but one that juxtaposes a myriad of mobilities together as experiences of being in exile. The meaning of the encounter between migration past and present retains a degree of exorbitancy, in keeping with the presentation of similar encounters in J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu. These are encounters that are both mappable but they are also entirely off the map in terms of the histories of empire that they mobilize, which bear a difficult relationship to the present in being both similar and yet different to the experiences of global migration.

Narratives of Redemption The final sequences of the film are set in Algiers and establish several trajectories of reconciliation between place and character, some more complex in their signification than others. Zano’s quest is resolved quite differently from Naima’s, which works to articulate the differences between the two in terms of their relationship to home. Zano’s desire for Algeria is strongly connected with a sense of nostalgia. As he tells Naima on the train that they take to get to the heart of Algiers, “We are in Algeria . . . Just think. All my father’s and mother’s family were born here”. While a sense of loss certainly haunts both Zano’s and Naima’s experience of the city, there is some form of reconciliation that is staged between self and place, although, in the end, both characters simply keep moving. Zano’s visit to his parents’ former home is paired with Naima’s participation in the Sufi ritual as “transformative experiences”. This is, of course, the goal of a pilgrimage. The sequence begins with Zano’s run up the stairs, in his excitement at visiting his parents’ home. The home is a veritable shrine to the past; upon entry Zano remarks “They [his parents] fled from here in a few hours. It was all they had. It’s crazy. Nothing’s moved. Even the piano’s where it was in the photos”. The interior of the home is comprised of a mise-en-scène of memory, as the camera moves through the space along with Zano, showing us all the photographs on tables and mantlepieces. He is also brought a box of photos by the Algerian family who reside in the home. One photo is of a man playing a violin, which serves as the answer to the mystery established near the beginning of the film, where Zano buries his violin in a brick wall. There is the suggestion that the man in the photograph is Zano’s father. The camera also shows us a framed photograph of a ship, the mode of transport for both arrival and departure to Algeria. Zano’s tears at the sight of the photos are perhaps emblematic of a re-discovery of the past, but only one that is visible through representational means. It is a moment characterized by both discovery and loss. The home itself is also a trace of the imperial past,

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as it remains untouched even though it is now inhabited by an Algerian family. Naima’s participation in the Sufi ritual adds a metaphysical aspect to her journey to Algiers that is not present in Zano’s visit to his parents’ home. Prior to the start of the ritual, Naima is brought to an astrologer. The seer attempts to call Naima back from exile as she repeatedly says “refind yourself, your family and your bearings . . . You must find your bearings”. She tells Naima that she knows about the scar, suggesting that it has something to do with her family but again, Naima’s history remains a mystery. The Sufi trance ritual signifies as the antidote to Naima’s exile, as that which will provide a connection between the self and space. It is the climatic event of the film, and as mentioned previously, it continues uninterrupted for such a long period of time that it feels at once ethnographic and transcendental. The extent of Naima’s transformation is articulated in the film’s final scene, when she and Zano visit his grandfather’s grave. Naima peels an orange and offers some to Zano, a gesture that recalls an earlier scene where she finds her own breakfast but does not bring ­anything back for Zano. These modes of reconciliation between self and the space of exile, although presented differently in relation to Zano and Naima, present an idealized vision of the city of Algiers. There is a sense of timelessness that is evoked in the film through the preservation of Zano’s parents’ home and their participation in the Sufi ritual, which even Zano takes part in near the end. The major markers of contemporaneity in the film can be located in the inclusion of imagery from the earthquake as well as a reference to the closing of the Moroccan border to Algiers, which is why Zano and Naima make use of the human smuggler. The closing of the Moroccan border occurred in 1994 as a result of what is dubbed the “second Algerian war”, facilitated by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region.48 These references to the contemporary reality of the city remain submerged. As constituted through narrative events, Algiers in this film signifies as the city of exile. If this particular depiction of the city works against its contemporary overdetermination as site of violence and instability, it also obscures socio-political readings by rendering the city as that which is made to the contours and, subsequently, the confines of Zano and Naima’s quests. While Eleftheoritis develops a critique of the film that situates Zano and Naima’s journey as that which is privileged by the film, rendering the movements of figures like Leila and Habbib meaningful only as it relates to their pilgrimage, a different reading emerges when Zano and Naima’s modes of exile are viewed in their historical context.49 What may in fact

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function as the politically subversive dimension of Gatlif ’s work is that in Zano and Naima’s union, Gatlif brings together two figures and two stories of exile that are generally kept apart in the literature and grand narratives of the consequences of the Algerian War and decolonization. Gatlif does insist on the nuances between the two characters; as Naima says to Zano after he yells at her for cheating on him, “you were born rich. I’ve slaved since I was fourteen. Here, there . . . with no home”. This particular road movie couple is one with a great deal of historical baggage. In a humanist turn, which is also politically progressive, Gatlif implicitly suggests that the wounds of the past can be healed through the coming together of those kept apart by the ravages of Empire, in a city that was once formerly colonized and not in Paris. It is the journey itself that reverses the condition of exile in this film.

Conclusions In This World and Exils partake of and ultimately offer a revision of two distinctly different traditions of the road movie. This gesture naturally attests to the flexibility of genre in either bearing the traces of cultural and historical traumas, as Kaplan might put it, or, as Exils suggests, a way of staging cultural forms of redemption and reconciliation. While not “city films” as such, an inhospitable London and a polarized Paris do make cameo appearances, while the methods of reading for space and place developed in each chapter of the book find applicability in this context. The social realist tendencies of a film like In This World are employed in the telling of a global narrative, in keeping with the global orientation of the form, which is further attenuated through the auteurist status of Winterbottom. The realist overtures of this film provide a heightened version of the kinds of ontological blurrings present in some of the films examined in Chapter 2, in their proclamation of place. But like Dirty Pretty Things, the clandestine nature of the journey demands an emphasis on interior space and on largely non-specific views of the cities that the pair traverse. As is the case with the core texts that comprise this book, In This World oscillates between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the specific and the universal in its alterations of the classic American road movie. In This World proves its potential political usefulness in contributing to the debate on the War on Terror as related to what is often narrated as the “problem of migration” to Britain. The ambivalences of the film’s allegorical project temper the stated intentions of both filmmaker and scriptwriter, which speaks to the difficulty of addressing an imaginary of an inhospitable London without inadvertently reinforcing it.

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the jo urne y nar r a t i v e 209 Exils on the other hand, bears many of the hallmarks of European ­ odernism, as distilled into the road movie genre. The way in which m Gatlif ’s status as transnational auteur is addressed in some of the critical literature concerning his films is indicative of the similar kinds of dialectical interplays that structure contemporary notions of world cinema. For instance, in An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Naficy refers to Gatlif as “Gypsy filmmaker” but also adds that he was born in Algeria.50 Naficy claims that: However, like many auteur and exilic filmmakers who find their most inspiring material in their own lives, only after he again “assumed his identity as a Gypsy” did he discover his own “hybrid voice”. This newfound voice is inscribed in a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning films that focus on Gypsy lives and stories in Europe and that also are deeply universal.51

Exils constitutes a departure from much of Gatlif ’s earlier as well as later work as it is not ostensibly a film about Gypsy culture. As such, Leigh refers to Gatlif as an Algerian émigré without raising his Roma roots. Koos argues that Exils is “Just one of a recent wave of internationally acclaimed films that actively situate themselves between nations and cultures”.52 He notes that films such as Exils “illustrate the transnational and transcultural realities of existence in an era of globalization”.53 Gatlilf ’s transnational background is taken up in a number of ways by the critics named above. For Naficy, it becomes the source of his success that seems to result from a blend of specificity and the “universal”. Leigh raises Gatlif ’s Algerian heritage as an explanation for the journey we find in the film, as Gatlif has mentioned his own émigré experience as the source of the filmic material. And Exils itself, as my analysis has demonstrated, flits between a “universal” and exceptionally specific portrait of the condition of exile, essentially allowing one to choose an interpretation. As mentioned previously, Koos offers an interpretation of Exils that ultimately neglects the film’s imperial subtext in favor of a more general reading of the nomadic state of global times, a reading facilitated by the film’s mobilization of this history as traces. In broadening the parameters of the particular narratives of global London and Paris told in the previous chapters, I am suggesting that films featuring journeys of arrivals and departures are also worthy of inclusion in such a project that focuses specifically on migrant narratives. While these films only offer glimpses of cinematic London and Paris, the imaginaries of these cities as charted in this particular book bear a significant relationship to these journey narratives where an inhospitable London has a role to play in In This World, while the division of Paris into center

