Space and being in contemporary French cinema 9781526102218

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James S. Williams

Space and beinG in contemporary French cinema

Space and being in contemporary French cinema

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Space and being in contemporary French cinema

James S. Williams

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © James S. Williams 2013 The right of James S. Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8432 4 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Carnegie Book Production

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Contents Contents

Contents

List of illustrations page vii Acknowledgements ix Preface: Making space xi 1. Space, cinema, being 2. Topographies of being: space, sensation, and spectatorship in the films of Bruno Dumont

1 41

3. Requiem for a city: the symbolics of space in the cinema of Robert Guédiguian

101

4. Heading nowhere: framing space and social exclusion in the films of Laurent Cantet

147

5. Re-siting the Republic: Abdellatif Kechiche and the politics of reappropriation and renewal

187

6. Beyond the Other: grafting space and human relations in the trans-cinema of Claire Denis

233

7. In lieu of a conclusion

285

Bibliography 294 Select Filmography 314 Index 325

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List of illustrations List of illustrations

List of illustrations

1. La Vie de Jésus (1997). 3B Productions.

page 53

2. L’humanité (1999). 3B Productions.

60

3. Twentynine Palms (2003). 3B Productions. Courtesy of the BIFI (Paris).

67

4. Flandres (2006). 3B Productions. Courtesy of the BFI (London). 77 5. Hadewijch (2009). 3B Productions.

81

6. Hors Satan (2011). 3B Productions.

86

7. La Ville est tranquille (2000). Agat Films & Cie.

106

8. La Ville est tranquille (2000). Agat Films & Cie.

113

9. À la Place du coeur (1998). Agat Films & Cie. Courtesy of the BIFI (Paris).

125

10. Marie-Jo et ses deux amours (2001). Agat Films & Cie.

128

11. Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars (2004). Agat Films & Cie. Courtesy of the BFI (London).

135

12. L’Emploi du temps (2001). Haut et Court.

153

13. Entre les murs (2008). Haut et Court. Courtesy of the BFI (London). 162 14. Entre les murs (2008). Haut et Court. Courtesy of the BFI (London). 163 15. Vers le sud (2006). Haut et Court.

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viii

List of illustrations

16. Entre les murs (2008). Haut et Court.

172

17. Entre les murs (2008). Haut et Court.

174

18. La Faute à Voltaire (2000). One Plus One.

192

19. La Faute à Voltaire (2000). One Plus One.

199

20. L’Esquive (2003). Noé Productions Int.

202

21. L’Esquive (2003). Noé Productions Int.

207

22. La Graine et le Mulet (2007). Artificial Eye.

213

23. La Graine et le Mulet (2007). Artificial Eye. Courtesy of the BFI (London).

216

24. Chocolat (1988). MK2 Productions.

239

25. Beau Travail (2000). Pathé Télévision/SM Films. Courtesy of the BFI (London).

247

26. Beau Travail (2000). Pathé Télévision/SM Films.

249

27. L’Intrus (2004). Ognon Pictures/Arte France.

259

28. L’Intrus (2004). Ognon Pictures/Arte France.

262

29. 35 Rhums (2008). Soudaine Compagnie/Arte France Cinéma/Pandora Film Produktion. Courtesy of the BFI (London).

271

30. White Material (2010). Why Not Productions/Wild Bunch. 277

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first Kim Walker and Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press for commissioning this book and their excellent advice, flexibility and efficiency at all stages; Lindsay Murray for her scrupulous copy editing and Alan Rutter for his fine work on the index; the staff at the Iconothèque de la Cinémathèque française (specifically Sandra Laupa) and at BFI Stills (in particular Dave McCall) for their wonderful aid and expertise; and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway London for awarding me a generous period of leave to complete the project. Earlier versions of Chapters 4, 5, 6 were published in French Studies 65:1 (2011), the International Journal of Francophone Studies 14:3 (2011), and The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (I.B.  Tauris, 2013), ed. Marjorie Vecchio, respectively. I would like to thank the publishers for granting permission to reproduce this material. I would like also to express my gratitude to Professor Phil Powrie for inviting me to take part in a panel on Maghrebi-French film at the ‘Bicultural Literature’ conference at the Institut Français in London in December 2010. I am grateful to Professor Alfred Thomas, Professor Daniela Berghahn and Dr Henrik Gustafsson for their valuable comments and suggestions at different stages of the project. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Catherine Grant for proving once again she is the best reader of film and the best friend anyone could wish for; and Dr Jason Gittens for his love, ­encouragement and support throughout. This book is dedicated to him.

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Preface: Making space Preface

Preface: Making space

The world is large, but in us it is as deep as the sea. (R. M. Rilke)

I’ve travelled around in the cinema. By that I mean simply that I’ve seen different kinds of film in very different types of cinema, and each has been a distinctive experience. I confess I’ve happily dozed off in the cosy, historic splendour of Le Ranelagh in Paris during a Duras retrospective, cranked my neck at the strange angle of the screen at the Renoir in London trying to figure out Haneke’s The White Ribbon, shuddered in the chaste, minimalist void of MoMA in New York while contemplating Godard’s Hélas pour moi, gasped for air in the tight, hushed row of a small film theatre in Shibuya showing the latest Kitano, and gazed awestruck at Tati’s Play Time in the vast, ornate surroundings of the Castro Theater in San Francisco, complete with Mighty Wurlitzer. I could go on. The essential point is that my different experiences of cinema are also real, existential states, and that when I reflect on particular films I remember indelibly where I first saw them and the material circumstances of viewing them. This sense of place is all part of the cinematic experience for me. Indeed, cinema is very specifically, and above all, the concrete, existential experience of space that connects the public, cinematographic cocoon, the worlds projected on to the screen (Bazin’s ‘window on the world’), and the individual realms of sensory and mental perception. Beyond the plot-lines and anfractuosities of narrative, what excites me, even in the reduced horizons of today’s ersatz, luxury cushioned, sofa cinemas, is a feeling of being in relation to the world. Sharing space with others in the public intimacy of cinema is always an experience of spatial freedom. One of the formative critical works for me on cinema is by Roland Barthes – not the Barthes of structuralist semiology, but the later, more autobiographical Barthes of ‘En sortant

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du cinéma’ (‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’). This is a short but beautiful article from 1975 on the personal pleasures of urban film viewing and the cinema auditorium as a sensorium linking together inside and outside. Barthes writes of being fascinated twice over – first by the image (there must be verisimilitude), then by its surroundings – and of having two bodies: one narcissistic that gazes into the engulfing mirror, the other perverse like that of an impulsive, ‘scrupulous fetishist’ who is both in the story and ‘elsewhere’ because alert to all that exceeds the image. The ‘darkened cube’ of the auditorium is presented as a shared, anonymous and populated space of physical idleness and availability that offers not just the sense of a ‘diffused eroticism’ – the collective, obscure mass of other distracted bodies (‘our erotic body’) – but also the composite joy, whatever the value of the actual film, of the shining, dancing cone of projected light that ‘pierces the dark’, the showering and spraying of light and colour, and the soundtrack that acquires its own ‘grain’ and forcefully enters the eardrums in a complete sensurround experience of material vibration. It is as if Barthes, for whom the filmic image constitutes in strictly Lacanian terms a lure (i.e. a passage between Imaginary and Symbolic, and between the drives and the contractual regulation of sexuality), were attempting to direct the filmic experience away from the dream and towards the space of fantasy because it remains concomitant to ‘my’ consciousness of reality. Barthes sums up his state of cinematographic ‘hypnosis’ as a ‘slightly disengaged imaginary’ at an ‘amorous distance’. To each his/her own, one might say. And that is precisely the point, for what Barthes is suggesting here, in what strikes initially as an oxymoron, is a ‘possible jouissance of discretion’ specific to cinema. In other words, cinema is a space of freedom because it offers the pleasure of choice. How we partake of the multiple erotic possibilities of the viewing experience is left to our discretion. Inspired by Barthes’s vivid and affirmative account of cinematic bliss, or what he calls his ‘situation de cinéma’, I have tried throughout all my work on French film to address a basic question: how to testify adequately to the personal, unique and liberating experience of cinematic space? Watching a particular film – especially, but not exclusively, in the classic format of a large, public auditorium – is always a real and, to varying degrees, immersive experience in real time at multiple levels (intellectual, cognitive, sensory). It can create new moods, thoughts, feelings and sensations. How, therefore, can one do critical justice to such a rich and immediate experience of human

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perception and consciousness – the sense of being together in a larger world than our own – within the fixed space of the printed page and the bounds of an academic study? Close textual analysis, frame by frame, sound by sound, can certainly convey some of the lived experience of space in narrative cinema which comprises the external worlds relayed, the fictional worlds created, the filtered mindspaces of the characters, and the multi-spaces of spectatorial reception (visual, auditory, haptic). Yet the question remains how to develop a multi-levelled approach sufficiently supple and capacious to register in close-up the shifting plays of cinematic form and consciousness – when interior space slips into external space, subjective into objective, inner into outer, and back again – while at the same time taking into full account the film’s wider, cultural frame, i.e. its more socially, historically and politically defined landscapes. A second related question is how to be open and receptive not just to different kinds of spatial practice in cinema, but also to different forms of theoretical thinking and writing about space. I am thinking here of the broad sweep of critical approaches, from the cultural and socio-political to the aesthetic, philosophical, formalist, sociological, anthropological, cognitive, and interpretative, and many more. This question assumes even greater weight within French film studies, especially as it has developed since the 1970s in the UK with its core empirical tradition of socio-political criticism linked to history and cultural studies that has evolved alongside the more psychoanalytically derived theory of Screen. This branch of the discipline has charted some of the momentous advances in recent French cinema relating to space and spatial politics, notably in films by beurs (i.e. French-born citizens of Maghrebi descent) who have sought to reveal the postcolonial realities of contemporary France (youth unemployment and violence in the banlieue, State control and racism, housing and immigration policies, etc.). The opening up of new critical spaces which foreground marginalised ethnicities, subjectivities and sexualities directly reflects the profound changes that have taken place in post-war French society. In view of the long tradition of spatial symbolics and politics within French cinema that stretches back to the first commercial film screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895, when public films of workers leaving Louis’s factory in Lyons (Sortie d’usine) were juxtaposed with intimate scenes and fictions of bourgeois family life such as Repas de bébé, how is one to encompass in a study of contemporary French film both the urgent social, cultural and political questions and

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complexities of spatial difference, identity and place, and the more general aesthetic and phenomenological issues of human subjectivity, being and perception, form and space? In other words, how are we to avoid making space ‘work’ solely in terms of mapping and redefining social identity, and thereby open up the simultaneous possibility of an aesthetics of cinematic space? How, in short, to make room for space and keep it moving, fluid and relational, beyond fixed theoretical and ideological frames and boundaries, as process rather than as concept – in a word, as ‘live’ space? Such questions constitute the particular challenge of this book on space and being in contemporary French cinema. Following Barthes’s jouissance of discretion and the existential freedom of space in cinema just adumbrated, I can choose at my own discretion not only the primary filmmakers but also the appropriate field and approach, or combination of fields and approaches, for my analysis. Space and being in contemporary French cinema brings together five very different directors who have established themselves over the last fifteen to twenty years as among the most adventurous and significant practitioners of space working in French cinema today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Critically celebrated at home and internationally, these highly individual (and in some cases controversial) filmmakers operate firmly within the auteur tradition, however commercial and popular their films may actually prove, and their work falls squarely within both the general field of narrative fiction and the recognisable bounds of realism, even as they extend and redefine it. With the notable exceptions of Cantet and Denis, none has yet been the subject of a full-length study in either French or English.1 The fact that they are often categorised under certain film historical and critical labels – local and regional filmmaking (Dumont and Guédiguian), the return to realism in French cinema during the 1990s (Dumont, Guédiguian, Cantet), beur cinema (Kechiche), or the current ‘new French extremism’ and cinéma du corps (Dumont, Denis) – is of minor importance.2 For crucially they all engage resolutely with the here and now, and with clearly defined characters in different locales, habitats and landscapes both within and outside the borders of the Hexagon. The book is structured around the guiding principle of setting critical areas and fields in productive tension and dialogue, and exploring them in tandem and non-hierarchically. It positions the reader as a co-traveller entering very different types of habitat and

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terrain and floating freely through the different force- and sense-fields of cinema as well as the emerging constellations of film theory. Yet this is not to enter the vacuum of some ‘pure’, timeless, conceptual space. Cinematic space is always operating within different configurations of the time-space continuum, and framing space is always making meaning at a specific moment in time. In fact, what provides this volume with a point of gravity is its strong focus on the ethicoaesthetic theme of our relationship to the external world at this particular historical juncture. For cinematic space, in its myriad forms and manifestations, helps us to think acutely about the geophysical world and to consider how it is framed ideologically by – and in – representation. How long, if at all, can space be left intact and free from (and indifferent to) the ratiocinations and anxious machinations of both subjectivity and, at the secondary level of the spectator, the interpretative impulse? I am not positing here a pristine, immaculate world – any world on screen is naturally a construction, and there can be no unmediated transparency of vision. However, how the world is conceived and framed, or reframed and deframed via mobile framing to the point of becoming ‘unframed’, is a crucial question that relates to our direct experience and perception of the outside. Although not perhaps as immediately identifiable for their work on the frame and framing as other contemporary directors working in French cinema, such as Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman, each of my chosen filmmakers has developed distinctive visual and framing strategies that reflect a deep and fundamental investment in the construction of cinematic spaces related to the real world. In what follows I hope to determine to what extent film can project the world anew, loosened from standard cinematic and cultural moorings and thus available as a possible source of new perceptions, affectivities and subjectivities. Indeed, I will privilege and celebrate those works that are fully cognizant of the aesthetic and ideological processes at stake and strive to convey both the recalcitrant materiality of the external world and our shared sense of being and mutual otherness. The measure of a film’s success will be precisely the extent to which it addresses and embraces the world as unsolvable mystery. Space and being in contemporary French cinema is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 presents a survey of different fields of enquiry orbiting around the notion of cinematic space: from the practice and theory of screenspace to the place of space in modern French thought, the idea of the ‘space of the cinematic subject’, and the centrality of

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space and spatial identity within the French cinematic tradition. This necessary background to the book’s main contexts and subtexts is completed by a general outline of the primary spatial themes of the five filmmakers and a summary of the chapters to follow. Chapters 2 to 6 are designed as a non-linear, non-diachronic series of case-studies with detailed textual readings of selected films by each filmmaker. Crossing different theoretical fields and resolutely eschewing an overarching chronological scheme, I seek to encounter space at its most literal and physical as well as figurative and theoretical. This requires proceeding first heuristically in order to trace the individual topographies and establish the particular rhetorical strategies and spatial dynamics set in motion. Although close textual analysis will provide a necessary launching pad for my discussions, it will continually project outwards towards the wider implications of the issues raised and pursue thematic and theoretical links with other cinemas and cultures. Resisting any temptation to synthesise the multiple cinematic and critical approaches explored, the short last chapter entitled ‘In lieu of a conclusion’ will suggest possible future spaces of critical enquiry in the expanding theoretical field of space in contemporary French cinema, where the possibilities for travel, at the frontiers of the discipline, remain literally endless. Select filmographies of the five directors are included at the end of the book following the bibliography. Finally, when citing material I shall refer to the original films, texts and screenplays, and all translations from the original French are my own unless otherwise stated. Notes 1 See Lebtahi and Roussel-Gillet 2005 in the case of Cantet, Beugnet 2004 and Mayne 2005 in the case of Denis. I will concentrate on Denis’s more recent works not covered in the two monographs, specifically L’Intrus (2004), 35 Rhums (2008), and White Material (2010). 2 Dumont’s films have been celebrated for their social-realist trappings and linked to the return to realism in the 1990s, because they deal with rural poverty, factory life, union relations, hospitals, medical institutions, the police service, disillusioned youth and racism. Indeed, for some the films mount a sociological critique of soulless suburban life and media images and pursue in various ways a discourse of alterity and outsiderhood that exposes the inhuman fear and hatred of the perceived foreigner. Yet Dumont’s work has also been received as part of the new extremism in French cinema on account of its frank and graphic, not to say brutal,

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depictions of sex and human violence (see Palmer 2011: 57–93). At the same time Dumont has been hailed as an exponent of the new genre of the ‘cinéma du Nord’ that includes, for example, Érick Zonca who made the highly influential La Vie rêvée des anges/The Dreamlife of Angels (1998).

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1 Space, cinema, being Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Space, cinema, being

Space, vast space, is the friend of being. (G. Bachelard) Space is to place as eternity is to time (J. Joubert)

Space in cinema The great American film critic Manny Farber memorably declared space to be the most dramatic stylistic entity in the visual arts – from Giotto to Kenneth Noland, from Intolerance to Week-end (Farber 1998: 3). He posited three primary types of space in fiction cinema: the field of the screen, the psychological space of the actor, and the area of experience and geography that the film covers (ibid.). Yet putting aside for a moment the particular spatial demands of character and plot, what exactly is cinematic space? It appears an impossibly vast realm, encompassing both mechanically reproduced external space and the artistic means of representing it. Mise-en-scène, or the composition and articulation of cinematic space, covers potentially everything in the staging of a shot, from the disposition of the actors to the arrangement of the décor and props, the placement of cameras, lighting, and the use of different lenses and film stock. The always magical process whereby real physical space (the setting) is reborn as fictional, two-dimensional cinematic space generates a panorama of spatial forms defined by differences in size, depth, design, angle, proximity, density, colour, contrast and proportion. In his seminal 1982 study of sentiment and affect in the cinema, which examines in detail the emotional implications of different effects and processes, Charles Affron presented a rich typology of screenspaces and spatial codes, from deep space and camera movement to spatial locus, focal length, the formal act of

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framing, photographic portraiture imposing stasis, protracted shots, and so on (see Affron 1982). Such an array of spatial techniques can assert the integrity of aesthetic space and cause it to expand and reverberate, whether, for example, in the manipulation of focal distance (the movement, say, from extreme close-up to far long-shot, and its reverse) or by means of devices such as super­imposition, which can bring different spaces and realities together and allow them mutually to coalesce in temporary osmosis. This has led another critic, Stephen Heath, to refer to space as the ‘superior unity’ that ties a film to its spectator. He highlights the specificity and contingency of places and bodies in narrative cinema and its binding mechanisms such as the 180º rule (Heath 1981: 40). Cinema is, of course, simultaneously an art of space and of time. A moving body occupies space, yet these spaces are not fixed moments but acts of duration, or space-in-time, recorded and projected in the classic celluloid format at a speed of twenty-four frames per second. The moving body thus succeeds in ‘being’ (spatial) and ‘becoming’ (temporal) by expressing duration, with time and space collapsing together to form a moving present. Or, put another way, place functions as the common denominator of movement (across) and duration (within). For this reason, space is intrinsically linked to time in cinema, and their combined effect as coterminous forces has given rise to some of French cinema’s most original achievements, from the extensive investigations in space-time by Jean Cocteau, for whom temporal perspectives obeyed the same relative rules as those of space, to the modernist deployment of space and time by Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman (to name just a few). One thinks in particular of Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), a pioneering experiment in female flânerie and ‘real time’, as well as of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s dazzling exploration of the virtual possibilities of time and parallel worlds in La Double vie de Véronique/The Double Life of Veronique (1991). The expansion and unification of cinematic space in and through time are central to our experience of film’s spatial dynamics. I wish to acknowledge from the outset that cinema, in its physical latitude and plastic extension, offers a unique sensation of spatial freedom on a level at once perceptual, intellectual and affective. For a permanent sense of movement is created by the mobile, material process of passing through multiple planes and spatial axes (left to right, top to bottom, across the frame, etc.), which are also different temporalities.

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Moreover, cinema is a medium that allows us exceptionally to shift back and forth between subjective and objective worlds, such that internal, mental moments can become external, and vice versa. The potential for such interspaces appears limitless. Indeed, the arrangement of subjective and objective point-of-view shots and reverse-field shots in montage opens up the possibility of constantly moving between different levels of reality and consciousness, or ‘virtual’ states of being. The formal dialectics of inside and outside, of intimate proximity and distant isolation, of the private and impersonal, is often intensified by the changing status of represented physical space as either outside and exposed, or inside and enclosed. Further, configurations of subjective and objective points of view do not always require a strictly subjective shot, because the exclusive close focus on one character moving through screenspace can itself often function as an implied subjective point of view. Such privileged experiential movement, provoking at times an exhilarating, even subversive, illusion of unboundedness, naturally carries certain limits, as, for instance, when continuous space suddenly becomes discontinuous through editing, or when the apparent promise of spectatorial identification and unstoppable access into a character’s subjective space is peremptorily thwarted by the film’s withdrawal into another type of objective space and the threat of opacity is renewed (for instance, the spatially disruptive use of flashbacks which thrust past moments within a diegetical present). To take the particular case of framing: there is always a structural tension between the profilmic field (the ‘real’ space being photographed) and the cinematic space of the frame which serves as a marker of spatial difference between what is included (and therefore intrinsic) and what is omitted (extrinsic). Yet it is precisely because frame selection can convey point of view as well as metaphorical meaning that framing can become an expressive tool of cinematic narration rather than merely a receptacle for the reproduction of reality. The creative potential of such a resource has inspired Des O’Rawe to propose a poetics of the frame, ranging from the ‘indiscernible’ (as in the ‘frameless framing’ of mainstream cinema) to the figurative, aleatory and reflexive. O’Rawe contrasts the austere, minimalist framing of Michelangelo Antonioni, who crafts an evasive, detached and seemingly autonomous frame to signify emptiness and alienation, with more expressionistic styles of framing where the effects of infinite regress in mise en abyme (for instance, the ‘virtual space’ created by mirrors drawing our attention to perpetually extended depth) can

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be compounded by framing to create a kind of ‘double framing’, or encadrement en abyme (see O’Rawe 2011). However, space is not only what we glimpse within the immediate, provisional frame, whether fixed or mobile, but also what lies outside it. Off-screen space (or ‘blind space’) exists in the diegesis but is not visible in the frame, thus producing a distinction between onstage and offstage. For the filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli, the continually restless hors-champ, whereby what is inside an image can leave it and what is outside can enter it, gestures always towards the world of the imaginary. It is, according to Comolli, what makes cinema such an original invention compared with other art forms. This conjunction of two separate yet interconnected spaces imposes itself even in the current era of digital imagery because, as Comolli notes, it cannot simply be ‘recycled’ (Gorce 1994: 34–5). Within this formal dramatics of space, place resides on multiple spatio-temporal registers, whether its own distinct world which exceeds the film frame, or a world furnished for our immersed view, or a sphere in tension between the two. It is not just that cinematic space is always in potential expansion: the ‘transspatial’ zone of the hors-champ is a flux that can threaten our ability to locate the image and ourselves in relation to it (we shall consider the implications of this shortly). So far I have confined myself largely to visual space, yet filmic space covers a range of sensory fields that are equally integral to its coherency. As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener have recently emphasised, sound is a pre-eminently spatial phenomenon in the cinema and constitutes a ‘third dimension’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 137). It, too, can move between interior and exterior, as between the diegetic and the non-diegetic (voice-over commentary, musical underscoring, etc.), to create what Robynn Stilwell has proposed very suggestively as a ‘fantastical gap’ (Stilwell 2007: 187). This is part of a larger gap formalised by Michel Chion between the visualised zone of on-screen sound (that is, sound whose source appears in the image and belongs to the reality represented therein) and the ‘acousmatic’ zones of off-screen sound where the source is hidden or invisible, whether temporarily or not.1 These general distinctions still remain valid despite the many recent advances in multi-track sound which now constitutes a quasi-autonomous ‘superfield’ (Chion 1990). The result is a fluid set of inner and outer sonic and auditory spaces, making hearing a multidimensional, acoustic space (what Mary Ann Doane has called the ‘sonorous envelope provided by the theatrical space’ (Doane 1985: 171)).

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Increasing the volume of sound, as in audio close-ups, or rendering sound ‘interior’ through the use of voice-over, creates new volumes of space and new levels of consciousness and affect within the film. This takes us into Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenal world of embodied perception and existential space (see Merleau-Ponty 1945), one of the key points of reference for Laura U. Marks’s influential theory of filmic touch and ‘haptic vision’. Marks argues that the material experience of touch, taste and smell in cinema may be a new vehicle of knowledge, beauty and even ethics since proximal senses operate as a membrane between the sensible and the thinkable (see Marks 2000 and 2002). In the same vein, in Cinema and Sensation (2007), a study of the physical nature of film and the viewing experience in contemporary French film, Martine Beugnet suggests that to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture is to participate in sensual perception and a form of spectatorship alive to the sensory qualities and textures of the moving image. Again, we are dealing with the movement between inside and outside space, for certain films construct haptic modes of vision that destabilise our common apprehension of the relationship between the subjective body and the objective world (see Beugnet 2007: 63–124). Of course, as Deborah Thomas reminds us in a very different discussion of film spectatorship in classic Hollywood cinema, the viewer is positioned at the boundary produced by the screen (or by the extended virtual screen) and thus, ultimately, always spatially excluded from the film’s narrative world. Even within subjective point-of-view shots, a sense of differentiation pertains and an imaginary space is formed between ‘us’ and the characters, though without this necessarily forcing us to relinquish access to their visual field (Thomas 2001: 114). Hence, just as the characters can inhabit an ‘ontological borderland between diegetic and non-diegetic spaces’, so, too, the viewer exists neither wholly within, nor completely outside, the narrative world (ibid.: 113–14). Taken together, however, the multiple fields of cinematic space I have enumerated constitute a living, breathing, contrapuntal process of drives, rhythms and counter-rhythms: of waves and surges, booms and retreats, cycles and repetitions, echoes and velocities, detours and divagations, exits and re-entries. The immersive and transformational nature of this multi-levelled spectatorial experience of cinematic space has been well captured by Daniel Yacavone in his developing theory of ‘film worlds’, which recognises both the symbolic and cognitive nature of films and their worlds, and their experiential, affective immediacy

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and presence (Yacavone 2008: 105). Drawing in particular on Mikel Dufrenne’s The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), Yacavone conceives of film worlds as intercinematic ‘object-experiences’ with a particular internal coherence intuited by the viewer (ibid.: 101), the essential duality of which may be described in terms of the polarities of external/internal, objective/subjective, representational/expressive, ontological/phenomenological (ibid.: 105). Yacavone endorses MerleauPonty’s idea of the intersubjective field of perception and action, citing him thus: ‘in the perception of another, I find myself in relation with another “myself”, who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am, in relation to the same being that I am’ (Yacavone 2006: 92–3).2 By its very nature film has the potential to dramatise the dynamic field of perception as the ‘commingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its co-existence with others’ (MerleauPonty 1964b: 59). Yacavone argues persuasively that ‘by putting us into imaginative contact with lives, situations and forms of being-in-theworld other than our own, representational works of art can cultivate empathetic understanding, a recognition of the shared ground of being’ (Yacavone 2006: 93). The intersubjective ‘live’ spaces formed between a film in process, its real (or implied) viewer, and its real (or implied) author, are necessarily shifting, contingent and constructed. For cinema is always experienced in a specific place at a particular time, and the creation of new worlds of meaning and affectivities within the work is matched by what takes place during the actual viewing encounter (what Roland Barthes called the personal ‘situation de cinéma’) which comprises desires, projections and fantasies relating even to the material set-up of the auditorium.3 In fact, the screen is transformed into what Dudley Andrew terms, with particular reference to André Bazin, a concrete ‘threshold’ through which the viewer passes on the way to visual experience. In the classic model of public film-viewing there are always two projections: one ‘filtered’ by the author-filmmaker, the other ‘filled’ by the spectator who projects him/herself towards the screen, thus taking the film into unforeseen networks (see Andrew 2010: 79–90). Cinema is literally a ‘project’ taking place inside the threshold of the screen which disrupts the film’s framing, understood in general thematic terms as the ‘design of its emplotment’, or the way ‘a view, a situation, a story, or an argument is framed when pertinent elements are taken together as a set, so that the position and function of all elements mutually determine one another in relation to the world’ (ibid.: 91). The porous

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screen becomes ‘the unstable meeting place on which are projected fragments of unlimited worlds from both directions’ (ibid.). As such, the screen overrides the ‘grip’ of the frame – what André Bazin, who prized the plenitude of the photographed real world, regarded as the hostile agent of spatial difference and exclusion, and what 1970s’ framing theory, focused on the materiality of film, sought to demystify and expose as the fixed ideological framing of perception.4 The composite viewing experience of cinematic space as material form, and the drama of how we orient ourselves in relation to reproduced sound and the projected moving image, set in motion different kinds of perception and subjectivity that are always in transition. Moreover, in its infinite variety and transformability, filmic space enables us to conceive of new forms of relations with the world and draws us into new kinds of sensory and existential zone, including that of free-floating memory. As Isabelle McNeill eloquently writes: ‘Cinema, with its capacity for instability and errancy, offers a potential flânerie in which the viewer can be conducted into a past not his or her own’ (McNeill 2010a: 45). I want to suggest in what follows, where I aim to give critical space to all forms of cinematic space and spatial enquiry, that the formation of new spatial thresholds generates, in turn, potential new sites and possibilities for understanding human relations and existence. Indeed, I will argue that the extensibility of cinematic space reveals new aesthetic dimensions of being, and that cinema is truly cinema only when it fully exploits its spatial potential and takes us to new and unguessed spaces, at once formal, imaginary and real. Space in modern French thought Up to now I have used the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ as virtually interchangeable. Yet the distinction between the two has been a central concern of much recent French thought. It is vital for any extended discussion of modern French cinema to acknowledge fully the evolution in thinking about space, the influence of which extends far beyond the simple theorising of cinematic space in linguistic terms (for example, André Gardies’s assertion that filmic space requires a decoding of place as the ‘text of space’, with place serving as the texte/parole of a langue constituted by space (see Gardies 1993)). In his landmark 1974 work, The Production of Space, the Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre revealed how the body creates a lived

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space that is both corporeal in function and inherently subjective. Social space for Lefebvre incorporates a body’s everyday actions, as well as how a body sees and is shaped by the natural world. Overriding Henri Bergson’s warnings expressed in Time and Free Will (1889) about the dangerous temptations of spatialising thought, Lefebvre reasserts the spatialised body. Indeed, all Lefebvre’s major work, including his groundbreaking, three volume Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1961, 1981), pursues a unitary theory of space, or ‘spatiology’, involving a rapprochement between physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space), and social space (the space of human action, conflict and ‘sensory phenomena’, or l’espace vécu). Invoking a ‘spatial architectonics’, Lefebvre argues that social space, at once dialectical and historical, is also ‘productive’ and performative with particular material effects because it is experienced first as a ‘spatial economy’. He formulates an active, operational, instrumental space: new social relationships call for new spaces, and vice versa, because spatial practices ‘secrete’ social space. In short, space which can be ‘heard’ and ‘felt’ and ‘enacted’ through physical gestures and movements involves our very sense of being in the world. It is to be contrasted with abstract space which denies the generalisation of what Lefebvre calls ‘differential space’ celebrating particularity, both bodily and experiential.5 Such thinking will lead Lefebvre eventually to the utopian idea that cities should release repression and become arenas of intense sensual and sexual pleasure and excitement.6 Lefebvre’s work has inspired an entire corpus of French thought devoted to redefining ‘space’ and ‘place’ and their relation to being. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Michel de Certeau argues that space is always a frequented, ‘practised’ place, that is, an intersection of moving bodies and an animation of places by the motion of a moving body. De Certeau champions ‘space’ actuated by the ensemble of movements within it as the medium through which change is possible – as opposed to ‘place’ which is ‘an indication of stability’ and thus the antithesis of change and possibility. Hence, a place is like a street geometrically defined by urban planning, but transformed into a space by walkers. In a key chapter of de Certeau’s book entitled ‘Walking in the City’, a practical knowledge of the city is shown to transform and cross spaces, create new metonymical (rather than metaphorical) links, and convey a mobile geography of looks and glances. For de Certeau, the term ‘space narrative’ means both the narrative that traverses and organises places, and the place that is constituted by the writing of that

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narrative. If spatial transformation is mediated via memory, by contrast place is antagonistic to time and appears autonomous of the practices that create it. The multiplicity of knowledges in the city acquired through the experience of daily life and alterity (to frequent space is precisely ‘to go over to the Other’) is an instance of what de Certeau calls ‘heterology’, and his work represents an attempt to ‘circle around’ being without reducing it to the categories of thought. This bold intellectual move has encouraged in turn new developments within anthropology and ethnography, notably Marc Augé’s highly influential anthropological study of the ‘non-places’ (‘non-lieux’) of ‘supermodernity’ which differentiates ‘places’ – relational, historical, concerned with identity, and creative of social life – from ‘non-places’, i.e. those areas of transit such as airports, supermarkets and motels which do not connect to human history because designed to be passed through and thus discourage organic social life (they are usually measured in units of time).7 The influential, far-reaching theories of Lefebvre and de Certeau, presented here in the most schematic terms precisely for reasons of space, have served as the basis for much recent postmodern debate on space and place and their relationship to time, in particular the work of Michel Foucault who, we recall, approached structuralism as a synchronic spatialisation of signifying systems without that necessitating a denial of time. Foucault asserted that space was being treated in political/ philosophical theory as ‘the dead, the undialectical, the immobile’, and that the spatial was seen as a frozen dialectic and the realm of stasis, that is, as a negation of historicity, of the fluidity of identity, and of the very possibility of politics. In an important article published in 1984 entitled ‘Of other spaces: heterotopias’ (originally a lecture from 1967), Foucault proposed ‘heterotopias’, or ‘counter-sites’ (‘contre-emplacements’), as ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’. For Foucault, these are real spaces functioning as ‘different kinds of effectively enacted utopias’ in which real sites are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (see Foucault 1984).8 Examples include marginal spaces where deviants are located (psychiatric hospitals, prisons), spaces of juxtaposed spaces (cinemas, gardens), sacred spaces (cemeteries), spaces of transitory time (festivals, fairgrounds), and spaces of illusion that critique quotidian space (e.g. brothels). Foucault is proposing here a new kind of ‘spaceplay’ capable of generating new practices, identities and subjectivities. His aim is to redefine the human as a ‘spatial invention’, that is to say,

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as a concept of space that engenders play and agency with its notion of a new technology of the self and a new art of existence, resulting in a new space of freedom and site of radical alterity. What is at stake for Foucault is both an aesthetics of existence and a ‘counter-memory’: one must have a consciousness of temporal emergence that contains comparative spatio-temporal dimensions, where the self both projects (future) and introjects (past) since it negotiates both the spatial and the temporal in order to have a sense of individuation. It is not that space is inherently powerful, for indeed it is the politics of spatial usage that determines its power, as, for example, in the patriarchal framing of architectural spaces which has traditionally privileged masculine power and marginalised women in its representation of social order, ­hierarchical progression, and stereotypical gender roles. Viewed as a whole, such comprehensive theoretical attention by these different French thinkers to the social and existential potentialities of space and its relationship to human being reflects the increasing displacement of time by space as the key factor determining social relations in contemporary, postmodern society now characterised by spatial superflux and uncertainty.9 Globalisation continues to move us away from a time-based to space-based culture, that is, from a tactile to an optical apprehension of the world, including a fascination with seeing at a distance and access to an elsewhere.10 Where once the dynamism of time, such as Bergsonian duration, opposed the immobility of space and constituted the mainspring of consciousness and human relations, reflecting precisely a gendered binary opposition between an active process of becoming (the masculine march of History) and the feminine stasis and fixity of being, now the networks of spatial connections have new theoretical priorities. This enables what the social and political geographer Edward Soja called in his 1989 book, Postmodern Geographies, which initiated a decisive ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences, a ‘transformative retheorisation of the relations between history, geography and modernity’ (Soja 1989: 2). Indeed, in the last couple of decades there has been a concerted effort to comprehend spatial paradigms and the practices that emerge from such cognitive framing in order to consider directly how space organises human perception. Soja himself, who advocates the incorporation of ‘the fundamental spatiality of social life’, has attempted to spatialise historical narratives by contesting existing critical practices of reading the urban which, he suggests, have usually privileged the temporal, linear and historical over the spatial (ibid.: 11). He thus

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harnesses Lefebvre’s idea of contre-espace (i.e. utopian as opposed to real or existing space), Foucault’s heterotopic space, and the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘Third Space’, defined as a site of enunciation which allows for the positive recognition of hybridity within which cultural difference may operate (see Bhabha 1994).11 For Soja, all three theorists radically challenge conventional modes of spatial thinking (Soja 1996). So prevalent, in fact, has become the postmodern vocabulary of ‘space’, conceived in broad terms as a dimension in which subjects fight for power, that some concerned critics talk of a hegemony of ‘spacespeak’ that serves a chiefly superstructural dimension, perceptible even in postcolonial theory.12 Within the particular field of urban geography, Doreen Massey has cautioned that it is both crude and erroneous to say that postmodernity is all space at the expense of history, and that modernity concerns only temporality and not space. As with all fierce proponents of space, her ambition in For Space (2005) is both passionate and profound: to liberate space from chains of meaning which embed it with closure and stasis (as opposed to time as change) in order to place it within other more productive chains alongside openness and heterogeneity.13 She posits an ‘open’ spatio-temporality because politics requires an open ‘time-space’, i.e. a space that is always being made, at once ‘multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming’ (Massey 2005: 59).14 It is precisely the continually disorienting experience of the time-space dyad in contemporary society and culture that has impelled political philosophers to consider the significance of film. Taking Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982) and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) as emblematic of postmodern cinema, David Harvey, for instance, has shown how ‘time-space compression’ (his term for the organisation and shifting geographies of late capitalism) has generated a crisis of representation in cultural forms (Harvey 1990: 308–23). Similarly, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), Fredric Jameson explores cinema, space and representation in the new world system of global capital which forms part of what he calls the fractured and fragmented ‘postmodern hyperspace’ (he takes by way of example the technological ‘interspace’ of Godard’s 1981 film, Passion, to show how in late capitalism private and public space have all but been abolished (Jameson 1992: 158–85)). Within the specific field of film studies, the spatial turn has encouraged a proliferation of new theoretical work on the nature and function of space in cinema as well as different types of screenscape,

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in particular concerning the city.15 One of the most interesting comparative studies of urban space, Stephen Barber’s Projected Cites: Cinema and Urban Space (2002), reveals how cinema has been vital to how the city is now imagined, created and remembered, and how filmmakers have interrogated images of cities to influence and determine our perception of history and the human body. (In turn, Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical ‘travelogue’ Amérique (1988) conceptualises cityscape as screenscape and insists that cinema’s visual images actively shape our own perceptions of urban space.) The particular distinctions made between ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘non-place’ continue to be a matter of much debate, notably in Wendy Everett  and Axel Goodbody’s wide-ranging 2005 collection, Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema, as well as in Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes’s edited volume Geopolitical Displacements (2011), which proposes a theoretical move away from space as a uniform property of cinema to place as a heterogeneous and very specific concrete element recorded by – or sensible in – a film. If films ‘take place’, Gorfinkel and Rhodes begin uncontroversially in their introduction, it is because they ‘take’ actual places and ‘archive’ them on celluloid, which is then projected and consumed in real places (the auditorium of the local film theatre, home DVD, etc). Endorsing Lefebvre’s emphasis on space as a social product, they then argue that place and cinema need to be viewed as double, that is, as both natural and constructed (ideologically encoded) (Rhodes and Gorfinkel 2011: x).16 Meanwhile, Peter Wollen places Augé’s distinction between place and ‘non-place’ in the particular context of the archetypal modernist, Walter Benjamin, who described identity and self-hood in the concrete terms of place. Watching a film for Benjamin is like moving through a building or a built environment: it requires a sense of direction, an attention to signs, symbols and meanings and an awareness of the purposes for which a place is intended and how it can be efficiently used. In fact, Benjamin conceived of two types of cinema: one that was essentially theatrical and demanded visual contemplation (so reproducing the static frame of the painting), the other ‘a cinema of montage which created a mobile space within which events were constantly reframed, extended and accelerated, approached and distanced’ (Wollen 2002: 200–1). In the light of Foucault’s key argument that classical space – namely geometrically unified Euclidian space and Renaissance perspective which presuppose a seemingly coherent, unified and self-sufficient Cartesian or transcendent subject – is no longer available to us,

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and that space now constitutes a source of radical uncertainty, film scholars have explored the usefulness of such terms as ‘heterotopia’ to account for certain forms of spatialisation in the cinema and its relation to temporality. Phil Powrie, for example, has defined heterotopia in relation to Varda’s nomadic cinema of drift and ‘gleaning’, where what matters is not where one is, or even where one is going, but the movement, transformation and becoming of the object and the subject (Powrie 2011).17 Elsewhere, Anthony Easthope has discussed spatialisation in certain key ‘pre-postmodern’ films of the 1960s, showing how Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which heralds a particular postmodern flatness and depthlessness, implies that several incompatible spaces may be juxtaposed simultaneously, and that opposed frames of representation may be presented together. In contrast to Godard’s contemporaneous yet firmly modernist Alphaville (1965), where spatiality still remains stable and knowable, however dystopian, Blow-up is much less confident in working out an attitude of utopia or dystopia towards the city, having lost much (though not all) of its nostalgia for a metaphysical dimension (the question of transcendental alienation barely figures in Alphaville) (Easthope 1997: 136–7).18 Of all the many new promising theoretical journeys undertaken recently in screenspace, however, one of the most fertile has been the analysis of cinema’s scaling and visual mapping of the world in terms of both architecture and cartography. In a fascinating study of the relations between film and architecture and their shared experiential ground, Juhani Pallasmaa develops a clear distinction between material (or purely physical) space and embodied or lived ‘existential’ space which combines mental and external space. Both cinema and architecture, Pallasmaa suggests, poeticise existential experience (see Pallasmaa 2007). Tom Conley even argues that the very act of watching a film is essentially a form of cartography (see Conley 2007), while Giuliana Bruno conceives of film as a product of the metropolis offering a new form of urban spatial desire. In her extraordinary interdisciplinary work of cultural history, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002), which weaves together film and architecture, travel, geography, domestic space and the art of mapping, Bruno argues that the haptic and architectural are indispensable in creating the sequence of effects that produces emotional responses in film audiences who are now no longer simply viewers. Let us stay with Bruno for a while, for she is attempting nothing less than a total psychogeography of cultural life in order to reach a new

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understanding of spatial experience as an ‘affective’ mapping that puts us in touch with mental landscapes and inner worlds. She uses the term ‘topophilia’ to describe ‘that form of cinematic discourse that exposes the labour of intimate geography – a love of place that works together with the residual texture of cineres. Such work is driven by a passion for mapping that is itself topophilically routed not on wholeness but on the fabric of lacunae’ (Bruno 2002: 354). Bruno explores the ‘emotion of motion’, taking as examples of the ‘architexture of film nomadism’ the work of Antonioni, notably the ‘sensing of space’ in La Notte (1961)) (ibid.: 95–9), and the visual ‘passages’ in the films of Akerman (ibid.: 95–103). She argues that one can view film as cartography in non-authoritarian and non-diagrammatic ways, referring to (among other Western artefacts) the early French cultural map, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte du pays de Tendre (1654), a true atlas of emotions which shows the link between cartography and emotion in the creation of a ‘tender geography’. Both a collaborative form of writing-as-mapping and a practice of cartography of intimate space, the Carte de Tendre made a geographical documentation of relational space in the haptic form of a map by which one could navigate interpersonal relations and locate women’s position in love and society (ibid.: 223). Bruno writes: ‘Cartography has activated a mental imaging of space in Western culture. The explosion of the cartographic impulse, bound up with the very politics of space, has defined the contours of the subject and forms of social organisation, and, in this way, has largely reshaped the sense of self in its relation to space. The impact of maps on selfhood is even more pronounced in forms of emotional cartography, as epitomised in the Carte de Tendre: through narrative forms, cartography has redesigned the very space of the subject. By providing a design for her spatial imagination, it has fashioned forms of spatial inner-subjectivity and intersubjectivity’ (ibid.: 235) (original emphasis). The exciting possibility Bruno raises here of a ‘space of the subject’ in the visual field, with both internal and external ramifications, is something we shall now take forward to the next section. The space of the cinematic subject Our travels in space theory, rapid as they have been, provide the necessary roots for a discussion of the material and relational experience of cinematic space in contemporary French cinema. In particular, Lefebvre’s founding idea of l’espace vécu as a socially created space

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encompassing a body’s everyday activities, as well as how a body senses and is shaped by the natural world, is crucial to appreciate fully the open multi-spaces of cinema and being. After all, we now live life increasingly like a film, i.e. spatio-temporally, and cannot conceive of existence outside space and time. How, therefore, may we conceive of subjectivity in the cinema in a way that takes direct account of the lived experience of spatial mobility and freedom during the multi-sensory viewing encounter, when we float intersubjectively between inside and outside, and all interrelated points of consciousness in between? Is there a cinematic ‘space of the subject’, and how might we define and theorise it? Within the study of film philosophy, Gilles Deleuze formalised a seismic change in cinematic space, perception and subjectivity in terms of the transformation of the ‘image-movement’ of silent and classical cinema, marked by an aesthetics of action and movement, into the ‘image-temps’ of modern (essentially post-war) cinema. ‘Duration’ (‘la durée’) – which Deleuze, following Bergson, saw as immanent to the universe – took over ‘action’, for cinema could no longer relay completed events (the result in large part of the crisis in representation following the Holocaust). The ‘event’ is now always in the very process of its creation., and duration comprises both past and present. The new cinema of the image-temps brought to the fore the site of an ‘open totality’ (Deleuze 1983: 277–8): ‘pure’ space enters the field of view, isolating certain events in certain areas of the frame, while allowing others to take place simultaneously elsewhere. No longer the silent enabler of clear, forward, linear movement, space has now the ability to change coordinates suddenly and without apparent justification. In such instances it may be said to change ‘faces’ and disguise itself in an array of masks or cloaks that render it both seductive and unfathomable. The result of this is an indeterminacy of location achieved through the proliferation of what Deleuze calls in his discussion of Antonioni’s archetypal modernism ‘any-space-whatever’ (‘un espace quelconque’). Space becomes disconnected from fixed points of origin and destination, so encouraging a concept of ‘betweenness’ in terms of identity and temporality.19 It means that film can now operate as a ‘spiritual automaton’, that is, as a machine that puts thought into contact with an Outside and is able to subvert the nature of the relations of representation normally existing in cinema between image and reality. In Deleuze’s sensation-producing abstract machine of affective intensities, visual and sound images collide into each other

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but cannot be reconciled into a single discourse. They are, in fact, ‘incompossible’ images (see Deleuze 1983 and 1985). Deleuze’s theories of space and time, as outlined in his two extraordinary tomes on cinema but also Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) (1980) (with Félix Guattari) and Le Pli (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) (1988), have been extremely influential in film and visual studies, though arguably have led to a glut of rather abstract and self-enclosed, normative ‘Deleuzian readings of …’. Yet while Deleuze brilliantly champions European modernist cinema (Godard, Duras, Resnais, Straub-Huillet, etc.) for its creation of pure audiovisual events not recuperable by narrative or character psychology, his intellectual priority is always on ‘pure time’ in the face of hostile forces like the cinematic frame which attempt to control the flows of time and ‘hold’ the spectator by means of the ideological processes of suture and plotting. For this reason, he privileges the processes of montage whereby the image itself becomes temporal through the editorial cut, and where the punctuations of montage determine the graphic, rhythmic, spatial and temporal relations within a film so as to create another form and level of cinematic time.20 In this kind of theoretical thinking, space will always remain, at best, ‘any-space-whatever’. Deleuze leaves us guessing where the contingent, real world and shared experience fit exactly – if at all – within such a temporally defined scheme of individual, motorised subjectivity and being. This larger question is of great theoretical relevance. In the field of feminist philosophy, Kathleen Kirby has recently attempted to reclaim the political value of experience by exploring precisely the distinctions and interrelations between internal and external spaces, discursive and concrete geographies, the psychic and the social. She proposes ‘the space of the subject’ as a valuable interpretative category to describe the structure of subjectivity, the space of the individual consciousness, and psychic space. For the space of subjectivity is not always metaphorical: different subjectivities have different spaces, and the space of one particular subject or group of subjects can change (Kirby 1996: 153). While recognising that theorists like de Certeau, Foucault and Deleuze attest to real, external space as a precipitate of the division between the inside and outside of the subject (ibid.: 8), she challenges their frequent conclusion that an individual reconfiguration of space may be adequate to transform the social landscape, proposing instead that such a transformation can only come from a more complete metamorphosis of the shared, extrapersonal realm

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(ibid.). Insisting on the materiality of existence and subjectivity, and keenly alert to issues of gender (the masculine, for example, ‘usually’ occupies a securely bounded and expansive space, while the feminine takes a porous, flexible form), Kirby asserts that space, because it brings the physical space of bodies and their circulation in man-made terrains together with the configuration of social categories and the shaping forces of representation, is a powerful medium and flexible enough term to inscribe subjectivity in all its complexity. Space, she writes, ‘provides precisely the substance we have been looking for to provide a multidimensional analysis of subjectivity, one that can be truly material without losing sight of the vitality of the inner life of individual subjects, that can incorporate experience into broader categories such as global economic relations, while maintaining the flexibility and the fluidity for imagining ways of transforming future subjects’ (ibid.: 150). Kirby concludes that what is needed now is to coordinate all the ‘spaces of the subject’ and to examine how all the other spaces – social, physical, geographical, semiotic – link up to the constitution of particular subjectivities: the texture of consciousness and how it is lived, the forms of relating available to it, its likelihood of seeking power, and its capacities for receptiveness and change. Kirby’s powerful and affirmative insights into space and subjectivity are particularly germane to a discussion of contemporary cinematic space, for they help us to comprehend fully that space is also a positive, labile and transformative state of subjectivity, and that the relationship between space and being is always experienced in the real present as a dynamic, relational process linking inside and outside, self and other. Kirby appeals at the end of her study to object relations psychoanalysis, in particular D.  W.  Winnicott’s concept of the ‘space of play’ as a subjective field which is eventually transposed on to the larger cultural field: if the social field is a place where subjects come together, interact, and occasionally leave transformed, the semiotic field is a place where boundaries get drawn, erased, shifted and reinscribed. We do not have to go down the particular path of object relations, however, to relate Kirby’s valuable conclusions to the material experience of viewing films, for cinema works at both an existential and aesthetic level. One potential model for formalising a spatial aesthetic in film based around the space of the subject as we are now defining it is provided by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit with their theory of the ‘aesthetic subject’. The fundamental claim of Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), their

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detailed study of Godard’s canonic Le Mépris/Contempt (1963), Pedro Almodóvar’s All About my Mother (1999), and Terrence Malick’s luminous war film The Thin Red Line (1998), is that the aesthetic subject, while it both produces and is produced by works of art, is a mode of relational being that exceeds the cultural province of art and embodies truths of being. In other words, ‘[a]rt diagrams universal relationality’ (Bersani 2010b: 142). For Bersani and Dutoit, who refer back to Freud’s The Ego and the Id, the self is created through the interiorisation of the relational field that is defined for the infant through its sensory interactions with its environment.21 Subjectivity is thus always a matter of our experience of space (that is, of our exchanges with the world) and the perceptual processes involved. As Bersani puts it succinctly elsewhere: Questions of identity are inseparable from questions about how we relate to both the human and the inhuman world. Subjectivity is inherently relational. What we are is largely a function of how we connect to the world. The tracing of these connections – perceptual, psychic, communal – is inescapably the tracing of formal mobilities, of the ‘shape’ of how we position ourselves both physically and psychically in the world (Bersani 2010: x)

To see the world is thus to look with it, not at it. Hence, art, for Bersani and Dutoit, becomes a privileged ‘place’ to learn to think with the phenomenal world, creating the possibility for an ‘aesthetic subjectivity that eschews psychologically motivated communication and replaces such communication with families of form’ (Bersani 2010b: 146–7). In the ascetic terms proposed by Bersani and Dutoit, we need to reimagine the relationship between subjectivity and the world and be aware of the patterns of visual correspondence between human and non-human life. Ontological relatedness translates as formal correspondences that manifest a solidarity of being in the universe, and the aesthetic is a relation to the world that ‘escapes’ the mastery of understanding. This is already beginning to sound rather abstract. Let us see how the central idea here of cinema as a locus of ontological relations always facing outwards to the world translates in concrete terms. In their analysis of Le Mépris, Bersani and Dutoit claim that the psychic drama and claustrophobic self-absorption of the tragic couple of Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille (Brigitte Bardot) is such that nature is ‘injured’ by human neurosis and the characters’ inability to see. Yet the film’s account of doomed love is also displaced by images of nature as a

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space of almost blank appearances that lie beyond all human desire and psychological entanglements. Here is how Bersani and Dutoit present the relations between human desire and external space: Neurotic desire – which may be a tautology – creates voids in space. The lack inherent in the desire that at once separates and cements the passionate couple is replicated by spatial breaks at those points where, as it were, their bodies tear into space. Space becomes discontinuous when it is invaded by these foreign bodies whose inner habitat has the false extensibility of a purely psychic space […] The loss or the violation of space is the loss of the filmic itself. The tragedy of the modern couple’s claustrophobic self-absorption is its destructive effect on what surround them – or, more exactly, on the filmmaker’s ability to compose a relatedness between the human and the non-human. Camille and Paul sin against the cinemascopic; to film them, perhaps only the close-up would be entirely appropriate. (Bersani and Dutoit: 2004: 44–8) (original emphasis)

The central idea articulated here that reaching out to space is also reaching out to the other, and that the loss of space is also the loss of the filmic itself, is a crucial one. If only Paul and Camille had allowed themselves to be seduced into the ‘openness of the imaginary’, lament Bersani and Dutoit, for this could have defined a new relation to space, and especially the ‘spaces of nature’ (ibid.: 68). What the lovers – and the viewer – need to do is to lose our crippling ‘expressiveness’ so as to move within nature, more as appearances registering, and responding to the call of, other appearances (ibid.: 70). Bersani and Dutoit posit a ‘lightness of imaginary being’ and suggest that every body has potentially a limitless extensibility in both space and time, and that such connections are universally immanent. In Le Mépris’s last shot of blue water and sky, we obtain a sense of nature in wide-shot as pure appearance. Here, finally, all subjects – human agitation and narrative – are left behind (ibid.: 68–9). Everything is now illuminated by a light from within the elements unencumbered by man’s ‘expressive being’, and no longer darkened by the demand of love, suggesting we may be ready to receive something like splendour and radiance (ibid.: 70).22 Bersani and Dutoit conclude on this poetic note of open possibility and theoretical promise. What is at stake here is a purely potential being – or a potentiality that persists in and beyond all realised being – and also a redefinition of the aesthetic. For Bersani and Dutoit, a sign of the aesthetic is precisely formal irresolution. In art, images, sounds, words communicate

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indiscriminately with one another; only the non-aesthetic is formally fixed and readable. For this to happen, we need to exert our spatial imagination and be actively receptive to the correspondences of the world, which means engendering an ethical and less possessive way of relating to the world – at the risk even of being ‘dispersed’ or ‘shattered’ by these correspondences. To be open to the world is a measure of our flexibility, of the extensibility of being: ‘[i]mmanent in every subject is its similitudes with other subjects (and other objects) – similitudes that are illuminated, that “shine” into visibility when those others intersect with the subject’s spatial or temporal trajectories’ (Bersani and Dutoit 2004: 8–9). Writing in particular about Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Bersani and Dutoit argue that such a possibility is linked to the very medium of film and specifically its perceptual aesthetic which ‘registers not the real world “as it is”, but rather a positioning in a real world. The images of film propose relational modes, which means that film can’t help but work within the field of ethics’ (ibid.: 175) (original emphasis). The final sequence of the film, which draws away dramatically from the psychoanalytical to propose a mode of open, receptive viewing and a greater appreciation of the possibility of simply existing in the world, illustrates exactly Bersani and Dutoit’s notion of the aesthetic subject as engaged in a process of expansive or ‘impersonal’ narcissism (defined as loving the other’s potential self), where what is experienced is a process of becoming, or what they conceptualise in richly suggestive terms as ‘evolving affinities of virtual being’. The liberating lesson of Bersani and Dutoit’s rigorous, close reading of film is that we are always perceptually implicated in cinema as ‘aesthetic subjects’ and engaged in a sensory collaboration with forms and the materiality of being. To privilege what is unknowingly evolving as potential between the subject and the other, or between the subject and the world, represents a prioritising of being over knowledge, or a displacement from the search for psychic truth (about the self) to an experience – and experiment – in relational transformation. Bersani and Dutoit underline brilliantly that the cinematic is never purely visual but also simultaneously invisible, aural and haptic, concrete and abstract, and thus can take us to entirely new spaces (affective, aesthetic, philosophical, intellectual) for reassessing and challenging the core determinants of human existence. The idea that the only cinematic truth is relational, and indeed that all is positionality and relationality, is vital for any notion

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of cinematic space and subjectivity as fluid and open. And it means that spatial strategies in film are always strategies of existence. As Klaus Ottmann has expressed it in a discussion of subjectivity in Akerman: her (Akerman’s) camera pushes existential questions on the human condition ‘toward a new extreme humanism: the shameless pursuit of subjectivity, a passionate heroism without irony, and radical strategies of Being’ (Ottmann 2008: 39). I wish at this point to return to Manny Farber with whom we began, since he was particularly focused on spatial strategies in film. For Farber, space was always both a physical and psychological entity, and he consistently honed in on instances of what he called paradoxically ‘negative space’ in narrative cinema. In the case of the deep focus innovations of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), which magnified the size of the human figures and faces and exaggerated their importance ‘to a point where the deep space between them seemed to have been negated’ (Farber 1998: 81), the result was a squeezing out and effective denial of visual and external space. Yet Farber also employed the concept of ‘negative space’ in other, more figurative ways to talk about cinematic practice in general. Here is his account of negative space, which I cite in full: Negative space, the command of experience which an artist can set resounding within a film, is a sense of terrain created partly by the audience’s imagination and partly by camera-actors-director … Negative space assumes the director testing himself as an intelligence against what appears on screen, so that there is a murmur of poetic action enlarging the terrain of the film, giving the scene an extra-objective breadth. It has to do with flux, movement, and air; always the sense of an artist knowing where he’s at: a movie filled with negative space is always a textural work throbbing with acuity. (Farber 1998: 9–10).

What Farber is voicing here, like Bersani and Dutoit, is more than a simple plea for imaginative collaboration or ‘co-writing’ between film and viewer. It is rather a sense that space in cinema is never just visual (or aural or haptic), but a permanently shifting, inter-cinematic force-field of competing drives, intentions, and projections – however conscious or unconscious, real or projected – between film, spectator, actor and author-director. Farber asks us to consider film simultaneously in terms both of the represented and the invisible in a kind of continually expanding hors-champ, so that we may better engage with the shared experience of the world beyond. He is suggesting, in fact, that we need to approach cinematic space in the broadest possible

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terms, by opening it up to general existential and aesthetic issues such as human subjectivity and experience, memory and perception. Yet these issues are, of course, necessarily linked to the wider frameworks of film reception which need to be factored into any complete account of the cinematic experience. This raises, in turn, important questions of a social, cultural, historical and political nature that a more formally based model of analysis, even one as compelling and sophisticated as that of Bersani and Dutoit, is at potential risk of downplaying or even eliding.23 Space and place in French cinema: a tradition The existential and aesthetic issues related to cinematic space that we have been tracing become extremely pertinent and pressing within the particular context of French cinema which has always been preoccupied with issues of spatial identity and difference. For with its strong realist strands, French cinema has from the outset been clearly demarcated and mapped out in terms of the representation of space. From the early 1895 silent shorts of Louis Lumière revealing two separate worlds – the public world of his factory and workers and the private world of his domestic bourgeois life – French cinema has consistently codified place in terms of origin and class as an index of identity. With the influx of immigrants from France’s former colonies into the Hexagon during the 1960s, this has now been extended to – and arguably supplanted by – questions of race and ethnicity. The pioneering scholarship of Carrie Tarr and Susan Hayward among others has foregrounded space as territory and as a marker of identity in cinema, suggesting persuasively that as a medium of space cinema is uniquely equipped to present social issues in their most concrete form, notably the spatial dislocation of excluded identities and the permanent tensions between the local, national and global (see Tarr 2005 and Hayward 1993). In his short preface to the 2009 number of Yale French Studies (115) entitled New Spaces for French and Francophone Cinema, the editor James F. Austin draws on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of social space to suggest correctly that if each mode of production or each hegemonic force provides its own social space, then reconfiguring space in French cinema may be one means to effect a fundamentally economic and political change (Austin 2009: 3). It is an obvious but essential fact that, perhaps more than any other national film tradition, French cinema also exists as a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense of the term (see

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Nora 1984–9), and has always enjoyed a unique status within modern French society and culture. The distinctive elements of French film culture and production – the avance sur recettes, auteurism and the cinéma d’art et d’essai, its star system, ciné-clubs, popular forms like comedy and the polar, etc. – have all contributed during the evolution of French cinema to assure its symbolic and mythological place within French culture and its privileged location within a complex cultural and political imaginary.24 Moreover, although always confronting crisis, most often financial, the French film industry still retains enormous cultural capital and prestige. During the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) agreements of the early 1990s, for example, cinema became a potent symbol and weapon in France’s campaign to resist the encroaching spaces of globalisation by successfully invoking ‘l’exception culturelle’. French cinema also possesses sufficient power to help advance the forces of social progress. This was proved recently by Rachid Bouchareb’s didactic, big-budget film, Indigènes/Days of Glory (2006), which addressed the long-forgotten history of the North African soldiers fighting for the Republic during the Second World War, and had the rare distinction of reversing the State’s racist policy on the allocation of war pensions.25 Central, of course, to the representation of space in French cinema has been the long tradition of representing and projecting Paris as the modern city with its instantly recognisable topography and modernist iconography. This has consolidated the already overdetermined symbolic space of the capital as a mythmaking machine: Paris as revolutionary, bourgeois, romantic, modern, etc. Paris’s hold on French filmmakers continues to be immense, reflecting the fact that the French State has consistently sought to reinforce a narrative of nationhood that binds citizen and territory. Geographical variety is celebrated, while cultural and economic hegemony is exercised by the State and centralised in the capital. This longstanding process in the formation of national identity has survived the widespread push for regionalisation and even devolution in the wake of May ’68. It is impossible here to sum up adequately the extensive representation of Parisian geography in French cinema, from the Quartier Latin and Seine to the bas-fonds of Belleville, Montmartre and the Canal St-Martin – part of the rich urban folklore of working-class Paris stretching to the ‘zones’ or no-man’s-land on the fringes of the city. Much excellent critical work has been produced reflecting Paris’s dominance within considerations of cinema as a spatial art: from early avant-garde experimentation and

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the silent crime serials of Louis Feuillade to the post-war movement of the New Wave, when filmmakers took to the streets and began to rechart Paris with hand-held cameras and direct sound, followed by the equally Paris-centric cinéma du look of the 1980s. Indeed, the period of modernism in French cinema is directly linked to the capital, emblem of modernity and generator of new speeds and rhythms, as well as of increasing social problems (intensive prostitution, zones of poverty, homelessness, depression, etc.). As Susan Hayward has shown, cinema represents Paris as a system of shifting signs and narratives that reveal both the imagined city in the form of an overexposed, ‘too visibilised’ cinematic city (including the repressed city of our imaginings), and the ‘real city’ too often invisibilised and underexposed (a corporeality linked to a fragmented social existentiality yet also to resistance) (Hayward 2000). In the same vein, Raynalle Udris has examined the visual anatomy of spatial metaphors of homelessness, bridges and wanderings in recent works like Les Amants du Pont-Neuf/The Lovers on the Bridge (1992) and Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits Fauves/Savage Nights (1990), which interrogate both the city’s undersides and central ‘void’ and attempt in various ways to deconstruct the symbolic map of Paris, whether by confronting the centenary of the founding of the Republic with contemporary marginality in the epicentre of the capital, or, in the case of the latter, blurring the distinctions between homosexually and heterosexually defined spaces in the carnal underbelly of Paris (see Udris 2000: 93).26 So great has been the continuing pull of the capital on French filmmakers that it has led Hayward and others to suggest that landscape does not really feature in French cinema, with notable exceptions like Marcel Pagnol’s ‘Marseilles trilogy’ (Marius (1931), Fanny (1929), César (1936)) and Manon des Sources (1952), or Robert Bresson’s severe tales of rural life such as Mouchette (1967) (see Hayward 2010: 163). Hayward is no doubt overstating the case for particular effect, for there are a number of key filmmakers who have specialised in other forms of landscape, including Éric Rohmer (the coast and seaside as well as Paris’s satellite new towns), Varda and François Ozon (the beach as liminal space),27 and André Téchiné who moves consistently between two clearly defined and opposed areas: Paris and the the rural south-west of his childhood (cf. Les Roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds (1994)). There also exists in France a long documentary tradition of anthropological and ethnographic cinema, developed notably by Jean Rouch in pioneering works such as the cinéma-vérité study, Chronique

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d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (1960) (filmed with the sociologist Edgar Morin), and extended more recently by Nicolas Philibert’s documentary Être et Avoir (2000) about a teacher in a small school in rural France, or la France profonde (the Puy de Dôme) (followed in 2008 by his even more remarkable Retour en Normandie), Raymond Depardon’s Modern Life (2008), the third part of his trilogy about peasant life, Profils paysans, and Luc Moullet’s astonishing La Terre de la Folie/Earth Madness (2009), a minute study of terrain (the southern Alps) that becomes also a study of local psychic phenomena. Yet for the last forty years the most contested terrain within French cinema has not actually been the city of Paris, nor indeed the provinces and la France profonde, but rather the ‘non-space’ of the banlieue. Like French culture in general, French cinema has become increasingly haunted and obsessed by the distinction between Paris as the capital (with all that connotes of enlightened society and culture) and the indeterminate and indiscriminate banlieue, a by-word for social alienation experienced by those banished from the centre (literally the ‘ban-lieue’),28 above all the second and now third generation of immigrants from France’s former colonies in North and West Africa and the French Overseas Departments and Territories (DOM-TOM) such as the French Antilles. In French society and culture space is politics, and the fixed opposition between the capital as polis and the banlieue often seems a fatalistic, if not fatal, binary. The generally deprived banlieue, especially on the capital’s eastern side (its so-called political ‘red belt’), forms an ‘unreadable’, alternative Paris that escapes the well-worn myths of the city and is mapped on to the former distinction between the shanty towns or bidonvilles that mushroomed on the urban periphery during the 1950s and 1960s and the straight, nineteenth-century lines of Haussmannian perfection in the centre.29 The at once geographically and socially marginalised inhabitants of the banlieue, of which Godard gave an early premonition in his stunning account of centralist urban and social planning in Paris under De Gaulle’s presidency, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle/Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966) (shot in the vast new complexes of La Courneuve), have been forced to cope with poor housing conditions, a faltering education system, reduced chances of vocational training and high rates of unemployment. As Adrian Fielder puts it well in his study of emblematic banlieue films such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine/Hate (1995), shot in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, ‘[t]his “anti-Paris” is depicted not as some liberating ontological essence in

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which to immerse oneself in order to better represent it, but rather as a place that doesn’t matter … in which marginalised human subjects are nevertheless endeavouring to reinvent communal and cinematic spaces’ (Fielder 2001: 280).30 The banlieue, which exists equally on the margins of most of France’s large cities, has become an expanding and visually mutating zone of both fear and excitement in the French cultural imaginary: a space of projection of social malaise, disorder and potential violence, or what Stephen Barber calls a ‘European breakdown zone’.31 In Yolande Zauberman’s Clubbed to Death (1997), a young woman, Lola (Élodie Bouchez) falls asleep on a bus in central Paris and ends up on the outskirts in a wasteland of abandoned buildings used as techno-music nightclubs where Arab and black immigrants live and party (she is soon engulfed by the ambient sensuality of rave culture and its aura of easy drugs and music). The more extreme and deliberately shocking Baise-moi (2000) by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, where explicit pornographic sequences intersect with a murderous revenge narrative, displays a series of alienating, peripheral zones filmed in the banlieue as an extra-European space infused by the cultures of North Africa. A recent sign that the divide between the two spaces of the bourgeois city and the impoverished multicultural ghetto may be more meaningfully bridged within French cinema is provided by Éric Tolédano and Olivier Nakache’s feel-good buddy movie Intouchables (2011), a mainstream comedy based on a true story about an older white, disabled Parisian aristocrat who forms a close relationship with his young, black minder and home-help, a native of the banlieue just out of prison. While reproducing many of the standard clichés about Old France and its young, multiracial and dangerous Other, the film has nonetheless enjoyed unparalleled commercial success in France and may usher the beginning of a new, more open and original approach to the subject in other filmic genres. Since the 1980s, however, and initially on the far margins of the French film industry, a growing number of filmmakers have been engaging directly with a transnational, multicultural space that encompasses the metropolitan centre, immigrant suburb and former colony. I am referring to Maghrebi-French (beur) cinema which, beginning with Mehdi Charef’s groundbreaking Le Thé au harem d’Archimède/Tea in the Harem (1985), has sought to represent space as a primary means of constructing identity, and, by challenging the symbolic spaces of French society and culture, help define the

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new spaces of postcolonial France. The politics of diasporic identity is spatially encoded in the beur genre, and the locale of the cité powerfully resists any crude or naive attempt at integration or assimilation within Republican space. Moreover, for young beurs trying to find their own bearings in French society, space is an all-too-literal metaphor of social place and status.32 Tarr in Reframing Difference (2005) and Will Higbee in a series of prominent articles (see Higbee 2001a,b and 2007) have examined at length how difference of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and age is represented spatially in beur cinema, and how the geography of place is a pivotal site for debates in France about citizenship and social, cultural and racial identity.33 More recently, film narratives of displacement have addressed the problematic transcultural experiences of those of both Maghrebi and West African descent in France, whether by exploring present-day Paris as itself a multi-layered, porous, transnational space, or by crossing the Mediterranean to North Africa in the return narratives of the 2000s (see Tarr 2007a and Higbee 2012).34 The most successful socially committed films that explore the relationship between geography and social identity, and thus lend themselves well to spatial analysis, are precisely those that work explicitly on the fault-lines of the Republic and emphasise fracture and porosity, thereby putting directly into question the traditional, congealed boundaries and presuppositions of Republican space. In the strict terms of political cinema, Martin O’Shaughnessy has described how new, oppositional political forms and strategies, including an ‘aesthetics of the fragment’ and the use of motifs borrowed from banlieue cinema and even melodrama, offer the chance to restore eloquence and visibility to socio-political struggle, and with it new ways at once to configure the real, restore ethical agency, and formulate resistance to spatial dislocation (O’Shaughnessy 2008: 180–2). Certainly, within the expanded, complex map of spatial struggle and difference in French cinema, any simple approach to Paris as integrated and homogenous – whether Christophe Honoré’s big-star Dans Paris/In Paris (2006), which rehearses the familiar tics of intimate, Paris-centred bourgeois drama while seeking to resurrect the heady days of the New Wave, or Eugène Green’s immaculate Le Pont des Arts (2004), set in the recent past of 1979–80 and visualising a romantic, almost exclusively white and heterosexual ‘readable’ Paris – seems at best nostalgic and woefully anachronistic, and at worst a politically dubious flight into the realms of fantasy.

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Space and being in contemporary French Cinema How, now, can we connect the two very different sets of critical concerns and approaches to film we have outlined: on the one hand a general theoretical and aesthetic focus on cinematic space, subjectivity and being within cinema; on the other the more socially, culturally and politically defined questions of spatial difference and identity specific to the French cinematic tradition? That is to say, how we might bridge the apparent gap between a phenomenologically sensitive exploration of the spectatorial experience of spatial and sensory perception, and a thematically guided analysis of a film’s social, cultural and political subtexts? It is an underlying parti pris of this book that there is no need to separate these two distinct approaches, and indeed that to do so would be counterproductive and a potential impoverishment of the protean richness and profusion of cinematic space which demands, for the reasons stated, a fluid, flexible and multi-levelled critical approach. Sustained reflection on the inherent transmutability of space in cinema inspires an ever-greater opening up of the fields and boundaries of theory. Moreover, if, as Bersani and Dutoit propose, we look filmically ‘with’ the phenomenal world, we will need to be fully alert to its intricacies of spatial form, dimension and valency. To maintain these two broad lines of spatial enquiry in productive, mutual tension will constitute in itself an experience of difference and relationality that defines the nature of space in cinema. The five contemporary French filmmakers explored in Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema – Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche and Claire Denis – address the specific effects of reality and lived experience on the human perception of space and time at the present post-industrial and postcolonial juncture. Although employing a highly diverse range of methods and styles, from the generally accessible and mainstream (Cantet, Kechiche, Guédiguian) to the more self-consciously poetic and experimental (Dumont, Denis), they all treat space in impressively concrete terms, whatever their particular investment in geographical setting and whatever cinematic genres they adopt and remould. Indeed, what distinguishes and unites these five contrasting auteurs, and what will provide this study with conceptual shape and cohesion, is their profound commitment to exploring different types of external space and topography, including rural and natural landscape (Dumont), the city as metropolis (Guédiguian), the workplace (and its converse)

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(Cantet), marginal sites of social integration and cultural assimilation (Kechiche), and border zones of postcolonial relations and kinship (Denis). We can be more precise: northern France and the Californian desert (Dumont), the metropolitan space of Marseilles, with occasional sorties to Paris, provincial France and Armenia (Guédiguian), a factory in Limoges, the Rhône-Alpes countryside, the tourist beaches of Haiti and an inner-city Paris school (Cantet),  the immigrant/beur  areas of Paris, the banlieue and a Mediterranean sea-port (Kechiche), and, in the case of Denis, transnational space tout court, anywhere from the Jura to Korea, Tahiti, Cameroon, Djibouti and Paris, resulting in one of the most far-reaching engagements with cinematic space in contemporary world cinema. The relationship to Paris in these films, if it exists at all, may be defined as tangential and transversal rather than as direct or centred. This could be construed as a reactionary move – i.e. a shift away from Paris as the capital of French and European imagination and theoretical knowledge (or, to cite Lefebvre, Paris as a chaotic and monstrous tangle). Yet what is crucial is that the transitional zones and mobile spaces these films transport us to are conceived and presented as falling outside the traditional conceptual orbit and mythological reach of Paris as the capital. As the film critic René Prédal suggests when he notes that the cinematic representation of the North, like that of other regions, offsets an emphasis on language characteristic of Paris-based bourgeois films due to a renewed focus on behaviour and the body (Prédal 2002: 118), this has the potential to open up new aesthetic space. For this reason, it may constitute a major critical gain. The five directors I have chosen share a set of interconnecting spatial themes and concerns: space as human habitat and source of human identity and intimacy; the materiality of space linked to human desires and bodily sensations; the influence of the physical environment on human behaviour; the relationship between space, place and subjectivity; the design and mapping of geophysical space by the agents of power and ideology; space as a primary vector of social and cultural memory; and the relations between the local, national and global. All the films under discussion are eminently ‘social’ films, even if they do not always conform to the standard codes of social realism, and examine at close range the play of human behaviour on the surfaces of external reality. Further, they raise in new and original ways potent questions about relationality, namely how we relate to others in shared settings, and, more broadly, how we perceive and represent the otherness of the world and external space. What matters in these

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films is not what we think we know of the world (an epistemological enquiry), but rather how we function within the world existentially, ontologically and aesthetically. They therefore invite us to reflect directly on the present and future orientation of the human condition, its prevailing patterns and drifts, especially in a country like France riven by deep social fractures and suffering from an acute decline in political hope and identity. Each chapter devoted to an individual filmmaker is proposed as a case study. It explores a distinctive metaphorics of space and visual rhetoric by focusing on the defining features of form and style. In addition to common areas of formal enquiry – movement versus stasis, the function of the hors-champ, sound and the human voice, colour and touch, citation and intertextuality – I will pay particular attention to the spatial configurations of consciousness (inner and outer, subjective and objective) within the cinematic field. I will also foreground the role and place of the real or implied viewer in the present tense of the viewing encounter and the implications of spectatorial affect. This will create a rolling map of different topographies and tonalities encompassing interrelated concerns about the nature and deployment of cinematic space, whether formulated in primarily visual terms as landscape and cityscape or instead as soundscape and voicescape, or indeed as different kinds of scape simultaneously. A central, recurring issue will be the formal act of framing, for not only does this raise issues of positionality (of inclusion and exclusion), but also it highlights the relations between physical, geopolitical reality and ‘illusory’ cinematic space. As O’Rawe argues, all that is framed is essentially unreal: every frame is a framed fragment of perceived reality and marked by a trace or memory of the real it has left in its wake. Moreover, if the conventional frame determines point of view, confirms its subject, and affirms the ontological order of things, by contrast ‘deframing’ creates a distortion of perspective or imbalance of composition that compels the eye to encounter an alternative image (see O’Rawe 2011). Hence, how the world is spatially deframed and reframed via mobile framing, even to the point of being unframed, is a crucial question that relates directly to our experience and perception of reality. I will analyse to what extent the major films of each director project the world anew, that is, loosened from standard cinematic, cultural and ideological moorings, and conducive to potential new perceptions, affectivities and subjectivities. My overall aim will be to establish what makes each director’s strategies of negotiating cinematic space – understood now

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in its most capacious sense – powerful, progressive and unique. As we shall see, a sustained authorial engagement with the issues of space and subjectivity necessarily entails a parallel experimentation with modes of duration and temporality. Chapter 2, the longest, introduces some of the key issues in the book regarding spatial representation and our relationship to the external world. It concentrates on the climactic scenes in Dumont’s films which work the faultlines between land and landscape and continually cross the borders between the internal subjective and the external objective. Explicitly undermining the prerequisites of genre (from police procedural to horror and war film), Dumont’s cinema engages directly with the immanence of natural forms, whether rural or wild. Further, his characters interiorise the landscape via an almost ritualistic use of point-of-view and reverse-field shot constructions. Hence, a cinema that seems to be so much about the external world is also inexorably centred on the subjective human gaze. The dilemma posed is whether such intensely anthropocentric ‘topographies of being’ (Dumont) constitute a positive looking with the world, and what role the viewer plays exactly in these acutely charged mental dramas. Chapter 3 interrogates Guédiguian’s obsessive portrayal of one particular city, Marseilles. Focusing in particular on his sustained use of tracking and panning shots, both horizontal and vertical, which would appear to provide a wide-angle view of the metropolis and an all-embracing ‘open’ frame, I will ask to what degree Marseilles constitutes a real and active presence in his work, and whether it figures more as a mythical projection and narrative backdrop on account of a spatial rhetoric inflected by nostalgia for a now lost history of political idealism and commitment. I will examine, too, whether Guédiguian’s highly defined spatial strategies break out of their formal grid when he enters other cities and regions. In attempting to answer these related questions, the chapter considers cinema’s relation to urbanscape and, more generally, the limits and limitations of any attempt to map symbolically a real place and its human habitat. Chapter 4 enters the spaces of work and non-work in Cantet’s films and asks what constitutes space and place within the contemporary field of social relations. In what appear rigorously objective, documentarystyle films, though with occasional swerves to melodrama, virtually everything – from identity to individual desire, from work to family crisis – is conveyed by Cantet in primarily spatial terms. By analysing specifically his concerted approach to framing and off-screen sound, I

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will determine how mobile and free the cinematic frame becomes in his work, and whether cinematic space is ultimately able to obviate and potentially escape the closed, ideological frame of exclusion in order to render present those who are normally disenfranchised from the networks of representation. Chapter 5 engages with cultural space as the site of social integration and métissage in the work of Kechiche who operates from within the context of France’s marginal and diasporic communities while always in dialogue with the white mainstream in recognisable, highly contested urban locales. Focusing on Kechiche’s strategies of ellipsis, performance, and ‘free’ sound in language and music, I show how Kechiche frames and ‘deframes’ the culturally loaded screenspaces which he elaborates in largely objective terms. The chapter will assess to what degree cinematic space can be hybridised textually, and whether it is able to function as a new and radical kind of cultural interface and communal site for creative and political transformation. Chapter 6 examines the continually shifting points of passage between inside and outside, objective and subjective, in the restless flux of Denis’s film work that crosses a continually expanding spectrum of physical and formal spaces, from remote natural landscapes to intimate passages of intertextual ‘grafting’. Moving always self-reflexively through multiple spaces of influence (filmic, literary, theoretical, philosophical), Denis’s cinema of diaspora brings together many of the spatial concerns explored in the study, not simply in the way contemporary space is represented as fundamentally postcolonial and relational, but also in the interdisciplinary manner she conceives of a collective cinematic unconscious. The chapter will establish whether the poetic and erotic transtextual desire created in her work offers the viewer access to new thresholds of aesthetic being, and, if so, whether existence might ultimately be seen as itself a form of radical, intersubjective ‘grafting’ that stretches beyond what I will call the ‘frame of the Other’. I would like in closing to turn finally to Gaston Bachelard and specifically his remarkable 1958 study, The Poetics of Space, a beautiful, and highly personal, philosophical and aesthetic account of the intimacies of ‘ordinary spaces’ – or what he called beguilingly ‘the quite simple images of felicitous space’ (Bachelard 1994: xxxv) (original emphasis). At the end of a chapter entitled ‘The dialectics of outside and inside’, Bachelard laments how Balzac’s corrections to a paragraph of the final manuscript of his 1832 novel Louis Lambert lost its ‘tonalisation’ of

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being, and in the process returned it to a mode of ‘indifferent space’. Here are Bachelard’s enlightening comments which I cite in their entirety: In an early version of Louis Lambert, we read: ‘When he used his entire strength, he grew unaware, as it were, of his physical life, and only existed through the all-powerful play of his interior organs, the range of which he constantly maintained and, according to his own admirable expression, he made space withdraw before his advance’. In the final version, we read simply: ‘He left space, as he said, behind him’. What a difference between these two movements of expression! What decline of power of being faced with space, between the first and second forms! In fact, one is puzzled that Balzac should have made such a correction. He returned, in other words, to ‘indifferent space’. In a meditation on the subject of being, one usually puts space between parentheses, in other words, one leaves space ‘behind one’. As a sign of the lost ‘tonalisation’ of being, it should be noted that ‘admiration’ subsided. The second mode of expression is no longer, according to the author’s own admission, admirable. Because it really was admirable, this power to make space withdraw, to put space, all space, outside, in order that meditating being might be free to think. (Bachelard 1994: 231) (original emphasis)

Keeping Bachelard’s vivid sense of the force and mystery of space to the fore, this study will aim to maximise the reverberations and possibilities of cinematic space and celebrate its potential for mediating and meditating being. Contemporary French cinema challenges us to be at our most open and alive – our most subtle and spacious – in order to capture what cinematic space reveals about the medium of film, contemporary society and culture, and our place in the world. Notes 1 Working on the term ‘acousmatic’ originally coined by Pierre Schaeffer, Chion develops the idea in explicitly spatial terms as a set of diagrams with zones and borders. See Schaeffer 1966 and Chion 1990. 2 Yacavone notes that in his often forgotten 1945 lecture, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, Merleau-Ponty argued forcefully that film was founded on the camera’s ability to convey – and the viewer’s ability to apprehend – those direct ‘signs’ where signified and signifier are conjoined within the context of a cinematic representation which shows that ‘what is inside is also outside’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 58–9). 3 For a discussion of the erotics of cinematic space in Barthes, see Williams 1998.

