Post-beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000 9780748678150

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POST-BEUR CINEMA

Traditions in World Cinema General Editors Linda Badley (Middle Tennessee State University) R. Barton Palmer (Clemson University) Founding Editor Steven Jay Schneider (New York University) Titles in the series include: Traditions in World Cinema by Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and Steven Jay Schneider (eds)

American Smart Cinema by Claire Perkins Italian Neorealist Cinema by Torunn Haaland Forthcoming titles include: The Spanish Horror Film by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll American Independent-Commercial Cinema by Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

Japanese Horror Cinema by Jay McRoy (ed.)

The Italian Sword-and-Sandal Film by Frank Burke

New Punk Cinema by Nicholas Rombes (ed.)

New Nordic Cinema by Mette Hjort, Andrew Nestigen and Anna Stenport

African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara by Roy Armes

Italian Post-neorealist Cinema by Luca Barattoni

Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory by Nurith Gertz

Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe by Aga Skrodzka-Bates

Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition by Stephen Teo

Cinemas of the North Africa Diaspora of France by Will Higbee

Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition by Peter Hames

New Romanian Cinema by Christina Stojanova and Dana Duma

The New Neapolitan Cinema by Alex Marlow-Mann The International Film Musical by Corey K. Creekmur and Linda Y. Mokdad (eds)

Contemporary Latin American Cinema: New Transnationalisms by Dolores Tierney www.euppublishing.com/series/tiwc

POST-BEUR CINEMA North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000

Will Higbee

© Will Higbee, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4004 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7815 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7817 4 (epub) The right of Will Higbee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations

vii ix

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1 26 61 96

Introduction: From Immigrant Cinema to National Cinema The (Maghrebi-)French Connection: Diaspora goes Mainstream Colonial Fracture and the Counter-Heritage Film Of Spaces and Difference in the Films of Abdellatif Kechiche Home, Displacement and the Myth of Return: Journey Narratives in the 2000s 6. Screening Islam: Cinematic Representations of the Muslim Community in France in the 2000s 7. Conclusion: Post-Beur Cinema Bibliography Index

130 154 182 192 201

Acknowledgements

First I wish to thank Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer, editors of the Traditions in World Cinema series, for their belief in this project, as well as their support and encouragement as I moved towards completion of the book. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of my initial proposal, who offered genuinely constructive criticism at an early stage that helped me refine the ultimate focus of this study. Colleagues from the University of Exeter – Fiona Handyside, Helen Hanson, Joe Kember, Song Hwee Lim, James Lyons, Steve Neale and Martin Thomas – offered encouragement, collegiality and, in some cases, close readings of drafts of chapters. Beyond the University of Exeter, I would like to thank the following friends and fellow academics, who have, in various ways, generously provided resources or given of their time and insight to critique the ideas that have made their way into this book: Patricia Caillé, Sylvie Durmelat, Susan Hayward, Sarah Leahy, Flo Martin, Mireille Rosello, Vinay Swamy and Carrie Tarr. Outside of academia, I owe a considerable debt of thanks to family and friends who have provided support and encouragement throughout the process of researching and writing of this book. In particular I must extend my gratitude to my parents, Brian and Cynthia Higbee, for stepping in on numerous occasions when the demands of work and bringing up a young family seemed incompatible. As always, an extra special thanks to my wife, Isali Gómez de Toro, for her unfailing love and support – even (and especially) when this project seemed

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like it would never reach completion. And finally, to my two children, Tom and Clara, whose unconditional love, laughter and willingness to distract their dad from the task at hand offered the perfect antidote to the hours spent working alone to complete this book.

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1: Figure 1.2: Figure 1.3: Figure 2.1: Figure 2.2: Figure 2.3: Figure 2.4: Figure 3.1: Figure 3.2: Figure 3.3: Figure 4.1: Figure 4.2:

Beur Cinema as a cinema of transition: Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985) 11 Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995): Maghrebi-French filmmaking and New Realism 15 Promotional poster for Beur sur la ville (Bensalah, 2011) 20 Cover of Les Inrockuptibles, which included a special dossier on Martel’s Mainstream (2010)30 ‘Nos stars beurs’: promotional poster for Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006) 42 Boyz on the beach: Le Ciel, les oiseaux et … ta mère! (Bensalah, 1999) 52 Sami as ‘fish out of water’ in Neuilly sa mère! (La Ferrière, 2009) 57 Zouina arrives in the French provinces, Inchallah dimanche (Benguigui, 2001) 74 Ali as witness to Franco-Algerian colonial history in Cartouches gauloises (Charef, 2007) 77 Hors-la-loi (Bouchareb, 2010): the gangster film as counter-heritage91 Jallel, the poetical refugee in La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001) 102 Krimo, the intermédiarie, covets Julia from afar in L’Esquive (Kechiche, 2004) 108