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and banlieue is essential in detecting the very specific yet subtle allegorical undertaking of Exils. Cities can appear in the cinema in a variety of guises, and perhaps it is worth recognizing the more understated ventures of this nature in conjunction with those that are easier to see. Notes   1. Dimitris Eleftheoritis, Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 2.   2. In her assessment of Road to Guantanamo, Deborah Allison notes that despite Winterbottom’s evocation of genre films, like the road movie, the war movie and the prison movie, in his own description of Road, critics and scholars alike mostly refer to the film as “docudrama” as a generic hybrid form in and of itself (p. 145). Winterbottom similarly refers to In This World as “road movie” although others label the film as docudrama. My reading of the film reflects my attempt to mobilize elements of both categories rather than choosing one over the other. See: Deborah Allison, The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom (New York, Toronto and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013).   3. Stephan Applebaum, “In This World”, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ films / 2003 / 03 / 03 / michael _ winterbottom _ in _ this _ world _ interview . shtml (last accessed 21 July 2006).  4. Sylvie Blum-Reid, “The Elusive Search for Nora Luca: Tony Gatlif ’s Adventures in Gypsy Land”, Portal 2.2 (July 2005), p. 3.   5. Winterbottom, along with scriptwriter Toni Grisoni, rehearsed a version of the journey that appears in the film and then filmed the journey with two non-actors, one of whom (Jamal), actually made the trip to London from Afghanistan that his character makes in the film.  6. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 60.   7. Ibid. p. 185.   8. Ibid. pp. 184–5.   9. As Marks writes in her review of the book, “the cartographic approach she (Bruno) offers in Atlas of Emotions could mobilize social and political histories”, (p. 342). See: Laura Marks, “Review of Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotions”, Screen 44:3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 337–42. 10. G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions, p. 71. 11. Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams also make the case that Winterbottom’s cinema is heavily indebted to other realist cinemas, including Italian neorealism, particularly in a film like In This World that grows out of his (and Toni Grisoni’s) response to a particular situation (p. 31). However, a similar story can be narrated about Frears’ migration films, as has been recounted in chapter two of this book. This is not to suggest that transnational references and influences cannot be discerned in Winterbottom’s work, but it is also difficult to not see the immediate links between some of his films, including

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In This World and Wonderland, and the global reconfiguration of the British social realist tradition, even though In This World is primarily not set in Britain. The film’s use of a realist aesthetic, albeit in an exceptionally reflexive form, does allow us to tie the film back to an entire history of British migrant cinema, as examined in the previous chapter. See: Brian Macfarlane and Deane Williams, Michael Winterbottom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 12. As Michael Atkinson writes about 1990s American road movies, “everybody is packing into the nearest stolen roadster, slapping an Elvis tape into the stereo and leaving their ruined lives behind. If they’re not explicitly in search of Hopper’s American Dream, their tail-chasings seek a freedom frontier – cinematic or otherwise – that hasn’t been afforded since the Gold Rush”, (p. 14). See: Michael Atkinson, “Crossing the Frontiers”, Sight and Sound 4.1 (1994), pp. 14–17. 13. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 77–8. 14. Ibid. p. 78. 15. Ibid. p. 78. 16. Ibid. p. 79. 17. Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), p. 8. 18. G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions, p. 6. 19. Ibid. p. 7. 20. C. Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma”, p. 204. 21. As recounted in interviews, the actor playing Jamal decided to embark on his own journey to London after the shooting of the film, where he was granted temporary license to remain, until his eighteenth birthday. 22. David Farrier, “The Journey is the Journey: Michael Winterbottom’s In This World”, Research and Drama Education (June 2008), p. 229. 23. C. Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma”, p. 202. 24. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 44. 25. Ibid. p. 71. 26. Sylvie Blum-Reid, “The Elusive Search for Nora Luca: Tony Gatlif ’s Adventures in Gypsy Land”, p. 3. 27. Ibid. p. 3. 28. David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 248. 29. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 173. 30. D. Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, p. 248. 31. D. Eleftheoritis, Cinematic Journeys, p. 128. 32. Leonard R. Koos, “Films Without Borders: An Introduction”, Postscript 25: 2 (2006), p. 3. 33. Danny Leigh, “Exiles”, Sight and Sound (February 2006), p. 54.

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34. See Leigh’s review, for instance, where he refers to both Zano and Naima as “French-Arab”. 35. Eleftheoritis reads this image of the mass exodus differently, arguing for its relativistic function vis-à-vis the individual movements of Naima and Zano (p. 130). 36. Ibid. p. 130. 37. C. Tarr, Reframing Difference, p. 5. 38. Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 24. 39. Ibid. p. 24. 40. N. Greene, Landscapes of Loss, p. 133. 41. Ali Yedes, “Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of PiedsNoirs Identity”, in: Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism and Race (New York: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 243. 42. Ibid. p. 241. 43. Ibid. p. 241. 44. Ibid. p. 244. 45. Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62 (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 189. 46. D. Eleftheoritis, Cinematic Journeys, p. 130. 47. Eleftheoritis describes a scene, where Laila and Habbib have boarded a truck that takes them away from Zano and Naima moving in the opposite direction, as an instance of a “double frame of relational movement” (p. 131). For Eleftheoritis, this scene illustrates a degree of relationality between the traveling pairs but also significant differences, as Naima and Zano walk at a leisurely pace. Naima is also able to intercept their journey in order to offer them her contact information in Paris, which demonstrates her agency in opposition to the forced nature of their movements. 48. Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830–2000: A Short History, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 220. 49. D. Eleftheoritis, Cinematic Journeys, p. 132. 50. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 82–98. 51. Ibid. p. 99. 52. L. R. Koos, “Films Without Borders”, p. 4. 53. Ibid. p. 4.

Conclusion

The world changes rapidly, but speed is not itself a value.

Mark Kingwell1

A picture, like a bridge, is often pointed in two directions, backwards and forwards, occupying this necessary and temporal interstitial space, a space between two spaces, between two landings, or cities or states. Mike Hoolboom2

I began this book with a meditation on Tati’s Playtime, a film where London makes a minuscule appearance via a poster of a gray skyscraper intended to humorously suggest a generic turn overtaking cities the world over. I now begin my final conclusions with a consideration of Rachid Bouchareb’s London River, a film that reverses the relation between the two cities as depicted in Playtime. In London River, Paris assumes a prominent and yet displaced position, its off-screen presence made palpable by the presence of characters and unfulfilled narrative activity that inadvertently places the two figures that are the subject of a search right onto the path of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Playtime and London River, of course, operate as bookends for the decades covered by this book, taking us from the post-war, post-imperial period to the contemporary moment. London River is a UK/France/Algerian co-production, solidifying the film’s connection to the “world” at the level of funding and in terms of its content, as is the case with the case study films that comprise this book. In a further correlation, the film, initially made for Arte TV, received a commercial release after it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival so that its European “start”, as a film made for a Franco-German television network, is then transformed into a global “finish” through its success on the festival circuit.3 What proves even more intriguing, as explained by Alison Smith, is that one of the film’s co-producers is an independent British company called The Bureau, which brings together independent producers throughout Europe who are united in their aim to make