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4 I am thinking in particular of the work of Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Pierre Oudart, who, along with Christian Metz, came under the philosophical influence of Louis Althusser and, in the newly politicised Cahiers du cinéma, attacked all conventional understandings of the cinematic apparatus through the optic of ideology in order to uncover what Althusser called ‘the internal shadows of exclusion’ (the ‘unsaid’ of history, sexuality, etc.). 5 A central part of Lefebvre’s project is to establish how rhythmic temporalities – beneficent rhythms, including cyclical time, which blend the heterogeneous array of everyday experience into some sort of homogeneity – subsist within the linear time of modern industrial society, and the compressed time of the bureaucratic world. Rhythm is a term used to designate a body’s movement in (and occupation of) space. It is the body’s (arhythmic) movements within a territory – and its facilitation of certain movements – that Lefebvre identifies as a unique rhythm. ‘Rythmanalysis’ refers to the experiences of space in which a body is always the primary mediator and repository of sensations (e.g. sweating, gesticulating, etc.). See Lefebvre 1992. 6 Such focus on the body looks ahead, of course, to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as the practice of everyday life, where the body is a kind of mnemonic device upon which culture is habitually inscribed. Bourdieu addresses the issue of the field as an active productive space – one that is not simply ascriptive but also and intrinsically temporal (Bourdieu 1990: 52–79). He examines, for example, the dialogic relationship between space and the body in the Kabyle house, where the body enacts movement and displacement in space, and space structures bodily practice (ibid.). 7 In a careful and subtle exposition of his argument, Augé makes very clear the different valencies and significations of ‘place’ in his own anthropological theory from the distinctions made by de Certeau between ‘place’ and ‘space’, arguing even that ‘the traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of the non-place’ (see Augé 1995: 75–115; 86). We might compare Augé’s thoughts with Paul Virilio’s portentous warnings about geopolitical space which, he argues, has been eclipsed by a ‘chronopolitics’ or ‘politics of time’. Space is now in electronics (i.e. the ‘telepresence’ offered by information highways), and this ‘non-place’ has supplanted the value of place. Due to active machinic optics, we are part of the industrialisation of the ‘non-gaze’, or sightless, virtualised vision. The realities of space and time thus become relativities between phenomena illuminated (or not) by transparent lighting effects. In this ‘lumino-centrism’, speed ‘subliminalises’ much of human vision and normal consciousness, and the new world time is one of chronostrategic proximity. See Virilio 1980 and 1997. 8 ‘[S]ortes d’utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements

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réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l’on peut trouver à l’intérieur de la culture, sont à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés.’ 9 In a short but fascinating study of the evolution of space and ‘spacing’ (espacement) as a critical concept and practice in French theory since the late 1960s, Verena Andermatt Conley posits correctly that what was initially perceived as a loss of existential space (i.e. spatial theory where space tends to be a function of time) under the impact of the State (consumerism, bureaucracy, the media, etc.) was due, above all, to globalisation. Conley then considers the very real spatial transformations in French society produced by an influx of immigrants and their descendants, where the right to a minimal existential territory (and thus everyday life) within the nation-state requires an active citizenship (as explored in the current work of Bruno Latour and Étienne Balibar). See Andermatt Conley 2010. 10 For a valuable introduction to the issues of modern versus postmodern space, see Clarke 1997: 1–18, where Clarke emphasises that modernity wanted to construct intellectually, through a distribution of knowledge, a clearly ordered, bounded and mappable cognitive space (ibid.: 3). Modernity colonised the social and physical spaces of pre-modern society by an abstract space – in the modern city there was a sense of the ephemeral and fragmentary. The world was experienced as a stranger – a universal strangehood – and it was here that the virtual presence of the cinema was to find its place (ibid.: 4). 11 The Third Space, a space of hybridity in and between cultural differences, is not, Bhabha claims, an actual space, and is not itself representable, but is caused by the openness of signs, symbols and culture that can ‘be appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew’ (Bhabha 1989: 130). Hence, this ‘Third Space’ of enunciation is not a fixed reference and makes meaning an ambivalent process. 12 Timothy Chesters rightly cautions that ‘space-speak’ tends to exclude real issues of land rights and exclusion by floating free of – and even flouting – the physical landscape (Chesters 2009: 3–4). 13 For Massey, space must be reimagined and the spatiality of our implicit cosmologies reinvigorated, for it constitutes the dimension of the social and contemporaneous co-existence of others. ‘Places’ are unfixed, in part because the social relations out of which they are constructed are always changing. ‘Place’ is thus a term and object of desire, and the identity of any place is open to contestation. Moreover, the very image of place oscillates between standing for itself (i.e. the condition of a literal image in which signifier and referent would collapse in identity), and a standing in for other entities, abstractions or values (a metonymic figure for Western capitalism, America, the idea of the urban, etc.). 14 Massey’s work has inspired within her field a new commitment to space and spatial formations linked to time and their interrelations, or what

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might be called new geographies of temporality and ‘timespace’, the title of a landmark 2001 collection by Jon May and Nigel Thrift. Timespace is not dualistic or dichotomous but serves rather as the essential unit of geography. For example, Mike Crang’s discussion in the same volume of the rhythms of the city, which he proposes as ‘temporalised space’ (Crang 2001), works with a sense of space-time as Becoming and a sense of temporality as action, as performance and practice, of difference as well as repetition (ibid.: 187). Crang argues eloquently for a greater understanding of instability and fecundity in the everyday of the urban fabric, invoking in Lefebvrian terms the rhythms of the city and mapping a move from spatialised time to temporalised space. This, he claims, will bring the virtual into the experience of space and open up the possibilities of immanent and emergent orders as well as non-determined forms. 15 See, for example, David Clarke’s The Cinematic City (1997), Myrto Konstantarakos’s Spaces in European Cinema (2000), Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice’s Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (2001), Alan Marcus and Dietrich Neumann’s Visualising the City (2007), and Richard Koeck and Les Roberts’s The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (2010). See also Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner 2010 and Martin Lefebvre 2006. 16 Underlying Gorfinkel and Rhodes’s argument is that global totality cannot be conceived without reckoning with local specificity, and that the terms local and global are derived from the discourse of topography, geography and cartography, that is to say, the very discourses of place. What is needed, they conclude, is an image of place that can challenge the ‘unimageable, unpresentable totality of our globalised contemporary condition’ (ibid.: xvi). 17 Powrie demonstrates how the heterotopic moment can subvert binaries and create a moment of radical (self-)questioning for the spectator, the result of a ‘non-binaried embodied gaze’ (Powrie 2011: 81). This is an open, mobile, nomadic space founded in paradox and not containable within the ‘normal’ temporal and spatial categories. Indeed, it is eccentric spatially and creates an imaginary space, most often through a form of mise en abyme (for example, the repeated long tracking shots of Mona in Sans Toit ni Loi/Vagabond (1985). Varda creates spaces out of synch with the narrative of the film and which feel displaced and distorted, spatially and temporally, informed by the imaginary and the marvellous. 18 Easthope emphasises that in classical space the dialectical relation between subject and object which produces a position for the subject must remain concealed and even denied, for it depends on transparency. This is carried through into the ‘narrative space of mainstream cinema which affords a monocular perspective’ (Easthope 1997: 131). 19 In Mille Plateaux (1980), Deleuze had already distinguished with Félix

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Guattari between points and lines as different ways of conceiving spatial relations. Points belong to the category of aborescence (i.e. rooted points of origin) and determine positions in space, thus organising and limiting space to a set of pre-established coordinates. Lines, on the other hand, have given up their possibilities of becoming and multiplying connections by yielding their force to the primacy and fixity of points. But they can also be independent of points, for instance, the ‘rhizomatic’ line, or the line of flight between points. 20 The implicit distinction here between mise-en-scène as space and montage as time is, of course, never as simple and clear-cut as Deleuze would like to suggest. In his 1956 article ‘Montage, mon beau souci’ for Cahiers du cinéma, Godard wrote famously that ‘if direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both: but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time [...] talking of mise-en-scène is automatically to speak again and already of montage’ (Godard 1985: 94–6). Godard is suggesting here that he could effectively alternate between the two principles by emphasising one or the other within a single film. That is to say, he could practise montage at the level of mise-en-scène and edit within the shot by juxtaposing different dramatic events between the principal characters and the background characters within a single scene. One thinks, for example, of the extraordinary play with space, movement and colour in the extended apartment scene in Le Mépris/Contempt (1963). 21 We recall also that in Freud, where the figures of place and space are pervasive, the unconscious (a primary site of memory) is an ideal space of unlimited storage. Freud retains the idea of a psychical topography and conceives of receptive and retentive layers in infinite spaces. 22 Bersani’s idea of aesthetic subjectivity aims to free us from an oppressive, Lacanian psychology of desire as lack (a psychology that grounds sociality in trauma and castration) and lead us ‘to a salutary devalorising of difference – or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome … but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness’ (Bersani 1995: 7). See Bersani 2006 where he explains ‘families of form’ in film and painting as ‘documents of a universe of inaccurate replications of the perpetual and imperfect recurrences of forms, volumes, colours, and gestures … as evidence of the subject’s presence everywhere’ (Bersani 2006: 168). Bersani has further developed this theme in his dialogue with Adam Phillips entitled Intimacies (2008), where he proposes an ‘impersonal intimacy’ premised on Foucault’s call for a ‘new relational mode’ – that is, a move away from a hermeneutics of desire to the pleasure of bodies. This is a form of intimacy that rejects personal identity, since the self which the subject sees reflected in the Other is not the unique personality central to common notions of individualism. 23 In the three separate studies included in Forms of Being, so great is Bersani

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and Dutoit’s drive to celebrate the workings of universal relationality that there is little or no mention of the particular historical and political subtexts of the films under discussion, except for a cursory acknowledgment of the real battle for Guadalcanal during World War II which provides the springboard for The Thin Red Line. There is no recognition, for example, of the historical and political importance of the setting of Cinecittà in Le Mépris, with its discussion of the end of cinema, or of contemporary Madrid/Barcelona and the AIDS epidemic in All About my Mother. 24 See Yannick Dehée 2000, a study of the ‘mythologies’ of French cinema from 1960 to 2000 which vehicles dominant representations of society and traces a history of the political imaginary of the French. Dehée pays particular attention to the mutations of French society as played out in the narratives and stars of French cinema during this period – a trajectory that passes from certainties to doubts, from a hierarchical to a disorganised society seeking new models. Ann Davies has even suggested that French cinema is itself ‘heterotopic’ precisely because it includes within it things that contradict each other, but also utopian in that the impulse to name it ‘French cinema’ – an illusion of order that recognises the very real chaos from which derives an idealistic (and impossible) impulse to classification and order – can contain contradictory definitions (see Davies 2011). 25 Despite their valour and total commitment to the French cause and Republican ideals, the North African combatants were treated as secondclass soldiers and later essentially erased from memory. The film recuperates forgotten events: we see at the end one of the few survivors in the film, now an elderly man, return to the foyer that is his home – an ‘incriminating’ space of present-day immigrant life in France. So moved was President Chirac in 2006 that he immediately reversed the law in order to bring the level of the pensions still paid to citizens of North African nations in line with those paid to the French. 26 Pierre Sorlin has read Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in far more negative terms, suggesting that it flattens the cityscape of Paris and reduces it to prosaic clichés like the neon sign of La Samaritaine, part of what he considers the general cinematic destruction of cities (see Sorlin 2005). Of course, the idea of the city as unreadable is bound up with the history of Parisian life and the established theme of Paris-inconnu. This fixed, almost morbid opposition might be poeticised as the Sublime of the City of Light versus the Abyss of the bas-fonds, thus extending the poetic terms proposed by Balzac in novels like Le Père Goriot to describe those areas of extreme wealth and poverty in nineteenth-century Paris, and which employ the topoi of the city as whore, underworld, labyrinth, female body, etc. Paris’s potential to be rewritten appears limitless, and is taken to a literal and graphic level in Chris Marker’s Chats perchés/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), which occupies the city with painted cats in the interests of a new

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autonomous, collective politics. See Flinn 2009 for an excellent account of Marker’s digital video practice. 27 Varda’s highly playful and autobiographical Les Plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnes (2008), for example, recreates a beach in front of her building in the rue Daguerre and offers up the beach as a site that can allow for eternal configurations and re-configurations of both space and the self. The subject is as unstable and fragile as the shifting sands of the beaches of the film’s title. Varda: ‘If people were opened up, you would find landscapes. If I was opened up, you would find beaches’. See Handyside 2011 for a fine account of the beach as a site expressive of the changed social and spatial relations of modernity, and which allows for the exploration of modern female subjectivity in the work not only of Varda but also of Catherine Breillat and Diane Kurys. Compare also Varda’s beaches to the ports of her late husband Jacques Demy whom she celebrated in Jacquot de Nantes (1991). Demy’s films include the ‘musical without music’ Lola (1961) (set in Nantes), La Baie des Anges (1963) (set in Nice), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). 28 The term ‘ban’ in medieval France had a special meaning, designating a judicial proclamation issued by a feudal authority in a given town, which all of the manor lord’s subjects were obliged to observe under penalty of death. The banlieue was the space surrounding the town, inhabited by the lord’s vassals, in which the ban was proclaimed and over which it had jurisdiction. The banlieue thus designates historically a place literally excluded from the terrain inside the city which nevertheless subjugates it through the authoritative dictates of its power structures. 29 See Rosello 1997 for a fine account of French interpretations of the bidonville during this era as ‘atypical pockets of disorder’. The bidonvilles are made spectacularly visible in Maurice Pialat’s documentary-style short L’Amour existe (1960), made while the New Wave was indulging in its predominantly white, middle-class and heterosexual love affair with the capital. 30 Fielder offers both a sociological and Deleuzian account of the recent history of the banlieue film, arguing that the most powerful films in this new genre appear to be ‘advocating a (tactical) performative mode of inhabiting the city, through which emergent urban subcultures might attempt – even within the most striated of State-regulated spaces – to constitute an urban body nomadism’ (Fielder 2001: 280). Will Higbee correctly places La Haine in the context of the new realism and the return to the political in French cinema during the 1990s and early 2000s, where the contemporary socio-political realities of exclusion, immigration, delinquency were directly addressed. This was a cinema in which the presence of a plurality of other-ed voices offered an explicit challenge to racism and the essentialising narrative of exclusion. See Higbee 2001a.

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31 See Austin 2009 for a useful historical account of the typically negative portrayal of suburban space in French film, evident even in films like Sylvain Chomet’s Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003). 32 It is not always a matter of trying to transform the marginalised banlieue into a new place of first-person individual identity. In some cases it means attempting to leave the cité one has been consigned to by moving into the city proper, or intra muros. Confronting the fact that to be both beur and openly gay in France risks a double disenfranchisement, Rémi Lange’s small, independent, romantic comedy, Beurs appart (2007), the title of which plays phonetically on ‘beurs à part’ (i.e. ‘apart’ or ‘unique’), offers a tantalising glimpse of the first explicitly self-defined gay beur space in French cinema, created by two young beurs who decide to leave the banlieue and achieve their dream of sharing an apartment in the city. 33 See Tarr 2005 for a comprehensive overview of beur and banlieue filmmaking in France up to 2005, which explores questions of identity in beur cinema, including analysis of beur women in the banlieue, memories of immigration, beurs in the provinces, cross-cultural social protest, and voices from the Maghreb. 34 See Tarr 2007a for a study of films of displacement in Paris by both white and West African filmmakers, including Djib (Jean Odoutan, 2000), (Paris xy) (Zeka Laplaine 2001), L’Afrance (Alain Gomis, 2002), Paris selon Moussa (Cheik Doukouré, 2003) and Code Inconnu (Michael Haneke, 2000).

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2 Topographies of being: space, sensation, and spectatorship in the cinema of Bruno Dumont Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Topographies of being: the films of Bruno Dumont

When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes a true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning and we will no longer have to use them. (M. Antonioni) [E]ven when I’m filming outside, I am only filming the inside. The film itself is the interior, from start to finish. That is why when I film a landscape, it is the character’s interiority. (B. Dumont) The landscape is like a face. (Juliette in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle by J.-L. Godard)

The world according to Dumont Bruno Dumont’s attraction to real settings and locality suggests a commitment to realism that André Bazin, who regarded the location of a film as where meaning primarily resides, would surely have approved. The rural, economically depressed and increasingly deindustrialised region of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais in northern France, and specifically his small home town of Bailleul about twenty-five kilometres northwest of Lille near the Belgian border, features in five out of his six films. Dumont records real decors, real people and real sound in a clearly demarcated, lived environment. This is a cinema grounded in primal

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matter and the dirt of the external real, celebrating, at least on the face of it, the understated naturalism of natural appearances while avoiding ‘abstract, artificial things’ (Dumont 2001c: 119). With his declared ambition to find the natural ‘rhythm’ of things (reality is the source and resource of everything, he confidently asserts), Dumont shoots usually in 35 mm colour CinemaScope, thus ensuring that his characters are set firmly within their milieu and that all objects and details are captured within the perimters of the frame. Dumont’s investment in the same habitat and terrain may seem odd, however, for a director who considers himself primarily a temporal filmmaker honouring what he regards as the specificity of his chosen medium. For Dumont, ‘[t]he only truth is the duration of a shot, in other words the rhythm of the film itself. The exposure and the movement of bodies, faces, in time. The rest is naught’ (ibid.:, 12). It is not only that Dumont’s films cover long durations usually structured around the passage of the natural seasons. His practice of mise-en-scène is also the art of organising the time of the actor, the length of a particular action, and the period of recording. It results in what Dumont calls ‘a cinema that moves towards beings and lets them develop in shots, in durations’ (ibid.:, 78). The extensive use of plan-séquences, promoted by Bazin as the means to experience and ‘inhabit’ the plentitude of the screened external world as profoundly as possible, is precisely what allows Dumont to focus with such intensity on the movement of characters through space. Indeed, slow long-takes enable Dumont to approach the contemporary landscape in all its raw and sometimes brute materiality. Yet although landscape in cinema may appear a uniquely realist record, it is, as Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner remind us, always subject to aesthetic manipulation, technological enhancement, editing, filters, lenses, etc. Framing, in particular, creates and shapes a view that ‘holds’ as a landscape: where before there was only the formlessness of pure spatial continuity, form now reigns. In short, landscape – a term that can refer both to the pictorial representation of a space and the real perception of a space – becomes another performative element within the frame, both significant and interpretable (Harper and Rayner 2010: 19).1 In her important analysis of rural cinema (and specifically Henri Storck’s films of occupied rural Belgium), Catherine Fowler provides a useful distinction between ‘landscape’ and land in the following terms: ‘[a]s exoticised, picturesque landscape, the rural becomes a universal space to which one might escape, as well as an image in which to

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invest or an idealised memory to be evoked. As nourishing land, the rural is represented instead as a specific place, a live presence, and a contested present; the relationship between land and one who “pictures” the land is real, intimate, and attentive’ (Fowler 2006: 135) (original emphasis).2 Dumont is invariably aiming in his work to convey the living, material presence of the land, but in the full awareness of the long visual tradition of landscape – an awareness that becomes most explicit in L’humanité/Humanity (1999) with its explicit allusions to the artistic heritage of the Flanders region. Such influences produce what Ian Aitken, in a separate discussion of André Antoine’s 1921 film, La Terre, has termed a ‘pictorialist naturalism’ – one that has its roots in the work of Émile Zola, particularly novels like Germinal and La Terre with their lyrical, even pantheistic, evocation of the rural and provincial environment (Aitken 2006: 67–8). As Aitken points out, pictorialism ultimately outweighs realism in this particular variant of naturalism which expresses a ‘constellation of sensibilities that poeticise the natural environment and … symbolise the psychologicalspiritual condition of the principal characters’ (ibid.: 76). Similarly, if Dumont appeals to the organic and embedded forces of reality, he also regards himself very much as a ‘painter’ of man in his natural landscape, invoking, for instance, the legacy of Paul Cézanne.3 His awkward looking farmers are directly inspired by the tradition of Flemish landscape painting native to Belgium and northern France, where the figure of Christ is always represented as a peasant, as well as by the rural neorealism to which Georges Braque returned in later life. This creates a defining tension in Dumont’s cinema: a painterly look and expression of emotion through a coolly materialist gaze. Bare naturalism is further transcended by the subtle stylisation of small details of characterisation at the level of the human figure, which often appears broken by inarticulable rage. Darren Hughes has highlighted a recurring motif in Dumont’s cinema: a medium close-up that positions the actor horizontally within the ’Scope frame, usually in a side view from the chest up. The lingering shots of hunched-over bodies and naked torsos give, as Hughes remarks of the shirtless Freddy at the end of La Vie de Jésus/The Life of Jesus (1997), ‘the appearance of being flogged’ (Hughes 2002). Let us be precise, however. Despite his stated allegiance to the real, Dumont resolutely refuses the term ‘documentary’ and insists that social reality is not his primary concern. In the case of the natural landscape, although it may appear immediately recognisable, there

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is no ambition on his part to map space. Geographical contours are left deliberately vague and disjointed, to the point that they often appear a purely generic, even abstract, set of tracks and paths, curves and inclines. Yet at the same time Dumont understands and exploits the lure of the pictorial, most notably in his style of composition and framing as well as with his treatment of light and the illumination of the landscape. While he may often choose to deny it, there is an austere, formal beauty at work in his long, widescreen, framed shots buttressed by land and sky. For the spectacular format of CinemaScope transforms the apparently ordinary and mundane into something other and mysterious. Indeed, Dumont acknowledges he works in the space of ‘incongruity’ and fully assumes the risks of the poetic distortion of reality. In one of his many grand statements and authorial pronouncements that form a dense and at times forbidding paratext to his cinema, he declares: ‘The filmmaker has to twist reality to deform it … I try to keep what could be called an element of reality, an appearance: the naturalism of the sets, the sounds and the actors, but everything else is fake’ (Dumont 2006c). For this reason, Dumont is continually stripping down and going back to basics through the twin processes of purification and subtraction. Altering reality to suit his purposes means, in the case of Bailleul, photographing the town’s streets virtually devoid of people. Such recourse to ‘reasonable’ distortion through minimalism is proof that the ‘truth lies not in reality but in ‘the perception of reality’ (Dumont 2001c: 116), or, better still, in the ‘emotion of reality’ (ibid.: 74). In addition, shots are consciously mediocre, unfinished and spontaneous, and the most natural light exposure is favoured. A filmmaker has a violent function, Dumont suggests with auteurist zeal, to ‘neutralise all the attempts made by each aspect or element of the complexity of the work to dominate or influence it towards a headlong search for harmony, in other words, for fusion’ (ibid.: 18). The rhythm of relationships between shots is possible precisely because of the extreme neutrality and ‘flatness’ of the individual shots.4 As with Robert Bresson, to whom Dumont is often compared, an individual image should not carry its own interpretation if it is to be ‘transformed’ through contact with other images.5 In fact, it soon becomes clear that Dumont’s creation of basic verisimilitude is merely a strategy to encourage the viewer to believe in a given situation and context, all the better for himself as author to transform it into something different and unnatural, ever ‘supernatural’, in the flash of an eye. He uses the French verb ‘basculer’ and the noun

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‘(le) basculement’ (figuratively ‘swing’) to describe those odd instants which suddenly break through the aesthetic surface and create a heightened, affective realism (his own experience, for example, of being overwhelmed to the stomach by the figuration of late Braque (Dumont 1997a: 58)). These are the poetic turning-points in his cinema when we sense that something else invisible is stirring in the flat, perfunctory images – perhaps grace, or illumination, or the miraculous, always to be defined. This produces, in turn, another potent paradox in his work: although the needs of plot would seem to be insignificant except as a device to allow characters to interact, both with each other and with the landscapes they inhabit, all his films display an absolute reliance on fiction. Things happen. Indeed, this is an incident-heavy cinema of events, climaxes and sensations thrown into dramatic relief by its highly stark, elliptical style and the painfully slow pace of the scenes. As he puts it, ‘[t]here is no cinema of reality. You need unreality, which is its substance’ (ibid.: 75). As we shall see, plot is just one of the many devices in a cinema rich in authorial strategies, decoys and other kinds of contrivance. So far, so good. But things start to become more complicated in Dumont’s bold theory of film when he considers specifically his natural settings and the fundamental role of the landscape. ‘My work as a filmmaker is to find incomplete backdrops that correspond mentally’, he states (ibid.: 114). The notion of completion (and incompletion) is central to this minimalist poetics and defines all aspects of Dumont’s practice. It accounts, for example, for his choice to work with local, ‘rustic’, untrained actors who often oblige him to remould his original ideas for the characters. As he puts it: ‘My characters are so expressive because they are all unfinished’ (ibid.: 75).6 And it is due to cinema’s particular origins in the ‘incomplete’ that there is an intrinsic link between cinema, the human condition (understood by Dumont as the continuous, never fully achieved state of being human), and, above all, nature. For ‘[i]ncompleteness is what resides in nature. The cinema can return to it’ (ibid.: 14). Dumont expands further on this point in terms of landscape: I am not a Christian. I am above all someone in doubt. I despise the religious, the clerical. I think there is something profound in human beings, something mysterious, bound to the sacred. The sacred is also in the profane, when there is something else that takes it out of the profane, and the camera is capable of showing it because it is something we experience ourselves. It appears to me. That is why a landscape is no

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Space and being in contemporary French cinema longer a landscape, it resonates with me. Why? Because I make it resonate, otherwise it doesn’t say anything, it remains silent. But if I am sad, it is sad; if I am happy, it is happy. It’s an endless process. I work with creatures, objects, subjects, people, each of us imperfect but in search of our own perfection. (ibid.: 75) (my emphasis)

Dumont has moved very rapidly here from the religious to the sacred and profane, yet this is entirely logical for a filmmaker who is focused so intensely on the body as the ‘root of the spirit’ (Trilling 2007) as well as on ‘the beginning of the soul, the primal matter and the substance of filmmaking’ (Dumont 2001c: 11). But what does he mean exactly when he talks of a landscape resonating only because of the self, and that the self makes it ‘speak’? He would appear to be presenting the relationship between humankind and ‘mute’ nature as one of pure osmosis, i.e. a state as elementary and self-evident as the natural elements themselves, as conveyed in the following, deceptively casual statement of his general method: ‘I film the earth and trees, the wind. Faces’ (ibid.: 12). Such vast and vague conceptualisations lie at the very root of Dumont’s complex and at times highly contradictory ideas about film as a medium of both secular transcendence and incompletion. For if landscapes and natural, open spaces of ‘meditation’ (in contrast with urban emptiness (Dumont 2001c: 89)) always come first, as Dumont consistently claims, they are also intimately linked to his characters who are trying to discover a purpose and communion with others in an alien world, drawn together often only by a shared, biological need for sex (particularly so in the case of Dumont’s women). Here is how Dumont describes the complex process of filming the visible world, in terms that recall Jean Cocteau’s awe for the marvels and epiphanies of the cinematic machine: You can only film visible things, but I know that by continuing to film the visible, all of a sudden, you pass to the other side. You have to wait, like an ascetic. You have to wait and it will necessarily shift … Time causes it to happen, not acting, not words. It’s the duration that causes the shift into something else, which is the interior world, the self, a mystery. (ibid.: 74)7

Dumont may wish to call this filmic process rather mystically a spiritual dimension of art, suggesting that art offers a pathway to a new, post-religious site of the ‘human sacred’ (Dumont 2011b). Difficulty arises, however, if we consider the clear implication not simply that representational landscapes can reveal interior states that would otherwise remain invisible, but that landscapes are always

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interior states. And further: that what we are seeing is always a mental landscape. To quote Dumont at his most dry: ‘It’s no longer a landscape because it’s transcended. And in being transcended it enters into the mind of the viewer to become something else. What I’m seeing is an analogical representation of interiority. One can’t seize an interiority, but one can arrange for exteriority to become interior’ (ibid.: 32).8 Dumont can put this central dynamic between inside and outside far more directly and accessibly when necessary: ‘My dream is to film inside of people. As you know this is impossible, even when people make love, they cannot go inside each other – this is the tragedy of humanity. So I try to represent what is inside with the outside. Landscape is not just a character, it’s THE character’ (Dumont 2008). These statements of authorial intent suggest not only that every subjective point-of-view shot in Dumont is indicative of a particular personal state of mind, but also that any subjective shot functions as an object correlative of the real. By the same token, exterior, objective reality is potentially always transformed into interior reality, in which case every shot, whether objective or subjective, can become a purely interior perception of the material world. The real subject in Dumont’s film is thus not the object but the gaze on this object: ‘[E]ven when I’m filming outside’, he declares, ‘I am only filming the inside. The film itself is the interior, from start to finish’ (Dumont 2001c: 74). Yet how valid and accurate is this deliberately provocative authorial statement? Is Dumont’s cinema really no more than an extreme version of pathetic fallacy whereby the external real functions as a reflection or projection of one’s own internal feelings? If so, how long can the landscape, which in Dumont is always occupied by human presence and activity, exist beyond the purview of human interiority, whether visual or aural? Put a little differently, how much objective and material agency does landscape enjoy in Dumont’s films? Can his cinema produce a positive looking with the world? To use the terms proposed by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in Forms of Being (2004), an analysis of subjectivity and form in modern cinema, does Dumont show us both ‘the world his characters are registering’ and ‘the imprint of the act of looking on the subject of looking’ (Bersani and Dutoit 2004: 146)? Or is it a more limited, one-way traffic such that the character as seer effectively ‘performs’ on an object (ibid.)? To pose such aesthetic and ethical questions is necessarily to raise the related issue of the place and function of the viewer. For if subjective point-of-view shots of the sky embody, visually and

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emotionally, a character’s search for meaning to his or her existence (however consciously or unconsciously), that search is automatically displaced and transferred to the viewer who receives the sounds and images. Is Dumont creating a new form of fluid, double vision whereby the audience apprehends the visible and imagines the invisible simultaneously? Is ‘looking’ ultimately always the same as ‘being’ in Dumont, and if so, what types of existential landscape is his cinema actually proposing? In seeking to address these interrelated issues concerning the materiality of landscape, form and human subjectivity, and how they play out in spectatorial practice, I will examine Dumont’s films in chronological order, starting with La Vie de Jésus and L’humanité which establish the principles of his spatial practice. I will explore in detail their key climactic scenes, paying particular attention to the use of reverse-field shot and the relations between external space, point-ofview, and montage. My aim will be to show how the different kinds of space put into play in his work – external, filmic, spectatorial, aesthetic – all come down to the essential question of man’s relationship with nature, for which Dumont establishes a clear set of contractual terms and conditions. I will argue that if his first two films serve as templates for the films that follow, Twentynine Palms (2003), which even his most well-disposed critics have regarded as a major aberration on account of its final descent into hard-core gore, actually marks a progressive move away from a syndrome of relentless interiorisation. I will not be engaging directly with the spiritual and mystical implications of the body and the sacred in Dumont’s work, even though these themes, along with that of human evil, constitute the point from which he necessarily starts (‘Evil is a part of life’, he states simply (Dumont 1997b)).9 Instead, by confining my discussion to the human presence within landscape and the specific relations between shot, space and affect, I hope to establish the fate of nature in Dumont’s cinema and determine finally whether it offers a new spectatorial practice of space and vision that is both aesthetically and ethically ‘open’. Facing off: man vs. nature in La Vie de Jésus and L’humanité With its core nexus of streets of terraced houses rebuilt after the ravages of the First World War, along with the local hospital and the church that is constantly passed but never visited, Bailleul has an authentic ‘realness’ in La Vie de Jésus. We see the English War Memorial, a concrete reminder of the historical context of the plains of Flanders,

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although Dumont has little to say directly about the historical and political construction of the local landscape. The permanent after-effects of this region traumatised by war remain always latent and implicit in his work – until, that is, explicit violence against a perceived foreigner explodes towards the end of the film. Instead, what is conveyed visually is a sense of deadening inevitability and imprisonment due to the surrounding flat, indifferent Flemish landscape and rural farming land firmly plotted within the wide yet fixed horizons of a ’Scope frame. The protagonist Freddy (David Douche) describes the area as a ‘trou’ (‘hole’) but it is not hostile as such, simply deserted and soulless, like the sterile supermarket where his girlfriend Marie (Marjorie Cottreel) works. The atmosphere is permanently heavy, exacerbated by extended plan-séquences in silence or with extremely limited, terse dialogue during which the viewer is forced directly to confront the characters’ crushing immobility and emotional repression. The only element that appears to be moving is the passage of the seasons: the film begins in the cold sunshine of winter and ends in the intense heat of high summer. Only once, during a brief escapade to the Normandy coast, do we leave this oppressive environment sealed by thick cumulus clouds. When not copulating at home or in the natural landscape (perfunctory scenes of penetration filmed in close-up with grim, almost clinical exactitude), Freddy and Marie simply look away and stare blankly out of frame, apparently into the void. This sets the standard for all Dumont’s characters, who are photographed within a circumscribed space and spend much of the time gazing off-screen. Yet this apparent lack of any real rapport with external space is interrupted by a number of point-of-view shots in the film, starting with the opening image: a backward-tracking shot capturing Freddy’s moped in action on a road in the country. This establishes a primary motif in Dumont’s cinema – a character in motion through landscape – and it is followed by a forward-tracking shot of the same action – a reverse-field shot that translates as a subjective shot from Freddy’s point of view. Later, during the episode of the automatic chair-lift moving high over the open landscape, the panoramic vista is defined as a point-of-view shot from Freddy and Marie’s perspective. In what is virtually the only time in the film (at least until the final sequence) that we are directed to the beauty of the landscape, Marie even remarks explicitly how ‘pretty’ the landscape is. This statement, articulated by the protagonists themselves who are pictured here in relative contentment, represents the projection of their own feelings on to nature: the external landscape

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is reflecting and rendering visible an ‘internal’ psychological landscape. There are other examples of this phenomenon. The shot of a tree immediately following sex between the couple in the fields must be read retrospectively as Marie’s intent gaze on a natural object – a tangible manifestation of her natural, straying curiosity. What this self-consciously blank style suggests is that natural objects cannot exist on their own in Dumont’s world without the human gaze. That is to say, they need always to be aligned and motivated by human vision and are never (or extremely rarely) allowed to be filmed objectively on their own terms. A potential shot of – and towards – the exterior world, which might indicate a dispersal of the self’s structural integrity, is eventually revealed as a reverse-field subjective shot and can be rationalised as the exterior projection of a character’s private mood or feeling, at the expense of an objective view of nature itself. The same applies in reverse: a gaze out of shot is duly followed by a subjective point-of-view of the landscape. Physical space thus becomes a dramaturgical stage where formal mind-games of suspense and tension are played out: is the shot we are watching an objective shot, and if so, how long can it remain as such before being tied to a character’s subjectivity and hence motivated as a reflection of an interior mood or thought? At one unexpected moment, the camera suddenly tilts down from an outside shot of the trees against the sky and then, in a continuous plan-séquence, slowly tracks backwards through what is the window of a hospital room, passing some white net curtains on the left. The camera finally rests on Freddy, who is seated on the left, his face covered with electrodes as part of his treatment for epilepsy. The landscape here is literally being sucked dry into the frame of human drama, rather than being allowed to impose itself in time on its own terms. In other words, landscape can only ever assume a human ‘face’ in Dumont, thus taking literally, and to its potential limit, the critic Serge Daney’s cinematic axiom: ‘All “form” is a face looking at us’.10 In Daney’s thinking, form in an image is the representation of desire, and the image, a metaphor of the face, summons us to dialogue with it. Similarly, in the way Dumont constructs and edits his images, it is effectively the viewer’s gaze that establishes forms in raw nature by hewing them out in the depths of the visible. In the process, the natural landscape risks becoming immaterial, a matter of abstract shapes and forms, rather than a mass of concrete detail. What we witness in La Vie de Jésus is, in fact, an unstoppable subjectivising and interiorising of the real by Dumont, and this can operate

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even when not strictly visual. We are confronted at one point with the vague view of a building in the far distance. There is little possibility of this being a subjective point-of-view shot, yet nor is it allowed to remain fully objective, for throughout we can hear the distant sounds of a brass band striking up – sounds which compete with the murmurations of ambient birdsong emanating from the foreground though off-screen. In this ‘unnatural’ soundscape (the human sounds are magnified in audio close-up), the natural landscape is effectively being colonised aurally by human presence. The image that follows is a medium-shot of members of the Bailleul Municipal Band practising outside the building in question called appropriately ‘Au Coin Perdu’ (The middle of nowhere). Hence, all is being made to function according to the human order. Compare this moment of human sound absorbing the landscape with the virtual silencing of nature. One of Freddy’s few positive preoccupations is his meticulous care for a caged pet chaffinch, yet this is also an image of incarceration mirroring his own entrapment in the hospital. ‘Léo’ is dutifully fed by Freddy but never released. Instead, he desperately wants it to whistle and will even play a tape of a singing chaffinch to encourage it. He places Léo’s cage behind a screen, thereby reducing the bird to a mere shadow, but to no avail. In this cruel perversion of nature, the isolated bird proves unable to sing and simply ‘be’. Instead, juxtaposed with a sequence of more animalistic sex between Freddy and Marie, it performs as a figure of human blockage and mute immobility. The film’s brooding atmosphere of underlying violence culminates in the murder of Freddy’s rival in love, Kader (Kader Chaatouf), who, with his North African family, has already been singled out and denigrated as different and suspect.11 Dumont films the attack on Kader by Freddy and his gang, when they surround him and kick him to death, with maximum efficiency and minimum drama. In his highly literary ‘text for a scenario’ which formed the basis of the script and which he used as a ‘source for emotions’,12 Dumont presents this murder as akin to a sexual ejaculation for Freddy, and as ‘martyrdom’ for the victim (Dumont 2001a: 105). Such a horrific act would normally qualify as the narrative climax to a film, yet typically with Dumont what seems the main event is merely the pretext for something of even greater import. Here, an even more ‘outrageous’ sequence will take place in the landscape – one that may potentially reverse human iniquity and reinstate humanity. The first sign that the film is evolving stylistically is the shot of Freddy now back at home on his bed, when

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for the first time the camera takes us gently forwards and downwards at a slight angle to meet his face in intimate close-up in almost ritualistic terms. What takes place henceforth will be between Freddy and the viewer. This reveals the degree of Dumont’s formalism, whereby a work is resolved internally by different types of shot that explode its established pattern, or what he calls its ‘dogma’ (Dumont 2001c: 102)). The shot transports us first to Freddy’s arrest by the police and abortive interrogation, then to the final sequence where, after escaping from the station and the inspector’s uncomprehending, rhetorical outburst (‘So society’s responsible, is it?!! … And who is it that’s going to deliver us from evil?’ (Dumont 2001a: 108)), Freddy collects his push-bike from home and cycles out of town. We rejoin him immediately in a ditch by the side of a road. What now unfolds is a staged series of shots organised around the passage of clouds that by turns block and reveal the sun’s rays. Freddy is viewed first from behind while kneeling face down in the grass, as if apparently dead. The next shot proves otherwise: he is now filmed sideways seated on the ground but rocking to and fro on account of slight epileptic spasms. He is then pictured supine with tears welling up in his eyes. We register the passing of time on Freddy’s naked torso as the clouds imprint their shadow on his body bathed in the overexposed fullness of the warm, blinding sunlight. A privileged subjective pointof-view shot reveals what he is looking up at: a quite awesome image of the sun nestling behind a stack of clouds and about to burst into full view. This recalls the earlier instant in the film between Marie and Kader, when she asked for his pardon for having assumed he simply wanted sex, and he immediately looked up towards the sky. After an edit on an eye-line match, we glimpsed the top part of a ruined church, clearly from Kader’s point of view. An image of his own internal confusion? The awkward shot composition certainly intimated as much. Such repetition of gesture across character and time establishes a formal and thematic link between the two enemies beyond the grave. Back in the field, however, we can now hear Freddy gently wailing over extreme close-ups of first an insect crawling up his naked arm and back into the vegetation, and then his rough, worn fingers clasped together in vegetal form. The next shot is of Freddy sitting up and looking directly into the camera with tears rolling down his face. Finally, we see what he is observing (the last shot of the film): a mundane long-shot view of the flat, grey, imprisoning countryside enshrouded by a now overcast sky. The sobbing continues but the sounds, almost certainly overdubbed,

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1.  Freddy (David Douche) recovering his humanity within the bosom of nature in the closing sequence of La Vie de Jésus (1997).

appear unnatural. Hence, in a contradictory double-movement, the pre-eminently natural (time imposing itself as duration in league with the natural elements) and the strangely unnatural (the exaggeration of sound) come together to create a potent, post-climactic effect. How should we interpret this extraordinary elliptical and ambiguous montage of shots during which Freddy immerses himself in the bosom of nature whose true worth he had never perceived before, and where, to the peaceful sounds of summer birdsong, we move from the cosmic infinite to the infinitesimal before being returned finally to the daily reality of Flanders? Although there are certainly sublime aspects to the set-piece sequence, it cannot be said to take the shape and form of a philosophical and aesthetic encounter with the unrepresentable Sublime of nature, precisely because it is playing out in wholly subjective terms themes already well established and in process. Landscape, like Freddy himself, is being purposively redetermined, but into – and as – what? After habitually being thrown off his moped, does his entirely unforeseen, intimate encounter with landscape, whereby he is literally ‘thrown’ back fully sensate into nature, and nature, in turn, is restored to its ‘proper’ place as a fully ‘live’, concrete presence, correspond to what Bersani and Dutoit find in the films of Éric Rohmer, that is, ‘an ‘image of our being-in-the-world’? In their reading of Rohmer’s oeuvre, Bersani and Dutoit list, by way of example, Magali’s ‘artisanal relation to the earth’ in Conte d’automne/Tale of Autumn (1988), Delphine’s wonder at the rare appearance of the green ray in Le Rayon Vert/The Green Ray (1986), and, in L’Ami de mon amie/My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (1987), Blanche’s ‘anguished sense of her lostness’ (her melancholy

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induced by the setting sun), which they read in Heideggerian terms as ‘her “thrownness” into a universe that owes nothing to human talk about human feelings, but is nonetheless the indifferent home where everything human takes and has its place’ (Bersani and Dutoit 2009: 33).13 The interrelations between man and nature described here appear in many respects equivalent to Freddy’s unheralded, pastoral experience, but in Dumont the mood and aims are very different and far more calculated regarding nature as potential locus of the human. For there is, of course, a metaphysical conceit operating in the final sequence of La Vie de Jésus: that a look at and from nature can save a member of humankind and provide emotional and moral balm, even after it has been relegated for much of the film to an entirely functional backdrop. Should we regard Freddy’s tears as a sign of conscience, however implausible such a notion may seem in view of his total lack of remorse thus far (we recall at the start his callous indifference to the images of famine on television)? In which case, the final episode could be read as a movement towards grace and redemption as Freddy, still haunted by the memory of Kader’s face, now acknowledges his misery and simultaneously elevates himself. Might this, in turn, mean that the sacred lies within the heart of man in the here and now, and that all is potentially grace? There is no music to guide us to a definitive meaning in the manner, say, of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), which floods the frame with the sounds of the ‘Magnificat’ from Monteverdi’s Vespers after the eponymous young heroine eventually drowns herself. The sign of a Christian metaphysics – the rays of golden light – is clearly perceptible in the final shots of Freddy. Brett Bowles sees the final close-up not only as a pietà (i.e. at the breast of Mother Nature) due to the way Freddy’s compassion is registered on his body, but also as a Jansenist ex-voto painting since divine grace is hinted at only obliquely, rather than being explicitly signified through classic iconography.14 For a more politically directed critic such as Martin O’Shaughnessy, the ending indicates the spiritual transcendence that contemporary man is condemned now to find on his own by bearing his own cross, since religion is no longer able to make sense of the characters’ lives and provide a moral structure (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 119). Dumont himself has accounted for the last sequence in terms of Freddy’s genuine remorse for his actions (Dumont 2001a: 108–9) leading to an epiphany: ‘[b]y sensing his misery, he [Freddy] simultaneously elevates himself. This epiphany, this elevation is what I [Dumont] take from Christianity’ (cited in Bowles 2004: 52). Yet Dumont also

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formulates an important distinction between the landscape and the heavens that favours deistic humanistics over the theology of repentance and salvation, and reintegration into earthly humanity over religious conversion or spiritual ascension. Freddy, he claims, ‘is not looking at the clouds at the end of the film, but the landscape, since there is not transcendence. It is not found up there but down here. The solution is to be found in the landscape… It is an awakening … It is the passage into oneself. It means releasing oneself to oneself ’ (Dumont 2001c: 45) (my emphasis). However we choose to interpret this final scene and the film as a whole (and Dumont rightly insists that it is a purely personal matter15), there is a concerted desire here for emotional deliverance through cinematic form, since the character’s gaze coheres and communes directly with that of the camera and the viewer. This sudden, new, shared fraternity of perspectives explodes the otherwise flat neutrality of shots, yet not in a blind, vertical motion. It is rather what we might term a contingent horizontal-vertical movement: the horizontality of space in ’Scope (the Real) matched by the verticality of time (the Event), both profoundly marked by the scar of human baseness and inhumanity. Such a tightly integrated cinematic process powerfully contradicts the static visual moment earlier in the film when Freddy’s gang visit Michou’s brother Cloclo dying of AIDS in the hospital. There, the numbed silence is broken by one of the gang commenting on the cheap reproduction hanging on the wall of a Giotto fresco, The Raising of Lazarus (1304–6), with the all-too-literal words: ‘It’s the man who’s resuscitated’. By contrast, the composite effect of shots, angles, and fields in the final sequence creates another temporality, that of montage – all the more exceptional in a cinema like Dumont’s where the number of cuts is relatively small due to the preponderance of long takes. It is thus through montage that the film’s metaphorical ending poses a direct formal challenge to the viewer, forcing us to consider and interrogate directly the ethics of our gaze vis-à-vis Freddy. Yet does the act of montage also offer a way out of the formal bind of the reverse-field that seems to enchain not only the characters observing the landscape (and the viewer watching this happen), but also the landscape itself? Or does it merely replicate it? The question of exactly what type of natural space – and hence what type of spectatorial space – Dumont’s cinema ultimately envisions is explored further in L’humanité, for which Dumont again wrote the screenplay and which takes off where La Vie de Jésus essentially left prior to the final sequence – with a furtive police

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inspector attempting not very successfully to do his duty. Located again in Bailleul and its natural surroundings, the film deals with similar themes and motifs, including a love triangle provoking male rivalry and jealousy, aggression and hostility, a painfully introverted male protagonist looked after by his domineering mother, and the presence and threat of an outsider (again an Arab, here a drug dealer). The very title, left deliberately in lower case as L’humanité to denote the concrete underside of humankind as opposed to the abstract grandeur of Man, formalises the themes of humanity and inhumanity exposed now at its most ‘adult’, raw and depraved in the very opening minutes with an image of the violated and murdered naked body of an 11 year old girl. The moral and physical disgust here is further conveyed by a concrete emphasis on slime, saliva, snot and sweat. The roving, hollow bug eyes of the hypersensitive and simpleminded detective protagonist Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) lie at the root of a film that foregrounds obsessive, traumatised looking and repulsion. With his sunken chest, stooped shoulders and pallid complexion, Pharaon wallows like a kind of Holy Fool in his own, highly deliberate, suspended time which, along with the omnipresent clouds and summer heat, sap the film’s energy and deaden its pace. This is aggravated by the long takes of often static scenes shot with natural light and again in wide-frame ’Scope without any conventional filmic cushion like incidental music. As Martine Beugnet writes, Pharaon cannot distance himself from the world’s ‘meaningless organic obscenity’, and we enter with him into the sticky materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘world as flesh’ (Beugnet 2007: 104). In inverse proportion to Dumont’s unholy relish for depicting physical matter, L’humanité also contains, however, numerous and explicit art references. Once again, the inspiration is Flemish rural painting. Pharaon is presented as the grandson of a real local, nineteenth-century artist, Pharaon Abdon Léon de Winter, who achieved distinction as a portraitist and genre painter of the Realist academy of northern France (his works form part of the permanent collection of the Musée de Benoît-De-Puydt in Bailleul). We are invited to read a blue wall plaque in Bailleul with his dates, and Pharaon even goes to the Palais des Beaux-Arts to donate a de Winter self-portrait for a retrospective. A formal tension is created between Dumont’s cinematic style and de Winter’s painterly approach, notably during the museum scene when Pharaon looks intently at several canvases, including a portrait of nuns secluded from the world.16 Although it

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may seem at times that Dumont’s shots are like de Winter’s pious still-lives, the cinematic image, always moving in time, presents an implied critique of the frozen image. To prove this point, Dumont will even approximate Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) through an extreme close-up shot of a disembodied vagina and clitoris contracting in sobs, just seconds after the woman in question – Pharaon’s one close friend, Domino (Séverine Caneele) – has offered her body to him as a ‘gift’ which he declines. This pulsating tableau vivant spectacularly contradicts the inert, battered body of Nadège in the undergrowth. For in Dumont the ‘live’ cinematic image is always recording human movement in time: anything that looks too much like a painting must be activated in order to obviate the horror of natural stasis.17 L’humanité starts, in fact, ‘unnaturally’ with an audio close-up of human breathing as a tiny human figure in silhouette runs left to right on a distant hill-top at the back of a perfectly composed, static frame. The next shot is of a lumbering, all-too-human body of flesh running through a freshly ploughed field before falling prostrate flat on to the mud. In these opening shots of horizontal drift, the middle-aged man (Pharaon) runs through the field in the blustering wind as if at one with the land. As in La Vie de Jésus, what counts most here is the act of human movement through the framed natural landscape rather than the land itself. Yet the motivation of the movement is unclear. Is this perhaps a crime scene, and, if so, is the man guilty of some misdeed? Or is he humbling and submitting himself to nature because he is emotionally distraught in the face of the pervasive brutality of humankind and overwhelmed by empathy for others’ suffering? The question is left wide-open. Indeed, more even than in Dumont’s first film, every scene becomes a site of non-committal contemplation and subjective gazing. The opening sequence of Pharaon in the fields is closed by an image of him now in his car listening to harpsichord music by William Christie at high volume. He gazes blankly out of shot, his natural default position, illustrating his basic tendency simply to observe. This is immediately followed through an eye-line match by a subjective point-of-view shot of the remains of a tractor in the distance, evoking Georges Braque’s Landscape with Plough (1955). Similarly, while in the car with his superintendent (Ghislain Ghesquière), Pharaon focuses in intimate subjective close-up on the man’s ruddy neck and the sweat on his brow falling on to his open-neck shirt. We also witness Pharaon’s recurring point-of-view

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shots of the hill on the horizon from his allotment, which suggest an obscure need for some type of contact with nature, though the view is invariably blocked by wire-netting. Point-of-view shots may even be shared here, as, for instance, when Pharaon, in the interview scene in London, stares out of the window with his translator at a physical assault on a man taking place outside the Eurostar terminal below. In the art museum in Lille, a precise relay of gazes is established: we look at the curator looking at Pharaon who blankly scrutinises a picture on the wall. Yet when elsewhere Pharaon simply gawps for a minute and a half at Domino and Joseph enjoying rough penetrative sex (a scene rendered in almost vivisectionist detail and verging on consensual rape), the viewer is made uncomfortably complicit with a voyeuristic act of looking. In short, in virtually every scene the act of vision is defamiliarised and thrown into question. It is not just Pharaon who has direct subjective access to the external real. Our first encounter with Domino, who spends most of her days when not working at the local factory leaning against the outside wall of her house and staring vacantly into space, features a subjective pointof-view shot of the other side of the street, the phone cables cutting diagonally through the frame. This is clearly a visual translation of her ambivalent feelings about her present existence: ‘You see, Pharaon, life really sucks’, she declares.18 Compare this exteriorisation of interior feelings with Domino’s obsessive point-of-view interest in the bulging swimming costume of Pharaon’s male acquaintance during the trip later to Dunkerque. Here, and in each of the cases we have mentioned, there is no returning counter-shot of another human figure for the purposes of identification between two characters engaged in dialogue (and by extension, in standard cinematic terms, with the spectator). The reverse-field shot (as opposed to point-of-view) is only ever related to one individual at a time in order to provide an external sense of that character’s internal thoughts and feelings. This is central to Dumont’s artistic credo of subjectivising the natural landscape in order to objectivise humans and hammer home the carnality of human life. The process seems contagious, for the landscape is continually (under) mined by the human gaze. Sébastien Ors remarks of L’humanité that ‘[e]ach gaze out of shot by Pharaon has its reverse shot, sometimes crude, but it needs to be shown because it exists, a question of morals’ (Ors 2001: 36), adding that ‘the gaze only has meaning with reference to the reverse shot’ (ibid.). This is a compelling reading, although it is not always strictly the case that a shot is matched by its reverse-field.

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Moreover, not every reverse shot carries the same weight or motivation, since it often depends on whether or not it takes place specificially in nature. Yet the fact remains that external reality seems only ever to be performing an expressive or figurative role and to have no real value in itself. Indeed, the landscape and elements barely exist visually without either human presence or fictional framing. The film’s opening long-shot of the landscape, for instance, is immediately cut once the distant moving human figure of Pharaon has exited the frame. Likewise, as soon as Pharaon’s bike has moved out of the frame during his ride through the countryside, the shot is replaced. Even an open panorama of the landscape in long-shot has to feature some type of human activity, like a tractor moving in the far-distance, in order to function. As in La Vie in Jésus, and indeed all Dumont’s cinema, we often wait with bated breath to see how long, if at all, the real can avoid being systematically swallowed up by the human gaze and presence, whether visual or aural. Rather than a morality of the reverse shot leading to a possible osmosis between man and nature, the defining structure of Dumont’s cinema corresponds more to the specularity of narcissism, with nature serving merely as a mirror to reflect man’s internal and spiritual malaise. Pharaon learns extremely little during his various investigations, and the film is riddled with weak links and gaping holes.19 Since the genre of the police procedural relies on the ability of a human subject to act in a given situation with a social structure, the film may justifiably be categorised as an ‘anti-policier’. Yet the generic thematic framework functions again more as a pretext and device for other, more important formal moments of basculement involving the landscape. Towards the end, back in his allotment and contemplating a distant hillock in the far-distance (the only elevated point of the landscape), Pharaon enters into an extraordinary state of physical levitation that makes plain the degree of apparent symbiosis in Dumont between land and character. First, we see Pharaon rise head-first into the frame from below while facing off-screen to the right, as if this were simply the mundane effect of an actor standing up to meet the camera’s line of axis. The next long-shot – a banal image of the allotment with the hill in the far-background (clearly a subjective point of view) – reveals that the camera is actually raised above the ground and that Pharaon really is levitating in mid-air. In a standard Dumont exercise in remotivation of shot, we are thus obliged to re-read the scene retrospectively and correct our initial assumption. The third stage of this four-part sequence is an

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2.  A human miracle in CinemaScope: Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté) levitating above his allotment in L’humanité (1999).

objective close-up shot of Pharaon with his eyes now closed: positioned on the same line of axis as the character, the viewer is made privy to a purely interior moment. The final shot of the sequence is a reverse-field view of Pharaon from behind and in long-shot, suspended above the allotment – an impression enhanced by digital effects that erase the two poles on to which he has been hoisted as if on a cross. He remains immobile in the air for a few protracted seconds, leaning to one side as if weighed down by his feelings of impotence (what Andrew Tracy calls here ‘the intolerable weight of being’ (Tracy 2004)) and the ­responsibility he feels for the guilt of those around him (possibly himself too). There is a two-way pull here: Dumont’s earthbound characters seem propelled forwards by the land, at times virtually driven into it, yet are also directed skywards. This is how the moment of elevation induced by apparent somatisation is conceived by Dumont in his published ‘text for a scenario’ (henceforth ‘text’), where he accentuates its metaphysical and spiritual dimension and Pharaon’s potentially quasi-divine status: ‘He [Pharaon] exposed himself intimately to the plain … There was nothing else, not one sign, just the presentation of Pharaon to the landscape by miraculous installation. The whole of Flanders was informed when the Saint was called. It gave its peace to the day and preserved his glory’ (Dumont 2001b: 106). Certainly, alone of all the characters in L’humanité Pharaon is not just tolerated by nature but blends with it and consciously tries not to disturb it because he has the humility to understand that it does not belong to him, even as he cultivates and nurtures it in his own allotment. As Ors notes, only Pharaon has any idea of how and what to draw from a fusional

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relationship with nature and the immense fatality dominating the human race (Ors 2001: 23).20 We may choose to read this ‘unnatural’, magical event in nature as a kind of mystical epiphany and miracle within the Christian framework of sacrifice. David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman argue, for example, that the sequence appears to correspond to the three-stage process of transcendence in film defined by Paul Schrader.21 Yet again, if we restrict ourselves to the strictly formal and concrete, this astonishing reverse-field shot construction opens up a new force-field in the film and extends what I proposed earlier in La Vie de Jésus as a double ‘horizontal-vertical’ movement of montage: the vertical direction of human action in time set against the wide, horizontal space of ’Scope. This suggests that the permanent ambition of Dumont’s cinema is to attain a temporary resolution of spatio-temporal contradictions through the rhythms of montage. The emphasis is on the viewer’s capacity to believe: we are projected forwards and upwards, then, via subjective point-of-view and reverse-field manoeuvres, locked into a precise formal hold. An equivalent fate befalls the landscape, for the sequence casts nature – the allotment in the foreground, the countryside in the background – into the fixed supporting role of stagesetter, observer and refuge. In this particular form of osmosis, nature is literally holding up the human within its bosom and performing a service: Pharaon is raised by the very flowers whose petals he had touched earlier and rubbed tenderly with his thumbs and forefingers. In this sense, what seems exceptional within the film corresponds perfectly to type: Pharaon finds in nature an already existing representation of his own mental state with no need to (re)construct it. It is as if he were projecting himself physically into nature as a way of relieving himself of his inner torment nourished by the culpability of others, for nature creates its own sense of appeasement, acceptance, even wonder. How different is this, we may wonder, from Domino who sees in nature merely a reflection of her own conflicted desires, and who, during the trip to the coast, is magnetically drawn to the water into which she partially immerses herself and promptly urinates? L’humanité extends its reverse-field logic and potential for montage towards the end when we are presented with a further mystery. Pharaon walks into his chief’s office and, upon discovering that the man who has been charged with the murder is none other than Joseph, first embraces him in close-up, then motions him up him from his chair in medium-shot (the camera rises in unison as if instinctively), before

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deep-kissing him as he weeps abjectly. The close-up of the two faces is now on a higher axis, although their positions relative to each other remain unchanged. It is precisely due to the sequence of reverse-field shots witnessed moments earlier during Pharaon’s act of levitation that we read this equally ceremonial scene of human embrace as an event of montage and illustration of the ‘unnatural’ powers of cinematic form. The characters interlock, just as the sequence of shots locks the viewer into the film’s grid. This moment of physical communion is shortlived, however. After some intense long seconds Pharaon suddenly pushes Joseph away as if rejecting him, This is followed by a now almost standard nature sequence: first, a bunch of bright, beautiful peonies held together by Pharaon in medium-shot in front of his crotch, then an objective view of him in long-shot in his allotment, followed by a close-up of his face and a reverse-field, subjective shot from Pharaon’s point of view of the surrounding hazy countryside. Nature has once again been cultivated into a reverse-field formation by means of a highly stylised and sustained movement of montage. As with the final shots of La Vie de Jésus, the landscape provides a calming, salvatory role for a humankind plagued by moral crisis, though here the process is staggered across different scenes and spaces which culminate in the film’s concluding mystery: Pharaon pictured in the same room, sitting on the same chair that Joseph occupied, in long-shot and at an angle, with at least one of his wrists in handcuffs (the other hand is not fully visible). The subsequent shot and final image of the film is a high-angle, reverse-field shot capturing Pharaon frontally as he looks up to the left towards the window off-screen in the general direction of the viewer, the trace of a half-smile etched on his face. We see now how much – yet also how little – distance we have travelled since the beginning of the film when the landscape first ‘gave face’ and appeared to breathe due to the audio close-up of Pharaon running in the far-distance – a process that Beugnet, following Deleuze, calls ‘visagéification’ (or ‘faceification’), whereby the inanimate acquires human, face-like features (Beugnet 2007: 104–5). L’humanité is wholly defined in terms of the human figure and the overcoming of natural distance: between Pharaon on the horizon and Pharaon in close-up. This renders futile any attempt by critics or Dumont himself to discuss the final sequence (and the film as a whole) solely in terms of grace and human transformation, or of internal godliness overcoming external evil (i.e. ‘Saint Pharaon’ taking Joseph’s crime (and all crimes) upon his shoulders because the situation demands that someone ‘take the

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fall’ for the unspeakable horrors of humanity (Dumont 2001b: 120)).22 For this is an entirely anthropocentric film about human vision and existence within landscape that marshals the viewer’s powers of spectatorial projection and works also to reaffirm ‘our’ human status. And it comes at the expense of nature itself, which ironically has made it all possible, both formally and thematically. It is entirely symptomatic that, during Pharaon’s encounter with the sow and her large litter in the barn of the dead girl’s family, the viewer is never allowed to get close to the poor animal lumped on its side through sheer exhaustion and unresponsive to Pharaon’s stroking hands. With nature and natural creatures consigned to a highly codified and delineated role (docile or else maternal), it is human perception and gesture that is always prioritised, intensified here by a subjective point-of-view shot of Pharaon’s own hands in close-up. It goes without saying that animals in Dumont’s human-centred world never look or answer back. Into the void: Twentynine Palms We can now better appreciate Dumont’s aesthetic mission: to make ungraspable, indifferent space signify. Or, to put it more accurately, to transform meaningless and pitiless nature into a compliant, hospitable space and refuge for human reflection and salvation. Far from simply presenting a series of horizontal, blank, ‘open’ gazes off-frame, Dumont’s films are organised punctually around nodal points of space and time that involve different forms of vertical propulsion and crystallise moments of inter-human encounter. These are also rhetorical instances of montage that involve natural space and intercut reverse fields to produce new kinds of intersubjective cinematic space into which the viewer is directly sutured. Despite outward appearances, this is not a cinema particularly interested in external space and the visible, immanent world. Instead, it is always gesturing through the human figure to an ailleurs off-frame that leads, paradoxically, to a private, interior, ‘fictional’ space: we move from characters facing off and out of screen to a formal face-off in montage that redirects and motivates the reverse-field. The more externality and exteriority there is in Dumont, the more possibility there exists for interiorisation. Indeed, so crucial is the reverse-field shot for a Dumont film to resolve itself spatially that landscape is never just a landscape, nor is it just a space for characters to circulate in and ‘project’ on to: it is always already a human face. In fact, Dumont has little to say about landscape, or nature qua nature,

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because it is always on its anthropomorphic way to being ‘completed’ by his characters. In short, rather than ‘unframe’ the world in order to rediscover it afresh, Dumont continually frames it, in all senses of the word. The omnipresent chirpings of birds, crowings of cocks and occasional blastings of wind are no more than that: ‘nature-effects’. Are there no limits to Dumont’s play of landscape as form? What happens, for example, when the core nature of Dumont’s landscape radically changes? Might this constitute a new, ‘other’ space safe from the highly claustrophobic and fatalistic universe of Dumont’s Real World? With Twentynine Palms the barren wilderness metaphorically and spiritually present in the representation of Bailleul is rendered wholly literal in the form of the high desert surrounding Joshua Tree National Park in California. The process of surveying the landscape is also made thematically concrete: an American photographer David (David Wissak) and his Russian girlfriend Katia (Katerina Golubeva) leave Los Angeles in a Hummer to scout for locations in the desert while staying at a motel in the small town of Twentynine Palms, situated near one of the largest US Marine bases (the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center).23 This is a totally unexpected move by Dumont into both an entirely different genre (what he called a ‘quickie experimental horror-movie’),24 and a new type of environment with no immediate associations, where all seems lost, displaced and indeterminate.25 There is nothing sublime about his presentation of the mythical landscape of the American West with its infinity of ugly outgrowths of shrub and inexpressive vistas. Dumont seems intuitively to grasp this and poses a dilemma: how can space be engaged when no real sense of the evolution of time exists due to the lack of seasons, and where any awareness of place as locale, and of characters organically linked to the soil of their habitat, however grimly, is distinctly lacking? Of course, on another level, the desert appears a perfect Dumont space due to the opportunities it offers for interiorisation. As Jean-Michel Frodon has observed, the desert as void is always mental and symbolic, even theoretical, rather than real (Frodon 2004). Dumont makes it expressly clear that the desert is ‘in’ the characters, and that ‘the landscape partakes in saying what’s inside of them, what they feel. I do on screen what every single person can feel when they go walking into the desert’ (Dumont 2008). Yet can extended direct exposure to the full materiality of such an extreme, natural wilderness also create possible new ways of perceiving and relating to space? The two protagonists seem cowed by the hostile, alienating landscape

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broken only by anonymous wind-farms. The palpable sense of latent menace and unknown threat created by dead vanishing points and endless objective long-takes (there are extremely few subjective pointof-view shots here, mainly restricted to David) is further aggravated by Dumont’s non-continuous cutting and the use of the hors-champ, notably in the case of the Marines with shaved heads who lurk on the periphery of the frame during the café sequence and who induce male jealousy and unease in the long-haired, hippy-looking David. Katia, meanwhile, acts at times like an unhinged neurotic, prone to attacks of grief, joy, and jealousy. The two struggle to communicate in their frustrated, inarticulate mixture of half-understood English and French. In fact, in a parody of amour fou, they only ever really connect during hard, animalistic sex which Dumont films head-on, loud and violent, with little lyricism or sensuality. In these sullen stagings where neither seems aware of the other’s presence, desire is presented as an act of self-gratifying aggression predicated entirely on domination. When violence does finally strike, however, it comes from without, as sudden, random and brutal as in a classic Old West ambush or more recent avatars like Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which also features a scene of forced male sodomisation. The couple are first ‘rear-ended’ in their black Hummer by a white pick-up, then David is struck down and raped by one of the three men who descend while Katia (along with the viewer) is forced to spectate in horror. The perpetrator appears with his shaved head like a Marine, and his ‘enjoyment’, filmed from a low angle and, like the rest of the scene, objectively, is experienced as emotional agony. His face contorts with a scream when he ejaculates, not unlike the trials of passion experienced by David and Katia. No quick cutting or sound design is allowed to comfort us during this scene which carries echoes of David Selznick’s Duel in the Sun (1946), with Katia lying in the desert dirt like Jennifer Jones during the final gory shoot-out. This being Dumont the violence will quickly be repeated, though differently. The return to the motel is marked by the reversal of an earlier sequence when Katia refused to open the bathroom door and communicate. As if seeking release from the trauma he has experienced and which has reduced him physically to a foetal position, it is now David who locks himself away. However, he suddenly opens the door and bolts towards Katia, pushing her back on to the bed and murdering her in a frenzied knife attack Psycho-style, his angry groans a monstrous intensification of the sounds of sex emitted

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earlier. The particular stylised rendering of this horror – a high close-up of the knife is poised above David’s head now half-shaven like a wannabe Marine – recalls also the detail of hands held high in Bresson’s L’Argent (1983). What follows is a stunning, final, high- and wide-angle long-shot (a two-minute plan-séquence) of the desert with David’s apparently dead, naked body lying prone in the foreground, his bottom in full view and dwarfed by his Hummer. A policeman walks up into the middle-distance loudly berating a colleague on the phone for not providing back-up. The cycle of violence and aggression seems inexorable: there can be no simple escape or deliverance from the spectacle of human evil, even in the emptiness of the shrub-land which fills virtually the entire frame and appears also to swallow up the policeman, with just a thin swathe of sky visible in the far background. Once again, Dumont applies the trick of an unnatural audio close-up: despite the fact that the policeman is continually moving far away, his voice remains fully audible. Such totalising violence has naturally determined the focus of critical and political responses to the film. For one numbed and ‘shocked’ critic, James Quandt, who originally championed Dumont as Bresson’s natural heir, the filmmaker has fatally succumbed, like Gaspar Noé and Philippe Grandrieux, to the ‘elemental elementary’, with the couple’s ‘every atavistic grunt and howl exaggerated by the silence of the soundtrack’ (Quandt 2004). Whereas the extremity of Dumont’s previous films was incorporated into both a moral vision and a coherent mise-en-scène, it is now, according to Quandt, imposed and escalated, the result of his slack, manufactured sense of American imbecility and xenophobia (references to Jerry Springer, ominous Marines, rednecks snarling at strangers, desert hillibillies).26 Certainly, Dumont skirts dangerously close to European stereotypes and visual clichés of a certain idea of rural America – the atrophied America of motels and gas stations, freight trains, oversize vehicles, backwater deviants – as well as its history of annexation, colonisation and destruction of land by white settlers.27 In fact, there is a long and noble history of European directors getting it all wrong about America, from Wim Wenders with Paris, Texas (1984) to Michelangelo Antonioni with his own film maudit, Zabriskie Point (1970), also set in the desert landscape of southern California, and which likewise attempted to deal with the particularities of American alienation and violence before exploding into an apocalyptic, Panavision finale.28 On a formal level Twentynine Palms includes, too, some remarkable Antonioni-like

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3.  A stunning overhead shot of David (David Wissak) and Katia (Katerina Golubeva) moulding their naked bodies to the bulbous mineral forms of the California desert in Twentynine Palms (2003).

compositions and tableau-like effects, notably the overhead view of David and Katia naked together on the desert rocks which seems to mimic the famous panorama of copulating couples of Zabriskie Point. In addition, the close-up of Katia’s hand feeling the bark of a Joshua tree recalls Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) touching the material surfaces of the changing urban fabric of Milan in La Notte (1961). Dumont justifies his film, however, not simply on account of its representation of the nature of American violence, but also in terms of the physical experience of watching it and its purgative effect on the audience. He states: ‘To allow us to live with ourselves and each other, it is important that we experience the non-human part of us on screen rather than having it in our lives. We need this sort of portrayal to free us from our nightmares’ (Dumont 2005:18). We shall come back to this question shortly. It would require a long and separate analysis to prove whether the graphic sex and abject violence in Twentynine Palms actually provides a convincing critique of the dangerous smoothness of Hollywood screen violence. Dumont himself claims that the film reveals the destructive American obsession with space and the deluded dream of having always yet more space to navigate and subjugate (a standard trope of the Western where the mythical landscape provides the charged, symbolic backdrop for male heroism, freedom and opportunity, usually through

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violent action, as in the films of D.W.  Griffith and John Ford). The deliberate way the film introduces the scenery and the actors suggests it will be an American-style road movie, yet ‘nothing happens, a great abyss opens up’ (Dumont 2005: 17).29 Such justification post facto is pure intellectual camouflage by Dumont, however, for what is really at issue here is not simply the horrors of American cinema and space (its cultural codes, its cinematic representations, its mirages of freedom and conquests, etc.), but also, I would argue, the actual horror of open, ‘objective’ space. The final shot emphasises the nefarious effects of open land and limitless space. Rather than become at one with – and within – the natural world, David ends up engulfed and obliterated by it. This was visually prefigured in the preceding shot when, immediately following the murderous act, the screen faded to black and then slowly re-opened as a long-shot of Katia’s dead body lying supine on the bed of the motel guest room. Hanging above the bed is a cheap, genericlooking reproduction of the American West (a ridge of mountains plus lake), which, as we know from earlier scenes, faces on the opposite wall a smaller, more colourful, version of the same. The room is now bathed in a phosphorescent light green that evokes the turquoise colours of the outdoor motel pool and also matches the matt blues and greens of the reproduction. In this levelling out of colour, the inside has now fused with the outside, or rather the external has become internal. Either way, landscape in its various forms has taken over and extinguished the human: in the space of one quick cut we move from Katia dead in front of a fictional landscape, to David dead within a real landscape. It has led one critic, Asbjørn Grønstad, who places Twentynine Palms in the context of Vincent Gallo’s equally controversial The Brown Bunny, which also appeared in 2003 and similarly unfolds in the landscape of Southern California, to argue persuasively that the trajectory of slow, visceralising aimlessness culminating in the inertia of the final, closed frame of the desert may be read positively as a progressive decommodification of the landscape where the tourist consumer is now mortally consumed (Grønstad 2012: 79).30 The thematic and visual link between open, non-defined space and human danger is provided self-reflexively by the film’s earlier concrete reference to an experimental art-work by the contemporary German artist Thomas Demand entitled Hof/Yard (2001), which just happens – quite implausibly – to be showing on the television in the guest room, and which follows a brutal cut from yet another bruising round of sex in the pool. The image, conveyed in full-frame, is a slow, languorous,

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night-time panning shot across a fenced-in backyard in what seems a crime scene lit in a red hue with neon glare. The bare façade of a single-storey building is illuminated by flashlights, suggesting photographers trying to obtain a snapshot of someone moving imperceptibly from left to right. The only audible sounds are the clicks and motors of cameras and the distant hum of traffic. Such is the faceless abstract nature of this inexplicable plan-séquence, which is also playing on a continuous loop (as David acknowledges to Katia, ‘[c]’est un art film!’), that it creates an eerie mood of menace. The same monitor has just relayed an episode of The Jerry Springer Show on father-daughter incest and rape, to which David remained callously numb by nonchalantly pleasuring himself. Taken in conjuction, Hof ’s homogenous, looped image – a form of mindless visual information that, for Serge Daney, requires ‘receiving’ rather than ‘seeing’ and creates only empty, dead space – can certainly be read as a critique by Dumont of contemporary image relations and our emotional relationship to graphic images. Indeed, Hof offers a precise mise en abyme of anonymous space as the potential home of apocalyptic horror and endlessly reversible human violence and destruction that runs from the rear-ended Hummer and act of anal rape to David’s final, naked butt in the landscape. Nature is no longer giving human ‘face’, and Twentynine Palms succumbs utterly to the immensity of physical space and landscape. The overpowering external real has now taken its revenge in Dumont’s work, and, only too logically within his metaphysical framework, it occurs in a desert wilderness with echoes of the post-Edenic fall, though without any counter-signs of spiritual transformation or redemption. Yet ironically, and tragically, this point of no return is reached at the end of what is actually Dumont’s first attempt to focus more on space rather than time, and to deliver on the film’s absolutely literal, place-specific title by engaging with the environment on its own terms. For the desert is often photographed here simply as external space and an object of pure fascination. Throughout the film the camera cuts away directly to extreme long-shots of the landscape where there is little or no human movement, and where no attempt is made to motivate it through subjective point-of-view. At times, the camera just observes the desert and exposes itself (and the viewer) to elemental emptiness via objective lateral- and forward-tracking shots from the moving Hummer – shots that are deliberately presented as not the point-of-view of the driver who remains to one side of the frame. It is as if Dumont were trying genuinely to tap into the spirit of the landscape, its genius loci. In this

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continuous, ‘subjectless’, open car gaze, the external world drifts by at a measured pace and material details are recorded and commented on by the couple as they pass in and out of the moving frame. Elsewhere, there are even loose, unanchored and unmotivated shots, for example, a long-shot of clouds in the sky which functions as, at most, a vague, elemental bridge between a desert sequence and another pool-side sex scene. A view near the beginning of a wind-turbine farm, glimpsed behind a passing freight-train, could perhaps be a subjective image, but, in an Antonioni-like play with shot motivation, it is revealed two shots later to be from a purely objective angle.31 This is not to say that there are no reverse-field manoeuvres in the film, yet the recurring and overt use of handheld camera dismantles fixity and easy legibility – an effect compounded by the duration of some of the wide-angle shots of natural perspectives that acquire even greater weight and depth of field in the desert heat and light. Even a clearly subjective shot of the sky from the direction of the rocks begins to shed its status and motivation over time. With time effectively suspended, desert space is no longer merely to be filled with human figures, actions, fiction, etc., but can impose itself as an externality influencing all that is visible and audible. What I am suggesting here is that the desert constitutes a tabula rasa in Dumont’s method and practice, and that Twentynine Palms may be celebrated as a wholly different approach to space and landscape in his work. During the moments just described, the film enters a more documentary mode that lies outside Dumont’s standard visual grid and establishes a non-hierarchical gaze. To use the terms provided by Martin Lefebvre in his account of landscape within Hollywood cinema which has always been obliged to organise (i.e. repress) space as part of its transparent, ‘naturalising’, classical narration, space is freed here from event-hood and from serving simply as a setting (i.e. ‘story space’) to become an autonomous space (Lefebvre 2006: 22–3).32 For Lefebvre, who privileges the appearance of landscapes during lulls in the story such as the temps morts in Antonioni, or when there is no diegetic motivation as in late-Godard films like Nouvelle Vague (1990) where non-diegetic inserts (or ‘elsewheres’) perform as part of an aesthetic of the Sublime (ibid.: 45), landscape can be ‘a form of being of external space in our minds’ (ibid.: 51) (original emphasis). That is to say, although external space always forms part of a mental process of human projection, it can also operate as a primary agent. Such moments in Twentynine Palms place it in a long, modernist tradition of formal experimention with the aleatory sounds, images and sensations of the everyday by means of a

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moving vehicle. I am thinking notably of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Leçons d’histoire/History Lessons (1972), which incorporates three ten-minute plan-séquences of a car driving through the streets of Rome, Marguerite Duras’s Le Camion/The Lorry (1977), structured around tracking shots of a lorry roaming the industrial landscape of the Yvelines,33 and Chantal Akerman’s D’Est/From the East (1993), a documentary-cum-travelogue that tracks leftwards slowly across Eastern Europe, from summer to winter, as the former Soviet Bloc starts to crumble.34 Each of these groundbreaking works is distinctive and unique, yet they all explore the ethical idea and potential of an open, ‘free’ frame as a new form of engagement with external reality. I would argue further that through his explicit referencing of Hof by his virtual namesake Demand, Dumont is deliberately taking an ironic distance in Twentynine Palms from his own artistic ambitions and pretensions to exteriorise the invisible while always interiorising the visible. A secondary mood of gentle self-mockery is thus created in the film, and as such Hof complements the parodically banal, slow-tempo American folk song by a Japanese male singer repreated ad nauseam on the car CD player, the words of which, when translated back into English, already announce the utopian fantasy of free space as just that – an impossible dream: ‘Let’s sing and dance, we are free and released! Soon on this island, Paradise will come’. To return to the specific case of the remarkable overhead views of David and Katia naked on an elevated desert outcrop: while the two may share point-of-view shots of potential mastery over the landscape below them, they also mould their interlaced, extended bodies on to the bleached, bulbous natural forms of the arid rocks, to the point they even appear absorbed by them. Exceptionally in Dumont’s work (and unlike Antonioni’s couples strewn in series across Death Valley and wrapped up solipsistically in their own pleasure), David and Katia are playing and as if communing with the elemental forms of nature on its own terms, reaching beyond the exclusively human in order to conjure some kind of reconciliation with nature. Martine Beugnet suggests that the characters are becoming ‘mineral’ (Beugnet 2007: 131), a process that, as Neil Archer argues, undermines and decentres the human as the governing figure within the world (Archer 2011: 63). It is crucial that we fully acknowledge and respect this fact before trying to will the opposite, i.e. that, as Nikolaj Lübecker puts it allegorically, the rock formation in the desert assumes in turn an anthropomorphic form, and that the Joshua trees resemble otherworldly creatures (Lübecker 2011:

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237–8). Lübecker continues: ‘the impressive landscape breathes, creaks, and appears to live … accordingly there is little difference between the animate and inanimate, between subject and object’ (ibid.: 238).35 Yet there is nothing in Twentynine Palms to suggest, still less prove, that the plants and minerals are becoming human. The ‘enstrangement’ of perception, as Viktor Shklovsky once defined it, restores the stone to its stoniness. Obdurately mute and impassive to acts of human rape and death, the extreme natural environment is nonetheless directly experienced by the characters in the burning heat of the rocks and the searing noise of the wind. Moreover, this is a film that also takes into account the consequences of human behaviour on human creatures. When the three-legged dog running after the Hummer is advertently run over by David, the couple immediately stop the car and descend; they can do nothing, but the dog survives and eventually runs off. Here, nature and human existence impinge mutually on one another according to the universal rules of cause and effect. Yet such a major departure from Dumont’s usual visual method and technique, matched by his attempt to employ real actors (something he later regretted because they always sought to ‘act’), proves ultimately disastrous, for there is an exact correlation between the open depiction of the real and the ‘inhuman’ horror that strikes from without. We note, too, that beyond the all-too-evident echoes of Hopper with the deserted motel and some brief, acousmatic sounds of classical music over a perspective of desert and palm trees, there are no specific references in the film either to painting or other redemptive forms of art which would normally provide a framework for Dumont to work with and against by means of poetic inversion. The unfortunate lesson here is that space in Dumont’s cinema must be properly calibrated to time and wired to human coordinates if it is not finally to combust in irremediable violence, and the film with it. In Twentynine Palms, where there is less and less opportunity for motivating human activity within either real time (for instance, the rituals of farm labour matching the cycles of natural seasons) or the supra-temporality of montage, and nothing therefore to offset natural, human bestiality and predatoriness (visible even in the way David tracks Katia down in the fixed, rectangular space of the motel pool), the exorbitancy of the calcified landscape along with the abjection of formlessness are free to take over. Indeed, in a film where the screenscape does not impose itself on the external landscape, we witness the gradual withdrawal of the human and its subsumption into nature through shots recording the movement of

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characters as they recede towards the image’s vanishing point rather than, as elsewhere in Dumont’s oeuvre, entering into the frame and consolidating its presence in a progressive spatial appropriation of the framed landscape. The final panorama of Twentynine Palms is significantly a bird’s-eye shot of the desert. This is not quite tantamount to saying that space per se is evil in Dumont, but within his life-or-death poetics of being, unqualified, anonymous space provides the perfect grounds for human catastrophe. The final message of Twentynine Palms appears alarmingly reactionary: as soon as Dumont leaves his home locale (the familiar, temperate bearings of Bailleul), there is no guarantee of an interior human gaze, and no Mother Nature to provide comfort and balm in a cruel, godless world. David’s ‘release’ through ‘inhuman’ savagery is at the expense of one woman’s life as well as his own. He responds destructively, not simply against the experience of rape but also, it would appear, against the fact that it occurred in a space evoking in corporeal terms the feminine, that is, the ovular tufts of desert shrubs protruding like female public hair, and the gigantic, vulva-like rocks on which Katia is pictured at one point clutching David’s testicles in a castratory gesture. This is anthropocentrism with a vengeance! Perceived as more at one with the parched landscape (at one point she had to be persuaded by David to leave the burning rocks) and thus more open to the idea that nothing momentous or ‘phallic’ is prominent within it except the endless rows of mechanical wind-machines, Katia, the forced spectator of David’s rape, is linked by association with its locus of male degradation and shame and must logically die on account of it. Such is the ugly, misogynistic conclusion to Dumont’s failed experiment in desert space – an otherwise admirable attempt to reverse his standard, warped approach to natural landscape. Return to order After the horror of full exposure to exterior space in Twentynine Palms, Dumont took no chances with Flandres/Flanders (2006), which, although ostensibly a war film, seems to come out paradoxically on the other side of violence to recover an interior space of contemplation. Moreover, although he has moved farther into the desert to film the battleground of an international military conflict (the MiddleEastern war zone is left unspecified and conveyed in sickly pale brown monochrome), Dumont returns to his home turf of Flanders for the

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farmyard scenes that comprise the first and final stages of this three-part narrative.36 The two geographical spaces are, of course, linked by the historical continuity of war. Dumont claims to ‘regenerate’ the true horror of military engagement by presenting direct, unflinching images and sounds of male aggression using only natural lighting and mono direct sound. This includes the gang rape of a native woman, followed by the gruesome castration of one of the guilty soldiers which the victim arranges out of revenge. During the long middle-section, the film cuts back and forth between Flanders, where a young woman, Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux), waits, and the theatre of war where her sometime boyfriend and neighbouring farmer André Demester (Samuel Boidin) and her new love Blondel (Henri Cretel) have both volunteered to serve, but where they continue to pursue their jealous rivalry over her. During this period Barbe becomes emotionally unstable and seems to suffer in her very body the arbitrary cruelties and injustices of war as if she were herself engaged in battle. Discovering she is pregnant she appears disturbed, even hysterical, and we cut dramatically from the shooting of child snipers to Barbe checking for blood between her legs. Similarly, we move from the image of the castrated solider – a Christ-like figure in the unbearable heat of war – to Barbe hospitalised after going AWOL and attacking a male psychiatric nurse, the violence of the two sets of images underlined by the dry cutting of shots. After this incident Barbe stares blankly off-screen, and the image is abruptly cut to a long-shot view of undergrowth and vegetation on the battlefield. It is as if, in a further refinement of Dumont’s technique, two separate physical universes were being locked together affectively in a reversefield construction. As Emma Wilson suggests, Dumont ‘films the affect of war, its nightmare proximity with home, its involvement with the bodily sensations and minor fantasies of everyday life’ (Wilson 2007: 22). Yet the concrete intercutting of stories and sequences via Barbe as bridging device and go-between also confirms something fundamental about Dumont’s particular metaphysics of cinema: an actual denial of spatial distance. What happens there – war, but also love (including the desire for war) – is also happening here, or at least is felt here.37 Which means that time, rather than space, is being foregrounded: events like death and murder connected together through time, the passing seasons that frame the film (we begin in late autumn and end in high summer), and the ritualised repetition of acts (Barbe and Demester continually heading off into the woods for quick copulation), are what lend structure and meaning to this narrative.