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Figure 4.3:

Figure 4.4: Figure 5.1: Figure 5.2: Figure 5.3: Figure 6.1: Figure 6.2: Figure 7.1:

Slimane stares out onto the waterways of Sète from the diasporic space of the Hôtel de l’Orient in La Graine et le mulet (Kechiche, 2007) Sara performs as the Venus Hottentot for Parisian salon society in Vénus noire (Kechiche, 2010) Distanciation and the politics of displacement in Bled Number One (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006) Zano and Naïma, the ‘right kind of migrants’, drift from France to Algeria in Exils (Gatlif, 2004) Nourdine and Mimoun connect over mint tea in Ten’ja (Legzouli, 2004) Generational conflict between Réda and his father in Le Grand voyage (Ferroukhi, 2004) Call to prayer from the pallet mosque in Dernier maquis (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2008) Post-Beur, proto-Republican outlaws in Les Chants de Mandrin (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2012)

116 122 142 144 148 168 177 190

TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA

General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically-oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception. The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly

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identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema). Textbooks and monographs include:

· An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination · A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in question · A summary of previous published work on the tradition · Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception · Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches · Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies). Monographs may additionally include:





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· Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in light of current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and globalisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/ aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity politics) · Interview(s) with key filmmakers working within the tradition.

1. INTRODUCTION: FROM IMMIGRANT CINEMA TO NATIONAL CINEMA

In September 2010, Maghrebi-French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s seventh feature film, Hors-la-loi, a gangster film set against the backdrop of the Algerian war for independence, was released across cinemas in France. Made for a budget of €20m, released on more than 400 prints and starring Jamel Debbouze – a French-born actor of Moroccan immigrant parents and one of French cinema’s biggest stars – Hors-la-loi enjoyed the kind of distribution and marketing conditions reserved for only the most high-profile French mainstream productions. The film aimed to capitalise on the success of Bouchareb’s Second World War epic, Indigènes (2006), which attracted over three million spectators in France and received an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film (admittedly as an Algerian rather than French film). If Indigènes’ message to its French audience was simultaneously confrontational and conciliatory, holding successive French governments to account for freezing the pensions of North African colonial soldiers at the same time as it argued for the rightful place of the French-born descendants of these colonial veterans in France, Hors-la-loi proved far more controversial. At the film’s premier in Cannes in May 2010, a group of protestors including veterans of the Algerian war, supporters of the far-right and harkis (Algerians who fought for the French in the war for independence) gathered on the Croisette to oppose what they saw as Hors-la-loi’s historical distortion of colonial history. Pressure was put on the organisers of the festival as well as French distributors and exhibitors to boycott the film that was attacked as ‘anti-French’ by Lionel Luca, a member of the centre-right UMP party (Jaffar 2010: 38). For his part,

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Bouchareb responded to these attacks by claiming that it was precisely because he was a French citizen that he had chosen to expose this contested period in Franco-Algerian colonial history (Bouchareb in Santucci 2010). As this opening example shows, directors of Maghrebi origin working in France have come a long way since the appearance in the 1970s of a handful of militant, low-budget films by immigrant directors located on the margins of the French film industry and the small but influential number of films made by French directors of North African immigrant origin in the 1980s that became known as Beur Cinema. These earlier decades undoubtedly produced some critically acclaimed work, including Les Ambassadeurs (Ktari, 1977), Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985), Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991), Hexagone (Chibane, 1994) and Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995). However, the films were somewhat limited in terms of their wider impact on French audiences. Indeed, until the crossover success in the late 1990s of two comedies, Les Deux papas et la maman (Smaïn and Longval, 1996) and Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (Bensalah, 1999), both attracting over a million spectators in France, the most successful Maghrebi-authored French film had actually been one of the earliest examples of Beur Cinema, Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (516 487 spectators in France) released more than ten years earlier. During the 1980s and 1990s, the artistic scope of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré directors was, arguably, further restricted by two factors. On the one hand, a reliance on consensual comedy aimed at diffusing rather than pronouncing the difference of the Maghrebi immigrant protagonists. On the other hand, the dominance of social realist narratives of beur and banlieue filmmaking that were, for the most part, resolutely located in the multicultural, working-class estates of the deprived urban periphery. The prevalence of these two trends in the 1980s and 1990s suggests the urgent need for directors of Maghrebi origin to address the sociopolitical realities facing the North African immigrant community in France by offering alternatives to the stereotypical images of immigrants as victims, delinquents or criminals found in mainstream French films during this period. However, it also raises the possibility of the ghettoisation of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers, in the sense that French producers and French funding bodies appeared more willing to back narratives that remained firmly focused on the experiences of the North African immigrant population and their French descendants. Indeed a significant portion of funding for many of these films came (and still comes) directly from organisations such as the Fonds d’Action Sociale (FAS), whose remit is, precisely, to promote projects that articulate the experiences of immigrant and ethnic minorities in France.1 In some respects, the situation facing Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in France during the 1980s and 1990s persists in the 2000s. Many of these filmmakers, such as the pioneering Maghrebi-French female director Zaïda Ghorab-Volta and Malik Chibane, experience the