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unconventional British films.4 As Smith remarks, London River is hardly just a “British film” but this detail contributes to what I see as the film’s presentation of London as a place that is significantly impacted by its French-African presence, both on and off-screen. While London River is a fictional film about the 2005 London bombings, it is made by a French filmmaker of Algerian descent, one who is known internationally for having made Indigènes (2006), a film that performs a scathing critique of the treatment of soldiers recruited from French colonies across the African continent to fight in the Second World War on behalf of the French. This is a film that raises the specter of a previous film made by Senegalese luminary Ousmane Sembene titled Camp de Thiaroye (1988) that similarly investigates the devastating treatment of African soldiers made to fight in the War, ending in their massacre. As such, Bouchareb is a filmmaker known for his address of less well-known facets of the French colonial enterprise. London River does not make reference to French colonialism through explicit means, but does reference the modes of migration that have persisted between France and her former colonies long after the end of empire. London River rather unexpectedly provides a way of revisiting many of the spatial tropes, narrative trajectories and thematic inclinations of the films examined throughout this book. This film evokes the format of the network narrative, wherein Elizabeth Sommers, played by veteran British actress Brenda Bleythyn, and Ousmane, played by the equally famous Sotigui Kouyaté, cross paths in the search for their respective daughter and son, Anne and Ali, in the wake of the London transit bombings. In the manner of the classic network narrative, the film gradually reveals that Anne and Ali were in fact a couple, headed to the Eurostar terminal in London to visit Paris when their bus blew up. While initially horrified upon learning about Anne and Ali’s relationship, Elizabeth gradually calms down and finds solidarity with Ousmane in the search and eventual discovery of the death of the pair. The Eurostar signifies a point of passage between London and Paris, one that is heavily policed on both sides. While the kinds of mobility facilitated by the Eurostar, including touristic and business-related travel that is germane to the identities of both Paris and London as glittering, cosmopolitan global cities, it is simultaneously indicative of their exclusionary practices. As noted by Andrew Hussey, the Eurostar Terminal remains separated by its imposing glass and steel architectural design, a barrier reinforced by soldiers armed with guns, from the rest of Gare du Nord station which leads out to the banlieues and has, in recent years, operated as site of civil unrest. As Hussey notes, Gare du Nord operates a

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co ncl us io n 215 crossroads between the center of the city and its banlieue and more broadly between Parisian affluence and the impoverishment and marginalization affiliated with the outskirts of the city.5 And yet this is not a film that is in fact directly concerned with the politics of the two cities in question, as outlined above. London River, like Exils, is a narrative of redemption between Elizabeth and Ousmane, one forged in the crucible of a devastating narrative of loss and clearly intended to offer a counter-narrative to the rampant Islamaphobia of many post-911 discourses. Ousmane announces more than once in the  film that he is of Muslim faith and of course, he is unable to evade the tragic outcomes of these attacks. The network narrative in this instance does the work of bringing these two disparate characters together in order to illustrate their common fate and ability to seek comfort in each other. As such, the modes of symmetry engendered by Boucharab’s particular use of the network format is overwhelmingly explicit at times. Both Elizabeth and Ousmane are affiliated with nature, her work in her garden in Guernsey echoing Ousmane’s job as forester in France. The film continually stages points of intersection between the two, including one hospital sequence where both characters are brought in to try to identify bodies that do not belong to their children. While Elizabeth initially plays the part of the white female hysteric, crying to her brother that the place where her daughter lived is “crawling with Muslims”, Ousmane assumes the role of “noble migrant” in his dealings with both Elizabeth and the city itself, even remaining collected while being interrogated by the police as a result of Elizabeth’s actions. Elizabeth, in this part of the film, is emblematic of notions of inhospitability that continue to plague migrant visions of the city, as exemplified in the London corpus of this book. But the narrative events that we would expect to follow an interrogation sequence of this nature never comes to fruition as the chief investigator reveals to Ousmane that he is also Muslim, a clear attempt by Bouchareb to destabilize the kinds of automatic associations often made between religious identity and ethnicity. The stoic nature of Ousmane’s performance is in sharp contrast with Elizabeth’s racialized hysteria and despair, in a way that only further enhances his noble status. These dichotomies begin to break down as the film progresses, culminating in the sharing of the apartment as it clearly belonged to both Anne and Ali. One of the film’s posters has Elizabeth and Ousmane poised at the very edge of the River Thames, where an iconic London skyline, complete with a view of Tower Bridge and Big Ben, looms in the distance. And yet the film is entirely set in Finsbury Park, replete with recurring images of location including the Hotel Skelton where Ousmane stays, the walkway

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with its posters of missing persons, as well as Anne’s flat where Elizabeth and later Ousmane reside. This is reminiscent of the specific depictions of iconic Brixton and other such areas of migrant settlement found in films examined in the London chapter. An interesting and ambivalent disparity arises between the film’s marketing of itself as “London film” and its rather local setting, less recognizable perhaps to international audiences. In fact, the “village” London so characteristic of certain Ealing films, including Pool of London as discussed extensively in Chapter 2, is an apt description of the city in this film, which supports narrative content in foregrounding similarity over and above difference. In Bouchareb’s London, the Imam at the mosque leads Ousmane to the language school where they realize that Anne and Ali were in the same Arabic language class, while the neigborhood butcher leads Elizabeth and Ousmane to the travel agent who confirms that Anne and Ali were headed to Paris. But in this case, “village” London is now global in its scope, where characters speak a variety of languages including French, Arabic, and Mandika/Bambara.6 Even Elizabeth speaks to Ousmane in French. We can view this as an instance of reconfiguration, where the imaginary of “village” London is updated and revised. London River tells a specifically London story that addresses racialized forms of strife under the banner of “The War on Terror” but one that also evokes traces of other cities and other histories. For instance, in an interview about the film where the question of shooting location is posed, Bouchareb draws links between the 18th arrondissement in Paris and Finsbury Park, with its reputation as a prominent area of Muslim settlement in London, in another comparative feat. Ousmane’s backstory, namely that he left his wife and son Ali behind in Mali while working in France for fifteen years, evokes the modes of displacement and loss that are endemic to such migrant journeys and ones that speak to a continued relationship between France and its former colonies that becomes apparent through this form of economic migration. While not filmed in a single location in Paris (but elsewhere in France), nevertheless London River implicitly proposes a comparative optic for thinking about the migratory history of Paris in relationship to the racialized sentiments and subsequent politics affiliated with the city of London. The combination of the two results in an altered presentation of both “village” and “inhospitable” London and longstanding London imaginaries become global in their scope, an impetus that is reflected in the film’s funding, exhibition context, and narrational content. The film indeed provides us with an unconventional portrait of the global city, in a manner that envelops the film within the world cinema rubric sketched in this

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co ncl us io n 217 study. It is perhaps a fitting end to a book where the models of cinematic London and Paris under investigation both converge and diverge in unexpected ways and for a book about global cinematic cities as they appear in their world cinema guise. Interestingly enough, a second comparison between the two cities that might very well take us into the future emerges in a recent article in The Guardian. In this piece Peter Walker identifies an unsettling trend in the London housing market, whereby the process of gentrification is reaching its apogee in driving out all but the very rich from the center of the city as more and more areas of London are desired and subsequently claimed by the urban elite.7 In short, perhaps London is in the early stages of morphing into Paris, with its somewhat stricter divisions between center and periphery. Whether or not the predictions of this article will come to pass, both this news story and my brief consideration of London River function as significant reminders that urban imaginaries as well as their material counterparts are in permanent states of flux. And yet, as this book has tried to illustrate with regard to a specific grouping of films that take two particular cities as their settings, the urban can be characterized by an equally insistent pull towards the depths of the past, back into its own histories where earlier versions of itself continue to stake their claims upon the contemporary in ways that are often unexpected and not easily detectable. While I have unearthed the kinds of balancing acts the films examined in this book are engaged in, including those between aesthetics and politics, familiarity and difference, as well as the past and the present, this book has embarked on a similar gesture of its very own. My own balancing act has involved developing parallel interrogations of what constitutes the “global” in the global cinematic city and “the world” in critical accounts of world cinema, two fields of study not often brought together in scholarly research. A second such act concerns my account of two cinematic cities that attempts to illustrate the differences between them in light of the urban imaginaries examined in this book while also finding points of commonality. My final conclusions will unpack some of the implications of this study as it pertains to my engagement with the primary debates that coalesce around my respective subjects. The question that I seek to provisionally answer is: What has been gained by this somewhat unorthodox approach to both the study of the cinematic city and of world cinema?