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This parallel intercutting of place is resolved in the last scene when Demester and Barbe hold each other in a mirror image of their earlier imperfect couplings, though with a vital difference. Earlier, when Demester returned alone, Barbe’s anger exploded: she claimed she had been on the battlefield with him and knew intuitively he had abandoned the wounded Blondel after their unit was ambushed in order to save his own life. Demester eventually admits the accuracy of her uncanny visions and acknowledges his guilt before finally giving vent to his emotions and weeping uncontrollably. In the final shot in the barn (a two-shot), he rests his face, with eyes almost closed, on Barbe’s stomach and proclaims his love for her. With her hand on his neck she faces in the general direction of the camera, though not directly at the viewer, her glazed eyes still opaque. She then declares her love in return and comforts him – an act of forgiveness and absolution, and yet another Dumont pietà. It would seem that although the film ends with Barbe’s open gaze, Dumont is ensuring here once again a male spiritual odyssey (in one interview he describes Demester as a ‘prehistoric’ man attaining humanity (Trilling 2007­)). Hence, the film’s many instances of centrifugal movement and dispersal, when figures gaze forlornly at the landscape or face solemnly off-screen, or move towards the horizon and vanishing point of an image, or else simply bifurcate in military manoeuvres, were but formal decoys – or what we might call, in view of the battle-zone context, ‘dummies’. Dumont explains this in his now standard terms of interiority: ‘I do not film Flanders, I film what the character has inside … Everything is mental and internal’ (Dumont 2006c). In a later interview Dumont goes even further by fusing the processes of interorisation and projection: ‘All that surrounds him [Demester] represents his interiority. When the landscapes are empty, it’s a way of articulating his internal emptiness, his silences. Barbe is an interiorisation of his desire for the absolute woman … Barbe is only a figuration of Demester’s mind, I’m not trying to make her an autonomous being’ (Dumont 2008b).38 At this point in Dumont’s work everything would appear to be interiorised and interiorisable, and it perhaps explains why, according to Dumont, the character of Barbe is so ‘inexact’: she is simply a fantasmatic projection, a symptom of unbalance and potential madness and animal-like human desire. She is thus fated to remain one-dimensional, allowing men to use her body. Indeed, the film refuses to allow us any real insight into what drives Barbe. All Dumont can muster in defence of this limiting approach is the remarkably honest, yet also rather disingenuous, comment:

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‘Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction’ (Trilling 2007). Yet there is an important and decisive formal shift during Flandres that complicates Dumont’s own reading of the film. In the first part the only subjective point-of-view shots, few as they are, are consistently aligned with Demester’s gaze: reverse-field images of the landscape: a closed gate connoting blockage, the small fire smouldering in the field against the shadowed and darkening landscape signalling a sense of dark foreboding. There is also a conscious play with framing and identification: at several moments we see what we think might be a subjective image from Demester’s point of view, but this is soon unveiled as an objective frame through which Demester and Barbe pass. The emphasis dramatically changes in the second and third parts of the film, however. The high action war scenes are presented rigorously from an objective point of view, including the rape scene filmed in long-shot, although immediately following the act we are transported close up to the female victim’s hand with her cum-stained fingers. Meanwhile, with her men away, Barbe stares long and hard out of frame. At one point, an image of one corner of the farm, deserted and seemingly burnt out, asks to be read as a visualisation of her helplessness and scarred sense of the world. Later, we cut directly from Barbe finally calm in hospital to a shot of the natural vegetation and undergrowth of the battle zones. This closed-up frame clearly signifies the closing up of her possibilities and permanent depression. Such close juxtaposition through montage suggests that this might also be her vision or nightmare of events which she will later claim to have personally witnessed. Yet when Demester returns from war in the height of summer, there are no point-of-view shots from his perspective. A long-shot of dappled trees against the sky and sunlight after they have made love is revealed by the proceeding shot as a subjective image from the point of view of Barbe who is holding Demester’s head against her breast (the default hugging position in Dumont), emphasising perhaps her sensitivity to the goodness and warmth of Demester’s body now reclaimed from war. This is a crucial reverse-field shot construction of human subjectivity relying on an ever-compliant Nature, without which a Dumont film cannot operate. Hence, Dumont’s account of Barbe’s lack of cinematic ‘being’ inadvertently limits the scope and power of his own work. Just after Barbe’s subjective reverse-field shot we witness one of the film’s most striking and unusual moments, as we accompany her alone back to the farm in a fast, lateral-tracking shot. We stay close with her while

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4.  The face of landscape: Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) and Demester (Samuel Boidin) locked with the land in Flandres (2006).

she stands precariously on her toes, now filmed in close-up, then look down on her from above as she gazes upwards in tears as if suspended in mid-air. This strange elevation, extended by a deliberately awkward high-angle shot, forces us, like the moment of Pharaon’s (and the camera’s) ‘miraculous installation’ in L’humanité, to address our own necessarily unnatural, spectatorial position – as judge? As voyeur? As stand-in for God? Nothing can be sure. Yet what this exceptional shot achieves is to break through the film’s self-imposed stylistic pattern: one character’s emotional release re-orients and re-centres the viewer, which in turn makes possible the film’s own (self-)release. Hence, the passage from the centrifugal (the endless facings off) to the centripetal (facing back into reverse-field) that we trace in Flandres and in almost all Dumont’s work ironically places the viewer at the centre of the field of vision who, in one last face-off – one final twist in the visual mise en abyme – is now directly interpellated and sutured into the narrative. As Dumont stated of Flandres during the press-conference for the film at Cannes in 2006: ‘That glimmer of hope isn’t in my film. It is born from the interpretation that the filmgoer makes of it’. This might be disputed, of course. One critic, Manohla Dargis, argues precisely the opposite: that Dumont has no real interest in the

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interior state revealed by Demester’s thick brow and silences (‘one of Dumont’s false Everymen’, she laments) ‘beyond the decorative and entomological’ (Dargis 2006). Contrasting Dumont’s method specifically with that of Bresson, Dargis concludes that Dumont ‘seems uninterested in spiritual journeys or in representing how the ineffable equally touches the human face, a donkey’s ear, a crown of flowers’ (ibid.). This persuasive statement, while it confirms what we have been observing, needs to be qualified, however. For the crucial blindspot in Dumont’s work is not that he leaves no real space open for his characters and their spiritual journeys, whether male or female. Rather, it is that he leaves no space open for anything but the human. For in Dumont’s entirely anthropocentric universe, being can only ever take a fully conscious, human form. There would seem to be no aesthetic alternative. In one full-frame, long-shot view of thick vegetation in the film’s central section, for example, we become immediately aware of a human presence lurking in the central background: a soldier promptly bodies forth, as if the cinematic frame needs to be activated at all times by human movement and a fictional event. Similarly, when we see Barbe looking intently out of frame while waiting outside the hospital, and then, in the next shot, glimpse a family of cats eating prepared food on the ground, we are obliged to read the second image through her gaze – perhaps as a sign of her growing uncertainty about the two men in her life (these are creatures in jealous competition for food, after all). In other words, the cats cannot exist outside a human frame. Dumont may leave us some room for interpretation by allowing us to enter our own ‘interior’ space, since nothing is articulated precisely or verbalised. But what we are witnessing repeatedly is how nature and the non-human cannot be approached on its own objective terms. There is simply no space available in Dumont to grasp the minerality and materiality of matter non-appropriatively, as one might even in an epic war film like The Thin Red Line (1998) by Terrence Malick (a filmmaker who, like Dumont, came into cinema from philosophy). With its unpredictable close-ups, inserts of living natural creatures, and disorienting moves towards abstraction, The Thin Red Line becomes, like the extraordinary Pacific geosphere so minutely depicted, profoundly indifferent to the fury of human evil being unleashed which it effectively places in a larger, ironic and ultimately damning perspective.39 The result is that the natural landscape is allowed to ‘shine’ (a key term in Malick) at its own speed. Moreover, as Bersani and Dutoit have demonstrated, because of the construction of a neutral, non-hierarchical gaze and a

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wholly receptive kind of human looking, the film makes no essential distinction between the human and non-human: ‘all objects participate (as witnessed by an active seeing) in the community of all being’ (Bersani and Dutoit 2004: 171). Bersani and Dutoit conclude that art’s highest ethical accomplishment is to show ‘universal presence’ (ibid.: 177). By contrast, nature in Flandres is always already encoded and interiorised as an extension of human expression. Or else it is simply a cavalry horse waiting to be gunned down indiscriminately in the bloody crossfire of human war. The pattern of cross-cutting between Flanders and the wider world is repeated in Hadewijch (2009), photographed for the first time by Dumont in Aspect Ratio, and which heads out from French Flanders first to Paris, then the Middle East, before finally returning to Flanders. The primary setting is precise: a convent called Hadewijch (in reality a Cistercian monastery, the Abbaye Sainte-Marie du Mont des Cats) from which the female protagonist, Céline (Julie Sokolowski), a young female novice, takes her religious name.40 Céline has such an ecstatic love of God that she confuses abstinence with martyrdom through overzealous acts of starvation and self-mortification. After being promptly expelled from the convent by the Mother Superior, who tells her to find her true self, she enters a proliferation of new spaces, moving back first to her high-bourgeois family home in Paris (the exclusive Quai d’Anjou on the Île de la Cité), then, via a young beur Yassine (Yassine Salime) whom she meets by chance in a local cafe, to the anonymous banlieue. The uncomprehending and frustrated Yassine is a typical Dumont red-herring in that he serves merely as the conduit to his more charismatic older brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis), a fervent Muslim fundamentalist, who eventually takes her to an unspecified trouble spot in the Mediterranean (a symbolic move from the Left Bank to the West Bank). She returns to Paris a religious terrorist and with Nassir lays a bomb on the metro before returning finally to the convent. The film exemplifies Dumont’s radical decentring of place: we are in the very heart of the capital in the heat of summer and the mood is intensively urban, yet, apart from brief glimpses of the Bastille in the distance and close-up shots of the quayside by the Seine, it feels strangely non-specific. At the same time Hadewijch illustrates Dumont’s geographical precision: the two terrorists embark at Kléber metro station and the bomb they plant (according to Dumont, probably false – another ‘dummy’) explodes shortly afterwards above ground near the Arc de Triomphe. The film also underlines Dumont’s

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commitment to narrative progression, essentially linear though pushed here to the limits of plausibility due to the rapidity of events, in particular Hadewijch’s sudden, naive conversion to jihadist terrorism. Yet after what we have already seen in Dumont, the theme of mysticism seems an entirely logical move since it transcends questions of reason, speech and our comprehension of the external world, leading to what Dumont considers a realm close to cinema – that of grace and the sacred. Dumont attributes his particular attraction to mystics and their writings to their directly physical experience of the presence of God: they feel the sacred through their bodies and an intense, erotic desire to be possessed by the Invisible. This theme, along with that of completion, is developed explicitly during Hadewijch’s conversations with Nassir in a communal, outside space in the cité where they debate the correct human response and action to take in the face of a silent God. Nassir advises her thus: ‘You must act if you have faith. You must continue the Creator’s work’. As they talk together about God manifesting Himself on earth, their faces are slowly illuminated by the increasing natural light off-frame – something that will be repeated even more astonishingly when they visit the convent together and Hadewijch declares that she is ‘ready’ to act for God, her facial expression completely flooded by the surging rays of sunlight. The juxtaposition and fertile intercrossing of two very different human paths and backgrounds are brought out powerfully when the two characters pray to their different Gods in the apartment the two brothers share, first in separate frames, then together as a two-shot. Yet again, typically for Dumont, this is only a pretext for another more unexpected juxtaposition and intersection of human trajectories. For there is a secondary story running in parallel to that of Céline involving an odd-job man David (David Dewaele) at the convent, whom we see briefly at work mending the cloister roof in the opening sequence and whose life as an ex-convict detained at the local penitentiary (the actual Centre Pénitentionnaire de Longuenesse) is glimpsed in short, documentary-style scenes that are intercut at odd intervals into the main narrative. It is through David and his manual labour on the roof that we register the passing of time and the seasons: the film starts in winter and ends in late spring/early summer when a sudden deluge brings him into physical proximity with the newly returned Hadewijch in the dry of the garden nursery. The sense of destiny hangs heavy here. This, it goes now almost without saying, is a film that encompasses a bewildering range of spaces and locations,

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5.  Céline (Julie Sokolowski) entering another still-frame composition of the natural world in Hadewijch (2009).

all the better for Dumont to focus on the temporality of spiritual grace and human transformation. Aesthetic tension is even more formalised here than previously, between the naturalistic performances of the non-actors photographed in quasi-cinéma-vérité style and the stately compositions and framings of the French countryside set against the natural elements. A pattern of repetition is established from the outset when, in an archetypal Dumont opening shot of human action in process, Hadewijch runs up a hill through the trees towards a small chapel with an outside shrine to Jesus cast in the form of a pietà. She runs into – and out of – a static frame that accentuates her movement. There are very few subjective shots in the film, but what there are remain from Hadewijch’s point of view and signify her personal moods. At the start she looks up into the cold, clear winter sky; in the shot that follows, we see her view of the sun. A wish for cosmic or divine intervention? No doubt. Later, in a Paris church, she looks intently at a classical music ensemble performing Bach. During this extended plan-séquence the camera zooms in slowly towards the musicians, signifying Hadewijch’s palpable desire to connect with the spirtual intensity of the music. Elsewhere, during the Middle East sequence, she looks out through the taxi window at the daily horrors and panic. In the following shot, we see the Arab townspeople in flight – presumably her perception of

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a Massacre of the Innocents. Hadewijch may still be fundamentally opaque and confused like Dumont’s other anti-heroes, but she is at least able to articulate her thoughts and feelings between bouts of sobbing. She is, as Dumont remarks, a ‘lighter’ type of visionary in his work.41 Once again, however, Dumont reverts in the final stages to a focus on the male figure, using the story of Hadewijch as the primary means to secure the resurrection and transformation of the criminal David as saviour and visionary. The last sequence, which unfolds almost like a dream, is a standard Dumont lesson in reading for clues retrospectively in and through time. We see David on the convent roof catching sight of the departing gendarmes below, then, still in the same shot, turning round to witness Hadewijch, clearly distraught from her meeting with the police, running out of the grounds. The next shot is of her arriving yet again at the outside shrine. During all that follows David will remain out of sight off-frame, yet he has now been planted as a potential intervening force. Hadewijch proclaims to God that the price of His manifestation is too high (i.e. the bombing). The following shot is a classically composed frame into which she runs, reversed in the next by another objective still-frame view of her running down the hill towards the river. The music we hear – André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus, Mystères du Rosaire, principally from the first of the three parts, ‘Miroir de joie’, although slightly rearranged – increases in force and volume as its brooding, opening, instrumental tensions escalate. Hadewijch stands on the edge of the river looking in, in virtual emulation of Bresson’s Mouchette, and proceeds to walk into the water and submerge herself completely. She is now entirely at God’s will.42 As the bubbles start to disperse on the surface an arm suddenly appears in close-up, followed immediately by a long-shot of David hoisting Hadewijch out of the water and into his arms. This muscular act of humanity can be immediately accounted for in terms of a temporal ellipsis: concerned by Hadewijch’s tearful state at the convent, David had followed her and then waded into the water to save her. Throughout the film he had, in fact, always been ‘looking to get right’ with the world by going ‘outside’ himself. His mother claimed he was a good man; he has now delivered on his promise, and it takes the form of a long-delayed direct encounter between the two characters. The final shots present a classic Dumont moment of human bonding and interiorisation through a reverse-field construction that locks the two faces together through montage, thus uniting two separate visual

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fields into a shared, filmic space. Shot one: Hadewijch splutters and cries (out of happiness and joy?). Shot two (a gentle high-angle): David stares blankly out over her shoulder and, in the very last second, looks off-frame to the right and slightly up towards the sky – an ironic reprise of the film’s first close-up shot at the convent when he peered up at a crane. This closed frame of human embrace, which neatly closes the film’s structural frame, marks again a graphic closing up and sidelining of nature: the couple are in the foreground, while the rest of the frame becomes a blurred green background that verges on the abstract. Nature is present, certainly, but rather as an idea, for it is the human countenance and act of rapture that we are directed to observe. An event in time – a benevolent act of (divine) intervention captured by means of montage – has transformed David from an inarticulate criminal into a saviour and visionary. This moment of embodied grace and illumination, culminating in a sideways/upwards glance that recalls the final images of Freddy, Pharaon and Barbe, is even more stunning for the fact that, up until now, David has consistently been denied any subjective point-of-view shot. Moreover, there is no reverse-field shot at the end to indicate exactly what he is looking at, thereby underlining his individual mystery. Hence, Dumont has reclaimed a version of meaningful humanity in a world gone awry: grace is harboured not in doctrinal faith but in the earth-bound actions of humankind and the skyward-looking eyes of a simple handyman. This miraculous human embrace, sealed in time by the cut and embrace of montage, is not only a chiastic folding together of different fields (frontal and reverse), but also the moment when (horizontal) space and (vertical) time finally come together in a tightly compressed diagram of opposites (male/ female, criminal/non-criminal, lay/religious, internal/external). This point of spatio-temporal intersection and formal resolution is where all Dumont’s cinema is ultimately heading, yet only achieves during rare and fleeting instances of human exaltation such as this, when Time over Space equals Being. But something even more conclusively ‘human’ is happening at the start of this final sequence which complicates such seamlessness. During the deluge of what may now be read as purificatory rain, we are presented with a medium-shot of a raven, hunched, immobile, and silent on a branch. One critic, Michael Guillén, conjectures that this is a symbolic portent and that the entire final scene is a flashback, although this cannot, of course, be proved (see Dumont 2009a). In fact, Guillén

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overreads what is extremely concrete and already highly determined, for the shot of the bird develops, as if magnetically, into a continuous, smooth pan left-to-right towards Hadewijch standing in the rain. There the camera remains. There may be no subjective point-of-view shot in the film’s final sequence, yet this image functions as good as one and sets up the viewer (in all senses of the word) for the final denouement of human grace and resurrection. This is the clearest statement yet by Dumont of his anthropocentric intentions: all revolves around the human figure, even when it is located off-frame. The only other visible instances of non-human creatures in the film are the squawking birds feeding off the bread in Hadewijch’s outstretched hand and which, because in long-shot, are barely perceptible except as a cacophony and flurry of abstract movements. One might invoke as a counter-example Hadewijch’s obedient white poodle, yet it, too, is never photographed in close-up and is paraded around like a largely faceless fashion accessory. It is this fixed and reductive framing of the non-human that actually provides for the continuity and inner logic of Dumont’s work. It leads one to ask whether the spaces and ‘holds’ of the human in his films, sustained by the very mechanics of filmic language (angle, framing, montage), can ever be dismantled and displaced. For in this closed, hyper-determined, mental world of human needs and desires, where every shot of the landscape is only ever a metaphor for an interior state (the projected ‘Invisible’), there is simply no space for any other type of unmediated and unmotivated human contact with the outside world. Everything is relentlessly interiorised and returned to the inner self of s/he who is looking – otherwise no event of grace or ‘internal illumination’ would be possible.43 Dumont’s most recent film, Hors Satan (2011), literally ‘Outside Satan’ but also ‘out of oneself’ (hors de soi) (i.e. free of life’s daily torments), finetunes the basic precepts and style of Dumont’s cinematic project to the point of suffocation. It starts essentially where Hadjewich left off, with the same mysterious male figure played by David Dewaele, now an anonymous drifter and poacher (Lui) acting as a guardian angel – and occasional exterminating angel – for a troubled adolescent girl (Elle) (Alexandra Lemâtre). Shot once again in CinemaScope by Yves Cape and set on the desolate, windswept Côte d’Opale along the Atlantic Coast in the Pas-de-Calais, the film is even more composed and pictorial, recalling the crepuscular and early-morning light of Dutch genre painting. One long-view of the couple in the landscape clearly references Jean-François Millet’s L’Angélus (1857–59), although in

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the context of the film the effect is more of an inverted and pantheistic Angelus. Although the dedramatising static and tracking shots are lesser in length (this is the first film Dumont has edited completely by himself), there is a greater emphasis on framing and angles, including some extraordinary high angle and overhead shots. In fact, Dumont claims there is no longer a need for duration via plan-séquences since a combination of framing, angles, actors and montage can now achieve the same. Another development here is the use of sound as raw matter through the direct mono-recording of the wind and human breathing without either Dolby sound or post-synchronisation (at times the same natural sounds extend ‘unnaturally’ across shots at different focal distances). Such extreme, heightened naturalism is exacerbated by the sparse dialogue and the recurring close-ups of faces and hands, including Bressonian moments of exchanging and picking up objects. Dumont claims that with Hors Satan he has arrived at a new ‘post-religious’ space, that is, ‘a new world without God, but with something of the sacred and with this man [Lui]’ (Dumont 2011a). Yet beyond the instances of human cruelty and brutality (including two killings in cold blood), a miraculous resurrection and the mockery of yet another police investigation, Hors Satan merely confirms Dumont’s technique and method with its ritualised repetition of certain shots and actions, its relays and replications of behaviour (e.g. Elle starts to pray in Lui’s usual spot as soon as he is taken off for questioning), its rigid choreography of the gaze, and the exclusive focus on human activity starting with the opening rapid series of shots, a dazzlingly efficient initiation into Lui’s vagabond actions that moves swiftly from close-up to long-shot. Dumont may play with the order of subjective and objective point-of-view shots in reverse-field constructions, obliging us to rely on what he calls our ‘retrospective capacities’ to make sense of odd ellipses in ‘psychology’ and so complete the suturing process (on several occasions, for example, a character is filmed looking out in the distance, yet the next image, although a reverse-field shot, is almost certainly not the object of his/her gaze). However, on no occasion is the integrity of subjective motivation and definition of shot seriously threatened or subverted. Indeed, such moments serve merely to underline it. Again, we witness the same humano-centric focus on the body within landscape at the expense of almost every other detail. The human body is invariably placed in the centre of the frame, whatever the focal distance, such that at times the only real value of the ultra-wide,

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6.  Lui (David Dewaele) and Elle (Alexandra Lemâtre) take centre-stage in the early morning beauty of the Côte d’Opale in Hors Satan (2011).

long-shot framing lies in deducing where exactly the human detail lies or will appear. This virtually mechanical process takes the viewer away from an appreciation of the extraordinary landscape which, in a special feature for Libération where he guides the critic Gérard Lefort physically through it, dune by dune (see Lefort 2011), Dumont celebrates as his natural stomping ground. In fact, Dumont ends up consigning landscape to the same secondary role it usually suffers in classical modes of film narration. For if, after one or two seconds, no clear human detail is forthcoming in a shot, the image is immediately cut. To repeat: Dumont’s cinema cannot tolerate the presence of nature without human anchoring and direction, and any momentous basculement in external space is linked solely to turning-points within the characters. For example, when Lui suddenly howls while lying on the ground, the image cuts to a nearby pool to record a fleeting insect movement on the surface of the water. Human cause, natural effect. The only time we register a freestanding detail and action of nature in a frame devoid of humans is, ironically, when we glimpse a bird high in the sky that does not appear to be moving. Yet this is evidently meant as an important omen. And so it proves: the following scene features a female hitchhiker who suffers a seizure during sex and to whom Lui will give the kiss of life. There is an oppressive, even terrifying, inevitability to Dumont’s push for signification and interpretation in the absolute terms of the human condition. Early in the film, which Cyril Béghin has aptly referred to as a ‘Dreyer-style western’ (Béghin 2011: 29), Lui’s rifle rears its head slowly into frame, rendering the background out-of-focus. The obsessive shallow focus on the human

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figure, part of a now extremely stylised play with foreground and background, goes hand in hand with a purposeful dedifferentiation of the natural landscape, turning it at times into a queasy, abstract blur that all but elides it. Natural space invites manipulation and control, in the manner of the vagabond poacher himself who uses it with impunity for natural and supernatural deeds, at one point inadvertently shooting a deer (‘without seeing’, he proffers) before then clubbing it to death. This, then, is a cinema of uniquely human drives and forces where Lui’s sudden dare to Elle – a formal Dumont wager to walk along a thin stone bridge dividing a large artificial pool of water so that the raging wildfire may cease – produces immediate results. She completes the task, the fire stops. Result: a miracle. Man has the power always to take a new path (literally and figuratively), and, it seems, to change the world. Yet if external nature qua nature is now essentially expendable, it is also continually pressed into its abiding role of human protector and saviour – as, for example, when, after Elle’s murder, Lui carries off her corpse and lays it carefully in long grass beside a pond for its eventual resurrection. (In the time it takes for this to happen, the murderer’s large dog Hugo suddenly offers itself to Lui and, in the final shot, escorts him out of the hamlet.) This is how Dumont justifies his authorial exploitation of landscape in Hors Satan: ‘I don’t believe in the duality of the landscape: I imagine it to be complex because our soul is complex, and the landscape has to recount this. I feel this subtlety, as we all do, so I try just to be on the topography of our being [sur la topographie de notre être], which is not a thinking or moral brain’ (Dumont 2011a).44 In this particular use of spatial metaphor, which underlines yet again nature’s role to service humankind’s needs and reflect a human ‘topography of being’, Dumont depicts himself, like Pharaon, above the landscape of the real (i.e. ‘on the topography’). It is a telling sign of the ruthless zeal with which Dumont pursues his fixation on the human, culminating in nature’s virtual lock-down. ‘Cinema + audience = one’ The truth of Dumont’s claim to be a temporal filmmaker is now fully revealed. His cinema may initially seem topophilic with its attention to place grounded in the very soil of wide-frame landscapes, yet it is a self-consciously ‘unnatural’ cinema of time and human acts of becoming where external space must know its place as human habitat and setting, or else remain a vague abstraction. If the filmed

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landscape imposes itself too completely within the cinematic frame, as in Twentynine Palms, the outcome is negative and destructive. Hence, natural space can never be left just as space, but must be formalised as filmic space within time. As we have seen repeatedly, Dumont’s cinema is all about overcoming space rather than making it – the treatment of landscape is only the most spectacular manifestation of this process. In a corpus of privileged moments and illuminations in and through time, the landscape – perennially ‘framed’ and ‘set up’; provides merely the hospitable ground for a state of human grace and self-transformation. The protagonists all share a wish to be succoured by nature, and nature will assuredly oblige. ‘The solution is to be found in the landscape’, Dumont proclaims, adding that this represents a personal awakening and a passage and release not to others but to oneself (Dumont 2001c: 45). Anything less than human is perceived for what it can offer for personal salvation; otherwise it constitutes a threat. And if it is not defined in terms of the human, it ceases virtually to exist. This is what makes Dumont’s ‘humanist’ filmmaking far more shocking than any obvious propensity to extreme violence. We have thus moved from an initial anticipation of expanded vision and visualcy in Dumont to the realisation of a highly ritualised and clinically executed cinematic strategy. Yet this is only one part of a larger sleight of hand performed by Dumont’s cinema of devices, decoys and ‘illusions’.45 For if Dumont pushes his central protagonists into new and at times increasingly abstract life-death situations, this is not so much to test their behaviour under certain conditions (as Laurent Cantet might wish to attempt, for example), as to disorient and challenge the viewer by forcing us to confront emotionally the question of what makes us human. Dumont always conceives his audience as an individual, and our response to his sounds and images is always more important than those of the characters on-screen who become merely agents and facilitators of ‘our’ privileged ethicoaesthetic and metaphysical encounter with cinema. As Dumont neatly puts it, what is crucial is ‘not the art but the relationship between the art and my response to it’ (Dumont 2005: 17). To return to the theme of completion introduced at the beginning of this chapter: the spectator is implicitly called upon to ‘complete’ not only the unformed non-actors who become ‘expressive in contact with the bodies and minds of the audience’ (Dumont 2001c: 75), but also the film itself. For Dumont solicits his viewers’ ‘presence, their eyes, their angle … so that they complete what they have in front of them. I [Dumont] am looking for

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their “feeling”’ (ibid.: 115). Precisely because it eschews the standard processes and aims of spectatorial identification through shot/countershot, Dumont’s practice of montage creates a space of – and for – the viewer and our potential for intersubjectivity. It is, as he describes it at one point, a kind of ‘viewer-montage’ where we are confronted with ‘the incompleteness of reality’ (ibid.: 19). This is the final piece of Dumont’s formal jigsaw: projected into the act of completing the film, we ‘complete’ the landscape and seal the film as ‘human’. Dumont is on a roll here: ‘Cinema is in the montage … What is edited isn’t what is seen on screen but the sensations, culture, experience, sensibility inside the audience … The film is a go-between which leads the scenario and mise-en-scène to operate from the audience’ (cited in Tuttle 2006) (my emphasis). Further, ‘[a] film is a means. It is a passage, an intermediary’ (Dumont 2001c: 48). In short, ‘[w]here cinema ends, the audience begins. ‘Cinema + audience = One’ (ibid.: 12). If the most fundamental space in a Dumont film is ultimately spectatorial, and if characters are merely figures for the viewer, then, according to the manipulations and illuminations we have been tracking at the level of character, the act of completion must also be a moment of spectatorial release and potential transformation. Dumont talks of this at times in mystico-poetic terms: ‘The face is expression. The camera becomes a probe. On the screen there is an alchemy between the viewer and the hero’ (Dumont 2006c). Or more prosaically: ‘[t]he body of each spectator must be modified. And the body is modified through time, through its duration’ (Dumont 2001c: 75). This desired completion is, to repeat, not a question of identification but of affect, which, for Dumont, is film’s unique power. ‘Cinema makes a direct impression on the body and hypnotises it’, he declares, adding: ‘To view a film is to participate in a bodily infusion’ (Dumont 2011b: 32).46 Indeed, Dumont conceives of his entire practice as a filmmaker in terms of sensation and sensibility over sense, and he contrasts this with his own scriptwriting which functions more as a kind of ‘pre-theory’: ‘When I’m shooting and editing, I work at getting back the sentiment, at breaking down the screenplay, which remains purely theoretical’ (Dumont 2006c). Interviewed about Hors Satan during the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and specifically its ambivalent male protagonist who is at once super-virile and sensitive and embodies extreme good and extreme evil (is he a lay saint, or pagan demon, or both?), Dumont developed in more concrete terms his approach to cinematic sensation. Cinema, he asserted, can do now what philosophy and rational thought

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cannot, that is, entertain and negotiate contradiction, for sensations tolerate juxtaposition and can deal with good and evil in the same breath (Henri Bergson is casually referenced). As Andréa Picard puts it in her analysis of Hors Satan, the film ‘makes a strong case of art transcending the dialectical logic, using the cruel contradictions that encircle us to reflect them back’ (Picard 2011). Such contradictions may be ghastly and even morally reprehensible, but the film may also be perversely awash in beauty (ibid.). What Picard is suggesting here is that the success of a Dumont film can only be measured by whether the spectator fully accepts and understands the contradictions and ambivalences his cinema presents. (In the particular case of Hors Satan, its premiere at Cannes provoked a mass exodus.) From here, of course, it is a short step to proclaiming that the viewer, rather than the film (still less the author-director), is the real centre of the cinematic relation because s/he ‘cultivates and ‘harvests’ the film (Dumont 2011b: 32). Reality and desire in Dumont’s cinema both revolve around the audience’s ‘body’: The only element of reality in cinema is the audience … the decisive moments are in the appearance of the audience. I am increasingly trying to make films that include this important place for the audience. They form a body, a voice, an ear. What is cut short is the attempt to captivate them, to seduce them […] being in their desire is what counts. (Dumont 2001c: 110–11) (my emphasis)

This extreme – and for the more sceptical critic, desperate, if not perverse – authorial wish for total proximity with the audience is actually one of the central planks of a highly idealistic project to establish absolute contact with the spectator’s emotions in order to cure him/her of being a simple consumer of films (ibid.: 53). For Dumont, today’s consumer-led, spiritually empty society is a culture that has failed politically, socially and morally. The cinema thus ‘has to establish a healthy relationship, where the audience is worth as much as the film they are watching because they also make the film. When I say that I will reduce the thickness of the film as much as possible, it is in order to leave them a place’ (ibid.: 116) (my emphasis). In the particular case of Hors Satan, where he claimed to be concerned only with the ‘physiology’ of human bodies and landscapes, Dumont summarises it thus: the film is the ‘physical’ and the spectator the ‘meta-’ (Dumont 2011b). Such liberationist concerns for his audience, located now at the very core of Dumont’s practice, places him paradoxically once again in

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the sphere of Bresson who, it is often forgotten, also projected a ‘free’, ‘loving’ viewer.47 This utopian dimension perplexes those critics who bristle at the figure of Dumont himself, whose supreme self-confidence, self-belief, and authority can seem all-too-knowing and misguidedly superior when not simply arrogant and condescending.48 Moreover, Dumont’s populist discourse is contradicted by the obvious fact that his films are not commercially popular and are limited to a small, niche, art house market. Yet Dumont turned to cinema precisely out of a personal need to reconnect with people, because, as he explained to David Walsh in October 1997, ‘[t]he power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost’ (cited in Hughes 2002). In its mulish, primitive recalcitrance to ‘reason’, Dumont’s cinema refuses admirably to be ‘civilised’ and exposes the audience to violence, danger, even barbarity. His concerted wish is not just to allow filmic miracles to ‘happen’, but also to make the viewer actually feel something in the full awareness that cinema is essentially ‘inhuman’ due to its metaphysical status and capacity: ‘It [cinematography] is the very beginning of the world, the substance of our lives. It is inhuman because it goes to the edge of the condition ... It is life itself, presented and represented. (Dumont 2001c: 12). Dumont’s films demand a gut response to a complex range of emotions and sensations: empathy/ revulsion, desire/pain, longing/fear, awe/confusion, transcendence/ alienation, etc.. These may appear at times rather cheap thrills (acts of momentary levitation, bloody castration, quick-fire murder), but they are meant to be embraced affirmatively and absolutely. For Dumont is a fundamentalist: he believes that it falls to representation ‘to give form to our nature in order for us to enter culture’ (Dumont 2006b),49 and that Art is the only final solution. Receiving inoculations of unfiltered sensation is the only remedy for the prevailing moral apathy. It also allows us to build up our natural defences and attain enough sensitivity not to harm our neighbour (Dumont 2011b: 34). Like Michael Haneke, a director who puts a similar premium on the truthful presentation of violence and the work of the audience to ‘complete’ a film, what is at stake is a salutary catharsis through the maximal representation of horror and violence. In short, Dumont is attempting to transform cinema into a new kind of salvatory existential space and thus restore it to the pioneering status it once occupied in the silent era when, as Jean-Luc Godard

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demonstrates in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), it encouraged new sensations and thoughts to take shape for the benefit of human knowledge and science before the endlessly repeated Hollywood stories of love and death took hold.50 Present mainstream cinema is more like a ‘non-place’, both in its often derivative and inconsequential product and in its format (multiplexes with roving audiences in interchangeable and semi-illuminated auditoria). Yet when the right kind of film comes along, however rarely, cinema, as Peter Wollen attests, can still be transformed: ‘We are transported into another space, a space which seems, in some ways, to be that of a “place”, in others that of a “non-place”. It is a space which is both lived in and the site of fantasy, a kind of fantasy travel’ (Wollen 2002: 200). Cinema can even be a pre-eminently democratic place. According to Dumont: ‘I do my job as a filmmaker. The viewer does his job as a viewer. It’s a balance. We are equal’ (Dumont 2006c). Yet after all we have witnessed close-up of Dumont’s intensively rhetorical, anthropocentric strategies and spatial devices, it remains difficult to see how the relationship between film, filmmaker and audience might offer a radical, new type of cinematic space, whatever we may wish to call it (metaphysical, or utopian, or sacred). However, in view of Dumont’s insistence on art and pictorial reference, and his absolute sense of an evolving intersubjective aesthetic practice of form that is more important than the film’s actual content, we may perhaps place his cinema (if only provisionally) in the context of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational art aesthetics, which is underpinned theoretically by Daney’s thoughts on form as face referred to earlier. Bourriaud develops Daney’s central idea in the following terms: ‘[p]roducing a form is to invent possible encounters; receiving a form is to create the conditions for an exchange’ (Bourriaud 2002: 23). To invoke Bourriaud here is to raise the possibility that Dumont is not simply reducing or ‘defacing’ the world, and moreover that there is a vital, even ethical, dimension to his unremittingly human project. Indeed, Dumont’s deployment of the cinematic apparatus as a primary encounter with the viewer matches Bourriaud’s idea of form as a dynamic directly attuned to both time and space – one that invents possible encounters resulting in new kinds of inter-human relations. In this more generous critical reading, which recognises cinema as a privileged cultural site for human affectivity and exchange, Dumont’s consummate play with cinematic form may be regarded as a genuine and profound exploration of contemporary intersubjectivity. Such humanist aspirations often

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come at an inhuman cost, however, and the virtue of Dumont’s cinema is that it never allows us to forget this. Notes 1 Martin Lefebvre adopts a more specific and theoretical approach to landscape in film by placing it in the particular history of pictorial art and visual representation, notably the landscape genre in nineteenth-century Western art with its notions of the picturesque and the Sublime, and where again the frame turns nature into culture and the land into landscape, projecting art as a place where we recognise our investment in space and redefine it. See Lefebvre 2006: viii. For the historian Simon Schama, landscapes in art are constructs of the process of ‘imaginative projection’, for landscape is the work of the mind before it can ever be a repose for the senses – its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock (Schama 1995). 2 What Fowler calls Storck’s ‘embodied and embedded picturing’ in Symphonie paysanne (1942–44) and other works from the 1920s and 1930s, which she presents as an example of ‘peasant cinema’ by a documenteur, can be usefully compared and contrasted with Dumont’s cinema, and not simply due to the similar setting and use of non-professional actors. Their work represents the land of northern France/Belgium ‘intimately in its quotidian realities and as a live and living place rather than a once lived in, remembered space’ (Fowler 2006: 146). To employ the vocabulary of Trinh T. Minh-ha, the land is ‘impressed and possessed by [its] subjects’ (ibid.: 145). 3 Dumont also fondly quotes Camille Corot’s axiom: ‘One must not seek, one must wait’ and Magritte’s statement that the ‘most important thing is not the subject but the positioning of the different object’. More recently, Dumont has directly invoked Zola, saying that with Hors Satan (2011) he is filming situations close-up and that his characters are in a kind of paradise: ‘la Terre’ (‘Earth’) (Dumont 2011b: 34). 4 Dumont is categorical that narrative ‘comes first of all from a search for banality … I like neutral things, neutral acting, neutral decors, mostly neutral plots and something will necessarily happen when they end up interacting … As soon as I feel that the framer is preparing a sophisticated composition, I change the frame … I move the camera to avoid entering the aesthetic domain. I am afraid of beauty’ (Dumont 2001c: 84–5). 5 Bresson writes: ‘Si une image, regardée à part, exprime nettement quelque chose, si elle comporte une interprétation, elle ne se transformera pas au contact d’autres images. Les autres images n’auront aucun pouvoir sur les autres images. Ni action, ni réaction’ (Bresson 1988: 22). What Bresson is after here are ‘images insignifiantes (non signifiantes)’ (ibid.), like

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Dumont’s deliberately ‘flat’ images, and his working principle is: ‘Aplatir mes images … sans les atténuer’ (original emphasis) (ibid.). Bresson is a natural point of reference for Dumont on account of a shared aesthetic of minimalism not only of character but also of dialogue and mise-enscène. Compare Dumont’s approach to location filming: ‘I seek not, I find, idem: I always shoot with what already exists, changing nothing, taking what is there, as it is’ (Dumont 2001c: 13), with Bresson’s general advice that one must not seek but wait. We could spend much time exploring the important stylistic connections and affinities between the Catholic Bresson and Dumont the self-confessed agnostic, for example, the shared interest in ellipsis, silence and rhythm, the heightened repetition of human gestures, uninflected voices and the fragmented depiction of the body (often with eyes cast down in abjection), as well as the common themes of human suffering and evil, the spiritual, mystical and sacred, sacrifice and grace, outsiderhood and saintliness, the possibility for salvation, and the ineffable and the Invisible – themes which come to the fore explicitly in Hadewijch (2009). Moreover, Dumont’s aphoristic ‘Notes de travail’ (Dumont 1997a) and his remarkable set of cinematic principles laid out in ‘The Work of a Filmmaker’ (Dumont 2001c), have the same cryptic and absolutist ring as Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe (1975). Asked to comment on the influence of Bresson on his work, Dumont claims to share Bresson’s desire for spirituality and admires his heightened style and grandeur (e.g. the use of close-up, direction of actors, his spiritual vein, his crafting of a film leading to the final shot). However, he also stresses a crucial formal difference: he uses direct sound which Bresson never touched (see Dumont 2007). 6 Dumont spent ten months casting for L’humanité before eventually finding Emmanuel Schotté, a former French army recruit, and Séverine Caneele, who had worked peeling vegetables in a Belgian frozen food factory. It is because Shotté refused to be filmed in sexual relations that his character was relieved of his sexuality. An actor’s choice thus constitutes an ‘accident’ which creates the film’s fate, and Dumont, when he commands ‘Action!’, can do nothing but wait for an ‘accident’ to occur (see Dumont 2001c: 58). This technique might be likened to that of Bresson’s ‘models’ except precisely that Dumont models his film on the actor and not the other way round (Dumont: ‘I choose my character to fit the person acting’ (Dumont 2008)). 7 There are many parallels to be made between the approaches of Dumont and Cocteau to the serendipities of the filmic medium and the zones of the Invisible. For a full account of Cocteau’s poetics, see Williams 2006. 8 ‘Ce n’est plus un paysage, car il est transcendé. Et en étant transcendé, il entre dans le mental du spectateur pour devenir quelque chose d’autre. Ce que je vois est une représentation analogique de l’intériorité. On ne

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peut pas saisir une intériorité mais on peut faire en sorte que l’extériorité devienne l’intérieur.’ 9 For a useful philosophical introduction to the question of evil in Dumont in the context of violence and the religious tradition of the sacred, see Clark 2006. 10 See Daney 1992, which is also a defence of formalism against the notion of cinema as simply a matter of content and reflection of society. For an introduction to Daney’s aesthetic theory, see Williams 2004b. 11 The particular question of the representation of racial identity and beur space in the film has been covered well by Carrie Tarr in Tarr 2005: 140–4. 12 Complete with images from the film and black and white production stills, the ‘text for a scenario’, published in 2001 by Éditions Dis Voir, reads like a novella and is often more extreme and graphic than the film itself. For Dumont, it constitutes the ‘already-written’ against which he works as a director. An equivalent text for L’humanité was published by the same press in the same year. 13 Bersani and Dutoit speak further of the ‘sensual happiness of a physical, nonsexual closeness to others and to the world, the tender eroticism of connecting, with our bodies, to all that lies beyond our bodies but within a shared universe’ (Bersani and Dutoit 2009: 35). They posit and celebrate a Rohmerian intimacy paradoxically uninterested in the films’ endless chatter of heterosexual sexual love affairs and matchmaking and their psychology of desire (ibid.: 29) where language ensures an ontological privileging of the human that justifies ‘backgrounding’ the universe (ibid.: 33). 14 Indeed, for Bowles the possibility of grace suggested by the sunlight that illuminates Freddy recalls the ray of light in Philippe de Champaigne in The Ex-Voto of 1662. He adds that at the end we are put in the position of God and asked to pass judgment, for the final scene implores us to grant forgiveness. Dumont provokes the ‘decisive action’ that ‘forces the viewer into confrontation with the Wholly Other he would normally avoid’ and ‘requests his participation and approval’. If we see tears as just self-pity, Bowles reasons, then we revert to an anti-humanist isolation that Freddy himself occupied before his acquisition of self-awareness. If we condemn Freddy, we condemn ourselves and implicitly repudiate our faith in humanity. By judging him we judge ourselves (see Bowles 2004: 53). Either way, grace is a fleeting, transitory moment – salvation remains hidden within each individual and is ultimately unknowable (from a Jansenist perspective, of course, this lack of proof is all the more reason to have faith). 15 ‘I want to hand Freddy over to the audience, so that they can come to terms with both the good and the evil in him. Because it is impossible to separate the two, the ending offers no predetermined moral … it’s for

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spectators to work out, part of their isolation. The audience is the film’s moral conscience. Freddy’s story sublimates the evil that exists in each of us’ (Dumont 1997a: 59). 16 In his production notes to the film Dumont observes that the expression the painter gives to his religious subordinates never reaches beyond impassivity – these are cold, distant paintings devoid of emotion and deprived of a sense of life’s contingencies or sensuality. 17 Though Dumont claims not to be aware of it, the frontal, high-angle image of Nadège’s despoiled body in the grass recalls Marcel Duchamp’s notorious art installation, Étant Donnés (1946–66). Her face is not visible, only her bloodied vagina shredded by the force of the rape and a close-up of ants and bugs already at work on her arms and legs. The film also refers to Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) during Pharaon’s existential howl of rage and emotional release when the high-speed Eurostar train passes by. 18 ‘Tu vois, Pharaon, la vie est vraiment écoeurante.’ 19 One such is the ambiguous relationship between Pharaon and Joseph (Philippe Tullier), notably when Pharaon stumbles by chance upon Joseph trying to enter the back of the hospital. It is never established what Joseph is doing there, but coming immediately after Pharaon’s hugging by a male nurse with vaguely feminine eyes, a male bond or complicity is posited (it is stated in the published text that Pharaon left the hospital a ‘changed man’). 20 We recall, too, during the trip to Dunkerque, that the sea imposes itself with such overwhelming force on Pharaon that he is literally swept up by the sheer beauty and joy of its immensity, described by Dumont in terms of grace and as ‘universal matter in fusion’ (Dumont 2001b: 40). 21 In his influential 1972 study of ‘transcendental style’ in Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer, Schrader argues that an account of everyday life is ‘riven by a disparity revealing moral or spiritual dimensions beyond our usual grasp’, before being restored in an image of stasis (as in the motionless shot of Pharaon that closes the film). This suggests that further revelations lie ‘in our own capacity for growth and understanding’ (Sterritt and Brottman 2003: 231). For Schrader, the transcendent is a matter of form, not experience, and the transcendental style, which culminates in stasis, stylises reality by eliminating (or nearly) elements that are expressive of human experience (Schrader 1972: 11). Transcendental style, which Schrader links to the primitive art tradition, transforms experience into a repeatable ritual that can be repeatedly transcended. In this process, the immanent is superseded by the transcendent (= the invisible and ineffable), yet immanence (whether external (realism) or internal (psychologism)) is also the energy of transcendence. 22 In fact, text and film start moving here in very different and opposed

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directions. In the film, the kissing episode between Pharaon and Joseph is immediately followed by the penultimate scene where Pharaon comforts Domino, who feels abandoned, cheated and violated. The embrace is at once firm and respectful. In the text, this becomes a moment of sexual appropriation: Pharaon takes Domino physically, almost obscenely, while they are both in an extreme state of grief and shock, as if he were perhaps playing God: ‘That was when Pharaon felt the urge to spill his seed inside her. He pulled down her knickers under her dress ... Out of pain they took pleasure and ran the whole gamut of humanity, right into the cleft. It was hideous, especially as they became emotional, still one on top of the other, when he spurted’ (Dumont 2001b: 119). 23 Much could be made of the symbolically overloaded Hummer HE, a militaryish SUV modelled after the US Army’s HMMWV (a name inspired by a euphemism for fellatio), and which David is at one point reduced to ‘waxing’. 24 Dumont made the film to raise his profile in the US in order to attract funding and backers for his longstanding ‘epic’ project The End, a police procedural that takes place as meteors fall to earth. 25 Dumont admits he felt personally afraid in the Mojave desert during scouting for locations: ‘You suddenly feel anything could happen’ (Dumont 2005:17). 26 For Quandt, Dumont fits neatly into a French tradition of provocation and is symptomatic of, at best, a narcissistic response to the collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political polarity and theoretical certitude, and where aggressiveness is really nothing more than a grandiose form of passivity (see Quandt 2004). Another critic, Richard Falcon, attacks both the film and filmmaker for ‘treating mundane, vicarious, fly-drive shagathons as though they were politically resonant tablets fresh from the high moral ground of neo-arthouse nihilism’ (Falcon 2005: 76). Much of the criticism of Twentynine Palms has placed it within the context of Jean Baudrillard’s travelogue, Amérique (1986), which proposes the blinding light and formlessness of the California desert as a figure for the West’s current existential malaise. 27 The film was predictably booed, mocked and generally panned when it premiered at Cannes amid accusations that it was little more than a pseudo-exploitation, Euro-hippie, anti-capitalist ‘freak-out’ by a European intellectual out of his depth. 28 The cathartic finale of Zabriskie Point is a series of explosions of Allen’s hillside mansion villa fantasised by Daria, immediately followed by the breathtaking fallout sequence in slow motion featuring the economic products of consumer society suspended as purely aesthetic objects. As Matthew Gandy states, Antonioni’s use of landscape as a critique of Western culture and his universalist conception of nature lie firmly within

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the high modernist tradition: Death Valley’s desert is a primitivist and even Romantic denunciation of the film’s modern consumer capitalist culture, while also connecting with certain forms of sublime high modernist abstraction in art (for example, the empty canvases of AbstractExpressionism). See Gandy 2006. For Dumont, the horror comes rather differently from within the California desert itself, which, of course, now bears within cultural memory the traces of Antonioni’s work. Dumont claims to admire Antonioni for using cinema as ‘a real mode of expression’ (Dumont 2005: 17), yet pushes the oblique, blank gazes and life-draining long-takes of Antonioni to new and disturbing levels. 29 Dumont sought ‘to assault the viewer’s sensibilities and the conventions of commercial American cinema’. The specifically American scenery and style of actors offers, according to Dumont, a way to mount ‘almost a terrorist attack’ on both the modern spectacle of violence and Hollywood’s traditional approach to suspense, i.e. the way the audience of a horror film knows what the threat is and where the tension arises from that (Dumont 2005: 17). 30 This forms part of Grønstad’s larger argument that current post-millennial cinema is witnessing an artistic return to the visceral foundation of one’s being in the world, i.e. to films showing the raw body stripped of its artifice and human gesture as a way of protesting against the rampant dehumanisation of corporeal experience (Grønstad 2012: 83). 31 See Williams 2007 for an introduction to Antonioni’s denaturalising formal strategies. 32 For Lefebvre, landscape is always in excess of its narrative function as setting, because, as a space of aesthetic contemplation and spectacle, it is a ‘spatial predicate’ distinct from setting (the location for some unfolding action) and territory (a lived space that we possess – or would like to possess) (Lefebvre 2006: viii). If not strictly contained as location, space may endanger the story’s claim on closure and coherence to the point that reality and matter are released from their ground and become free-floating. 33 See Williams 1997: 25–46 for a full analysis of Le Camion as a freewheeling, circulating and reversible construct open to the outside, but one that is ultimately resolved via the rhetorical processes of montage involving sound and image as well as inside and outside. Dumont’s general preference for flat images may be compared to Duras’s neutral ‘images passe-partout’ whereby she sought to privilege the play of sound (and increasingly her own voice) over the visual. 34 The motion of Akerman’s camera through exterior space is relentless, broken only by short interludes showing individuals within static interiors. D’Est also traverses layers of history, past and present by revisiting sites of Jewish diasporic geography. Akerman subsequently developed the film

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into a multimedia installation entitled D’Est: Au bord de la fiction/From the East: Bordering on Fiction (1995). 35 Tracing the genealogy between Zabriskie Point and Twentynine Palms in terms of the evolution of the European avant-garde, from 1970s emancipatory optimism and transgression to contemporary self-destructive violence, Lübecker concludes that the human tragedy of Dumont’s film takes the viewer ‘all the way into the libidinal, metaphysical and political dead-end’ (Lübecker 2011: 246). Yet the ‘free’ – albeit unsustained – documentary-style moments I have been highlighting cast doubt on such a fatalistic and overdetermined reading of the film’s narrative. 36 The battle scenes were actually shot in Tunisia on 16 mm and with direct sound. 37 At the Cannes press conference, Dumont spoke about this apparent message of love: ‘This film speaks about love, because I need it, it is written into my life. Waging war is love, too, for it means to fight for all and because someone else wants it ... One must wait an hour and a half for the word to be pronounced’. 38 ‘Tout ce qui est autour de lui représente son intériorité. Quand les paysages sonts vides, c’est une façon d’élaborer son vide intérieur, ses silences. Barbe, c’est l’intériorisation de son désir de la femme. … Barbe n’est qu’une figuration du mental de Demester, je ne cherche pas à en faire un être autonome.’ 39 See Chapter 3 (‘One Big Soul’) in Bersani and Dutoit 2004 for a brilliant analysis of the desublimating strategies of Malick’s film. They argue that by showing how animate and inanimate objects might be physically or formally connected, the film ‘registers not the real world “as it is”, but a positioning in a real world’ (175). Further, ‘[i]naccurate replications – between the subject and the world, among the world’s objects – shatter individual identities in order to redesign the world as correspondences that can be illuminated by our perception of them’ (177). 40 Hadewijch d’Anvers (c. 1210–60) lived in the duchy of Brabant as a beguine, that is, as an evolutionary theologian and poetess who sought God outside the convent in an ecstatic experience and rejected human love in favour of a holy communion with the Lord. The challenge – one that Céline is also forced to confront – was to rest in God while working in the world, for one cannot be released from being human. 41 They [Dumont’s characters] have access to the invisible through their gaze on externals – perhaps the sight of a pasture, a winding path, a small river – but they access the invisible through the visible world. They know how to see … they can see what to others is invisible and interior … Through their gaze, because of their gaze, because they know how to see; the visible becomes an invocation of the invisible. They are like spectators at movies … In this film the protagonist is conscious for the first time … Hadewijch

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is a lighter person – “light” in the sense of illumination – and her clear gaze is able to transform the world’ (Dumont 2009a). 42 In Bresson, the scene of attempted suicide is far more staged. Mouchette falls down the hillside and drowns only on her third attempt, leaving us to focus entirely on the bubbles in the water as the sacred music of Monteverdi’s ‘Magnificat’ take over. As James Quandt remarks, this held image of Mouchette’s body being received by nature has encouraged many critics to propose a divine, even ecstatic, deliverance. See Quandt 2003: 18. 43 In his discussion of L’humanité, Ors celebrates Dumont’s all-encompassing, ‘sacred’ process of human contemplation as a key to a ‘poetics of fatality’ (seee Ors 2001). 44 ‘Le paysage est comme ça, assez étonnant: rien n’est catégorique, tout est délicat et subtil. Je ne crois pas à la dualité du paysage: je l’imagine complexe car notre âme est complexe et il faut que le paysage la raconte. Je sens, comme nous tous, cette subtilité, alors j’essaie d’être juste sur la topographie de notre être, qui n’est pas qu’un cerveau pensant et moral.’ 45 Dumont acknowledged this point very matter-of-factly during the 2006 Cannes press conference for Flandres: ‘I work with illusions’. 46 ‘Le cinéma, c’est impressionner, hypnotiser un corps … Être spectateur d’un film c’est participer d’une infusion d’un corps’. 47 Bresson stated in 1966 that, as a director, ‘one must let the spectator be free and at the same time be loved by him’, for ‘it is good and pleasurable to feel that the audience suddenly tries to put itself in our place and love what we love’ (Bresson 1996: 30). 48 Jacques Rancière, for example, argues in his critique of L’humanité, that Dumont’s lofty humanism is merely symptomatic of the prevailing star culture of humanitarian compassion (see Rancière 1999). 49 ‘Il appartient à la représentation de donner forme à notre nature pour rentrer dans notre culture.’ 50 See Temple and Williams 2000 for an introduction to Godard’s thinking on this topic, which is linked directly to his theory that the full potential of montage as an instrument of knowledge was never achieved.

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3 Requiem for a city: the symbolics of space in the cinema of Robert Guédiguian Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Symbolics of space in the cinema of Robert Guédiguian

Marseilles never ceases to evade the take. (J.-L. Comolli) This area is dead, and so are we. (Bert in Dernier Été)

Marseilles metropolis The spectacular opening panning shot of La Ville est tranquille/ The Town is Quiet (2000) is one of the most majestic and seemingly all-encompassing in recent French cinema. To the calm, opening notes of Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, the camera pans steadily and horizontally left-to-right across the port of Marseilles bathed in a warm summer glow, with the vast housing estates of the northern suburbs and the hill and mountain ranges of the Massif de l’Étoile lying visible in the far background. Resting initially at the end of a long quay to the west of the Fort Saint-Jean on the north side of the central harbour, the camera takes in ships marked ‘Méridionale’ and ‘Méditerranée’ proclaiming the city’s unique Mediterranean identity, then skirts past the Cathédrale de la Major and the rooftops of the historic area of Le Panier, thence over the marina and quaysides of the Vieux-Port. Yet just as this extraordinary urban loop is being traced, Satie is suddenly replaced by the more romantic sounds of Brahms, and, while moving across the businesses of the southern side of the harbour, the pan is itself peremptorily cut, replaced by a close-up of the legs of a young person seated on a chair. A slow, vertical camera movement up the body reveals a boy playing the classical music we are now listening to on an electric stand-up keyboard. The setting, which we realise was the

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point of axis for the pan, is the garden of the Palais du Pharo. A crowd is gathered on the grass to listen, with the Vieux-Port still gleaming in the background. This opening sequence, as visually arresting as the sweeping aerial shots of Nice at the beginning of Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), uses a wide pan and deep-focus lens to produce a panoramic view of the Bay of Marseilles that turns the scene into scenery and land into landscape like a vedute of eighteenth-century Italian painting. The mobility of the camera offers the surprise of suddenly capturing new elements within its frame and in a range of angles and dimensions, the process exemplifying the excitement of the urban encounter. Indeed, the almost 360° degree turn announces the scope and ambition of the film: to grasp the multiplicity of the city spread out before us in all its superflux and expanded depth of field. This giant urban fresco reveals what Mike Wayne calls, borrowing a phrase from Lukács, the film’s attempt to capture the ‘extensive totality’ of contemporary Marseilles (Wayne 2002: 223). It is an ideal projection of Marseilles, a paean to this unique, historic ville populaire and cosmopolitan ville métisse, which has been been a pre-eminent city of transit and exile, France’s gateway to the world (in particular North Africa during the period of French colonialism), and where, for Guédiguian, all the world is present.1 We behold Marseilles’s unique topography, the result of its particular combination of tradition and modernity and the fact that each time the city has prospered it has torn everything up and reconstructed itself. Marseilles is as much a decentred aggregate of village-like communities in the distance such as L’Estaque – the northern working-class suburb and fishing port in the sixteenth arrondissement where Guédiguian was born and grew up, the son of an immigrant Armenian docker and German mother – as it is a showpiece, imperial, nineteenth-century city and modern port. No other contemporary filmmaker in France has been so identified with one particular city as Guédiguian with Marseilles, and it has inspired most of his sixteen films. Although many have been directly financed by the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, Guédiguian steadfastly refuses the label of regional filmmaker, regarding himself specifically as a cinéaste du quartier whose very ‘language’ is Marseilles: ‘It’s home’, he declares, ‘I can recreate fiction here because the real belongs to me … 100%’ (Danel 2008: 76).2 In fact, Marseilles is one of the few towns in France that can claim, along with Paris and Nice, the status of a ‘ville-cinéma’, and Guédiguian is part of a long line of

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celebrated social realist filmmakers linked to the city that includes most obviously Marcel Pagnol, to whom he is for many the natural successor; the filmmaker and script-writer René Allio, who directed Retour à Marseille (1980); and the important documentary filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli.3 This cinematic tradition, which has profoundly influenced the general perception of the city, has been extended more recently by the Taxi films that have put the city on the map as a location for action comedies, by the popular television series Plus Belle la Vie set in an imaginary quarter of the city called Le Mistral, and by the cult thriller novels of Jean-Claude Izzo, in particular his Trilogie marseillaise, filmed for French TV with Alain Delon as the detective hero, Fabio Montale.4 Yet while Guédiguian claims particular allegiance to the late Allio as a partisan de route who created in 1970s the Centre Cinématographique Méditerranéen, he expresses strong contempt for Pagnol, in particular his ‘Marseilles trilogy’ (Marius, Fanny, César), on account of its Provençal folklore clichés and petit-bourgeois dramas concocted in the studio – the Marseilles of pastis and pétanque. He aligns himself instead with Jean Renoir, whose groundbreaking film Toni (1935), a work of neorealism avant la lettre set in the nearby town of Martigues, makes no attempt to impose the visual picturesqueness of Provence landscape (although the pace of Toni’s dramatic structure is arguably dictated by the environment’s elemental force and rhythms).5 Yet if for Guédiguian one doesn’t have to be a Marseillais to make a proper Marseilles film and expand the Marseillais visual idiom, he himself is directly attuned to Marseilles’s general artistic tradition, including that of Cézanne, who stayed and painted in L’Estaque, and the Fauves who were inspired by it.6 Putting to one side the (in)famous mythology of its tough portside – drugs, prostitution, underworld crime, increasing gangsterdom – powerfully imaged in Alain Bévérini’s 2002 detective film Total Khéops and already visible in early silent films like Louis Delluc’s Fièvre (1921), Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (1923), and Maurice Tourneur’s Justin de Marseille (1934), what is it that attracts such very different filmmakers to Marseilles? For Comolli, the city has an imaginary and almost fantasmatic, ethereal nature which cannot be captured – it appears to ‘give itself’ from the outside, yet in the very moment of eliciting the gaze it appears to withdraw (Gorce 1994: 27–8). For Jean-Henri Roger, director with Juliet Berto of the influential independent polar, Cap Canaille (1983), the characters in fiction films set in Marseilles always find themselves lost in the city and thus can never be bourgeois and settled. For Claire Denis, who shot the Marseilles

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scenes of Beau Travail (2000) in winter, the special moonlight gives a peculiar fluorescence to the town, while the omnipresent sea functions like an ‘amniotic liquid that envelops history’, as if the city were a foetus living in a marine uterus (cited in Bouquet 1995: 37).7 Similarly, for the film critic and director Alain Bergala, who admires the permanent brassage of the city, the dry, northerly Mistral wind provides both a clean sharpness to the countryside and often a hyperrealistic quality or ‘surprésence’.8 All Guédiguian’s films are shot on location and display topographical coherence. Indeed, employing André Gardies’s term ‘referential space’ (Gardies 1993: 78–9) to account for how a film is geographically, socially and historically rooted and identified, François Penz has championed Guédiguian precisely for filming the city ‘as it is’, arguing that Marseilles is allowed here ‘to be an equal partner … and itself, in all its complexities’ (Penz 2007: 146). Guédiguian’s permanent concern is with the relations between place and identity, and ‘attachement’ (‘attachment’) becomes a key term in his work. The bodies of his characters are directly marked and defined by their social milieu and class, as well as by the environment and space they are inhabiting. This priority on material context is evidenced by the use of all-embracing panning and wide-frame shots. We are reminded here of Henri Lefebvre’s statement in The Production of Space that what occupies space is ‘a specific body, a body capable of indicating direction by a gesture, of defining rotation by turning round, of demarcating and orienting space’ (Lefebvre 1991: 169–70). Moreover, Guédiguian would seem to exemplify Michel de Certeau’s notion of space as a frequented, ‘anthropological place’ that creates the organically social, as opposed to the unsymbolised ‘non-place’ resulting in ‘solitary contractuality’. This process is not metaphysical, as was the case with Dumont, although, as we shall see, Guédiguian does leave some room for mystery, which he calls vaguely ‘the place of the sacred’. In fact, the major human loci of Guédiguian’s cinema are all directly physical, in the form of social and communal activities like drinking, eating, working and fighting. Yet for Guédiguian there is always the fundamental question of the politics of space: who owns it, who occupies it, who has the right of access to it, who needs it, and who is crossing through it. Indeed, what prevents Guédiguian’s work from being simply co-opted as a tourist promotion by the region that underwrites it is that it invites us to understand and gauge the concrete process of urban transformation – for instance, the extent of L’Estaque’s continuing mutation

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from an active port to a post-industrial late-capitalist economy – and its deleterious effects on human lives. This process is possible precisely because of the relatively limited range of areas and views of Marseilles portrayed in Guédiguian’s films, which also favour highly explicit visual flashbacks. It is further enhanced by the many interconnecting formal and thematic threads linking the films, as well as the collaboration since L’Argent fait le Bonheur (1992) of his regular co-scriptwriter Jean-Louis Milesi and his core troupe of actors reconfigured from film to film, specifically his wife and abiding muse Ariane Ascaride, Gérard Meylan (an old friend from college days and still working as a nurse in Marseilles), and Jean-Pierre Darroussin. This core trio is supplemented by other regulars such as Jacques Boudet and Pascale Roberts. Let us rejoin the opening moments of La Ville est tranquille, for this series of precisely edited shots illustrates not just totality but also fragmentation, separation and underlying disorder. A discordant note is sounded even before the first shot, for the familiar sounds of the city that accompany the opening credits (blue text against a white background) are cut as soon as the first printed image arrives. This mood continues with the sudden curtailment of Satie and subsequent replacement by Brahms, and then with the unexpected cut of the horizontal pan into a static close-up that develops, in turn, into a slow, vertical pan. Hence, if music serves as a connecting device for the different views of the city, it also establishes the theme of arbitrary separation and ironic disjunction: that of the cool Paris modernist minimalism of Satie set against the Phoenician city of Marseilles. We note the irony already of the film’s title: the adjective ‘tranquille’ to describe this famously unruly city that gave its name to the original Revolutionary hymn, the Marseillaise. The glimpsed fortifications of the Vieux-Port built under Louis XIV are a testament to the historic conflicts between the city’s autonomy and the French capital (first during the monarchy, then during Empire), and the fact that the city functions in a permanent state of internal conflict, most recently that between pieds-noirs, harkis (i.e. those Algerians who fought on the side of the French during the Algerian War), and North and West African immigrants, following the collapse of the port economy. The pastoral image of the lawn concert must therefore be read implicitly as a metaphor for the separation between different kinds of culture: the ‘base’ commerce of the port versus the ‘high’ culture and art of the Haussmannian centre. Such spatial literalisation is, as Wayne has noted, a recurring spatial trope in Guédiguian’s work which associates

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7.  With his back to the Cathédrale de la Major and the Vieux-Port below, Gérard (Gérard Meylan) witnesses high culture at the Palais du Pharo in La Ville est tranquille (2000).

rooftops and elevation with the social elites and the visual command they have over the urbanscape (Wayne 2002: 225). Hence, while the sequence may encourage the idea of harmony and inclusion, asking that the jots be joined up to form something more immediately identifiable and meaningful, it also establishes through internal difference and juxtaposition a sense of non-communication and exclusion. Indeed, in the very gesture of connecting, it seems to be insisting on dislocation and loss. Further, although Guédiguian clearly draws on the potential of the moving image to capture the intricacy of urban space and movement, the pan is conducted at such a swift pace that objects and forms start to appear abstract. There are evident dangers with this type of visual manoeuvre, as Comolli notably has recognised when he talks of a panning shot’s ‘circular, regular, continuous’ movement that imposes a certain unity, monotony and homogeneity (‘the force of the same’) and, by effectively denying the hors-champ, smoothes out the variations and disparities of urban chaos. Each fraction of space, successively framed, Comolli suggests, slips from the hors-champ to the champ and declares its basic similarity with the preceding fraction (Gorce 1994: 37–8). Comolli speculates that the distinctive ‘hors-champ marseillais’ (i.e. its rich, heterogeneous, urban mix) is always resistant to the perfectly controlled hors-champ of a coherent panning shot.9

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Like all Guédiguian’s work, the opening sequence of La Ville est tranquille raises the question of the relationship between the vertical and lateral, and between time and space. Here, passing through empty, devastated, post-epic urban space is also passing through lost time, from the eighteenth century of the Fort Saint-Jean (built, like Fort Saint-Nicolas which it faces, during the 1700s) to the symbols of Marseilles’s imperial age (almost all the city’s grand public moments date from its heyday in the second part of the nineteenth century) through to the emblems of post-war, post-industrial decline, such as the deserted wharves and serried rows of forlorn housing estates on the hills. The Marseilles Guédiguian is depicting has survived the breakdown in community and working-class solidarity, the fragmentation of a now moribund Left in the new era of globalisation, the increasing decline in strength of the Communist Party in the northern suburbs, and the concomitant turn to the far-Right here as elsewhere in France. A man firmly of the Left (although he declined to renew his membership of the Communist Party shortly before he began filmmaking), Guédiguian fully acknowledges that he is documenting a disappearing world (Danel 2008: 45). Virtually all his work deals with some form of lost illusions (personal, political, social) and locates its central narratives in the specific context of regional unemployment and financial hardship – part of Guédiguian’s attempt to make sense of a city that is continually spread out before us, there. His cinema is a kind of passionate, committed, visual chronicle of the progress and development of a city that, after many years under the socialist mayor Gaston Defferre (re-elected six times in succession), now labours under the centre-right policies of the current mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin (of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP)), and is still waiting for its recent rebranding with European Union funds as Euro-Méditerranée to reap social and not just financial dividends (much of the area between the financial district of La Joliette and the commercial port still remains a building site). Guédiguian’s work is inspired to varying degrees by the engaged materialist aesthetics of Bertholt Brecht,10 the political commitment of Pier Paolo Pasolini,11 and his own advanced studies in sociology (he is the author of a university thesis in sociology on the ‘conception of the State within the working-class’). The important recent book of interviews with Isabelle Danel, Conversation avec Robert Guédiguian (2008), is even prefaced by a quote from Brecht about the need to deduce aesthetics, like morality, from the ‘demands of our struggle’. However,

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Guédiguian refuses any notion that he is merely proposing messages – at the very most he is constructing morals and allegories (Danel 2008: 133). Indeed, he proposes his project in eminently accessible aesthetic terms, constantly repeating, for example, that L’Estaque is simply a matter of colour, lines, light and bodies. He claims he has no signature ‘style’ (each new film is different from the rest, he asserts) while rather disingenuously laying claim to a ‘deliberately naïve gaze’. Yet for all Guédiguian’s proven and authentic geography of his home city, allied to impeccable liberal humanist credentials founded on compassionate socialism and a humble, Malraux-like faith in the values of popular cinema as ‘an art that reveals to men the “Grandeur inside them of which they are unaware”’ (Danel 2008: 141),12 his practice of cinematic space is far from obvious or straightforward. In a persuasive article arguing that Guédiguian’s main topic is the demise of place as the locus of the development of feelings of belonging and identity, Laura Rascaroli claims that his spatial discourse is best examined through a scale that goes straight from local to global, and that he presents Marseilles as always transnational and universal, as opposed to national. Whereas the local is embodied (smells, colours, etc), the global is disembodied and catastrophic (Rascaroli 2006: 97). In this reading, which positions the national as the negative (a source of right-wing extremism, for example), Marseilles stands for the Midi with its particular light, colours, gestures, faces, accents, cuisine, etc. that open up to the South and the special Mediterranean mix of peoples. In more general terms, however, the city becomes a paradigm of the contemporary condition: the loss of roots, rapid change and the disappearance of ‘place’. One gains a concrete sense of this multi-layered process in Guédiguian’s breakthrough film, Marius et Jeannette (1997), his first work to find the large popular audience he was always courting and which he describes as ‘a kind of parable’ with archetypes and very simple style narration, as if on a theatrical stage’ (De Baecque and Toubiana 1997: 59). The film constitutes one of his utopian and universalist ‘contes de l’Estaque’, in contrast to ‘realist’ fictions like La Ville est tranquille, although Guédiguian insists that both stylistic strands must be taken together since all his films return to the core question of how the city is represented and figured. To the downbeat sounds of Il Pleut sur Marseille sung by Jacques Menichetti (already used in À l’attaque!/ Charge! (2000)), the film starts off elliptically and symbolically with a small, transparent, plastic globe rolling across the water from the tourist docks at Marseilles to the harbour at L’Estaque, before, in a

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gentle, right-to-left horizontal tracking shot, washing up on local mud flats with an abandoned sign for L’Estaque visible below the water’s surface – as if we were in any doubt that for Guédiguian L’Estaque, a microcosm of Marseilles, represents the world. Guédiguian then proceeds to convey visually the cramped physical conditions, narrow communal courtyard and winding backstreets of L’Estaque, as well as the false promise of escape and eternity represented by the ever-distant Mediterranean sky and sea.13 Yet what exactly is Guédiguian’s relationship here to his chosen city? Or, more specifically, what is the precise relationship between the filmic and the urban in his cinema? Moreover, how close, how objective, how ‘real’, can a filmic portrayal of a city ever be? I wish in what follows to examine in depth these interrelated questions of theme and form, focusing first on spatial movement and the disposition of the human figure in the urbanscape of La Ville est tranquille in order to establish the full reality and significance of the opening sequence. Guédiguian would appear in those opening moments to be creating an open frame inviting corporeal and affective movement and the free-play of forms, light, colour, and matter. Yet does his formal portrayal of such an elusive city as Marseilles escape the evident risks of homogeneity and the negation of otherness highlighted by Comolli in his account of cinematic form and urban space? Further, how is this process affected by Guédiguian’s highly idiosyncratic working method, whereby he resides in Paris for most of the year to reconstitute his memories of Marseilles, before returning to the city for three to four months to shoot the resulting screenplay (see Olive 2009: 63–4)? Is Marseilles anything more than an iconographic backdrop, however spectacular, offering in rapid, short-hand fashion a ready set of potent images and themes? And if we accept that visuality in Guédiguian’s work is consistently moulded to (and by) narrative drama – a drama that features the often desperate search for some kind of new, shared, emotional or communitarian space – might it not also be the case that his treatment of urban space is actually compromised by his primary focus on historical and political temporality? In short, does Guédiguian add anything new to the city’s visual medium? By comparing the visual strategies of La Ville est tranquille with the key elements of spatial representation in Guédiguian’s other major films of the last twenty years, I will attempt to establish whether space can withstand the powerful political and symbolic currents driving his work, and ultimately whether it can ever operate simply as ‘space’.