2

introduction

same ­problems of funding and distribution, and feel trapped as ethnic minority filmmakers in the eyes of most French producers (Ghorab-Volta 2007; Bluher 2001). Others, such as Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, seem to have made a conscious decision to resist any move towards the mainstream, preferring the artistic and political freedom that working in the auteur-led independent sector grants them. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the industry, the crossover success enjoyed by directors such as Bouchareb, Bensalah and Allouache, the near universal critical acclaim for the films of the actor turned director Abdellatif Kechiche and the emergence of bona fide French stars of Maghrebi origin such as Jamel Debbouze and Gad Elmaleh, points to a substantive and significant shift to the mainstream. This mainstreaming is an important indication of how these filmmakers, and the characters they portray on screen, have been embraced by majority French audiences. Consequently, there has been a notable move away from perceiving Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in France as solely the product of an immigrant cinema produced on the margins of the industry that only speaks to the minority ethnic communities from which it emerges. This is not simply a case of immigrant, postcolonial or accented filmmakers crossing over to the mainstream – though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is happening in the 2000s. Just as importantly, it will be argued in this book that filmmakers of Maghrebi origin working in France in the 2000s have increasingly questioned the boundaries between national, transnational and diasporic cinema at the same time as their films demand, either implicitly or explicitly, a reconsideration of the very difference (religious, ethnic and cultural) that has traditionally been seen as a barrier to their successful integration into French society. In contrast to earlier films by North African émigré filmmakers who, for obvious reasons, have tended to view the Maghrebi population in France as a temporary presence, with one eye on the diasporic homeland (see, for example, Le Thé à la menthe (Bahloul, 1984) and Salut cousin! (Allouache, 1996), Maghrebi-French directors have, claims Alec Hargreaves, always spanned ‘spaces that are far more diverse than those suggested by the ethnic marker beur’ to produce a cinema that is at once ‘locally grounded, nationally referenced and globally minded’ (Hargreaves 2011: 31, 38). There is certainly a great deal of truth in this assertion. One need only think of the range of spaces and protagonists located beyond France in Rachid Bouchareb’s work to date as well as the centrality of the multicultural banlieue – a location that is itself strongly influenced by (African-)American popular culture – in MaghrebiFrench filmmaking since the 1980s, creating diegetic spaces in these films that are at once local and global. However, it also fair to say that, despite this transnational outlook, the majority of Beur Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s remains locked into the social realist conventions of beur and banlieue filmmaking;