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The Time of the Global The scholarly perspectives on globalization privileged by this study encourage us to think beyond the astonishing speed at which global cities mobilize capital, people, and cultural productions through two central considerations. Firstly, the phenomenon of global migration, with all of its difficulties, gives rise to an alternate incarnation of the “time of the global”, one that is slow, impeded by blockages at nearly every turn, with borders that become more pronounced when the stateless are in question. Secondly, and this assertion has a specific application to cities like London, Paris, and perhaps other European ex-capitals of the imperial world, the global cityscape emerges from the vestiges of empire, a phenomenon intertwined with nineteenth-century European modernity and well beyond. Part of the density of global cities stems from the way in which their current formation takes its shape from both its modern and imperial past. As such, speed, differentiation, simultaneity, three words that accurately describe three facets of life in the global city, are evenly matched by delay, continuity and memory, three marginalized terms that also speak to the experience of global cities like Paris and London. In finding ways of looking back, this book participates in a wider intervention that has transpired within the field of globalization, but one that takes the cinema as its central focus. I have developed something of second double movement in this book when it pertains to the study of the cinematic city, one that involves choosing films that themselves offer a vision of global London and Paris outside of the discursive confinements of a “present-tense” view of these cities, and another that has entailed crafting a methodology that moves back in time, actively seeking out films that lend themselves to the kinds of dialogues between past and present that this book has been invested in excavating. The doubleness of my approach has led to the fashioning of several analytical paradigms for the study of global Paris and London that originate very specifically from my analytical consideration of migrant mobilities, ones that I hope will have a wider application. Abbas’ conception of urban exorbitance takes on a very particular resonance in this book, as a theoretical tool that expresses the difficulty of meaning that the encounters between the post-imperial migrant and the global migrant present in the French corpus of the book. Connected to the experience of exorbitance is the notion of relationality, facilitated in the French corpus through the template of the “network narrative”, which engenders both recognizable as well as exorbitant urban encounters. Denis’ and Haneke’s depictions of Paris as referential and relational city, echoed in the work of Godard

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co ncl us io n 219 and others, is a politically significant gesture in countering the notion of cultural amnesia, where imperial history has little sway over public discourse, other than as a way of blaming migrant populations for their inability to “get over” the inequalities of the past. The network narrative in these instances foregrounds as well as heightens these tensions between an insular and expanded conception of the city of Paris. A second model involves a longstanding imaginary of Paris, one that poses stark divisions between the center and periphery and that comes across forcefully in a wide range of cinéma de banlieue and its companion pieces, among which I have classed Caché. This particular form of spatial and social exclusion, alive and well in Paris, attests to Ross’ notion of the “frozen temporal lag” or what we can also refer to as “slow time” so that global Paris in this body of cinematic work, not unlike the city itself, seems unable to completely vanquish the inequalities of its historical past. This book locates this particular division within the domain of interior space, bringing the interior back into discussions of the cinematic city in a way that is previously suggested in the work of Walter Benjamin, to take an example. Divisions of a similar nature in the London corpus of films are more accurately described through the lens of proximity as various iterations of “high and low”, including the distinctions between the urban elite and the impoverished migrant, among other kinds of dichotomous formations. Massey’s distinction between space and place proves useful in developing distinctions between films that I have included in the history of migrant London-based cinema crafted for the parameters of this inquiry. This corpus of work concerns the difficulties of integration as opposed to the exclusionary politics that dominate the French corpus. Despite these differences, an overarching commonality between all these spatio-temporal models is that they privilege a view of the city as a crossroads, of different figures and histories that both converge and diverge in ways that endow such cities, supposedly the abode of non-places, with such complex meaning. The global cities in these films are sites of friction and collision but also of affinity between past and present, high and low, center and periphery. That the journey films examined in Chapter 3 bear the marks of continuity with the city films proper suggest that the story of passage, with regard to migrant narratives more broadly, have a profound and close relationship to those of potential urban settlement. The notions of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration have been drawn upon throughout the book in order to put Bhabha’s conception of the “past-present” to appropriate use. While it is commonplace to argue that modernity and globalization are completely related phenomena, the

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same cannot be said of the relationship between empire and the global city films. The work of Betz in a cinematic context and that of Schwarz and Ross within the domain of cultural history all point towards the act of displacement as the primary means by which the imperial past makes its way into the present, cinematic or otherwise. We can return once again to Godard’s Deux ou trois choses here as an example, whereby the image of the HLM that obscures that of the Algerian boy is an act of displacement in textual terms that projects a larger, historical displacement of the Algerian migrant to the outskirts of Paris. It is Schwarz’s assertions concerning the manner in which the imperial past can erupt into the present through unexpected means and in narratives that on the surface have little connection to the histories of empire that have also proved relevant in thinking through the place of empire in this grouping of contemporary films. While Exils is a film that explicitly journeys back to the imperial past, even if all of its intricacies are not on display, the same cannot be said of the other films. Innocuous shots of buildings, street-level encounters, specific uses of mise-en-scène, the use of sound among other motifs and techniques are often in service to the “pastpresent” in these films, but not in a way that is always entirely obvious. Sometimes the eruption of the past in the present in these films shows up the difference between the two, but what has proved more interesting in some respects is trying to decipher the unexpected affinities that also emerge between past and present. As such, I have tried to demonstrate that these films ultimately demand a mode of historical reasoning that is attentive to the dynamics and indeed, the politics of spatial and temporal hybridity as they pertain to two cities that once resided at the very pinnacle of the imperial global order. In this book, the act of return takes us to a historical past but also a cinematic one. The urban narratives in these films are told in particular ways, through the use of specific stylistic devices and modalities of storytelling that I have categorized under the rubric of world cinema. As outlined in the Introduction, recent discourse on world cinema tends to privilege the politics of their circulation, which we can think about within the context of this book in at least two ways. For some, the political value of texts studied in this book may in fact reside in their ability to draw diverse festival audiences; this is perhaps the argument that Sternberg and Berghanan might make, in line with their ideas for rebranding European cinema as world cinema. For others, such widespread appeal and one that is seemingly aimed at particular class brackets, is what prevents these films from assuming a militant, hence politically meaningful status. Examining the politics of the text, in addition to the politics of

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c­ irculation, calls for a different mode of engagement and, in the case of this book in particular, one that charts enduring traces of established and recognizable forms of filmmaking as they are incorporated, revised and reconfigured in these contemporary films. As noted in the Introduction, the shifting nature of these forms of filmmaking, as gleaned in these texts, offers one vantage point for viewing the world cinema turn within European filmmaking. In a piece titled “Globalization and Hybridity”, Frederic Jameson notes that one of the ways to prevent scholarly attempts to map out the “totality” of globalization from succumbing to truth claims is to draw up “an inventory of the dilemmas of representation”.8 To build on Jameson’s observations to this effect, what I have tried to do in this book is to develop an inventory of both the patterns as well as the ­dilemmas of representation that this particular corpus presents. The overt allegorical resonances of both Dirty Pretty Things and In This World dovetails with an entire history of social realist filmmaking as it pertains to Williams’ notion of social extension in addition to the significance of the relationship between location and character that is a longstanding feature of this mode of filmmaking. We can delineate these two films, among many others, as their global heirs. In contrast, associational allegories are what dominate the French corpus of films as their adherence to the legacies of modernist filmmaking reify the dominance of ambiguity in place of clarity. Modernist techniques are banded together with the network narrative, the thriller genre, as well as banlieue cinema across the French grouping of films in order to tell stories of global migration in its effect on the city. I view these cinematic matrices as instances of “global convergence” whereby modernist filmmaking is combined with other popular, generic forms. A similar instantiation of generic hybridity is in evidence across the British corpus, which often combines traces of the thriller genre with social realist content, an evocation of a longer history of formal hybridity that has left its mark on British social realist cinema. As such, the relationship between location and character that is so integral to social realist filmmaking is intact in Dirty Pretty Things, but in a way that corresponds to the emphasis on space as opposed to place in the film. The road movies explored in Chapter 3 also bear traces of the social realist tradition, in the case of In This World, and modernist art cinema, in the case of Exils. Reflexivity assumes a number of guises in these films, in keeping with the evocation of different cinematic forms, replete with certain longstanding conventions. While Dirty Pretty Things is a London film that “knows it”, a claim that is also true of the corpus of black British films and Frears’ other social realist dramas examined in the book, reflexivity in Caché and