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Mapping the city limits Following its remarkable opening sequence, La Ville est tranquille plunges us immediately into the all-too-real material world of Marseilles with the portside fish-market filmed at ground level in an icy-blue hue. It is here that Michèle (Ascaride) works, travelling back and forth to her council flat near the docks, which she shares with her half-estranged, unemployed, alcoholic husband Claude (Pierre Banderet) and her drug-addicted, single-mother daughter Fiona (JulieMarie Parmentier). Michèle functions as the point of intersection for the chief male characters of the film: former lover Gérard (Meylan), a louche café owner, drug dealer and occasional contract killer, and naïve taxi driver Paul (Darroussin), a former docker who accepted the offer of redundancy money and who lives alone and frequents prostitutes. The multiple, criss-crossing storylines link together, in fact, eighteen protagonists of different race, class and politics (family members, lovers, acquaintances, etc) in a complex web of mysterious, at times oblique relationships in the social mosaic style of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) set in Los Angeles, though in this case without any real sense of neighbourhood. The chance, arbitrary way in which the paths of the different characters collide, sometimes in the soulless non-place of an out-of-town shopping mall, merely underlines the fact that they are isolated and cut off from each other, in particular the working-class characters, as shown by the absence of support for the dockers who even lack solidarity amongst themselves. Family structures provide no refuge: Paul happily spins lies and fantasies to his doting but now thoroughly disenchanted retired parents (his politically committed father, Pierre, vows never to vote again out of disgust for the way the Left is now fraternising with the far-Right), and Fiona manipulates her concerned mother to the point of forcing her to become her drug-dealer, while at the same time accusing her of being a racist for not desiring black men – a throwaway remark that demonstrates the degree to which ethnicity is a palpable source of tension and threat within the city. Marseilles is presented as teetering on the edge. The prevailing light of the film, a ‘luminosity terminally impregnated with gloom’ (McGonagle 2007: 234), creates a twilight atmosphere for the city and its troubled, damaged inhabitants. Indeed, La Ville est tranquille struggles to signify mutual and dynamic interaction. As Wayne puts it, the ‘connections have little integral aesthetic logic and therefore lack the capacity to signify fully social dynamics’, thus presenting a flawed

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social totality (Wayne 2002: 224). The film has attracted important political commentary, for it is impossible not to read the configuration of space in geopolitical terms. According to Martin O’Shaughnessy, the film underlines how the world has fragmented into two spatialties: one of power, the other of powerlessness, and the growing void between them, because the second seems incapable of toucing or even naming the first (O’Shaughnessy 2008: 174). There can be no universally translatable hymn of opposition because there no longer exists a grand narrative of collective solidarity and renewal. Indeed, without an epic, workingclass choir, the Internationale can only be sung by a lone voice – Paul in his taxi. The camera passes mournfully by the famous ‘Marseille Europort’, the size of a high-rise and traditional sign of Marseilles’s pride in being a major European port, yet the port often appears no more than that: an inflated advertising logo. However, O’Shaughnessy also argues more positively that, like Bertrand Tavernier’s 1999 film Ça Commence aujourd’hui/It All Starts Today, La Ville est tranquille holds fragmentation and the desire for solidarity in tension due to its choral structure. In so doing, although bearing witness to the loss of a universal grounds for resistance, the film nevertheless expresses its own resistance to atomisation.14 Yet what, in purely physical terms, is a post-epic, metropolitan space? Despite the film’s light, mobile camerawork, Marseilles is pictured here like a giant chess-board: all the elements (players and objects) are acted on and directed by social/economic forces in a grim, geometrical game of power relations, breakdown and survival. In this stylised and highly circumscribed cartography, the two great churches of central Marseilles are forever looming and loitering at the back of the frame and providing a certain depth of urban field. They also demand to be read metaphorically or symbolically, for while Guédiguian may describe himself as a ‘secular atheist’,15 these buildings appear to function as rare repositories of meaning in the new urban wilderness. They are like silent sentinels pointing back to an ideal past when religion, society, civic pride and prosperity were all powerfully integrated and the identity between the city and its inhabitants was absolute. In addition to the Vieux-Port, the dockside and odd glimpses of the narrow streets of Le Panier, the traditional working-class quarter of Marseilles and site of successive waves of immigrants (first Italian, then Armenian, Spanish, Portuguese, and, most recently North African), the film also enters the Parc de Bagatelle area of the 6th/8th arrondissement, where Paul’s parents live, and the

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large modern avenues of the central, late-nineteenth-century quarter of La Joliette, dissected by straight-line avenues and dominated by the large, sprawling, bulbous Romano-Byzantine cathedral referred to locally as la Cathédrale de la Major, constructed on an esplanade between the Vieux-Port and the modern port.16 We are never allowed to get close to this site, however, any more than that of the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde on the other side of the harbour overlooking the city from its highest vantage point. These edifices function solely as symbolic coordinates rather than as accesssible urban sites. Similarly, in Marius et Jeannette the cathedral and basilica are visible from L’Estaque only as bleached, diffuse forms in the background sea mist. Yet they are also unmissable and inescapable, functioning in La Ville est tranquille like lost anchors whenever the protagonists are passing through the central zone. In short, the spatial terrain is always being converted here into symbolic territory, mapped and plotted according to an impressively efficient visual short-hand: churches and monuments are set in relief against an urbanscape that is continuously limned by overhead panning shots or tracking shots from within a moving car. Such a fixed and distanced topographic projection produces an odd, at times even queasy, sensation of spatial realism, for Guédiguian heightens and exaggerates what makes Marseilles so distinctive as a French city: not only the effects of post-war rebuilding involving the wholesale destruction of entire areas following extensive bombing by the Allies in 1944, but also the four-lane highways like the Autoroute du Littoral and Autoroute du Soleil which penetrate right into the centre. In the terms proposed by Penz, these visual markers, which are also precise social markers, produce topographical coherency. However, this does not translate into a real creative engagement with space, or indeed a self-reflexive awareness and interrogation of the difficulty of filming Marseilles, as acknowledged above by Comolli. There is, for example, little or no harnessing of the potential of the hors-champ and the invisible world in the film. This is a super-stylised portrait of a dying city with little room for doubt or uncertainty. There is, in fact, a profound formal disconnect at work in Guédiguian: characters are effectively alienated, exiled and ejected by Marseilles in the detached, often ironic way it is framed. As in the opening sequence which concludes with the young musician playing alone, they are framed against a precise background in virtual isolation. Indeed, in Guédiguian’s visual grammar, the middle-ground is rarely conveyed

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8.  Michèle (Ariane Ascaride) sells her body to Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) in his car parked alongside the deserted warehouses of the port yet guarded over by the Cathédrale de la Major in the background in La Ville est tranquille (2000).

by a medium long-shot. Instead, we are usually taken from a long-shot directly to close-up, thus omitting an intermediate stage of organic unfolding and transition within the shot. Rather than a smooth, fluid plan-séquence recording the interrelated movement of characters within a larger frame, it is left to montage to link discrete and fragmented shots and planes. In this formal scheme, panning shots emphasise distance, separation and withdrawal rather than unity. In some cases, as when Paul is photographed at the market in dialogue with his father’s old friend from the Resistance, René, there is no establishing shot to anchor the viewer, with the result that the urban background remains just that: simply the background to a two-shot that exposes a lack of genuine depth of field. Often the film simply relies on one-shot close-ups from different angles and planes. The sensitive Viviane (Christine Brücher), a music teacher for autistic children, alerts us directly to the problems and implications of perspective when she inveighs against the hypocritical and phoney ‘gauche réaliste’ embodied by her architect husband, Yves (Jacques Pieiller): ‘You always think you’re smart … with an objective point of view … But you forget where you’re looking at the view from’. Her young lover Abder(amane) (Alexandre Ogou), whom she had taught while he was in prison and who knows instinctively

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that it is safer to look at Marseilles from a height and the right angle, serves as the film’s moral compass and symbolic watchman. The conclusion to a panoramic sweep across the cityscape from Viviane’s city-centre balcony shows Abder symbolically positioned beneath the distant Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde as church bells ring. In fact, at the end of almost every panning shot in the film there is a human figure, either looking or moving through the frame. Hence, every ostensibly objective shot is determined and, as it were, subjectified. This conforms to the arrangement of space in classical narrative cinema, notably in the Hollywood western where the landscape is no more than a setting for human action and every element of the decor is ideally used up as the narrative unfolds. What is so exceptional about the particular panning shot with Abder is that it is made part of a concerted shot formation: the direction of the pan right-to-left is quickly reversed and remotivated into a pan left-to-right from the docks to the cité to meet Abder’s face. This is the perfection of formal control, the reasons for which will soon become apparent. Abder embodies the best of the city – its hope and its challenge – and is as upstanding as the basilica itself. He is also the only character who manages (albeit temporarily) to transgress social and class segregation through his cross-racial, cross-class, cross-generational relationship with Viviane. Yet the fact that he is indiscriminately killed in a manner that reflects historical fact (a man of Comoran origin, Ibrahim Ali, was murdered by Front National supporters in February 1995 in a northern quarter of Marseilles), only highlights that within this environment of dysfunction and disharmony the promise of anything radically different and fair (socially, racially, generationally) is impossible to realise. Abder’s multiracial band of teenagers agree that Figuières, a calanque on the Côte Bleue in the direction of Martigues, is controlled by fascists, so they decide instead on driving that evening to the more local Corbières. They jump exuberantly into the balmy water of the Mediterranean to the sounds of raï music, the wide camera frame embracing the figures with the lights of Marseilles floating in the background. This illuminates the city’s status as an ethnically diverse melting-pot, although significantly no one in the film is connoted as Italian, and indeed the specific ethnic origin of characters is only mentioned when the teenager Momo raps about his pride in being Comoran, thus confirming McGonagle’s point that ultimately the narrative insists more on social class than ethnicity (McGonagle 2007: 240)). The teenagers’ brief, joyful moment together is to be contrasted

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with Améline’s quasi-fascist, erotic fantaises of nature, primitivism, and volkisch labour: she claims while making love to Gérard on the very bed he was born in that she can imagine his mother groaning in pain while giving birth. Ironically, and tragically, it is when the group return home to their own cité that Abder is shot indiscriminately by one of the Front National members (among them Claude) who think that local, regional and national space belongs exclusively to those who consider themselves ‘Français de souche’. We glimpse their ‘Préférence Nationale’ posters incorporating a map of France and the ­inflammatory words: ‘Immigration = Invasion’. No escape to a safe ailleurs is possible in La Ville est tranquille. In this portrait of a dying city that unfolds more like a requiem, and where space is a matter of life and death, Marseilles is defined as a deadly contest not just between those living in its different sections but also between generations. Like the impossible and finally murderous gulf between the city’s traditional white French population and its secondor third-generation black and Arab immigrants, a desperate mother must kill her own daughter to ensure the survival of her granddaughter. Yet to map and overdetermine the real so powerfully is also potentially to cancel out what makes a city a city: its multiplicity and capacity for surprise, spontaneity and unheralded encounters. De Certeau makes a fine distinction between cartes (maps) and parcours (tours but also detours), i.e. between on the one hand the structuring, totalising view of map-makers with their plans de ville and town planners for whom the city is a concept; and on the other the messy accumulation of quotidian movements and paths produced by those at ground level (de Certeau 1990: 175). This distinction between two modes of spatial narrative (one relating to objects, the other to bodily experience) is also, of course, one between ‘seeing’ and ‘being’. De Certeau invokes Merleau-Ponty, who draws a distinction between geometric space and anthropological, or ‘existential’, space, i.e. the site of an experience of relations with the world expressing the same essential structure of our being as ‘in relationship to a milieu’ (ibid.: 173) (to be understood as physical surroundings rather than abstract location). In La Ville est tranquille, however, urban cartographics implies a denial of the city as an existential space formed of everyday social practices. For what is left out of the film’s dystopian equation is precisely the noise and commotion of Marseilles and its unique, raw energy and vitality, eloquently evoked by Stephen Barber as a ‘vastly open zone that magnetises everything in its sight, then sends that violently scrambled

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mass of images, languages and sensations pouring back out into the streets’. Marseilles, he continues, ‘exudes the glaring, vital indignity of Europe … the lunatic spasms and tics which animate the city are accentuated by the blasts and moans of the Mistral […] the great sensory rush of the city’s noise’ (Barber 2001: 34–6).17 Curiously, we never experience at first hand in La Ville est tranquille, or anywhere else in Guédiguian’s work, the frenetic, multicultural clamour and throng of Marseilles in daily action, as in the teeming markets of the centre at Noailles or underground on the metro. The city remains literally – and as if phobically – at the level of surface, always skirted past and across yet never actually invested in. It is hard not to read such attention to surface and symbol as ironically an inadvertent endorsement of Yves’s arrogant cynicism and fatalism, for like the self-proclaimed ‘aesthetic surgeon’ promising the city a facelift to replace a blue-collar economy with tourism, the film also keeps the viewer at a totalising distance from the physical materiality and random discoveries of the ­contemporary metropolis. Of course, on one level, Guédiguian’s studious avoidance of large crowd scenes and of anything in the city that does not deal directly with the protagonists simply takes to an extreme what Pierre Sorlin has identified as a paradigm of European cinema: the representation of European cities as elusive, mysterious and impenetrable. For while people certainly inhabit them and houses and apartment buildings are visible, we know little about them. Very often the city serves simply as a background and remains anonymous. Yet as such, according to Sorlin, urban space offers an access to infinity and an inexhaustible source of anecdotes and chronicles, for what is most important is that the city is a way of life: the physical space is a ‘non-place’ that the actions of the crowd transform into a town (see Sorlin 2005: 36).18 The final visual effect of La Ville est tranquille is also not too removed from what François de la Bretèque, in his study of terrain and social formation in the images of Provence in French cinema, has defined as the ‘regional picturesque’ (see de la Bretèque 1992). For we are never able to develop, as can happen in the best films located in one specific and clearly demarcated place (Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se lève (1939) or Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), for example), what Peter Wollen calls ‘our own set of memories, associations and expectations … our own symbolisations, our own mental maps’ (Wollen 2002: 214), in order to integrate ourselves physically within it. Instead, we receive a highly filtered and symbolically capped picture of a delimited urban space

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that appears merely archetypal of a large conurbation in the south of France facing common social problems (unemployment, racism, political disaffection, etc). What we are witnessing, in short, is Guédiguian’s profound ambivalence towards his home city. La Ville est tranquille is effectively organised around a documentary-like opposition between the vertical – the ideal, utopian fantasy of social mobility caught in elevated and overhead shots, at a distance, and often drenched in warm sunlight – and the horizontal – the blocked reality of life in a fragmented city seen from quarter to quarter, isolated cité to cité, centre to port, at times veering towards dystopia. Hence, despite initial impressions, the film’s grand opening pan, while a brilliant demonstration of the moving image, is actually crossing through time by crossing out space. Guédiguian’s cinema may appear topophilic – after all, he gives Marseilles an instantly recognisable topographic face – yet it is fundamentally ‘topophobic’ since the city is reduced to a fixed set of spatial coordinates which function as symbolic and mythical indices rather than as living, breathing spaces. That is to say, in the terms proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, the urbanspace operates as a map of lines of force rather than of lines of escape. Such a symbolics relies precisely on the coalescing of certain ideas and forms into easily graspable certainties and fixed, universal truths. Indeed, La Ville est tranquille appears caught in its own rigid rhetorical grid and patterns, of which the viewfinder of the rifle used by Georges for his contract killing of a right-wing senator (Améline’s father), highlighting and isolating his victim against a dark background, is only the most literal and deadly example. In short, the film’s spectacular opening is revealed retrospectively as a hollow gesture ultimately recording the death of the urban real in its spatial depth. This ambiguous effect is further aggravated by the fact that La Ville est tranquille is programmed and subtended by a number of flashbacks, both intratextual and intertextual, to Guédiguian’s first feature, Dernier Été (1980), set in L’Estaque-Riaux, about an unemployed youth who decides to leave but dies in a bungled burglary. These brief scenes provide some of the backstory to the relationship between Michèle and Gérard: the first is a dance sequence between Bert and Josiane in the bar, the second a lyrical, romantic moment between the two in the Calanques. The result is less celebratory than commemorative, however, since it serves only to emphasise the abortive promise of the couple’s relationship and the extent of Gérard’s own personal fall into

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nihilism. It is as if all that is happening is not just immobilised in a time-warp but sucked into an endless, self-reflexive cinematic spiral or mise en abyme that reproduces everything that has come before in a sad lament for the epic time of collective solidarity and noble struggle whose moment has definitively passed. Compare this limited and literal imaging of the past with the eponymous character’s personal journey of urban rememoration in Claire Simon’s Mimi (2003) – an exploration of Nice as a space of collective memory and shifting, dynamic virtuality which Isabelle McNeill has described very suggestively in terms of ‘spatial duration’ (McNeill 2010b: 129–38). Unlike Simon’s Nice, Guédiguian’s Marseilles has been effectively stripped of an imaginary or virtual sphere mediated through collective experience. La Ville est tranquille is not only lumbered with extended flashbacks. The moment of the young Georgian pianist (Sarkis) playing at the start of the film is briefly reprised in the middle, but in a wider frame that captures the Palais frontally and now reveals Gérard in the audience with his back against the Cathédrale de La Mayor before moving forwards to donate money. The film – and Marseilles with it – is not progressing, but caught in a temporal snag it cannot escape. Yet if time is blocked and suspended, this does not inspire a new, countervailing emphasis on space, which seems here merely to reflect and accentuate the enormity of the crisis: that the city is dead and that real evolutionary change and progress through time is all but impossible. It is an ironic measure of the warped relations to space in the film – and a sign of Guédiguian’s confused aesthetics – that the only occasion when the camera seems loose enough to explore space on its own terms, and not as part of a pre-programmed panning shot or tracking shot formation and geometrical composition, is when we are looking with Améline from Georges’s balcony. For the first time in the film, the camera simply roams across the wasteland, tracing first the railway line, then the docks in the distance, as if joined at the hip with Améline in a flowing stream of primordial, fascistic consciousness. At moments like this, both the city of Marseilles and Guédiguian’s cinema that has formalised it appear in full regression. In fact, the natural space of elemental and liquid formlessness constitutes a highly ambivalent affective dimension in his work because it is at once enticing and dangerous and can assume a variety of forms, both positive and negative, as here. This is space in its purest and most fearful form for Guédiguian, and it will be a test of all his symbolising and sublimatory muscle whether it can be marshalled and ‘re-mapped’ into something

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acceptable and affirmative, for instance, the religious and sacred, as opposed to merely mystico-spiritual abstraction or mirage. The reappearance at the end of La Ville est tranquille of a happy Sarkis who, with his father at his side, now plays on a grand piano positioned in front of his home, would seem to offer a far more positive conclusion. As a fresh, young immigrant, Sarkis has everything literally to play for. Yet the ending cannot entirely dispel the film’s prevailing tone of pessismism and negativity. The piano has just been delivered by a team comprising, ironically, Claude on a van that moments earlier had skirted the Le Panier side of the harbour of the Vieux-Port (with Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde again visible in the far-background), just yards from where Gérard has shot himself in the mouth during his sudden stand-off on the street with aggressive male youths. No random coincidence is left without some kind of consequence in Guédiguian. At that particular moment the camera swivelled round from the scene of Gérard’s suicide (the climax to a disturbing series of confrontational point-of-view shots rendered as champ/contre-champ) to capture in the same shot, via a brisk, minimal pan right-to-left, the white van passing in the street below. The harsh, dark sounds of Janis Joplin’s working-class plea, Cry Baby, which accompanied the build-up to Gérard’s death, are now taken over by Sarkis’s piano as he plays outside in the courtyard for his family and ethnically mixed neighbours (predominantly central and Eastern European) in an unspecified, old, working-class quarter of the city. A vertical pan leads upwards from the boy playing to a low-angle image of the neighbours cramming the balconies of the apartment building and peering down at the source of the music. The camera does not itself move upwards to reach the sky, which looks decidedly blank and bleached out. Instead, it simply pans slowly up from the ground to register a range of ethnic differences in a hybrid social space. This final sequence of impromptu recital – a two-part formation of panning shots, first horizontal, then vertical – replicates, of course, the spatial pattern of the film’s opening shots, though here the direction of the pan is reversed (it is now right-to-left). It also offers an equivalent play of planes, surfaces and perspectives, ensuring that the near-foreground suddenly comes into frame (either from below or overhead) to create an impression of depth of field. As such, the concluding scene efficiently closes the structural frame opened up at the beginning. It also allows us to appreciate still more clearly the opening sequence – and the film as a whole – for what it really is: a

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fantasy of time and futurity rather than an exploration of urban space. For what is being offered at this final stage is both a utopian fantasy of social mobility and a ‘dream’ of solidarity and integration across cultures, ethnicities and political ideologies. The question is posed: will the racist Claude, having successfully transported the scene’s symbolic freight, now see the light ‘vertically’, that is to say, through time and across generations, and thus permanently embrace ethnicity and difference? As the camera tilts gently up past the different stories of the building, time would appear to stand still. This is emphasised by one particular split-frame composition that takes the form of a direct juxtaposition of Claude’s strangely awestruck face with that of a young girl reflected in the piano on the left as she looks down from above. Hence, time imposes itself as the central idea, while space – abstracted and almost incidental – becomes merely its setting. This was also always the case at the beginning where, despite the shot’s spatial glow and shimmering depth, the different spaces and quarters glimpsed during the moving panorama of Marseilles served simply to figure the more crucial consideration of different times, ages, periods, and generations, in the process raising the perennially unanswered question of how to bring them together. In both cases, external space is defined solely in terms of the passage of time. Very rarely, if ever, in a Guédiguian film do we view land or sea or sky on its own material terms and enjoying its own, natural extensibility. This explains why La Ville est tranquille could not have ended with the scene just before, i.e. the formal moment of cinematic relay between two separate events and spaces (the close-up foreground of Gérard’s suicide, a van passing in the middle-distance) engineered in a dynamic spatio-temporal swivel. For this was a crossing and transformation of space – an instance of pure cinema – brimming with hope and potential. Yet such intuitive lateral thinking cannot exist as anything more than a momentary narrative bridge in Guédiguian’s cinema. Indeed, so great is the film’s need to compensate for its countless moments of real and symbolic breakdown that the final vertical pan must be shown to deliver on its promise and reveal an image of community and solidarity through music. This is far from assured, of course. As McGonagle writes, the promise of unity with this cross-section of society appears fragile, and an ‘almost apocalyptic fade to white at the end underlines its tentativeness, suggesting they [the assembled listeners] may only remain united whilst he [Sarkis] plays’ (McGonagle 2007: 236). We have seen this type of temporal tilt away from and over space

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before in Guédiguian. At the end of Marius et Jeannette, the main protagonists turn their back on the camera and walk symbolically in the same direction on a footbridge over a generic highway (a deliberately anonymous and faceless image that connotes simpy ‘the urban’). As the camera tilts slowly up, Guédiguian dispatches the narrative in a brief voice-over where he explains matter-of-factly that each of his characters’ hopes and expectations will come true. The sequence ends with an iris shot into black to the sounds of the Neapolitan song, O Sole Mio. What we are witnessing here, in a film that began with a series of lateral tracking shots of a globe floating on the water, is the resolution to a standard Guédiguian formal tension between the temporal–vertical (overhead shots above the framed urban space) and the spatial–horizontal (tracking shots relaying the details of lived reality). As in La Ville est tranquille and elsewhere in Guédiguian’s work, it is the temporal–vertical that prevails, here in the particular form of a retrospective futurity. Which is to say, space can never really take place in Guédiguian. All is subsumed under time, to the point that space – narrativised, motivated, overdetermined, evacuated – loses depth and becomes simply an abstract, virtually immaterial, stage-set for the narrative. Put another way: in a cinema that both mourns the lost, epic time of History and dreams of a utopian Future, space represents always the impossible (dystopian) present. Guédiguian’s films are a requiem for space tout court. The voyage out Yet must Guédiguian’s portrayal of Marseilles always conform to this strict formal, symbolic and space-denying pattern? À la Place du coeur/ Where the Heart Is (1998), his first attempt to expand his artistic canvas both formally (it announces the problematics of space in its very title, À la place du coeur – literally ‘In the place [or square] of the heart’) and geographically (it takes his audience for the first time into Marseilles proper), appears to adopt a new and different strategy. Adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, the original 1970s Harlem setting transposed to contemporary Marseilles with Sarajevo replacing Puerto Rico, the film celebrates the fact that we are for the first time in Guédiguian’s work in central Marseilles by letting us hear in advance of the first printed image some archetypal urban sounds (traffic, police sirens) that sound a note of tension and confusion. François (or Bébé) Lopez (Alexandre Ogou), an 18 year old

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black man, remains incarcerated after having been wrongfully accused by a racist policeman of raping a Bosnian woman. When his childhood sweetheart and girlfriend Clémentine (or Clim) Patché (Laure Raoust) reveals that she is pregnant, the parents of both teenagers join forces together to help save him, a task that requires Clim’s mother Marianne (Ascaride) to head to Sarajevo, a city still barely recovering after the recent war, to implore the rape victim (Mrs Radic) to retract her false accusations (this she will finally do after Marianne returns to Marseilles). Related in a contemplative voice-over by Clim and including some of Baldwin’s original prose, translated and recited almost verbatim (an effect reinforced by the intermittent use of phrases handwritten on screen that initiate spoken passages), the narrative is defined by temporality, featuring early on a customary flashback to a childhood scene between Clim and Bébé and continually crossing back and forth across time. It even includes a flashback to a scene extracted from Guédiguian’s own Kil lo sa? (1985), where a younger version of the father Joël Patché (Darroussin) watches Ariane asleep. Yet À la Place du coeur is over-schematic to the point of caricature in its portrayal of two diametrically opposed families: the unity and compassion of the Patchés versus the division of the Lopez family with the unsubtly fundamentalist Christian white mother Francine (Christine Brücher) supported by her black foster daughter against her white docker husband, Franck. (There is also in a side-narrative an awkward opposition between the innocent, heroic beauty and survival of the film’s central couple and the reported downfall of two childhood friends.) Afflicted with a heart condition linked to his time on the docks, Franck soon bonds with Joël, a builder equally humiliated by the world, in over-dramatic and sentimental fashion, including drunken antics together in a bar to the sounds of Harlem jazz (Guédiguian has acknowledged that he is glorifying his working-class characters here, even making them ‘saints’19). Similarly, the grotesque portrait of the racist policeman who engineers the fabricated crime of Bébé remains a crude stereotype. Unlike Guédiguian’s immediately preceding film, Marius et Jeannette, with its small communal courtyard connecting neighbours from different generations and ethnicities and facilitating discussion of unemployment, religion, politics and sex, there is no central urban space or crossroads to unite the various characters. The inner-courtyard of the Lopez apartment building is devoid of life, apart from the solitary Franck still unpeeling fruit after all these years, a casualty of the

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remorseless march of time. As Rascaroli has argued, the characters are irremediably isolated and alienated, with no support network of friends, union members or co-workers (Rascaroli 2006: 103).20 In fact, the only community we see in action in À la Place du coeur occurs briefly in the restaurant where North African men bond together homosocially (and for Clim and the viewer homoerotically) over a meal and dance together. The representation of this immigrant community is not as forceful or comprehensive as that in other contemporary films set in Marseilles, such as Karim Dridi’s Bye-Bye (1995), Kamel Saleh and Akhenaton’s Comme un aimant/The Magnet (2000), and Philippe Faucon’s Samia (2000). The first two take place specifically in Le Panier alive with street noise and the ambient sounds and music of its multi-ethnic population.21 À la Place du coeur gestures also to this contemporary hybrid space, the result of the city’s cultural heritage of the Maghreb and France’s colonial past, yet provides no evidence that the relationship between Clim and Bébé is anything but a precarious and isolated instance. However, what is most original and significant about Guédiguian’s film is precisely its heavily stylised and racialised representation of Marseilles. The old and idealistic Jewish landlord M. Lévy (Jacques Boudet), who preaches harmony and offers the young couple a ‘place’ to be together (Bébé’s workshop will become their apartment), functions in direct counterpoint to the prevailing representation of Marseilles as a menacing space of violence, stupidity and racism. The opening words of Clim, whom we follow symbolically in a back-tracking shot with the Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde in the ever-increasing far-distance, convey from the outset the precarious link between identity and the troubled city: ‘I used to love it [Marseilles]. The city hates me as I’m a negress now’. This regret is made even more poignant by the clear affinity Clim still feels for the city of her birth, and which she expresses in the natural, even elemental terms of symbolic osmosis: ‘The water I wash in flows with Marseilles like blood into millions of underground caverns’. Her salvatory gaze on Bébé will be expressed in almost cosmic terms when she remarks that she could see ‘all earth and sky’ in his face and skin when he gave her his first sculpture. Yet the city portrayed here is no more than an agglomeration of oppressive, claustrophobic symbolic sites – prisons, ruined wharves, dangerous fly-overs, as well as basilicas and cathedrals (the Lopez children are taken for Sunday worship to the Cathédrale de la Major in one flashback scene) – all intensified melodramatically by the ­expressionistic use of natural light, strong back-lighting, and high contrast.

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The central dialectics of pain and ecstasy will eventually be resolved in the final, strained – yet for this film entirely logical – cross-cutting of Clim giving birth while Bébé chisels his humanoid sculpture into being in an equivalent, shared labour of love and successful delivery. The last beautiful shot, which effectively returns us to where we started (the childhood of Clim and Bébé), serves as a kind of symbolic pledge: the camera suddenly focuses on the nondescript base of a column of an apartment building in the warm glow of the past, as if this were literally and concretely ‘in the place of the heart’ (as opposed to ‘in place of the heart’), and something we must hold on to in order to ground our lives more deeply by privileging the minor and humble at ground level over the ‘major’ (the name of the cathedral). Again, what is prioritised and cemented here is the simultaneously concrete and abstract ‘idea’ of solidity and identity rather than the messy details of daily life. Such a hyperbolic message does not need to be verbalised by Clim because it is abundantly clear. The final image exemplifies the film’s presentation of Marseilles as a whole where, notwithstanding the constant pealing of church bells, the noise and commotion of the urban flow is progressively muted. Odd details of reality may be allowed to intrude – a number 22 bus, shots of a central square with traffic, the bus-stop by the Bourse, real shots of firecrackers being let off one evening in the Vieux-Port, North African men dancing together in the restaurant – yet they do not take hold and remain just that: reality effects. Little is seen of Marseilles that is not said by Clim in her punctual voice-over, which reduces the bus to silence and the cacophony of Marseilles to a relative hush. Indeed, shots of the city traffic are literally written over and out by Clim’s hand, the ellipsis of such incomplete phrases as ‘The first time we made love’ indicating that the visual image, when it is not simply redundant, serves only a secondary role in the film’s much larger pre-inscribed, symbolic narrative. Hence, À la Place du coeur is really no more about memory in the act of forming than it is a documentary of the city in flux and process. And related to the fact that the city is continually abstracted from its defining noise and unruliness are the clear risks of symbolism and essentialism: American blues music for the emotional buddy story of the two fathers embarking on their long strange journey, and clichés about the male body and male laughter deriving directly from ‘the balls’. Yet in one early flashback (drenched again in a yellow hue) featuring the Patchés outside on the street, the camera places the family in an open, expanded frame that embraces the city spread out below, and towards

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9.  Marianne (Ariane Ascaride) and Joël (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) solidaires on their balcony in a film still of À la Place du coeur (1998), with central Marseilles an indistinguishable blur behind them.

which they then proceed to walk. There are other promising moments of non-motivation and autonomy of shot, on the face of it ‘empty’ shots, as when the camera leaves the two fathers engaged in conversation inside a bar and moves outside, rising slowly left-to-right high above the building and the motorway spanning it above before turning round to the right to penetrate the deserted wharfside buildings opposite (this is eventually revealed as a bridging shot, since the next image shows the duo climbing over the fence and breaking into the space in order to carry out illegal contraband activity). During these rare and fleeting moments alive with the potential of urban flânerie for characters and camera alike, we are able to glimpse briefly the collective nature and memory of the material city: what it once was as a industrial port, who built it, and what it has now become, in short, what de Certeau calls the ‘spirit’ of space and the very essence of place in its ‘shifting thicknesses’ (de Certeau 1990: 162). Yet overall À la Place du coeur remains locked in a lengthy series of formal and thematic checks and balances: between concrete detail and abstraction; the symbolic and literal (i.e. writing ‘over’ the city); habitat and human figure (moments

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when the couple are pictured walking through the streets at dawn or in the daytime); the subjective and collective; the human subject and inanimate object (as in the phrase: ‘The objects are amassing dust’); character and caricature; drama and melodrama; documentary essay and narrative; shot motivation (intensive shot/counter-shot close-up in prison) and non-motivation; the personal and universal; destiny and surprise; the human (coeur) and the inhuman. However, the narrative of predestination inexorably prevails. The long-awaited moment of physical love between Clim and Bébe is presented as ‘the moment [that] was waiting for us’, and the focus is again on future generations: ‘Go forth and multiply’, Lévy declares, endorsing the new multicultural France. In fact, it is precisely because time is focused more explicitly on the characters’ individual trajectories, rather than on Marseilles itself in the present, that the confusion and blockage between space and temporality appears less acute here. The result is a fable of love and unity in Marseilles, of bridges at once spatial, temporal, social and conceptual, yet it comes again at a major price: that of a sustained engagement with the real, living city. After À la Place du coeur and La Ville est tranquille there would seem nowhere left for Guédiguian to go in his representation of Marseilles, other than a cinema by symbolic numbers. This is precisely what transpires in Marie-Jo et ses deux amours/Marie-Jo and her two loves (2001), where the tense, interracial aspects of Marseilles have totally disappeared. Instead, we are offered romantic, sun-kissed images of Marseilles and its environs, from the Vieux-Port to the Calanques and the îles du Frioul lying outside the harbour. The structure and imagery could not be more symbolic. The paramedic Marie-Jo (Ascaride) is faced with a stark choice: stability in L’Estaque with her builder husband Daniel (Darroussin) who is bound to the land, or the excitement of the urbane and cosmopolitan Marco (Meylan) who lives in Le Panier (his apartment overlooks the east side of the Vieux-Port and Notre-Damede-la-Garde) and guides ships into the port. As the split name in the title – ‘Marie-Jo’ – suggests, all corresponds to a binary formula. There is no gradation in the urban panorama (as Marco steers his boat into harbour we see both cathedrals in the same frame), and the binary oppositions are now musically underscored: jazz for Marco, baroque for Daniel. All the views of Marseilles on- and off-shore – Marie-Jo on the highway driving in the direction of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, or the Vieux-Port by night – are more obviously composed, light and pictural than in Guédiguian’s previous features, the fruit of his

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first collaboration with the cinematographer Roberto Berta. The only new addition to the Marseilles map is the glimpse of the Avenue du Triomphe as Marie-Jo speeds on the Autoroute Nord on her way to work at the Belle de Mai ambulance unit. The emphasis is now explicitly on time rather than space. The speeded-up image of dawn rising through the window of Marco’s apartment, where we see the lights of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde in the distance at night slowly fading into day – a gorgeous but essentially trite image – is symptomatic of the film’s fetishising approach to the city. Such stock images serve one simple function only: to provide Marie-Jo et ses deux amours with symbolic traction, especially in the way they are often superimposed and constitute a visual dialectics enhanced by the twin use of speeded-up images and slow-motion, as in the final sequence. That space is pressed entirely into the service of time is confirmed by the long epigraph, attributed to Dante, which presents time formally and metaphorically in terms of place. The extract relates in the first person the pain of losing one’s path at the middle-stage of one’s life in a dark, overgrown and wild forest too painful to describe because its ‘horrors’ are akin to death: ‘Oh, how painful it would be to say how this forest … was coarse, dense, and wild’. So fundamental is this elemental symbolism to the film’s dramatic structure that any other kind, whether romantic or religious, would push it over into caricature.22 It is totally inevitable that once Marie-Jo has made her decision to move in with Marco, Daniel will in time succumb as rival to the mortal danger of the water after diligently restoring his little boat called Marie-Jo and inviting his wife to enjoy with him the rare excitement of the open sea. Romance slides inevitably into melodrama, leading to the dramatic climax and suspense which sees the simultaneous death by drowning of Marie-Jo and Daniel while still holding hands (she had jumped in to try to rescue him after he knocked himself backwards into the water). There is much use of superimposition in the final sequence which plays out to Mozart’s Mass in C-Minor (plus Schubert’s The Death of the Maiden), and where, in the ultimate shot, the backwash of a boat appears to carve up the sea into two before it is rendered diffuse and dedifferentiated. The image is freeze-framed, suggesting over-symbolically that all has now been rendered equal in an alternative, now mythical time. Guédiguian is at rather difficult pains to justify the film as political and utopian, hazarding that, like all idealistic revolutionaries, Marie-Jo is a romantic who refuses to accept the real and dreams of making the impossible

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10.  A shot of Marie-Jo (Ariane Ascaride) driving to work superimposed over a long-shot of Marseilles in Marie-Jo et ses deux amours (2001). The triumphal arch, Porte d’Aix, is visible middle-left, while Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde looms large in the far-background.

possible.23 As for the city of Marseilles, represented in this limited, pop-up fashion by a film that lacks any real authorial commitment to the urbanscape, it would appear all but irrelevant. Guédiguian’s approach to Marseilles thus far has ensured that it always remains in a state of décalage between different temporalities (quotidian, epic, utopian, dystopian) because not directly inspired by the active experience of everyday life in the city. Yet could such fateful rhetorical manoeuvres and symbolic reflexes be avoided by simply moving outside the city limits of Marseilles? The topography that makes this particular metropolis such a complex and difficult visual space to represent, other than symbolically, would clearly no longer pertain. Further, Guédiguian’s highly ritualised working method of urban reconstitution, already highlighted, would be dramatically changed. Transported to new territory, could the aesthetic thus be finally separated from Guédiguian’s symbolics of place and open up a more fluid practice and representation of space? Or is Guédiguian’s cinema now so encased within its own formal shell that no change or progression can ever be possible? The odds are not promising. When Marianne arrived in Sarajevo in À la Place du coeur, the battle-scared city immediately encouraged a different, quasi-documentary style. As the taxi ushered her from the

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airport towards the centre, the attention of the camera was suddenly displaced, as if spontaneously, by a slow pan from right to left towards a house in the distance undergoing rebuilding. This allowed us to contemplate the scale of the damage inflicted by the event of war and the reconstruction now in process. For the first time in the film the camera movement was triggered by an object of pure fascination and literally ‘thrown’ into a new urban landscape not preordained by the narrative scheme. A little later, a gently mobile frame simply recorded the movements of intersecting trams, as if governed solely by the measured pace and rhythms of the city. In both cases, the integrity of the plan-séquence remained undisturbed by the actions of montage. Yet such idle, open curiosity was not sustained, and soon the difference between the visual representation of Marseilles and that of Sarajevo was difficult to establish due to the use of cross-cutting montage and uniformity of lighting, as well as in some cases by a similarity of framing and composition. For instance, the typical Marseilles configuration of flat foreground and high background (usually NotreDame-de-la-Garde) was approximated, however unconsciously, when Marianne visited Mrs Radic in her apartment building in Sarajevo. The building was presented in long-shot from the outside with, to its right, a tall aerial building standing on a raised incline. This uncanny spatial replication of Marseilles was sealed by the incongruous use of Léo Ferré on the soundtrack. On her return home, Marianne declared, in rather forced, proto-communist terms: ‘We’re like them, they’re like us’. The same could have been said of Sarajevo itself: this unique Balkan city was, ironically, ‘just like’ Marseilles. Something similar occurs in Le Voyage en Arménie/Journey to Armenia (2005), which, after quickly leaving Marseilles presented according to Guédiguian visual type, takes us to the outermost reaches of Europe. The route of Anna’s (Ascaride) journey in search of her curmudgeonly father Barsam (Marcel Bluwal), which will also become a personal spiritual journey to the roots of her Armenian identity, is conveyed very concretely and self-consciously on the screen in advance in simple, animated form like early primitive cinema. This brief, cartographic demonstration is actually entirely emblematic of Guédiguian’s mapping impulse whereby a highly selective visual mapscape is crudely imprinted over the urban terrain.24 There are certainly moments when the film appears to break out of the standard Guédiguian mould, as when Anna first arrives in this new terra incognita. In the taxi from the airport into the capital Yerevan (a

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virtual replay of the Sarajevo episode in À la Place du coeur), we simply watch Anna as she gazes intently at the strange, new environment while Satie is heard on the soundtrack. In what appears a slice of cinéma-vérité, we witness with her the urban drift of the everyday in the Armenian capital through slow tracking shots without any obvious markers or points of anchor. Guédiguian is content here to let the city speak for itself, free of the constraints of narrative time. Yet, just as in À la Place du coeur, this new adventure in space is short-lived, as genre (including a thriller-style car-chase with Anna’s young travelling mate, Schake) and the twin narratives of family and identity soon kick in. We are treated with Anna to an extended dialogue and lecture by her father’s old friend Yervanth (Meylan), an ex-soldier and patriot, on the history and background of Armenia, including the 1915 genocide and 1988 earthquake. We also visit the underground chambers in the monastery of Khor Virap in the flat Ararat Valley, site of the country’s official foundation as a Christian nation in AD 301. Anna is even led down the pit where St Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned. This ultra-didactic political lesson in Armenian symbolism and national pride – the glory of one’s native land, the history of national oppression and resistance, the relationship between a people and its land – renders concrete the painted picture of Armenia glimpsed at the beginning of Le Voyage en Arménie in the father’s house in L’Estaque (in fact, almost every character in the film brandishes a reproduction of Mount Ararat, currently under Turkish control). It leads like narrative clockwork to Anna’s eventual reunion with her father who just happens to be facing the mountain, and finally, in the last sequence back at the airport, to direct scrutiny of the mountain in the distance with the taxi-driver and pseudo-paternal figure Manouk (Romik Avinian) who vows (though his speech is left deliberately untranslated) that it will become Armenian again, and that when it does he will be there to smoke another cigarette. On a purely formal level, we have barely progressed, for, as previously, the symbolic mapping of Armenia does no more in the end than replicate the short-hand symbolism of the establishing shots of Marseilles at the start, when Anna drove to her father’s house against the all-too-familiar, iconic backdrop of NotreDame-de-la-Garde and the Vieux-Port. What the film offers, in fact, is not the excitement of an Armenian epiphany but rather the sad realisation that the topography of mountain and church in Armenia could almost be Marseilles (albeit on a much larger scale). Again, what counts is not so much what is actually shown, but rather that it can

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always be made to symbolise. Simply put, images can only ever exist as symbols in Guédiguian. Yet what if Guédiguian were to enter not simply a new external space but a totally new cinematic field? Might a new visual aesthetics be elaborated beyond the fixed terms of Guédiguian’s own generic boundaries such as his contes de l’Estaque? Lady Jane (2007), which heads up to the road to Aix-en-Provence, is also Guédiguian’s first properly historical film, and his first explicit deployment of a commercial genre, the polar (or thriller). It concerns the reforming in contemporary Marseilles of a small idealistic gang of three called ‘Lady Jane’, played by the three stalwarts of Guédiguian’s troupe, which operated there during the 1960s and specialised in stealing fur coats for the local poor. The reason for their sudden reforming, as unexpected as their earlier dissolution, is that Muriel’s (Ascaride) adolescent son, Martin, is kidnapped and she is unable to pay the ransom. The film opens with a long-shot of the port and cranes of L’Estaque to establish this small universe in standard fashion, until the camera pans left and we see the gang in its heyday distributing furs while wearing their trademark masks. The contrast between this colourful past bathed in a nostalgic summer glow and the subsequent greyness of contemporary Marseilles structures the film, but it is just one of many revolving around the idea of place, including the contrast between the urban grit of the metropolis and the softer, bourgeois contours of Aix-enProvence, where Muriel now owns a small luxury goods store called ‘Jane’, and the distance between the apparent freedom of those early days (symbolised by the Rolling Stones song Lady Jane) and the forced compromises and increasing casual brutality of modern life (unhappy marriages, a single-parent family, loneliness, indiscriminate violence). René (Meylan) works ostensibly at a nightclub in Marseilles and is probably also a pimp; François (Darroussin), now married, has a small company repairing boats on the Étang de Berre, a lagoon to the north of L’Estaque. Guédiguian has acknowledged that the opening establishing shot of Lady Jane conveys automatically the world of the film: this is going to be once again about working-class characters in Marseilles, as if nothing more need be said. In fact, Lady Jane, which includes brief extracts from two existing films by other directors though without any obvious intertextual investment or tension,25 is unique in Guédiguian’s oeuvre for not offering any of the usual sites of his symbolic map of Marseilles. There are no shots of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, or La Mayor, or even

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the Vieux-Port. Instead, all the locations seem generic and prosaic: the city is depicted as a grimy scrum of street traffic and trams in the anonymous Haussmannian centre, in sharp contrast to the rich, quiet backwater of Aix-en-Provence. However, we are presented as usual with disconnected and hypostatised markers of the past which we are invited simply to record and tick off: banal portside bars like ‘Le Relais des Quais’, a tram moving through La Joliette en route to Gantes. Because it is defined dramatically, narratively, ideologically and symbolically, space must again perform according to time.26 Indeed, spatial difference is always programmed by time in Guédiguian, to the point that space becomes merely an appropriate setting for actions and deeds, or else is consigned to the background. In the images of Aix-en-Provence, one senses that the public spaces are at least frequented and clearly identifiable (the Place des Trois Ormeaux, the Pharmacie des Prêcheurs, etc.), with passers-by conversing with each other within the wider frame of their environment and enjoying the richness of the quotidian. Only the ironic omnipresence of Vivaldi on the soundtrack operating as tasteful muzak dispels the otherwise confusing and contradictory suspicion here that, as with Améline in La Ville est tranquille, a bourgeois/right-wing context is being championed by Guédiguian as the only site available for an authentic and full engagement with urban space. Once again the purely spatial is negatively projected by Guédiguian. Everything else in the film, however, remains a ‘non-lieu’ in Marc Augé’s sense of the term: the TGV station on the outskirts of Aix, a covered car-park, a deserted school, a boat-yard by the water, nightclub bars, pavillons, etc. That is to say, all is blank and predictable, even when identified by name, such as the Centre Hospitalier du Pays d’Aix or the Caisse d’épargne des Bouches du Rhône. It is as if the polar genre were already so thick with symbolic codes and rules that Lady Jane could not tolerate any further overt symbolic intensity without endangering the tight efficiency and suspense of its narrative. Hence the reason for the virtually indiscriminate shots of urban and coast-side life which reinforce the film’s dark and rather flat mise-en-scène. In view of what we have been observing in Guédiguian, this seems like a potentially liberating move – at least the city and its inhabitants now have more room to breathe on their own terms. Yet herein lies the problem: for as long as there were symbolic highs there was also a chance – however slight and remote – of something better, aesthetically and existentially. Here, the mood is irredeemably bleak. The trio reunite but the smiling young Martin is gunned down by the

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kidnappers while the negotiated exchange is taking place. The assassin is eventually found and taken to a deserted school, yet there is no joy in revenge and François will himself be felled at the end in a replay of the past but in reverse (the gang originally disbanded after he accidentally committed an act of murder). By the time the final epigraph about the uselessness of revenge (an eleventh-century Armenian proverb) arrives in written form on the screen, it is completely superfluous, coming after earlier statements to that effect by Henri (Boudet) accompanied by television footage of conflict in the Middle East. For a director who claims not to be delivering a message, the main theme could not be more pat: violence begets violence, a message underwritten by the film’s stern invective against new technologies (notably the picture app mobile) and the stark depiction of the casual, sadistic violence of contemporary life. Of course, there are other themes here, too, but they are the stock-in-trade of Guédiguian’s philosophy: the disappearance of the past, the relentlessness of time, the impossibility of returning to the good old days which nevertheless continue to haunt. The last shot is of Muriel alone in the noise and throng of a nightclub concert by Nacimiento, adrift in a sea of young faces and staring impassively into an abstract void, in direct contrast to the opening high-angle, vertical shot of the daring deeds she performed in Marseilles when she was younger. Time is unforgiving: just as the townspeople do not remember the furs provided by the gang, so, too, there is no place left, political or otherwise, for once idealistic soixtante-huitards to go. In a France-Inter radio interview included on the French DVD, Guédiguian laments the fate of the ‘common project that has disappeared’. For the first time in his work there appears to be no way out and no higher ground, whether symbolic or aesthetic. The fatalistic linking of space culminates in Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars/The Last Mitterrand (2004), based on the journalist Georges-Marc Benamou’s personal testimony about the last months of the gravely ill President Mitterrand, although he is never directly identified by name in the film. This journey into the mental and physical space of the late President (played by Michel Bouquet), as he attempts to come to terms with an unreconciled personal and collective memory, does not set foot at all in Provence. Instead, it takes us into new and very varied territory: from the French capital (the Élysée Palace and the Champ-de-Mars of the title near the Eiffel Tower, though emphatically not the Paris of Mitterrand’s grands projets), to the banlieue (specifically the basilica of Saint-Denis with its royal catacombs) and la France

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profonde, including the region of La Beauce around Chartres, the Brittany coast, Liévin (where we hear on the soundtrack Mitterrand’s famous Congress of Épinay speech in 1971), and his small home-town and future resting place of Jarnac in the South-West. There he lies down on the floor of the local church, so intense is his identification with this region (the President insists that as the son of a vinegar producer he will always remain part of the bourgeoisie de province). Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars marks the first occasion in Guédiguian’s work that space qua space becomes an explicit philosophical issue, as opposed to purely personal or political as in Le Voyage en Arménie. Yet far from diverting and reorienting Guédiguian’s temporal and symbolic tendencies, these new spaces merely consolidate his method and style, taking to a higher level his totalising method and revealing further the risks of nostalgic universalism. Set to the music of Bach, Strauss and Tchaikovsky and larded with recited quotes from the early twentieth-century Catholic and socialist/ nationalist writer Charles Péguy (his ‘Présentation de la Beauce à Notre-Dame de Chartres’), Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars offers a high-vantage, cartographic view of the world, starting with the opening sequence of the helicopter flying over the grain fields of the Beauce. If the map of France is also the ‘body’ of France, seen from above and below, it is presented, like the President’s own ailing, cancer-striken body, as floundering under the encroaching fear of obsolescence and cultural marginalisation at the twilight of the millennium. The theme of the national body in an intermediate state is brought out explicitly during the President’s visit with Antoine (Jalil Lespert), the young left-wing journalist he has personally chosen to ghost-write his memoirs, to the marble effigies (or ‘gisants’) of Henry II and Catherine de Medici at the basilica of Saint-Denis. There he indulges in a mystico-symbolic identification with the monarchical tradition of France and expresses a belief in his own ‘sacred’ body as a President removed from base politics. This is, of course, difficult and potentially dangerous territory, but in view of what we have already seen in Guédiguian’s work, notably La Ville est tranquille, which flirts with the mystical, and Voyage en Arménie, which posits the sacred, it is not altogether new or unexpected. What is different is simply that this ambiguous ‘other’ space, for so long the latent background to Guédiguian’s working approach to cinematic space, now assumes centre-stage. Is Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars offering a critique of the depoliticisation of Mitterrandian France, or rather a validation of

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11.  The President (Michel Bouquet) with his ghostwriter Antoine (Jalil Lespert) and close retinue on the sands of Brittany in Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars (2004).

the ideology of ‘eternal France’ that evacuates politics? In the case of Vichy, for example, where place immediately symbolises a regime and which Antoine visits alone in order to probe further the facts of the President’s selective account of his wartime activities, the issue, both for the President and for the film, is simple: since Vichy was not strictly France, France cannot feel guilty about the deportations of the Jews.27 This rather disturbing idea of an unquestionable, unimpeachable, eternal France (Chartres, Saint-Denis, Jarnac) appears also to suggest an ‘immaculate transmission’ between the President and Antoine, with the result that the political is sacrificed at the altar of the symbolic. The sense of political obfuscation is great and adds a darker hue to the President’s observation as he scans the countryside that the French colour par excellence is grey. The film’s one deliberately abstract landscape, verging on a seascape – the isolated sand-flats of a Brittany beach with houses just visible in the misty far-distance, where the President evokes the poet Paul Valéry (‘the sea, the sea, always restarting anew’) (‘la mer, la mer, toujours recommencée’) – serves further to void the political of historical change in favour of the eternal and poetic.

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What exactly is landscape’s role here in the construction of a national imaginary, and does Guédiguian adopt a critical stance towards landscape’s ideological function? In an excellent close reading of Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars, Ludovic Cortade argues that the President’s flight over the Beauce effectively freezes it in time by tying it down to a political and national heritage value (Cortade 2009: 73). Just as the King has a physical and mystical body guaranteeing the continuity of his power over time, so, too, the landscape is both a simple grain field and the essence of ‘eternal France’ (ibid.).28 Cortade places this within a larger filmic context, suggesting that if landscape appears among the privileged vectors of identity in current French cinema, it is in the specific guise of essentialisation and absorption which associate it with the traditional attributes of regional identity or ‘Frenchness’. An essentialised landscape, Cortade writes, reinforces the collective imaginary in the face of globalisation and the social disconnect (ibid.: 67–8),29 for such a representation dissolves all problematisation of contemporary politics and leaves room for the melancholic reappearance of a monarchical conception of power – the refuge of a national imaginary when confronted with what Guédiguian calls in relation to the film ‘the end of the Socialist idea’ (Guédiguian 2005b: 30). As for absorption, this depends on the theme of the ‘mystical taking root’ and the access of the body to an entity that transcends it: eternal France. Cortade concludes persuasively that Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars is less a critique of the false hopes created by French socialism from 1981 to 1985 than a sign of the contemporary period (the early 2000s) when the search for spatial identity appears the only alternative to the crisis of socialism (ibid.: 79). Certainly, such nostalgia for identity under the cover of an essentialised landscape is never sufficiently problematised by Guédiguian, who shows Antoine, despite occasional misgivings, loyally transcribing the President’s words – as if, Cortade suggests, ‘a withdrawal into national identity was always preferable to the difficulties of globalisation’ (ibid.: 78). We might nuance this still further in the following terms: if ageless space evacuates politics, it is specifically space in its mythical-symbolic dimension. This goes hand in hand with Guédiguian’s investment in epic time, leading to his favourite themes of cross-generational continuity and futurity. In short, the regression into a certain type of abstract spatial territory (an eternal, national landscape) reflects precisely Guédiguian’s depoliticising regression into non-historical, sacred time.

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The end of the road Our journey through the sites of appetitive symbolisation in Guédiguian’s work has revealed the extraordinary, all-embracing, panning shot of Marseilles at the start of La Ville est tranquille to be a simulacrum of urban space. Throughout the corpus littered with maps, posters and assorted graph-like effects, we see little of the continually evolving city in its chaotic, throbbing dynamism. Moreover, we are not allowed to become familiar with it on our own terms for all is predetermined and overdetermined to set specifications, even when Guédiguian’s films seem at their most aleatory and capacious. The endless referencing of a small, set number of symbolic landmarks and edifices functions more as a spectacular decoy and screen than as a new pathway into the concrete realities of Marseilles, which are effectively sublimated, as if reality itself were being consistently derealised in the name of larger themes. Allied to this is Guédiguian’s massive compensatory push in the current, post-idealistic era of globalisation, alienation and fragmentation to make his stories and characters signify and symbolise something, anything, even to the point of over-inflating their political force, notably with Marie-Jo et ses deux amours. La Ville est tranquille best exemplifies Guédiguian’s frustrated ambitions for an ideal political and collective space. Not only that: his wholly reductive approach to Marseilles provides a template for all his other encounters with urban space, from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, Sarajevo and Yerevan, despite initial signs that the force of a new space requiring fresh coordinates and a more fluid, imaginative kind of audiovisual mapping might override Guédiguian’s symbolic and dramatic demands. His cinema always arrives to some degree after the image, although, as we have seen, flickerings of undetermined encounter and surprise within a shared material space are still perceptible, almost against the odds. Ultimately, however, Marseilles and all Guédiguian’s circumscribed urban landscapes become the same empty, abyssal space to pass through quickly, head-down. For all its geographic reach, this is a cinema of ever-diminishing spatial and aesthetic horizons. In conclusion, Guédiguian’s cinema is not really about space after all, and his approach to space-time is determined wholly by his understanding of the irremediability of political time. His insistent use of flashbacks confirms not just the blocking of time but a lack of genuine investment in space as ‘space’, which reflects in turn the lack of a radical, progressive political cinema that might move beyond

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simple nostalgia for bygone times, melancholy, wish-fulfilment and fantasy. Indeed, it is precisely because Guédiguian’s insatiable temporal needs can never be met that he fills the vertical temporal void with flat, horizontal space. The political philosopher Ernesto Laclau has controversially opposed space to politics, suggesting that ‘[p]olitics only exist insofar as the spatial eludes us’ (Laclau 1990: 68). Yet in the case of Guédiguian the reverse is true: the lack of an open and integrated understanding of space results precisely in a reduced sense of the political. A cinema that would appear to be representing and embracing the Other – the hybridity of the contemporary metropolis and its dense networks of social relations – is actually, in every frame, always insisting on the impossibility of making new and meaningful connections. Indeed, meaning lies here only in the memory of an epic past or the fantasy of a utopian future, but not in the present. Space on its own terms – let us call it the play of difference, or the formlessness of the real – is always already vacant and dead. Guédiguian’s requiem for Marseilles is both a requiem for space in general and a symptom of committed socialist filmmaking now in terminal decline. Guédiguian’s 2009 film, L’Armée du crime/The Army of Crime, a solidly crafted piece of historical reconstruction about resistance in the Second World War, may seem a completely new departure in his work, yet for the reasons given it marks an entirely logical next step in his aesthetic project, perhaps even its summation. It dramatises a true story, that of the ‘Manouchian Group’, a clandestine band of young immigrant fighters and foreign partisans in the French Resistance (twenty-two men and one woman) led by the exiled pacifist Armenian poet, Missak Manouchian (played by Simon Abkarian). The Group comprised Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Armenians, Spanish and Italian communists. The famous story of the ‘Red Poster’ case has been told before, of course, notably in Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des Ombres/ Army of Shadows (1969), a Gaullist film that elided both ethnicity and communism, and Frank Cassenti’s 1976 L’Affiche Rouge, starring Pierre Clémenti. Guédiguian’s revisionist political aims are only too apparent: to reappropriate for the Left a proud episode in the story of European working-class leftist solidarity, for the Group came under the authority of the ‘Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d’Oeuvre immigrée’ (FTP-MOI)) in what he calls a ‘battle for truth’ (see Guédiguian 2009). To find symbolic weight Guédiguian has now retreated wholly into memorialisation. This ideological drama is presented in the form of a naturalistic historical fresco, complete with large doses of period

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atmosphere such as the songs of Ray Ventura that vie for attention with Armenian music as well as Mozart, Bach and Brahms. Yet the cost of such attempted reconstitution, however well-acted, is a freezedrying of the image into a bland, populist mapping-by-numbers that is also morality-by-numbers, where everything is (pre)determined along Manichean lines: communist martyrs versus evil Nazis and their self-serving French henchmen, including the collaborationist police inspector Pujol (Daroussin) newly enlisted in the Brigades Spéciales of the French police. Identity is fixed spatially: the two principal Jewish heroes are defined wholly by their geographical location within Paris. Swimming champion Marcel Rayman (Robinson Stévenin) inhabits working-class Belleville, while the Marxist intellectual Thomas Elek (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) lives in a family café in Saint-Germain. During the notorious Operation Spring Wind in the summer of 1942, a single-decker bus carries its passengers wearing the yellow star towards the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Meanwhile, we see sewers for hiding in, cafés for blowing up, and the basement of the local Gestapo headquarters for inflicting torture. We are also offered odd glimpses at foot level of the iconic quayside of booksellers in summertime Paris as the Group is later taken by van to the Fort Mont-Valérien prison and execution centre in Suresnes. Space is thus reduced to nothing more than a fixing agent and a series of symbolic stage-sets – an historical surface shorn of all detail and depth in order to relay the urgency of the narrative action and message. As one critic has correctly remarked, such purely functional camerawork leaves little room for mystery (Matthews 2009: 50). The Paris we are offered is the Paris of myth. This unsubtle, bloated piece of episodic and entirely academic filmmaking, leavened only by the odd, witty, symbolic touch such as planting a bomb in a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, also takes liberties with the strict chronology of events in its mission to deliver the universal gospel of multi-ethnic struggle and heroism.30 Again, it is precisely Guédiguian’s lack of genuine interest in space and spatiality that results in a lack of political nuance and complexity. We are in the rarefied realm of the hyper-symbolisable where time (re)colonises space. Without attention to the details of the real which remains schematic when not simply sublimated away, all that is left ultimately is propaganda. There is no mention, for example, of the Soviet–German pact, or of any ideological tensions within the Resistance – tensions which revolved around the very fact that the Manouchian Group was composed of foreigners and that the French Communist Party (PCF)

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needed them strategically to stay in Paris, even though the net was tightening around them, to demonstrate to De Gaulle the might of the communist resistance.31 These are delicate and still painful subjects for some, yet Guédiguian and his co-scriptwriters Gilles Taurand and Serge Le Péron have chosen to elide such issues in order to pit heroic goodness against evil. The poster for the film neatly reworks and reverses the original ‘Affiche Rouge’, produced by the Nazis as part of their propaganda, where the members’ faces were grouped in miniature against a red background. Now a black gun is pointed at a Nazi face in shadow, with, in red, the words ‘Résistants’ and ‘L’Armée du crime’ (the Nazi nickname for the band) printed above and below it respectively. This encapsulates Guédiguian’s obsessive need to control and suspend the aesthetic process by always finding an adequate icon and symbol, here that of the noble communist cause, community and martyrdom – one that might, he evidently hopes, inspire contemporary résistants in their global battle for human rights. Having exhausted all other options, Guédiguian proves with L’Armée du crime that the only path left to accomplish the optimistic and utopian films he would ideally like to make is to set them in the certifiable past and keep them there, since the uncomfortable realities of space and the frustrated, potentially fatal encounter with the blocked present can at least be minimised, if not totally avoided. Guédiguian is under no illusions, however. He knows exactly the scale of historical damage and political loss, though is still prepared to dream the politically impossible with contrived and increasingly unconvincing narrative dramas. His most recent film, the socialist-friendly Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro/The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011), does nothing to break this mould. Inspired by a Victor Hugo narrative poem ‘Les pauvres gens’ (‘Poor people’), the film aims to restore the utopian idea of an awareness of social class. A banner at the start reads ‘The fight is a class fight’. However, the melodramatic narrative detailing the aftereffects of a robbery soon stretches the limits of credibility even before it arrives at the requisite happy ending of communal solidarity against the common enemy. For the first time in his work Guédiguian throws his honest, working-class heroes (here a retired married white couple) against the young racaille of the banlieue. As we might expect by now, though, this does not mean that he actually enters the alien turf of the ghetto. Instead, despite its suggestive spatial title evoking Ernest Hemingway’s famous short story as well as Pascal Danel’s 1966 French pop song, the film concerns merely the threat of the distant banlieue

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to the treasured community of L’Estaque. Once again, the need for a regularising moral narrative trumps any genuine concern with space and the environment, leaving the film to play out awkwardly to the mawkish grooves of its space-lite theme tune, Joe Cocker’s Many Rivers to Cross. In a cruel irony, it is when things may initially appear more spatially open and encompassing in Guédiguian that they are actually most foreclosed. Until the political situation in Marseilles, and France more generally, dramatically changes – until, that is, there is a genuine sense of renewed political progress through a new initiative on the Left that can address and work to resolve the problems of fragmentation, disillusion, unemployment and racism (and for Guédiguian this can only be achieved within the context of a reunited European Left32) – then it will probably only be by alternative means (ironically those normally deemed capitalist) that Guédiguian will be able to celebrate and promote a progressive space of real community and futurity. I am thinking here of his own role within the film industry as director of the highly successful production company he co-founded, Agat Films & Cie (which recently bought out another company he created, Ex Nihilo), where, he claims, the values of equality, collectivity and cultural diversity are proudly enshrined. In addition to his own films, the company produces the work of a new generation of socially engaged filmmakers such as Pascale Ferran, Tonie Marshall, Cédric Klapisch and Dominique Cabrera. Guédiguian describes his unique position within the industry in terms of a ‘métier’: he is both a professional producer and a ‘cinéaste amateur’ (Danel 2008: 136). In 2006, he also helped actively to set up a European network of independent film distributors (Europa Distribution) to tackle the growing domination of global audiovisual and film consortia. However, on Guédiguian’s own cinematic terms, the space of commercial film production remains purely symbolic – symbolic precisely for lack of being materially real – of a new social space that is still to be created and remains for now the stuff of fantasy. Notes 1 The oldest city in France (according to myth it was made a Greek colony in 600 BC), Marseilles is the second most populous city after Paris and the third largest metropolitan area after Paris and Lyons, swelled during the the 1950s by extensive immigration from North Africa (it was the entrance

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port for over a million immigrants) and, following the independence of Algeria in 1962, by the return of over 150,000 Algerian settlers (pieds-noirs). 2 ‘C’est chez moi! Je peux y recréer de la fiction, puisque le réel m’appartient … à 100%.’ See also Guédiguian’s ‘Profession de foi. “Marseille, ma langue!”’, written for the press-book of À la vie, à la mort! (1995) and included in Danel 2008: 78. 3 Comolli’s influential documentaries about the politics of the city include Marseille de père en fils (1989), which feeds into his extraordinary account of the city’s recent political history during the 1980s and 1990s entitled Marseille contre Marseille (a series made for French television in collaboration with Michel Samson). 4 For important accounts of the history of cinema in and of Marseilles, see Winkler 2007 (specifically on Guédiguian), De Baecque and Toubiana 1997, and Johnston 2011. The latter makes a useful distinction between ‘land-locked’ Marseilles films and Marseilles-Maghreb ‘transit’ films. 5 The written prologue to Toni acknowledges the fact that it takes place in the Midi where nature engineers so well ‘the fusion of races’. As a mark of homage to Renoir, the bridge from which Toni leaps appears in Guédiguian’s 1992 L’Argent fait le Bonheur and evokes another film by Renoir, La Marseillaise (1938). Guédiguian’s 1989 Dieu vomit les tièdes was partially shot in Martigues. 6 See, for example, Georges Braque’s important abstract painting Les Usines de Rio Tinto à L’Estaque (1910). À l’attaque!/Charge! (2000) even refers directly to a Cézanne painting, as does Marius et Jeannette (1996). 7 Denis also recognises that language is a central part of the city’s unique social and cultural space, on account not only of the particular thick accent and slowed diction, but also of the commonly shared taste for speech and simple pleasure of telling long stories. 8 See Bergala’s fine historical study for French television, Le Temps d’un détour, Marseille au XIX siècle (1991). One might compare Bergala’s account of the material and elemental atmosphere of Marseilles with the strange, suspended, hyperreal glow of San Francisco captured brilliantly on film by Alfred Hitchcock, although there the effect is due to the very humidity and saturation of the air from the bay. 9 In his own Marseille de père en fils Comolli claims there is only one brief shot of this kind – from the Vieux-Port to the roofs of the Gare SaintCharles – and that this constitutes an exception to the edited collage of competing sounds and images (Gorce 1994: 38). 10 One thinks, for example, of the Brechtian-style framing of À l’attaque!, where a director and scriptwriter comically remake the film as it goes along by visualising it – a narrative that offsets what O’Shaughnessy rightly terms its ‘knowingly impossible wish-fulfillment’ (O’Shaughnessy, 2005: 74). Brechtian influence is not only explicit in the odd direct-to-camera

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address by characters. Guédiguian will also occasionally, and rather pretentiously, attribute gaucheries and imperfections in his films, as well as odd jarring changes of tone and even genre in the same work, to a Brechtian strategy to offset the cinematic illusion. As O’Shaughnessy suggests, À l’attaque’s Brechtian framing still fails to lift it from its own absurdity and serves instead only to underline the difficulty of figuring the dynamics of capitalist globalisation within the spatio-temporality of conventional fictions (O’Shaughnessy 2005: 74). I would argue further that the over-investment in a formal device in À l’attaque! is directly responsible for its indifference to the question of place, resulting in a number of misfires, for instance, the crude and embarrassing bordello sequence. 11 Guédiguian’s first film, Dernier Été, included references to Pasolini’s speech about genocide included in his prophetic 1975 collection of essays, Corsair Writings, which insisted on the vital need to counter the dehumanisation of contemporary life with an optimistic sense of combat. 12 ‘Un art qui révèle aux hommes “la Grandeur qu’ils ignorent en eux”.’ 13 Marius et Jeannette has been extensively examined by critics in terms of politics and nostalgia. See in particular Powrie 2001. 14 According to O’Shaughnessy, despite its ambition and scope, La Ville est tranquille brings us back to the dislocated spatio-temporality of the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse/The Promise (1996), whereby intense, highly localised microdramas are played out against an epic backdrop that provides mute testimony to their origins but no language to speak or to oppose their present. See O’Shaughnessy 2005: 85. 15 Guédiguian admits that although he likes religious music and churches, and can recognise Christianity’s universalising power to create and inspire a collective coming together, he himself is an atheist and believes in ‘Man’. 16 The Cathédrale de la Major celebrates among other things the city’s victory over the great plague of 1720, while Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, affectionately called ‘La Bonne Mère’, is perennially thanked for its salvation: helping to liberate the city from the Nazis and, more generally, saving its sailors and fishermen. For the writer André Suarès, the latter’s soaring belfry and bell-tower topped by a statue of Virgin with Child – a permanent fixture in the topography of Guédiguian’s cinema – is a ‘mast’. 17 Compare, for example, with Rachid Bouchareb’s London River (2009), about two people from different races and cultures suddenly brought together in north London in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bomb attacks. It is never simply a question of establishing shots, presenting a landscape first in order to position the characters. Here we see and experience these two characters in an extreme close-up which can then expand into a wide shot: a plan-séquence that incorporates and embraces the city and others. The frame appears elastic and open to the Other, a classic cinematic

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conceit, but convincing in its portrayal of inhabitants living together in a city seemingly under siege. 18 Sorlin talks in absolute terms of ‘an original European space and a specific way of occupying it’. I would argue further that it is precisely this lack of knowledge about the inhabitants in situ in French cinema that allows the viewer to read them immediately in the most basic terms of place and class. 19 Charles Tesson writes incisively that for the workers in this film, the only thing that seems to count is family and maintaining tradition, noting that Guédiguian’s workers always belong to a time gone by (see Tesson 1998). 20 For Rascaroli, lodgings are the the most significant spatial category in Guédiguian’s cinema, especially his earlier films. A linked theme is that of communal living. Guédiguian’s more pessimistic films are those in which characters inhabit more normal community lodgings and are therefore isolated in their homes without the support of community. Characters in Guédiguian are drawn to spaces marked by decay which they then appropriate and beautify. 21 Like Comme un aimant with its intimate portrait of unemployed beur youth, Bye-Bye offers no simplified vision of pluri-ethnic utopia and resolutely rejects any essentialist cultural and social-spatial identities imposed on French-born descendants of Maghrebi immigrants (see Higbee 2001b). The Marseilles depicted by Dridi is blighted by racial tensions and hostility, as well as by the clash between the patriarchal older generation and confused young beurs forced to confront the daily realities of racism and drugs. 22 The risks of extreme, overdetermined symbolism of character and setting are also visible in the film that immediately follows, Mon Père est ingénieur (2003), which takes us back to multiracial L’Estaque and concerns an idealistic married woman, Natacha, opting out of the human race by falling mute, her apparent loss of the will to live a result of her frustration at people’s hypocrisy and mendacity. Wrapped in awkward religious allegory, the film begins during Christmas with a sequence complete with Hebraic music of Natacha and Jérémie (Darroussin) arriving in Marseilles like a modern Mary and Joseph and squatting in a warehouse. This is all just a dream by Natacha, however, who is lost in a trance and being cared for by her parents. Does Natacha’s mute face represent perhaps the lowly, desperate fate of socialism today? Either way, the faux-biblical sequences are artificial and over-sentimentalised, detracting from, rather than enhancing, the more genuinely poetic, because organically formed, aspects of the rest of the film. Significantly, Natacha’s idealism and commitment to Marseilles as a doctor (glimpsed in flashbacks) were the reason for her downfall when she became involved in a family dispute: a romance between a white girl, Mylène, and an Arab boy, Rachid. 23 Guédiguian stated in one interview: ‘Embodying this love story and these

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feelings in such a concrete and close daily reality has for me the force of a political gesture’ (Guédiguian 2002). 24 I am using the term ‘mapping impulse’ as defined by Teresa Castro, i.e. as a cognitive and perceptual/experiential response to the human landscape and environment. Castro identifies three formal strategies that distinguish cinema’s visual mapping of urban space: topophilia, description, and surveying. See Castro 2010. Guédiguian’s cinema, at its best, corresponds to a strategy of surveying. 25 A standard telefilm, Les années de sang, l’impasse partie 2, and a short film about asylum seekers in Paris, Ma vie à l’hôtel, directed by Valérie Denesie and produced by Guédiguian’s own Agat Films & Cie. 26 We might compare Lady Jane in this respect with Agnès Jouai’s recent social comedy, Parlez-moi de la pluie (2008), which depicts the omnipresence of (summer) rain in Aix-en-Provence and its environs. Here, the weather has a sudden and determining effect on narrative, the elements and the landscape, reducing the characters with supreme and beautiful indifference to cowed and blathering wrecks. This type of natural osmosis between character and place does not happen in Guédiguian’s Aix-enProvence, still less his Marseilles where the rain is typically metaphorical, symbolic and abstracted (cf. the opening song of Marius et Jeannette, Il pleut sur Marseille). 27 The Jewish librarian, Judith, whom Antoine meets in Vichy, warns him not to bother the President any further in the search for truth – as if she were somehow trying to absolve him of any responsibility, and as if the President had indirectly arranged for this to happen. 28 The final shot of the film takes the by now standard Guédiguian form of a vertical pan tilting upwards, revealing a pine tree in a low-angle shot. This is a reference to the property of Latche, in the Landes, where Mitterrand resided before his death in Paris in January 1996. The tree has an ambivalent meaning, however, for it can serve in France as a symbol of both the Left and the Right. As such, it goes beyond the nation’s political divisions and represents the symbolic integration of identity on the basis of a unifying and affective relationship with the landscape. The pine is a relic of the ancien régime, for like the King it is endowed with two bodies and links together the visible and the invisible world. As Cortade suggests, the tree’s ambiguous status allows the film to evacuate political dialectics (and the dialectical movement of history) in favour of the incorporation and absorption of the presidential body in an essentialised landscape. The depoliticisation of French history appears in all its fullness only because it is inscribed in an ageless space (Cortade 2009: 77). It is worth noting that in Mitterrand’s 1981 presidential campaign, an image of rural landscape lies in the background to the slogan ‘Tranquil strength’ as a reassuring symbol of stability and tradition.

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29 As Cortade notes, this raises the more general question of landscape in contemporary French cinema. The identity function of landscape’s essentialisation is reinforced by the frequency of the absorption motif whereby characters forge a matricial link to space by cloistering themselves in enclosed and reassuring spaces, in both heritage cinema and the cinéma du look (e.g. Alain Corneau’s Tous les matins du monde (1991) and Luc Besson’s Subway (1982)). This raises in turn the question of landscape’s ideological function in the construction of a national ideology (the myth of eternal France) that aims ultimately to depoliticise cinema (Cortade 2009: 68). 30 To take just one example: the film does not make it clear that although the whole group was tried just after 21 February 1944, only the twenty-two men were executed on the spot. The Romanian Olga Bancic was sent to Germany to be decapitated by axe. 31 These facts are presented in the documentary by Mosco Boucault, Des Terroristes à la retraite, broadcast on French television in July 1985, despite the efforts of the PCF to censor it. 32 In November 2008 Guédiguian attended a meeting for the launch of the new Parti de Gauche in the Île-Saint-Denis by ex-socialists Jean-Luc Melanchon and Marc Dolez. He was also co-signatory to an article published in Le Monde in December 2008 entitled ‘Pour une autre Europe’. Guédiguian’s other recent political interventions include his campaign against the European constitution of 2005, ‘Vive la télévision’, Le Monde, 9 August 2004, ‘Le patrimoine de toute la gauche’, Le Monde, 2002 (about reinventing the Left), ‘L’année de l’Arménie’ (in 2007) (about uniting the particular – where one is born – and the universal – the entire world), ‘Un monde “hollywoodisé”’ (Le Monde, 2002) (about ‘the right of peoples to control their own image’), and ‘Pour une autre Europe’, Le Monde, 11 December 2008 (co-signed by the writer Annie Ernaux among many others).

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4 Heading nowhere: framing space and social exclusion in the films of Laurent Cantet Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Space and social exclusion in Laurent Cantet

Acoustic space has the basic stucture of a sphere whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. (M. McLuhan) What am I doing here? (Ellen in Vers le sud)

Place, power, politics Cantet is one of the most rigorous and acute exponents of social space working in French cinema today. All space within his work is presented as socially constructed and ideologically impregnated, and his films ask us to survey and negotiate an intensive network of spaces arranged around familiar visual paradigms and overlapping tropes: centre/border, interior/exterior, open/closed, high/low, public/private, personal/communal, mobililty/immobility. Indeed, Cantet offers an almost clinical, anthropological dissection of the construction of place and status in the social order, establishing a precise set of spatial coordinates that plot the politics of everyday social and economic existence in the current period of global capital: the places of work (and increasingly non-work) in corporate France, the institutions of the State, and the transcolonial zones of tourism. Hence, space is never just space in Cantet: it is always already codified, apportioned, distributed, even segregated. Further, Cantet presents an extensive typology of place by means of an extreme sensitivity to the different interrelated layers, sub-levels and gradations of social space, and to how these

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are regulated visually and discursively. Every scene, every shot, in his cinema is potentially political because it is socially, economically and politically determined, above all by class and race. Human relations are always relations of power, a fact consolidated by the persistent use of shot/counter-shot for scenes of dialogue, yet where there is no attempt to forge standard identification through subjective point-ofview. In fact, even during its more expressive moments, Cantet’s work scrupulously observes objective point-of-view to ensure that characters and objects are apprehended in their full material and social contexts. What few subjective shots there are remain purely functional, for what is important is not the subjective gaze but rather the study of human behaviour in its objective, external state. This is a universe away from the kind of interior cinema of reverse-field motivation we have witnessed with Bruno Dumont. Such an intensely sociological approach may sound rather dry and overschematised, like a series of case-studies of human specimens in preprogrammed environments, yet all is calibrated and dramatised self-reflexively in Cantet in pre-eminently cinematic terms. Extended plan-séquences and largely naturalistic mise-en-scène lay bare the details by which we can  grasp and define the spatial economy of the prevailing neoliberal social order. Indeed, this is exemplary experimental filmmaking within the boundaries of character-led narrative cinema, and a consistency in method and style is ensured by Cantet’s team of regular collaborators, notably Director of Photography Pierre Milon, who has shot all Cantet’s work except for Ressources Humaines/ Human Resources (1999), and editor Robin Campillo who has co-scripted all Cantet’s major films with the exception of Ressources Humaines (written by Cantet himself with Gilles Marchand) and his first, short feature made for television, Les Sanguinaires/The Bloodthirsty Ones (1997) (part of a series addressing the new millennium entitled ‘2000, vu par …’). In Cantet’s singular brand of psychogeography, the status of place is primordial, part of the very marrow of human existence, and he demonstrates how it influences and dictates human character, identity, action, even libido. This is a cinema of permanent unease relating an individual’s state of existential crisis, in particular his/her daily lived relations within a collective social unit, and encompassing such themes as isolation, outsiderhood and displacement. Each film begins with a sequence of documentary-style action rich with expectation yet also anxious foreboding. Invariably a character physically enters a specific and clearly demarcated type of space as if it were a new world:

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a provincial home town and local company; the roads and roadsides of the Alpine countryside; a Third World ‘tourist paradise’; an inner-city collège at the start of a new school year. Much of the narrative drama revolves around the protagonist then discovering, and attempting to come to terms with, the real nature and implications of these concrete spaces and their false promise of social mobility and access. Indeed, experience in Cantet is measured precisely in terms of crossing through space and becoming fully aware of the multiplicity of forces that shape and underpin it. Yet if Cantet’s films are structured around a systematic apprenticeship in the reading of space, this is never a smooth or assured process. Interspatial zones can suddenly close or reopen, exposing different kinds of barrier both literal and metaphorical, visible and invisible, such as the closed door, glass ceilings, and cordons sanitaires. Indeed, what may at first seem spatially propitious is often revealed as blocked or regressive. Moreover, the same space can serve different purposes but not always in an affirmative, transformative sense. For in the new post-industrial, corporate era, one may think (and be actively encouraged by society to presume) that one has a personal purchase on an environment because one passes enough times through it. However, one can just as quickly be made to feel the invisible outsider looking in. Cantet’s protagonists are haunted and obsessed by the desire to find the ‘right place’, beginning with François (Frédéric Pierrot) in Les Sanguinaires, who believes he has found the ideal place (the eponymous islands off the coast of Corsica) for himself, family and friends to escape the crowds celebrating the new millennium.1 Although nominally about leisure, this early film presents an isolated man trying to find his place in a group: when he realises he does not belong he becomes slowly desperate. The search for the right ‘place’, here and elsewhere in Cantet’s work, is perpetually thwarted and blocked. As Cantet puts it: ‘A common thread in my films is in these beings who have not found their place, who are acutely aware that they are uprooted. They try and make do with the tragedy of their lives  … to my mind what makes a character exist is his own awareness, often very painful, of his exclusion and solitude’.2 The typical Cantet protagonist is thus caught in the space of an existential paradox and split between two opposed desires and self-images: the wish to escape the group, yet also the hope of integration. This often works out, as Yannick Lebtahi and Isabelle Roussel-Gillet rightly put it, as a place of compromise between an imagined identity and one that is socially viable and acceptable

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(Lebtahi and Roussel-Gillet 2005: 112). This thematics of floating in the entre-deux is intrinsically linked in Cantet to that of shame, due to the sense of limbo and social betrayal it engenders under the gaze of the Other. Let us quickly establish the principal spatial dynamics of Cantet’s four main features. Ressources Humaines begins with Franck (Jalil Lespert), a young, bright but naive business graduate, returning by train from Paris to his working-class family home in Normandy and passing through the industrial landscape, including the massive EDF plant at Porcheville. He is attempting to find a position of mobility within the social system at the same time as reconnect with his family by embarking on a trainee management internship in the same factory where his father Jean-Claude (Jean-Claude Vallod) has worked for thirty years, but which is now being downsized with the oldest workers on the assembly line (including his father) targeted for dismissal. The film is rare in French cinema for taking place in an actual operating factory (at Aubevoye in the Eure) and employing a mostly non-professional cast. It is also set during a very specific socio-political period in France: the introduction of the 35 hour working week. The narrative traces Franck’s apprenticeship in the corrupt workings of management and business politics: from his initial willingness to help introduce controversial new terms and conditions of employment to his lethal mistake of asking workers on the assembly line for their opinon via a referendum. He quickly finds himself in an untenable position, having to smooth the way for workers to be laid off, and thus in direct conflict with the CGT union led by the firebrand Mme Danielle Arnoux (played by real-life activist Danielle Mélador). Professional and industrial strife ignites personal family conflict, for father and son now find themselves on opposite sides of the fence and the demons of the past, including social aspiration and class shame, rise inexorably to the surface. Franck accuses his father of projecting on to him his own repressed social climbing fantasies and of inculcating a legacy of shame at being blue-collar. Franck declares at one point: ‘I’m ashamed of shame’ (‘J’ai honte de la honte’).3 He is stranded between two worlds: alienated from his social class but not yet part of the dominant class. He gradually shifts his loyalties from the management, who have duped and treated his father so badly, to the initially suspicious striking workers. However, he also finds that his love-hate relationship with his father is even harder to unravel than he had anticipated, for Jean-Claude is panicked that his offspring is

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jeopardising his fast-track future. Hence, in an attempt to placate the boss who has already betrayed him, the father obstinately refuses to side with his son and join the strike. The pared-down mise-en-scène and flat, natural lighting, matched by unflashy camerawork and largely improvised dialogue, provides a documentary-like concreteness and specificity to the (non)interaction between blue-collar labour and white-collar management in this largely male workplace.4 A total of six distinct spaces can be identified, three public and three private, including the apartment of Alain (Didier Émile-Woldemard), the black worker mentored by Franck’s father and who helps Franck to understand the full reality of class relations in the factory. All boundaries are policed: at one point, the workers are observed panoptically from above by management perched on a restricted higher level. There are also micro-divisions of space within the public sphere, such as the café and restaurant. As Martin O’Shaughnessy notes, Franck is consistently placed on the peripheries of the various social groups, and finds himself barred from attending a union meeting after having earlier been excluded from a management meeting (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 89). Franck’s first entry on to the factory floor is initiated by virtually the only subjective point-of-view shot in the film (an awestruck glimpse of the sheer scale of the operating machinery in motion), followed by a gently sweeping, lateral tracking shot of Franck walking across the floor that graphically reinforces his alienation from the workforce. In this social theatre of closed doors, partitions and thresholds, Franck comes to understand, at the same moment as the viewer, that the same space can encompass different worlds defined variously by class, race, age and sex. Yet once Franck and Alain have forcibly broken into the company offices to sabotage management plans and the workforce has moved to strike action, the metal bars forbidding access to the building are literally transformed into new points of social contact by the posted copies of the stolen official letter revealing management plans. Collective strike, when workers reappropriate physical space, serves to overturn the standard barriers between the personal and professional, the family and work. The joyful metamorphosis of space is only temporary, however, for the film ends on a note of individual loss and failure. Having reached a point of no-return with his father, Franck plans to return to Paris. The question he asks of Alain in the last frame – ‘Where is your place?’ (‘Elle est où, ta place?’) – is a question that is really directed at himself and applies to all the protagonists in Cantet’s cinema who

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are depicted in varying states of existential limbo. Yet if space cannot accede here to the full status of ‘place’ as socially and economically defined, its potential for collective empowerment and transformation will nevertheless continue to resound in Cantet’s work as a direct political challenge. Despite its title (French for timetable/schedule), which hints both at the regulatory effects of time upon the subject and one’s use of that time, Cantet’s 2001 film, L’Emploi du temps/Time Out, focuses again on the problematics of place and non-place.5 To find oneself suddenly out of a job in the current social-symbolic system is to float in a kind of mental void that decimates one’s self-worth and self-perception in relation to the world and the Other. Inspired by the infamous Jean-Claude Romand case of 1993,6 L’Emploi du temps follows Vincent Renault (Aurélien Recoing), a financial executive recently made redundant in a corporate lay-off after eleven years with a leading management consultancy firm in the Lyons area. Like Franck, Vincent is cast adrift, seeking identity yet lost in a bewildering array of spaces – physical, social, economic, familial. The film starts with a ritual initiation into new space: Vincent wakes up in his car to the cold morning light of a remote motorway car-park, checks out the shop of the adjoining service station, then races his car on the open road against a moving train. In fact, he spends his entire working week sleeping rough in his car, cruising motorways, or sitting in roadside cafes, lay-bys, and hotel lobbies – transitional spaces further heightened as such by being shot at night. This is a life of solitary roaming and erring outside the social sphere. Yet the in-between space of the open road also offers an existential escape from the restrictions of social place, specifically the expectations of his oppressive father (played by Jean-Pierre Mangeot) and the demands of his wife, Muriel (Karin Viard), and their three children, in particular the eldest, Julien (Nicolas Kalsch). Vincent’s search for a very different kind of place takes a strange form, however, since he soon ends up inventing a life-style that is almost the mirror image of the life he appears to be fleeing from. He engages in a simulacrum of business dealings and professional networks and constructs a busy timetable for an imaginary job at the United Nations – a job where he reinvents himself as an altruistic bureaucrat. He even haunts the corridors and reception areas of real corporate workplaces in Geneva. Space, which now includes a soaring natural landscape, is very precisely delineated, ranging from Vincent’s car and family home with its large French window offering both easy access and non-access to the banal, uniform

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12.  Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) enframed by the glass partitions and metallic contours of the UN building in Geneva in L’Emploi du temps (2001).

space of the Novotel symbolising transit and masculine exchange, the secluded Alpine chalet where he takes Muriel, a clothes store in town, Julien’s school, the small apartment of his old college friend Nono (Maxime Sassier), and the UN building with its latticed glass windows striated with iron tubes like an open web suggesting transparency and projecting an ideal vision of work while simultaneously excluding the observer from participating. Third World development is revealed by this building to be a misleading euphemism for marketisation and exploitation: the unreal world of distant sounds and glass partitions is the physical embodiment of the ‘immaterial’ labour taking place within it. Here, as in virtually all cases, Vincent is positioned concretely as the social outsider looking in, the alternation between interior and exterior underlining his split identity. He is a spectator of his own life, at times merely an object of CCTV surveillance, in what is a direct critique by Cantet of the pernicious specularity of contemporary life. The film’s elaborate architectonics of windows, doors, partitions and other obstructions constitutes, as in Ressources Humaines, a theatre of existence in which the dimension of the gaze is primary, comprising both the people who look at others, and those who feel themselves to be looked at. In each of these spaces and decors, a character disturbs and unmasks Vincent, whether his former work colleague Jeffrey (Nigel Palmer) outside the offices of his former company, or, more devastatingly, Jean-Michel (Serge Livrozet), who, in the reception

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lobby of the Novotel he owns, sees immediately through Vincent’s memorised pitch and verbal mimicry – a masquerade of discourse covering up a profound lack of self-identity that Vincent is never able fully to articulate. Jean-Michel does not belong to the bourgeoisie and has no reason to be flattered or seduced by Vincent’s cultivated charm. Instead, he initiates him into his own space and world: the behind-thescenes of the motel with its bedrooms of contreband, and clandestine trips across the border that reflect Vincent’s increasing borderline behaviour.7 In complete contrast to his musician friend Nono, who has built himself a work studio within his family apartment in order to marry the personal and professional, Vincent is always passing through – rather than inhabiting – outdoor ‘open’ space which is traditionally gendered male in distinction to enclosed, domestic, female space. Although he seems to blend perfectly into his surroundings (Cantet describes him as a ‘chameleon’), he can never find refuge. Some critics choose to see the natural world here as an intermittent safe haven and escape from entrapment (see, for example, Franco 2008: 46). However, it is equally oppressive and claustrophobic. In one framed composition, Vincent, counting his money outside in a long, high-angle shot, is visually entrapped by a tree-trunk and tangle of large branches visible in the foreground, all the while watched suspiciously by a passing couple. Paradoxically, the vast landscape can also generate a sense of agoraphobia, as when Vincent manically runs his new Range Rover around in an empty field in an extreme, wide-angle long-shot emphasising emptiness and alienation. In such stylised mise-en-scène, the majestic, forbidding Alpine mountains serve only to encase his anxious solitude still further, while the snow reflects back his emotional coldness. There can never be a ‘pure’ or neutral space in Cantet.8 I have deliberately resisted calling the non-spaces Vincent drifts through ‘non-lieux’ in Marc Augé’s sense of the term, i.e. those archetypal supermodern spaces of circulation, communication and consumption such as airports, shopping malls and car lay-bys, where solitudes co-exist without any real social bond or even emotion. Much critical attention has focused on precisely this aspect of the film and its link to the solitary, mobile, male body, starting with the road itself as a kind of ‘non-place’ of masculinity. Will Higbee, for example, sees the film’s performance of the ‘non-place’ as a temporary site for the negotiation of crisis, indeed as a kind of Foucauldian ‘heterotopia’ defined as a distant or removed place or location that allows sacred or forbidden acts to be performed outside social space in order for a

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certain crisis to be resolved (see Higbee 2004). Neil Archer, meanwhile, draws on the feminist work of Kathleen Kirby on spatial concepts of human subjectivity to argue that the film foregrounds a maternal rather than phallic zone – that is to say, a ‘zone of pre-Oedipal regression’. Referencing Higbee, Archer writes: ‘it [the non-place] is not just an escape route for the masculine in crisis, but a site in which masculine identity within patriarchy is imaginarily restored and reassured … the tensions Higbee aptly describes find their imaginary resolution, rather than evasion, within the non-place’s gendered zone’ (Archer 2008: 138).9 While in broad agreement with both Higbee’s and Archer’s general theoretical approach, there is a potential risk here of over-­simplification. Cantet’s thoroughly ‘straight’, deromanticised view of space – part of his strategy always to peel away deceptive social masks – means that there is never simply a ‘non-place, because any space is always overdetermined by social, economic and political factors. The non-lieu remains an attractive yet also superficial interpretation, since it does not take into account the permanent questions of class and status of these different milieux and their marginal populations (for example, the visible long-haul lorry drivers of the autoroute, the staff glimpsed at the service stations and motels). It may even be more appropriate to employ Deleuze’s notion of the ‘any-space-whatever’, originally used to describe the immensities of the immanent world in the 1960s films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Deleuze 1986: 122). Indeed, important connections can be made between Cantet and Antonioni in their approach to individual alienation in a rapidly changing social environment (in the case of Antonioni, that of post-war Italy undergoing dramatic modernisation and dehumanising urbanisation). Moreover, like Antonioni, Cantet’s sociologically defined cinema is intersected by metaphysical extremes, including that of the void. For example, the tense moment when Vincent suddenly loses Muriel in the Alpine mist and is immediately overcome by fear and loneliness directly echoes the episode in Il Deserto Rosso/Red Desert (1964) where the fog suddenly enshrouds all the main characters in the new industrial port of Ravenna.10 Cantet plays too in Antonioni-like fashion with the suspense of point-of-view: what appears a potential subjective shot of Muriel in the hazy far-distance from Vincent’s point-of-view is eventually revealed as a purely objective perspective. Any promise of spectatorial identification with character is steadfastly denied in Cantet. Further, Cantet always brings us back to the ‘real’ world. In the penultimate sequence of L’Emploi du temps, Vincent leaves his now

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stationary car and walks off into a field, to be swallowed up by the pitch black of night. Yet Cantet does not leave it there – suicide would be the easy narrative option. In a return to a more documentary, realist mode characteristic of all Cantet’s endings, which reimpose ever more starkly the dilemma and stakes of place, L’Emploi du temps transports us in the final sequence to the quotidian glare of the office work-place where Vincent is now being interviewed by a recruiter (an actual CEO, Philippe Jouannet). This is a typically understated yet utterly devastating final sequence which we shall come back to in detail later. Cantet’s third feature, Vers le sud/Heading South (2006), is a bleak portrayal of the world of sex tourism in Haiti in the late 1970s under the dictatorship of President Jean-Claude (‘Baby Doc’) Duvalier. It is inspired by three short stories by the exiled Haitian writer Dany Laferrière from his 1997 collection, La Chair du maître, including one called ‘Vers le sud’ (rewitten and republished separately by Grasset in 2006). Shot partly in the capital Port-au-Prince though otherwise in the adjoining Dominican Republic, it begins and ends at the airport where wealthy, middle-aged white women from North America and Canada arrive to enjoy sex and sun with young, black, male prostitutes. When the latest arrival Brenda (Karen Young) has arrived and been collected by the hotel manager and factotum Albert (Lys Ambroise), we follow her journey by car through the dirty streets of the capital to the beach resort known as the Hôtel de la Petite Anse (Hotel of the Small Bay) where, as now standard in a Cantet film, she (and the viewer) will be initiated into the codes and customs of this small and exclusive world. It is presided over by the haughty and acerbic Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), a university professor of French in her mid-50s, obsessed with the shy, handsome 18 year old gigolo Legba (Ménothy César), and includes also the earthy Québecoise Sue (Louise Portal), a confirmed hedonist in thrall to local boy Neptune (Wilfried Paul). Ellen herself is looking existentially for a place of freedom (free love, desire) outside the hypocritical rigidity of Boston (this is also, of course, the new, post-’68 period of free love and female empowerment). Yet what Ellen promotes to Brenda as open paradise is, as we quickly see for ourselves, a gilded cage of exploitation and a new front-line in class and race relations. No one character has access to all the areas and spaces. The liminal territory of the beach where initial contact is made between tourist and hustler belongs to the resort, which is presented like an extended stage-set with a whites-only restaurant deck leading off to private cabins like ante-chambers. Framed by

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symbolic limits – the sublime of sea and sky on one side, the abyss of the wild forest and dark undergrowth on the other – the beach serves as both a workplace and instrument of social and economic power, where native male bodies are reduced to a pure commodity. This is set in spatial opposition to Port-au-Prince, a realistically depicted space of political corruption into which the viewer is periodically thrown, and where thuggish soldiers (an allusion to Duvalier’s security forces, the Tonton Macoutes) pose a constant danger. Yet here Legba and his fellow hustlers also have the rare chance to be themselves in their native habitat and not perform a pre-scripted role. Legba is respected by his peers precisely because he possesses cultural capital through his contact with whites, although his movements remain always subject to the official gaze of the military police. Language is also a determinant of space: the white women speak English and French (Sue even a little créole), while the black toy-boys speak créole to themselves and enough French to expedite their business. This produces a trilingual, multi-accented film that integrates the sounds of Haiti (including also its music) and is thus, as part of its politics, directly accessible to creolophone audiences. If Cantet exposes the stark economic and political inequalities between North and South and the different races in this new ‘transcolonial’ space, he also relativises power relations spatially. For example, when Brenda enters into a trance with music on the dancing deck, it is Legba, by turns dominated and dominator, who has the music changed. Exploited on the beach, he is his own boss in his home quarters (significantly, when he visits his mother in her small shack, she now assumes control). Moreover, the white women may be the exploiting capitalists in this tourist resort, but they are all victims in their own way back home. Place, position and status are continually shifting and being redistributed by Cantet, a process already evident in the polyvalent title Vers le sud, where the geopolitics of place incorporates the innuendo of ‘going down’ sexually to the genital region. Yet certain elements remain irreversible. In the opening scene an old woman tries to ‘flog’ her beautiful daughter to Albert to guarantee her future safety and survival, even though Albert possesses no real status or power of his own. The glass partition behind which the girl stands alone foregrounds the fatal reduplication of power relations. The woman’s omen, delivered like a Greek chorus, that everyone wears masks and one must be careful even of the good, is proved horrifically correct when the political real eventually imposes itself in shocking and bloody

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fashion. Legba’s islander lover is also the kept mistress of an unseen Colonel, and the chauffeur she has been provided with to monitor her movements – a man she naively considers her guardian angel – becomes both her and Legba’s killer. After being brutally murdered their bodies are unceremoniously dumped on to the beach – there is nothing safe or liberatingly transitional about a Third World beach. Again, the bright tourist vistas of sun, sky and sea may be opposed superficially to the dark undergrowth from which the car emerges at night transporting its human cargo, yet both spaces are lethal fields of privilege, control, domination and power. The film records the gradual realisation by Ellen that all sex tourists are effectively complicit with Haiti’s oppressive regime, however blithely unaware they choose to remain of the hierarchies of the local system in place (she is told matter-of-factly by the police that tourists never die in Haiti). Cantet’s fourth feature, Entre les murs/The Class (2008), winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, takes us for the first time in Cantet’s feature films to the inner-city, specifically the contemporary, multi-ethnic classroom. Based on François Bégaudeau’s 2006 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name about his own adventures as a school-teacher, it presents a year in the working life of a quatrième class in a collège de ZEP in the twentieth arrondissement of north-east central Paris. Credited as co-scriptwriter alongside Cantet and Campillo, Bégaudeau himself plays François Marin, a 30-something teacher of French about to commence his fourth year at the school. The result of extensive months of rehearsal in workshops personally conducted by Cantet in which locally drawn pupils and teachers were encouraged to contribute their own experiences, the film, like Ressources Humaines, has the look of cinéma-vérité documentary realism even though it is firmly anchored in the fictional realm. The use of wide-screen CinemaScope (Cantet’s first such experiment in this area), together with the lack of any guiding voice-over, contributes to the film’s stylisation. We never leave the labyrinthine school grounds once inside them, and only occasionally does the camera stray from the highly circumscribed space of a small classroom, for instance, to the central courtyard directly below which can morph in familar Cantet fashion from a playground and space for staff/student reconciliation into a public stage for transgression (by pupil and teacher alike), as well as a site of exclusion. At such moments, institutional common space becomes an abyss exposing the rifts and fractures of the utopian Republican space of the classroom above. No sky or horizon is visible

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beyond the windows composed of multiple panels separated by bars through which the outside appears always an undifferentiated grey. These are enclosed images in the most literal sense, and the virtual symmetry of time and place exacerbates the feeling of a huis clos announced by the very title, Entre les murs (literally ‘Between the walls’), with its connotations of a prison or fortress. (The title is also a Parisian reference to the intra muros, i.e. the area within the city walls now bordered by the périphérique.) Indeed, the space of the classroom, which would normally be conveyed by a long-shot of the master and pupils along the same axis, is replaced here by the space of the camera. The class is the classroom is the frame. Entre les murs provides clear thematic continuity in Cantet: the social encoding and power relations of space, the crisis of individual solitude versus group identity, and the concrete spatialisation of division, paradox and the entre-deux. We trace the progressive abstraction of space: the passage from François’s initial fantasy of open space, both physical and existential, to a subjective realisation of closure and stasis and an ever-diminishing set of possibilities. Such movement towards interiority in Entre les murs was already perceptible in Les Sanguinaires where the characters head towards a faint light shining offshore and the viewer moves from a precise, concrete space to a more mental domain that is to say, the characters’ gaze on that particular space in the form of a point-of-view shot of blue-tinged waves filmed as if a blur.11 Again, Entre les murs offers an ostensibly negative ending due to a shattering of ideals that bears the weight of human tragedy. Like all Cantet’s protagonists seeking mobility and the capacity to traverse different spaces – Franck who wishes to move freely within the work-place and rise from his class without obstacles; Vincent who invites Jean-Michel home for dinner with the aim of finally uniting the private and public, domestic and professional; Ellen who wishes to move back and forth from emotional coldness to beach sex with impunity – François aims ideally to connect and unify the world of the classroom and that of the staff-room. Yet all these characters discover that social movement is never assured or without sacrifice, for space invariably gets in the way. Cantet’s spatial strategy is continually to strip away the levels of personal self-delusion and reveal a more objective reality. Entre les murs marks the culmination of Cantet’s project thus far on the politics of space as a means of representation and exclusion. For it consolidates and intensifies his style and method in terms of

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mise-en-scène and composition, point-of-view, the hors-champ, and above all the cinematic frame as a marker of spatial difference, i.e. as the boundary between that which is present and that which is omitted. I would like to focus in depth on this film in order to examine how far, and with what success, Cantet creates a more progressive and affirmative cinematic space sufficent to obviate – and potentially overcome – the territories of social tension and inequality he maps out so unremittingly in his work. Compelling us always to consider our ‘place’ as a viewer/voyeur in a cinema of human discomfort and pain, Entre les murs raises important and far-reaching questions. First, very specifically — and bearing in mind the traditional French figure of the teacher who exerts authority in the name of a Republic that allows no space for the overt signs of difference – can a film about a contemporary French secondary school point the way towards a more democratic environment where pupils have the opportunity to play an equal and integral part in the pedagogical process? Second, is it possible to construct a new spatial dynamics capable of freeing both cinematic space from its ideological frame, and individual activity from symbolic violence? In short, can the filmic representation of cultural mixité help us to re-experience social space? Through analysis of Cantet’s complex framing strategies in three key sequences, I will attempt to show that Entre les murs renders powerfully present those who are habitually cast to the margins or excluded from the social frame. Further, by comparing equivalent moments in Cantet’s other films, I will suggest that by reconceiving the cinematic frame as a mobile form and receptive vehicle for embracing sound, Entre les murs ultimately proposes an ethical form of both cinematic and social space in new, surprising and potentially fertile ways. Framing exclusion: the politics of space and sound The first very brief shots of Entre les murs take place before we even set foot inside the school and are highly instructive, not for what they reveal of the action to come, but rather for what they imply will not happen. A man’s face (Marin) is photographed in medium close-up as he looks off-screen to the right and collects his thoughts while sitting in a café. He is pictured behind the just discernible profile of a male figure standing at the bar in the immediate foreground who glances down obliquely in Marin’s direction in the middle-ground. Other figures circulating outside are visible in the blurred background. After

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a few seconds Marin exits and walks towards the school to begin his first day back at work after the summer break. The structure here, of the watcher being watched, might suggest some erotic attraction or voyeuristic gaze, yet this possibility is withdrawn as soon as it is offered, as if to demonstrate that both intimate private stories and artful cinematography and mise-en-scène (the mystery of depth of field, the suggestive gesturing towards a vague or inaccessible hors-champ) will barely feature in this film. Instead, the sequence establishes a formal dialectics of viewing and spatial relations: between clarity and vagueness, subject and object, distance and proximity, closed and open frame, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, line and angle. How does this theoretical preamble and obvious structural framing device feed into the themes and narrative of Entre les murs? Inspired by the contemporary French sociologists Stéphane Beaud and Michel Palioux, co-authors of influential studies such as Violences urbaines, violence sociale (2003) about the structural roots of youth violence in the banlieue, Cantet defines school in an interview for the film in characteristically sociological terms, talking of a ‘sounding board’ or ‘microcosm’ in which the equality and inequality of opportunities, of integration and exclusion, play out concretely (Mangeot 2008: 6). The particular type of multicultural school presented constitutes, according to Cantet, one of the last places in France where there is a genuine and dynamic social mix, and his primary aim is to show how it works (or not) as a socialising institution and framework for learning not just academic subjects but also how to live with others, understand difference, and construct identities. Accordingly, at the beginning we are led by Marin through a series of doors, passages, stairs, corridors, and classrooms being prepared by the cleaners, a journey that demands an appreciation of space both as a literal form of enclosure and, on a metaphorical level, as a negotiation of limits and borders. What makes the film so fascinating is that the classroom reveals instead the fractures and contradictions of the Republic, in particular regarding its universalising, nationalist ambitions of intégration and absolute demand for ideological consensus in the face of the specificities of its new immigrant populations. Important social issues such as the inequality of background are posed by students who challenge the very idea of a social norm by virtue of their family circumstances. Wei (Wei Huang), for example, is a reclusive yet gifted son of Chinese immigrants who is threatened like his mother with deportation owing to French immigration policies, while the rebellious Malian boy, Souleymane

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13.  François (François Bégaudeau) presiding over the fixed, Republican space of the classroom in Entre les murs (2008).