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presenting us with Maghrebi-French characters who, ultimately, either find themselves relegated to a marginal space or state of limbo in the narrative, or remain firmly located in the localised, deprived socio-economic space of the cité (working-class housing estate of the banlieue).2 Moreover, given that, in terms of their politics, these films are primarily concerned with asserting the rightful place of Maghrebi-French youth in France, the most frequent response of the young beur protagonists to the North African heritage of their immigrant parents in films of the 1980s and 1990s has tended to be one of indifference or outright hostility (see, for example: Le Thé au harem d’Archimède; Cheb, Bye-bye; and Le Ciel, les oiseaux . . . et ta mère!). While such tensions do not simply disappear in the subsequent decade, this book will explore how the ‘locally grounded, nationally referenced and globally minded’ outlook of both Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in question is more fully realised in the 2000s. Not only do these films offer more nuanced and potentially enriching possibilities for exchange between the French and North African origins, locations and traditions of their protagonists than their predecessors, but they also do so in ways that seek alternatives to the diasporic axis as the ultimate determinant of the complex and often tense relationship (particularly for the second generation) between host and homeland. Even taking into account the inherent transnationality of earlier Beur and banlieue cinema of the 1980s and 1990s identified by Hargreaves, the 2000s still represent a key decade of transition or departure for Maghrebi-French and North African immigrant filmmaking in France, and for a variety of reasons. Firstly, directors of Maghrebi origin in France have produced a greater range of films over the past decade, particularly in relation to genre. Secondly, a more diverse matrix of socio-economic spaces are occupied by the protagonists of Maghrebi origin in these films, moving beyond the banlieue as the dominant and, in some cases, what seems to be the only location for characters of Maghrebi origin in the mid-1990s (Higbee 2007a; Tarr 2005). Thirdly, there has been a notable historical turn made by directors of Maghrebi origin in the 2000s. This relates to a re-examination of a shared Franco-Maghrebi history, which itself connects to a larger debate over the memorialisation of France’s colonial past and the visibility of a history of post-war immigration from North Africa. However, with recent films such as Vénus noire (Kechiche, 2010) and Les Chants de Mandrin (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2012), the historical reach of such films has extended beyond colonial history or a history of immigration between France and the Maghreb.3 Finally, in the 2000s, we witness a greater degree of access to mainstream production, distribution and exhibition networks for certain Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers on both sides of the camera. Such advances, in particular the move to the mainstream, could be seen as distancing these directors from the very subjects and environments that led

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Bosséno to describe Beur Cinema as a cinema of ‘social intervention’ (Bosséno 1992: 49). And yet, as shall be argued in the chapters that follow, despite these important developments, films made during the 2000s by directors of Maghrebi origin continue to offer key interventions into socio-political debates surrounding immigration, integration and social exclusion in contemporary France. What is more, in terms of their stylistic influences, modes of production, socio-political engagement and global ambition, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s have produced a cinema that, more than ever, is simultaneously local, national and transnational in its approaches, ­references and outlook. The aim of this study is, therefore, to analyse these films and filmmakers via a methodology that combines the recent debates in film studies concerning questions of national, transnational and accented cinema4 with existing work by scholars in the field of French and francophone studies who engage with these films either as texts that provide insights into France’s socio-political relationship with its immigrant minorities (Tarr 2005; Hargreaves 2007; Durmelat and Swamy 2011) or as a platform for a theoretically-led analysis of the politics of inclusion and exclusion facing France’s postcolonial minorities (Rosello 1997, 2002). However, before we examine Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking of the 2000s in detail, it is necessary to address two further areas. Firstly, a brief historical, industrial and socio-political contextualisation of the representation of the North African immigrant population in French cinema since the 1970s, that will allow a better understanding of the conditions that led to the key transition for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s. Secondly, recognition of the similarities (and differences) that exist between the various directors who are included under the rubrics of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in France and the problematic ‘naming game’ involved in categorising their films. North African Immigrant Cinema of the 1970s If a new generation of Maghrebi-French (or beur) directors did not emerge until the 1980s, the history of North African émigré filmmaking in France effectively begins in the 1970s. In part, immigrant filmmakers were simply unable to access the means of production prior to this period but their absence was also due to the strict censorship laws surrounding French cinema that remained in place until the mid-1970s. This made it difficult for any filmmaker (French or North African) to engage with the colonial question in a politicised or ‘anti-French’ manner in anything other than allegorical or elliptical terms, or else through narratives that offered only tangential references to events such as the Algerian war.5 As a result, the representation of North African subjects