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Code inconnu is a nod to the old modernist promise of dismantling the illusory nature of the cinematic apparatus in search of a deeper “truth”. J’ai pas sommeil and Exils lie somewhere in between as the films do not employ Haneke’s nor Frears’ respective brands of reflexivity. J’ai pas sommeil is not an overt allegory on the state of contemporary Paris, in keeping with the enigmatic nature of Denis’ cinema, and a similar statement can be espoused about Exils’ treatment of Algerian-Franco history. In This World takes its social realist bearings several steps further by deliberately and therefore, reflexively troubling the boundaries between fiction and documentary. I also have been at pains to demonstrate the “representational” dilemmas of these texts, of particular forms of ambivalence often generated by precisely the modes of reconfiguration and revision outlined above, coupled with the particular oscillation of these texts between the familiar and the unfamiliar, as well as specific and generic invocations of particular histories of migration and of the city itself. It is precisely these difficulties, ones that circumvent any easy assignment of political value or utility, that make these films ideal world cinema texts as they embody the very ambivalences that the genealogy of the term forcefully raises. The study of the circulation of cinematic forms offers a complementary analytical optic to the expansive conception of circulation that dominates the study of world cinemas in allowing for ways of ascertaining the mobility not only of individual films but also of types of cinema as they appear in their global guise. While the term “world cinema” often assumes a categorical function across festival and academic circuits alike, I have attempted to mobilize the term in one of its myriad analytical capacities, and in a way that allows textual analysis to surface as an integral tool for the study of world cinema in historical and political terms. It is a methodological strategy that combines what is “old”, which is the close study of a film’s specifically textual properties, with what signifies in this context as “new”, which is the emphasis on circulation within existing studies of world cinema. This is perhaps an odd strategy to adopt when we seem to have found ourselves in a time where textual analysis is increasingly written off as retrograde, taking a backseat to more pressing issues related to media convergence, the global histories of filmic circulation or historical accounts of “useful cinema”. While not wanting to detract from the significance and scholarly excitement generated by the subjects “of our time”, there is still room for aesthetic analysis in the study of pressing contemporary questions. If the need to think historically is a demand that scholars like Schwarz and Bhabha make upon us in their insistence that the memories of the past disrupt teleological understandings of the present in ways that must

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co ncl us io n 223 be attended to, textual analysis is one of many methods that aid in the achievement of this aim. In the case of this book, the variety of movements from “empire” to the “world” and back again cannot be discerned at the level of circulation but only through an attention to the text itself. The circulatory routes assumed by these films only tell a global story, as is also the case with an over emphasis on the global city, in either its material or representational incarnation, as proliferated with non-spaces. This book offers two broad illustrations of this contention in my focus on cinematic London and Paris, allowing us to see a certain continuity across each corpus in terms of the evocation of traces of older forms of filmmaking, coupled with longstanding imaginaries of the city as well as differences that pertain in equal measure to the recent migrant history of each city and to its respective traditions of filmmaking. What has been achieved in my dual focus is a series of arguments and claims that operate against the homogenizing tendencies of globalization in rendering difference mute or easily circumvented. In bringing together material on the cinematic city with that of world cinema in a single book, I have devised a methodology that is attentive not only to the urban context of these films, but to a specifically cinematic one as well. My approach allows us to track similar ambivalences across two iterations of the global that come together within the case study films. The global city is hardly “global” in the manner of its inclusiveness or openness to the world at large but rather in its positioning at the apex of a distinctly neoliberal world order. Likewise, the concept of world cinema can never be entirely global in its orientation because of the impossibility of conceptualizing cinema in accordance with any sense of totality, as the case study films have suggested and as is of course suggested by numerous scholars writing on this topic. While world cinema refers to a great many things, including festival films or films made outside of Hollywood, the term’s potential unwieldiness lends itself to a certain vagueness or, put more positively, a certain malleability. The problem is that in implying “everything”, it seems that the notion of world cinema can worryingly also imply nothing at all. It is in this particular valency of the term, where vagueness and homogeneity preside, that we can locate what I outlined earlier as the potential of the world cinema turn in film studies to operate in its symptomatic capacity, as evidence of the negative effects of globalization upon the discipline of film studies itself. The overarching intention of this book, with regard to my mobilization rather than avoidance of the concept of world cinema, is to suggest at least one way of finding some precision within the term which allows us to acknowledge global routes of circulation while also demonstrating that

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often what is in circulation refers back to very specific histories and traditions of filmmaking. My approach in this regard is clearly derived from a healthy fear of the leveling potentialities of a term like “world cinema” outlined above. But my approach also stems from my belief that the world cinema branch of film studies need not succumb to this fate.9 The study of world cinemas certainly has the potential to provoke alternate readings of “Western texts” while also drawing our attention to the various dynamics of global film cultures that often bypass Hollywood as a touchstone, as already demonstrated by many scholars tackling these subjects. While Bhaskar Sarkar argues quite persuasively that the transience and fluid nature of contemporary globalization is unlikely to lead to what he terms the “radical homogenization of identities and cultures”, we must ensure that conceptions of world cinema similarly work against the tendency towards the downplaying of difference.10 Sarkar posits the notion of a variety of “globalities” in place of a monolithic conception of the world, an exceptionally useful proposition that coincides with the aims of this book, where I have examined perhaps two kinds of world cinema among many others.11 I end this book with one last coda, as a way of extending my analysis towards larger socio-political concerns, ones that are destined to become even more urgent as time passes. What can we make of the dawn of the “world cinema turn” in film studies at a point in time when, as Jonathan Crary points out in his unsettling book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, the threat of “worldlessness” becomes increasingly palpable in the face of impending environmental catastrophes?12 The question of scale returns once again, but this time it seems that the world itself is entering into a state of diminution. For Crary, the onset of market-driven 24/7 time cycles is indicative of the destruction of multiple temporalities; to borrow a phrase from Chion, “all times and spaces become one” under the implementation of a homogenous temporal order whose effects are wide ranging, extending from diminished sleep patterns to the horrors of drone warfare. The world that Crary describes is one without history and one where the figure of the observer is entering into a period of precariousness as reflection and contemplation are activities that are slowly being banished.13 In fact, the labor and movement of the “stateless” is where we can locate particular instantiations of 24/7 time cycles and in this corpus of films it is Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things who embodies the endless time of labor as he works both during the day and all through the night. Figures like Okwe are part of the new disposable class, the “byproducts of neoliberalism” as Crary puts it, who have very little market value or use once their work patterns become unsustainable.14 But the other side of