(Franck Keïta), like all Cantet’s male protagonists, finds it increasingly hard to discover his niche. Hypersensitive and seemingly indifferent to any attempts to improve his behaviour, he appears lost between two cultures. More even than in Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive (2004), where young adolescents in a cité mount a school production of Marivaux (to be explored in Chapter 5), language is the major battleground here, provoking a war of attrition between the standard French spoken by the teachers and the tchatche de banlieue rooted in argot and verlan practised by the pupils. Although the class perseveres with Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, it complains when forced to complete grammar exercises that always rely on ‘babtou’ (‘honky’) names like Jean but never Aïssata or Rachid. Similarly, the children question the practical usefulness of learning the imperfect subjunctive, for them an irrelevance that they link derisorily to the ‘ jambon-beurre’, or Français de souche. The endless verbal jousting, games of bluff, and provocation are premised on who has the last word. Marin handles well an initial showdown with Souleymane when the latter asks him insolently whether he is gay, even forcing Souleyamane to feel a slight discomfort for posing the question, but another teacher who flees enraged back to the staffroom gives vent to the same kind of offensive language his students employ (‘Let them rot in their shit!’) (‘Qu’ils restent dans leur

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14.  A wide-angle view of the schoolyard in Entre les murs (2008): a space of unregulated movement and privileged site for the new voices of multicultural France.

merde!’), thus indicating that the parallel worlds of the classroom and staffroom are not always that far removed. Entre les murs eventually assumes the form of a tragedy with, first, Marin’s ‘fall’ in the recreation ground, where he descends to confront two female pupils, Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani) and Louise (Louise Grinberg), for having ‘betrayed’ him, and, second, his own ‘sacrifice’ of Souleymane during the boy’s disciplinary hearing by the school board for having stormed out of Marin’s class in a fit of violent temper and having accused all teachers of trying to take revenge on him, in the process accidentally hitting another student, Khoumba (Rachel Régulier), in the face with his bag. We witness the apparent powerlessness of the school authorities to stop Souleymane’s exclusion by secret ballot. This individual tragedy merely confirms the failings of the French education system and its ideals of assimilation evident throughout the film. For the school’s rituals of transparency and participation are revealed as at best a charade (the anomaly, for instance, of having a student sit in on a meeting as student rep where her own progress is being discussed by teachers who are concerned only with filling in boxes on forms), and at worst a web of hypocrisy and manipulation based ultimately on the logic of exclusion and the lack of any real understanding of cultural difference. Marin had earlier relayed to his fellow teachers what he learned from Khoumba, namely that the policy of relocation to another school would not work in the case of Souleymane, whose father would almost certainly send him back to Mali if he were expelled. There is no room for context or flexibility in the system, however. The teachers

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may initially tie themselves in embarrassing knots over what limits or sanctions to apply when dealing with Souleymane, yet they all agree that no allowance can be made: he is a misfit and disruptive presence (‘agent perturbateur’) who has no place in the school (we learn, in fact, that almost every disciplinary hearing results in a verdict of expulsion). Much of the criticism of Entre les murs, both positive and negative, has focused less on its stark portrait of social reality than on the omnipresent figure of Marin himself, whose unflagging, engaging style betrays an immature and impulsive streak and, at times, plain insensitivity. Neither a die-hard traditionalist nor a new wave multiculturalist, Marin lies somewhere in-between, endorsing some elements of cultural pluralism when the situation demands but always maintaining the validity of the key rationalist, republican concepts such as equality and excellence. The self-portrait project  he assigns his students is conceived, for instance, more in terms of greater self-knowledge than an opportunity for engagement with cultural and ethnic diversity. Marin unwittingly exposes what is most troubling about school systems, namely the inherent trust in adults to behave as such. Using and abusing irony in his classroom dialogues to cultivate the art of nuance, he seems never really to believe in the virtues of the transmission of knowledge. Manifestly demoralised and often cynical, he nevertheless prides himself on appearing more liberal than his colleagues, who are depicted variously as conflicted, petty, and self-absorbed, and to whom he can appear equally arrogant, as when he disdainfully shrugs off the advances made by a new teacher Fred (Frédéric Faujas) to collaborate. The pupils are, of course, wise to Marin’s playful, bristling, neo-Socratic approach and the power dynamics of the system he represents. They reasonably question why they should have to reveal their ‘trucs intimes’ in an assignment when he is not particularly interested anyway and never responds in kind. If they ever do come to the front of the class, it is one at a time only, and at Marin’s express command, as part of a lesson to improve their rhetorical skills, for he demands a meticulous respect of spatial boundaries just as he does of grammatical correctness. In the case of Khoumba, Marin seems unable to grasp why she might baulk at reading yet again in class, apparently blind to the unequal situation the two find themselves in where discipline always operates as a means of power. Her subsequent letter to Marin entitled ‘Le Respect’ (Respect), read out in the film’s only instance of voice-over and in which she admits her insolence, insists quite rightly that the respect he demands be mutual and, further, that it is inappropriate and

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wrong that he, with impunity, call her ‘hysterical’. We are reminded here of Bourdieu’s argument that the French education system, the most visible site of nation building, always serves to reproduce social inequality and hierarchisation, in the same way that Jacobin ideology can actually justify the system while appearing to challenge it.12 The press-book for Entre les murs deliberately invokes Bourdieusian terminology, claiming that a school is fundamentally discriminatory and unequal because it fabricates production. The specific link between class and structural inequality is incisively made when Marin expresses both surprise and discomfort on hearing that Khoumba and another student regularly travel four stops on the metro to shop at the Galeries Lafayette in central Paris – as if the heart of the capital should normally be off-limits to those considered on the margins. While Entre les murs certainly avoids some of the pitfalls of the original book, which cited official discourse at length and without comment, including the Principal’s encomium to the inherent goodnesss of the system (Bégeaudeau 2006: 244), it would seem ultimately to have failed to provide a proper framework for challenging outmoded, universalist, republican ideals and the muddled direction and blindspots of the education system. Carrie Tarr makes the excellent point that although the film powerfully exposes Marin’s flawed attempts to negotiate the contradictions involved in imposing the curriculum required by republican ideology while recognising the diversity of his pupils, it also reproduces negative racial stereotypes, notably that of an African boy as the most disruptive pupil contrasted with an Asian boy (here not of postcolonial immigrant origin) as the class ‘good boy’. Another severe limitation is the lack of any ethnic minority voice in the classroom (Tarr 2011: 140).13 Such clichés encourage the film’s occasional melodramatic leanings which culminate in Esmeralda’s last-minute and quite unexpected colloquial tribute to Plato’s Republic, the one book (of all books) which she admits to having picked up and read, though crucially not at school but via her sister.14 As the film critic Richard Porton elegantly puts it: ‘Slapped on the wrist for mild political incorrectness, the hapless teacher is re-coronated as an antic philosopher king and avatar of Socratic dialogue’ (Porton 2008). The values of the Republic are thus symbolically upheld and even Khoumba is redeemed, ready in the final lesson to show what she too has learned during the course of the year. The film ends up, in effect, mystifying the educational process by asserting that classrooms in trouble can always be ‘transformed by the empathetic, if ultimately condescending,

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intervention of a heroic teacher’ (ibid.). Indeed, the film arguably positions and frames the children themselves as the permanent source of the problem while endorsing Marin’s benign authoritarianism and tired pedagogical methods. It might even be said this could not be otherwise in view of Cantet’s mutually admiring relationship with Bégaudeau, who, in his other guise as film critic, has been particularly complimentary about Cantet’s work.15 What is left out of Porton’s and other critics’ accounts of Entre les murs, however, is a close attention to the film’s formal aspects and in particular its extensive probing of cinematic space. I wish to argue, in fact, that another arc is in progress in the film that subtends the major narrative themes and develops the spatial issues raised by the opening sequence. Although it does not diminish the problems caused by the lack of an explicit and fully coherent political critique, it allows for a far more positive and accurate reading of the film. For Cantet is attempting here nothing less than to reconfigure Republican space by constructing a new spatial dynamics capable of freeing cinematic space from its ideological frame. At the root of this project lies his very method of filming. Three high-definition DVD cameras, for the most part hand-held and positioned on the same side of the classroom as in a televised football match, capture the action with fly-on-the-wall lensing. One camera stays on the teacher, another on the pupil speaking, and a third on the pupil about to speak or act. Denied the basic means of character identification such as shot/counter-shot or establishing long-shot, and undisturbed by any background music or non-diegetic sound, we are consistently placed on a close, flat axis with the action as if caught within it. CinemaScope itself reduces the depth of field and height of images, thereby magnifying the sense of claustrophobia in the class. It also increases the possibilities of intensive framing, for example focusing on the position of one character while others remain blurred. Much of the formal tension of the film derives precisely from Cantet’s deep ambivalence about framing owing to its ideological implications. Since spatial relations are always power relations for this director, every camera frame in his work becomes a potential site of struggle and resistance according to how it is established and sustained. In Entre les murs point-of-view is almost totally absent, and any explicit framing of the classroom is rendered impossible for the practical reasons given. The film thus unfolds as a permanent interrogation and critique of the cinematic frame. Whenever the frame is directly invoked it is to emphasise the bureaucratic and institutional process

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itself, as, for example, when Marin is pictured writing his accident report from behind a window, the frame of which is reinforced by the static cinematic frame. Any delaying or blocking of the action by conventional framing, angle, or other ‘vertical’ effects of composition such as depth of field signifies an imposition of power relations and a threat to the vital process of cultural mixité. Already in Vers le sud much of the dramatic tension revolved around not only who is the subject of the gaze, but also who inhabits the frame. In a film where the only fully frontal naked shots are of men, the camera captures the women’s view of their young gigolos through point-of-view shots that linger on the male flesh. In fact, the film moves back and forth in a steady, measured rhythm between wide-angle plan-séquences, where we see the play of forces in full-frame (the white guests in the centre surrounded by black sex-workers and domestic staff), and close-up shot/counter-shot sequences that expose the power relations of the exchanges. Similarly, there are moments near the beginning where we are invited to match an eye-line shot of Legba walking up the beach with Brenda’s subjective point-of-view. Yet this possibility will never be open to Legba or his co-workers, underlining the fact that he remains an undeveloped character who represents nothing more ultimately than an object of desire – an homme fatal  whose body is his only capital.16  All the while the background sounds of the breaking waves intrude into the frame, suggesting an implicit critique of the fixed gaze, just like the slow and highly self-conscious panning shots back and forth across the beach. The question of who controls the gaze comes to a head, literally, when Ellen photographs Legba lying naked on her bed for her own erotic pleasure – because she can. We glimpse his body through the viewfinder in a subjective shot from Ellen’s point-of-view. When he brushes her hair in front of the mirror he is made virtually invisible in her reflection, his face occluded by hers as his disembodied hands motion to service her. In the case of Brenda, the pronounced use of mirror self-reflections underlines both her narcissism and her neurosis about being watched. Legba, who observed her on her previous visit to the resort in a way, she claims, she had never experienced before (the basis for her ‘love’ for him), is denied such visual pleasure, although the viewer is made privy to the critical gaze he often casts towards her, and to which she remains characteristically blind. Although all the white female tourists are provided with a monologue to camera in their private luxury rooms, the discreet

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Haitian head-waiter Albert is accorded only a voice-over as he goes about his duties, while the native male gigolos enjoy no individual screenspace or voice-over whatsoever.17 In fact, the voice-over soliloquies have an ambigious status within the film’s diegesis. Are they benign interrogations or confessions, and if so, is the viewer being positioned as a judge who can apportion blame, or perhaps as a priest who can absolve? Our role is made deliberately unclear, a fact enforced by the distancing effect of the camera and the excessive length of shot. Again, Brenda presents an extreme case. As Sadie Wearing has argued in an excellent analysis of the politics of affect and female shame relating particularly to intergenerational intimacy, Brenda’s sexual confession makes a spectacle of the complex dynamic of scopic exploitation. As the camera slowly zooms in towards her sitting on the bed, she is framed as ‘both exploiter and exploited, as victimised by bourgeois codes of feminine sexual repression … and as blithely and shockingly predatory, bribing a semi-starving boy for her sexual gratification’ (Wearing 2011: 178) (original emphasis). Brenda subsequently gazes on the object of her desire walking outside her room, the window-slats or venetian blinds that resemble bars testifying to her own myopic self-absorption. Brenda neither acknowledges nor expresses any shame here, just as she feels no humiliation during the dance sequence when she drives herself into a virtual trance, and just as later she displays no grief at Legba’s death. Yet precisely because of the stylised staging of the scene, it is left to the viewer both to establish whether Brenda actually seduced or abused  Legba, and to negotiate the discomfort the scene deliberately creates. According to Wearing, rather than ‘encourage a cerebral, disembodied critical position’, this ‘provokes a gut-wrenching, visceral sensation which might be named as shame’ (ibid.). Hence, ‘the shame which fails to attach diegetically might be seen to [illuminate] the complexity of social privilege and exclusion’ (ibid.: 181) (original emphasis).18 Wearing concludes rightly that cinematic space is suddenly opened up for ‘considering the layered politics of affect’ (ibid.: 182). The politics of framing and composition is thus a central feature of Vers le sud, and it is sealed by the tableau effect of geometrical opposition produced towards the end. There, as Ellen articulates the central question raised by all Cantet’s protagonists: ‘What am I doing here?’ (‘Qu’est-ce que je fais ici?’), she faces the camera frontally from the centre of the frame while Albert, juxtaposed in the right foreground, looks askance off-screen left, thereby creating a kind of

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15.  The open frame as void: Ellen (Charlotte Rampling) and Albert (Lys Ambroise) lost in their own worlds after the death of Legba in Vers le sud (2006).

void in the middle-foreground. The two figures share the frame – a rare cinematic conjunction between a middle-aged black man and a middle-aged white woman (see Greer 2006) – yet they are not aligned on the same axis and barely make eye contact, as if occupying two separate worlds. Which, of course, they do. Albert’s head is also bowed, perhaps in silent shame at having to listen to a white woman’s account of her naked passion and ‘love’ for a Haitian boy. Shortly after, in a closing of the structural frame opened up at the beginning by Brenda’s arrival along the same route, she rides back to the airport in Albert’s taxi. Yet this forward-tracking shot through the streets of Port-auPrince deliberately avoids any possibility of identification with Ellen for we are denied a conclusive point-of-view shot from her perspective, thus generating a gap of uncertainty and doubt. Woefully out of place though at least still with a place to go, Ellen quietly takes her leave from Albert and waits on the satellite bus, framed by the window as she looks blankly into space. A gentle, silent zoom emphasises her immobility and solitude and her tangible sense of horror at having to return to the closed world of Boston. This sudden fixity is in dramatic contrast to her earlier blithe remarks about the utopian transgression of limits and her own confusion of fantasy and reality – for instance, her absurd claim that Legba ‘belonged to everyone’, and her arrogant assertion based on possessing American dollars that ‘one can find a

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solution to everything’ (she even proposed obtaining a passport for Legba so he might come to live with her). We might link Cantet’s particular practice of framing here, and in Entre les murs and his other films, as an index and vehicle of exclusion with Judith Butler’s ‘frame theory’ of social and political power. In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Butler makes the simple but crucial point that the prevailing Western ‘frames of recognition’ aim to contain, convey, and determine what is seen, with the result that ‘certain lives are perceived as lives while others, though apparently living, fail to assume perceptual form as such’ (Butler 2009: 24). The American orchestration of the war in Iraq, Butler states, relied on a notion of whose lives count (and are therefore grievable when they die) and whose lives do not register as having value (that is, those who are culturally different from or ‘other’ to ‘us’). Yet precisely because normative frames of representation can circulate only by virtue of their reproducibility, which thus introduces a structural risk for the identity of the frame itself (reproducibility, Butler correctly argues, ‘entails a constant breaking from context, a constant delimitation of new context, which means the “frame” does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organisation to its content’ (ibid.: 10),19 they can also, ‘depending on the specific mode of circulation, call certain fields of normativity into question’ (ibid.: 24). Hence the urgent political and theoretical challenge. The context and stakes of Cantet’s and Butler’s work are, of course, very different, yet Cantet’s commitment to reversing cultural norms of thought and perception is no less vigorous or far-reaching. His determinedly lateral concrete thinking about the educational process has a clear ethical and political aim: to counter the fixed, republican frame of nationalist pedagogy and so, in Bourdieu-like terms, create the possibility for bodily movement and displacement free from symbolic violence and the ‘misères de position’ it causes in contemporary society (see Bourdieu 1993: 24 and passim). To ‘work’ the cinematic frame is thus, for Cantet, to work the very seams and fault-lines of the Republic. His absolute faith in the integrity of his young subjects in Entre les murs and the energy of their shared multicultural space is such that, in an inversion of standard symbolic encodings of shot, it is paradoxically when the image is ‘full’ and ‘closed’ in visual terms (that is, taken over completely by classroom activity) that it is at its most inclusive and ‘open’ in the metaphorical and ethical sense.

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A central feature of Entre les murs, and much overlooked in discussions of the film, is that it is punctuated by eight very short and discrete ‘outside’ sequences in the school that are neither of the classroom nor of the staffroom. The function of these exterior shots is very different from those, say, of être et avoir (2002), Nicolas Philibert’s affectionate and nostalgic fly-on-the-wall documentary study of a small, single-class school in the Auvergne, where the bridging sequences and establishing shots of the natural countryside through the seasons wrap the long, composed takes of school life within the eternal, utopian landscape of the Republic.20 Indeed, taken together, the outside shots of Entre les murs function more as a critical and conceptual frame for viewing the classroom action through the prism of difference and alterity. For in this further figuration of frame, the exterior images are almost all static, high-angle, surveillance-style long-shots that cover the camera frame with a collision of different physical levels and planes (the school’s inner courtyard, walkways, steps, passages, and so on). If we turn to the second outside shot, it offers the blocked, partial view of a gym lesson in the playground clearly taken from the classroom overlooking it. The image immediately following indicates that it is a subjective shot from Marin’s point of view, in line with our initial perception that just as only he enjoys spatial authority and autonomy in the classroom, so only he has the right to a point of view outside it. Yet the film quickly works to dispel this expectation in favour of a more objective and complete investigation of the system itself. The following three outside sequences are composed of unanchored shots of the playground, all from a distance and slight high-angle, and which establish a series of important themes: the status of the image (a dispute between Souleymane and a couple of girls over his right to take photographs), racial difference (a football game that leads to a confrontation between African and West African boys), and conflict between staff and pupils over territory (the scene watched by students from the classroom, a virtual upper balcony, when Marin ushers Souleymane to the Principal (Jean-Pierre Simonet) for using the tu rather than vous form and during which Souleymane lingers defiantly on the steps to tie his shoelaces). Another, more neutral exterior sequence comprises three long-shot views of the courtyard being steadily filled up by students led out in file by their teachers in a progressive closing-up of the frame. I should like to examine now in close detail three consecutive outside sequences in Entre les murs that constitute in their own right a

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16.  Playing for time: Souleymane (Franck Keïta) keeps his teacher (François Bégaudeau) waiting in the schoolyard in Entre les murs (2008).

mini-drama of focus, angle, and point-of-view, and problematise most dramatically the cinematic frame. First, the moment when Marin enters the students’ territory; second, Souleymane’s disciplinary hearing that leads to his expulsion; and third, the final sequence of the staff–student football game in the playground that loops back one last time to the classroom. My aim in analysing Cantet’s framing strategies is to determine how far the film is able to dislodge the ideological frame, and ultimately how successful it is in liberating filmic space and thus creating the possibility for free movement within the system. de-framing The sequence begins with the education supervisor, Julie (Julie Athenol), confronting Marin on a set of stairs overlooking the playground below. She asks if it is true he had called Esmeralda and Louise ‘pétasses’ (‘skanks’), to which he sheepishly replies yes. This contradicts his earlier claim that he merely said they were ‘behaving like pétasses’, that is, adopting ‘une attitude de pétasse’, on account of revealing his ‘confidential’ opinion of Souleymane as ‘academically limited’, proferred during an end-of-year staff meeting about pupil evaluations at which they were both present as class reps. For Marin it was just an innocent rebuke; for them it was a particularly abusive term denoting ‘slag’. Leaving Julie, Marin heads downstairs and we catch him next as he comes into frame to meet the smiling Esmeralda and Louise on their own level in the playground mêlée. Crucially, however, the frame is not fixed but hand-held and constantly shifting, as if responding

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spontaneously to the physical movements of the pupils. In this move from the vertical to the broadly lateral and horizontal, we are placed on a direct par with the students. There is no static frame or use of shot/counter-shot formation to freeze the multi-perspectival, circular flow, which is accentuated by fluid editing and marries what Cantet calls the pupils’ impassioned ‘self-looping rhetoric’, or purposeful lack of rational argument.21 Marin demands to know why the girls ‘betrayed’ him by revealing the sensitive contents of the meeting, to which they immediately retort that if teachers can formally complain, so can pupils. The encounter quickly degenerates into an ugly face-off when they raise the issue of Souleymane, something which Marin had wished to keep separate yet which they (and we) know is simply not possible: Souleymane’s act of violent insubordination occurred just moments after Marin’s explosive use of the term ‘pétasse’. They hold him personally responsible for provoking Souleymane, and Esmeralda, employing the final insult delivered by Souleymane when storming out of Marin’s class, lashes out: ‘You say skank, we say arsehole … it’s the same thing’ (‘Vous dites pétasse, on dit enculé … c’est la même’). The camera frame has swelled with other students closing in around Marin and engulfing him. His verbal rhetorical tricks and sophistry are turned on their head, almost literally, and he starts fatally to lose his temper, just as Souleymane had done with him. He makes things worse by throwing professional caution to the wind and declaring presumptuously that the new student Carl (Carl Nanor) is now calmer for having been relocated to a new school, hence living proof of the higher wisdom of the system. ‘You think you’ve tamed me? (‘Vous m’avez adouci?’), Carl snarls back sarcastically, adding, ‘teachers who exclude pupils are all arseholes in my eyes’ (‘les profs qui excluent les élèves, ce sont les enculés pour moi’). All the while Marin, who had escaped disciplinary action by simply agreeing to write in his official report that he had lost his temper and used abusive language, lays claim to the spurious superiority on which the entire educational system is based: ‘I’m a teacher, I can say things pupils can’t (‘Moi, je suis prof, je peux dire des choses que les élèves ne peuvent pas dire’). He is, of course, proving something else here with his actions: that in a particular context and set of circumstances, a teacher can regress to the state of an unruly child. Khoumba instructs him in the real rules of the game: ‘We know everything’s already worked out’ (‘On sait que tout est déjà calculé’) This disturbing episode of raw aggression ends with a panicked François scurrying nervously out of frame, to

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17.  François (François Bégaudeau) besieged by his flock after entering their territory in Entre les murs (2008).

be picked up in a reverse-field shot when Khoumba follows him back inside the building and explains matter-of-factly what will happen to Souleymane if he is expelled. In this stunning reversal of teacher–pupil relations, Marin has learned in just a couple of minutes a vital lesson about the politics of education and the complex reality of the often precarious lives of the inner-city children whom he prefers to regard merely as anonymous empty vessels for indoctrinating with the lessons of the Republic. He has been spectacularly ‘out-classed’, or, better still, out-framed, by the indiscriminate mass he is entrusted to shape into responsible citizens of the Republic. The republican frame has, in turn, been profoundly shaken and undermined. en-framing The cinematic frame assumes a more theatrical and directly political dimension during the bureaucratic ritual of the disciplinary hearing. First the teachers, then the parent and student reps, and finally Souleymane and his mother move slowly and silently into a fixed open frame, filling up the conference room like actors walking from the wings on to the stage. As they occupy the allocated sides of the assembled square of tables, we are entitled to ask if this is finally democracy in action. The fact that we are positioned first at a side angle to, then from behind, Souleymane and his mother indicates a certain solidarity with the accused, especially when we glimpse from behind Souleymane’s left shoulder the profile of Marin looking obliquely towards him. But Cantet then stages a reversal of what one might

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normally expect of a visual symbolisation of inclusion and exclusion. From the moment the backs of the heads of Fred and François are conveyed in slightly blurred focus and positioned at the sides of a wide frame that captures Souleymane and his mother at its centre, frontally and in sharp focus, we know instinctively that he is being singled out as different and ‘other’ and thus doomed to be expelled. And so it proves. The two parent reps argue persuasively that the entire incident needs to be re-examined: Souleymane was, after all, trying to defend the honour of the two girls described by Marin as ‘pétasses’, and, moreover, it is abnormal that Marin should be present as both witness and concerned party. Their views are politely ignored by the Principal, who a little earlier during the assessment meeting had also disregarded Esmeralda’s observation that Souleymane had actually increased his grade average by 0.5. As the teachers try to inflate their discourse with hyperrational, bureaucratic turns of phrase, Souleymane is forced into the uncomfortable position of having to translate the deliberations for his mother, who cannot properly speak or understand French, there being no interpreter available. On one level this offers a neat inversion of the power relations at play, yet Souleymane visibly suffers when he has to translate his mother’s opinion that, despite appearances, he is a good boy who does his homework and looks after his family. By saying nothing in his defence, Marin’s betrayal of Souleymane is now complete. Previously, during the self-portrait project, he had insisted with cavalier nonchalance on displaying to the entire class Souleymane’s highly personal and discreet digital photograph of his mother in which she gestures her obvious disapproval at being photographed. The photograph thus already constituted a brave personal transgression, all the more so since the figure of the mother has an untouchable status in African society, something to which Marin appears completely oblivious (he proclaims Souleymane’s work rather superciliously a ‘chef-d’œuvre’). His subsequent dismissal of Souleymane’s academic potential merely compounded his betrayal of the boy’s trust in his teacher’s discretion. Since Souleymane refuses to add anything in his defence, a secret vote is immediately arranged. In a perfect matching of form and content, the fixed frame performs again as a symbolic sign of the intransigence of republican thinking and ideology. As the votes are cast dehumanisingly by anonymous hands into a transparent ballot-box that is meant to represent, synecdochically and symbolically, the transparency of the system in general, outside the same room mother and son avoid each other’s gaze, looking

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off-screen to the left as if into a void or well of republican shame. As soon as the inevitable verdict of definitive expulsion is announced, Souleymane and his mother leave the school in a deafening silence, walking together in bleak long-shot up the outside steps (an obvious metaphor of their permanent struggle as immigrants) and across the deserted concrete walkway. In this most simple and quietly damning of frames, we now find ourselves fully implicated as viewer. It is not only that the idealised space of the classroom as embodiment of, and instruction in, republican values has been emphatically negated; our effective collusion as silent witnesses with the framing mechanisms and symbolic violence of the system has also been laid bare. re-framing The final outside sequence of the film closes the structural frame opened up by the first shot in the café. Marin joins other staff and pupils in a cramped game of football in the playground during what must now be understood in context as a display of staff–student reconciliation. The players are first filmed anonymously at ground-level, as if to emphasise a renewed desire for egality and undifferentiation, a fast panning shot across the delimited space providing a rush of genuine, documentary-style action. Yet after what we have just experienced this cannot easily be viewed as an innocent game capable of transcending the divisions and inequalities of school life in the name of a putative republican harmony. It is, in fact, a pure fiction of integration, an illusory happy ending, and one already undercut by the immediately preceding scene in the classroom when a student who has barely spoken until now, Henriette (Henriette Kasaruhanda), approaches Marin at the end of the final class and declares forlornly that she has learned nothing whatsoever and does not wish to continue to the next, pre-ordained stage of her education (vocational school). This devastating statement, which throws into doubt the proud confidence of republican principles and aspirations, sounds a concluding note of ambivalence and deflation. The sense of failure is underscored by the two last, desolate shots of the film: brief, anonymous, still-frame views of the deserted classroom strewn with the chaos of untidy chairs and tables, the first of the front half with the blackboard now erased of writing, the second of the back, and both at an oblique and slight high angle that reconsigns the outside to a blank, almost abstract distance behind the closed windows. By insisting so decisively on the stasis of

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this sealed-off interior and the absence of what was once there (the class in its original tempestuous form prior to Souleymane’s expulsion), the film seems to end in a state of irremediable loss: that of the promise of a new form of spatial relations and identity based on genuine inclusion and a more honest and respectful dialogue between staff and pupils. It would appear, in short, to signify the failure of Cantet’s project to make space perform in new ways, for the reinvocation of the frame – open and empty in the sense of lacking any detail, action, or character to engage our interest – has been finally revealed as just that: devoid of hope and exclusionary. This is in line with almost all Cantet’s endings, which address the formal implications of closure and insist on ambivalence. In Ressources Humaines, the stunning final plan-séquence takes the form of a smooth, slow, forward zoom towards Franck and Alain sitting outside the closed factory and talking. It ends at the point where Alain’s face is completely blanked out by that of Franck who now occupies in close-up the centre-foreground, isolated and alone in the frame, just after he has asked Alain the film’s fundamental question, ‘Where is your place?’ – a question more rhetorical than anything else here since it presupposes no answer. This highly self-reflexive, negatory camera movement directly highlights the question of place within the frame, making the gesture of occlusion a sign of the film’s internal self-critique – the cinematic system is part of the same social and political system and never divorced from it. The final sequence of L’Emploi du temps takes place some months after the moment of Vincent’s breakdown, when he walked slowly out of his car into the nocturnal abyss depicted via an objective point-of-view shot. The image suggested suicide, but against all expectations (and the film plays brilliantly on our prior knowledge of the Romand case), Vincent is now resurrected in a brightly lit office being interviewed for a managment position following his father’s intervention. Yet this sudden return to the light marks a further humiliation for Vincent, a fate almost worse than death, since he is now no more than a fils de papa submitting himself to a suffocating professional role in order to hold on to his family. He is once again the performing body, providing all the right answers in a masquerade of mutual social exchange and entrapped within a fixed corporate frame of shot/counter-shot that is abstracted from the world outside (a fact reinforced by the lack of a clear horizon visible through the window behind the head of the recruiter). It is like a painful Warhol screen-test, though here crucially with sound, and it also puts the viewer on the line

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by forcing us to question our own socially prescribed role and ‘place’ as witness and/or voyeur. At the moment Vincent is obliged to voice his compliance with the corporate system by declaring he has no fear (a denial flatly contradicted by his terrified expression as he pulls slightly back and tries to evade full eye contact), we are propelled towards him in the form of a slow zoom and invited, like his potential new employer, to scrutinise his face in greater detail. The particular combination of forward motion and music (Jocelyn Pook’s yearning strings resume again on the soundtrack) replicates the set-up of an earlier scene when Vincent, seated on the couch with Muriel, admitted for the first time his feelings of dread and panic. There we were transported towards him in an achingly slow zoom accompanied by Pook’s orchestral score. In a rigorously objective film like L’Emploi du temps, such rare, affective configurations of sound and image constitute subjective moments. Yet just as there is no escape for Vincent from filial expectations and the list of new functions and responsibilities enumerated by the recruiter, so, too, the viewer is unable to turn a blind eye here to the flagrant manipulation of the cinematic apparatus and its mechanisms of control. Such is the comprehensive and uncompromising force of Cantet’s politically engaged, self-interrogating cinema. The conclusion to Vers le sud engineers a similar formal reversal: we move from Ellen in sombre, static mid-shot at the airport, to Brenda in full, frontal close-up on a boat leaving Haiti, her face gleefully filling the frame as the breeze and sun highlight her blond hair. We return to the earlier format of the voice-over as she attempts now to rationalise her actions (the events at the hotel were, despite everything, a form of sexual liberation) and declares her intention to travel and head further South (she has no home and is completely ‘done’ with men of the North). Typically she seems not to have reflected at all on the significance of Legba’s death, so preoccupied is she with her own feelings and need to be loved. Her shameless, solipsistic wish – ‘I want to know them all’ (i.e. all the islands in the Caribbean) – has an ominous and fatal ring to it: she will continue to wreak havoc wherever she goes, like a virtual vampire in an unstoppable drive of capitalist exploitation and (re)colonisation. Brenda then calmly turns her head around and looks towards the backwash, and beyond that to Haiti receding in the distance – an ironic take by Cantet on the masculine Orphic myth of fatally looking back and causing the love object to disappear. This is not a subjective point-of-view shot: we remain behind Brenda to the end of the shot in what is a direct critique of her appetitive gaze. As Wearing

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deftly puts it: ‘Brenda, who hates being looked at, ends the film turning away from the camera, her desiring and consuming gaze triumphant’ (Wearing 2011: 179). What might therefore be construed in another type of film as the promise of an available, mobile frame through time and space – the opening up and emancipation of female desire – is revealed here to be a deceptive ‘mask’ that we are now able to read and interpret politically as a decisive closing-up of new social possibilities. Again, progression is revealed as regression: even a manifestly open frame can operate as a closed, suspended and reductive visual form. This is another lesson by Cantet in reading through the frame, and, as the sounds of the sea carry over into the credits, we are left to reflect directly on the incommensurablilty and political contradictions of social space and spatial freedom. To return finally to Entre les murs: the film’s apparent final statement of failure has perplexed and troubled some commentators of the film who regard it as a graphic admission of the inexorable decline and mess of French education.22 Yet this is, in fact, only half the story, for, as Noël Burch reminds us, it is precisely when we are confronted with an empty frame that we begin to consider seriously what is happening outside it, that is, in the space of the hors-champ (Burch 1969: 41–4). The only action at this point is relayed on the soundtrack which permeates the still-frame with the shouts and cheers of the pupils in full voice at the football match in the courtyard below. This may seem merely to underline a formal division, that is to say, the discrepancy between a mute image and off-screen sound. Yet in this first and only productive instance of hors-champ in the entire film, the image works laterally with natural, diegetic sound (as opposed to vertically with over-dubbed sound) to reveal something new: an unguessed combination of heterogeneous sound and image that precedes any act of montage and replays the process of saturating the frame that defines the film, in this case solely by means of the spontaneous and irrepressible, albeit indecipherable, voices of multicultural France that carry over into the closing credit sequence and drown out any authorised speech from the teachers. With this paradoxical voiding of the classroom that celebrates the potential of free sound and renders strategically present those who are habitually cast to the margins and remain excluded, Cantet achieves a highly symbolic reformulation of inside and outside, clarity and vagueness, that transports the idea of space to a new conceptual level. Space is now to be understood not simply as what one perceives within the frame, or even outside it,

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but also what actively crosses through it and transforms it, i.e. the shared world of language. In a brilliant aesthetic refusal of closure, the ending of the film demands that we return immediately to the start to listen again to the language of mixité, but this time more acutely, ­imaginatively, and profoundly. We see, then, at this limit-point in Cantet’s practice – the most extreme example yet of the way a Cantet film is reversed from initial spatial movement into fixity and stasis, and when the open frame appears closed off and closed-up with dead space – that the only way forward formally is through sound, precisely by moving beyond the standard spatialisation of sound. I have in mind here particularly classical narrative cinema where images organise bodies and objects spatially and sound ‘serves’ the image by attaching itself to it mimetically. In L’Emploi du temps, Cantet used Pook’s instrumental score to move beyond the general boundaries of social realism and heighten the emotional impact, recalling the use of music in Hollywood melodrama such as the films of Douglas Sirk. In Entre les murs, however, Cantet is drawing on the full potential of sound as a spatial phenomenon and ‘impression’ to create an active soundscape. As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener argue, sound can give film a ‘body’, a ‘third dimension’, because, unlike the flat, visual image, it possesses tactile and haptic qualities. It is, after all, related to waves and therefore movement. They write: ‘[s]ound covers and uncovers, touches and enfolds even the spectator’s body … [it] is also fleeting, transparent and diaphanous, it escapes our desire to capture, fixate, and freeze it’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 137). Hence, any definition of sound must remain ambivalent: it is both directional (it has a source and brings something about) and enveloping (it surrounds us constantly, being at once inside and outside). Unlike with colour, say, which appears inherent in an object, with sound we always try to identify a point of origin or source – it either travels or is sent (i.e. it emanates from an object). In short, whereas the cinematic image is surface (and therefore two dimensional), sound is three dimensional space, with the result that the envelope of sounds creates a spatial extension and adds to the film’s performance (ibid.: 140).23 In Vers le sud, as Françoise Lionnet has forcefully argued, Cantet combines multiple modes of perception – visual, aural, tactile, multilingual – in order to destabilise the ‘received theoretical paradigms of visuality’. The result is a ‘visual aesthetics that particularises desire, bodies, and voices’ (Lionnet 2008: 234–7) (original emphasis).24 In the particular case of Entre les murs, sound ultimately

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works oppositionally by carving out a new space of resistance, which remains the long-term goal of collective, political critique as defined by O’Shaughnessy in his discussion of Cantet’s cinema (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 94). This is where space is really always heading in Cantet, and it is made possible now, paradoxically, because redefined and reconfigured as sound. Entre les murs resolves itself, therefore, in formal terms by reinventing  the cinematic frame as a pre-eminently mobile and receptive vehicle for social and cultural inclusion. Such a bold, symbolic recasting of the space/frame relation bears out what the psychoanalyst Darian Leader has observed in his recent consideration of the frame motif in the context of Freud’s theory of mourning, namely that the work of mourning needs to mobilise the symbolic dimension and create a frame for absence – one that by drawing attention to the conditioned, ‘artificial’ nature of what is perceived can help to mark out a space for inscribing and symbolising loss. In other words, a representation of the lost object must be represented as nothing more than – yet also nothing less than – a representation (see Leader 2009: 101–8).25 To view Entre les murs in the final analysis as a constructive work of social mourning (the young pupils-turned-actors were all on hand with Cantet to receive the Palme d’Or at Cannes), is, of course, far from saying that Cantet has created a more democratic artistic space sufficient to overcome the social tensions and inequality so powerfully relayed in the film. In fact, the pure potential of undifferentiated sounds remains only an abstract promise. For how is one to disentangle and hear equally all the voices and cultures of this new, rich multi-language? Which is to ask: if one could simply start all over again, how might one honour cultural diversity without causing separation, division and exclusion? We are reconfronted with the crisis of differentiation in the Republic, specifically the dilemma of intégration versus communautarisme, with the latter heralding for some ethical solidarity, for others ethnic separatism. In lieu of any easy answers the film reveals with impressive clarity and urgency the stakes of the problem and underlines the social risks of inertia and complacency. The political challenge remains to address the damage and trauma of institutionalised alienation and exclusion by moving definitively beyond the strict frame of republican universalism that still governs French thinking about education, despite regular attempts at reform. This is not a revolutionary message, of course. The continuous innovation and reinvention of social forms and models like education

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means that one always has to work with, and through, the system. Yet by exposing and attacking in Entre les murs, as in all his films, the logic of the frame so unequivocally by means of a resolutely ethical approach to cinematic form, Cantet has taken a significant step to recharging and radically redefining our field of critical vision. Notes 1 Before Les Sanguinaires Cantet had made two shorts that also unfold in circumscribed spaces: Tous à la manif/All at the Rally (1994) presents a father and son working together in a café that is invaded by striking college students who disturb their strict work regime founded on rules and expose their conflicted relationship. In Jeux de plage/Beach Games (1995), a father voyeuristically tails his 18 year old son, who is having an affair with a girl while on holiday in the calanques near Cassis (the roles are played by Jalil Lespert and his actual father, Jean Lespert). Cantet again stages a scene of filial shame when the boy and his friends discover his father spying on them (his pathetic gaze is directed on what he can never recapture – his youth) and attempt to strip him naked before the son eventually intervenes. 2 Director’s pack for Vers le sud.  3 For a fine discussion of how Franck is caught between two worlds which he cannot unite, see Wayne 2002: 67–70. 4 Compare the spatial logic of Ressources Humaines with that of Siegrid Alnoy’s Elle est des nôtres (2003), also shot in the Rhône-Alpes region (in this case, in and around Annecy), and which offers an even more pessimistic depiction of the alienation and anomie – as well as repressed neuroses and latent psychosis – of the modern work-place. Set in the anonymous, sterile context of oppressive new offices and corridors of a company on the edge of a new town complete with strip malls and city malls yet dwarfed by the beautiful, bare, snowy landscape, the film likewise dramatises the human wish to be integrated and accepted by a community based on criminal values. Here, however, the central relations (at times murderous) are between women. The extremely stylised, slow tracking-shots and electronic ambient music (plus Mozart’s Requiem) emphasise the cold, empty spaces of office life, and a permanent décalage between space and human emotions is created reflecting the existential angst of modern life. 5 Time is usually presented in Cantet as a clearly defined block of duration: Tous à la manif  runs the short length of a college strike; Jeux de plage a summer vacation, specifically one festive night; Les Sanguinaires the school holidays between Christmas and New Year; Ressources Humaines

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an interrupted internship; L’Emploi du temps seven months out of work; Vers le sud a summer vacation; Entre les murs an entire school year. 6 Jean-Claude Romand, who is thought to suffer from a ‘narcissistic personality disorder, pretended to his family and friends for eighteen years that he was a medical doctor linked to the World Health Organisation before one night in 1993 murdering his wife, children, parents and mistress. Not only is the setting similar (the French/Swiss border) but also Romand, like the self-deceiving fantasist Vincent, spent his days simply wandering and hoodwinking those close to him into investing money in imaginary hedge funds. Other films inspired by the case include Nicole Garcia’s L’Adversaire (2002), based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Emmanuel Carrère. 7 As Laura Rascaroli and Ewa Mazierska have shown, there are actually three distinct stages in Vincent’s evolution in the film: (i.) his joyful, aimless, juvenile, leisurely travelling and childish pleasures of racing against trains etc.; (ii.) the much less pleasurable experience (because more like ordinary work) of the UN fiction when he constructs a fake identity, memorises documents, meets clients and commutes to Geneva; (iii.) his life as a manly adventurer with Jean-Michel, crossing the border with counterfeit goods, meeting real people, and at last sharing his thoughts, memories and feelings with another human being who functions as a surrogate ‘good’ father. Of course, Vincent will never be able to do what Jean-Michel did and reject his married bourgeois life, for he actually wants both worlds. See Rascaroli and Mazierska 2006: 119–24. 8 Compare Vincent’s silent submersion in space, where time appears suspended, with Jean-Michel’s  detailed and shady back-history which, as his own fascinating commentary on his personal scrapbooks proves, is based around key moments and events, including trauma, fantasy, castration, rape, eroticism, etc. This type of psychoanalytical discourse is exceptional in a film which, although it revolves around Vincent’s impossible relationship with his father, and his own impossible relationship with his son Julien, conveys crisis in largely unspoken, visual and spatial terms. Vincent’s sudden discomfort and aggressiveness towards Jean-Michel (and later Jeffrey), due to his fear and phobia of male touch and intimacy which he never experienced with his father (a distance he reproduces with his own son), may perhaps be accounted for in terms of ‘homosexual panic’. 9 Archer highlights in particular the foetal sense of space and maternal cocoon when Vincent is photographed at the start ensconced and sleeping in his car, suggesting that this is part of the narrative’s ambivalent movement: the car’s ‘uterine dimensions … mask its gendered inscriptions as a big boy’s toy, permitting the irresponsibilities of the aimless drive’ (Archer 2008: 144). Archer adds that this womb-like quality is accentuated by limitations to vision: ‘The anonymous motorway, the mountain pass;

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foggy or rainy landscapes of reduced visibility; night-time drives with their headlamp pools; tunnels with their puslation of light and dark’ (underscoring the ‘heartbeat’), and the film’s other major effect of the acoustic register, which is normally repressed by the optical: ‘[e]ngine noises, the sound of tyres on tarmac, the lulling chimes which accompany the opening and closing of doors’ (ibid.). Archer concludes that ‘this suspension of the subject is untenable’, and that ‘the freedom of the road is an illusion, a cinematic fantasy’ (‘the cinematic road trip becomes its own non-place’ (ibid.: 147)), though he adds that ‘it is vital to Cantet’s cinema of commitment that his [Vincent’s] efforts are both understood and, to a degree, embraced’ (ibid.). 10 Compare, too, the start of L’Avventura (1960) where, as in Les Sanguinares, the characters on the island suddenly feel powerless and absurd in the face of nature. 11 Cantet talks about this in his interview with Gérard Lefort included on the British DVD version of Ressources Humaines (Soda 2006). 12 See Bourdieu and Passeron 1970 and the later Bourdieu 1993 which, in the concise chapter ‘Les Exclus de l’intérieur’ (913–23), shows how the education system conspires to retain those whom it effectively excludes by relegating them to more or less devalorised courses of study. Bourdieu writes (with Patrick Champagne): ‘This system of education, for the most part open to all and yet strictly reserved for some, succeeds brilliantly in uniting the appearances of “democratisation” and the reality of reproduction which is achieved at a higher degree of dissimulation, and thus with an increased effect of legitimation’ (921) (‘ce système d’enseignement largement ouvert à tous et pourtant strictement réservé à quelques-uns réussit le tour de force de réunir les apparences de la “démocratisation” et la réalité de la reproduction qui s’accomplit à un degré supérieur de dissimulation, donc avec un effet accru de légitimation’). 13 Tarr places Entre les murs in the particular context of French and Maghrebi-French films about State secondary schooling that offer highly diverging views of the French education system as a crucible of republican universalism, from Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (1985) (dir. Mehdi Charef) to Pierre et Djemila (1987) (dir. Gérard Blain), Le Plus beau métier du monde (1996) (dir. Gérard Lauzier), and L’École pour tous (2006) (dir. Éric Rochant). In the case of Philippe Faucon’s Samia (2001), the film opens with an uncompromising scene in a classroom where a young girl (Samia), interviewed by a teacher about her career prospects, rebukes the education system for limiting her horizons and effectively consigning her and other immigrant young women to the social scrap-heap. 14 Cantet’s films have, in fact, all leaned at times, and in different ways, towards melodrama. For Higbee, Ressources Humaines and L’Emploi du temps are ‘social-realist melodramas’ because of their repeated displacement of the

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social crisis into the domestic sphere, notably the second with its insistent use of the British composer Joceyln Pook’s elegiac theme tune complete with swirling strings. See Higbee 2004. 15 Bégaudeau praised Vers le sud as a model of ‘ideological lightness’ for the delicate way it confuses discourses (including the ‘politically correct’) and dissolves standard paradigms of white and black/dominator and dominated. See Bégaudeau 2006a: 30. 16 Bonnie Greer has justly criticised Cantet on the grounds that while he tries to give substance to the three main voids of the Western imagination (Woman, Black, the Third World or the South), he proves unable to explore fully both the Black and the Third World. Instead of an examination of black masculinity, we are offered the cliché of yet another young black man dead on screen, mourned by whites who didn’t know him, and by his own people beyond the frame. See Greer 2006. Legba in the Haitian Voodoo traditon (and as Elegua in the African Santeria tradition) is a disruptive ‘trickster’ god and wise protector, as well as mediator and guardian of thresholds and crossroads who raises awareness of interrelations and interrelatedness (between humankind, the natural world and the spirit world). Many of these attributes correspond to Legba, a ‘trickster’ hustler working the border zone of the resort and bringing different worlds together. 17 It is a quietly devastating monologue, however, since it is the only time Albert lets slip his mask of obliging affability. He reveals he is descended from a family of patriots who fought the Americans in the 1915 Occupation and harbours an implacable loathing of the white visitors who contaminate all they touch (his grandfather believed ‘the white man was an animal’). He predicts that tourist trade dollars will prove more damaging than artillery – a fact proved correct, it would seem, by Legba’s senseless murder. 18 Wearing makes a parallel here with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of shame’s potential for an activist politics, since we are invited to disidentify with Brenda, who is ‘exposed as a ruthless and acquisitive coloniser whose narcissistic investment in her own victimisation renders her oblivious to the devastating effects of her actions on others’ (Wearing 2011: 182). 19 Butler takes as a prime example of this process the notorious digital images from Abu Ghraib that were circulated globally across the internet and provoked ‘a widespread visceral turn against the war’ (Butler 2009: 11). 20 See Cortade 2009 for an insightful discussion of this particular form of visual representation of French landscape. Être et avoir also comprises an interview with the dedicated teacher and old-fashioned disciplinarian, Georges Lopez, in which he talks explicitly about his Spanish and republican origins.

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21 Commentary by Cantet and Bégaudeau featured on the British DVD version, The Class (Artificial Eye, 2009). 22 See, for example, Mignon-Chatras 2008: 218. 23 Elsaesser and Hagener emphasise that sound can be reproduced only in time: ‘Sound is therefore more malleable than the image because it has always … been endowed with the power of metamorphosis, i.e. it can alter its form at all times’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 137). They add further that sound can carry meaning, enable communication, create reference, but also destroy or distort meaning as noise and interference. For ‘sound is both material, in the sense that it owes its existence to matter, and immaterial, since it is a wave phenomenon that cannot be displayed and reproduced but only be produced anew’ (ibid.: 138). 24 Lionnet places Vers le sud in the specific context of the usually spectacular and exploitative visual representations of Haiti both in television and film, and suggests that in its totally original mise en image of the first independent black nation in its sustained state of colonial trauma, Cantet’s camera ‘underscores the relationality of different bodies through the foregrounded use of touch, which functions as a different mode of understanding, one that resists assuming forms of scopic power or control’ (Lionnet 2008: 236). For this reason, the film is far more successful in communicating the full texture of minor or resistant identities than the literary text by Laferrière on which it is based. For Lionnet, Cantet contributes a new angle of vision on postcolonial issues, and on the circulation of peoples and desires, due to his radical humanism, his compassion for his characters, and his ‘nuanced moral vision’ (ibid.: 237). 25 Leader draws directly on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917).

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5 Re-siting the Republic: Abdellatif Kechiche and the politics of reappropriation and renewal Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Re-siting the Republic – Abdellatif Kechiche

France, the country of freedom, the country of Voltaire. (La Faute à Voltaire) I have a dream that our suburbs will rise up. (A. Kechiche)

With the striking exception of Vénus Noire/Black Venus (2010), a historical fiction about the life of Saartjie Baartman (the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’) that goes back in time and leaves the borders of the Republic, the cinema of Abdellatif Kechiche focuses on very distinctive contexts and settings in contemporary France, tracing a curve from migrant displacement to settled immigrant life. He is less concerned with dwelling on the particular issues of immigration or the psychological traumas of diaspora (and with it the binary opposition between métropole and diaspora) than with exploring and celebrating the new sites, forms and structures of multi-ethnic France. His work presents the social and cultural fabric of (im)migrant communities, whether urban or suburban, in utterly concrete, spatial terms. La Faute à Voltaire/Blame it on Voltaire (aka Poetical Refugee) (2000) takes place in north-central Paris and addresses ‘illegal’, transnational immigration within the Mediterranean, engaging explicitly with issues of marginality and nationhood. L’Esquive/Games of Love and Chance (2003) is set in the very different environment of the Paris banlieue and records the new language of its youth. La Graine et le Mulet/Couscous (aka The Secret of the Grain) (2007) unfolds in the working-class French-Tunisian community of Sète, a port on the Mediterranean coast

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now fallen on hard times (Kechiche is himself a second-generation Tunisian immigrant who grew up in the Nice banlieue). Like Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel’s groundbreaking Drôle de Félix/ Adventures of Felix (2000), which took its beur protagonist (played by Sami Bouajila) on a journey into the unfamiliar spaces of la France profonde, the priority in each of these films is on telling new and as yet untold stories of the everyday drama of integration within the social and cultural perimeters of the Republic.1 Nothing is allowed to impede this artistic and historical process, and in interviews Kechiche expresses deep distrust of the aesthetic impulse, in particular the prevailing aesthetics of beur or banlieue cinema. Hence, whilst he talks in general terms of wishing to ‘modify’ the spectator’s gaze, subscribing to the uncontroversial idea that if one does not also exist ‘as image’ one ceases to exist (Kechiche 2001), he refuses to ghettoise the beur context in his work. Equally, there is no wish to poeticise matters in the style, say, of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s much-discussed Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? (2002), the grim tale of a young, illegal Algerian man eking out a life in the banlieue but which also features abstract, night-time shots of the cité and even bucolic views of the adjoining countryside.2 In fact, Kechiche is in the vanguard of those directors attempting to develop and reinvent the very genre of beur film, moving deliberately from a politics of representation to the (inter)textual and performative processes of cinema itself. The result in the case of La Graine et le Mulet was an unprecedented cross-over audience in France of over 800,000 and national acclaim, culminating, as with L’Esquive, in the award of three Césars. Kechiche’s cinema is an immersive experience of duration and gestation featuring extended plan-séquences, an emphasis (at times extreme) on the close-up, and a restlessly inquisitive, probing, objective camera (often hand-held), at once frontal and respectful, whereby we are brought into direct touch with the characters, their worlds, and language. By Kechiche’s own admission, his approach is one of simplicity of mise-en-scène and photography. There is little camera movement apart from strictly functional pans, and virtually no tracking shots. However, this is compensated for by his magisterial direction of ensemble casts of largely unprofessional actors – an engagement and commitment that reflects his own background as a stage and screen actor. (During the 1980s Kechiche was himself the very face of beur cinema, although his first major film role was actually as a new immigrant in Paris in Le Thé à la menthe/Mint Tea (1984) by the

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Algerian filmmaker Abdelkrim Bahloul.) It is not just that Kechiche works concretely from within highly contested national locations (the inner city, the cité, a provincial town of large immigration). He also takes us into a range of clearly demarcated public sub-spaces: a hostel for homeless people, a small park stage, a floating restaurant boat. Kechiche’s actors inhabit these spaces intensively and organically, filling the camera frame directly with their bodies, movements and voices to create a highly physical cinema. We noted in Chapter 1 that space is an underlying issue in all Maghrebi-French film-making, where representation can provide a means of constructing (diasporic) identity, to the point that all differences of ethnicity, gender and sexuality are represented spatially. We might also add here the general context of Arab and African cinema where, as Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes point out in their discussion of the great Senegalese director, Sembène Ousmane, ‘what might, in another system of film narration, be seen as a problem of time (the lack of a future) is conveyed … in spatial terms’ (Malkmus and Armes 1991: 190). Malkmus and Armes claim further that the ‘African system of using binary sets of oppositions as a way of organising spatial representation can be seen as in many ways akin to [photographic] collage’ (ibid.: 192). In this variant of spatial politics, an active investment in physical space ensures social identity. Yet Kechiche’s films would be merely archetypal and perhaps even unexceptional if they simply reproduced this basic working method and aims. What makes his work so powerful and special is precisely that different kinds of space are put into play at a range of levels, from the physical and intertextual to the theatrical and cinematic. Moreover, the forms, contours and modalities of space are consistently being reactivated and re-presented. Hence, peripheral, transitional spaces become the stage for cross-cultural encounters with central strands of French culture and tradition by means of an extensive, allusive network of intertextual associations and symbols. Indeed, Kechiche’s films display an astonishing density and wealth of historical and cultural sources, references and citations (filmic, literary, philosophical) that are predominantly French or European and often classical in nature. What specifically Arab influences there are, apart from the occasional use of Arabic, are usually confined to the soundtrack in the form of music which provides a formal tension with the image. Yet Kechiche fashions all these elements and influences into a dynamic cinematic space of textual ‘re-creation’ open to change, difference and movement – a process that goes hand in hand with his portrayal of interracial

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relationships (a distinguishing feature of much beur cinema), which are presented as a vital step towards integration. For even though Kechiche consciously avoids in his work all forms of overt social and political protest (again, with the notable exception of Vénus Noire), his approach to sources and symbols has a broadly political aim since it speaks directly of the here and now and projects itself forwards by envisaging new kinds of personal and social identities beyond embedded, essentialist assumptions of race, nation or ethnicity (‘white’, ‘French’, ‘beur’, or otherwise). In so doing Kechiche reframes the culturally familiar and normative, revealing that what is of primary importance is not just the urban metropolis – a privileged site and zone of cultural memory – but also precisely those blank, culturally ‘dead’ wastelands or ‘non-places’ usually deemed insignificant, not to say irrelevant, to the national and cultural tradition, such as the banlieue and the small, provincial sea-port. In short, Kechiche’s is a project of social and cultural reclamation through the reinvestment and reinvention by marginalised subjects of particular kinds of collective and physical space. Let us be clear: Kechiche’s new form of francophone postcolonial cinema presents itself directly as ‘French’, all the better to rearticulate and displace the ‘national’ of French cinema. It is as if he needed first to establish a solid cultural, historical and symbolic frame in order then to perform the real business of desymbolisation and de-essentialisation, or what we might call cultural ‘deframing’. We can liken this process to the recent political move in French cinema to de-essentialise the banlieue myth, as in the documentary films of Dominique Cabrera, Patrick Laroche and Lara Rastelli during the 1990s (see Levasseur 2008 and Dobson 2008). Yet in Kechiche’s case the results are far more complex because the canvas is constantly changing and responding to a textually derived practice of juxtaposition and disjunction. A generative cinematic space of acculturated métissage is formed where what is prioritised are the social and cultural determinants of a multilayered, ‘trans-ethnic’, and continually evolving cultural process rather than the fixed biological fact of genetic métissage (i.e. children of mixed race). Moreover, Kechiche eschews any standard literalisation of this process of cultural displacement in the form, say, of images of transit or migration.3 In this respect Kechiche may usefully be compared with the Algerian writer Assia Djebar, who, as Mireille Rosello has carefully shown in her study of ‘performative encounters’ between France and the Maghreb, takes bi-cultural hybridity not as a point of resolution of

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racial tensions or hierarchies but simply as a given and starting point in her fiction, thus moving beyond any simplistic or romantic notions of métissage.4 Kechiche foregrounds, for instance, the neologisms of youth argot and verlan – the ‘tchatche de banlieue’ – as a new dialect and idiom equivalent to créole since it does not exist in the Maghreb, where there still remains little interest in finding a third way between the native tongue and the ex-colonisers’ language.5 Yet how politically significant is Kechiche’s practice of cultural reappropriation and cultural métissage, where material space is always already textual? Put a little differently, to what extent, and with what success, does Kechiche subvert the symbolic frame politically within the lived context of multi-ethnic France? Does his method of cultural mediation simply reframe the diasporic experience within a syncretic yet politically complacent conceptual frame based around a cultural memory that is almost exclusively French and gestures irresistibly towards the universal? In which case, to employ the terms proposed by Nadia Kiwan in a related context, is there a risk here of a merely abstractifying movement of ‘organic hybridity’, rather than a committed process of politicised difference or alterity (Kiwan 2009: 15)?6 I wish to explore these key questions by taking Kechiche’s films in chronological order and examining in close detail their treatment of both external and cinematic space. This will require interrogating the different textual forms that cultural hybridity takes in each case and analysing how Kechiche accesses French cultural history and memory in order to defamiliarise and destabilise symbols, archetypes and stereotypes. By tracing the particular social and cultural frame constructed by each film – one that actively draws on the symbolic framework of State and Nation – and then establishing the cinematic processes by which it is actively ‘deframed’, we will be able to understand better the exact nature and function of Kechichian space and determine how it performs both culturally and politically. La Faute à Voltaire La Faute à Voltaire tells the story of the transitory existence in north-east Paris of a 27 year old Tunisian, Jallel (Sami Bouajila), from the moment he arrives seeking asylum to his deportation for illegal immigration for having abused his 30–day temporary residence permit, or APS (autorisation provisoire de séjour).7 The eldest son of a father who has just died, he is a congenial, if naive, figure whose individual

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trajectory – a tragically compressed éducation sentimentale – reflects both the pleasures and miseries of life in the parallel universe occupied by France’s marginalised others. The spaces he passes through after the immigration centre include a homeless shelter (foyer), an Indochinese restaurant and a Tunisian café called ‘L’Alhambra’ where he meets Nassera (Aure Atika), a beur waitress and neurotic, unmarried mother to whom he pays 30,000 francs to marry in order to achieve legal status (she will let him down on the day of their ceremony and make off with his money). Severely depressed, he then enters a psychiatric hospital (the Hôpital Esquirol) where he meets the young, troubled Lucie (élodie Bouchez), with whom he forges a new and fragile relationship. Each new space encountered in the film is its own world with its own vocabulary and set of rules which Jallel has to learn and master. He is fully at home with the socially and racially mixed homeless people on the margins, and the foyer, shot with a mobile camera, is presented as a multicultural, heterogeneous space that brings together a unique mix of characters and backgrounds, from the sexually ambiguous Paul (François Genty), who becomes a Buddhist, to the Breton Franck (Bruno Lochet), who dates Nassera’s friend and fellow barmaid, Leïla (Virginie Darmon). La Faute à Voltaire can clearly be approached in the context of recent debates in France about hospitality, inspired notably by Tahar Ben Jelloun’s controversial L’Hospitalité française: racisme et immigration maghrébine (1984), a scathing critique of France’s nationalistic response over fifteen years towards North African immigrants.8 Jacques Derrida’s central idea that hospitality is what arrives at the border, in that initial surprise of contact with an Other (a stranger, a foreigner), is also entirely consonant with the search for political asylum and the problematics of urban encounter in La Faute à Voltaire.9 Indeed, the theoretical ideal of welcome without assimilation is negotiated in practical terms in all Kechiche’s work. Yet Kechiche is also attempting something very different and specifically cultural here. The very first brief shot is a detail of the extraordinary bronze statue by Aimé-Jules Dalou at Place de la Nation entitled Le Triomphe de la République, erected in 1899 and one of the largest public statues in France from the Third Republic commemorating the regaining of Liberty following the end of the Franco-Prussian war. It is a female personification of the Republic leading a convoy of figures: ‘Liberty’, ‘Work’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Education’. The chariot of the Nation, drawn by two lions, symbolises universal suffrage. The detail in question is

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18.  The opening shot of La Faute à Voltaire (2000): a night-time view of the detail Paix from Dalou’s Le Triomphe de la République at Place de la Nation.

the voluptuous nude female figure at the rear representing La Paix (Peace). She is photographed at night from the front and below at a low-angle with a wobbly, hand-held camera. At her feet lies a splendid cornucopia, while from her right hand she dangles a long-stemmed rose that directly meets our gaze. The shot is very brief, just enough for the statue to be recognised allegorically and function structurally as a framing device for the film. It quickly fades out into black, literally in a flash, as suddenly as it arrived. For indeed, the effect is of an old-style photographic flash bulb producing a spectral, ethereal glow, and it establishes from the outset a twin emphasis on the artificial and material that will be developed throughout all Kechiche’s work. For the moment, however, the image disappears into darkness, from which the first scene at the immigration centre gently emerges in the form of a panning shot right to left. We can read this two-part sequence immediately in conceptual terms as establishing the city as a site of collective cultural memory and legend. For, as Isabelle McNeill remarks in her suggestive study of urban space and memory in French film, the city is both a physical, geographical space and an imaginary, or virtual, sphere mediated through cultural experience (McNeill 2008: 213). Indeed, it functions as a shared intersubjective zone between the collective and the individual, although here, for the moment, the inhabitants remain only virtual because caught in bureaucratic limbo as nomadic migrants. What

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counts most, in fact, in these opening shots is precisely the politics of space and movement. We progress from a vertical view of the status corresponding to an imperialist spatial model (we look up to be nourished by the bounty of the Republic) to the measured horizontal tracking shot in the reception room that is at eye-level, passing slowly from one immigrant group to another, inclusively and respectfully rather than hierarchically and divisively. The tension between these two directions will serve to define the film and all Kechiche’s work, such that what might at first appear a rather plain and earnest cinémavérité style of social realism always forms part of a complex spatial politics. The detail of the statue also raises the theme of relations and relationality. In the absence of the whole, it will need to be placed within a larger, expanded frame and context – one that is already audible in the vague hum of voices of the newly arrived immigrants that gently swell the frame and appear to write over the nineteenthcentury image of Republican triumph. With the migrant sounds of the foreign Other perceptible from the outset, there can thus be no one originary, ‘pure’ Republican space. All is already ‘mixed’ and in flux, an effect engineered by a decisive act of montage and the slight rocking of the hand-held camera. This is a moment pregnant with possibility and potential: that of human touch and genuine exchange with the Other, however we might define this. Included here are both established actors and ‘real’, unauthorised immigrants, a sign not simply of Kechiche’s desire for a measure of authenticity but also of his naturally transgressive commitment to bringing together worlds that would not normally meet. The exchange between Jallel and two other male Arab immigrants as they deliberate on strategies for best gaining asylum immediately sets the tone and stakes of the film. They refer ironically to France as the country of freedom and Voltaire (‘the French think they’re the inventors of freedom’), which opens up the film’s aggressively directed title, La Faute à Voltaire, with its implied themes of freedom and Republican blame and guilt. In the interview scene that immediately follows with the immigration officer (Francis Arnaud), Jallel claims to be Algerian, rather than Tunisian, in the hope that France’s historical burden of repressed guilt over the Algerian war will play in his favour while seeking identity papers. Yet the opening sequence of La Faute à Voltaire remains also fragile and fleeting in its sudden promise, and at the risk of appearing merely an evanescent phantom. Already Kechiche seems to be warning us not to read the Dalou statue over-aesthetically, since what is most

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significant is what it connotes historically and politically. Certainly, the statue provides a symbolic and narrative anchor to the film: later Jallel will even sit at its base with the beautiful though vulnerable Lucie who becomes the very image of France that he has to learn to love. As Colin Nettelbeck remarks, La Paix becomes a very ambiguous image for Jallel, provoking in him hope yet also caution and frustration (Nettelbeck 2007: 309). However, the film is always operating textually beyond fixed, essentialist notions of identity, national or otherwise. Having planted the seeds of an intertextual framework, Kechiche immediately ensures they grow and blossom. Although unversed in Parisian verlan (he fails, for example, to understand on first hearing the word ‘rebeu’, verlan for ‘arabe’), the educated Jallel has already been shown reading the sixteenth-century poetry of Pierre de Ronsard. It is therefore no surprise that when he and Lucie attempt to sell flowers – long-stemmed, of course – on the metro, they recite together, to attract custom, Ronsard’s ‘Ode à Cassandre’. This act of direct engagement with the French literary tradition, where Lucie’s red jacket matches and extends the ‘crimson robe’ of Ronsard’s rose, produces a blissful, if temporary, moment of collaboration played out in public space. And the viewer, too, is invited to take the flower and work with it, reaping its textual potential with the same active urgency promoted in the poem itself, which ends with the lines: ‘Cueillez, cueillez votre jeunesse:/ Comme à cette fleur, la vieillesse/ Fera ternir votre beauté’ (‘Pluck, pluck your youth, since, as with this flower, old age will tarnish your beauty’). The ‘Voltaire’ of the title would seem to stand entirely separate from this intercultural space and process. For the name is linked in the narrative with the metro station and boulevard where the Mairie of the eleventh arrondissement is located – the same Mairie where Jallel and Nassera fail to marry. Yet rather than serving metonymically as the site of blame for Nassera’s fault and betrayal, ‘Voltaire’ is already functioning dynamically as part of an intertextual quote, from the second line of a series of four quatrains in Gavroche’s song, C’est la faute à Voltaire, from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Misérables (the words alternate with ‘C’est la faute à Rousseau’ in the fourth line). This celebrated song sketches a story of social disadvantage and exclusion through which joy is reversed into degradation, and Gavroche sings it as he stands amongst the insurgents of the Paris June Rebellion of 1832, fixing his gaze on the national guards attempting to shoot him. In the same way, Kechiche’s film catalogues an abasement of human dignity,

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yet this is always counter-balanced by a mixture of wit, humanity and good humour similar to that found in Gavroche’s rhyming couplets with their highly ironic pairing of Voltaire and Rousseau, two figures who opposed each other while alive, yet who together represent for Hugo the failure of Enlightenment philosophy to solve nineteenth-century social problems. In both works, responsibility (‘la faute’) is ascribed to a State and bourgeois ideology that attempts to monumentalise and essentialise itself in grandiose symbols of human aspiration and achievement (Voltaire/Rousseau for Hugo, Dalou for Kechiche) while failing to safeguard its most vulnerable inhabitants (Gavroche dies, Jallel is deported). La Faute à Voltaire directly critiques French universalism by showing how the issues of citizenship and cultural identity postcolonial impact materially and morally on France’s nomadic, ­ others. Nettelbeck has rightly argued that the film marks an attempt to revitalise narrative through the use of diverse cultural artefacts (Nettelbeck 2007): from a Georges Brassens song, Brave Margot, to an issue of the street newspaper Macadam Journal that Jallel sells briefly on the metro and which has on its front cover a special feature on the contemporary French writer, Bernard Clavel (the issue also includes a history of the Paris metro). Indeed, the film provides us with a clear list of cultural markers and influences that vehicle the French tradition and which Kechiche asks us to consider and place in a larger textual context, just as Franck at one point does with the official livre d’or (visitors’ book) at the Mairie.10 Such an approach to cultural reflection and understanding, along with the film’s insistence on new, contingent, transitional spaces and social groupings beyond the official State limits of intégration, may perhaps be compared to the represention of Paris in recent films by West African directors working in France. Alain Gomis’s L’Afrance (2001), for instance, similarly explores the metropolis as a palimpsestic, transnational space – at once plural and contradictory – where social interactions between Africans and others can lead to rewarding, if transitory, cross-cultural relationships (in this case, between a West African male protagonist (El Hadj) and a white French woman).11 Kechiche is likewise interested in new ‘creolised’ forms of Europeanness, yet, as we are seeing, what is specific about his cinema is that it also explicitly foregrounds and promotes formal acts of textual miscegenation without which positive action on a socialcultural level cannot, it seems, be developed and sustained. Compare this approach with the moment in L’Afrance when El Hadj passes

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the Assemblée Nationale in the police van after being arrested as a sans-papiers (he will be stripped naked and his right to work legally and continue his studies withdrawn). We catch a fleeting glimpse of the building’s imperious statues depicting hallowed Officers of the State, yet there is no sense of this being a performative urban space and no textual/cultural engagement is initiated. For Kechiche, such an image would conversely provide yet another springboard for reinvesting and reconfiguring the rich seams of indigenous ‘French’ culture. There would appear, however, to be no ambiguity to the smooth images of deportation at the end of La Faute à Voltaire, which seal the Republican frame opened up at the beginning. Outside the Place de la Nation station in the cold light of morning following a night of revelry in the foyer, a static fixed-frame in long-shot simply waits to record the moment of Jallel’s capture by the police, who haul him into a waiting vehicle after a random ID check. Dalou’s statue Le Triomphe de la République is just visible in the right background, as if now both inaccessible and indifferent. The subsequent image is another fixed frame in extreme long-shot which shows Jallel being led on to the tarmac at Orly and ushered up the steps of the waiting plane. The extreme focal distance depersonalises him as just another anonymous statistic of illegal immigration. The tricolore colours of the police van – blue, white, red – extend the colour scheme of the Air Inter plane, confirming that this is the concerted will of the State machine. So much for France’s vaunted ideals of hospitality. The Republic is expelling an undesirable, a fact made graphically evident in the film’s final image: a view again of the figure of La Paix shot at night, but this time a static image from behind so that the highlight is no longer the hand and long-stemmed flower but, in this most provocative of conclusive images, the statue’s bare behind. As will be confirmed shortly, Kechiche has a particular interest, not to say obsession, with the exposed female form, and the film’s earlier representation of Nassera as the femme fatale lying shamelessly on the bed in her nightclothes, recalling as it does the 1940s screen vamp Ginette Leclerc, is patently overscored. Yet such extreme visual emphasis on the female body also forms part of a conscious cinematic strategy by Kechiche. In the sequence preceding the arrest, Jallel wakes up and stares at a reproduction on the wall of a Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting, L’Escarpolette (The Swing) (1767). This is a quintessential rococo image from the period of Voltaire and an exemplary example of the hedonism of the ancien régime. It is significant not only because it represents the French at erotic play

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(this is the poster under which Jallel and Lucie make love), but also, of course, because it is a scene of forbidden looking: the married woman is revealing (knowingly or unknowingly) her genitalia to a nobleman lurking below on the left while her husband pushes her from behind. Typically with Kechiche, the theme of visual desire and fascination is amplifed by another image that transports us trans-culturally to yet another medium, period and tradition. For on the facing wall hangs a French poster for Rear Window (1954), Hitchcock’s penetrating study of voyeurism and scopophilia, or ‘rear vision’. What is being formulated here is a complex circuit and critique of looking and the gaze, such that the position of the viewer and his/her relation to the subject is put directly into question and literally on the line.12 The utopian promise of Dalou’s La Paix has been reversed as dystopia. The credits roll down in white over the image, underwriting the (temporary) end to one man’s search for freedom. Yet this is not the whole story. For just as the film resolutely refuses to provide a simple political programme in favour of immigration, so, too, it avoids any crude demolition of French Republican values, inviting us instead to read with and through and around the cultural tradition. What imposes itself at the end, in fact, is a spirited musical chant, Saadi Bik Ya Lella by Lofti Jormana, heard previously in the film when Jallel and Lucie make love in the bedroom. In line with the poetics of free movement versus stasis that we have been tracing, Kechiche confronts us head-on with a formal disjunction: between a fixed symbol of the State, now fully exposed and desymbolised, and fluid sounds signifying a new, multiracial, urban population. The music fills and warms the cold frame of La Paix’s behind, suggesting a bold, open counter-spirit of mixité and community. Moreover, we are transported by the flow of the music back to an earlier moment in the film when Lucie lewdly bore her behind to Jallel while evoking the statue’s inviting forms. Hence, in an exemplary illustration of the reversibility of space, the statue now becomes a site of poetic transformation, and rather than underscoring sadness, pity and despair at a tragic outcome it helps to restore in the last moments a new sense of human connectedness and affirmation.13 La Faute à Voltaire attains ultimately the status of a gift or open flower, for we are given the possibility to rethink and reinvent the very nature and terms of hospitality within the expanded context of hybridic culture. Images of art and beauty are employed here directly to critique and deconstruct the symbols of the French Republican

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19.  Jallel (Sami Bouajila) and Lucie (Élodie Bouchez) selling long-stemmed flowers in the metro while reciting Ronsard in La Faute à Voltaire (2000).

tradition. What the film endorses, finally, are the processes of change and generation, as well as a belief in the shared experience of collective space that generates comradeship and solidarity. Jallel’s encounters and performances in the metro transform quotidian space into a new public site of creativity and surprise that, as Claudia Esposito states employing the vocabulary of Michel de Certeau, ‘calls into question the law of the everyday’ (Esposito 2011: 231), including the social norm of commuting in the economic order. In the process, ‘real’ space becomes a textual space, at once fluid and moving, as opposed to the static frame and policed territory of Place de la Nation. The central scene of the film, which has nothing to do with narrative action and all to do with existence as a process of communal becoming, is effectively when Jallel and Lucie play pétanques (an integrated French custom par excellence) not only with their own friends but also with a crowd of strangers that include indigenous French and Arabs, young and old, male and female. Shot intimately with a hand-held camera that creates a warm, dizzying and dynamic motion, the sequence develops into an outside bal, complete with a small band and singer, that inspires spontaneous dancing, laughter, and the free giving of presents. It is a kind of ideal, impromptu multi-community that extends Jallel’s initial comment that it makes no sense to differentiate Arab from Arab simply on the basis of nationality. As he put it, ‘We are all cousins’, whether Tunisian or Algerian. Problems are created only when the State is not

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able to integrate the goodwill and humanity of Jallel and those like him because it promotes and enforces harmful, essentialist preconceptions of what is ‘right’ and ‘natural’ (a note already sounded in Ronsard’s poem where Nature is depicted as ‘truly cruel’). For Kechiche, we have to move beyond traditional, fixed, State-devised notions of difference and respond to the particular challenge formulated at the end of the film: that is, to reappropriate and recontextualise French culture (here La Paix) by placing it into a new, progressive and necessarily ‘impure’ allegorical and symbolic framework. L’Esquive With L’Esquive we are transported into the different world of the Paris banlieue inhabited by third-generation beurs as well as by sub-Saharan African, South-east Asian and Portuguese immigrant youth. The area is left unspecified and anonymous, although the film was filmed in the Cité du Franc-Moisin in Saint-Denis.14 Shot on digital video in realistic style with hand-held movement, and deploying for the most part amateur actors, it marks a concerted attempt by Kechiche to reverse the stereotypical image of the banlieue as a problem site of exclusion where young beurs are simply maladapted to the space in which they live – a ‘concrete phobic space’ in the French political mediascape, as Peter Bloom aptly puts it (Bloom 2006: 140). Adrian Fielder argues in Deleuzian terms that banlieue films like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine/ Hate (1995) appear to be ‘advocating a (tactical) performative mode of inhabiting the city, through which emergent urban subcultures might attempt – even within the most striated of state-regulated spaces – to constitute an urban body nomadism’ (Fielder 2001: 280). Like La Faute à Voltaire, L’Esquive takes further this process of reinventing social space by making it directly textual and part of the mainstream itself by combining popular and ‘high’ culture. The very title, meaning ‘dodging’, is an instance of tchatche, and indeed the film not only dodges some of the constants of the established banlieue genre like unemployment, criminality, violence, gang warfare, riots with the police etc., by focusing on very young adolescents and their vulnerability, but also, more crucially, it reclaims communal material space both culturally and cinematically.15 The sounds and actions of high culture are inserted quite literally into the public and private spaces of the cité, including the classroom, as the students of a State secondary school rehearse for their end-of-year production of Marivaux’s classic,

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eighteenth-century French comedy of manners, Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard/Games of Love and Chance. In this way, the banlieue as archetypal non-lieu becomes a new space of cultural production: the cité is transformed into a new terrain of ‘cited’ texts, or ‘textes cités’, and thus a re-citing – and re-siting – of the very stereotypes of the cité. L’Esquive begins in the middle of a display of masculine-style verbal aggression and counter-reaction outside on the estate, yet it soon moves forwards to more ‘feminine’ spaces such as a private flat and inner stairwell, a Chinese dressmaker’s shop, and spaces outside and between the blocks of flats where young women come to chat. In fact, as Patricia Geesey argues in a study of how marginalised social and peri-urban spaces are ‘practised’ and (re)defined by female characters in L’Esquive and other recent beur films where they enjoy increasing mobility (including Zaïda Ghorab-Volta’s Souviens-toi de moi (1996) and Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche (2001)), the girls, by also occupying the public space of the outside steps, reinvest and reappropriate quotidian space once principally the preserve of young male beurs.16 Indeed, their ability to turn such spaces (both visual and diegetic) into places to inhabit as their own indicates a new acquistion of power and agency (Geesey 2011: 175). Moreover, their new circulation, navigation and negotiaton of borders for so long defined by tradition, social exclusion, and class and gender difference reveal new forms of physical and symbolic ­self-identification with place (ibid.: 162). L’Esquive, where the reappropriation of external, physical space is also that of standard French cinematic space, decisively refutes the once commonly held view, famously expressed by Kassovitz, that the banlieue is a space where genders don’t mix. In fact, the most important site in L’Esquive is not the makeshift theatre in a local community centre where the Marivaux play is successfully performed at the end in front of parents, teachers and fellow pupils, but rather the small but clearly defined arena-type space in a common outdoor area of the cité where the male and female teenagers rehearse amongst themselves, some even in costume, thus rendering Marivaux publicly ‘visible’. The three small, concrete, low-rise steps-cum-terraces are transformed into a kind of mini, open-air stage. Kechiche explains that he chose this particular cité precisely for its theatrical look, and the fact that the cité allowed him to isolate the characters against ‘an architectural backdrop that was very stylised, expressive, almost symbolic’ (Kechiche 2001) (my emphasis).