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this narrative of ceaseless mobility is that of time without change, without ebbs and flows of differentiation, which the nearly frozen relationship between Paris and its banlieue gesture toward. In this paradigm of homogenous time, stasis and mobility merge into one. This assertion brings Jia Zhang-ke’s aptly titled The World (2004) to mind as the world in this film, a theme park in Beijing, has been distilled down to a series of iconographic reproductions of quintessential landmarks that are static and unchanging; as several characters observe, the New York skyline, in Beijing anyway, still has the Twin Towers on display. According to the “worldlesness” thesis that Crary puts forth, the integration of technological consumption and market-driven agendas bear chief responsibility in pushing the world closer and closer to a state of homogeneity, the nightmarish outcome of a world without pause or temporal delay. To return to the cinema, Laura Mulvey makes the case that new technological developments within the domain of the digital have made the act of textual analysis, an activity that involves pause and reflection, easier to accomplish than ever before.15 The tension between mobility and stillness remain intact in the contemporary moment, even in the face of Crary’s disturbing predictions of the eventual loss of “pause” and of difference itself. It is perhaps here where we can locate something of a political utility in textual analysis as an essential component of the study of world cinema, in ensuring that we don’t get caught up in keeping pace with the speed of global flows without thinking very carefully about exactly what it is that is being mobilized. In this way, a very tiny bastion of resistance can be waged against the overwhelming problem of potential “worldlessness”, a possibility that even affects film studies in its own way, once the language of flows supersede rather than works alongside that of content, aesthetics and politics. While it might be easy to view the “world cinema turn” in film studies as part of a broader depoliticization of the discipline of film studies, the study of world cinema need not eschew politics, as I hope this book, in alignment with other pieces in this burgeoning field of study, demonstrates. Notions of world cinema, particularly when the category is made attentive to the often contradictory and ambivalent dynamics of circulation within and outside the text, should and must play their part in helping us to ascertain and work through the urgent political questions of our time. Notes  1. Mark Kingwell, “Mark Kingwell’s Seven Paths to the Stars”, The Globe and Mail (13 October 2012, available at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

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news/national/time-to-lead/mark-kingwells-seven-pathways-to-the-stars/ article4610505/ (last accessed 22 October 2012).  2. Mike Hoolbloom, “John Greyson”, available at http://mikehoolboom. com/?p=2055 (last accessed 3 September 2013).  3. For further details, see Alison Smith, “Crossing the linguistic threshold: Language hospitality and linguistic exchange in Philippe Lioret’s Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb’s London River”, Studies in French Cinema 13.1 (2013), pp. 75–90.   4. Ibid. p. 79.   5. Andrew Hussey, “The French Intifada: how the Arab banlieues are fighting the French state”, The Guardian, 23 February 2014, available at http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/french-intifada-arab-banlieuesfighting-french-state-extract?CMP=fb_gu (last accessed 24 February 2014).   6. A. Smith, “Crossing the linguistic threshold”, p. 80.   7. Peter Walker, “London’s world status and house price boom is now hurting the middle class”, The Guardian, 2 August 2013, available at http://www.the guardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/02/london-inequality-house-prices (last accessed 3 August 2013).  8. Frederic Jameson, “Globalization and Hybridity”, in: Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 315.  9. For instance, in their introduction to World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, editors Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman productively ask the question of how film studies can be “upgraded to a transnational perspective, broadly conceived as above the level of the national but below the level of the global?” (p. x). 10. B. Sarkar, “Tracking global media”, p. 47. 11. Ibid. p. 44. 12. J. Crary, 24/7, p. 18. 13. Ibid. p. 40. 14. Ibid. p. 44. 15. See “Delaying Cinema” (chapter eight), in: Laura Mulvey, Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2007).

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s e le c t b ibl io gr a p h y 235 Porton, Richard, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke”, Cineaste 31.1 (Winter 2005), pp. 50–2. Pozanesi, Sandra, “The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe”, Third Text 26.6 (November 2012), pp. 675–90. Prime, Rebecca, “Stranger than Fiction: Genre and Hybridity in the ‘Refugee Film’”, Postscript 25.2 (Winter/Spring 2006), pp. 56–66. Rehm, Jean-Pierre, “Juste sous la surface”, Cahiers du Cinéma 605 (October 2005), pp. 30–1. Roddick, Nick, review of Dirty Pretty Things, Sight and Sound 12.12 (December 2002), p. 45. Rodowick, D. N., The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Romney, Jonathan, “Caché”, Sight and Sound 16.2 (February, 2006), pp. 63–4. Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (London and Boston: MIT Press, 1995). Roud, Richard, Cinema One: Jean-Luc Godard (London: British Film Institute, 1967). Said, Edward, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Sarkar, Bhaskar, “Tracking global media at the ‘outposts’ of globalization”, in: Nataŝa Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational  Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 34–58. Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London and Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Sassen, Saskia, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization”, Public Culture 12.1 (Winter 200), pp. 215–32. Saxon, Libby, “Secrets and Revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Caché”, Studies in French Cinema 7.1 (February 2007), pp. 5–17. Scatton-Tessier, Michelle, “Le Petisme: Flirting with the Sordid in Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain”, Studies in French Cinema 4.3 (2004), pp. 197–207. Schwarz, Bill (ed.), “Introduction”, West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 1–30. Schwarz, Bill, “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible”, in: Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 268–72. Schwarz, Bill, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Selvon, Sam, The Lonely Londoners (London: Alan Wingate, 1956). Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.), “Introduction”, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Shoat, Ella and Robert Stem, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994). Shonfield, Katherine, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London: Routledge, 2000).

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s e le c t b ibl io gr a p h y 237 Yedes, Ali, “Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of Pieds-Noirs Identity”, in: Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism and Race (New York: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 235–50. Young, Lola, Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996). Young, Robert J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

Index

Ackbar, Abbas, 27, 57–61, 75–6, 81, 218 Affron, Charles and Affron, Mierella Jona, 95–6 Afghanistan, 185, 191, 195 Akomfrah, John, 180 Algeria, 14, 15, 52, 87, 90, 94, 104, 182, 196–7, 199–203, 205–6, 209 Algerian, 13, 49–50, 72, 87, 89, 106, 200–3, 206–7, 209, 213–14, 220 Algerian-Franco, 222 Franco-Algerian, 184, 198, 203 War, 41, 43, 51–2, 85, 89, 90, 93, 115, 197, 202, 207–8 “allegory by association”, 60, 76, 78, 115, 198 Allison, Deborah, 210n2 Alphaville (Godard), 3, 39, 117n16 AlSayyad, Nezar, 156 Amélie (Jeunet), 61–7, 71, 73, 75–7, 80–1, 83, 86, 135 America, 1, 29, 44, 48, 182, 184 imperialism, 43–4, 50–1, 84 road movie, 195–7, 208 Amine, Laila, 127, 148 Amour (Haneke), 87, 96 Andrew, Dudley, 19, 22 “apartment plot”, 64, 66, 110 Art Deco, 96–7, 100 Arthur, Paul, 123n117 Aswad, 167 Atkinson, Michael, 211n12 Augé, Marc, 1, 7, 18, 184, 186–8 Austin, Guy, 120n63, 66, 124n47 Babylon, 161, 165–6 Babylon (Rosso), 28, 133, 153, 155–6, 160–2, 164–5, 167, 174 Babymother (Henriques), 179n79

Balibar, Etienne, 9–10, 68, 79 Banlieue, 13–15, 40–2, 45–51, 93–4, 95–6, 100–4, 107, 110, 112–13, 139, 199, 210, 214–15, 225 cinéma de banlieue, 13, 88–9, 93, 102–3, 105–6, 107–9, 111–12, 115, 200, 219, 221 “Battle of Paris”, 99, 101, 197 17 October 1961, 87, 101, 115 Baudelaire, Charles, 11 Bauman, Zygmunt, 68, 70 Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 63 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 11, 58, 88–9, 219 Berghanan, Daniela, 21–2, 220 Bergstrom, Janet, 37n84 Berlin Symphony of a City (Ruttman), 29, 46, 57 Besson, Luc, 63 Betz, Mark, 11, 45–7, 50, 84, 220 Beugnet, Martine, 118n30 Bhabha, Homi K., 4–7, 9–10, 17, 20–4, 60–1, 114, 128, 194, 202, 219, 222 Big Ben, 1, 59, 215 Binoche, Juliette, 56, 90 Bishop, Elizabeth, 189 Black Audio Film Collective, 172 Black Joy (Simmons), 28, 133, 153–5, 156–7, 164, 166, 174 Blethyn, Brenda, 214 Blum-Reid, Sylvie, 24, 196 Borden, Iain, 29n3, 30n4 Bordwell, David, 54–6, 58–9, 60 Bouchareb, Rachid, 127, 213–16 Brabazon, Tara, 152, 154 Brennan, Timothy, 9–10 Brixton, 14, 134, 152–6, 165–7, 216 Brunette, Peter, 23

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inde x 239 Bruno, Giuliana, 8, 158, 182–5, 190, 192, 193, 196 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 131, 139, 141, 146, 148–9, 161, 164 Burning an Illusion (Shabazz), 28, 133, 161–2 Caché (Haneke), 4, 27, 37, 51, 71, 87–116, 135, 200, 219, 221 Cameron, Earl, 133, 140, 146–7, 149, 159 Camp de Thiaroye (Sembene), 214 Canary Wharf, 7 Carax, Leos, 63 Castells, Manuel, 30n7 Celik, Ipek A., 88, 91–2 Channel 4, 128 Chion, Michel, 91, 100, 224 Chocolat (Denis), 55, 85, 121n85 Cinéma du look, 63 city symphony film, 39, 51, 56–7 Clair, René, 62 Code inconnu (Haneke), 4, 23, 27, 53–62, 64, 65–7, 69, 73, 77, 80–5, 100, 104, 112–14, 116, 203, 206, 222 colonialism, 9, 20, 43, 49, 55, 82, 85, 139, 214 Conley, Tom, 78 Cowan, Michael, 82 Crary, Jonathan, 82, 224–5 Cronenberg, David, 137 dancehall, 155–6, 158, 162, 165, 167 Darke, Chris, 47 Dave, Paul, 129–31, 154 Dearden, Basil, 28, 133, 140, 146, 152, 159 decolonization, 9, 13, 15–16, 50, 90, 94–5, 98, 101, 103–4, 197, 200, 208 Denis, Claire, 4, 23, 27, 40, 52–5, 57, 60–3, 65–7, 72–4, 76–7, 79–82, 84–6, 107, 110–13, 116, 184, 218, 222 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Godard), 3, 26, 39–52, 53, 56, 60, 71, 83–4, 101, 104–6, 116, 133, 220 Dirty Pretty Things (Frears), 4, 27–8, 127–8, 130–8, 140, 144–50, 155, 157–8, 162–4, 168, 170–4, 184, 187, 194, 208, 221, 224 Diva (Beineix), 63

Docklands, 7, 133 Donald, James, 57 Driver, Felix, 10 Drummond, Phillip, 171 Durgnat, Raymond, 177n57 Durovicová, Nataša and Newman, Kathleen, 226n9 Eastern Europe, 53, 68, 69, 82, 83 migrant, 82 Eastern Promises (Cronenberg), 137 Eiffel Tower, 2, 3, 47, 59 Ejiofer, Chiwetel, 135 Eleftheoritis, Dimitris, 181, 197, 201, 204, 207, 212n35, 47 Elsaesser, Thomas, 25–6, 58, 98, 135 Empire Windrush, 14 Escritt, Stephen, 97 Europe, 6, 10–12, 21, 23, 48, 56, 76, 79, 85–6, 209, 213 auteurs, 54, 77 cinema, 11, 21–2, 45, 46, 72, 220–1 city, 60, 90, 187 co-productions, 56, 62 directors, 85–6 filmmaker, 113 modernism, 50, 57, 84, 128, 209 modernist cinema/filmmaking, 23–6, 40, 44, 47–8, 50–1, 73, 84, 87, 113, 116 nation, 9, 50 road movie, 182, 196–7 Union, 79 urban modernity, 8–9, 137, 218 Eurostar, 214 Everett, Wendy, 120n60 Evian Accords, 14, 196, 202 Exils (Gatlif), 4, 24, 29, 180–4, 196–210, 215, 220–2 exorbitant city, 27, 58–9, 61, 73, 76–7, 82–3, 113, 114 encounters, 72, 160, 218, 80, 116 Ezra, Elizabeth and Sillars, Jane, 123n117 Farrier, David, 193 film noir, 55, 137, 139, 142 Finsbury Park, 215–16

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Fischer, Lucy, 96–7 Flame in the Streets (Barker), 28, 133, 146, 148–9, 159, 161 flânerie, 8–9, 11, 46, 49, 71, 73, 89, 158, 161 flâneur, 8–11, 46, 60, 70, 89, 140, 158–9, 181 flâneuse, 39, 46–7, 49, 51, 52, 69, 73–4 Forde, Brinsley, 167 Fortress Europe, 6, 72, 78 Fraser, Murray, 138 Frears, Stephen, 23, 28, 128, 130, 135, 137, 138, 145–8, 156, 158, 184, 221–2 French Poetic Realism, 62–3 Freyer, Peter, 33n48 Friedberg, Anne, 46 Galt, Rosalind, 77, 79–80, 84, 86–8, 89, 107, 112 Gare du Nord station, 214 Gatlif, Tony, 4, 23, 24, 181, 182, 196–8, 200–5, 208–9 Geraghty, Christine, 145 Gibson, Sarah, 127 Gilbert, David, 10 Gildea, Robert, 202 Gilroy, Paul, 14, 21, 115, 134, 160, 161–2, 166, 167 Gleber, Anke, 46 global city, 1, 4, 5, 7–8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 26–9, 39, 51, 57, 59, 72, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 116, 132, 136, 137, 144, 147, 148, 158, 169, 171, 174, 189, 216, 218, 220, 223 globalization, 1, 4–7, 9–10, 11, 17,18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 29, 44, 55, 57, 60, 61, 67, 68, 82, 83, 88, 135, 136, 137, 184, 189, 194, 209, 218–19, 221, 223, 224 Godard, Jean-Luc, 3, 17, 26, 39–52, 56, 60, 71, 101, 106–7, 116, 218, 220 Golubeva, Katerina, 56 Gorbman, Claudia, 179n82 Graham, James, 128 grands ensemble(s),13, 17, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 94, 111 Grant, Catherine, 20–1, 22

Greene, Naomi, 90, 95, 202 Greenwich Observatory, 141–2 Gregory, David, 195 Grisoni, Tony, 183 Gunning, Tom, 31n24 Guzetti, Alfred, 117n7 Hall, Stuart, 16–17, 21, 85, 113 Hallam, Julia, 129 Hamid, Naficy, 209 Hampstead Heath, 150, 151, 152 Handsworth Songs (Afromfrah), 172–3 Haneke, Michael, 4, 23, 27, 40, 52, 53, 54–8, 60, 61, 62, 66–9, 71–2, 77–80, 82–3, 84, 85, 86, 87–92, 94–103, 105, 107, 112–16, 184, 218, 222 Harvey, David, 30n7 Hayward, Susan, 43, 106 Henriques, Julian, 178n79 Highmore, Ben, 3 Higson, Andrew, 130, 133, 140, 143 Hill, John, 145, 149 Hillier, Bevis, 97 HLM, 93, 99, 100, 104–5, 108, 111, 200, 220 Hollywood, 19, 54, 58, 77, 85, 86, 97, 223, 224 Holy Motors (Carax), 63 Hussey, Andrew, 214 In This World (Winterbottom), 4, 29, 31, 172, 180–4, 187–8, 190–1, 193–6, 197, 205, 208, 209, 221–2 Indigènes (Bouchareb), 214 Jacobowitz, Florence, 103, 114 J’ai pas sommeil (Denis), 4, 23, 27, 51–62, 64–8, 72, 73, 76–7, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 104, 113–14, 203, 206, 222 James, Nick, 69, 128, 132 Jameson, Frederic, 18, 221 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 61–3, 65, 73, 75, 77 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 166 Jordan, Neil, 130–1 Jousse, Thierry, 45 Kaplan, E. Ann, 98, 191, 193, 208 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 13, 102–3