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20.  An extreme close-up of Lydia (Sarah Forestier) and Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) rehearsing outside in the cité in L’Esquive (2003).

It becomes a shifting textual space of free circulation, improvisation and interpretation operating beyond the strict confines of institutionalised function or conventional symbolism. Here, the youth of the cité improvise their own space hors carton, on to which the Law cannot (at least for these odd, precious moments) inscribe its order. This could be read in terms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘autonomous’ or ‘indeterminate’ zones, i.e. those pockets of activity towards which individual ‘bodies-in-becoming’ gravitate in order to escape (however fleetingly) the ‘apparatuses of capture’ aimed at regulating the forces contained within a given social or ‘molecular’ field (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987). For indeed, the camera’s tight framing of the adolescents’ faces and its focus on human interactions ensures that the ever-present and otherwise dwarfing blocks of flats do not block the horizon as they do in other banlieue films, suggesting that the cité might become a new site of opportunity and social experimentation. Moreover, through the sheer force of their highly physical language, the teenagers resist such material oppressiveness, their voices carrying over and across cinematic space in its now active, performative mode.17 Again, Kechiche is showing positively how new and totally unforeseen blendings of language and culture can subvert and transform the norms and limits of daily space. Significantly, the sequences of rehearsal and the scenes of the teenagers amongst themselves are shot in more or less the same style,

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part of Kechiche’s permanent wish to treat all scenes and sequences as equally independent and autonomous, and evidence of his specific strategy to destroy any sense of cultural hierarchising. Juxtaposed within the same physical and temporal space, both languages – the dynamic verbal sparring of (la) tchatche and la vanne (put downs) and the elegant turns and romantic banter of marivaudage – are at once performative and theatrical, encouraging the art of troping while also revealing vital differences between what is said and what is meant.18 Hence, the film reframes and revalorises the popular language of the banlieue, offering it up as a bearer of ‘universal’ meanings rather than as the impenetrable language of a marginalised minority (Tarr 2007b: 136). The viewer is directly involved in this process by virtue of the method of filming, which allows us to be simultaneously in the audience and watching the action on stage, or on the stage itself focusing in close-up on particular figures and observing the audience, or else circulating backstage in the wings and dressing-room. The excitement of the performance is further increased by the immediate editing style, including the use of dry cuts into extreme close-up that recall the vertiginous claustrophobia of Jean Cocteau’s more aesthetically stylised Les Parents terribles (1948). Kechiche is driving home, here, the continuing pertinence of Marivaux’s comedy about the dynamics of class and power which employs traditional motifs of mistaken identity. Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard, we recall, revolved around plots of love and disguise, with masters dressing up as servants and vice versa. Something similar is being played out for real when the shy Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), immediately after being dumped by Magalie (Aurélie Ganito) for his unexplained absences, resorts to bribing his friend Rachid (Rachid Hami) to withdraw from the production so that he can woo Lydia (Sarah Forestier), a longtime Platonic friend, while assuming the guise of Harlequin. The unlikely interracial couple of Lydia, a sassy young white girl with glowing blonde hair and blue eyes who loves to flirt while dressed in period costume, and Krimo, a superficially surly adolescent whose toughness masks his essential vulnerability, provides the major narrative of L’Esquive. Smitten, Krimo had lent Lydia cash to buy the dress she was haggling over with the Chinese dressmaker and which she will wear in the performance; in return, she invited him to follow her to the first rehearsal in the park. Krimo, and the viewer, can only admire the extent to which Lydia and Frida (Sabrina Ouazani) ‘master’ Marivaux’s language in the roles of Lisette the maid and Sylvia the bourgeoise

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respectively, embodying for their own satisfaction and pleasure the ‘essence’ of Frenchness accorded to Marivaux’s now canonic text. Yet there are also vital differences between the play and reality. Marivaux’s work concerns an instance of double deception that finally resolves itself because the masters dressed as servants ‘naturally’ fall in love with each other. According to the white, female school-teacher (Carole Franck) in charge of the production, Marivaux demonstrates that we are all prisoners of our social origins and that therefore there is no such thing as chance. However, the film itself appears to throw into question such a quasi-deterministic and essentialist view of the nature of social relations and, as Vinay Swamy correctly argues, it ‘belies any belief in a deterministic Marivaudian world of constancy’ (Swamy 2007: 63). In fact, much of the critical work done on the play of language in L’Esquive has a basic premise: that to appropriate the Other’s language is to find one’s ‘place’. As such, it feeds into the generally positive study of plurilingualism in the migrant communities presented in contemporary French cinema (see Berger and Komori 2010). Inexpressive in the extreme, and always feeling a little out of place, Krimo perseveres in his role as Harlequin and manages for a time to express his feelings through his disguise and open himself up to the drama of life. As Kechiche puts it: ‘He becomes interested in the world of the other … it’s an awakening. Theatre does not count as a means of success, the revelation of a special gift, but rather as an initiation into the possibilities of play’ (Kechiche 2001). As if to reinforce this point, the film emphasises that it is the female students who dominate the stage production, which also features a West Indian girl in the role of the master Dorante (Kechiche has stated that he wanted a white girl to play Lydia so that the film was not completely attached to one particular culture, and also to prevent the charge of reverse discrimination through only having beur actors (see Kechiche 2001)19). The dynamism of the girls’ language is such that they address each other as ‘ frère’ (‘brother’) and talk about having ‘couilles’ (‘balls’), thus reappropriating the masculinism of popular French for their own purposes. In the process, some of the essentialist principles and presuppositions of Marivaudian language – and French language and culture tout court – are definitively reversed.20 If L’Esquive ultimately fits into debates about the banlieue as imagined social-cultural construct and lived identity, it is because the banlieue is revealed here to be a privileged site invested with a collective historical and socio-cultural identity rather than simply a non-space

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of exclusion (significantly, the spaces of the parents’ homelands do not figure at all in the characters’ – or the film’s – imaginary). It is not just the Marivaux play that ensures this outcome. Infants from a primary school are shown performing the Conférence des Oiseaux, a twelfth-century text by Farid al-Din Attar, which opens up a new space of wonderment that we are invited to experience almost like a documentary. The work was staged notably by Peter Brook in a multilingual, multinational production that travelled the world during the 1980s. Kechiche’s ambition, like Brook’s, is clearly to ensure that the continuing vitality of the great Islamic literary and artistic tradition remains universally accessible. It may be overshadowed by Marivaux at the end, but it remains a crucial symbolic marker in Kechiche’s artistic project. The cultural enframing of L’Esquive is thus a tribute to the fusion of European and Arab culture, and, within the specific context of a mixed, multi-ethnic community uniting students and parents, adolescents and adults, it serves to consolidate the universal dimension of the narrative. We may compare the communal dimension of Kechiche’s cultural project in L’Esquive with that of Jean-Patrick Lebel’s fictionalised documentary, Notes pour Debussy, Lettre ouverte à Jean-Luc Godard (1994), which returns to the Paris suburb of La Courneuve featured in Godard’s classic 1966 film, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (where Lebel himself played a small role as the Flaubertian character, Bouvard). Lebel’s film challenges what he views as Godard’s highly selective and ultimately misleading portrait of the grands ensembles to tell the story of modern alienation and prostitution during the rapid urbanisation of Paris in the 1960s. In Notes pour Debussy (the title refers to the name of one of the housing complexes), the inhabitants of different communities currently living there produce their own interweaving narratives and create together their own new spaces (Lebel deliberately restricts his own role to that of mediator). As Verena Andermatt Conley puts it: ‘Lebel helps the residents participate through word and deed in the construction of a new French space, the nouvel espace that Étienne Balibar and others argue for … which the collective creation of a coloured wall mosaic at the end of the film makes clear’ (Conley 2010: 154). Conley’s reference to this contemporary Marxist thinker is highly pertinent to our discussion, for, like Kechiche, Balibar has a positive vision of the spatial transformation produced in France by the influx of immigrants and their descendants, and he militates for the creation of new and habitable social spaces available to all. Moreover,

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both philosopher and filmmaker share the idea that every citizen is an active subject-citizen with multiple identities and has the right to a minimal existential territory from which to speak and act (see Balibar 2004: 47–8).21 Yet cultural reframing and spatial resistance is, by its very nature, a difficult, sometimes perilous process beset with real dangers. As Kechiche acknowleges, there is a certain milieu in French culture that does not wish to loosen its grip on its ownership of cultural property (Porton 2005: 49). The bitter proof of this – and it is underlined in highly graphic terms – is the scene towards the end of L’Esquive involving for the first time the police. The teenagers are attempting to resolve their various issues and relationships in their own particular way. After a series of trials and tribulations caused by Fathi’s (Hafet Ben-Ahmed) outrage at Lydia for what he perceives as her playing with Krimo’s heart, Fathi finally drives his friend to the periphery of the estate in what is probably a stolen car in order to meet Lydia. After some aggressive, albeit well-intentioned, manhandling by Fathi to separate Lydia from her own friends (the quick-tempered Frida and Nanou (Nanou Benhamou)), Lydia and Krimo talk in the car watched from a distance by the others who sit back and spectate, as if it were another form of performance (the process becomes a virtual reflex in Kechiche). In one sense, this simply replicates the earlier rehearsal scenes outside, yet the vital difference here is that the setting is off-limits in the eyes of the authorities. The difficult, even tearful process of rapprochement between the two young lovers is well underway when a police car suddenly pulls up. Being white and blonde, Lydia is initially unnoticed. Instead, the police frisk Frida, tearing from her pocket a copy of the Marivaux text which they presume to contain illegal substances and with which a policewoman then hits her across the face. This intense and brutal sequence is suddenly terminated in medias res with a close-up of the battered text which encapsulates the ‘acting out’ of submersion of French culture by the State in order to humiliate and marginalise those who are most disenfranchised. In Deleuzian terms, the space of the cité has been reterritorialised and ‘re-striated’. Kechiche is suggesting here, I think, that what is important is not just the daily provocations of the police – that goes almost without saying. Rather, cultural artefacts can also be used to reinforce attitudes of exclusion and bar those already marginalised from full access to ‘Frenchness’. In the same way, the school-teacher, happily incarnating the State, never once invites reflections on Marivaux’s model of social

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21.  Lydia (Sarah Forestier) and Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) rehearsing in costume in front of their class in L’Esquive (2003).

relations, thus ensuring that her authorised views go unchallenged. Moreover, she makes no attempt to tap into the natural creative energies of her culturally diverse students by allowing them to appropriate Marivaux’s language for themselves. Instead, they must fit into the pre-set rules and forms of the system she represents or risk finding themselves excluded. Having walked out of the production after the teacher’s injunctions to put more feeling into the role of Harlequin and so enjoy the pleasure of ‘coming out of himself’ (‘Free yourself! Give yourself!’, she exhorts), Krimo immediately feels himself an outcast and assumes the State-driven status of victim and excluded. The film offers a clear critique of such ideological arrogance and blinkeredness that results only in exclusion and ultimately racial marginalisation. Yet could Kechiche himself also be accused here of simply subscribing to the French universalist model of integration by endorsing the school and thus the State (notwithstanding the unjustifiable behaviour of the police) as the one positive element in this film, since it allows for the successful staging of the Marivaux play as well as the Conférence des Oiseaux? The answer lies in Krimo’s personal situation and it will be conveyed typically in spatial terms. Remarkably, there is no narrative follow-up to the episode with the police. We never know, for example, if the teenagers are taken to the police station and charged. For in the space of a cut we are taken from the police raid to the later event of the performance in the community

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centre. Yet this dramatic use of ellipsis illustrates the degree to which time invariably becomes a matter of space in Kechiche’s cinema. As with Jallel breaking his temporary residence permit in La Faute à Voltaire, stretching, suspending or ‘exploding’ the linear flow of time in L’Esquive also opens up new spaces and ‘folds’ for creativity and performance which carry in turn the potential for self-discovery and community. Krimo, however, is no longer part of the production. During the performance, he (and the viewer with him) peers from outside through the glass windows of the centre in what, up to this point, is the only subjective point-of-view shot in the film. He loiters for a while, visible in the far background like an interloper behind the audience (a parallel is established here with his own absent father languishing alone in Fresnes prison). There is no one to return his gaze in a motivated shot/counter-shot sequence, simply a reverse-field shot that seals his forlorn isolation. We eventually follow him as he walks away from the centre and back to the seclusion of his bedroom with its empty, silent fantasies of a purely imaginary private space (the exotic yachts drawn by his father abstracted from all collective reality). The implication here is that the school has failed in its mission to nurture and integrate, for while it facilitates a successful group performance it also signally fails to embrace the likes of Krimo. Indeed, his absence is barely noticed. The final sequence dutifully closes the frame set up at the start by Krimo shouting up to Magalie in her bedroom. Now it is Lydia calling up repeatedly to Krimo but to no avail; we see Krimo hiding in his room afraid to make contact.22 Lydia eventually gives up and walks alone past an older white man walking his dog. She exits the slightly shaking hand-held frame top-right, followed soon after by the man and dog middle-left. We are left with an open-frame view of the cité devoid of all human presence. Banal in the extreme and lacking composition, the shot is held for a few long seconds before cutting to credits. The relationship between Krimo and Lydia is thus left suspended and ambiguous, and the feeling of missed opportunity is exacerbated by the complete non-interaction between the young girl and older man who pass each other like ships in the night. Once again, however, this is not the last word. For during the brief moments of the final sequence, a mysterious personal dedication: ‘à Slaheddine’ (a Tunisian first-name), is inscribed in typewritten form in the lower-right corner of the frame. Then, as the resigned Lydia turns to head off out of frame, the open frame suddenly becomes alive and receptive again, resounding with a gentle and plaintively

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jaunty burst of Balkan gypsy accordion music (Slijivovica Impro’ by Branislav Zdravković, Dario Ivković and Raoul Cepelnik). The music accompanies her exit and ensures the transition into black and the arrival of the credits. It reprises in a more muted instrumental form the vibrant Serbian song heard just moments before during the elated, post-performance backstage scenes (Odmori se majko by Nedeljko Bilkic), and which ran over into an outside, early evening shot of the cité before fading out when Lydia approached Krimo’s building. In both cases, music operates as a bridging device between scenes, and the second instance, by referencing the first, underscores the positivity and joy of collective activity. This is the final note sounded by the film, rather than the sight of emotional separation. Moreover, the fact that the passage of music is clearly an improvisation (we hear at one point the musician’s whispered voice) reaffirms the idea of performance and process. Together with the dedication, the composite effect here is of an idiosyncratic and fluid open frame and space of cultural métissage incorporating indigenous French and diasporic Arab culture, the dialect and sub-culture of the cité, and a symbolic meeting of East and West in the music of Serbia. We see that it is how music functions and operates spatially that counts, not just its hybridic credentials ranging from Eastern European and Arab to French and Spanish Caribbean (the Bachata musician, Luis Vargas) (Kechiche deliberately refused the obvious option of hip-hop and rap for his banlieue tale). This stands for L’Esquive as a whole which activates and instantiates its own title by continually dodging narrative, thematic and spatial expectations. Such acts of cinematic form through montage are a celebration by Kechiche of the spatial and performative itself. La Graine et le Mulet With La Graine et le Mulet, Kechiche presents a very different, settled, Franco-Tunisian provincial community that positions itself as naturalised ‘French’ in relation to the unspecified and unseen migrants who are suspected of taking local jobs. Its evocative title, La Graine et le Mulet (literally ‘The Semolina and Mullet’), has the resonance of a Ronsard-style conte, and indeed was the title of ‘the new film’ advertised by Jallel in La Faute à Voltaire when he was selling Macadam Journal in the metro (Kechiche’s intertextual self-awareness knows no bounds). This extended social drama would appear to start where L’Esquive left off, an impression encouraged by its density of

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personal and cultural symbolism. It is structured around two long, set-piece sequences: a Sunday family lunch and a dinner thrown to convince reluctant party officials to support a new restaurant. This is a work of, and on, place settings: both symbolic settings at the table (one’s position and status within the family and society more generally) and geographical settings (the location and locale). Moreover, the title merges two distinctive cooking traditions: Mediterranean (North African couscous) and French (bouillabaisse, a speciality of Provence). The fact that the film is dedicated at the end to Kechiche’s own father and two other individuals with culturally distinct names – one North African (Mustafa Adouani), the other French (Francis Arnaud, who has a small role in the film as the port manager, Monsieur Gruault) – further imprints cultural hybridity. The film will actively develop these material connections and associations through its particular techniques of semi-improvised dialogue, extreme long-takes and edgy close-ups that draw out not only the warmth and love that cement the extended family, but also the deep tensions dividing it. The film begins in quasi-documentary mode with a young Arab male guide Majid (Sami Zitouni) on a tourist boat introducing the viewer to the post-industrial space and history of Sète, a crumbling sea-port whose traditional industries – fishing and shipbuilding – are now on the wane. We are plunged immediately into a wide-frame of the port and informed of the beleaguered state of the local economy: on one side stand the piles of scrap metal destined for Turkey, on the other the site where the criée du poisson announcing the day’s catch at market once took place. Ironically, it is Majid’s Arab accent that provides the only sense of place here, although his commentary is short-lived and sacrificed to kinky sexual fumblings below deck with an older, white French woman, Madeleine (Violaine de Carne) (later revealed as the wife of the Deputy Mayor). Of course, the port, which was also the birthplace of Georges Brassens (a further intertextual nod back to La Faute à Voltaire), has links to North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean, and thus denotes a mixed, inter-cultural space. Yet precisely because of its declining state, Sète is depleted of any utopian energy and ambition and functions almost as an ‘anti-port’. Indeed, turning inland away from the sea, Kechiche focuses instead on something far more unusual and unique: a cité directly adjacent to the water (the Cité de l’île de Thau). This hybrid sub-space makes for a startling – and what Kechiche calls ‘theatrical’ – juxtaposition of the banlieue and the Mediterranean. Indeed, when, towards the end and at night, we see the cité reflected

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in the water, it is as if metamorphosed into a new, compound ‘cité-surmer’. This exemplifies Kechiche’s irrepressible drive to hybridise and his profound suspicion of anything that appears ‘natural’ or ‘in’ its place – the point, for example, where physical terrain can be fixed and consecrated as terroir. For, as elsewhere in Kechiche’s work, although we are initiated here into an array of distinctive social spaces, public and domestic (from a bank and café to different hotel rooms and a family apartment), the emphasis is always on the contingency and shifting, porous nature of states and boundaries. Hence, the same space can serve different purposes and connote various identites: for example, inside the cheap Hôtel de l’Orient the traditional food, song and dance of the Maghreb are foregrounded, while outside it, on the quayside, a focal space for North Africian émigrés, the terrace is marked more as a meridional space (see Higbee 2011). In cinematic terms, La Graine et le Mulet presents itself on one level as a reappropriation of Sète from Agnès Varda’s first feature film, La Pointe Courte (1956), a precursor of the New Wave and set in the particular fishing quarter signified by the title. In one of its two unrelated narratives, La Pointe Courte offered a neo-realist perspective of the harsh conditions suffered by the town’s fishermen (the other, far more stylised narrative strand concerns a Parisian couple ruminating on the state of their marriage). With a similar combination of fictional drama and documentary record of the continuing oppression of the working-class, La Graine et le Mulet provides a contemporary updating of Sète, now a post-industrial town of extensive North African immigration and exemplifying the remarkable changes that have occurred in French society and culture during the intervening years. Unlike La Pointe Courte, however, Kechiche’s film does not permit itself any artful compositions or poetic tracking shots of the landscape. Nor does it allow its characters the luxury of imagining a personal escape-route. Indeed, the chief male protagonist Slimane (Habib Boufares), a 60 year old ship’s carpenter who has just been summarily laid off after thirty-five years (and who, because he worked as an undeclared immigrant for many years, will not receive the full amount of redundancy pay to which he would normally be entitled), adamantly refuses to believe in the nostalgic vision proposed by his two sons of a mythical return to the homeland (le bled) and a simple, happy retirement. A quiet, benign and unassuming man misunderstood by his sons who seem oblivious to the fact that he came to France in search of a better life, Slimane now regards himself as French and still wishes

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to make good in the city and country he considers home. Moreover, age has only increased his innate obstinacy, which links him to the fresh fish – the grey mullet of the title – that he personally delivers by moped to his family at the start of the film. For although highly adaptable, mullet is known as a difficult fish to catch and associated phonetically in French with ‘mulet’ and ‘mule’, i.e. mule, a hybrid of female horse and male donkey, as in the French expressions ‘têtu comme un mulet’ (‘stubborn like a mule’) and ‘une tête de mule’ (‘stubborn headed’­). With what little he receives as redundancy payment Slimane decides bravely, but also bloodymindedly, to risk all by purchasing a disused and rusting French boat – an action that will inevitably provoke dissension amongst some of those closest to him. But Varda’s film is not the only filmic reference on display here. When the newly revamped barge is brought into harbour, with Slimane, Rym (Hafsia Herzi) and Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem) standing at the mast, La Graine et le Mulet conjures up a series of sources and associations from classic French cinema, a process formalised by the very name of the boat, Source. Most obviously it recalls the eponymous barge at the centre of Jean Vigo’s poetic realist masterpiece, L’Atalante (1934), yet it also takes us back to the small boat in L’Éternel Retour (1943) (scripted by Cocteau, directed by Jean Delannoy), which Madeleine Sologne (Nathalie I) bestrides when returning across the water to save the dying Patrice (Jean Marais). By reinventing the boat as a literally sink or swim French-Tunisian business enterprise, Kechiche is similarly reclaiming the motif from Delannoy/Cocteau’s aesthetically intense fairy-tale based on the Tristan legend, which was both admired and reviled when released during the Occupation due to its Teutonic look and fascist undertones (the Nietzschean title, the lovers’ dyed, ultra-blonde hair, statuesque poses).23 We are reminded here, too, of the dialoguedriven filmed theatre of the Provençal filmmaker, Marcel Pagnol, and specifically his Marseilles trilogy (Fanny (1931), Marius (1932), César (1936)), through the film’s portrayal of a group of older, retired North African men who provide the live music for the restaurant sequence and comment sardonically on Slimane’s fortunes and misfortunes like Pagnol’s Greek-like chorus of card-players. Yet Kechiche deliberately avoids the nostalgic and folkloric aspects of Pagnol’s work, just as he does the over-symbolising tendencies of the filmmaker currently most identified with Marseilles, Robert Guédiguian. Where Guédiguian, as we have seen, always makes metropolitan space function symbolically, referencing its edifices, churches and monuments to Empire

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22.  Slimane (Habid Boufares) with Rym (Hafsia Herzi) and his son Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem) on the revamped barge Source as it is pulled into dock in La Graine et le Mulet (2007).

as unimpeachable lieux de mémoire, Kechiche actively deconstructs Republican symbols, divesting them of their imperialist and colonial weight in order that they may function freely and positively in a new collective, transcultural, generative space of hybrid forms. Perhaps a more apposite point of comparison, already alluded to in Chapter 3, would be Karim Dridi’s Bye-Bye (1995), a film set in Marseilles’s Le Panier district and alive with the sounds of raï, rap and ragga. The city is presented here as the embodiment of a multi-ethnic, miscegenated, multicultural space that reflects its cultural heritage of the Maghreb and France’s colonial past (see Higbee 2001b). Dridi’s general formulation of cultural brassage directly challenges the essentialist cultural and socialspatial identities imposed in the film on young beurs, for here, very differently from Slimane’s family, it is the patriarchal older generation that is demanding a return to the bled. Significantly, whereas Ismael is always framed looking out across the Mediterranean at boats taking passengers between France and the Maghreb, the view from Slimane’s lodgings is focused solely on the internal waterways of Sète. In fact, Bye-Bye throws into sharp relief Kechiche’s far more positive sense of transnational cultural exchange between the Maghreb and France, as well as his highly strategic deployment of cultural, aural, visual and linguistic signs to create a precisely calibrated textual frame of métissage.24

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As for the more general references to the French cultural and political tradition, these could not be more explicit now. The quay where Slimane wishes to anchor the restaurant is named the Quai de la République, yet in fact the Source never arrives there due to bureaucractic machinations. Instead, it will remain moored near the Hôtel de l’Orient where Slimane is staying as if it were a foyer (he lives there with other mature North African men and in a separate room from his new middle-aged partner, Latifa (Hatika Karaoui), also the owner). Hence, the main trajectory of the film – Slimane’s attempt to evolve from out-of-work docker into restaurant owner and employer and thus regain a sense of agency and autonomy (he finds himself unable to make love to Latifa in the hotel, where she enjoys economic power) – is defined in precise spatial and visual terms as one of potential social integration within the Republic from the immigrant margins. A communal sense of optimism is expressed by the North African elders who congregate daily outside the Hôtel de l’Orient that the project of restoring the boat will be authorised by the town and that he will be granted a loan precisely because it does not involve an overt expression of Islamic difference, i.e. a mosque. Yet the film also reveals the latent racism of provincial France, with the petit-bourgeois officials intent on offering Slimane only a temporary permit for his boat and not in the more desirable central area. Directly confronting the deep-seated bastions of Republican France is the rich mosaic of Slimane Beiji’s vast family, the result of his divorce from his forceful wife Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk) and the interracial marrying out by some of his children, who now have their own families. Yet ‘family’ encompasses here all those who come together at Souad’s for a lunch of couscous which she has lovingly prepared, and which Slimane, although not present, will also enjoy when his sons later bring him some in his hotel. As a multi-ethnic, transgenerational and transcultural group in action comprising three generations, this extended family gathering provides the most complete expression yet of Kechiche’s expansive, non-essentialising method of cultural re-contextualisation that incorporates the domestic, public, familial and communal. The very idea of a natural family by birthright is undermined by the presence of Algerian, Tunisian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and French members. For instance, the eldest daughter Karima (Faridah Benkhetache) has a Spanish husband, José (Olivier Loustau) and together they are bringing up young children. Her close beur friend Lilia (Leïla D’Issernio), who has a white husband, Mario

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(Bruno Lochet), also has mixed-race children whom they bring along to the meal. If the serving of couscous embodies aspects of the cultural memory of the Maghreb and provides familial and communal cohesion even after the long (unexplained) separation of Souad and Slimane, it thus also serves as a route to desired integration. In what is clearly a ritual event, Souad dispenses her couscous to an elderly French neighbour as well as a homeless man on the street. Ethnic food thus contributes to the production of locality, intergenerational cohesion and communal solidarity – one that has little to do with the ‘homing’ desire of diasporic families simply to preserve the cultural authenticity of their homeland through forms of social closure.25 Indeed, Slimane’s family reveals some of the important cultural complexities of a non-Islamist, North African family where women do not wear the veil and are more culturally and economically integrated than the men, as, for example, when Rym accompanies Slimane to the bank to secure financial backing for the restaurant and does most of the talking. The sense in the film of a continually forming, generative community is already suggested in the titular term ‘graine’, with its connotations of seed and propagation. Yet such plurality is never simply romanticised by Kechiche. This is a disparate clan beset by jealousies, feuds and crises, notably concerning the son Majid, the serial philanderer who is cruelly betraying his Russian wife, Julia (Alice Houri), under the knowing eye of his mother. Indeed, it often seems united only in its resentment of Latifa and her garrulous daughter, Rym. A central aspect of Kechiche’s generous and naturally denaturalising notion of family is precisely Slimane’s unconditional love and pure attachment for Rym whom he calls ‘ma fille’ (‘my girl’), and which is unlike anything he feels for his ‘natural’ children and grandchildren. In what is a powerful troping by Kechiche on the father-daughter topos so endemic to French cinema, they are often pictured together in framed head-shots and intimate two-shots, at times almost like a couple in love. Yet their close, chaste proximity is born of mutual respect and empathy: he is a born survivor, and, like her, wishes to move forwards and dare to imagine new social possibilities. (We note that Rym has also been adopted by the group of North African elders, one of whom, Hamid (Abdelhamid Aktouche), explains to her personally the spirit of self-sacrifice that originally motivated men of the first generation to emigrate to France.) Slimane’s totally unexpected new project is a symbol of this continuing quest, and also an expression of his desire to leave a concrete legacy for all his

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23.  Slimane (Habid Boufares) and his adopted ‘daughter’ Rym (Hafsia Herzi) passing Sète harbour on their way to an appointment with the bank in La Graine et le Mulet (2007).

‘children’. Indeed, one might view Slimane’s attempt to construct a shared family business as a new, extended home in the spatial terms of social and cultural enracinement explored in the work of Yamina Benguigui, notably Mémoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin (1997) and Inch’Allah dimanche. The latter focuses on one woman’s arrival in France in the 1970s during the regroupement familial when immigrant labourers were permitted to bring their wives and children over to France.26 In La Graine et le Mulet Kechiche is asking precisely whether a new reintegration of the centre and the margins can be possible – one capable of rising above racial difference while at the same time respecting it. Crucial to any answer will be whether the new world of a ‘multi-family’ (including Souad again as cook) can unite with the traditional world of work to achieve the social and spatial success of a floating restaurant. All attempts by Slimane and Rym to obtain external funding and official permission for their venture – from the bank, council and customs – have thus far failed. The one-off opening of the restaurant represents, therefore, a last-ditch attempt to secure financial, social and cultural endorsement.

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Yet what does this new physical and social object called Source represent exactly? In the first instance, the boat’s original, ‘natural’ function has been diverted and reappropriated in what is an ongoing process of cultural détournement in Kechiche’s work initiated by the subversion of Republican texts and symbols in La Faute à Voltaire. The physical space may seem banal, its interior stuffed with garish draperie and clichéd paintings of camels and palm-trees, yet its significance lies in its very function as spectacle: the town councillors must wait on the quayside in the dark before Slimane illuminates the boat in order to let the evening’s drama unfold. Higbee rightly emphasises the performative element here, both in the theatrical and cultural sense, suggesting that the boat is ‘transformed into a performative space in which the possibilities of encounter between Maghrebi and French culture can be tested – a metonymic site in which the dynamic politics of multiculturalism in contemporary French society are played out in the micro-environment of the floating restaurant’ (Higbee 2011: 226). Further, although presided over by Slimane, the boat is a powerful female space due to the extraordinary activity and commitment of his daughters (real and adopted) and partners (past and present). Hence, this new, floating, intercultural, hybrid space – a further extension of Kechiche’s poetics of performance, transformation and reclamation – has the potential both to redefine identity (national, social, gender) and to create a new virtual space of communal being. Such promise may be linked perhaps to Michel Foucault’s liminal ‘otherspace’, or ‘heterotopia’, which specifically encompassed the boat as ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’ (Foucault 1984: 49).27 Nothing is assured, however, during the tense drama of the restaurant’s opening that occupies the final third of the film and comprises a series of interconnecting narratives escalating in suspense: Latifa finally bowing to Rym and deciding to attend despite the presence of Slimane’s children; the mystery of the missing couscous; Slimane leaving on his moped to find it; Latifa heading back home to cook some new couscous; Slimane finding Julia in acute emotional distress over Majid’s behaviour; Rym belly-dancing to play for time. Even though it is Rym’s decision alone to take the stage, and proof yet again of her indomitable will, the act itself reduces her to the status of an eroticised object, exacerbated by the camera’s fetishising fragmentation of her body through extreme close-ups. Indeed, the protracted dance

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sequence renders the boat a highly complicated and ambivalent object that compromises – and arguably cancels out – its utopian potential. Moreover, the restaurant sequence has the appearance of a social farce, with impatient rival tradesmen and owners depicted as vulgar and pretentious when not overtly racist. ‘It’s like putting a wolf in a hen-house – he’ll never leave’, one of them comments insultingly in distinctly spatial terms about Slimane’s wish for a central permit while greedily enjoying his hospitality. Intercut into this lengthy scene are the panning cinéma-vérité-style shots of Slimane chasing desperately around the quaysides of the cité the mischievous young boys who have stolen his moped. This serves to close the structural frame opened at the beginning with his personal delivery of mullet, yet also further recharges and extends the cultural frame of sources. For these shots directly recall Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic, Ladri de Biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948), with its similar fusing of social realism and personal drama. Kechiche has acknowledged this influence in interviews, and already in the spirit of neorealism La Graine et le Mulet features in the role of Slimane an unprofessional actor/workman and friend of Kechiche’s father (the part was initially to be played by one of the film’s dedicatees, the Tunisian actor Mustafa Adouani, who died during the initial stages of production). With the supremely cinematic device of parallel editing that cuts between Slimane in increasingly desperate physical motion and the rest of the family waiting nervously at the restaurant, we are invited to negotiate between two very different cinematic styles and traditions.28 Again, as with Cantet, it is ‘free’, active and embodied sound – here, the live performance of the ad hoc band of North African musicians – that interposes itself as a formal bridge between the images of the father’s wretched search and those of Rym’s bellydance of love and self-sacrifice for Slimane, filmed in endless, dizzying close-up like an interminable danse macabre as she plays courageously for time (Kechiche himself calls it a ‘dance of death’).29 Over the last image of Slimane as he collapses to the ground, his body immediately reframed in a static, open-frame, long-shot so characteristic of Kechiche’s endings, we hear in full force the music of the restaurant. There seems to be no reason for this sudden, mutual contamination of two parallel episodes which have until now been kept almost totally separate and intact due to the strict observance of diegetic sound, i.e. the loud commotion of the restaurant pitted against the eerie silence of the cité at night, broken only by the sounds of the moped and the boys’

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mocking chants. Yet such a self-conscious, ‘unnatural’ act of montage draws our attention precisely to the potential of cinematic form, and above all to the absorbing power of music which, when deployed in a particular way, can possess a transformative quality. When the screen goes abruptly black and the credits start to roll down slowly, it is as if all the thematic and narrative elements set in play – restaurant, cité, family drama, suspense, etc. – had now been fully embraced by means of sound, the music serving via montage to transcend differences and divisions and at the same time commemorate the brave and noble ambitions of Slimane and his family. Once again, music – the same chant by Lofti Jormana heard repeatedly throughout La Faute à Voltaire – falls under the sign of the communal, improvisatory and performative, at once free and original. This intricate marrying of sound and image is a formal expression of human love and devotion that, as it were, recuperates Slimane, and it invites us in turn, as with La Faute à Voltaire and L’Esquive, to fill the open frame with positive speculations on what might happen next.30 As well as confounding any expectations of the film’s title (a Ronsard conte would typically move towards a final allegorical message or moral statement), such formal openness and fluidity succeeds, as in the previous two films, in lifting La Graine et le Mulet away from tragedy and despair towards a spirit of resistance, as well as a recognition that everything is still to play for and can surely be achieved. It is because of this that we are once again returned to what is the film’s most vital aspect: its affirmative, expanded cultural frame that is opened up strategically at the end and operates beyond essentialist notions of family or kinship. The film is, after all, about ‘sources’, to be understood literally as fresh ‘springs’ rather than simply as origins or roots, and its one resounding message is to cultivate new social and communal formations through decisive acts of solidarity. The old French boat Source has been reinvented as a multi-ethnic, transgenerational and transcultural space, at once domestic, public, familial, collective and communal. In other words, a vision of France – and space – at its most ‘métissée’. The docked barge may not be moving physically but is in full spiritual and cultural flow, like the endless chatter and unstoppable wave of music produced during the meal that swells the frame with an irresistible depth of sound and energy. For this reason, the film is a tribute not just to Kechiche’s father but also to the many humble, selfless immigrant workers who came to France – a new and alien territory – in search of a better life.

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Open-sourcing the transcultural We have seen how all three films by Kechiche establish new, contingent, social sub-spaces and groupings beyond the officially sanctioned limits of ‘intégration’, whether in the metro and a homeless shelter, an outside stage, or a revamped barge. Each figuration of community presents a fresh and positive start in its particular context (urban co-existence, teenage experience in the cité, provincial small business). Further, by transforming the cinematic frame into an echo-chamber to record the sounds of multicultural France and allow cultural mixité to reverberate, each film creates a shared, hybrid, ‘open frame’ of cultural mediation and re-evaluation. For Kechiche, as for Cantet, sound, in contrast to the visual image, is formally always more autonomous, free and potential, and, as the ending to each film reveals, it becomes the principal vector of métissage. Indeed, it is through oral performance, music and the act of dialogue that Kechiche’s characters can best forge a new and progressive sense of community by coming out of themselves and feeling ‘other’, that is to say, by performing with others and becoming part of something larger and continually evolving, both socially and culturally. This explains why the happiest times in Kechiche’s films are the simple selling of flowers on the metro while reciting Ronsard, or playing in a Marivaux production to a mixed, working-class audience, or participating in the spectacle of a large family meal, or working together to transform a wreck into a floating restaurant. It is part of a generalising, non-essentialising process of self-projection and theatricality, one might even say ‘impurity’, in the manner of Jallel who suffers at the beginning from sexual phobia but gradually learns to accept his ‘indecent’ physical desires. Slimane himself slowly morphs from a dour, sulky and frustrated pater familias into a proud businessman on a mission, positively glowing with hope and energy in the presence of his adoring new ‘daughter’, Rym. The process assumes a negative or tragic tone only when Kechiche’s characters fail to grasp this ideal, like Krimo, or, more usually, are prevented from pursuing it by the forces of the State. In this grass-roots reimagining of the notion of alterity, personal change and development signify collective endeavour and solidarity with others, which, for Kechiche, is always a cause for hope. As he puts it in one interview: ‘In my films, I like it that there is always something about to become. The restaurant will happen one day … For me, hope is conveyed through a group’ (Kechiche 2007b). Hence, the

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fact that Slimane collapses at the end does not diminish the validity or worth of his social-cultural project. We can grasp the full measure of its success if we compare it with what we have already seen in Cantet and Guédiguian: in the former the endings are ambiguous and most often leave a justified feeling of dread; in the latter there is a negative sense of fatalism and ironic inevitability, as if things had already been played out and irrevocably lost. Only in Kechiche do we have an underlying sense, despite the downbeat narrative non-resolutions that bring to an uncertain close the films’ structural frame, that all remains possible. For the excitement of the fresh and youthful, the unheralded and inexhaustible, is projected beyond displacement, dislocation and alienation. The prospect of a new society and culture beckons, since the French urbanscape is now free of its pernicious, overdetermined divisions into intra muros and extra muros, the banlieue and province. The contemporary urban is reborn as the site of promising new encounters – the space of, and for, unforeseen connections and cultural reconfigurations in a slowly emerging, multi-ethnic France. The privileged joyful scenes of communal performance and community in Kechiche’s work are matched formally by those pivotal moments when, as we have seen, his films de-frame themselves climactically by breaching, and subtly subverting, their carefully cultivated frame of cultural sources. What is foregrounded in the generative process of textual displacement is the act of controlled release. Hence, Kechiche is creating not merely a hybrid, postcolonial space – he starts off automatically from this point – but, more vitally, provisional spaces of creative transformation in and through (inter)textual performance. Which is to say, cultural métissage for Kechiche is never idle bricolage or a straightforward mixing of identities and cultures in an abstract postmodern ‘state of in-betweenness’ (Kiwan), but rather an active, ‘organic’ montage of multiple acts and elements instantiated in the filmic present through the play of sound and image. As a formal process of métissage perpetually rehearsed and re-invented in Kechiche’s cinema, this dynamically extends Homi Bhabha’s theory of the ‘interstitial’ (see Bhabha 1994).31 For if it dismisses the importance of origins, it is also absolutely committed to revealing the uniqueness and equivalence of its characters in their specific encounters with language and culture. This is urgent cultural work: the symbols of the Republic are reinvested, reinvigorated and remotivated into something that is more warm, liquid and flowing, and which is never allowed to congeal and reset because it is always in process. To keep the project

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in motion requires also keeping space open and mobile – that is, to invoke again the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, free of ‘the organisations that re-stratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a [re-territorialised] subject … micro-fascisms just waiting to crystallise’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 464–70). Kechiche is always mediating, in fact, the fluid aesthetic space pitched between two very different kinds of political absolute that serve as the epigraphs to this chapter: on the one hand, the ideal of Republican universalism cited ironically at the start of La Faute à Voltaire (‘France, the country of freedom, the country of Voltaire’); on the other, his own, personal view of France expressed during the Arab Spring of 2011: ‘I have a dream that our [=French] suburbs will rise up’ (Kechiche 2011). French cinema becomes, therefore, in Kechiche’s hands a powerful intersubjective and transformative medium. His films actively celebrate the cinematic and serve as a call-to-arms to the viewer to ensure that characters and spaces are finally brought together and united. Even in La Faute à Voltaire, where we are confronted finally with the offensive behind of La Paix, there remains still the anticipation of further spaces to traverse, negotiate and reverse. Kechiche clearly places the responsibility for resolution and change in the lap of the viewer. ‘We’, together, have to work out how to bring characters like Jallel and Krimo back in from the cold into a now redefined and expanded social-cultural frame, and, more generally, how to help create a more supple and egalitarian ‘whole’ into which all the various parts may eventually be placed. In the case of La Graine et le Mulet, we are compelled to link together two seemingly impossible moments and actively imagine the future legacy of the father in the light of the potential success (not just commercial but also social and cultural) of a restaurant venture that brings together all branches of his family and resolutely defies the lingering racism of contemporary France. Indeed, Kechiche’s acts of cinematic form are best conceived as social acts that serve both to reframe and relocate the social-cultural field in France, and, in so doing, reinvent it. Pre-empting any easy co-option of his cinema by the French State as a tactical vehicle to improve relations with its North African community, Kechiche’s practice of social and cultural mixité demands that we respond actively by grasping its multiple strands and begin the hard work of forging new – and as yet unimagined – social and cultural formations and mergings. To employ the vocabulary of computer software, Kechiche may be said to be reprogramming

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the ‘source-codes’ of the French tradition and patrimoine (its texts, images, narratives, symbols) and offering them in turn to his audience for cultural ‘open-sourcing’, that is, as an open-access practice of creative modification and regeneration through direct interfacing with culture(s). What is at stake, ultimately, is to recharge and redistribute a national tradition that has too long been regarded in terms of cultural capital and distinction and experienced as the exclusive property of an indigenous elite. Notwithstanding Kechiche’s own perception of his limited, marginal place in the French cultural world and media, despite his stunning critical and commercial success,32 his project of transcultural reinvestment and resistance, whereby formal acts translate as social acts, inspires a rare optimism for the future of social cohesion in France and a genuine confidence in cinema’s capacity to help advance it. Vénus Noire What then, finally, are we to make of Kechiche’s most recent film, Vénus Noire? For it appears immediately to fragment and scatter the spatial, musical and intertextual coherency of Kechiche’s project by prioritising narrative over space and ultimately flattening it out as a series of dead zones. Indeed, rather ironically in view of the amount of spectacle and performance depicted here with an international cast, there is little or no performativity or reinvention of space, but instead an absolute insistence on all show as demeaning and obscene (etymologically, the place of filth). What may appear on one level an intensification of Kechiche’s visual style (extreme long takes, set-piece sequences evolving into tableaux, etc.) constitutes, in fact, the exact opposite of his spatial practice, since we are presented with simply a catalogue of clichéd and static ‘historical’ spaces: medical amphitheatre, inhuman cage, circus fairground, scientific art studio, tribunal, church altar, aristocratic salon, brothel, even a virtual reality stage-set of early-nineteenth-century Piccadilly. This perpetual closing up of space due to the full, closed frames stuffed with intruding bodies and scenery (there are only odd moments when the camera ‘makes’ space and opens up new communal areas) is also a visual symptom of the rather clunky and predictable use of time in the form of an extended flashback. We begin in Paris in 1815, with Napoléon’s Surgeon General Georges Cuvier inspecting Saartjie Baartman’s genital organs torn from her deceased body, which he pickles along with her brain

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having made a plaster cast of her body, then proceed back in time to 1810 to trace her last tragic years, first in London, then in Paris. We return finally to where we began, with the French doctors and scientists at the dissection table appropriating her dead body for research to confirm their pre-established racist racial theories (a form of social Darwinism avant la lettre).33 Yet over the final credits, we are suddenly fast-forwarded to contemporary times with television images of the day in May 2002 when, following President Nelson Mandela’s formal request to France, Baartman’s remains were finally removed from the Musée de L’Homme in Paris (where her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain had been on display until 1974) and repatriated to her homeland to be properly buried later that year. The cultural drama and political force of these images, conveyed in a reduced format within the frame as if merely ‘for the record’, is strangely minimised. Lost, too, is a sense of the enormity of space and distance of transportation involved from the museum to the newly reborn post-apartheid country of South Africa. Indeed, in sharp contrast to Kechiche’s other work, this is an instance of literal translation and reclamation, i.e. of bodies rather than of culture. In these last few moments the whole political question of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ finally comes into play, but it is too late. The images, diminished in size, even appear redundant because introduced by written captions that provide the final part of the Baartman story. As such, they do no more than extend the pre-staging and pre-establishing tendencies that propel and define the film’s secondary narrative about State order and control. Hence, no real expansion of space is pursued, even in the recent present, to ensure a countervailing spatial poetics of open movement and free thought. Instead, what the film ultimately demonstrates, by negative example, is how tightly interwoven and imbricated is the time-space dyad in cinema, such that a lack of real investment in physical space corresponds to an absence of creative engagement with time, and vice versa. In short, the refusal of space is also the elision of history and politics. Of course, the fatal closing up of cinematic space constitutes part of Kechiche’s conscious strategy to make us empathise directly with the position of his doomed protagonist – an atrophied, alcoholic, destroyed soul, played with remarkable understatement by the young Cuban actress Yaima Torres, who is literally encaged and denied any form of escape. Any new openings and opportunities in her life are quickly and very concretely blocked off. Whereas external space in Kechiche’s

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earlier films was restlessly explored and reconnoitred as a matter of priority to open up new zones of shared agency and readability, here it becomes simply claustrophobic through yet more extreme close-ups, to the extent that Baartman’s oppressed, melancholic space is effectively interiorised as that of the viewer. We have nowhere to turn, at times even to breathe, over the course of two hours and forty minutes of highly uncomfortable and disturbing viewing. Yet at the same time our gaze always remains exterior, for we are never made privy to Saartjie’s personal thoughts or feelings by means of subjective point-of-view shots or a voice-over, and thus remain always at an emotional distance. Again, this is perhaps how it should be: Saartjie Baartman is a tragic yet fundamentally unreadable historical figure who will always remain Other. She is at least granted here the dignity of private, unfathomable thoughts that defy appropriation and manipulation. It is, however, the particular role and position demanded of the spectator in Vénus Noire that has split critics, between those who commend Kechiche’s attempt to force the viewer into submission so that we acknowledge our own capacity for spectatorial voyeurism, and those who regard such a strategy as complicit in the very objectification and abjection the film seeks to expose and decry. For Eugenio Renzi, the effect created is of a numbing and flattening sameness of the gaze, camera movement and field, which is not that of any one character (despite the numerous approximations of point-of-view shot) but rather of the filmmaker himself, and thus, inevitably, the viewer. Kechiche, he argues, simply ‘abuses’ his audience with too many extended and relentless voyeuristic scenes of dehumanisation and degradation (Renzi 2010). Mathieu Macheret goes even further, suggesting that the film takes the form of a trial where the accused is really the spectator, rather than the audiences represented and their multiple viewing spaces which are revealed always to be the same. In short, the world is divided too neatly into two: on the one hand are the racist voyeurs, on the other the inaccessible Saartjie whom Kechiche looks at from the same position he views his public. Yet this also creates an enormous contradiction since the logic of the spectacle is never undermined: like the grotesque, all-too-proximate audiences, the viewer is invited to enjoy fetishistically the ‘monstrous’ beauty and eroticism of this victim-exhibitionist (see Macheret 2010). A more generous and balanced reading of Kechiche’s method is offered by Jean-Michel Frodon, who suggests we are forced to interpellate the nature of our gaze precisely because not all looking is made the

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same in the film due to the powerful mirror-effect of the characters’ gazes on Saartjie. Frodon concludes rightly that Kechiche’s cinema is always interrogating our practice as spectators and attempting to establish what is at stake in the mechanisms of filmic representation, including the codes and transgressions of language and bodily gesture (see Frodon 2010). With a film that operates on such a raw emotional level, the final critical response will no doubt be extremely personal. Yet one thing is clear: Vénus Noire performs an inversion of Kechiche’s cinema of cultural and political optimism as we have defined it, and in so doing constitutes a valuable and highly instructive lesson. In what is effectively a one-dimensional film about the smothering of one individual’s life in the colonial past, it would seem there is nothing immediately political to be gained from a fictionalised historical study of racism conceived primarily in terms of time, rather than initiated by space. Indeed, such a counter-intuitive move on Kechiche’s part is counter-productive. Within the context of Kechiche’s cinematic project, Vénus Noire marks a concerted attempt to redraw the boundaries of his artistic method and practice. It may perhaps reveal itself in time as a brave and radical experiment by a popular auteur trying to divest himself of his own acquired cultural authority, even to the point of alienating his audience.34 The firm hope remains, however, that Kechiche will return once again to the present period to reclaim and reframe the sites of cultural struggle and resistance in contemporary France – an approach which, as we have seen, engages with the entirety of space (geophysical, cinematic, textual, visual, auditory) in new, hybrid, timely and political ways.35 Notes 1 Drôle de Félix tells the story of the journey of a young mixed-race and HIV+ man, Félix (Sami Bouajila), who treks crosses France from Dieppe, where he is happily installed with his white boyfriend, down to Marseilles to track down his biological father with whom he hopes to be reconciled. What counts most for him, and the film, are the people he meets along the way (gay and straight, young and old, white and black/beur) who constitute for him a new, imagined and expanded form of French family that embodies the Republican idea of universality and integration over difference (gender, class, ethnic, sexual orientation). See Williams 2010 for an examination of the symbolic and political dimensions of Félix’s queer journey.

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2 For an excellent, compact and up-to-date account of Maghrebi-French (beur) filmmaking in France, see Higbee 2007, Wagner 2011 and Levine 2008, which provides an incisive overview of the aesthetics of beur/ banlieue filmmaking). 3 One such example of literal transit is Sébastien Lifshitz’s Wild Side (2004) which, with its shifting urban and rural tableaux and occasional glimpses of trans sub-culture, rehearses a transgender, transcultural and transgenerational fantasy of errance featuring a young beur hustler, a Russian immigrant sans-papiers and a transsexual prostitute who form a ménage-à-trois in the rural north of France and return together to the capital wrapped around each other while asleep in the train carriage. See Rees-Roberts 2008: 53–64 for a comprehensive study of this film that both celebrates its attempt to reinvent kinship ‘horizontally’ through the creation of utopian moments promising a new form of commonality and community, yet also critiques its ‘class tourism’, ‘the unfortunate flipside to dissident sexuality’ (ibid.: 64). 4 Rosello shows how in Djebar’s fiction children within the same mixed-race family are engaged in an entirely individual process of fréquentage, or ‘cohabitation’, that is to say, an endless continuation and reinterpretation of the supposedly ‘original encounter’ (Rosello 2005: 73), such that each child becomes ‘the symbol of a different type of relationship with hybridity’ (ibid.: 20). 5 One might consider here the relevance of the term ‘créolisation’, as theorised by French Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau who favour it over métissage to describe contacts between cultures that are specifically located. See in this regard Dawn Fulton’s excellent analysis of creolisation in the work of the French-Algerian writer Leïla Sebbar, which argues that Sebbar’s creation of a ‘palimpsestic’ Parisian landscape is an example of the francophone literature of migration affirming the non-Europeanness of Europe’s centre (Fulton 2007). In other words, it is an ‘interior vision’ that re-centres France’s ‘elsewhere’ in the métropole by inscribing the repressed imperial periphery in the very heart of Paris. By working ‘with’ and from within the centre, Sebbar’s work asserts that the centre is not uniformly European but creole, plural, contradictory. I will argue that the acts of textual and linguistic performance in Kechiche’s cinema similarly direct our attention to new forms of ‘creolised’ Europeanisation. 6 For Kiwan, alterity in the contemporary Francophone postcolonial context is best harnessed as ‘a subaltern mode of resistance and protest’ (Kiwan 2009: 10). She argues that the ongoing process of engagement with a subjective mode of alterity implies movement within a space that engenders simultaneous resistance to discourses of universalism which deny differences, and to discourses of particularism which overstate such differences.

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7 For a fine account of the developing pan-European genre of clandestine immigration that includes Vincenzo Marra’s Tornando a casa (2001) and Montxo Armendáriz’s Las cartas de Alou (1990), see Berger and Winkler 2008. While stressing the commonalities of transnational and trans-European migrant cinema, they highlight the different ideological approaches taken to transnational space, exploring in turn places of transit and border crossing, instances of the non-lieu as theorised by Marc Augé; ‘private’ spaces, places of residence and the workplaces of the clandestinos; transitory places (in Michel de Certeau’s sense of the term) for fleeting encounters, such as boulevards in city centres, old (tourist) harbours, and beaches, all of which acquire new and different connotations in the migration context; and finally the Mediterranean sea which features prominently in films about illegal immigration from Spain, Italy and France. 8 When republished in 1997, Ben Jelloun added a preface in which he explores the theoretical notion of hospitality with reference to Emmanuel Levinas’s Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité (1961). 9 For Derrida, of course, the ‘space’ of hospitality is an aporia, since genuine hospitality, which ideally requires giving up everything that we seek to possess and all we own (and to do this before any number of unknown others), is not a possible scenario, even though the idea of hospitality depends upon this altruistic concept. To offer hospitality is thus to be aware that the Other may ruin ‘my space’, and, in its purest form, requires non-mastery and the abandoning of all claims to property or ownership. Like the gift, absolute hospitality is thus a figure for unconditionality in Derrida: it could never be politically or juridically instituted, yet remains to be considered a condition of possiblity of hospitality in the more limited sense of the right to asylum, the right to immigration and citizenship rights, and even cosmoplitian right in the Kantian sense. See Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000. 10 With the character Franck Kechiche is tapping directly into French popular culture, for Lochet is most famous for his role as a stereotypical character from the area of La Sarthe in the long-running TV series, Les Deschiens. 11 Other directors include Jean Odoutan (Benin), Zeka Laplaine (Congo), and Cheik Doukouré (Guinea), whose films, as John Orr has argued, explore France as an Africanised transnational space and operate a time-space compression which shows that the city can no longer be viewed as a tangible entity with distinct boundaries (see Orr 2000: 137). They are informed by, or intercut with, discussions about memories of, or communication with Africa, and invite the viewer to make connections between people and events, and to retain some faith in the possibility of human empathy and agency. For Carrie Tarr, they denounce racism but

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offer a specific critique of the after-effects of French colonialism, while providing a more positive vision of Paris as a multi-layered transnational space than, say, Michael Haneke’s highly ambivalent postmodern portrayal of multiracial Paris in films like Code Inconnu/Code Unknown (2000) (see Tarr 2007a: 75). 12 The full title of L’Escarpolette is Les Hasards heureux de l’escarpolette, again emphasising the play of love and chance so important to Kechiche. In narrative terms, this image comes shortly after the scene with Antonio who wanted to sleep with Lucie for 20 francs. Lucie, who sleeps with everyone yet is now pregnant, was first introduced as la profiteuse, as ‘disponible’ (‘available’) as the married woman who is showing her genitalia to a nobleman in the Fragonard painting. 13 Compare with the métro which transmutes from an image of solitude and disarray, first into a space of professional and conjugal blossoming, then into the jaws of a police trap. 14 Kechiche recruited young amateur actors in the Seine-Saint-Denis département and tracked them closely on film with a digital camera for six weeks in the area around the concrete tower blocks where they grew up. 15 The film’s generic fluidity has been underlined by Tarr who presents it as part teen-romance, part coming-of-age film, part comedy of manners, part high-school movie, and part variation on the beur and banlieue film (Tarr 2007b: 133). 16 As Daniela Berghahn notes, the organisation of space according to generation and gender in banlieue films was clearly established by the first beur film, Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (1985) (dir. Mehdi Charef), where the spaces of diasporic domesticity are marked as feminine: mothers cook, clean and nurture, and sisters help with the domestic work. Whilst the first-generation father is usually confined to the domestic sphere, boys and young men are given relatively free rein outside. Daughters have found themselves, therefore, occupying a liminal position between the domestic and public spheres. See Berghahn 2012. 17 Compare this poetic and utopian vision of cultural appropriation with Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s 1978 work for television, France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants, directly influenced by the work of Deleuze, which investigates in close-up how a young boy and girl are ideologically programmed and inscribed by the mass media into the Republican system (the title is inspired by the classic nineteenth-century education manual by G.  Bruno, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877)). 18 As Vinay Swamy explains, Marivaux was often himself chastised by his contemporaries, such as the philosopher d’Alembert, for the strangeness of his neologisms divorced from everyday language. He was deemed to be sinning against good taste and the French language by bringing in

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expressions such as tomber amoureux de quelqu’un (rather than se rendre amoureux) (see Swamy 2007: 60). 19 Kechiche states in the same interview that, as a first name, ‘Lydia’ does not belong to any one specific culture and thus has universal currency. 20 A rather more critical view of the use of language in L’Esquive is taken by Michel Chion, who sees it as ultimately endorsing the teacher’s fatalistic discourse on language as permanently linked to one’s social condition. The pupils develop no real critical reflexivity about language in general and will thus remain condemned to simply reproducing banlieue-speak. Chion suggests that Kechiche’s work itself suffers from a recurring emphasis on submission due to his particular conception of naturalism and truth (e.g. Kechiche’s preference for improvised dialogue). See Chion 2008: 162–7. 21 In works like Droit de cité (1998), Balibar seeks to rearticulate the nationstate in the context of inner and outer borders, arguing that the latter have to be made porous and allow people to circulate. His notion of droit de cité suggests a right of entry and residency of foreigners and, in particular, of immigrants in the diversity of collective situations and individual trajectories covered by this term – a term that subtends and initiates citizenship. 22 Compare Krimo’s silent fate with that of the aggressive Balou in Le Thé au harem d’Archimède where, in a flashback sequence, he is shown to have been badly failed by the education system due to an abusive alcoholic teacher, paving the way to his marginalisation and exclusion and a future career as pimp. 23 See Williams 2006: 56–62 for an account of the film that places it in its aesthetic, historical and political context. 24 In a fertile discussion of soundscapes and what he calls ‘displaced audio’ in Maghrebi-French filmmaking, Higbee uses the theoretical term ‘heteroglossia’ to account for the degree of interplay or ‘creolisation’ of languages and competing voices (accents, vernaculars, and dialects) identified by generation, ethnicity and gender. See Higbee 2009: 232. 25 I am drawing here directly on Daniela Berghahn’s excellent study of gender, generation and the production of locality in recent cinematic representations of the diasporic family, including that of La Graine et le Mulet, which refers to the social-cultural anthropology of Arjun Appadurai (Berghahn 2012). For Appadurai, the world of places has now been supplanted by a world of global flows or shifting landscapes (mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes etc.) and transnationally mobile people whose group identities have assumed a nonlocalised quality (Appadurai 2001: 48). As Berghahn shows, in diasporic families the sons and daughters often challenge patriarchal authority by engaging in alternative ‘localityproducing’ activities by which they align themslves ultimately with the value system and lifestyle of Western majority culture. 26 As Isabelle McNeill shows in her study of Benguigui’s project to imagine

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new spaces, enracinement includes the idea that an image can become a small stone to build the edifice which is memory. Yet the goal of enracinement also requires that the process of remembering be shared by filmmakers, the community and viewers beyond that community. McNeill writes: ‘Through the audiovisual representation of home-spaces, the films invite spectators to participate as guests in the collective remembering of marginalised members of French society. In this invitation we see film’s power to negotiate a sense of shared space and belonging’ (McNeill 2011: 24). 27 ‘[U]n morceau flottant d’espace, un lieu sans lieu, qui vit par lui-même, qui est fermé sur soi et qui est livré en même temps à l’infini de la mer.’ 28 It might also be argued that the end of La Graine et le Mulet unfolds in Christian terms as a version of the Last Supper with the ascent to Golgotha, sacrifice, and delaying of the meal. This would require, however, a separate study devoted to religious symbolism in Kechiche’s work. 29 As Ginette Vincendeau has pointed out, while the film celebrates women’s dynamism in comparison with ineffectual men, it also has problems constructing their identity outside traditional myths of femininity. For example, Souad and Latifa are always pitted against each other vying for Slimane’s affection, while the desperate wife Julia becomes just a screaming fury (Vincendeau 2008: 47). In this regard Kechiche’s work has progressed very little from his severely limited treatment of the female characters in La Faute à Voltaire, which presented Lucie as an obsessive nymphomaniac, Nassera as a deceiving wench, and Leïla as merely weak and complaint. A more complete study of Kechiche’s work than is possible here would require a thorough critique of his treatment of gender and sexuality. 30 I have deliberately avoided here saying that Slimane dies, since nothing is conclusive in the final frame. Hence, while I agree with Higbee that the ending offers a more honest portrayal of multiculturalism and intercultural exchange as a work in progress in contemporary France (perhaps for the first time in Maghrebi-French filmmaking the possibility for difference, and the spaces that such difference makes, can be celebrated, critiqued and explored as part of a French national and not solely ‘immigrant’ cinema (Higbee 2011: 228)), I take issue with his wish to overdetermine the film’s meaning. The film ends on a deliberate note of doubt and uncertainty, since pure knowledge and facts are continually subordinated in Kechiche to the more important issues of empathy, understanding and contingency. 31 Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’ of enunciation, referred to in Chapter 1, becomes powerfully concrete and real in Kechiche, for as a process of revision and rearticulation his films play with time and produce different forms of time-lag (décalage) that suspend narrative time (bureaucratic, legal, institutional) and open up the cinematic field to create potential new

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spaces (see Bhabha 1989). Compare this with Bhabha’s idea of how ‘Nation’ is constructed of ‘double time’, i.e. two types of time in the process of enunciation: one fixed and mythical (the myth of eternal origins), the other a space for negotiating new cultural demands, resistances, the time of undecidability, the time of liberation (the time of transformations) (see Bhabha 1994: 199–244). 32 Kechiche describes La Faute à Voltaire as a ‘flop’ because afterwards he received neither an advance nor funding of any kind to make L’Esquive and La Graine et le Mulet, although the former benefited from the support of the Centre National de la Cinématographie once made, and the latter was produced by a major player in the French film industry, the late Claude Berri, for Pathé. 33 Saartjie Baartman was an African born in 1789 from the Khoisan Tribe and the slave of a Dutch farmer. She was called the Hottentot Venus because that was the term used by white settlers to deride those of the Quena tribe, now Khoisan. Distinguished by her large buttocks and elongated labia (the famous ‘Hottentot Curtain’) characteristic of some Khoisan women, she went with the brother of her slave owner on an exhibition, a ‘Freak’ Tour in England, with the promise of a wealthy future. She was then sold to a Frenchman who took her to France, where an animal trainer, Réaux, exhibited her under more pressured conditions for fifteen months. An entertainement attraction across Britain and France from 1810 to 1815, she became towards the end of her life the subject of several scientific paintings at the Jardin du Roi, where she was examined in March 1815 by the anatomist Georges Cuvier in the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle. She continued to drink heavily and supported herself with prostitution in a brothel and then in the streets. She died of an undetermined inflammatory ailment on 29 December, 1815, possibly syphilis or tuberculosis. Kechiche has changed the historical account slightly (Saartjie was much older than 25 in 1810, for instance) for obvious dramatic reasons, though by straying from the record, Kechiche, it may be argued, forces her to become something she would surely have shied away from, i.e. a representative of racial maltreatment, and thus a symbol rather than a person. 34 Compared with the extraordinary box-office run of La Graine et le Mulet, the film found only a limited audience in France: just 122,000 entries in two weeks. 35 As I write Kechiche has just completed filming an adaptation of Julie Maroh’s celebrated graphic novel, Le bleu est une couleur chaude (2010), starring Léa Seydoux as a young girl discovering her homosexuality.

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6 Beyond the Other: grafting space and human relations in the trans-cinema of Claire Denis Space and being in contemporary French cinema

The trans-cinema of Claire Denis

Whenever you make an incursion into a space, that space is altered … memory leaves a mark… and this mark leaves a mark on the body. (M. Monnier in Vers Malthilde). Even the pleasure of framing the image isn’t sufficient. Desire for the cinema ought to go beyond the frame, towards meaning. It should be a desire for a relationship with others. (C. Denis)

Space/passage/threshold The freewheeling, nomadic intensities of Claire Denis’s films are among the marvels of contemporary cinema. Consistent across more than ten feature length films (and as many shorts and documentaries) over a period of thirty years, Denis’s prodigious cinema of drift and dispersal reveals an extraordinary attention to space and landscape. Extending Manny Farber’s dictum that in modern cinema ‘[a] story must … develop by moving into a more complex space, rather than by perpetually reiterating the same space’ (Farber 1999: 45), Denis puts into circulation a continually shifting and proliferating array of natural, social and cultural spaces, from primal, oceanic regions to new, multi-ethnic, urban frontiers. She has been particularly focused on landscape as raw expanse, with extreme wide-angle shots underlining the immensity of the land and humankind’s desperate and often hopeless attempts to control and civilise it. In the dexterous hands of her regular Director of

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Photography, Agnès Godard, the camera directs the viewer, tentatively and imperturbably, to untameable landscapes and the natural elements, involving us in a tense drama of sound, silence and scale. No site is fixed or unitary or fully knowable, rendering the environment more an expanding series of intermediate border zones. Indeed, Denis’s approach to external space bears out exactly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essential idea that the world is defined by intractable mystery and lies on the hither side of all solutions (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xxiii). Space is the underlying drama in Denis’s work, for all her protagonists are suspended in a kind of spatial crisis or limbo yet seek, whether consciously or unconsciously, a new, existential relationship with the immanent world. Rather than simply engage with other humans (a necessary and crucial first stage), they are impelled to negotiate and transform their concrete experience of physical space and spatial relations. They emerge as if organically from – and into – the spaces where they are temporarily implanted or happen to be crossing through, making human displacement and marginality the privileged loci of her materialist cinema. These fragile characters are ultimately searching for a new organic way of being in the world, and of becoming at one with the world, in order to make sense of their lives. Denisian space thus probes the very depths of being and extends far deeper than in the work of the other filmmakers we have studied, where the sustaining vision of identity or community is still viewed primarily in terms of pre-existing human relations. A permanent sense of exteriority and incommensurability lies at the root of Denis’s practice of otherness, justly celebrated by critics, where strangeness is revealed within the familiar, including the self. In short, Denis is attempting nothing less than a remapping and reimagining of human relations in space and the environment. She explores in concrete detail the different ways people inhere in the world: the forms and patterns of human movement, the gestures of the human figure in space.1 Hence, her ethnographic interest in the workings of distinct sub-cultures and communities at particular moments in time. The 1994 short, US Go Home, set in the outer Paris banlieue during the mid-1960s (the last years of US military presence in post-Second World War bases), reveals adolescent life in these newly built urban zones as a borderline, transitional state. The film exemplifies Denis’s method of establishing place before story, often depicting an initial journey towards the location where the main action is due to take place. A long, documentary-style pan accompanied by an explanatory

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voice-over sets the geographical context at the start, moving very deliberately from green countryside and hills to views of a highway alongside housing units still under construction (the ironically named ‘Wild Irises’). The camera then tracks a still undefined space, a literal ‘terrain vague’, the unfinished, hybrid state of which matches exactly the state between childhood and adulthood. So close and symbiotic, in fact, is the intermittent relationship between humans and habitat in Denis that they achieve a kind of osmosis, to the point, paradoxically, that they cannot be imagined anywhere else. Moreover, if the human body is sometimes presented like a landscape, stretched out in extreme close-up like a new territory to be reconnoitred (in Denis, white characters often have place-names as first names like ‘France’ and ‘Ardennes’), the landscape itself can appear a human body, with Godard’s camera gently combing it to reveal its carnal and (meta) physical secrets. As Emma Wilson suggests, Denis teases out the interlayerings of body, surface and territory: the wasteland in Trouble Every Day (2001), for instance, resembles human skin with hair-like blades of grass, and the ground is awash with yellowish light (Wilson 2005: 221). Within Denis’s prismatic engagement with space, the image itself becomes, as Laura McMahon writes, essentially indeterminate and incomplete, gesturing always through the use of off-screen space (the hors-champ) to that which lies outside itself (McMahon 2008b: 75). Denied suture through conventional formations of shot/counter-shot that would normally recapture off-screen space and bring it back into the closed filmic system, the image is pushed, as it were, outside of itself and subjected to spatial dislocations, decentrings and deframings that expose the misaligned seams of montage. Denis’s releasing of non-diegetic space and creation of porous borders is possible precisely because she hews out physical openings (or brèches) in time, slowing down, elongating and even suspending the flow of time in order to foreground the nature and conditions of space. Bifurcated and splintered, space and time become for Denis a completely relative matter: the next shot could take place literally anywhere, and at any time, so further fragmenting and scattering plot. As a result of such fluid, changing perceptions, neither space nor time is ever just ‘there’ in Denis, but always part of an intense poetic process that encompasses formal and represented spaces, at once vividly concrete and verging on abstraction. The strange, ‘unnatural’ compositions that are produced feed into the dilated, ominous pace of her films, which have a primeval,

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gravitational pull, amplified by the looping, instrumental rhythms of her regular music collaborators, the British band Tindersticks, and the dry vocal delivery of her actors. Tempos and rhythms mutate as new states of being come into play and take over, for instance, the overpowering urges of violent human and animalistic desire, even cannibalism, in Trouble Every Day. As Vincent Malausa puts it in relation to L’Intrus/The Intruder (2004), the effect is of ‘recyclable surfaces of memory, layers of space-time superimposed to infinity’ (Malausa 2005: 44).2 For this reason, it may be better to speak of space in Denis in terms of ‘passage’, which is at once a physical place, an active movement (traversal), and a passive state (of being), with poetic and even metaphysical resonances. I’m thinking in particular of Mary Ann Caws’s formulation of the term ‘metapoetics of the passage’ in modern poetry (specifically Surrealism) to convey the shifting ‘architextures’ of meaning, where passage is simultaneously an ‘architextural’ image, a state of mind, and a rhetorical structure.3 The reader, like the viewer in Denis’s cinema, is placed perpetually on the move as an active and fully alert passenger (see Caws 1981). Watching a Denis film is an exhilarating spectactorial experience, not only of defamiliarisation and estrangement but also, as many critics have testified, of embodied perception, sensation and synaesthesia. Indeed, with its labile, animate spaces subject to a kinetic play of competing rhythms and vibrations, and its coalescent forms and spasms of colour matching the deterritorialised forms of desire in the narrative, Denis’s work is ripe for Deleuzian analysis. Focusing on the affective flows and charges of Denis’s cinema which overwhelm situations where space and time are no longer reliable or determinate, Martine Beugnet talks eloquently of ‘a cinema of the senses’ creating an interspace between the sensuous and cerebral, the tactile and the narrative (see Beugnet 2004 and 2007). Elena Del Rio argues for the films’ ‘kinaesthetic seductions’ due to their multi-sensory performance, exemplary, she claims, of Deleuze’s notion of cinema as a spiritual automatism and, more generally, of his philosophy of intense, ‘incorporeal’ materialism (see Del Rio 2003a and 2008: 148–77).4 Certainly, the Denis viewer is propelled into an intermediate spectatorial space that offers an astonishing range of haptic and chromatic expression, from the most intimate touch to the most obscure of visions. Human figures are conveyed as external surface phenomena, but often with such close and extreme intensity that it is as if the exterior were being reversed into something interior. This is the point

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where the landscape becomes a potential mindscape, yet, unlike in Bruno Dumont’s cinema with its grid of reverse-field constructions, it is never formalised or motivated but rather left as a continuous, open, virtual, process of infinite possibility and spatial freedom. As Adrian Martin observes, everybody in Denis’s work is in motion, literally or metaphorically adrift and dancing, and all is grasped on the cusp between the now emerging and the still-immersed (see Martin 2006). The result is a cinema of divagation and deambulation, of delocalisation and dissolution, but with little nostalgia for the original pieces left rolling in the incessant wash. Every space appears liminal, contingent and transitional, and every new, ‘frontier’ image possesses the luminous status of a vision, or dream, or poetic ‘illumination’. Indeed, every visual and aural threshold carries the promise of a potential new state and modality of being. Hence, our encounter with space in a Denis film can generate both tension and awe, and is never less than momentous. To gain a concrete sense of some of the profound spatial implications and possibilities of Denis’s work, and in particular of the aesthetic and political stakes of her particular practice of framing, let us look briefly at her first film, Chocolat (1988). It is set in the northern mountainous region of Mindif, a province of Upper North Cameroon, as well as on the southern coast, between Douala and Limbé, and the inland capital of Yaoundé. The opening sequence begins when a near-monochromatic, still-frame image of a coastal beach is re-animated into motion, triggering, as a black father plays with his young son in the waves and they move eventually left out of frame, a slow 180º pan to the right that takes us inland towards a young white woman sitting on the beach observing them (she will remain in long-shot). The sequence immediately raises the questions of point of view, of open and closed space, and the correct method (if it exists) of framing reality. It also plays with audience expectation. In the following scene when the woman (Mireille Perrier) later bumps into the father (Emmet Judson Williamson) and son on the open road, it quickly transpires that she, though called France Dalens, is from Africa, whilst he, Mungo Park, is African-American, thus putting the transparency and logic of racial/ cultural identity directly into question. All the film’s highly stylised poetic compositions and deframings of cinematic space will expose the racist presuppostions of colonial space and work to de-essentialise racial difference. Indeed, Chocolat interrogates colonial spatial politics – the fundamental issue of who is allowed to move where and when

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through the often invisible lines of power and segregation – by consistently addressing who ‘controls’ the frame. The open front door of the colonial villa, for example, through which the large volcanic mountain ‘La Dent de Mindif’ (Mindif’s Tooth) is often framed in the background, is also the door which the domestic boy Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), who plays a maternal and paternal role for the young France in the extended colonial flashback, is impelled to close after refusing the sexual advances of his Master’s wife, Aimée (Giulia Boschi) (an act of deference towards colonial authority for which he will pay with his job). With its Republican flags defiling the natural environment, the villa is presented as artificial and merely temporary, and continually contrasted with the barren yellow heat and dust of the bush, as well as the rains and waves of the ocean. The colonial administrator Marc Dalens (François Cluzet) states he will build larger roads, part of the colonial delusion of total control over the land which is permanently undermined by the omnipresent ants. Yet he also recognises during a conversation with his young daughter France that the closer one gets to the horizon, the more it flees the eye. We could go further into the politics of colonial space here, but this is just one dimension of a film that, like so much of Denis’s work, continually de/re-frames itself in order to open up spatially to difference. One of the defining and originary moments in her oeuvre – indeed, a virtual primal scene – occurs at the end of Chocolat when we are offered a new postcolonial vision of black identity and brotherhood. Leaving the adult France in the airport as she waits to board and gazes attentively off-screen into the distance, the camera cuts to the three black luggage-handlers on their break, one of whom is Isaach de Bankolé. After being enclosed within space during the colonial narrative – as when forced to sit on the back of Marc’s pick-up, his face enframed by the back-window – he is now autonomous and ‘unbound’. To the jaunty African jazz beats and rhythms of the South African musician and composer Abdullah Ibrahim on the soundtrack, the camera slowly motions forward and frames the trio within the columns of the over-pass. Then, once these same columns have been stripped back to the edges of the frame and the field ahead (both literal and figurative) has been opened up, the signs of modern Africa now visible in the far-background, the camera stops at a respectful distance simply to record the gestures of three men in the middle-distance enjoying being together, chatting, smiling, gesticulating, tapping each other, joking, even casually urinating, as the rain

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24.  With the concrete columns of the overpass now pushed to the limits of the frame, the forward-tracking camera stops to record Isaach de Bankolé (centre) and his fellow baggage-handlers opening up to the world in front of them and off-screen in the extraordinary final long-take of Chocolat (1988).

and light come and go behind and in front of them. They remain dry under the now invisible over-pass above them, which provides a natural stage-set for their performance of male camaraderie. During this entire extended long-take – a magnificent plan-séquence which also creates a remarkable sense of deep space – we hear nothing of the men’s personal conversation. These present-day Cameroonians exist together, with and for themselves, beyond the concrete and ideological frame of the Other, a set of power relations in which the European spectator, interpellated by the cinematic apparatus, is necessarily implicated. Shared public space is presented here as a kind of human refuge and functions in the cinematic present as the site of a social ritual focused around the body in performance. This is an extraordinary moment, and its significance is worth spelling out in the clearest possible terms: Denis is formally stripping back the ideological frame of the Other (Blacks perceived as different and other within a White gaze), and in the very process opening up the cinematic frame to reveal the visible world. To deframe and reframe the Other in Denis is simultaneously to ‘unframe’ and embrace the world. Yet does this rare glimpse of a shared, communal space, where space is

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envisioned as a site of passage and threshold to new, provisional forms of male intimacy, represent also a new postcolonial state of being? Put a little differently, does it gesture towards an ‘open’, relational space – a potential space of mutuality – where new forms of being still to be defined might eventually emerge? Andrew Asibong has carefully traced Denis’s ‘flickering spaces of intimacy’ and solidarity – those fleeting moments when postcolonial subjects try almost against the odds to create a sense of proximity and belonging (familial, sexual, or otherwise). This is a highly complex and charged process, further complicated by factors ranging from race and nationality to gender, class, sexual preference and age. Asibong highlights in particular those unexpected, ephemeral instances of unnameable intimacy between (normally white) women and (usually black) men which offer a physically expressed, vaguely post-social transformation of the oppressive social space they both inhabit – a space that serves as a new womb-like shelter of protection and hospitality, with the woman reborn as a new daughter and acceptable guest, and the man ‘re-embroidered’ as a nurturing, post-colonial mother-father (or sometimes the reverse) (see Asibong 2009 and 2011). Examples include the love-scene between Léo and his cannibal wife Coré in Trouble Every Day, when he washes the blood from her limp body (‘an act that bears witness to the couple’s unbearably generous kinship’ (Asibong 2009:110)), and the celebrated quasi-mystical café scene in J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (1993), when the Lithuanian Daïga (Katerina Golubeva) grazes ever so slightly, and erotically, the fingers of the Martinican serial killer Camille (Richard Courcet) in shadowy close-up as he reaches across the bar before exiting the frame. While in broad agreement with Asibong’s ultimately guarded embrace of such snatches of ‘unspeakable’, pseudo-parental intimacy,5 I would argue that they form part of a much wider engagement by Denis with space and alterity that can only be understood within the context of (inter)textual relations. For while Denis is an exceptional exponent of external, physical space, she is also one of the most literary of contemporary auteurs, who continually deploys new forms of ‘internal’, intertextual space. Open to all forms of international collaboration (viz. her long and fertile collaboration with Tindersticks), her work is generated organically by the heat of intertextual energy. Her working method is an ongoing, composite process of authorial translation and theoretical mediation that taps directly into a vast cinematic and artistic wellspring, such that each film forms part of a dense, transhistorical,

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literary, musical and cinematic weave. This only half-buried network of fictional/intertextual connections and operative influences adds to the seductive mystery of Denis’s work. In the case of Chocolat, the film engages to varying degrees with Ferdinand Oyono’s landmark 1956 novel about colonial relations, Une Vie de boy/House-Boy, as well as Doris Lessing’s classic novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), a psychological tale set in colonial Rhodesia and featuring a white heroine, as well as loose strands and echoes of Joseph Conrad.6 Denis’s formal negotiation of cinematic space constitutes, in fact, a complex rhetorical and textual engagement with a principally masculine realm of influence and mystery. Indeed, she conceives of the artistic process as a direct encounter with the cinematic screen viewed as intrinsically masculine and fundamentally sexual in nature, hence a locus of potentially violent desire and passion.7 For this reason, the filmic in Denis is always most profoundly the textual and erotic. As an active and transformative process, intertextuality in Denis’s work may be compared, at least initially, to Mikhail Iampolski’s theory of filmic intertextuality, where a chain of transparent, mimetic fragments is intermixed with quotations or ‘textual anomalies’ that challenge the normalisation of meaning, obstruct mimesis and seek to open reading out to the unlimited field of cultural history (he cites the particular examples of Griffith, Buňuel and Eisenstein) (see Iampolski 1998). For Iampolski, who, like Denis, always approaches the intertextuality as process rather than as end-result, these quotations are transformed in the operations of semiosis which he defines as reading in an aura of enigma and as producing labyrinthine movements of meaning. Meanings sabotage each other, he suggests, creating a bottomless semantic funnel typical of all ‘constructions en abîme’ (ibid.: 47). Something equivalent is at work in Denis’s films which similarly unfold as a series of intertextual tropings at a number of levels, both narrative and formal, and open up to new networks of textual association and filiation (what Iampolski calls a new ‘Third Text’). These ‘internal’, intertextual spaces operate not only in concert and tension with Denis’s exploration of liminal spaces, states and sensations, but also as their very condition and possibility for representation. It is not just that the two processes go hand in hand: without the first the second is simply not feasible. Indeed, a central tension and double movement defines Denis’s work balanced always between two conflicting movements: one centrifugal (its drift and cosmic pull – the point from which Denis invariably starts), and the other centripetal

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(its internal, intertextual workings). The more formal intertextual depth there is, the more possibility there exists for the navigation of visual and external space. Hence, to return to the term ‘passage’ that ranges from the physical to the textual, musical and relational (as in an exchange or negotiation between two people): it may be said to apply to all levels in Denis’s work, which has an underlying ambition to orchestrate very different kinds of ‘other’ space into an all-embracing space of mutual otherness. Yet how exactly does this interplay of different types of space and landscape relate to the fragile and charged, often ravaged, human relations that play out at the level of narrative, where issues of lineage and filiation are often left uncertain and ambiguous? That is to say, what types of interrelation exist between these different spaces and surfaces in a cinema founded on narrative parentheses and modes of non-progression, or what Janet Bergstrom sums up neatly as Denisian ‘opacity’ (see Bergstrom 2003)? Put another way, how do the visual, narrative, intertextual, spatial and sexual come together exactly in Denis’s work? In what follows I hope to demonstrate that Denis works through the opacity of otherness precisely by creating yet further opacity at a formal, textual level. In all instances we are dealing with relational space, whereby intertextual networks and family relations or kinships mutually reflect and refract each other. This is a material process of violent intrusion and transformation of cinematic space where, as I will argue, at key, erotic, intermedial turning-points, when different modes of passage are juxtaposed and intersect, formal violence sublimates ‘real’ violence and transfigures the relational other (character, intertext) in a new spectatorial interspace of theory and audiovisual play (‘spectator’, from the Greek ‘theoreos’). Focusing first on Beau Travail (2000) and L’Intrus, Denis’s most complete and perfectly realised experiments in cinematic being through and across form, and then examining some of the pivotal moments of spatial ‘translation’ and reframing of otherness in her subsequent work up to and including White Material (2010), I will suggest that interior intertextual space is not simply a conceptual sphere of her cinema, but also a uniquely performative and sensuous, trans-aesthetic space that operates in the cinematic present as a generative cell for the negotiation and potential (if only temporary) ‘resolution’ of external space and otherness. At the core of this process is Denis’s ethicoaesthetic practice of deframing the Other in order to unframe and so celebrate the external world. My ultimate aim will be to establish

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space in Denis’s multi-cinema as a powerful means for understanding the very materiality of being. Trans-space: new grafts, new relations Set in the present, mainly in Djibouti (the last French colony in Africa to gain independence, in 1977), Beau Travail, a commission for the ARTE television series Terres Étrangères, transports the viewer to a shifting series of foreign spaces. From the beginning, when we travel on the railway between Addis-Ababa and Djibouti city, the geography of the landscape is clearly mapped out. The unit of the French Foreign Legion, under the command of the chef de corps Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), is initially located along the coastlines before it then decamps to an arid plateau overlooking the sea and facing three volcanic formations rising out of the water, as if landlocked by the turquoise sea. There is a tangible sense here of the inhospitable torrid climate and the landscape’s harsh materiality. As Susan Hayward has suggested, the landscape will act as an unremitting foil to the unsubstantial, transcendent, lost (post)colonial body of the Foreign Legion and become therefore a metaphor for its dislocation (Hayward 2010: 174).8 In such terrain, it is difficult for the postcolonial body to assert a clear sense of identity and sexuality: the legion is revealed moving aimlessly through a misunderstood and barren landscape, walking from right to left, in parallel with the horizon, in a frieze-like effect that flouts depth of field. Moreover, the soldiers are filmed at length performing endless manoeuvres and building roads to nowhere alongside existing lines of communication. Galoup (Denis Lavant) will later take his men off to Lac Goubet, a seawater loch known as the ‘Pit of Demons’ where, according to locals, the eternal mountains are the home of evil spirits. With its hostile, calcified plains, this postcolonial landscape is littered with the concrete debris of war and colonialism, and at times the colour of the claustrophobically filmed lakes is a lurid, ghastly green – thick, dark, congealing. If I begin by foregrounding the different physical environments of the film, it is because the film delineates them so acutely. The first words by Galoup on the voice-over referring to the right angle of attack in his account of events reflects this geometrical precision, in particular the disposition of male gazes in series, whereby Galoup scrutinises Forestier observing Sentain. In this extended force-field of mis-matched vision, the external landscape imposes itself forcefully

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in the present. It is the same later when we see Galoup back in cold, wintry Marseilles after being forced to leave the Legion in disgrace. Denis shows him staring moodily into the distance as he walks towards the harbour of the Vieux-Port, rides the tram through alien concrete panoramas, or mopes around in desolate municipal housing. Galoup’s second sentence: ‘Marseilles, end of February. I have time ahead of me [devant] now’, conveys this non-time spatially: we are effectively seeing Marseilles from the point of view of the volcanic mountain landscape in Djibouti. Denis is brilliant at juxtaposing such different spaces with their own distinctive temporalities and putting them into critical relation with each other. Indeed, the film presents a drama of different spatio-temporal states and liminal zones – literal and metaphorical borderlands where natives and aliens, ‘guests’ and ‘intruders’, cohabit uneasily. Beugnet and Sillars have demonstrated that the initial pull of Beau Travail is towards a timeless, mythical space: that of the obsolescent Legion with its ideals of universality and assimilation based on an epic transcendence of the individual self and the collective myth of the French nation. This symbolic realm is free-floating, unanchored in space and time, cyclical and repetitive, but it will eventually be reframed literally through a widening of the visual frame which opens up ‘the space of history – situated, local and specific’ (Beugnet and Sillars 2001: 172–3). How exactly do the legionnaires relate to the African space? Unlike the indigenous peoples and nomads who are omnipresent and stand out against the landscape, they ironically blend into it due to their greeny brown camouflage clothing which matches the volcanic environment. Indeed, as Douglas Morrey suggests, the soldiers seem at the beginning to emerge organically from the landscape in much the same way as the shrubs. A subsequent cut showing the play of light over bright blue sea water establishes the film’s non-hierarchical visual register, in which human beings seem to have no greater claim to the image than other elements of the décor (Morrey 2008: 12). As Morrey puts it, the non-anthropocentric focus of Denis’s mise-en-scène casts the legionnaires as primarily ‘bodies in a landscape, bodies in, or as, space’ (ibid.: 13). In fact, the film puts into play a set of opposing movements and entities: male soldiers/female locals, Sentain/Galoup, vertical/horizontal, the open, deserted communal space of Djibouti/ the restricted urban and domestic space of Marseilles, the solitary figure of Galoup/the unit acting in unison, the tracking of impersonal, indifferent space/Galoup’s individual plotting of memory and the past,

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and crucially, as we shall see, verbal narration/visual space. These formal tensions come to a head, literally and graphically, in a charged face-off when, in a duel of fixed stares, the legionnaires, organised around Sentain on one side and Galoup on the other, circle in towards each other, spiral by spiral (Denis talks of this process as akin to the ‘ jeu de l’oie’ (‘goose game’), an old French board game where one proceeds from outside to inside via concentric circles). Yet another set of more formal tensions is at work in the film that is directly linked to this complex spatial drama and dictates its unfolding. The opening words by Galoup just cited are paradoxically the last words spoken by an earlier manifestation of Bruno Forestier, played by a younger Michel Subor, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963). Subor stated at the end there: ‘Now all that remained for me to do was to learn not to be bitter. But I was happy because I had time in front of me’. Another line by Forestier in Le Petit Soldat: ‘Maybe freedom begins with regret’, is also quoted by Galoup. The echoes of Godard’s film are many: we see the older Forestier in the mirror removing his hands from in front of his face just as he did as a young man in Le Petit Soldat. We also catch sight of publicity stills of Subor from the same period. The actors who carry cinematic history with them are invariably male for Denis, and Beau Travail testifies to her acute sense of a rich cinematic imaginary which she intensively mines.9 Indeed, the particular way Subor’s features are highlighted at the beginning appears to present him as a personification of cinema itself. But the film also revolves around a clear source text: Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (unfinished and posthumously published in 1924), as well as some late Melville poems like ‘The Night March’, echoed in the sequence where the legionnaires carry Sentain aloft as if in a procession. Finally, the film is sustained musically by the orchestral drama of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd on the same theme (with libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier). Yet the film is no simple adaptation of either. As Catherine Grant has demonstrated, it is an ‘adaptation that resists being an adaptation’ (see Grant 2002). What matters in the translation of a particular text from one form to another are rather the affects and reverberations created. Beau Travail marks a continuing process of creative displacement, condensation and ‘translation’ of Melville’s work, which Denis positions from the outset as its forbidden, troubled, sexual core. The torture and agony of Melville’s Claggart and the all-male world of the Legion revolve for Denis around the same danger and threat: that of the potential

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explosion of unsayable male desire and sexuality, or, in Melville’s terms, ‘primeval’ passion, ‘passion in its profoundest’.10 The fact that Denis is the female translator of an all-male world in Beau Travail sets up the possibility of an intertextual fantasmatics or poetics of gendered intertextuality. She talks compulsively of male artistic relations and influence, establishing through interviews and director’s statements a dense, paratextual discourse about inter-male creativity and authorship – part of an extended, masculine hors-champ that encompasses her loose family of male actors criss-crossing the corpus like Subor, Colin, de Bankolé and Descas. If Colin is right that Denis films men intimately as if she were herself a gay man, it is also true that she has a consuming attraction for male authors, composers and filmmakers, and an equal fascination in bringing them together in new and original formations and textures. She actively draws on this seductive rump of male otherness (including her chosen artists’/ actors’ rich back-histories), creating as a female auteur a rich textual and theoretical space of male kinship as potent and far-reaching as the ‘invisible human fluids’ (‘pheromones’) sensuously described by the wondrously feminine bakery owner in Nénette et Boni (1997). In the case of Beau Travail, Denis claims to deploy Subor as a ‘transformer’ within the film, as if he were Melville in a silent act of translation (Denis 2000: 51). The logic of substitution and reversal in Beau Travail marks the beginnings of a sublimation of the original sexual/textual trouble. The title, literally ‘Beautiful work’, is already a gendered inversion of Bruno’s term to describe Sentain, ‘belle trouvaille’ (‘beautiful find’). Such transtextual strategies may perhaps be equated with Robert Stam’s notion of the ‘transtext’ proposed in his study of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), where he describes the complex way Truffaut’s film creates a ‘web of writing’ with the Henri-Pierre Roché novel it adapts. Using the vocabulary of performativity and intertextual dialoguism, Stam posits an ‘intertextual diaspora’ encompassing other novels by Roché, each text forming part of the ‘transtext’ of this larger body of work (see Stam 2005: vii). Denis’s intertextual practice shares these elements, yet in her case the transtextual is also what I would call the transspatial, for the intertextual lines and folds have a direct and immediate consequence on filmic space. Indeed, intertext and space come together in Beau Travail in a choreographed performance and transformation of the external space which is so powerfully conveyed. Already, in the opening sequence with its play of forms, shadows and silhouettes – the

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25.  The Legionnaires perform their dance manoeuvres on the desert plateau to the sounds of Britten’s Billy Budd in Beau Travail (2000).

drawings/paintings of the legionnaires and their history accompanied by the sounds of Britten – the film moves through overlapping levels of counterpoint grafted on to each other. The legionnaires’ outside dance sequence entitled ‘Dance of the Weeds’ (choreographed by Bernardo Montet) animates and transforms rhythmically an organic desert space. The screen literally opens up to the male bodies and the extended space of their performance. It begins first with the legionnaires’ elongated shadows on the earth in a plan-séquence that starts with the strange distended forms and movements of their silhouetted bodies which emphasise shadow play and corporeal gesture rather than identity (with the exception of Bruno and Galoup, the legionnaires remain essentially anonymous in the film). The dance builds up homoerotically and is subsumed by the surging, swelling, vocal crescendo of Britten’s ‘O heave! O heave away, heave! O Heave!’. Denis insists on this powerful musical sweep as the camera pans slowly past the legionnaires with their hands held up high in a supremely symphonic moment that is at once literary, operatic and cinematic. Intertextual expansion becomes, therefore, a dynamic poetics of space, and Beau Travail pans out as a series of organic ‘grafts’ that cut across form in a continual process of translations acting in counterpoint.

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I am using the word ‘graft’ here because this is the term (in French, the verb greffer, noun greffage) that Denis herself uses in an interview about Beau Travail to describe the film’s concrete, molecular transplanting and transformation of different elements (see Denis 2004b: 19–22). Moreover, greffer/greffage, which comes to define potentially every aspect of Denis’s practice, including even the ‘quasi-biological’ state of physical exhaustion incurred during editing (Denis 2001b), is the term she naturally employs whenever she wishes to oppose identity and belonging with something more inherently fluid and provisional. This includes her own conception of France as a shifting set of territories formed while growing up within an itinerant family (though born in France, Denis spent her childhood and early adolescence in different parts of Africa) (Denis 2011). Identity for Denis can only ever be an experience of exile and marginality – an open frame of permanent strangeness – and the true ‘family’ is always diasporic. In her video trailer for the ‘sensorial’ exhibition Diaspora, which she mounted in 2007 at the new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Denis formulated diaspora ‘as etymologically dispersion and the attempt to remain connected’. And indeed, if we retain the example of the ‘Dance of the Weeds’ which is expanded later in the film when the soldiers lie on the ground as the camera gently pans over them at a slight high-angle to the sounds of Britten’s ‘High-Ho’, what is being prioritised here, as Leo Bersani rightly remarks, is a primary de-identifying move that emphasises the non-purposive pleasures of touch and ‘contentless sociality’ (see Bersani 2010a). According to Bersani, Beau Travail is primarily an experiment in ‘bodily relatedness’ in material space (ibid.: 101):11 the camera pans typically from one face to another, providing nothing deeper than a physical identification and registering – but not attempting to fix – difference. Crucially, the highly physical, virtually naked, choreographed dances in the desert landscape help to displace what Bersani terms the unit’s brooding erotic tensions. The legionnaires will continue to enact non-psychological, de-signifying movements as the film progresses, first with their military manouevres, then with their domestic, communal actvities such as ironing. To repeat, this homoerotically charged group dancing is intertextually inflected and motivated, and the Dance of the Weeds sequence will be quickly followed by a superimposition of surfaces that encapsulates the profound interrelatedness of space and intertext. In a defining episode of Denisian montage, Galoup’s handwriting in a notebook is gently faded into an image of the oscillating blue sea as if they

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26.  Superimposition as palimpsest: a close-up of Galoup (Denis Lavant) writing his diary in Marseilles over the waters of Djibouti in Beau Travail (2000).

were melting into each other. The continuing chords of the preceding sequence (the heft of ‘O heave! O heave away, heave! O Heave!’) connect all the various elements. In the next main sequence we see Galoup back in Marseilles, while on the soundtrack, in what Denis calls a ‘parallel text’, he reads out more or less verbatim the short passage we have just seen written in his notebook. There is a continuity in flux here, such that past and present, subjective memory and myth, Marseilles and Djibouti, are all held together and overlap. This liquid, palimpsestic writing in and over and through space constitutes precisely a metapoetical interspace or ‘passage’ where the prewritten (Galoup’s script) figures self-reflexively the film’s other pre-established, ‘found’ intertexts (Godard, Melville, Britten) (we are reminded here of the Greek etymology of ‘metaphor’ as a ‘carrying across of meaning’ (meta-pherein)). Such an erotic and graphic interplay of visual and written signs across different surfaces and textures – an instance of audio-visual transformation that presupposes an active viewer and listener – is the very essence of the intertextual as transtextual and transspatial in Denis. It becomes also a locus of narrative tension that reaches its climax with the episode of the broken compass that Galoup gives to Sentain for the solitary trek he must undertake as punishment

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for defying Galoup’s orders. This is a scene of cross-reading between different levels: on the voice-over Galoup calmly relates the death of Sentain, yet such an assumption is decisively contradicted and exposed as pure fantasy by the visual evidence of Sentain’s body being reclaimed and absorbed by the pristine white salt sulphur and halite crystals of Lac Assal. The material process of metamorphosis reinjects its own sense of change (here the slow, inexorable rhythm of organic alteration), and ultimately, in the film’s most fundamental ‘translation’ (from the Latin transferre, to carry), Sentain is discovered and transported to safety by the Afar nomads of a salt caravan. The implication is clear: liberated from narrative time and personal fantasy, and intertextually moulded and extended, space can offer a new state or threshold of being, or what we might call more appropriately here a new ‘minerality of being’. We see then how, in strictly formal terms, a Denis film starts in a margin of abstraction, proceeds to literality, then choreographs itself through a lyrical poetics of form, gesture and pattern in space that enacts a decisive change and transformation. But this is only part of a larger story in Denis for, as already mentioned, the screen is posited as masculine. The film ‘lifts off’ organically by means of an intensive, masculine-identified nexus of intertextual influence that demands diffusion and must be actively unbound and ‘sublimated’ via new forms. We witness here the swerve from a mantrap (Melville) to the calmer water of poetic abstraction by means of ‘forms, measured forms’ (Melville). This marks a purgative passage to the feminine through continuous gentle pans and tracking shots: a mobile, graceful feminine backdrop (la mer, l’eau, les femmes, la terre) finally absorbs and sublates the masculine narrative of fear and projection that would otherwise lead to Sentain’s virtual calcification (le sel, le compas). The film’s decentring, centrifugal forces thus lift it out of the centripetal vortex that is Galoup’s core narrative of male rivalry and latent, violent desire. Hence, Beau Travail illustrates Denis’s success in negotiating and working thorough accreted layers of male influence, melancholy and crisis: it is an aesthetic meditation of and on film that offers the possibility for intertextual relay and release through the positing of ever new and surprising spaces, intertexts and environments. This multi-form process is carried through to the end. The penultimate scene is a tense staging of potential suicide: in a static and silent shot, a recumbent Galoup rests his gun against his naked torso with the vein of his muscled left-bicep pulsating in close-up. However, the scene is abruptly cut and we are suddenly transported

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into what appears to be the same nightclub featured earlier, though, like the lack of temporal coordinates, this is left deliberately vague and abstract. What matters is that the space now looks and ‘feels’ different and engenders a very different kind of spatial experience – one of cinema as pure spectacle. Dressed in black and filmed at full height as if now resurrected, Galoup starts to dance for himself, manically and acrobatically, in front of a large back-wall mirror to Corona’s 1993 disco hit The Rhythm of the Night, the first line of which, ‘This is the rhythm of my life’, actually commenced in the previous shot and pre-empted the cut. Again, Denis traces a material movement (here of ‘rhythm’) reflexively across a number of sensory levels: from the natural rhythm of blood in the veins, to the explicit rhythm of the Corona music, to the rhythm of montage. Galoup finally lets his repressed body free in loose, frenetic movements and uncontrolled spasms. It is as if the formal violence and reversal of discontinuous montage, which cuts directly into the filmic flesh, had averted the threat of real violence. Moreover, for the first time in the film, a unit of music is allowed to play uninterrupted and impose its own temporality or rhythm on the circumscribed space. Bersani writes that space is now reconfigured as a dynamic performative space that leaves behind the family tragedy of ‘fratricide’ and ‘patricide’. It is also, of course, the moment when the actor Denis Lavant steps out of his role to reclaim his own cinematic imaginary.12 Hence, in a not uncommon Denis paradox, this absolutely concrete, and objectively rendered, ‘present’ cinematic moment shifts the narrative almost effortlessly to a higher, self-reflexive level of abstraction and otherness. Galoup becomes other to himself both as a mirror reflection (the actor Lavant) and as a potentially new, ‘reborn’, human being. Beau Travil ends on this auspicious yet entirely provisional note of spatial and transtextual resolution. Denis’s radical working through the author – let us call it: her subtle art of pure graft – has created a new form of ciné-being. Denis’s cinema of multiple, interwoven spaces in Beau Travail marks the culmination of a complex rhetorical and textual method of intertextual grafting. What makes this process so distinctive is its specifically male parameters and filiations, and the fact that gestures and lines of dialogue are shared and relayed by male figures across different works and forms in an extended, multi-levelled, male imaginary (Subor-Forestier-Godard-Galoup-Lavant, etc.). This is taken to a further level in L’Intrus, an epic haul across continents and oceans that passes through different temporal and geographical zones – from the

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Jura and the Alps to Tahiti via South Korea – and constantly threatens to veer off into abstraction. This work of inconclusive mysteries and opacities, impressionistic and intransitive images, and real or imagined fantasy scenarios and nightmares, where reality, dreams and thought all appear to co-exist on the same plane, was inspired by Denis’s reading of Jean-Luc Nancy’s short autobiographical memoir from 2000 of the same name about undergoing a heart transplant and living with a grafted organ. Nancy documents the repercussions of coronary malfunction and the aftermath of surgery, including whether the transplant, though necessary for his survival, might eventually be rejected by his body. He depicts himself during the long process of treatment in resolutely spatial terms as ‘béant’, or ‘closed open’, i.e. as an opening through which passes a stream of unremitting strangeness. This serves as the basis for a reflection on the state of exclusion in its many contemporary guises. Nancy figures the act of receiving an alien heart as an encounter with the Other as Intruder, suggesting that an ethical response to the arrival of the stranger can occur only when one welcomes intrusion without trying to absorb, assimilate or master it (Nancy 2010: 11–12). Indeed, one must allow for both the strangeness and the surprise of the intruder to remain intact: ‘To welcome a stranger it is necessary also to feel his intrusion’ (ibid.).13 Denis had, in fact, already engaged with Nancy’s central concept of the Other as intruder in the ten minute black and white short, Vers Nancy (2002). Although ostensibly about the passage of time which frames the work and the portmanteau film in which it featured (Ten Minutes Older: The Cello), the work, as we would expect by now, is directly about the dynamics of space as passage. Nancy is filmed in conversation with a young foreign female student (Ana Samardzija) on a moving train that may (or may not) be going to the historic border town of Nancy (no destination is indicated or reached). Of course, the title is also meant to be taken literally as a cinematic approach towards Nancy himself, who talks here about his theory of intrusion and the social and political issues of alterity and hospitality in present-day France. The pair are formally framed by the carriage window, and, in another direct intertextual nod by Denis to Godard, the student wears the same type of cap as Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky) when she took the train with the politically engaged philosopher Francis Jeanson in the central sequence in La Chinoise (1967), where they debated the value of violence and terrorism as the next political step. The spatial disposition of La Chinoise is replicated precisely (male teacher on the right, female student

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on the left), and certain gestures like the hand touching the window are exactly similar. Yet Denis opens up the scene physically by revealing another space: that of the facing corridor where a third character, a black passenger (Alex Descas), is loitering. The presence of Descas in the passage-way matches – and renders self-consciously explicit – Denis’s formal move to an intertextual Third (Godard). This creation of spatial difference, where we follow Descas’s movements while listening to the couple’s conversation on the soundtrack, is further reinforced by the contrasting skin tone and texture of the three figures. Whereas a filmmaker like Abdellatif Kechiche would endeavour through parallel editing to keep separate the two spaces demarcated by race, Denis plays deliberately on the suspense of Descas’s intentions: will he or will he not enter the carriage? After an apparent lull, we witness him suddenly leave his space of limbo by turning the door-handle and crossing the threshold, thereby ‘intruding’ directly into this all-white territory. The incursion has the force of breaking an entry, for Descas is perceived as a threatening Other who disturbs the flow of conversation between the couple, who now feel decidedly awkward. The situation recalls Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, i.e. those spaces which seem pure openings but also hide curious exclusions. One thinks one is entering, but one is also excluded in the very process – those who penetrate are passing guests rather than invited (see Foucault 1986). Eventually Descas makes an attempt at dialogue to ease the tension, asking how long is left of the journey and commenting how the trip was too short (Nancy gently counters it was long enough). This reference to time marks a final self-reflexive move by the film which presents the carriage as a shared theoretical space within clearly defined intertextual surroundings – a space that must undergo the violence of a formal infraction. Vers Nancy thus exemplifies the key elements of Denis’s transtextual method as we have defined it thus far. To return to L’Intrus, where Descas is again present though in the minor role of a priest: Nancy has stated that Denis ‘adopts’ rather than ‘adapts’ his essay in order to explore themes of foreignness and rejection, suggesting a ‘backwash movement’ (reflux) between the two works (in turn, Denis claims that Nancy’s book is present in every scene of the film).14 According to Nancy, Denis’s film thinks through the ‘mutual intrusion’ of times and places and people, and shares his underlying idea that the intruder is actually the ‘self’, rather than what ‘intrudes’ into the body or self such as a new heart. In other words, the self is always already ‘lacking’ and subject to a permanent condition of

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strangeness and fragmentation. On this point Denis’s film could not be more clear. In an initial voiceover before the opening credits arrive, a female voice we will later identify as that of Katerina Golubeva, who plays the ambiguous role of medical go-between and angel of vengeance, states over her own image (and in her native Lithuanian): ‘Your worst enemies are lurking inside, in the shadow, in your heart’. Denis pursues explicitly in L’Intrus the creative idea of ‘grafting’, for it is not simply Louis Trébor, played again by Michel Subor, who undergoes a transplant. There is intrusion at every level of the film – thematic, concrete, formal and philosophical – due to the core related issues of alterity and foreigneness. Like the general, unspecified ‘intruder’ of the title, the figuration of the intruder is multiple and scattered: for so long the predator expelling undesirable migrants trespassing on his private estate, Louis becomes with his grafted heart himself a foreign body and intruder. His now haggard features following the operation reveal him to be indelibly marked by intrusions, and he is imaged at one point frozen on the ground, his wound torn open, being dragged along by a horse. The deep rectilinear scars that run across his torso find their visual equivalent in the duplication of man-made boundaries that punctuate the frames like scars on the skin of the film. Indeed, from the opening credits in red that bleed into the screen then disappear, the film’s continually mobile frame pulsates giddily like a throbbing heart to the mysterious beauty of Stuart Staples’s perpetually unresolved guitar loop. This is an epidural, organic cinema of drives: every image and sequence is like a transplant or intrusion in a film which has a profound exteriority, continually attracting and ‘grafting’ the viewer with odd shards of narrative before then purposively distancing and estranging us, just as the human body can reject a new heart because so much medication is required to undermine the body’s natural immune system. Hence, like Louis himself, L’Intrus becomes irremissibly remote and ‘other’, all the more so since we are denied the basic manoeuvres of spectatorial identification such as shot/countershot. What is fundamental here is that these various forms of otherness as intrusion are marked out and negotiated in specifically spatial and intertextual terms. Let us consider first the film’s extraordinary presentation of the natural landscape. L’Intrus has a triptych structure: each of its three parts corresponds to a precise geographical region and atemporal narrative. The Jura mountains on the French-Swiss border are presented as a space of passage for smugglers and illegal immigrants, which Louis

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and the border police try to control with fences and compounds. The film speaks of a world of violent and paranoid ownership (Beugnet 2008: 42) fixated on the delimitation and defence of a territory where the foreign body is always the intruder and reducible to a threat, to be hunted, driven away or repressed. Beauty has thus been reduced to a circuit of human violence and fear – trespassers, then soldiers and border police are photographed from above like flies and dots on the landscape in a wide, CinemaScope frame. On the ground, limits are imposed by human hand: not only frontiers and customs, enclosures and partitions, but also doors with blinds and double-windows that can momentarily obscure characters. The second part of L’Intrus is what Denis, in a short but highly suggestive article where she uses the reflexive form of the verb greffer to describe her initial research for the film and its ‘trajectories’, calls the ‘limbo’ of Pusan situated between the two hemispheres – a necessary third term in the film and ‘[t]he passage between two states of the body’ (Denis 2005b: 45). With is antiseptic modernity studded with Christian churches, the snow-bound urban environment of Pusan is an intermediary space of surfaces where capital is exchanged for use somewhere else and which Louis must pass through (Sweeney 2005). Finally, we are transported to the open marine expanses and gleaming azure skies of French Polynesia where Louis goes in search of his eldest lost son whom he believes he fathered with a native woman, but where he is told bluntly that Tahiti is not his home (‘Ta place n’est pas ici’). Again, it is fluid space – at once mobile and unheimlich – rather than fixed place that determines the film’s form and structure. Yet L’Intrus is also a film about the different effects on the body of dynamically diverse environments, for the landscapes inspire a multitude of ways of relating to space. Prior to his operation, Louis is filmed in the Jura melting into the intruding world, eager to annihiliate his ego in nature – naked, swimming in the water, with a close-up of his hand caressing the sandy shore. Compare the vertical, often claustrophobic presentation of the Jura and Alps by means of high or overhead angles, where the sky is seldom visible and the light often poor, with the horizontal, oceanic landscapes of the South Pacific where the sky fills the frame with chromatic energy and blue hues, creating a contrary sense of open expanse and virtual agoraphobia in the face of a limitless, weightless horizon. A recurring formal motif of L’Intrus is a wide-angle shot in slow panning movements which, together with aerial tracking shots over the breathtaking and ever-expanding natural landscape,

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convey a sense of wonder at the unknowable. This is a landscape where Louis is no longer in control and which he cannot domesticate – his mattress and possessions carried safely above the water to a small island will soon be ruined by the elements that submerge his makeshift cabin. How should we read such silent, wild beauty and unfathomable immensity, which Denis herself acknowledges as ‘dangerous to film’?15 During such moments, the film displays an extraordinary receptivity to space redolent of Gaston Bachelard’s ‘felicitous’ images of ‘interminable space’ with their intimate intensity experienced during daydreams which transport the dreamer outside the immediate world to the infinity of the productive imagination (Bachelard 1994: 184). This double sense of expansion – of space and being – is felt directly in L’Intrus where we are placed as if in a state of active daydreaming and rêverie through the overlappings of time, real and imagined. Acknowledging the immediate spectatorial experience of being drawn into such unsettling images of cosmic beauty, Henrik Gustafsson has described the ‘uncanny’ effect of Denis’s landscapes in (post)colonial terms because they oscillate between a vision materialised and a vision withheld, between entry and exile, and between ‘solid land’ and ‘secret hinterland’: ‘On the one hand’, Gustafsson argues, ‘they [the landscapes] mobilise a whole repertoire of colonial fantasies – palm-fringed islands, mountains shrouded in mist, pristine deserts and lonely wanderers. On the other, they disrupt aspirations to form a bond, to set roots, or leave a mark … characters are themselves marked, scarred, or cut off from the object of their proclaimed love (the love of the land, of the Legion, or of a son). Landscape distinguishes itself; that is, it refuses to be assimilated. It does not bring about a closure, but a fracture’ (Gustafsson [in press]). This persuasive reading of Denis’s ambivalent strategy towards external beauty invites a political meditation on how the natural world has been scarred by the history and fault-lines of colonialism and postcolonialism. But it is only one aspect of Denis’s overall approach to landscape, which also takes the intertextual form of grafting and operates according to a process of poetic association – one that, as I hope to prove, does not preclude the political. Beginning now with the explicit theme of resurrection, Denis grafts a network of loose and disorienting allusions to the story of Christ, echoing a simlar deconstruction of Christian allegory at work in Beau Travail and which Nancy termed ‘areligion’.16 The figure of Sidney as the sacrificial son and martyr goes back to Sentain (played

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by the same actor, Grégoire Colin), and, in a mutual intrusion between both films, both Subor and Colin’s characters bear the traces of their earlier incarnation as legionnaires. Before Sidney is revealed dead in the morgue in Tahiti with his heart ripped out, he is filmed in his father’s deserted cabin reading the letters which he presumes (no doubt mistakenly) were meant for him. He is wearing around his head the same garland of leaves (a crown of thorns) worn earlier by the young, anonymous, vagabond girl, another Christ-like figure who, if we retain the French word for wilderness girl, ‘sauvageonne’, is herself linked to the theme of transplantation and grafting (the term is applied to a natural stock plant or tree used as a base for grafting). It is never made clear, however, whether Sidney actually provided the heart for his father’s operation. Moreover, Louis’s surgical scar at this late stage in Tahiti is almost invisible, whilst the young man’s wound seems fresh. Is this perhaps just another dream-image, like the torn, disembodied heart lying on the snow? Either way, in both Denis and Nancy, the body, as Douglas Morrey has shown in an important gloss on Nancy’s work, marks the limit between sense and the world: The body is always other: the means by which the other appears to me but also by which I am revealed to myself, as other … [b]ut the image is also other, an othering of the real: the means by which the real reveals itself in separating itself from itself. In this way, the image always contains an excess of sense, while the real only gives itself to be experienced as wound or scar. Paradoxically, then, the image enacts a kind of embodiment of the real just as the body is an image in the sense of a coming to presence of being … the wound opens the body to the outside, but is also an opening in, an in-folding or invagination. (Morrey 2008: 29–30)

This conception of both the body and image as a ‘coming to presence’ of being corresponds to Nancy’s general approach to the body as materiality and ‘open’ space. He argues in Corpus (2006), in characteristically high, rhetorical style, that bodies are not full, or filled, space, but rather that which opens space and makes it spacious (as opposed to spatial) (Morrey 2008: 11). And further: the body is what gives rise to (but literally also gives space or room to) existence; it spaces space. This physical ‘spacing of space’, and the central idea that the body is the ‘being of existence’ (‘The other is a body because only the body is other’ (Nancy 2006: 29)), informs all aspects of Nancy’s thinking, including that of the cinematic screen itself, which he views as ‘an opening in the world onto the world’ (Morrey 2008: 20). For the cinema does not reflect an outside, but instead ‘opens the inside upon itself’ (Nancy

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2001: 45–7): ‘Matter, bodies, the world for Nancy are always already open because they are that which opens space (to itself), and yet there can be no entering into this open as though from the outside. If all things co-exist within the open, then their relation can only be one of mutual exteriority inside’ (Morrey 2008: 20–1) (original amphasis).17 To summarise these highly distilled insights into space and otherness by employing the vocabulary of Merleau-Ponty: the cinematic flesh is a medium through which being unveils or reveals itself as embodied existence. In the case of L’Intrus, the open, ever-expanding intertextual ‘wound’ and graft of the filmic body encompasses a range of other influences touching each other in mutual exteriority from within. These influences include once again Le Petit soldat (the narrative of the transplant begins at the Mont-Blanc bridge in Geneva where Godard’s film starts), as well as the colours of Paul Gauguin, and F. W. Murnau’s Tabu (aka Story of the South Seas) (1931), a film that takes place on and around Bora Bora and questions precisely the topos of paradise in the South Seas.18 The grafting process would appear to be endless and infinite, like Staples’s ever-virtual score that invites us to experience the porosity and spatiality of cinematic time. Yet this powerful and dense network of themes and motifs and textual doubles is still not enough for Denis, who is thinking always of the larger cinematic body and imaginary: ‘A heart transplant brings with it the imaginary; I had to give Subor again his place in the imaginary of cinema’, she states (Denis 2005b). In fact the narrative of L’Intrus is ultimately crystallised through fragments of a little known (and, in fact, abandoned) 1961 film by Paul Gégauff, Le Reflux, starring a much younger Subor.19 Shot in the same Polynesian region as The Intruder and based on Robert-Louis Stevenson’s adventure story in the South Seas, The Ebb-Tide (Trébor is also an anagram and reversal of Robert), Le Reflux is extracted four times as grainy, saturated footage in ever more intricate fashion, appearing in the film’s final stages in Tahiti like tissue transplanted on to a strange cinematic body and not fully integrated within it – enough, though, to present tangible memories of a younger Louis (for Denis, he is also the same age that Louis’s lost son would be). The presence of Le Reflux constitutes itself a drama of incorporation and mutual intrusion that extends in new, plastic ways the graphic, trans-textual interspaces and superimpositions of Beau Travail. In the first three instances, Gégauff’s film is reprised very briefly and in rapid succession: shots in sequence of the young Subor with two crew-members on a small coaster making contact with a foreign island,

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27.  A young Louis (Michel Subor, flanked by Serge Marquand) catches sight of land in one of the short extracts from Paul Gégauff’s Le Reflux grafted in L’Intrus (2004).

then of Subor landing ashore on his own by means of an anchor to the sound of gunfire in the background. The moody jazz score of the original is retained in the first two instances, but by the third Staples’s music takes over the images and appears to assimilate them. The second in particular locks together Subor’s gaze from the boat to the land in Le Reflux and Louis/Subor’s gaze aligned with that of his old friend Henri (Henri tetu Tetainanuarii) in L’Intrus. The fourth instance, which is linked thematically around the idea of the impending storm (the rainswept boat on the high seas in Le Reflux matches the wind picking up in L’Intrus accompanied by bad weather reports on the radio), is now imperfectly integrated, or rather openly embraced, into the film by Staples’s musical chords that crucially do not cancel out the original dialogue, even though it is hard to hear and left untranslated. Hence, in an intertextual process formalised as exclusively male and scopic, and which again highlights an encounter with the foreignness of the Other (an unknown island in an unnamed film), the guest film (Le Reflux) is not subsumed by its host text or body double (L’Intrus) – its otherness remains intact. Like Beau Travail, L’Intrus illustrates Denis’s success in working textually thorough accreted layers of male influence, melancholy and crisis. The film is a controlled engagement with its intertextual others who are welcomed into its very skin and flesh like a homeopathic dose of otherness. In fact, this transtextual graft, achieved only at the constant risk of being consumed by the forces of desire, passion and destruction, unfolds as a spatial poetics: new spaces and thresholds are

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breached and opened up by this dense weave of greffage, leading, as we have seen, to a concrete crystallisation of represented and narrative space. Working through space is, for Denis, always working through texts, and the extent of exploration of external, pro-filmic space is exactly proportional to the degree of the transtextual probing of the film’s internal, formal landscapes. The more forms and textual relations to be crossed with and through, the more extended and expanded is the external space and landscape. I am not suggesting that this must necessarily always be vast and wild, for it is never simply a matter of physical scale but rather of method and approach. For this reason, intertextual space offers a new kind of transformative Third Space grounded in the cinematic imaginary. We may choose to view this internal space in terms of the metaphysical out of which emerges the physical that is then resolved spatially. Yet above all it is a relational space, for filial and familial relations in Denis intermesh with – and are mutually dependent on – formal metamorphosis which takes the form of an intertextual moulding, channelling, reformulation and re-articulation of the spaces of otherness. All Denis’s films strive to attain this correct mix of intertextual otherness, and the forms of textual filiation produced via grafting herald new relational modes. This constant dance of relations between a vast spectrum of texts and forms is one that disturbs cultural hierarchies and also opens them up to new relations beyond themselves in which their identities can only ever be transient and contingent in the cinematic present. To put it simply: the space of cinema, which for Denis is always intertextual, takes place, and is felt, at the most concrete level of filmic tissue. This is an erotics of cinematic space, and the pre-eminently homosocial (and sometimes homoerotic) aesthetic spaces created – spaces of intensive graft and desire – serve to pre-empt any over-identification with the feminine, something Denis has directly acknowledged as a major risk in her work, not only in terms of characterisation but also in her own direction of actresses, notably Béatrice Dalle as female cannibal in Trouble Every Day.20 In view of Denis’s consistently active and performative deployment of a male-identified hypotext, we can talk in terms of a specifically male kinship between texts and intertexts. But considering the remarkable physicality of the intrusion of the Gégauff film, which cuts transgressively into the flesh of L’Intrus at the concrete level of the exposed male body (specifically the gorgeously rugged Subor in his sweaty open shirt), and taking into full account what we have already seen in Beau Travail, might

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we not regard the process of resurrecting men and bringing them together across form, time, generation and culture as instantiating an open, queer, intertextual space and presaging an alternative form of male kinship? For what happens in the penultimate sequence of L’Intrus (before, that is, the dazzling last moments of pure cinema when Dalle romps rhapsodically through the snow as the ‘Queen of the North’ pulled along on a sledge by her dogs in a series of forwardand back-tracking shots, her mouth open, laughing, her top undone, the fur of her clothes flying – the ecstasy of the human body in full motion), is an equally memorable, if less spectacular, encounter, and one that has been completely ignored by commentators on the film. I am referring to the scene between Louis and and the young Tahitian, Toni (Jean-Marc Teriipaia), which takes place in a totally new space in the film – the deck of a cargo boat. Toni, we recall, had earlier ‘offered himself’ as Louis’s lost son as part of a business deal – a gift from the local townspeople which Louis clearly didn’t buy, literally and figuratively, since Toni did not take the money that Louis flashed at him after immediately realising this was a well-meaning masquerade (or at least not all of the money: the thick wodge of notes has been opened though most still remain). After the hospital sequence, the camera had tracked Toni around the streets of Papeete, hugging close to his body. At the end he is now suddenly with Louis on the boat, perhaps, we may surmise or fantasise, for the simple pleasure of an adventure around the world with an older man whom he has decided to adopt. Leaning gently against the side of the boat in long shot against the sun, he is pictured as a young hunk smiling benignly across at Louis on his makeshift bed before bringing him tea. Photographed like this, Toni returns us immediately to the images of the earlier Louis/Subor in Le Reflux: dark, swarthy, unkempt, moody and masculine, and as if suddenly now reborn. The two clink their cups in celebration, and Toni then sits down on the deck to converse with Louis who is similarly smiling. In a film where there is no creative joy in heterosexual sexual relations (witness the banal, sadomasochistic scenarios played out between Sidney and his border-control wife, where she gets to be frisked like a suspect, or the awkward and painful penetrations experienced by Louis and his girlfiend (Bamboo)), this has the force of a supremely tender homoerotic movement across age, race and culture – one that was perhaps prefigured earlier in the film when, in Pusan, Louis fixed his gaze suddenly on the nape of a young Korean man in the lift.

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28.  Toni (Jean-Marc Teriipaia) smiling towards Louis lying on deck as the boat carrying the coffin of Louis’s son Sidney heads into the South Pacific in L’Intrus (2004).

This is all undeclared and unarticulated, of course, and the episode could be viewed in purely negative terms as a young native on the make befriending an old white sugar-daddy soon to die with the promise of financial reward. Yet at the very least, such a potential possibility carves a space out of the noxious (self-)sacrificial and Oedipal structures of filial guilt, responsibility and vengeance that have stalked the narrative thus far, like the continually resurfacing, and phantasmatic Golubeva figure who, while appearing to be an exteriorisation of Louis’s foreign, mercenary heart (Sweeney 2005), at one point taunts that his heart is merely ‘empty’. Beyond the structure of the gift and exchange, beyond knowledge, symbolism or the false lure of ‘home’, Toni, who was actually photographed swimming in the ocean long before he surfaces in the diegesis, simply ‘is’. He shares with Louis the joy of two drifters brought consensually together in an undefined, and unclassifiable potential male relationship as the boat slides across the sea, adrift and with no known destination. This shared act of voluntary exile is presented, too, as a new, external, mobile space of passage beyond blood connections, morbid self-interiority, or the cruel paranoia of those earlier violent moments when Louis killed young stray men, like the trespassing migrant whose handsome dead face is glimpsed by the wilderness girl through the ice. Now ‘father’ and ‘son’ are roles to be improvised freely between strangers in a metaphorical extension of the one positive tender moment early in the film, when Sidney cradled his young baby boy, Louis, who finally returned his smile (the shot’s exceptional beauty is emphasised by its length). The young child so lovingly nurtured there seemed to remain

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in osmosis with his surroundings and embodied a fleeting, innocent moment of being-in-the-world before human instincts are perverted by the adult need to defend territory. The extended brief encounter between Toni and Louis delivers on this existential promise. A full study of the queer dimensions of Denis’s work will have to wait for another occasion.21 What I am suggesting here, however, is that male intertextual kinship is part of the general drift and drifting that for Denis defines cinema as opposed to literature, yet which, for its life-blood, relies on a pan-aesthetic imaginary. For without the hard work of textual grafting there can be no cinematic drifting. Put simply, grafting new forms of aesthetic passage is life itself. Denis is not interested in merely regendering space (urban or otherwise) as ‘female’ in a politics of gendered space. In this sense the critic Rosanna Maule is surely right: Denis’s approach is not only post-feminist but also ‘post-subjective’ (see Maule 2008: 207–36).22 Far more important to Denis, as we have repeatedly seen, is the possibility for some kind of emotional and metaphysical rebirth and regeneration through space. Her poetic, erotic model of relationality that queers the family pitch and produces new correspondences and forms of fraternity and male intimacy is always an eminently formal, intertextual process blurring the boundaries between artistic forms and transforming individual works. This goes hand in hand with a sensual engagement with the totality of matter, one that defamiliarises space (both represented and off-screen) and counters narrative logic (sometimes fantasmatic, often lethal) which it slows down and suspends before dismantling and reshifting it. As Agnès Godard’s camera gently strokes and grazes the external real, tracing new shapes, forms, and patterns, it is always working on the margins with – and beyond – fixed symbolic and ideological structures and narratives (familial, Oedipal, or otherwise), scaling and subverting these spaces rather than simply negating them. Moreover, Denisian spacing works against narrative constraints and fixed scenarios in a mobile attentiveness to the world which, as Morrey elegantly puts it, ‘open[s] representation as a question by sliding across the surfaces of sense’ (Morrey 2008). Denis creates her precisely composed, grafted and calibrated ‘other’ aesthetic spaces to filter the otherness of the external real in her work. Formal acts of aggression and incursion into space offer the opportunity to reconfigure the order of things, since, to invoke the dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier’s statement in Denis’s 2005 documentary short, Vers Mathilde, used as the first epigraph above,

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any movement into a given space always alters it and leaves a concrete trace. Not only is intertextual space thus a new kind of relational space based on artistic desire and respect (Denis ‘corrects’ an intertext precisely out of love), but also, more profoundly, the intertextual is the relational in Denis which serves to negotiate thematic otherness and help reverse the film’s pessimistic familial narratives. Denisian cinema strives to find the right intertextual balance, and ultimately the only safe filial relations are intertextual precisely because they are metaphorical and approximate. Grafting is thus a performative and spatial and aesthetic and erotic process, and Denis’s characters attempt to forge a new type of existence by grafting a new intimate relationship to space. This takes the form of shared collective moments, whether the richly grafted ‘Dance of the Weeds’ in Beau Travail which allows the legionnaires to interact dynamically with the desert environment, or Toni and Louis’s tea ceremony under the sign of Le Reflux during their passage across the ocean. This is where identity and subjectivity are always heading in Denis when everything else has been stripped away and abstracted. Denisian space, aesthetically reconfigured and grafted, openly embraced and shared, is tantamount to Being. The open frame: beyond the Other Space, then, is a poetic, performative, and generative process in Denis’s work, where different levels and forms of space are consistently brought together relationally and self-reflexively. To restate Nancy’s active formula: space ‘spaces’ because freighted with interlapping literary, musical and cinematic allusions and resonances. A tracking shot through filmic space that does not also engage in some way with the cinematic imaginary will not open up space in a Denis film and may instead close it off, so deep are the relations between form and alterity in her practice. Denis is attempting to regraft the very boundaries  of human  relationality and intimacy in order to point the way towards yet further material spaces and states of being. We may invoke here Bersani’s concept of ‘impersonal intimacy’ to include not only how characters come to see themselves in relation to others and the world, but also how the ‘en-grafted’ intertextual figure of the listener/viewer/ reader is made to engage with Denis’s work beyond spectatorial narcissism and identification conventionally defined. In short, the flickering spaces of intimacy and hospitality (Asibong) in Denis are merely the prerequisite and means to a deeper and more profound

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intimacy with the world and being. Any study of otherness in Denis’s work, however sophisticated, that does not take into account its internal landscapes risks being incomplete. It would require a long and separate study to record in full the many different ways Denis’s other films graft a male cinematic imaginary in their search for new cinematic spaces. The key for Denis is always to find the right degree and mix of intertextual/inter-cinematic otherness, that is, the right equation of textual abrasion and formal intrusion leading to the expanded reconfiguration of space. In Denis’s earlier films, this process is usually fragmented and not always fully integrated. S’en fout la mort/No Fear, No Die (1990), for example, a film about about two illegal black immigrants who turn to cockfighting in the nondescript badlands of Paris’s industrial outskirts, begins with Dah (Bankolé) reciting a quote from The Quality of Hurt (1972), the first volume of Chester Himes’s autobiography, which also appears as a title on the screen: ‘Human beings – all human beings, of whatever race or nationality or religious belief or ideology – will do anything and everything’. The film is self-consciously organised along colonial lines inspired by Denis’s reading of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) (1952). Along with Joceyln (Descas) who embodies the defeated ‘alienated psyche’ central to Fanon’s idea of subject/object relationships between whites and blacks, Dah is forced to live with the cocks in the basement below the white-run restaurant. In J’ai pas sommeil, direct reference is made on the radio to Raymond Bernard’s silent black and white comedy short, Le Costaud des Épinettes (1923), about a sensitive young man who passes himself off as a thug of the Épinettes in a louche bar in the Montmartre street of the same name. This is also the area where the gentle Camille commits his gruesome murders, and where Daïga escapes to the ‘safety’ of a porn movie theatre. From its vertiginous opening of a police helicopter flying above Paris, J’ai pas sommeil ‘essays’ different private and public spaces, all disconnected and dislocated, and which the characters never really inhabit. Théo (Descas), for example, takes his young son up on to the roof of their apartment building at night to sleep surrounded by neon. The film also produces sudden moments of impersonal touch and proximity, as in the café sequence between Camille and Daïga already mentioned. This continual ‘rehearsing’ of space is matched by the drag performance of Le Lien Défait (literally, The undone link), a song by Jean-Louis Murat which Camille mimes and dances to, loosely and lasciviously, letting his dress slip to expose his chest.

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In Nénette et Boni (1995), set in the working-class area of Le Canet in Marseilles and rigorously eschewing the city’s mythical landmarks, Denis nevertheless acknowledges the tradition of Marcel Pagnol, notably his 1938 film melodrama La Femme du Boulanger (where Ginette Leclerc plays a sexy wife to Raimu), by means of the sensuous figure of the unnamed bakery owner (Valéria Bruni-Tédeschi). Her American partner and pastry-chef, Vincenzo Brown, played by the filmmaker Vincent Gallo, consciously evokes Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961) during a flashback to their first meeting when he was a sailor and she a local bartender. With its multiple filiations that actively work through French cinematic memory (including also Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1950 adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s novel, Les Enfants terribles, in the scene where Nénette (Alice Houri) spoonfeeds her brother Boni (Grégoire Colin)), this is a film that directly questions the Name of the Father, first with the hopelessly weak ‘bad father’ ironically called M. Luminaire (Jacques Nolot), then with the ideal father that Boni wishes to become at the end when he steals his sister’s unnamed newborn baby (father unknown) and takes it back to the house in which he has maintained the bedroom of his deceased mother as a sanctuary and shrine. Denis’s intertextual method becomes progressively more complex and ambitious following Beau Travail. Trouble Every Day oozes with the cinematic ghosts of gothic horror and gore, from the various screen characters of Quasimodo (notably played by Charles Laughton in 1939), Frankenstein and Nosferatu, to the expressionism of Georges Franju and Jacques Tourneur (including the latter’s 1942 film Cat People, remade by Paul Schrader in 1982), and the many recent experiments in the horror genre by Abel Ferrara, David Lynch and David Cronenberg. There is also a specific reference to Robert Bresson’s Une Femme douce/A Gentle Creature (1969) when Tricia’s (June Vessey) green scarf wafts slowly through the air across the Paris rooftops. The notion of graft is conceived in slightly different cinematic terms, however, through two brief extracts grafted together from authentic anthropological films about Guyana by the scientist Alain R. Devez: La Forêt tropicale de Guyane and Le Camp des Nouragues. Relayed via lap-top, this grainy slow-motion footage about a scientific settlement in an unidentified rainforest provides a postcolonial point of reference and entry in the narrative about an evil virus brewed in a former colony coming back to haunt the white man. Denis taps into other kinds of cinematic imaginary, too, exploiting again the screen presence of Gallo

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as a researcher turned cannibal, Shane Brown (the future director of The Brown Bunny (2003), will always be Mr Brown for Denis), and Béatrice Dalle (once referred to unkindly by critics as ‘la grande bouche’ of French cinema) as another human cannibal, Coré, who stalks the wild, intermediate zones of the Paris banlieue (Fontenaysous-bois, Le Raincy). All is presented as organic: Coré’s physician and scientist husband (Descas), who grows plants for experiments in his laboratory, is called Léo Sémenau (suggesting phonetically ‘(la) semence’ (seed, semen)), and Shane shoots out sperm in the hotel toilet that is then fingered by his wife, Tricia. For some, the film marked a step too far by Denis into the carnal realm of unconstrained drives and pure materiality, where erotic lust devours and reduces the body of the desired other to something less than human. In fact, if there is any excess here it has more to do with the amount of intertextual influence in play, much of which remains dispersed, as if Denis were throwing together everything she could to retain a hold on her most complete expression yet of the irremediable violence and destructiveness of sexual desire (Denis and Godard have acknowledged the additional influences of the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall’s images of suburban alienation, and a Frans Hals painting of a female servant). Indeed, the film seems literally ‘all over the place’, a not unusual state for a Denis shoot, as she herself readily recognises, but one usually offset and transfigured by the editing process. Here there is no real intertextual biting point, with the result that the film remains more a series of impressive fragments, leaving inter-corporeality to play out literally as human victims are opened up and partially consumed. In short, the erotic kiss is merely reversed into a deadly vampire bite.23 As Léo’s research director remarks in a flashback sequence: ‘[ç]a ne cadre pas’ (‘it doesn’t square’) (literally, ‘it doesn’t frame’). Vendredi soir/Friday Night (2002) is based on a novel by the contemporary French writer Emmanuèle Bernheim, and its traffic jams plug into a vast filmic imaginary of the modern car, from Godard’s Week-end (1967) to George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) via the early road-movies of Wim Wenders, on whose Paris, Texas (1984) Denis assisted as director. Yet the film’s intertextual tensions are more musical in nature. It begins with techno musician and composer Jeff Mills’s Entry to Metropolis from his 2000 score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) which segues, when the still-frame shots of the changing Pariscape at sundown are replaced by a slow, 360º panning shot right to left, into the specially commissioned,

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delicate, instrumental music of Dickon Hinchliffe (former member of Tindersticks) heard throughout.24 The spatial entre-deux that Laure (Valérie Lemercier) suddenly finds herself in when stalled in Paris traffic (the strange ‘non-time’ of a city immobilised by a transport strike) corresponds to the temporal entre-deux of her own life, in transit between single life and coupledom. Juxtaposing a fluid range of spaces, from public to private, real and imaginary, as well as different volumes and speeds (sudden slow-motion, speeded-up action), elliptical dissolves and superimpositions, Vendredi soir is finally ignited by a stunning encounter between Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, a turning-point in the film when it literally changes gear as Jean (Vincent Lindon) takes over the wheel from Laure. The prevailing quiet tempo and sombre, unison strings of Britten’s The Bitter Withy (Opus 90) are now superseded and transformed as the car reverses, accompanied by a relatively slow movement from Shostakovich’s string quartet, Chamber Symphony Opus 110a. Then, as the car surges forward, the quartet immediately builds up into the famous passage of pounding modernist chords and rapid strings that conjure up echoes of Bernard Herrmann’s suspense score for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).25 A brilliant mise en abyme effect is created by the speed of the camera’s tracking movement which blurs the surfaces and forms of the city, and where the abstract shapes produced evoke the frames of a celluloid film-strip. This illustrates that if Denis approaches space musically, she also conceives music, like time and intertextuality, in utterly spatial terms like concrete blocks. Such a highly self-reflexive, formal act of musical montage serves to pre-empt and dedramatise in advance the prescripted sexual event, much like the images of wafting smoke and steam on the blocked roads help to defuse the claustrophobic atmosphere of tension and aggression. This process is pursued through to the end. As Hinchliffe’s Sunrise burgeons forth once again, slowly yet more loudly against the noise of background traffic, into a beautifully simple and lyrical ascending motif, so Laure turns round the street corner in the direction of the camera and skips ecstatically through the Paris streets in slow motion as if now released and open to the Other, passing finally a sign in a shop window advertising ‘partitions’ (musical scores). This brief overview of Denis’s other major films to date does not, of course, do full justice to their intricate and compulsive textual workings, yet it provides at least a concrete sense of how potent and all-embracing the idea and practice of space is in all her work, and how space can be dynamically figured and poetically transformed in a

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cinema that grafts a specifically male imaginary, whether filmic, literary, or musical. I would like now to look in greater detail at a more recent film, 35 Rhums/35 Shots of Rum (2008), set in the French West Indian community in Paris, which, although in a self-consciously minor key, reveals perhaps most comprehensively and emphatically the aesthetic and political stakes of Denis’s combined spatial art of unframing/ reframing and transcultural, intertextual ‘grafting’. By focusing on the film’s key, central scene, I will suggest that at the root of Denis’s project lies ultimately an ethical wish not only to reimagine the external world unframed, but also to dismantle – and move beyond – the frame (or discourse) of the Other (i.e. the ideological framing of those who are perceived as ‘different’ and ‘other’, to be feared, fetishised, or excluded) in order precisely to re-engage with these same others on more mutual and progressive terms. 35 Rhums would appear to mark a radical shift in Denis’s method, both formally and thematically. It portrays a firmly rooted black, working-class community in a very specific area of north-east Paris around the Rue de la Guadeloupe, just within the city limits at the farthest reaches of the eighteenth arrondissement (the location for the apartment complex where the characters live is actually the nearby Rue Cugnot). In other words, this is an intermediate – or, as Denis says, ‘frontier’ – space on the threshold of the banlieue (Denis 2009a), but a far cry from the urban bleakness of S’en fout la mort. Further, although the film is composed almost entirely of black characters, race is rarely made an issue. What is important here are the daily working lives of an entirely legal and ‘normal’ stratum of Parisian life. Mixed-race Joséphine (or Jo) (played by Mati Diop) will end up marrying literally ‘the boy next door’, her young white suitor (and orphan) Noé (Grégoire Colin), thus ensuring close proximity with her Caribbean father Lionel (Alex Descas), a train driver on the suburban RER network, with whom she has lived in the same apartment since the death of her white German mother. The other main character is Jo’s pseudo-mother, taxi-driver Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), who still holds a torch for Lionel. 35 Rhums presents for the first time in Denis’s work a ‘real’ father in all senses of the word: Lionel opens the film watching and driving trains, and he successfully closes it by duly completing the strange drinking ritual alluded to in the title. Personified in the impassive, weathered figure of Descas, it is the always attentive and almost passive, ‘soft’ presence of this father that provides for the film’s inner calm and consistency. Culminating with the day of Jo’s wedding, 35 Rhums is certainly Denis’s

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most classical and heteronormative work to date. If, however, we explore the film within the specific context of grafting, we will see that Denis’s evolving, multi-layered work on space and the frame, and with it intertextual relations, reinvents the family within an expanded notion of kinship that serves to redefine the very nature of human relations, and in so doing develops the full potential of Chocolat’s open ending. The relations between the four proto-family members come to a head in the brilliant set-piece sequence where an unexpected surge of physical desire is peremptorily cut short before it can explode into being, resulting in a preternatural serenity. I am referring to the sudden moment of mutual seduction between Lionel and the beautiful African owner (played by Adèle Ado) who has eyed him up, and he her, from the moment she opened the closed door of her restaurant and he crossed the threshold (followed by Jo, Noé, and Gabrielle) after Gabrielle’s car broke down in the rain while ferrying them to a concert.26 The sequence is a perfect illustration of Denis’s cinema of the senses: a precise choreography of movements and bodily rhythms, of silent looks and touches, at once sensuous and spontaneous, shot for the first time in the film in emotive close-up with facial expressions, glances, and feelings running from anxiety to jealousy under the orange candlelight. Here the cinematic frame is opened out and fully spatialised, allowing for a moment of emotional blossoming and erotic crossing over to the Other. Everything seems in flow and process: a mobile camera opens up the frame and traces the movement of desire which Lionel sets in motion through a subtle yet decisive act of agency. He gently hands his daughter to Noé, shifting out of the frame that he occupies in order to allow the young man finally to express his desire for Jo (even if she instinctively draws away from his kiss – at least for the moment). Then, as if improvising a ritual, Lionel and the owner exchange looks in a magnetising shot/counter-shot, before he suddenly takes her hand and erotic contact is made. Jo is now made witness to Lionel’s desire for another. Meanwhile Gabrielle, cast in the role of pure spectator, is left to rue her earlier wish to play loudly in the car, solely for Lionel’s ears, a slow reggae ballad by the Jamaican singer Sophia George entitled Can’t Live without You. Hence, space is fashioned once again into an interspace or site of passage between different states of being. The sequence, which plays out as if in real time due to the uninterrupted music, opens up centrifugally a tightly circumscribed physical space at the right moment so that the protagonists can enter a new, ‘other’, intersubjective and figurative

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29.  Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) in the foreground eyes up Lionel (Alex Descas) who gazes off-frame: part of the continuous displacement of physical and textual desire during the Nightshift scene in 35 Rhums (2008).

space outside the House of the Father by becoming unfamiliar and ‘other’ to themselves’. There is a strong sense here that things are being quietly and efficiently worked out and through – a meeting of past and future in the process of becoming that, like an experiment in alchemical transmutation, produces spatially a new and liberating depth of field. This creates new lines and networks of affection that stretch out to the viewer (positioned now most literally by Denis as a passenger), and for which the film’s primary cartography – the endless shots of, and from, the trains crossing on the commuter tracks – is but a prefiguring metaphor. Due to Lionel’s clear lead – the delicate gesture of passing Jo on to Noé – all three are able now to start a fresh chapter in their interconnected lives. Lionel does not return to the nest that night, perhaps for the first time ever, and as Noé says to Jo the morning after when he finds his cat dead and thus the last material link with his parents suddenly dissolved: ‘Everything’s going to change now’. This quietly momentous moment is initiated by the opening bars of the song Nightshift sliding into gear and swelling the frame. A 1985 hit by the rock-funk group The Commodores, Nightshift is a tribute song to the memory of soul singers Jackie Wilson and Marvin Gaye. In a mood at once resigned and celebratory it tells of leaving the ‘dayshift’ (i.e. life on

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earth) and starting the ‘nightshift’ in heaven where the departed will remain ‘forevermore, evermore’ in close contact with the living (the chorus ends with the words: ‘You found another home / I know you’re not alone / On the nightshift’). Again, what is being proposed here by Denis is a line of masculine textual influence that not only opens this particular Parisian sphere to the sounds of American culture but also establishes a link across different forms of black experience: French West Indian, African, African-American, and, if we add the song that precedes Nightshift on the jukebox, Siboney (a cover by the Martinican crooner Ralph Thamar of a Cuban ballad by Ernesto Lecouna), Spanish West Indian. Such transcultural shifting determines the very structure and function of this scene where relationships are reconfigured and desire safely rechannelled. Jo will eventually make her own mind up about marriage after learning of Noé’s decision to leave unless she finally declares her hand. Here, no-one is the property of the other: it is a matter of genuine love and respect between fully consenting adults. The importunate and consistently jilted Gabrielle exerts in the end no influence, though she returns in the last scene with Lionel where he playfully suggests that the eponymous drinking legend of the ‘35 shots of rum’, which they perform together with assembled friends, may have been his own pure invention. Crucially, on the day of the marriage, when Jo arrives at Noé’s apartment, the door is closed on the viewer. For the marriage ceremony doesn’t need to be shown – it is superfluous to the deeper processes of kinship and community on display. The message here is quintessential Denis: the need to move beyond immediate ‘natural’ family structures and rise to the challenge of forging new affective forms of human connectedness and other kinds of ‘home’ (‘another home’). What Jo achieves with her father is an exemplary crafting and modulation of otherness, between self and other, and self and self, that safeguards and expands trust, friendship and intimacy. By marrying Noé she will ensure continued physical and emotional proximity with her father. Hence, for all Denis’s multilevelled fascination with the seductive male figure (a complex and dangerous locus of twisted filiation and intertextual depth), it is the female characters like Jo and Laure in Vendredi soir – characters who are nomadically en route and allow the intense experience of liminal space to take hold of them – that perhaps come closest to reaching a new and fundamental state of being in the world within a social framework. Theirs is a sustained, aesthetic experience and adventure of being alive to the play of forms and forces in new spaces.

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In fact, Lionel and Jo had already prepared for this moment with their unexpected road trip together late in the film to Lübeck to visit her German aunt (played by the legendary actress and Fassbinder icon, Ingrid Caven) and lay flowers on her mother’s grave. It is their last journey together as father and unmarried daughter and might appear to send the film spinning off in new directions. For this maternal space is also a virtually deserted foreign place where they look and feel ‘other’ by virtue of their colour and background, though not completely so since Jo still enjoys a connection with German culture through the language. The episode – which comes directly before shots of the marriage day – is recuperable as filial bonding, yet is also simultaneously about the daughter wanting to feel other to her father before letting go and moving on to her future husband. The incestuous closeness here (they sleep together at night outside on the dunes almost like lovers, facing the water and their blue camper van) is thus experienced as the beginning of a new distance and separation. It is as if the Nightshift/refuge sequence were just the vital first stage in their necessary experience of otherness which is defined, as always in Denis, in terms of space that needs to be actively negotiated (here by Jo herself). Significantly, the scene has a particular aesthetic dimension due to the painterly shots of children carrying Japanese lanterns along the shore against an early reddish dusk, which recall the painting Carnation Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–86) by John Singer Sargent. What distinguishes this sequence within Denis’s cinema is the degree of calmness and control involved – the process is executed with natural, almost clinical precision. Yet the Nightshift represents, as we might expect, only one part of the grafting process of 35 Rhums. For the film also marks a personal correction and shifting by Denis of the 1949 classic, Late Spring, by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Based on a story by Kazuo Hirotsu, Late Spring concerns a dutiful young woman Noriko (Setsuko Hara) living in the suburbs of Tokyo with her 56 year old professor father, Shukichi (Chishu Ryu). There, the turning-point was the uninterrupted, eightminute performance of a Noh drama during which Noriko suddenly became aware of her father’s apparent interest in an attractive widow and realises he may not need her after all. I have explored at length elsewhere the many thematic and formal links and differences between 35 Rhums and Late Spring (see Williams 2012), notably around class and the portrayal of the father figure. It is, however, in Denis’s decision not to emulate Ozu’s trademark fixed framing at floor or low-eye level that the difference between the two films is most marked. For even if there are

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clear links in composition and mise-en-scène, Denis’s framing is entirely her own. In addition, if Denis presents the interior of the apartment in Ozu-like minimalist terms through what she calls ‘simple static shots of domestic grids’, she continually seeks to move beyond this by means of creeping, forward-tracking shots which, even if they seem to be heading nowhere in particular, convey a constant sense of forward development that positively embraces the forces of time and change so often refused or avoided by Ozu’s characters. This unwavering commitment to a continually mobile frame lies at the root of Denis’s desire to purify the film of any traces of unnecessary drama or melodrama and to truncate dramatically the Nightshift scene. If 35 Rhums is thus a personal story of authorial respect and transcultural admiration for Ozu under the sign of the Father (Denis presents 35 Rhums explicitly as ‘a variation on the theme of her grandfather while thinking of Ozu’27), it is precisely because it reconfigures Late Spring – a case again of Denis negotiating spatially her intertextual other. As Agnès Godard puts it in her commentary with Denis on the French DVD of 35 Rhums (ARTE, 2008): ‘[w]e went beyond Ozu’. A sense of belief in minimalist things was maintained, but without imitating his style – the apartment is a fully choreographed space in itself ‘full of gestures’. Denis’s account of a relationship where neither daughter nor father gives anything up as such directly reverses Ozu’s tragedy of enforced separation and sacrifice based on strict adherence to the patriarchal law and social obligations. Indeed, 35 Rhums begins as if already on the other side of trauma, and beyond standard questions of morality, passion, or recrimination, on track towards a new level of understanding and joyful resignation. Ozu’s perpetual discourse of duty and family honour (‘Be a good wife’), which causes Noriko to regress from a loving, smiling daughter in the first part of the film to a resentful young woman who collapses emotionally inwards, is replaced by Lionel’s simple, positive message to Jo: ‘Think of yourself’. Lionel’s final casual revelation that he may have made up the eponymous drinking legend himself, followed by the last shot of him unpacking another rice cooker (the cooker that Joséphine had purchased at the start but did not acknowledge due to the embarrassment of duplication), suggests a deliberate textual openness that carries faith in the active powers of invention. Legend serves self-reflexively here as a mise en abyme of the intertextual romance between Denis and Ozu which provides the film with its steady anchor. While desire always operates for Denis within the realm of death and violence, she would appear in 35 Rhums to be feeling her way

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towards new artistic territory beyond aggression and subversion by means of the purposeful accommodation of social forms and laws. Jo chooses to work creatively within existing social norms in order to safeguard her love for her father – a process experienced here as a measure of autonomy rather than conformism. By deregulating and romancing the Father, and even assuming the risks of sentimentality, 35 Rhums renegotiates and reinvests familial structures and social prohibitions. This successful search for new ‘other’ spaces of alterity that offer potential kinship is possible precisely because of the liminal moment of the male-identified Nightshift, suggesting that ‘unnatural’ kinship – or ‘extended family’ if viewed in the express terms of ‘diaspora’ defined by Denis – represents the best chance of working through, and sublimating, the intrinsic violence of sexuality and passion.28 As always in Denis, this is linked to forms of ritual that have the capacity to divert and defuse desire. If we accept that the spatial is the aesthetic in Denis because it always marks a transformative ‘shifting away’, 35 Rhums, with its gently mobile, inclusive and open frame and multiple grafting, may be said to render the Other representable spatially and aesthetically. For Denis mediates with and through Ozu as textual other, negotiating his otherness and opacity at a formal level as textual matter that can be reframed and potentially resolved. Such investment in textual and spatial relations – an affective mode of kinship through and across texts that ensures the film’s own safe passage – offers a textual beyond of the Other, that is, beyond the fixed limits of the discourse of the Other, and it gestures towards a new commonality and solidarity beyond the fact of difference. Moreover, by grafting for the viewer/listener new, intimate, aesthetic spaces, at once transitional, hybrid and open, beyond the standard terms and conditions of spectatorial identification, Denis powerfully resists the idea of difference as threat. For this reason, and the fact that Denis is grafting new ‘families of form’ outside the strict Oedipal binds of heterosexual family narratives, we might link her work to Bersani and Dutoit’s project discussed in Chapter 1 to rethink relationality beyond narcissism and the fixed ego in order to conceive new relational modes and affinities of (virtual) being that open up unexpected correspondences between the self and the world. Certainly, Denis’s grafting of Ozu, working with, and through, and ultimately beyond, the Other, could not be more self-reflexive, with the intertextual relays perceptible in every passage back and forth of the shunting trains Lionel either drives or observes. For Denis, meaning in

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the cinema always comes down to an ethical desire for a relationship with others beyond the frame of the Other. As she powerfully put it around the time of J’ai pas sommeil: ‘Even the pleasure of framing the image isn’t sufficient. Desire for the cinema ought to go beyond the frame, towards meaning. It should be a desire for a relationship with others’ (Denis 1994: 74).29 In its quiet, totally unassuming way, 35 Rhums showcases and extends the multi-dimensional interspaces and transtextual ambitions of Denis’s cinema. The full measure of its success can be gained by contrasting it with White Material, set in the very different context of a white French farming community in an unnamed state in Africa. Although edited and released after 35 Rhums, White Material was actually filmed first and constitutes both an aesthetic extreme and outer-limit in Denis’s oeuvre. Shot for the first time not by Godard but by Bruno Dumont’s regular Director of Photography, Yves Cape (the editor here, Guy Lecorne, is also Dumont’s editor), the film looks deliberately flat and bleached out. One of the defining features of Denis’s cinematic style – its intimate engagement with the external real – cannot take root here because usurped by urgent tracking shots which alternate with extreme close-ups and jump-cuts in action-thriller style. The drama plays out to the same, repeated instrumental Tindersticks theme, Opening – a wheezing squeezebox that, with its mournful viola and portentously plucked strings, imposes an oppressive, trance-like mood of dread. Although the narrative is punctuated by shards that may be embedded flashbacks or just as easily flash-forwards and possibly hallucinations – Maria is always fleeing from, or returning to, the place she calls ‘home’ – the effect of a pre-set stopwatch ticking down to apocalypse remains constant. This runs deliberately counter to Denis’s usual depsychologising approach founded on gaps and ellipses, narrative indeterminacies and speculative possibilities which normally lift away from the scene of psychoanalysis in order to emphasise the aesthetic potential and mystery of being in the world. In fact, the sad irony of White Material is that despite its astonishingly vivid, almost hallucinatory presentation of the open African bush and its sense of a perpetual ‘hyper-intensified’ now (Romney 2010), what is actually being recorded here is the progressive extinguishing of space. An equivalent spatial paradox defines Matteo Garrone’s disturbing Gomorrah (2008), where the lush beauty of the open, Neapolitian perspectives of countryside and shoreline is presented as completely polluted and rendered void at every level. In both cases, there is

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30.  The extinction of space: Chérif’s militia patrol the burning Vial plantation in the sequence that both opens and closes White Material (2010).

simply no place left for space to go. The shocking penultimate scene of White Material when, in a low-angle close-up, Maria leans forward over an open hatch and clubs her ailing ex-father-in-law, Henri, who is standing below, on the back of the head repeatedly and mercilessly, marks a deadly closing up of screen space.30 White Material ends, in fact, where it began, with the mayor Chérif leading his private militia by torchlight through the Vial plantation and setting it on fire – a lacerating vision of a world scorched of human love and friendship, and where human relations have been reduced literally to ash. This is a vision of total breakdown. Just as the white plantation family implodes in violence, so, too, the new Boxer glimpsed in the last shot will find new children to manipulate in an endless cycle of bloodshed. No personal aesthetics of space can be performed here. Instead, the blighted landscape remains merely the site for a narrative of collective destruction. Far from pointing towards new inclusive spaces, the cinematic frame is, by the end, graphically shut and sealed, to be reopened by a shot that repositions the new black rebel leader in the middle of the frame simply as ‘Other’ – a spectre of terror forever to haunt the frame after he exits to the right. Narrative closure may have been avoided here but nothing of a more fundamental nature has changed, and no spatial resolution is possible. The film is a fatalistic, univocal narrative about power, death, and survival where no space (or time) exists to trace the materiality of matter and human and textual relations. This represents a stunning inversion of Denis’s normal method and practice of space and intertextuality as we have defined it. Beyond the obvious fact that White Material is, above all, a star-vehicle,

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marking the first time in Denis’s work that the theatrical performance of its star (Huppert) completely dictates its narrative flow (Denis admits to having been in total awe of Huppert’s incandescent energy and aura), the particular potency of Subor and the remarkable male cinematic imaginary he has personally embodied in Denis’s cinema is progressively depleted. Once he is finally decapitated and space has been literally smothered out, the film is all but over. In short, the processes of fragmentation and violence inherent in Denis’s work have been taken here to a contagious, dehumanising level – one that takes to its logical conclusion her absolute sense that desire is violence. The reasons for such a negative outcome should by now be fully clear: there is no generative textual nucleus for development and thus no possibility for intertextual grafting, despite the fact that the film has impeccable literary credentials, being a collaboration with the celebrated French-Senegalese novelist Marie NDiaye rather than Denis’s regular scriptwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau (NDiaye is a writer who places the family at the heart of her work as the source of all tensions). Despite echoes of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, the film engages directly with no major intertext as such. Indeed, the fixed, black and white postcard image of Lessing in the 1950s, briefly glimpsed on the dressing table in Maria’s room as just some other generic ‘white material’, merely confirms the absence of anything more sustained.31 Hence, White Material’s inability to recuperate any new or genuine fraternity and commonality, either real or formal, out of the familial horror, and thereby circumvent Maria’s intransigence and misplaced fixation on belonging, throws into acute relief the multiple stakes of Denis’s grafting project. If her work is normally one of form working through formlessness (the point from which she always begins, like strangeness) in a continuous process of spatial circumnavigation, here, by contrast, there is no rechannelling and rearticulation of the masculine screen and imaginary. For all its resoundingly cinematic qualities and movement, White Material does not engage at this further aesthetic level and ends up the least ‘Denisian’ of all her films. Yet White Material may also be read in a more favourable, political light. For Denis would seem to be indicating here that nothing has fundamentally changed in racial terms in Africa. Moreover, recognising the continuing legacy of exploitation where all remains symbolically charged and comes down to either white or black, she has chosen not to play by her own internal rules and authorial inclinations. Postcolonial black African society cannot be easily transumed aesthetically or

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opened up culturally, and no blurring – still less queering – of spatial or textual borders seems possible. Of little or no currency here are the fluid textual networks and intersecting lines of cultural reference that can be immediately accessed and elaborated, for instance, in the comfortable black Parisian milieu of 35 Rhums, or in the exceptional case of the Foreign Legion in Beau Travail, a film where the voice-over narrator is, after all, positioned ‘back home’ in Marseilles. White Material remains trapped within – yet also rigorously faithful to – the unrelenting glare and shock of the Other. There is no beyond to the Other, no real beyond of the frame, except the spectacle of yet more fear and violence. As I have argued elsewhere with particular reference to the influence of Fanon, implicit in every frame of this film, it would be more constructive and accurate to view the approach of White Material less as a symptom of blocked creativity than as evidence of a political parti pris. For the cinematic and intertextual void it presents is surely a direct response to a very specific contemporary context: an independent African state undergoing a period of violent transition yet still defined by the accrued symbolic weight of Black versus White and the power relations of Us and Them, and where the enormity of child abduction by rebel movements means that the opportunities for education are literally cut down dead (see Williams 2012). White Material, I’m suggesting, is an impressively honest and uncompromising film precisely because it acknowledges the limits, or ‘non-spaces’, of Denis’s textual practice in the face of the political real. Its apparent aesthetic weakness – its lack of an intertextual graft and failure to surpass the cinematic and ideological frame of the Other – is paradoxically the very sign of its political strength. For this reason, it works with, rather than against, 35 Rhums. Denis herself proposes a kind of dialogue between the two films such that they balance each other out. Following the lines of our discussion, we might formalise this complementarity not in terms of formal and thematic extremes (i.e. between one intertextually bereft film seemingly beyond race and another intertextually replete yet wholly defined by race), still less as one between symptom and cure, but rather as itself, potentially, a new form of kinship and shared aesthetic space between filmic texts that extends Denis’s general project of relationality. For together they help us, like all Denis’s work, to imagine how the boundaries of human proximity may be more positively imagined, pointing the way, as in the last, radiant image of Chocolat, towards new spaces for social/ cultural intimacy and the possible grounds for common mutuality.

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In her commentary of the Nightshift scene on the French DVD of 35 Rhums, Agnès Godard talked in virtual absolutes of the concrete power of the film’s ‘images-essence’ and ‘images de cinéma’. Denis’s intertextual poetics of space possesses ultimately the force of Bachelard’s post-Bergsonian poetic image in all its phenomenological, ecstatic newness and salience, where the real measure of its ‘being’ lies in its ‘transsubjective’ sonority and ‘reverberation’ rather than causality. In Baudelaire, Bachelard proposes, the word ‘vast’ marks an ‘infinity of intimate space’: an activity of poetic spatiality that goes from deep intimacy to infinite extent (Bachelard 1994: 190). Baudelaire’s poems are human realities and must be experienced in their immensity. Denis’s extraordinary trans-cinema of grafted passages, which take us to new and unforeseen thresholds of being and relationality, demands the same. Notes 1 Denis also teaches a course at the European Graduate School entitled ‘Cinema as cultural anthropology’, which, according to its website, aims to examine ‘contemporary filmmaking as an exploration into multi-ethnic and cross-cultural environments, with the cool passion and distanced engagement of an anthropologist’. 2 ‘[S]urfaces recyclables du souvenir, couches d’espace-temps superposables à l’infini’. 3 Caws notes that ‘passage’ is a liminal stage that can accommodate role reversal and notions of textual exchange and reader response. 4 Del Rio explains that Denis’s characters are found less in sensory-motor motivating situations and more in a state of Deleuzian bal(l)ade, of strolling, sauntering or rambling, which defines Deleuze’s pure optical and sound situations. In this affective realm that goes beyond subjectivity and characters to involve the film body as a sensation-producing machine, space, as in Deleuze’s ‘time-image’, becomes the ‘any-space-whatever’ (see Del Rio 2003a). 5 Asibong argues that these form part of what he calls Denis’s version of ‘fantastical kinship’: the (white) woman’s fleeting, unnameable, highly choreographed interactions with a ‘a certain kind of black man’ are like dances which always involve her inarticulate, physically-expressed desire for the post-social transformation of the space they both inhabit into a new womb-like space of radical protection and comfort, by which she is re-born as New Daughter, and the man re-embodied as postcolonial Mother-Father (see Asibong 2011). 6 Chocolat makes reference (twice) to Kurt Weiss, the German who founded and owned the family villa and was apparently killed by his own Boy.