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inde x 241 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 13, 27, 107–13 Keiller, Patrick, 12, 154 Kerr, Paul, 54, 55 Knight, Stephen, 137 Konstantarakos, Myrto, 104–6 Koolhaus, Rem, 59 Koos, Leonard, 199, 209 Kosovo, 54, 69 War, 69 Kouyaté, Sotigui, 214 Kracauer, Siegfried, 8, 78, 140, 142, 158 Kuhn, Annette, 20–1, 22 Kureishi, Hanif, 145 La Défense, 7, 62 La haine, 13, 102–6, 115 Ladbroke Grove, 152, 156 Laderman, David, 196–7 Last Resort (Pawlikowski), 28, 134, 157, 170–2 Lavant, Denis, 63 Lay, Sarah, 130, 133, 173 Le joli mai (Marker), 118n28 Le million (Clair), 62 Le petit soldat (Godard), 118n28 Leigh, Danny, 200, 202, 209, 212n34 Leggott, James, 176n27 L’esquive (Kechiche), 27, 107–9, 111–13 Les statues meurent aussi (Marker and Renais), 118n28 Lipstiz, George, 168 London, 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12–15, 17–18, 23, 27–8, 29, 46, 126, 127–8, 130, 131, 132–46, 148, 149–54, 156–8, 160–4, 166–75, 180, 182, 184–5, 187–9, 190, 193–5, 196, 205, 208, 209, 213–19, 221, 223 London River (Bouchareb), 127, 213–17 Lonely Londoners, The, 167 Loshitzky, Yosefa, 21, 117n51 Lurey, Karen, 9, 49 Ma, Jean, 57, 135 MacMaster, Neil, 203 Mali, 54, 79, 216 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 57 Marcus, Sharon, 46, 64 Margate, 170–1

Marker, Chris, 84 Marker, Cynthia, 55 Marks, Laura, 183 Marshment, Margaret, 129 Martinique, 54, 66–7, 68, 82 Massey, Doreen, 9–10, 18, 28, 49, 134, 149–51, 168, 192, 219 Mauvais Sang (Carax), 73 Mayne, Judith, 67, 68, 74 McFarlane, Brian and Williams, Deane, 210n11 modernity, 8, 48, 58, 59, 60, 93, 95, 107, 166, 219 bourgeois, 96, 99 European, 8–9, 137, 218 French, 94 London, 15 nineteenth-century urban, 3, 4, 8, 11, 39, 64, 136, 158, 218 Paris, 2, 6, 105 post-war, 14, 16, 47 Mona Lisa (Jordan), 130–1 Montmartre, 54, 57, 62–5, 73–7, 80–2 Moretti, Franco, 35n66 Mort, Frank, 138–40, 143 Mowitt, John, 20 Mulvey, Laura, 225 Muriel (Renais), 118n28 My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears), 28, 128, 135, 145, 156–7 Nagib, Lúcia, 19 Navqi, Fatima, 79 network narrative, 27, 54–61, 62, 67, 72–3, 75–6, 81, 83, 88, 127, 135, 140, 214, 215, 218, 219, 221 Nichols, Bill, 24 Nine Muses, The (Akomfrah), 180 non-place, 7, 8, 158, 184, 186–9, 194, 219 non-space, 170–1, 187, 194, 223 Norindr, Pavivong, 108 Notting Hill, 14, 148, 150, 159, 162 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 150 Orr, John, 143 Osterweil, Ara, 96, 103 Ové, Horace, 28, 133, 155

242

f ro m e mp ire t o t h e wo r l d

Paquot, Thierry, 45 Paris, 1–3, 4, 6–7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17–18, 26–7, 29, 39–41, 43–8, 51, 53–9, 61–2, 64, 67–8, 70–82, 85–96, 99, 101–2, 104–7, 109, 112–16, 134, 139, 180, 184, 196, 197, 200, 201, 204, 208, 209, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218–20, 222–3, 225 Périphérique, 41–2, 47, 134 Peters, John Durham, 30n16 Peucker, Brigitte, 99 Phillips, Michael, Phillips, Trevor, 143, 160, 166 pied-noir, 14 196, 200, 202–3 Pines, Jim, 149, 152, 174 Playtime (Tati), 1–3, 6, 39, 46, 56, 59, 213 Pool of London (Dearden), 28, 133, 140–3, 145, 146–8, 149, 150, 172, 216 Porton, Richard, 89, 90, 109, 110 Post-Imperial Era/Period/Moment, 2, 41, 50, 104, 133, 139, 142, 148, 160, 213 Britain, 15, 149, 160 city, 10, 51, 95, 101, 138–9, 149 flâneuse, 46 history, 12 London, 10, 15, 18, 29, 134, 149 migrant/migration, 28, 53, 128, 139, 218 mobility, 13 nation, 94 Paris, 10, 18, 29, 39, 106 past, 15, 18, 100 present, 142 settlement, 162 Powell, Enoch, 126, 148, 172 Powrie, Phil, 63 Pozanesi, Sandra, 177n51 Pressure (Ové), 28, 133, 152–3, 156, 160–2, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174 Prime, Rebecca, 176n18 Rehm, Jean-Pierre, 93 Renais, Alain, 84 road movie, 24, 29, 180–4, 186–7, 193, 196, 198–9, 208, 209, 221 American, 182, 184, 197, 208 migrant, 180 see also European road movie

Romania, 54, 69, 79 Ross, Kristin, 13–14, 15–18, 42–4, 47–8, 51, 88, 94–5, 100, 105, 219, 220 Rothlisberger, Leisa, 54 Roud, Richard, 117n12 Ruttman, Walter, 29, 57 Said, Edward, 10, 197 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Frears), 128, 135 Sapphire (Dearden), 28, 133, 146, 148–52, 156, 159, 160, 161, 174 Sarkar, Bhaskar, 19n, 224 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 107 Sassen, Saskia, 6–7, 136 Saxon, Libby, 123n121 Schwarz, Bill, 12, 15–18, 61, 107, 116, 220, 222 Selvon, Sam, 167 Sembene, Ousmane, 214 Shaw, Sally, 178n68 Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert, 35n72 Shonfield, Katherine, 14, 41–2, 51 Sinclair, Ian, 129, 131, 132, 137 Skyfall (Mendes), 143–4 Smith, Allison, 213–14 “social problem” film, 128, 133–4, 146, 148–9, 150 social realism, 128–9, 135, 157, 221 British, 129–30, 24 Sorlin, Pierre, 45, 51, 188 Sous le toits de Paris (Clair), 62–3 Stansted Airport, 131, 170 Sternberg, Claudia, 21–2, 220 Stora, Benjamin, 212n48 Strauss, Frédéric, 53, 64, 116 Subway (Besson), 63 Swami, Vinay, 108–9 Tarr, Carrie, 13, 58, 72, 82, 102, 109 Tati, Jacques, 1–3, 6, 39, 47, 213 Taunton, Matthew, 43, 49 Tautou, Audrey, 135 Thatcher, Margaret, 126, 128–9, 145, 172 The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), 103, 115

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inde x 243 The Piano Teacher (Haneke), 99 The World (Jia Zhang-ke), 225 35 rhums (Denis), 27, 55, 107, 108, 110–13 Tower Bridge, 141, 215 transnational, 19, 20–1, 29, 85, 90, 167, 186, 196, 209 Trifonova, Temenuga, 121n79 Trouble Every Day (Denis), 81 Vanderschelden, Isabelle, 62–3, 64 Varda, Agnes, 51 Vendredi Soir (Denis), 81 Vertov, Dziga, 57 Vietnam War, 43, 44, 48, 50–1, 101 Vincendeau, Ginette, 61, 62–4, 102–4, 105–7, 110, 115 Virtue, Nancy E., 123n117 Walker, Peter, 217

“War on Terror”, 37, 181, 182, 185, 194, 195, 208, 216 Wheatley, Catherine, 77–8, 84, 87, 90, 95–6, 97, 98, 100, 103, 115 White, Jerry, 33n47 Williams, Raymond, 17, 129, 221 Williams, Zoe, 126 Winterbottom, Michael, 4, 23, 181–7, 189, 192–6, 198, 205, 208 Wolf, Janet, 46 Wollen, Peter, 7 world cinema, 7, 19–28, 40, 52, 54, 58, 81, 84, 85–6, 90, 103, 116, 128, 130, 132, 135, 137, 173, 181, 209, 216, 217, 220–5 Yedes, Ali, 203 Young, Lola, 131, 149, 153, 154, 174 Young, Robert J. C., 141