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In The Heart of Darkness Kurtz, we recall, is slowly going mad with a mysterious disease and shouts out: ‘Exterminate the Brutes’. 7 Denis expressed it thus in 2001: ‘les histoires naissaient souvent chez moi d’un noyau masculin, y compris lorsque l’homme n’était pas le personnage principal. Avant même la première image, quand un projet commence, il est plus masculin que féminin … Au fond, le cinéma est masculin pour moi’ (Denis 2001a: 26) (‘Stories often emerged in me from a masculine kernel, including when the man was not the main character. Even before the first image, when a project begins it is more masculine than feminine … The cinema is essentially masculine for me’). 8 The Foreign Legion is an autonomous collectivity of displaced foreign nationals (only around a quarter of the corps are French) that creates its own paternity under the motto: ‘The Legion [i.e. not France] is our homeland’. 9 See Lack 2004 for a comprehensive account of the references to Subor and Le Petit Soldat in the film, which he proposes as ‘pretexts’ in a process of mimeticism. 10 I explore this process at greater length in Williams 2004a. 11 Bersani talks of ‘an aesthetic ethic of correspondences between the self and the world, a community of being in which the recognitions of various degrees and modes of similitude is itself a sensually appealing deconstruction of the prestige of knowledge’ (Bersani 2010a: 95). He proposes the ‘concept of impersonal intimacy and even impersonal narcissism as a viable alternative to what seems … the limiting and harmful assumption that intimacy necessarily includes, indeed may depend on, a knowledge of the other’s personal psychology’ (ibid.: 96). 12 Like Subor, Lavant carries own cinematic baggage here as a fetish actor of the 1980s cinéma du look, specifically the Godard-influenced films of Leos Carax such as Boy Meets Girl (1984) where he dances in a set-piece sequence to David Bowie’s Modern Love, and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) where he is a fire artist. Expanding this circle of filiations: Carax also featured in Godard’s King Lear (1987), and his Pola X (1999) is an adaptation of Melville’s 1852 novel of incest, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. 13 ‘Accueillir l’étranger, il faut bien que ce soit aussi éprouver son intrusion.’ 14 See Nancy 2005a. This movement of creative kinship also unfolds outside the film, in the ongoing dialogue between Nancy and Denis, which follows a logic of transmission and exchange between philosophy and cinema. This includes an article by Nancy on Trouble Every Day (see Nancy 2008), a five-part radio interview between the two with Laure Adler broadcast on France Culture on 15 November 2005 (the second part is on L’Intrus), and Vers Mathilde (2005), a ‘documentary’ about the dance choreographer Monnier that features Nancy taking part in a performance of a text he co-wrote with Monnier. See also Monnier and Nancy 2005. For

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an excellent overview of the dialogue between Nancy and Denis as itself a ‘practice of strangeness’, see Beugnet 2008. 15 Denis states in the director’s interview on the English DVD of L’Intrus (Tartan, 2005) that when faced with beautiful landscapes one must know in advance exactly what one is hoping to achieve. 16 For different accounts of the different forms of sacrifice and resurrection in L’Intrus, see Morrey 2008, McMahon 2008a and 2008b. Nancy writes of the resurrected body and the Mary Magdalene figure in the film who reaches out to grasp the body. For Nancy, the raising up of the coffin at the end is like an ascension, signalled by a previous shot of islanders gathered around an empty tomb (see Nancy 2005a). See in this regard Nancy’s other work on art, Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps (2003), about Christ resurrected. It is worth stating here that Nancy has also written an essay entitled ‘Uncanny Landscape’ (2002) (in Nancy 2005a: 51–62) where he speaks of landscape as having a force and capacity to estrange and render uncanny – it is the ‘presentation of dislocation’. The horizon, which joins and disjoins, brings together and pulls apart, closes and opens, is a metaphor for the image in general that is not a bond, but a cut, separated from the invisible ground that surrounds it. 17 Nancy presents the cinematic gaze as an entry into space because it is penetration before it is consideration or contemplation (Nancy 2001: 15). Elsewhere, in Nancy 2006, he adds that the image coming to the screen in cinema is not experienced as coming from some depth or recess of the screen, but is the spacing of the screen itself, existing as the expanse or extent of the screen – i.e. experienced directly as evidence within my eyes and body (cited in Morrey 2008: 20). 18 Tabu, Murnau’s last film, examines the yearning for freedom expressed in a vision of spatial alterity. With its rich weave of loose associations, L’Intrus positively invites critics to invent and project causal connections, though not always convincingly (see, for example, Wim Staat 2008, which is simply too literal and inaccurate about the death of the wild child). Denis has also acknowledged the influence of Gilles Deleuze’s L’Île déserte et autres textes (2002), specifically the title text on desert islands which, she claims, is about people of the North going to the South thinking it is the last possibility of a paradise, then discovering it is no longer a voyage but a dérive (Denis 2005b: 45). In fact, there is no direct mention by Deleuze here of Europeans heading South, though this may be implied in references to Jean Giraudoux’s Suzanne et le Pacifique. He is more concerned with the paradox that humans can drift toward an island that is nonetheless imaginary, and that they can create on an island which has merely drifted away. The essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual; mythological and not geographical. Denis has a similar approach in L’Intrus, making the deserted island part of a specifically cinematic imaginary.

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19 Le Reflux was eventually released in 1965 with an ending by Roger Vadim and Jacques Poitrenaud in which Subor explains in a voice-over recording that his character fell in love with a Polynesian woman, but decided not to stay because he felt himself a ‘doomed man’. The original full title of Le Reflux was Le Reflux ou l’Enfer au Paradis (literally, The Ebb-tide or Hell in Paradise). 20 In Denis 2004a: 156, Denis talks of consciously trying to avoid ‘slipping into them [her female characters] the false pathos I have towards myself’. She formalises the problem thus: ‘in order to capture a female character, I will be obliged to provide a surplus of myself’ (ibid.). She adds that Dalle is very different in that ‘she forbids pathos, my pathos. She transcends it instantly. By her beauty. Her phenomenal intuition. Béatrice places herself on the level of humans’ (ibid.). However, in an interview immediately following Trouble Every Day, Denis recognised the danger she felt working with Dalle: ‘il est vrai que je suis troublée par Béatrice. Du coup, en plateau, j’étais très timide avec elle, mais cela m’a permis de décupler mon pouvoir imaginaire à son égard. Béatrice m’a sommée de la regarder comme une très belle femme et m’a séduite’ (Denis 2001a). 21 In the case of Vendredi soir/Friday Night (2002), for example, Catherine Grant shows persuasively how the extreme ‘straightness’ of Denis’s adaptation of Emmanuèle Bernheim’s heterosexual novel actually makes the film ‘queer’ (see Grant 2009). This queer dimension is furthered by the status of the comic actor and humourist Valérie Lemercier (Laure) as an emerging gay icon in France. She directed Le Derrière (1998), for example, in which she also starred, about a daughter who, upon discovering her father in Paris is gay, impersonates a young gay son to get his attention. Vendredi soir is also dedicated to ‘Nan’, almost certainly the photographer Nan Goldin. 22 Maule considers the oddness of Denis’s dismissal of gender and a gender informed perspective as both indicative of a third wave of feminism in France, and a radical reconceptualisation of feminine subjectivity invoking a different approach to the female body (Denis refuses the category of woman filmmaker). Drawing on Deleuzian models of post-subjectivity to help account for Denis’s corporeal cinema, Maule concludes that ‘Denis’s description of herself as a separated being points to a definition of the author as an Other where otherness no longer primarily symbolises the position of women in western culture’ (Maule 2008: 232). 23 See Beugnet 2004: 168–73 for further analysis of the film’s proliferation of spaces of dread and infiltration. 24 Mills is another key musical collaborator for Denis. Her 2007 Diaspora exhibition, already mentioned, featured a soundtrack by him, and in a television encounter in 2009 the two are filmed walking the streets of Paris one night and discussing their work. See ‘Au Coeur de la Nuit’ broadcast on ARTE on 16 April 2009.

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25 Denis has emphasised that Hermann copied material both from Britten and Shostakovich, but at least Britten and Herrmann were friends and would exchange things (Britten was also on good terms with Shostakovich). See Denis 2003. The Hitchcock link is not gratuitous: the creepy receptionist (Micha Lescot) in the deserted hotel could be a French cousin of Norman Bates. 26 The sticker on the door of the restaurant reads ‘Amour des jeux Paris 2012’ (‘Love of the Games Paris 2012’), a reference to Paris’s (failed) bid to host the next Olympic games. It already signals perhaps that what lies inside, a place of warmth and hospitality to strangers, will also be a space of desire and play. 27 In conversation with me in 2010 Denis has spoken in more general, humanistic terms of a kinship with Ozu, her ‘human friend’. Late Spring, a film which, as Denis already stated in her contribution to the 1993 tribute film, Talking with Ozu, brought into clarity her own family history as soon as she saw it during an Ozu retrospective one summer in Paris, left her totally overwhelmed (she talks in her celebration of Ozu of a ‘personal connection’ with the film). If, as Denis has said, 35 Rhums proved so easy to shoot and edit, it is perhaps because it had already been imprinted and formed by that first indelible viewing of Late Spring. 28 Witness, too, how Lionel’s middle-aged and now retired Caribbean work-mate, René, travelling by train, silently observes a white woman of similar age returning home from a long day’s work. Nothing is said or articulated, but an implicit understanding and empathy is struck beyond the evident differences of race and sex. It is another instance of ‘unspeakable’, pseudo-parental intimacy and kinship through, and across, otherness. 29 ‘Même le plaisir de cadrer ne saurait suffire. L’envie de cinema doit aller au-delà du cadre, vers le sens. Ça doit être un désir de relation avec les autres.’ 30 I have explored elsewhere the links between this scene – where, in Lacanian terms, the Real suddenly erupts and takes over in a graphic and highly literal psychotic foreclosure of the Symbolic – with Maria’s general character and behaviour as the only European woman in a film that unfolds like a virtual case-study of female obsession and hysteria. See Williams 2012. 31 Huppert had originally approached Denis to adapt this novel. See Denis 2010a. There are echoes also in White Material of Faulkner, Conrad, and the Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi to whom Denis dedicated the film in her director’s statement at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. See Williams 2012.

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7 In lieu of a conclusion Space and being in contemporary French cinema

In lieu of a conclusion

Only empty space can really hold the future in store. (R. Barthes)

The arc we have traced in this study of spatial strategies and cinematic framing in contemporary French cinema is one of a progressive engagement with the external world. That is, from a closing up of the cinematic frame and closing off of geophysical space to an increasing opening up of the frame and an opening out to the world and the Other. Bruno Dumont’s cinema of devices, decoys and illusions may initially seem topophilic with its attention to place grounded in the very soil of wide-frame, rural landscapes, yet it is a self-consciously ‘unnatural’ cinema of time and human acts of becoming where space must know its place as human habitat and setting, or else remain a vague abstraction. The ritualised, interiorising use of reverse-field within the temporalities of montage, whereby landscape is always on its anthropomorphic way to being ‘completed’ by his characters, results in the rarefication and eventual suffocation of space. Rather than ‘unframe’ the world in order to rediscover it afresh, Dumont continually frames it, in all senses of the word, to the point of reducing it to pure function. The symbolic and political demands of Robert Guédiguian are so absolute that Marseilles – and all his heavily mapped and circumscribed urban landscapes – invariably become the same empty, abyssal space to pass through eyes wide shut. His cinema almost always arrives after the image due to a lack of any genuine investment in space qua space. Indeed, despite some show-piece sequences suggesting the contrary, Guédiguian’s symbolic mapping of the metropolis is not really about geophysical space at all, for it is thoroughly predetermined by his understanding of the irremediability of political time. In this

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closed world, there is rarely any possibility of spontaneous urban encounter or spatial surprise. Laurent Cantet’s method is very different in that he reconceives the space/frame relation by exposing and undermining the logic of the frame frontally, sideways, and also from behind, by means of the hors-champ. The cinematic frame becomes in his films a pre-eminently mobile and receptive vehicle for social and cultural inclusion, notably through sound. The lesson of Cantet’s ethical and aesthetic manoeuvres against ideological framing is that even a visibly open cinematic frame can operate as a closed, suspended and reductive visual form if it serves merely to enforce dead or empty social/cultural space. The cinema of Abdellatif Kechiche constructs a social and cultural frame that actively draws on the symbolic framework of State and Nation which is then purposively deframed. Each film creates a shared, hybrid frame of cultural mediation and performance, transforming the cinematic frame into an aesthetically and ethically open echo-chamber to record the sounds of multicultural France and encourage cultural mixité to reverberate. For Kechiche, sound, in contrast to the visual image, is formally always more autonomous, free and potential. As the open ending of his first three films reveals, it can also become the principal vector of desired métissage. In Claire Denis’s extraordinary trans-cinema of grafted passages, which takes us to new and unforeseen thresholds of filmic being and connectedness, space becomes a poetic, performative, and generative process whereby different levels and forms of space are consistently brought together relationally and self-reflexively. Denis mediates with and through appointed intertextual others, negotiating their otherness and opacity at a formal level as textual matter that can be reframed and potentially resolved. Calibrated with a gently mobile, inclusive and open frame, this multiple intertextual grafting renders alterity representable, both spatially and aesthetically. Indeed, Denis regrafts the very boundaries of human relationality and intimacy in order to point the way towards yet further material spaces and states of being. At the root of her project lies ultimately an ethical wish not only to reimagine the external, material world unframed, but also to dismantle – and move beyond – all negative discursive framing of the Other. In the process, cinematic space, unanchored from standard cinematic and cultural moorings and resistant to the terms and conditions of spectatorial identification, manifests itself as a potential source of new perceptions, affectivities and subjectivities.

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Our travels through different cinematic worlds reveal that composite audiovisual strategies of space and framing create a perpetually shifting field and play of mobile forms. Just when we think we know where filmmakers are heading in their spatial practice, we witness swerves to new loci of affective/aesthetic investment and fresh locations of theoretical interest, whether in the ethico-erotics of intersubjective spectatorship (Dumont), the spatialisation and ‘unframing’ of sound (Cantet), the interstices of parallel editing and montage (Kechiche), or the multi-form passages of transtextual poetics (Denis). In the most imaginative hands cinematic space becomes a powerful mediator for social and cultural change. In the particular case of Kechiche, film offers the possibility to reappropriate and reinvent not only French Republican space but also traditional cinematic territory, including the newly established terrain of beur cinema. As we have seen, Kechiche challenges his audience to move beyond State-devised notions of difference by opening up French culture and placing it in new and necessarily impure spaces and audiovisual frameworks. By defamiliarising and reprogramming the source-codes of the French tradition and patrimoine (its texts, images, narratives, symbols, stereotypes) and then offering them to his audience for cultural ‘open-sourcing’, Kechiche proposes an open-access practice of creative modification and regeneration through direct interfacing with culture(s). Guédiguian, by contrast, demonstrates by negative example the potential and stakes of spatiality in cinema. His obsession with the non-lieu of political utopia proves ultimately a refusal to engage with space at all in favour of nostalgic communitarian fantasies and a ritualised rumination on lost time. Hence, if the commitment to filmic space and framing is potentially always a political matter and an affirmative, progressive gesture, the refusal of space leads logically to a refusal of the political itself. Space, in short, is always a mirage – the closer one is to mapping its critical boundaries and lieux communs, the more the horizon of fixed or unifying knowledge withdraws. Cinematographic space above all, in its many different forms and guises (screenspace, landscape, diegetic space, soundscape, spectatorial space, etc.), is fluid and contingent, liminal and protean. Those films that work most the rich spatiotemporal seams of the cinematic field and extend the parameters of the frame are precisely those that most engage with – and enter into – cinematic space as an organic, multi-dimensional and multi-sensory experience, so displaying the external world at its most concrete and

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corporeal. Put differently: to deframe the cinematic frame is both to expand filmic space and unframe our standard perceptions of the material world. For cinema shows us both the process of physical space becoming formal space, and the world becoming the world. Moreover, by creating new openings and networks of relations between screen and spectator, self and other, public and private, cinematic space also generates new thresholds of human being in time. The cinematic subject is always diasporic and in process – the extensibility of space is the extension of being. Which means, in turn, that being is never just the interface of the Other, as some psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists of the virtual world of cyberspace would have us believe. The space of the real is never simply accessible at the click of a key or button, but always mutable, complex and incomplete.1 Some possible future paths of theoretical enquiry suggest themselves. First, Kechiche’s aesthetic-political project of cultural reclamation and renewal points to a larger emerging project within French cinema to reinvest and reinvent its own historical spaces and topographies, in particular the academically guarded, high-modernist precincts of the auteur. Irma Vep (1996) by Olivier Assayas, for example, has replayed the formal dynamism of the New Wave by tracking the erratic flows and rhythms of everyday Paris. Starring the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, it opens up brilliantly the silent film legacy of Louis Feuillade, experimental avant-garde film, and post-’68 cinéma engagé. More recently, Luc Besson, a survivor of the early 1980s cinéma du look, offered in Angel-A (2005) a highly stylised and self-conscious homage to the New Wave in black and white set around the Pont Alexandre III in Paris. Crucially, it subverted one of the New Wave’s standard reflexes – a principally white cast – by featuring the beur actor Jamel Debbouze in the male lead. A more self-consciously explicit and extensive critical engagement with the legacy and influence of the New Wave is provided by Jacques Nolot, an actor and scriptwriter who has collaborated with Denis and directed three feature films incorporating aspects of his own life, in which he also stars.2 Each explores different kinds of space. Following L’Arrière-pays/Hinterland (1988), where a 50 year old actor (Nolot) returns to his family home in the provinces to take care of his dying mother, La Chatte à 2 têtes/Porn Theatre (2003) effectively excavated and re-gendered the physical and symbolic space of the film theatre, one of the archetypal, self-reflexive sites of the New Wave. As the camera tracked elegantly up and down the aisles and probed the deepest recesses of the auditorium, gently caressing the

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anonymous figures engaged in furtive sex, it exposed and deconstructed the masculinist and heterosexist presuppositions of the New Wave so incisively detailed by the film critic Geneviève Sellier (see Sellier 2008), as well as its often homophobic leanings.3 Nolot’s third film, Avant que j’oublie/Before I Forget (2007), an austere, unflinching portrait of a lonely and isolated 58 year old former gigolo Pierre, closes with a stunning sequence that takes the form of a tableau vivant. Pierre arrives at a cheap sex cinema in Pigalle called the ‘Atlas’ to realise his secret, long-held fantasy of dressing publicly in drag. Wearing a female wig and makeshift black dress, his thin moustache now shaved off, his arms and legs bare, he hovers a few minutes in the entrance. Then, as Mahler’s Third Symphony strikes up again on the soundtrack, he steps forward gingerly into the darkened interior which gradually swallows him up.4 Although deliberately understated, this momentous sequence possesses all the excitement of the New Wave’s attempts to relay the shock of daily reality through the extended use of plan-séquence and live sound. Most notably, the diegetic sounds of the street and traffic are not minimised or cancelled out. Further, like all the five filmmakers explored in this study who query our historical moment – the fragmented world of a late (and for some, lost) modernity – in and as form, Nolot actively encourages us to consider the nature of our identification with cinema and to conceive new ways of being in space. Without ever directly acknowledging it as such, his drag fantasy in the cinema foyer both celebrates the true legacy and excitement of the New Wave – its commitment to investigating contemporary sounds and images – and remakes queer the very territory of French cinema and cinephilia. Nolot invites us to retain, lest we forget, the recent cinematic and cultural past as a vital part of our living collective imaginary, since what we inherit is also, of course, what sustains us, specifically the sense of a direct engagement with present and historical reality which forms part of the very project of modernity and its radical critique. Such a transformative performance of cinematic legacy in Nolot’s work raises a second potential new avenue of enquiry into filmic space. For in its supremely physical focus on the materiality of cinema and its continuing place within our lives, Nolot’s cinema also obliges us to consider how external space and the physical world will be envisioned creatively by the next generation of filmmakers. Whenever the natural landscape has been encountered in this study, it has been with a sense that it is immanent, present and alive. Yet some recent French films have already acknowledged the crucial existential fact that we are

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living through a period of seismic environmental change, and have foregrounded the local effects of an emerging global crisis. Michael Haneke’s Le Temps du loup/The Time of the Wolf (2003), for instance, portrays a world of post-apocalyptic social breakdown following an unspecified ecological disaster, where the water has been contaminated and livestock have to be burned. On a less spectacular and more intimate – though no less profound – level, Ursula Meier’s Home (2009), shot by Agnès Godard and starring Isabelle Huppert, presents a family living in an isolated house near an abandoned motorway whose life dramatically changes when the motorway is returned to operation. The film reveals the extent to which contemporary life, social relations and the ecology are affected by car culture, noise pollution and potentially devastating evolutionary change. Viewed within this increasingly bleak global context, a work like Philippe Grandrieux’s Un Lac (2008), set in the gleaming, snow-bound, natural wilderness and deep forests of the North, would appear to close a long tradition of artistic attempts to present visually the Sublime. Indeed, the film (shot in Switzerland) seems wilfully nostalgic in its portrait of a pristine natural landscape available for the airing of epic family stories.5 The burgeoning new field of eco-film criticism attempts precisely to establish the purpose and validity of current cinematic visions of nature and humankind in films ranging from Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) to La Marche de l’Empereur/March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005), and so encourage a more progressive and urgent understanding of the environment (see Willoquet-Maricondi 2010 and Cubitt et al. 2012). The third projected area of spatial enquiry follows directly on from this. For the retraction of the natural world and physical space is matched by the steady disappearance of the medium of film itself. As I write, digital has just replaced celluloid as the mainstream form of projection, and at Tate Modern in London the video artist Tacita Dean’s installation Film (2011), where radiant images of the natural world are projected on to a vast CinemaScope screen flipped on to its side like a cathedral window, is commemorating the vanishing beauty of 35 mm film. Again, the filmmakers we have studied all currently work within the world of analogue images. Yet what will happen to cinematic space when new technologies are fully embraced and we enter wholly into the fabricated realms of virtual reality, 3–D and computer generated imagery (CGI)? Will cinematic space continue to offer new existential frontiers and thresholds, and thus the continued possibility of new sites of human contact and exchange, thought and emotion, as we

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have traced them? As Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner have rightly suggested, ‘Those born in the emerging digital age may have a different response to cinematic landscapes, founded on the coherence of the image and sound … rather than on the correspondence of the film to a sense of pre-existing form, or verisimilitude connected with experience’ (Harper and Rayner 2010: 17). Critical opinion on the general impact of digital technology on cinema remains, of course, extremely varied. According to Stephen Barber, digital imagery is much like its analogue predecessor in that it possesses a dual, allied vulnerability to the forces of memory and oblivion, and to the arbitrariness of corporate culture (Barber 2002: 181). Meanwhile, the film theorist Garrett Stewart eloquently proposes that new film technology is leading to a ‘postfilmic’ kind of cinema at the intersection of new intermedial sites where new forms of temporality – ‘framed’ ‘digitime’ and the ‘timespace-image’ defined as the implosion of spatial and temporal categories into a fantastic zone (where, for example, the plane of the past can be morphed by retraversal and transformed, rather than just remembered) (Stewart 2007: 286) – offer the potential for totally different kinds of narrative plotting and a new consciousness in, and of, images (ibid.: 1–19). Assayas’s hyper-glossy Demonlover (2002), set in the virtual, inhuman spaces of the corporate world, mimics the sensory and cognitive experiences of digital media, alternating between 35 mm film and DV footage from pre-existing animation films, videogames and websites, all further elaborated in post-production. The critic Rosanna Maule reads Assayas’s blurring of the boundaries between indexical and virtual imagery (or what she calls ‘techno-bending’ (Maule 2008: 99)) in highly positive terms, and against those critics who see only a fascination with digital glamour. For Maule, who claims we are now entering a new realm of post-auteurism in France, Assayas’s post-ontological approach to the image ‘aims to convey the loss of spatial and temporal linearity in our post-Euclidean culture and to render the vectorial nature of people’s interrelations and communications within a new technologies- and media-saturated environment’ (ibid.: 96). Time will tell if Assayas succeeds in finding a genuine new digital place for French cinema within new audiovisual media, rather than one that simply reproduces familiar spaces cleansed precisely of the messy human reality and otherness of daily life. (I’m thinking here in particular of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s infamous use of new technology such as digital compositing and CGI in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie

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Poulain/Amelie (2001), to depict selectively, and even erase, the actual multicultural population of Montmartre in northern Paris.6) Of course, it is not simply a matter of how films will continue to be conceived and produced, but also of how new technology changes the very way we receive and view them (via iPad, iPhone, etc.). New forms and surfaces of spectatorship will doubtlessly provoke new sensations and engender new kinds of perception, as well as new ways of understanding and feeling space. This will create, in turn, new portals for the study of film and inspire new ways of writing about film, a process already glimpsed in the pioneering new critical genre of videographic film essays created digitally and disseminated online.7 The interrelated spaces of potential new filmic enquiry and practice I have briefly sketched out project cinema forwards to exciting new adventures in audiovisual space. I would like to end, however, by suggesting that even within the familiar spheres of French auteurism, new and fertile cinematic regions are forming beyond the strict confines of the cinema. Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, for example, have recently taken their work into different physical spaces in order to expand and energise their filmic practice: for Varda, with her exhibition L’Île et Elle at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2006; for Godard, with his Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946–2006 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006. Both filmmakers engaged directly with the art gallery and museum as a form of empty space and transformed it into an art-work composed of multiple installations in multiple formats. The standard territories and mapped contours of cinematic space were in each case dynamically reshaped and redefined. Whereas Varda employed a range of spatial and visual strategies (notably collage) to deal with loss and death and construct a new collective public space (see Barnet 2011), Godard, in apparent mourning for the death of cinema itself, employed minimalist techniques to break up and atomise space, turning the gallery into a virtual construction site that deliberately denied a collective experience. The three main rooms of Voyage(s) en Utopie were organised in terms of temporality. The second, for instance, entitled ‘Hier’ (‘Yesterday’), was dedicated to cinema and featured monitor screens playing classical films, a miniature train set, and, in a small yet not insignificant gesture of ecological awareness, large potted plants. As Des O’Rawe has argued, a history and language of the image was being radically deframed here, for with its deliberate scattering and disconnecting of objects, images and languages, the installation became more a ‘de-installation’ – one that ‘refuses to situate its own

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artefacts (and associations) into anything resembling a theme’, and where the standard boundaries between the internal and external are dissolved (see O’Rawe 2011). As in the case of Varda, however, the end result was a reinvigoration of filmic practice stimulating fresh debates about both the possibilities and limits of new visual forms and the tools of multimedia.8 (Godard’s next feature, the blistering Film Socialisme (2010) which confronts head-on the current state of Europe in financial, social and political meltdown, was shot entirely in a digital format.) On this evidence alone it may be premature, and indeed purely academic, to periodise French cinema – and cinema tout court – in terms of a before and after digital and the post-auteur. The cinematic process, however it evolves, will continue to generate new forms of thinking about space and our shared place in the world. Indeed, our critical engagement with cinematic Space and Being has only just begun. Notes 1 See Wertheim 1999 for a penetrating account of the ‘erotic ontology’ of cyber-utopia. 2 Nolot played small roles in Denis’s J’ai pas sommeil/I can’t sleep (1993) and Nénette et Boni/Nenette and Boni (1996), and wrote the screenplay for her 1992 short, La Robe à cerceau, in which he also starred. 3 One example of this latter tendency will suffice: Paul’s (Jean-Pierre Léaud) total incomprehension and horror at seeing two men kiss in the cinema toilets in Godard’s Masculin-Féminin: 15 faits précis/Masculine-Feminine (1966). 4 See Williams 2009 for a full analysis of the film, which explores its many influences, from Malevich to Barthes and Deleuze. 5 Another recent European example of ecological filmmaking is the British artist/filmmaker Sarah Turner’s Perestroika (2010), structured around two different train journeys twenty years apart from Moscow to Siberia, and which charts the environmental changes that have occurred during this period, notably to Lake Baikal, the deepest in the world, and which Turner, on the voice-over, believes to be on fire. 6 See Andrew 2004 for an excellent account of this film and its place in the history and current evolution of French cinema. 7 See, for example, the creative research currently taking place at ‘Audiovisualcy: An Online Forum for Videographic Film Studies’ (http:// vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy), spearheaded by Catherine Grant. 8 For a fine account of the evolution and aesthetic stakes of Godard’s exhibition which arose out of the ashes of his original project, Collage(s) de France, archéologies du cinéma d’après JLG, see Païni 2006.

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Laurent Cantet Tous à la manif (All at the Rally) (1994) 27 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Vincent Dietschy, Bénédicte Mellac Screenplay: Laurent Cantet Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Tatjana Jankovic Sound: François Maurel Cast: John Bertin, Michel Brun Jeux de plage (Beach Games) (1995) 28 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Vincent Dietschy, Bénédicte Mellac, Géraldine Michelot Screenplay: Laurent Cantet Camera: Pierre Milon, Catherine Pujol Editing: Thomas Bardinet Sound: François Maurel Music: Alain Goraguer Cast: Jalil Lespert, Jean Lespert, Julia Minguet Les Sanguinaires (The Bloodthirsty Ones) (1997) 68 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Haut et Court, ARTE Screenplay: Laurent Cantet, Gilles Marchand Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Robin Campillo, Stéphanie Léger Sound: François Maurel Cast: Jalil Lespert, Frédéric Pierrot, Catherine Baugué, Marc Adjadj, Gilles Marchand, Nathalie Bensard Ressources Humaines (Human Resources) (1999) 100 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Haut et Court Screenplay: Laurent Cantet, Gilles Marchand Camera: Matthieu Poirot-Delpech, Claire Caroff Editing: Robin Campillo, Stéphanie Léger Sound: Philippe Ricard, Jonathan Acbard, Antoine Ouvrier, Didier Leclerc

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Music: Melos Quartet Cast: Jalil Lespert, Jean-Claude Vallod, Chantal Barré, Danielle Mélador, Didier Émile-Woldemard, Lucien Longueville

L’Emploi du temps (Time Out) (2001) 134 mins, 35 mm, col. Production: Haut et Court, ARTE France Cinéma, Rhône-Alpes Cinéma, Havas Images Screenplay: Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Robin Campillo, Stéphanie Léger Sound: Olivier Mauvezin, Agnès Ravez Music: Jocelyn Pook Cast: Aurélien Recoing, Karin Viard, Serge Livrozet, Nigel Palmer, Maxime Sassier, Jean-Pierre Mangeot, Nicolas Kalsch Vers le sud (Heading South) (2006) 105 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Haut et Court, Films Seville (Canada) Screenplay: Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo (based on three short stories by Dany Laferrière) Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Robin Campillo Sound: Claude Lahaye Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Ménothy César, Karen Young, Lys Ambroise, Louise Portal, Wilfried Paul Entre les murs (The Class) (2008) 128 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Haut et Court Screenplay: Laurent Cantet, François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo (based on the novel Entre les murs by François Bégaudeau) Camera: Pierre Milon, Catherine Pujol, Georgi Lazarevski Editing: Robin Campillo, Stéphanie Léger Sound: Olivier Mauvezin, Agnès Ravez, Jean-Pierre Laforce Cast: François Bégaudeau, Nassim Amrabt, Louise Grinberg, Wei Huang, Franck Keïta, Carl Nanor, Esmeralda Ouertani, Rachel Régulier, Laura Baquela, Samantha Soupirot, Henriette Kasaruhanda, Frédéric Faujas

Claire Denis NB: For a complete filmography of Denis’s films up to Vendredi Soir, see M. Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Chocolat (1988) 105 mins, 35 mm, col. Production: Cinémanuel, TF1 Films Production, MK2 Productions Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Robert Alazraki (framing: Agnès Godard) Editing: Claudine Merlin

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Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto, Dominique Hannequin Music: Abdullah Ibrahim Cast: Isaach de Bankolé, Giulia Boschi, François Cluzet, Mireille Perrier, Cécile Ducasse

S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die) (1990) 91 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Cinéa, Pyramide, Les Films du Mindif, Caméra One, La SEPT Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Pascal Marti (framing: Agnès Godard) Editing: Dominique Auvray Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel, Alix Comte Music: Abdullah Ibrahim Cast: Alex Descas, Isaach de Bankolé, Jean-Claude Brialy, Solveig Dommartin, Christopher Buchholz J’ai pas sommeil (I Can’t Sleep) (1993) 110 mins, 35 mm, col. Production: Arena Films, Orsans Productions, Pyramide, Vega Films, Les Films du Mindif, France 3 Cinéma, M6 Films Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Nelly Quettier Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto, Vincent Arnadi, Thierry Labon Cast: Katerina Golubeva, Richard Courcet, Alex Descas, Line Renaud, Vincent Dupont, Laurent Grévill US Go Home (1994) 68 mins, 35 mm, col. Production: IMA Productions, SFP Screenplay: Claire Denis, Anne Wiazemsky Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Dominique Auvray Sound: Hervé Chauvel, William Flageollet Cast: Alice Houri, Grégoire Colin, Jessica Tharaud, Martine Gautier Nénette et Boni (Nenette and Boni) (1997) 103 mins, 35 mm, col. Production: Dacia Films, La SEPT Cinéma Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Yann Dédet Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto Music: Tindersticks Cast: Grégoire Colin, Alice Houri, Valéria Bruni-Tédeschi, Vincent Gallo Beau Travail (2000) 90 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Éric Zaouali, SM Films, La SEPT/ARTE, TANAIS COM Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Nelly Quettier

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Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel, Dominique Gaborieau Music: Eran Tzur Cast: Michel Subor, Denis Lavant, Grégoire Colin, Marta Fafesse Kassa

Trouble Every Day (2001) 102 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Xavier Amblard, Dacia, Messaoud/a Films, Kinétique, Rezo, Canal+, ARTE, ZDF Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Nelly Quettier Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto, Christophe Winding, Dominique Hennequin Music: Tindersticks Cast: Alex Descas, Béatrice Dalle, Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey Vendredi soir (Friday Night) (2002) 90 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Bruno Pesery, Arena Films, France 2 Cinéma Screenplay: Claire Denis, Emmanuèle Bernheim Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Nelly Quettier Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto Music: Dickon Hinchliffe Cast: Vincent Lindon, Valérie Lemercier, Micha Lescot Vers Nancy (Towards Nancy) (2002) 10 mins, b/w short for the portmanteau film, Ten Minutes Older: The Cello Production: Martine Cassinelli, Why Not Productions Screenplay: Claire Denis Camera: Agnès Godard, Tony Chapuis, Lionel Perrin, Léo MacDougall Editing: Emmanuelle Pencalet Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto Music: Brice Leboucq Cast: Jean-Luc Nancy, Ana Samardzija, Alex Descas L’Intrus (The Intruder) (2004) 130 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Humbert Balsan, ARTE France Cinéma, France Ognon Pictures Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Nelly Quettier Sound: Jean-Louis Ughetto Music: Stuart Staples Cast: Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katerina Golubeva, Alex Descas, Bambou, Florence Loiret-Caille, Béatrice Dalle, Henri tetu Tetainanuarii, Jean-Marc Teriipaia Vers Mathilde (Towards Mathilde) (2005), 84 mins, 8mm and Super 16mm, col. Production: ARTE France Cinéma, Why Not Productions Camera: Agnès Godard, Hélène Louvart

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Editing: Anne Souriau Sound: Brice Leboucq Cast: Mathilde Monnier and dancers of Centre Choréographique de Montpellier (CCM)

35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum) (2009) 100 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Karl Blaumgartner, Christoph Friedel, Bruno Pésery, Claudia Steffen Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau Camera: Agnès Godard Editing: Guy Lecorne Sound: Martin Boissau, Christophe Winding Music: Tindersticks Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Grégoire Colin, Nicole Dogué, Adèle Ado, Julieth Mars-Toussaint, Ingrid Caven, Stéphane Pocrain White Material (2010) 106 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Pascal Caucheteux Screenplay: Claire Denis, Marie NDiaye Camera: Yves Cape Editing: Guy Lecorne Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel, Christophe Winding Music: Stuart Staples Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Michel Subor, Christophe Lambert, Isaach de Bankolé, Nicolas Duvauchelle, William Nadylam, Adèle Ado

Bruno Dumont La Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) (1997) 96 mins, 35mm, col. Production: 3B Productions (Jean Bréhat, Rachid Bouchareb, Muriel Merlin), CRRAV (Centre Régional de Ressources Audiovisuelles), Norfilms Screenplay: Bruno Dumont Camera: Philippe Van Leeuw Editing: Guy Lecorne, Yves Deschamps Sound: Éric Rophe, Matthieu Imbert, Olivier de Nesles Music: Richard Cuvillier Cast: David Douche, Marjorie Cottreel, Geneviève Cottreel, Kader Chaatouf L’humanité (Humanity) (1999) 148 mins, 35mm, col. Production: 3B Productions, CRRAV, ARTE France Cinéma Screenplay: Bruno Dumont Camera: Yves Cape Editing: Guy Lecorne, Mathilde Muyard Sound: Pierre Mertens Music: Richard Cuvillier Cast: Emmanuel Schotté, Séverine Caneele, Philippe Tullier, Ghislain Ghesquière, Ginette Allègre

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Twentynine Palms (2003) 119 mins, 35mm, col. Production: 3B Productions, Thoke Moebius Films, Winstar Screenplay: Bruno Dumont Camera: Georges Lechaptois Editing: Dominique Pétrot Sound: Philippe Lecoeur Cast: Katerina Golubeva, David Wissak Flandres (Flanders) (2006) 91 mins, 35mm, col. Production: 3B Productions, CRRAV, ARTE France Cinéma, Le Fresnoy Screenplay: Bruno Dumont Camera: Yves Cape Editing: Guy Lecorne Sound: Philippe Lecoeur Cast: Adélaïde Leroux, Samuel Boidin, Henri Cretel, Jean-Marie Bruveart Hadewijch (2009) 120 mins, 35mm, col. Production: 3B Productions, CRRAV, ARTE France Cinéma, Le Fresnoy, Herbstfilm Produktion Screenplay: Bruno Dumont Camera: Yves Cape Editing: Guy Lecorne Sound: Philippe Lecoeur Music: Élise Luguern Cast: Julie Sokolowski, Yassine Salime, David Dewaele, Karl Sarafidis Hors Satan (Outside Satan) (2011) 110 mins, 35mm, col. Production: 3B Productions, CRRAV, Le Fresnoy Screenplay: Bruno Dumont Camera: Yves Cape Editing: Bruno Dumont, Basile Belkhiri Sound: Philippe Lecoeur, Emmanuel Croset Cast: David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre, Christophe Bon, Aurore Broutin

Robert Guédiguian NB: For a complete filmography of Guédiguian’s films up to Lady Jane (2007), see I. Danel, Conversation avec Robert Guédiguian: ‘Je n’ai jamais rien fait seul’ (Paris: Carnets de l’Info, 2008). Dernier Été (Last Summer) (1980), 85 mins, 35mm, col. (co-directed by Frank Le Wita) Production: René Féret, Les Films Arquebuse, Maison de la Culture de Bobigny, Maison de la Culture du Havre, Maison de la Culture de la Rochelle Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Frank Le Wita Camera: Gilberto Azevedo

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Editing: Vincent Pinel Sound: Luc Perini Music: François Béranger, Vivaldi Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Moreno, Djamal Bouanane, Malek Hamzaoui, Joëlle Modola, Jim Sortino

L’Argent fait le Bonheur (Money brings Happiness) (1992) 85 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Caméras continentales, France 2, CNC Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Bernard Cavalié Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Fatima Laourassia, Rossini Cast: Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Jean-Jérôme Esposito, Pierre Banderet, Frédérique Bonnal, Gérard Meylan Marius et Jeannette (Marius and Jeannette) (1997) 102 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, La SEPT, Canal+ Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Bernard Cavalié Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Vivaldi, Johann Strauss Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Pascale Roberts, Jacques Boudet, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Frédérique Bonnal À la Place du coeur (Where the Heart Is) (1998) 113 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, La SEPT, France 2 Cinéma, Canal+, Diaphana Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Bernard Cavalié Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Liszt, Louis Armstrong Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Laure Raoust, Alexandre Ogou, Christine Brücher, Jacques Boudet, Beata Nilska À l’attaque! (Charge!) (2000) 90 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, TF1 Films Productions, Canal+, Diaphana Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Bernard Cavalié Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Jacques Menichetti, Johann Strauss, J.-S. Bach Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin

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La Ville est tranquille (The Town is Quiet) (2000) 133 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, Canal+, Diaphana Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Bernard Cavalié Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Erik Satie, Brahms Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Pierre Banderet, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Alexandre Ogou, Véronique Balme, Christine Brücher, Jacques Boudet, Pascale Roberts, Julien Sevan Papazian Marie-Jo et ses deux amours (Marie-Jo and her Two Loves) (2001) 124 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, France 3 Cinéma, Canal+ Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Renato Berta Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Schubert, Vivaldi, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Manu Chao Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Jacques Boudet, Julie-Marie Parmentier Mon Père est ingénieur (My Father is an Engineer) (2003) 108 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, France 3 Cinéma, Mikros Image, Gimages Films Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Renato Berta Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Arto Tunçboyaciyan Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Christine Brücher, Pascale Roberts, Jacques Boudet, Pierre Banderet Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars (The Last Mitterrand) (2004) 117 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, Film Oblige, ARTE France Cinéma Screenplay: Gilles Taurand, Georges-Marc Benamou (based on the book Le Dernier Mitterrand by Georges-Marc Benamou) Camera: Renato Berta Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Cast: Michel Bouquet, Jalil Lespert, Sarah Grappin, Philippe Fretun, Anne Cantineau

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Le Voyage en Arménie (Journey to Armenia) (2005) 125 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, TF1 Films Productions, Canal+, Diaphana Screenplay: Ariane Ascaride, Marie Desplechin, Robert Guédiguian Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Arto Tunçboyaciyan Cast: Ariane Ascaride, Gérard Meylan, Chorik Grigorian, Simon Abkarian, Roman Avinian, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Jalil Lespert, Marcel Bluwal Lady Jane (2007) 102 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Vivaldi, Nacimiento Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Jacques Boudet, Pascale Roberts, Frédérique Bonnal L’Armée du crime (The Army of Crime) (2009) 139 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Cie, Studio Canal, France 3 Cinéma Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Gilles Taurand¸ Serge Le Péron Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Alexandre Desplat Cast: Simon Abkarian, Virginie Ledoyen, Robinson Stévenin, Grégoire LeprinceRinguet, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Yann Trégouët, Ariane Ascaride, Olga Legrand, Lola Naymark, Gérard Meylan Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro (The Snows of Kilimanjaro) (2011) 90 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Agat Films & Ex Nihilo, France 3 Cinéma Screenplay: Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi Camera: Pierre Milon Editing: Bernard Sasia Sound: Laurent Lafran Music: Pascal Mayer Cast: Gérard Meylan, Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Grégoire LeprinceRinguet, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Marilyne Canto, Frédérique Bonnal, Yann Loubatière

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Abdellatif Kechiche La Faute à Voltaire (Blame it on Voltaire aka Poetical Refugee) (2000) 130 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Jean-François Lepetit, Flach Film Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche Camera: Dominique Brenguier, Marie-Emmanuelle Spencer Editing: Tina Baz-Légal, Annick Baly Sound: Joël Riant, Ludovic Henault Cast: Sami Bouajila, Élodie Bouchez, Aure Atika, Bruno Lochet, Carole Franck, Sami Zitouni, Olivier Loustau, Virginie Darmon L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance) (2003) 119 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Jacques Ouaniche, Lola Films, Noé Productions Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalya Lacroix Camera: Lubomir Bakchev, Sofian El Fani Editing: Ghalya Lacroix Sound: Nicolas Waschkowski Cast: Sarah Forestier, Osman Elkharraz, Hajar Hamlili, Sabrina Ouazani, Rachid Hami, Hafet Ben-Ahmed, Aurélie Ganito, Nanou Benhamou, Carole Franck La Graine et le Mulet (Couscous aka The Secret of the Grain) (2007) 151 mins, 35mm, col. Production: Claude Berri, Hirsch/Pathé Renn Production, France 2 Cinéma Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalya Lacroix Camera: Lubomir Bakchev, Sofian El Fani Editing: Ghalya Lacroix, Camille Toubkis Sound: Éric Armbruster, Nicolas Waschkowski Cast: Habid Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Faridah Benkhetache, Abdelhamid Aktouche, Bouraouïa Marzouk, Alice Houri, Leïla D’Issernio, Bruno Lochet, Olivier Loustau, Sabrina Ouazani, Sami Zitouni, Hatika Karaoui, Mohamed Benabdeslem, Violaine de Carne Vénus Noire (Black Venus) (2010) 162 mins, 35mm, col. Production: MK2, France 2 Cinéma Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Ghalya Lacroix Camera: Lubomir Bakchev, Sofian El Fani Editing: Camille Toubkis, Ghalya Lacroix, Laurent Rouan, Albertine Lastera Sound: Nicolas Waschkowsksi, Jean-Paul Hurier Music: Slaheddine Kechiche Cast: Yaima Torres, André Jacobs, Olivier Gourmet, Elina Löwensohn, François Marthouret, Michel Gionti, Jean-Christophe Bouvet

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Index Index

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations

À la Place du coeur/Where the Heart Is 121–6, 125, 128–9 À propos de Nice 102 Adversaire, L’ 183n6, 184n10 aesthetic subject, the 18, 20, 37n22, 242, 263–4, 275–6 see also the cinematic subject Affiche Rouge, L’ 138 Affron, Charles 1–2 Afrance, L’ 196–7 Agat Films & Cie 141 Aitken, Ian 43 Aix-en-Provence 131, 132, 137, 145n26 Akerman, Chantal xv, 2, 21, 71, 98n34 Akhenaton 123 Algerian War, 105, 194 alienation 66–7, 112–14, 123, 137, 150, 181, 182n4, 267 All About my Mother 18, 38n23 Allio, René, Retour à Marseille 103 Almodóvar, Pedro 18 Alnoy, Siegrid 182n4 Alphaville 13 alterity xvin2, 9–10, 171, 191, 220, 227n6, 240, 252, 254, 257–8, 264, 275, 282n18, 286 see also the Other Althusser, Louis 34n4 Altman, Robert 110 Amants du Pont-Neuf, Les/The Lovers on the Bridge 24, 38n26 American Graffiti 267 Ameur-Zaïmeche, Rabah 188

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Ami de mon amie, L’/My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend 53–4 Andermatt Conley, Verena 35n9, 205 Andrew, Dudley 6 Angel-A 288 anthropomorphism 62–3, 71–2, 78, 84–6, 92–3 Antoine, André 43 Antonioni, Michelangelo 3, 13, 15, 41, 66, 70, 97n28, 155 any-space-whatever (Deleuze) 15, 155, 280n4 Appadurai, Arjun 229n25 Archer, Neil 71, 155, 183n9 Argent, L’ 66 Argent fait le Bonheur, L’ 105 Armée des Ombres, L’/Army of Shadows 138 Armée du crime, L’/The Army of Crime 138–40, 146n30, 146n31 Armenia 129–31 Armes, Roy 189 Arrière-pays, L’/Hinterland 288 Ascaride, Ariane 105, 126, 126, 128, 129, 131 Asibong, Andrew 240, 280n5 Assayas, Olivier 288, 291 Atalante, L’ 212 Attar, Farid al-Din 205 Augé, Marc 9, 12, 34n7, 132, 154, 227n7 Austin, James F. 22

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auteur tradition xiv, 28, 226, 240, 246, 288, 291–2 Avant que j’oublie/Before I Forget 289 Baartman, Saartjie (Sarah) 187, 223–6, 232n33 Bachelard, Gaston 1, 32–3, 256, 280 Bahloul, Abdelkrim 189 Bailleul 41, 44, 48–9, 56, 63 Baise-moi 26 Baldwin, James 121 Balibar, Étienne 205–6, 229n21 Balzac, Honoré de, Louis Lambert 32–3 banlieue, the 25–6, 39n28, 40n32, 161, 187–8, 204–5 banlieue cinema 25–6, 39n30, 40n33, 140–1, 188, 200–9, 228n16 see also beur cinema Barber, Stephen 12, 26, 115–16, 291 Barthes, Roland xi–xii, xiv, 6, 285 Baudelaire, Charles 280 Baudrillard, Jean 12, 97n26 Baudry, Jean-Louis 33n4 Bazin, André 6–7, 41, 42 Beau Travail 242, 243–51, 256, 260, 279; ‘Dance of the Weeds’ sequence 247, 247–8, 264; music 245, 247, 251; writing sequence 248–50, 249 Beauce 134, 136 Beaud, Stéphane 161 Bégaudeau, François 158, 165, 166, 185n15 Béghin, Cyril 86–7 being xiii, xiv, 13, 20, 31, 48, 70, 87, 234, 264, 270; and becoming 20, 87, 199–200, 220–1, 288; ciné- 251; communal 215–16, 217, 199, 220; postcolonial 240; topography of (Dumont) 87; virtual 3, 20, 288 passim Benamou, Georges-Marc 133 Benguigui, Yamina 201, 216 Benjamin, Walter 12 Bergala, Alain 104 Berghahn, Daniela 228n16, 229n25 Bergson, Henri 8, 10 Bergstrom, Janet 242 Bernard, Raymond 265

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Bersani, Leo 28, 37n22, 53–4, 78–9, 95n13, 99n39, 248, 251, 264, 275, 281n11; Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (with Dutoit) 17–21; Forms of Being (with Dutoit) 37n23, 47 Berta, Roberto 127 Besson, Luc 288 Beugnet, Martine 5, 56, 62, 71, 236, 244 beur (Maghrebi-French) cinema 26–7, 40n33, 188, 190, 228n16, 287 see also banlieue cinema Beurs appart 40n32 Bévérini, Alain 103 Bhabha, Homi 11, 35n11, 221, 230n31 bidonvilles 25, 39n29 Blade Runner 11 Bleu est une couleur chaude, Le 232n35 Blow-Up 13 body, the 8, 55–6, 239, 244–52, 257 Boorman, John 65 borders 154, 156–8, 171–2, 201, 234, 254–5 Bouajila, Sami 188, 191, 199, 225n1 Boucault, Mosco 146n31 Bouchareb, Rachid 23, 143n17 Bourdieu, Pierre 34n6, 165, 170, 184n12 Bourriaud, Nicolas 92 Bowles, Brett 54, 95n14 Braque, Georges 43, 45, 57, 142n6 Brecht, Bertholt 107 Bresson, Robert 24, 44, 54, 66, 78, 91, 93n5, 94n5, 100n42, 100n47, 266 Britten, Benjamin, Billy Budd 245, 247, 247, 284n25 Brook, Peter 205 Brottman, Mikita 61 Brown Bunny, The 68 Bruno, Giuliana 13–14 Burch, Noël 179 Butler, Judith 170, 185n19 Bye-Bye 123, 144n21, 213 Ça Commence aujourd’hui/It All Starts Today 111 Cabrera, Dominique 141, 190

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Index Camion, Le/The Lorry 71, 98n33 Camp des Nouragues, Le 266 Campillo, Robin 148, 158 Cantet, Laurent xiv, 28, 88, 148, 159 see also individual works; endings 156, 159, 177–82, 221; framing 31–2, 166–70, 171–8, 286, 287; melodrama 184n14; mise-en-scène 148, 160; and non-places 152–6; and space 28–9, 147–60; and time 182n5; typology of place 147–8 Cape, Yves 276 Caplet, André 82 Carné, Marcel 116 Cassenti, Frank 138 Castro, Teresa 145n24 Cat People 266 Caws, Mary Ann 236 Cézanne, Paul 43, 103 Chamoiseau, Patrick 226n5 Chanteloup-les-Vignes 25–6 Charef, Mehdi 26–7, 184n13 Chatte à 2 têtes, La/Porn Theatre 288–9 Chesters, Timothy 35n12 Chinoise, La 252 Chion, Michael 4, 33n1, 229n20 Chocolat 237–41, 239, 270, 279, 280n6 Chomet, Sylvain 40n31 Christie, William 57 Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer 24–5 cinéma du look 24, 146n29 cinema of the senses 270–6, 271 CinemaScope 44, 84, 158, 166, 255 cinematic subject, the 14–22, 250–1, 263–4 see also the aesthetic subject cinéma-vérité 130, 158, 194 Cité du Franc-Moisin (la) 200 Citizen Kane 21 Clarke, David 35n10 class 12, 23, 27, 107, 148, 102, 150–2, 165, 210–11 classical space 12–13 Clavel, Bernard 196 Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 2 Clubbed to Death 26 Cocteau, Jean 2, 46, 94n7, 203, 212, 266

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Code Inconnu/Code Unknown 40n34 Coeur fidèle 103 Collard, Cyril 24 colonial space 223–6; 237–41. compare postcolonial space Comme un aimant/The Magnet 123, 144n21 Commodores, The, Nightshift 271–2, 273, 274, 275, 280 Comolli, Jean-Louis 4, 101, 103, 106, 109, 112, 142n3, 142n9 Conférence des Oiseaux, La 205 Conley, Tom 13 Conrad, Joseph 241 Conte d’automne/Tale of Autumn 53 Corot, Camille 93n3 Cortade, Ludovic 136, 146n29 Costaud des Épinettes, Le 265 Courbet, Gustave 57 Crang, Mike 36n14 créole 157, 191; creolisation 196, 227n5 cultural capital 165, 184n12, 223 cultural hybridity 191, 208–9, 210–19, 213, 214–15, 275; mixité 160, 179–80, 221–2; multicultural 170, 213 see also métissage Dalou, Aimé-Jules, Le Triomphe de la République 192–5, 193, 197–8 Danel, Isabelle, Conversation avec Robert Guédiguian 107–8 Daney, Serge 50, 69, 92, 95n10 Dans Paris/In Paris 27 Dardenne brothers 143n14 Dargis, Manohla 77–8 Darroussin, Jean-Pierre 105, 122, 126, 126, 131, 139 Davies, Ann 38n24 Dean, Tacita 290 De Certeau, Michel 8–9, 104, 115, 126, 199 De la Bretèque, François 116 De Sica, Vittorio 218 Defferre, Gaston 107 Dehée, Yannick 38n24 Del Rio, Elena 236, 280n4 Delannoy, Jean 212

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Deleuze, Gilles 15–16, 37n20, 62, 117, 155, 202, 222, 228n17, 236; Le Pli (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) 16; L’Île déserte et autres textes 282n18; Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) (with Guattari) 16, 36n19 Deliverance 65 Delluc, Louis 103 Demand, Thomas, Hof/Yard 68–9, 71 Demonlover 291 Demy, Jacques 39n27, 266 Denis, Claire xiv, xvin1, 28, 142n7, 233–4, 242–3, 264, 286, 287 see also individual works; actors 245; cinema of the senses 270–6, 271; cinematic drifting 263; cinematic imaginary 245; and desire 274–6, 278; engagement with the real 276; and family 269–76; framing 269–76, 273–4; greffage (grafting) 32, 247–8, 251, 254, 258–9, 264, 266, 270, 273–6, 286; and identity 248, 264; and intertextuality 32, 240–2, 246–7, 249–50, 265–8, 280; and landscape 233–4, 243–4, 254–6, 282n15; and Marseilles 103–4, 266; music 236, 245, 247, 251, 267–8, 271–2, 276; and otherness 238–41, 242–3, 246, 264–80, 273, 275, 279, 283n22, 286; and space 29, 234–6, 260, 263–4, 264–5, 279; spectatorial experience 236–7 Dernier Été 117, 143n11 Depardon, Raymond 25 Derrida, Jacques 192, 227n9 Deserto Rosso, Il/Red Desert 155 desire 19, 46, 57, 58, 61–2, 65, 90, 247–9, 260–4, 274–6, 278 see also erotics of space Despentes, Virginie 26 D’Est/From the East 71 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle/ Two or Three Things I Know about Her 25, 205 Devez, Alain R. 266 difference 200, 238–41, 253, 275, 287; spatial xiv, 28, 132, 160

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diaspora 102, 209, 246, 248, 275 see also migration digital technology, impact of 4, 290–2 Djebar, Assia 190–1 documentary tradition 24–5, 103, 142n3, 205 Dolez, Marc 146n32 Double vie de Véronique, La/The Double Life of Veronique 2 Doukouré, Cheik 40n34, 227n11 Dridi, Karim 123, 213 droit de cité 229n21 Drôle de Félix/Adventures of Felix 188, 225n1 Ducastel, Olivier 188 Duchamp, Marcel 96n17 Duel 65 Duel in the Sun 65 Dufrenne, Mikel 6 Dumont, Bruno xiv, xvin2, 43–4, 47, 99n39, 237, 285, 287 see also individual works; aesthetic mission 63–4; affective realism 45; anthropomorphism 71–2, 73, 78, 84; art references 56–7, 57, 84–5, 96n16, 96n17; choice of location 41–2; on cinema 89–90, 91; cinematic strategy 87–93; comparison with Bresson 94n5; decentring of place 79–84; default hugging position 76; denial of spatial distance 74; editing 85; formalism 52; humanist filmmaking 88, 100n48; humano-centric focus 85–7; and landscape 31, 41–8, 45–6, 47, 63–5, 69–73, 85–7, 87–8, 98n28; mise-en-scène 42, 66; plan-séquences 42, 49, 85; and reality 41–2; and religion 45, 54–5, 80; and space 28; style 28; point-of-view shots 47–8, 52, 76; and time 72–3; use of CinemaScope 44; use of medium close-up 43; use of montage 55, 61, 63, 76, 82–3, 89; use of reverse-field shots 58–9, 62, 63; and the viewer 88–93, 98n29; violence and 64–8, 91 Duras, Marguerite 2, 71

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Index Dutoit, Ulysse 28, 53–4, 78–9, 95n13, 275; Cinema, Aesthetics, ­Subjectivity (with Bersani) 17–21 Easthope, Anthony 13, 36n18 École pour tous, L’ 184n13 ecological filmmaking 290, 293n5 education system 165, 179, 181–2, 184n12 Elle est des nôtres 182n4 Elsaesser, Thomas 4, 180, 186n23 Emploi du temps, L’/Time Out 152–6, 153, 177–8, 183n5, 183n7, 183n8, 183n9, 184n14 enracinement 216, 230n26 Entre les murs/The Class 158–67, 162, 163, 170–82, 183n5, 184n13; criticism of 164–7; football sequence 171, 176–8, 179; framing strategies 171–8; outside sequences 171–8, 172, 174; pétasse sequence 172–4; portrait of Marin 164–5, 166, 175; resolution 179–82; Souleymane’s disciplinary hearing 172, 174–6 Epstein, Jean 103 erotics of space xi–xiii, xiv, 247–51, 260–4, 270–6 see also desire Esposito, Claudia 199 Esquive, L’/Games of Love and Chance 162, 187, 188, 200–9, 229n20; rehearsal sequences 202, 202–4, 207 essentialism 124, 126, 136, 211 Éternel Retour, L’/The Eternal Return 212 ethnicity 26–7, 165 see also race and racism ethnographic cinema 24–5, 266 Être et Avoir 25, 171, 185n20 Everett, Wendy, Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema 12 exclusion 175, 176–7, 181, 206–7, 252 Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, Le/ Amelie 291–2 Falcon, Richard 97n26 family 214–16, 219, 225n1, 269–76 see also kinship Fanon, Frantz 265, 279 Farber, Manny 1, 21–2, 233

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Fargeau, Jean-Pol 278 Faucon, Philippe 123, 184n13 Faute à Voltaire, La/Blame it on Voltaire (aka Poetical Refugee) 187, 191–200, 193 Femme du Boulanger, La 266 Ferran, Pascale 141 Feuillade, Louis 24 Fielder, Adrian 25–6, 39n30, 200 Fièvre 103 film industry 23, 141 film worlds (Yacavone) 5–6 First World War 48–9 Flandres/Flanders 73–9 flashbacks 117–18, 122, 124–5, 137–8 Ford, John 68 Forêt tropicale de Guyane, La 266 Foucault, Michel 9, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 217, 253 Fowler, Catherine 42–3, 93n2 fragmentation 137, 141 framing xv, 2, 3–4, 30, 86, 88, 129, 160, 181, 287; Cantet and 31–2, 166–70, 171–8, 286, 287; and closing off 180; control of 238; cultural 205–7; deframing xv, 30, 32, 172–4, 221, 242–3, 288; Denis and 269–76, 273–4; en-framing 174–6; Kechiche and 32; and landscape 42; movement 172–3; and opening 270; the Other 239–40, 242–3; politics of 167–70, 287; positioning in 174–5; reading through 179; tight 202, 202; unframing 239–40, 287 France 135–6, 187, 191, 220, 221, 227n11, 286 Franco-Tunisian community 209–19 Franju, Georges 266 French Foreign Legion 243–51, 247, 281n8 Freud, Sigmund 18, 37n21, 181 Frodon, Jean-Michel 63, 225–6 Fulton, Dawn 226n5 Gallo, Vincent 68 Gandy, Michael 97n28 Garcia, Nicole 183n6

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Gardies, André 7, 104 Garrone, Matteo 276–7 Gaudin, Jean-Claude 107 gaze, the 50, 58–9, 78–9, 85, 167, 178–9, 198, 225–6, 282n17 Geesey, Patricia 201 Gégauff, Paul 258–9 gender 10, 17, 27, 46, 155, 201, 217, 230n29, 241, 244–6, 250, 260–1, 263, 275, 283n21 geopolitics 11–12, 34n7, 157–8, 210–11 Ghorab-Volta, Zaïda 201 Guillén, Michael 83–4 Giraudoux, Jean 282n18 Glissant, Édouard 226n5 globalisation 10, 23, 35n9, 136, 137 Godard, Agnès 234, 263, 274, 280, 290 Godard, Jean-Luc xv, 2, 11, 13, 18, 18–20, 25, 205, 228n17, 245, 252, 258, 267; Film Socialisme 293; Histoire(s) du cinéma 91–2; ‘Montage, mon beau souci’ 37n20; Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946–2006 292–3 Gomis, Alain 40n34, 196–7 Gomorrah 276–7 Goodbody, Axel 12 Gorfinkel, Elena 12, 36n16 greffage (Denis) 247–8, 251, 251–2, 254, 258–9, 264, 266, 270, 273–6, 286 Graine et le Mulet, La/Couscous (aka The Secret of the Grain) 187, 188, 209–19, 213, 216, 222; filmic references 211–13; final sequence 218–19, 230n30 Grandrieux, Philippe 66, 290 Grant, Catherine 245, 283n21 Green, Eugène 27 Greer, Bonnie 185n16 Griffith, D.W. 68 Grønstad, Asbjørn 68, 98n30 Guattari, Félix 117, 141, 202, 222; Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) (with Deleuze) 16, 36n19 Guédiguian, Robert xiv, 28, 105, 107, 137–8, 285–6, 287 see also individual works; and alienation

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 326

112–4; banlieue cinema 140–1; cinematic space 108; endings 221; and eternal France 135–6; and identity 104–5; inspirations 107–8; mapping 129, 137; and Marseilles 31, 101–9, 117, 118, 121–33, 137, 212–13; and memorialisation 138–9; and Paris 133, 137, 139; and political time 137–8; politics 107, 138, 146n32; portrayal of Marseilles 110–21; and space 28, 134–6; and time 127; use of flashbacks 117–18, 122, 124–5, 137–8; use of location 104–5; use of montage 113, 129; and violence 133; working method 109, 128 Gustafsson, Henrik 256 Hadewijch 79–84, 81, 82–4, 94n5, 99n41 Hadewijch (d’Anvers) 99n40 Hagener, Malte 4, 180, 186n23 Haine, La/Hate 25–6, 39n30, 200 Haiti 156–8, 167–70, 178–9, 185n16, 186n24 Haneke, Michael xv, 91, 228n11, 290 haptic vision 5, 235–6 Harper, Graeme 42, 291 Harvey, David 11 Hayward, Susan 24, 243 Heath, Stephen 2 heteroglossia 179, 229n24 heterotopia 13, 217, 253 Higbee, Will 27, 39n30, 154–5, 184n14, 217, 229n24 Himes, Chester 265 Hinchliffe, Dickon 268 historical burden 102, 106, 118, 130–1, 134–5, 137–8, 194, 278–9 Leçons d’histoire/History Lessons 71 Hitchcock, Alfred 116, 198 Home 290 Honoré, Christophe 27 Hopper, Edward 72 Hors Satan 84–7, 86, 89–90, 93n3 hors-champ, the 4, 21, 64, 106, 160, 179–80, 286 hospitality 192, 197, 227n9 Hughes, Darren 43

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Index Hugo, Victor 195–6 Huillet, Danièle 71 humanité, L’/Humanity 43, 55–63; allotment levitation sequence 59–61, 60, 77; art references 56–7, 57; opening sequence 57–8, 59 Huppert, Isabelle 278 Iampolski, Mikhail 241 Ibraham, Abdullah 238 identity xiv, 18, 28, 149–50; black 238–41; construction of 26–7, 152–6, 189; Denis and 248, 264; and geography 26–7; lack of 154; landscape and 146n29; and place 104–5, 152–6; regional 136; social-cultural 27, 204–5; and space xvi, 22, 136, 189 ideology 107–8, 110–11, 117, 133–6, 137–8, 146n29, 147–8, 150, 152–3, 160–1, 164–5, 170, 179–80, 192–4, 206–7, 214, 223–4 image-movement (Deleuze) 15 image-temps (Deleuze) 15 immigration 25, 27, 35n9, 105, 115, 123, 144n21, 187, 191–2, 194, 205–6, 209–10, 211–12, 269 see also diaspora Inch’Allah dimanche 201, 216 Indigènes/Days of Glory 23 institutional space 158–60, 161–6, 174–6, 192–4 integration 181, 188, 196, 207, 220–3, 225n1 interspatial zones 3, 149, 270–1 interstitial, the 221 intertextual space 240–2, 258–61, 264 intertextuality 240–2, 246, 246–7, 249–50, 258–68, 280 intimacy 14, 240, 270–3, 281n11, 284n28; impersonal (Bersani) 264–5 Intouchables 26 Intrus, L’/The Intruder 236, 242, 251–64; grafting 251–2, 254, 258–9; influences 258, 282n18; intertextual spaces 258–63; Le Reflux references 258–9, 259, 261, 264; resurrection theme 256–8, 282n16; Toni episode 261–3, 262

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 327

327

Irma Vep 288 Izzo, Jean-Claude 103 J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep 240, 265 Jameson, Fredric 11 Jarnac 133 Jelloun, Tahar Ben 192 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 291–2 Jeux de plage/Beach Games 182n1, 182n5 Jews, deportations of 135, 139 Jouai, Agnès 145n26 Joubert, Joseph 1 Jour se lève, Le 116 Jules et Jim 246 Justin de Marseille 103 Kassovitz, Mathieu 25–6, 200, 201 Kechiche, Abdellatif xiv, 28, 32, 187–91, 223, 253, 286, 287 see also individual works; assessment of 220–3; and the banlieue 200–9; and becoming 220–1; cinematic space 190–1; deconstruction of Republican symbols 213; deframing 190–1, 221; endings 218–19, 221; and the female form 197; framing 32; and identity 190; and language 162; L’Escarpolette (The Swing) sequence 197–8; locations 189, 211; mise-en-scène 188; and the Other 192; and sound 220, 286; and space 29, 211, 224–5; and time 208, 230n31 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 2 Kil lo sa? 122 kinship 219, 227n3, 246, 260–2, 270, 275, 279, 284n28; queer 261–4 see also family Kirby, Kathleen 16–17, 155 Kiwan, Nadia 191, 226n6 Klapisch, Cédric 141 La Courneuve 25 Laclau, Ernesto 138 Ladri de Biciclette/Bicycle Thieves 218 Lady Jane 131–3, 145n26 Laferrière, Dany 156 L’Amour existe 39n29

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328

Index

landscape 35n12, 42–3, 47, 70, 77, 88, 288–90; anthropomorphism 71–2; Antonioni’s use of 97n28; arrangement of 114; and the body 244–5, 255–6; Denis and 233–4, 243–4, 254–6, 282n15; desert 64, 67, 69–73, 73–4; Dumont and 31, 41–8, 45–6, 47, 63–5, 68, 69–73, 85–7, 87–8, 98n28; and Hollywood cinema 70; Martin Lefebvre on 70, 93n1, 98n32; and the national imaginary 136; need for human presence 48–51; psychological 50; rural 41–3, 49, 66, 76; subjectivising 53, 58; uncanny 255, 258, 282n16; Varda and 24, 39n27 Lange, Rémi 40n32 language 157, 162, 179–80, 202, 203–4, 229n20 Laplaine, Zeka 40n34, 227n11 Laroche, Patrick 190 Latche 145n28 Late Spring 273–4, 284n27 Lauzier, Gérard 184n13 Lebel, Jean-Patrick 205–6 Lebtahi, Yannick 149–50 Lefebvre, Henri 9, 11, 12, 14–15, 34n5; Critique of Everyday Life 8; The Production of Space 7–8, 104 Lefebvre, Martin 70, 93n1, 98n32 Lefort, Gérard 86 Lemercier, Valérie 283n21 Lessing, Doris, The Grass is Singing 241, 278 Libération 86 Lien Défait, Le 265 lieu de mémoire 22–3 Liévin 133 Lifshitz, Sébastien 226n3 Lionnet, Françoise 180, 186n24 lived space (l’espace vécu) 7–8; habitus 8, 34n6 Lofti, Jormana 198, 219 Lola 266 London River 143n17 Lopez, Georges 185n20 Lübecker, Nikolaj 71, 99n35

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 328

Lucas, George 267 Lumière brothers xiii–xiv, 22 McGonagle, Joseph 110, 114, 120 Macheret, Mathieu 225 McLuhan, Marshall 147 McMahon, Laura 235 McNeill, Isabelle 7, 118, 193, 229n26 Malausa, Vincent 236 Malick, Terrence 18, 20, 78, 99n39 Malkmus, Lizbeth 189 mapping 13–14, 111–12, 115, 129, 137, 145n24, 234, 271 Marchand, Gilles 148 Marie-Jo et ses deux amours/Marie-Jo and her two loves 126–8, 128, 137 Marius et Jeannette 108–9, 112, 121, 122 Marivaux, Pierre de Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard/Games of Love and Chance 162, 200–1, 203–7, 220, 228n18, 229n18 Marker, Chris 2 Marks, Laura U. 5 Marseille contre Marseille 142n3 Marseille de père en fils 142n3, 142n9 Marseilles 102–4, 115–16, 123, 127, 141, 141–2n1, 142n7, 144n22; Avenue du Triomphe 127; Cathédrale de la Major 112, 113, 123, 143n16; Denis and 244, 266; Guédiguian and 31, 101–9, 110–21, 117, 118, 121–33, 137, 212–13; La Joliette 112; Le Panier 111, 123, 126, 213; L’Estaque 108–9, 126, 130, 131, 144n22; Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde 112, 114, 123, 126, 127, 143n16; Palais du Pharo 102, 118; Parc de Bagatelle 111–12; Vieux-Port 102, 105, 106, 126, 244 Marshall, Tonie 141 Martin, Adrian 237 Martineau, Jacques 188 Massey, Doreen 11, 35n13, 35n14 Maule, Rosanna 263, 283n22, 291 Mazierska, Ewa 183n7 Meier, Ursula 290 Melanchon, Jean-Luc 146n32 Melville, Herman 245

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Index

329

Melville, Jean-Pierre 138, 266 Mémoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin 216 mental (interior) space 8, 45–7, 49–50, 85 Mépris, Le /Contempt 18, 18–20, 37n20, 38n23 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 5, 6, 33n2, 56, 115, 234, 258 métissage 190–1, 209, 213, 220, 221 see also cultural hybridity metropolitan space 23–4, 29, 79, 101–9, 111–12, 121–3, 126–8, 128–9, 133, 192–200, 265–8, 269 see also urban space Metz, Christian 34n4 Meylan, Gérard 105, 106, 126, 131 Miéville, Anne-Marie 228n17 migration 27, 187, 193–4, 211–12; migrant cinema 27, 40n34, 123, 196–7, 228n7, 228n11 see also diaspora Milesi, Jean-Louis 105 Millet, Jean-François 84–5 Mills, Jeff 267, 283n24 Milon, Pierre 148 Mimi 118 mise-en-scène 1, 37n20, 42, 66, 148, 160, 161, 188 Modern Life 25 Mojave desert 97n25 Monnier, Mathilde 233, 263–4 Mon Père est ingénieur 144n22 montage 16, 37n20, 55, 61, 63, 76, 82–3, 89, 113, 129, 287 Morin, Edgar 25 Morrey, Douglas 244, 258 Mouchette 24, 54, 100n42 Moullet, Luc 25 multicultural space 170, 213 Murnau, F. W. 258, 282n18 music 82, 100n42, 101, 119, 124, 126, 127, 134, 141, 180, 182n4, 198, 209, 219, 236, 245, 247, 251, 267–8, 271–2, 276

nation/nationhood 22–3, 134, 135–6, 146n29, 130, 165, 192–3, 195–7 see also the Republic naturalism 43, 44, 85; pictorialist 43 nature 48–55, 53, 59, 62–3, 68, 85–7, 87–8, 233–5, 238, 243–4, 255–6, 289–90 NDiaye, Marie 278 negative space (Farber) 21–2 Neiges du Kilimandjaro, Les/The Snows of Kilimanjaro 140–1 Nénette et Boni 246, 266 Nettelbeck, Colin 195, 196 New Wave, the 24, 27, 288–9 Noé, Gaspar 66 Nolot, Jacques 288–9, 293n2 nomadic space 36n17, 39n30, 233–4, 237, 244, 255–6 non-lieux (Augé) 9, 92, 152–6 Nora, Pierre 22–3 Notte, La 14, 67 nouvel espace 205–6 Nouvelle Vague 70 Les Nuits Fauves, Les /Savage Nights 24

Nakache, Olivier 26 Nancy, Jean-Luc 252–4, 256–8, 257–8, 264, 281n14, 282n16, 282n17

Pagnol, Marcel 24, 103, 212, 266 Pallasmaa, Juhani 13 Parents terribles, Les 203

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 329

Odoutan, Jean 40n34, 228n11 O’Rawe, Des 3–4, 30, 292–3 Ors, Sébastien 58, 60–1 O’Shaughnessy, Martin 27, 54, 111, 142n10, 143n14, 181 Other, the 138, 192, 238–41, 242–3, 271, 288; the body as 257; Denis and 264–80, 273, 275, 279, 283n22, 286; foreignness of 259; as intruder 252–4; and space 257–8 see also alterity Ottmann, Klaus 21 Oudart, Jean-Pierre 34n4 Ousmane, Sembène 189 Oyono, Ferdinand 241 Ozon, François 24 Ozu, Yasujiro 273–4, 284n27

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330

Index

Paris 23–7, 29, 38n26; Boulevard Voltaire 195–6; Denis and 267–8, 269–76; Dumont and 79; West Indian community 269–76; Guédiguian and 133, 137, 139; Kechiche and 187, 191–200; La Courneuve 205–6; Musée de L’Homme 224; Place de la Nation 192–5, 193, 197–8, 199 Paris, Texas 66 Parlez-moi de la pluie 145n26 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 107 passage 236, 242, 249, 252–3, 280n3 Passion 11 peasant cinema 93n2 Péguy, Charles 134 Penz, François 104, 112 perception xiv-xiv, 1–7, 8–9, 12–13, 14–22, 42, 69–72, 152–6, 179–80, 234–7, 238–40, 252–3, 255–8, 264–5, 276–7, 285, 286–8 Petit Soldat, Le 245, 258 phenomenology 5–6, 7, 16–17, 18, 59, 33n2, 234 Philibert, Nicolas 25, 171 phobic space 115–17, 137–8, 140–1 compare topophilia Pialat, Maurice 39n29 Pialoux, Michel 161 Picard, Andréa 90 Piccoli, Michel 18–19 place xi, xiv, 22–7, 35n13, 108, 147–8, 217; decentring of 79–84; and identity 104–5, 152–6; and non-place 152–6; search for right 149–50, 151–2, 177; and space 8–9, 34n7 Plages d’Agnès, Les/The Beaches of Agnes 39n27 plan-séquences 42, 49, 50, 85, 148, 188, 239, 289 Plato 165–6 Plus beau métier du monde, Le 184n13 Pointe Courte, La 211–12 point-of-view shot 3, 47, 49–50, 57–8, 148, 155, 166, 167, 237 polar genre 132 politics of space 104–5, 147–60, 189 Pont des Arts, Le 27

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 330

Pook, Jocelyn 178 Porton, Richard 165–6 postcolonial cinema 23, 26–7, 186n24, 188–9, 190–1, 196–7, 228n11 see also beur cinema postcolonial space 25–7, 29, 102, 105, 114, 140, 156–8, 161–2, 187–91, 196–7, 210, 221, 238–9, 243–4; transcolonial 157–8 see also diaspora (post)modernism 2, 11–13, 35n10, 92, 288–9, 291–2 power relations 148, 157, 164, 175, 214, 223–5, 262, 278–9 Powrie, Phil 13, 36n17 Prédal, René 29 Profils paysans 25 Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars, Le/The Last Mitterrand 133–6, 135, 145n27, 145n28 Promesse, La/The Promise 143n14 Quandt, James 66, 97n26, 100n42 race and racism 171, 214, 227n11 see also ethnicity Rancière, Jacques 100n48 Rascaroli, Laura 108, 123, 144n20, 183n7 Rastelli, Lara 190 Rayner, Jonathan 42, 291 Rayon Vert, Le/The Green Ray 53 realism xiv, xvin2, 39n30, 41–4, 87, 90, 159, 180; affective 45; reality effect 124 see also naturalism Rear Window 198 Reflux, Le 258–9, 259, 261, 264, 283n19 reframing xv, 31, 176–8; cultural 170, 191, 205–7; compare cultural deframing 190–1, 221–2 regroupement familial 216 relationality 18–21, 29–30, 242, 263–4, 275–6; relational art aesthetics (Bourriaud) 92 religion 45, 54–5, 80, 214, 256–7; areligion (Nancy) 256–7; Christian allegory 256–8 Renoir, Jean 103

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Index Renzi, Eugenio 225 Repas de bébé xiii repetition 5, 81–2, 85, 130, 137–8 Republic, the, 161, 181, 228n17 see also nation/nationhood Republican space 27, 158, 166, 169, 194, 197–8, 287 Resnais, Alain 2 Ressources Humaines/Human Resources 150–2, 177, 182n4, 182n5, 184n14 Retour en Normandie 25 reverse-field shot 3, 58–9, 62, 63, 76, 82–3, 85 Rhodes, John David 12, 36n16 Rochant, Éric 184n13 Roger, Jean-Henri 103 Rohmer, Éric 24, 53–4 Romand, Jean-Claude 183n6 Ronsard, Pierre de 195, 200 Rope 116 Roseaux sauvages, Les/Wild Reeds 24 Rosello, Mireille 190–1, 226n4 Rouch, Jean 24–5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 196 Roussel-Gillet, Isabelle 149–50 Saleh, Kamel 123 Samia 123, 184n13 Sanguinaires, Les/The Bloodthirsty Ones 148, 149, 159, 182n5, 184n10 Sans Toit ni Loi/Vagabond 36n17 Sarajevo 121, 122, 128–9, 137 Schaeffer, Pierre 33n1 Schama, Simon 93n1 Schrader, Paul 61, 96n21 Scott, Ridley 11 screenscape xv, 11–12 Scudéry, Madeleine de 14 Sebbar, Leïla 227n5 Second World War 15, 23, 112, 113, 134, 138–40 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 185n18 Sellier, Geneviève 289 Selznick, David 65 S’en fout la mort/No Fear, No Die 265, 269 Sète 187, 210–11

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 331

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shame 168, 182n1, 185n18 Short Cuts 110 Shostakovich, Dmitri 268, 284n25 Simon, Claire 118 situation de cinéma (Barthes) xii, 6 social exclusion 136, 161–2, 165, 167–70, 205–6 social mobility 117, 120, 211–14, 221–2 social space 8, 147–60 Soja, Edward 10–11 Sorlin, Pierre 38n26, 116, 144n18 Sortie d’usine xiii sound 4–5, 85, 160, 179–81. 186n23, 219, 229n24; Kechiche and 220, 286; off-screen 31–2, 51, 167, 179–80 Souviens-toi de moi 201 spatialisation 2–3, 8–10, 13, 35n9, 74, 115, 257–8, 147–9, 182n4, 189–90, 206, 263–4 spatial turn, the 10–14 Spielberg, Steven 65 Stam, Robert 246 Staples, Stuart 254 stereotypes 122, 139, 140, 165, 191 Sterritt, David 61 Stewart, Garrett 291 Stilwell, Robynn 4 Storck, Henri 42–3, 93n2 Straub, Jean-Marie 71 Suarès, André 143n16 subjectivity xii-xiii, 15, 16–22, 37n22, 76, 167–8, 225; intersubjectivity 89, 263–4, 270–2, 274–5, 287; point-of-view shot 47–8, 52, 63, 76 Subor, Michel 245–6, 251, 254, 258, 259, 260–1, 278 superimposition 248–9, 249 Swamy, Vinay 228n18 symbolic space 120–1, 124–6, 127–8, 130–1, 137, 139–40, 141 Tabu (aka Story of the South Seas) 258, 282n18 Tarr, Carrie 22, 27, 165, 184n13, 227n11, 228n15 Taurand, Gilles 140 Tavernier, Bertrand 111

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332

Index

Taxi films 103 Téchiné, André 24 Temps du loup, Le/The Time of the Wolf 290 Terre, La 43 Terre de la Folie, La/Earth Madness 25 Terres Étrangères (TV series) 243 territory 22, 98n32, 171, 172–4, 214, 248, 252–3, 254–5 terrorism 79–84 Tesson, Charles 144n19 Thamar, Ralph 272 Thé à la menthe, Le/Mint Tea 188 Thé au harem d’Archimède, Le/Tea in the Harem 26–7, 184n13, 228n16, 229n23 Thin Red Line, The 18, 20, 38n23, 78, 99n39 Third Space, the 35n11, 230n31, 260 35 Rhums/35 Shots of Rum 269–76, 271, 279, 280, 284n28 Thomas, Deborah 5 time: blocked 118; Cantet and 182n5; double 232n31; Dumont and 72–3; epic 136; Guédiguian and 127; Kechiche and 208, 230n31; political 137–8; pure 16; rhythmic temporalities 34n5, 251; sound in 186n23; and space 2, 10, 107, 117, 132, 139 time-space 11, 35n14 Tindersticks 236, 276 Tolédano, Éric 26 Toni 103, 142n5 topophilia 14, 117, 145n24 compare phobic space Total Khéops 103 Tourneur, Maurice 103, 266 Tous à la manif/All at the Rally 182n1, 182n5 Tracy, Andrew 60 transitional zones 29, 152, 158, 254–5 transcultural, the 220–3, 240–1, 272–4 trans-space 243–64 transtext, the 246, 249–50

Williams, Space and being in contemporary French cinema.indd 332

Trinh Thi, Coralie 26 Triplettes de Belleville, Les 40n31 Trouble Every Day 235, 236, 240, 260, 266–7, 283n20 Truffaut, François 246 Turner, Sarah 293n5 Twentynine Palms 63–73, 99n35: criticism of 48, 97n26, 97n27; desert rocks sequence 67, 67, 71–2; final shot 68, 73; Hof/Yard (Demand) references 68–9, 71; landscape in 63–5, 68, 69–73, 88 Udris, Raynalle 24 Un Lac 290 Une Femme douce/A Gentle Creature 266 universalism 134–6, 137, 196, 222, 225n1 urban space 11, 12, 24–6, 31, 36n14, 102–4, 113–4, 116–7, 128–31, 132, 193–4 see also metropolitan space US Go Home 234–5 Valéry, Paul 135 Varda, Agnès xv, 2, 24, 36n17, 39n27, 211–12, 292–3 Vendredi soir/Friday Night 267–8, 272, 283n21 Vénus Noire/Black Venus 187, 190, 223–6 Vers le sud/Heading South 156–8, 167–70, 169, 178–9, 180, 183n5, 185n15, 185n16, 185n17, 186n24 Vers Mathilde 263–4 Vers Nancy 252–3 Vie de Jésus, La/The Life of Jesus 48–55, 143n14; closing sequence 43, 49, 52–5, 53, 62 Vie rêvée des anges, La/The Dreamlife of Angels xviin2 viewer, the xii, xii–xiii, 5–7, 30, 31, 48, 77 88–93, 98n29, 225–6; spectatorial affect 30, 89; spectatorship 5, 225–6, 242, 292; voyeurism 58, 167–8, 225–6 Vigo, Jean 102, 212

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Index Ville est tranquille, La/The Town is Quiet 110–21, 137; final sequence 116, 119–21; opening sequence 101–2, 105–7, 106, 109, 112 Vincendeau, Ginette 230n29 violence 51–2, 64–8, 91, 133, 161 Virilio, Paul 34n7 virtual space 217, 288, 290–1 visagéification 62 Voltaire 194, 195–6 Voyage en Arménie, Le/Journey to Armenia 129–31, 134 Walsh, David 91 Warhol, Andy 177 Wayne, Mike 102, 110–11 Wearing, Sadie 168, 178–9, 185n18 Week-end 267

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Welles, Orson 21 Wenders, Wim 11, 66, 267 Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? 188 western, the 67–8, 114 White Material 242, 276–9, 277, 284n31 Wild Side 226n3 Wilson, Emma 74, 235 Wings of Desire 11 Winnicott, D. W. 17 Winter, Pharaon Abdon Léon de 56–7 Wollen, Peter 12, 92, 116 Yacavone, Daniel 5–6, 33n2 Zabriskie Point 66–7, 97n28, 99n35 Zauberman, Yolande 26 Zola, Émile 93n3 Zonca, Érick xviin2

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