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on French screens before the 1970s remained trapped in the colonial imaginary of a cinema that introduced the Maghreb through tales of love and adventure, where characters of North African origin appeared as ‘servants, traitors or exploited sexual partners’ in an exotic colonial space, such as that found in L’Atlantide (Feyder, 1921); Pépé le Moko (Duvivier, 1937); L’Appel du Bled (Gleize, 1942) (Sherzer 1996: 5). Of the relatively small number of French films including characters of Maghrebi-origin between 1910 and 1969 (little more than 150 features over five decades) the vast majority were located in the Maghreb and provided North African subjects with only secondary roles (Garel 1989: 68–76). In contrast, the 1970s saw a notable increase (relatively speaking) in the presence of the North African immigrant subject on French screens, as well as the tentative beginning of documentaries and features directed by filmmakers of North African origin. Whilst between 1910 and 1969 only twelve French films involved characters of Maghrebi origin based in France, during the 1970s the number rose to thirty-four (Garel 1989: 68–76). On screen, the Maghrebi protagonist was no longer represented solely as the distant or exotic colonial subject. Instead, he (for it was almost exclusively a male protagonist) reflected the socio-economic realties of France’s post-war reconstruction, appearing as an economic migrant in the larger French cities. Such representations emerged in two distinct areas. On the one hand, in French-authored narrative features such as Elise ou la vraie vie (Drach, 1970) and the political narratives of civic cinema, such as Dupont Lajoie (Boisset, 1974), that were aimed squarely at a mainstream French audience. On the other hand, directors of Maghrebiimmigrant origin such as Ali Ghalem (Mektoub, 1970; L’Autre France, 1974), Naceur Ktari (Les Ambassadeurs) and Ali Akika (Voyage en capital, 1977) aimed, through low-budget, socio-realist and militant cinema, to highlight the racism and exploitation faced by North Africans living in France. The main difference between the two types of cinema is, unsurprisingly, narrative focus: while the former foreground the reactions of ethnic majority French protagonists to the exploitation and racism suffered by North African immigrants in France, the latter focus on the experiences of the immigrants themselves. In spite of this tentative increase in visibility on screen and behind the camera, the presence and influence of Maghrebi immigrant directors in the French film industry remained extremely limited during the 1970s. Militant immigrant filmmakers continued to encounter great difficulties in distributing their films to a wider French public and tended to be dismissed as offering representations of Maghrebi immigrants as helpless victims of French racism (Smith 1995: 42). However, it should be noted that the uncompromising and often brutal portrayal of racism offered by filmmakers such as Ghalem and Ktari was consistent with the aims of militant and civic cinema of the 1970s (produced by directors such as Yves Boisset) to privilege political content and

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social reality over the aesthetic appeal of spectacle and the escapism of fictional narrative. Moreover, by exposing the experiences of North African immigrants in France, these films directly addressed subject matter that was either denied or ignored by the majority of French society and French cinema. Given the almost exclusive focus in the above films from the 1970s on the male North African immigrant, Ali Akika’s Voyage en capital is highly significant for the way in which it also opens up a space for a female, secondgeneration protagonist. In the film, the established focus on the male immigrant worker remains in the form of the Algerian émigré, Khader (Mustapha Mazari), whose exposure to everyday racism in Paris propels him towards political activism. However, unlike in earlier militant cinema of the 1970s, this politicisation is not presented as ‘an inevitable process’ (Smith 1995: 46). Khader initially shows little interest in allying his status as immigrant with any form of political struggle and, like the French themselves, views his presence in Paris in purely economic terms. Against this more familiar representational trope of the male immigrant worker, the experiences of a female protagonist of Maghrebi immigrant origin emerges in the form of Djamila (Naïma Hamlaoui), a young Parisian university student of Algerian origin, born in France. Though keen to maintain her links with Algerian cultural heritage, Djamila confesses in the film to feeling uncomfortable upon a recent return trip to Algeria, and further displeases her father by refusing to relinquish the independence she enjoys as a women within French/western society. Her attempt to articulate the conflicts of identity and loyalty felt by the French descendants of North African immigrants by allowing them a central position within the diegesis effectively qualifies Voyage en capital as a precursor to Beur Cinema of the 1980s. The 1980s. Majority-French Representations of the North African Immigrant Population: A Criminalised Underclass Moving into the 1980s, two representational trends are noticeable. The first is the extent to which, in mainstream French cinema at least, the immigrant worker of the 1970s is replaced by the North African protagonist as a delinquent or criminal Other (Schwengler 1989: 32–5). This representational shift can perhaps be explained by the fact that, as the permanent settlement of North African immigrants and their families became a reality in the late-1970s and early-1980s, so French society could no longer perceive the Maghrebi population as a temporary, economic presence. Instead, some sought to qualify their otherness in terms of criminality and deviance. These anxieties appear most frequently in French polars (crime films) of the early 1980s such as La Balance (Swain, 1982) and Police (Pialat, 1985). In both films, the North African immigrant population and its descendants exist in a criminal underworld of drugs, violence and prostitution that is set apart from mainstream French society.

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Despite the potentially negative connotations of such r­ epresentations, for contemporary French critic Hubert Prolongeau, the emergence of the Maghrebi protagonist as member of a criminal underclass in fact represented a positive advance: For the first time, the Arab [sic] is not defined by race alone but by his place in society. Though he is only offered the lowest rung on the ladder, he occupies it with force. The Arab of the 1980s no longer has his head smashed in by a stone, he goes to prison because he is a gangster (Prolongeau 1989: 16). Leaving aside the simplistic description of militant immigrant cinema of the 1970s implied in the above quote, the idea that replacing the exploited and victimised worker with the drug-dealing criminal can somehow constitute a victory for the North African is rather suspect. The Maghrebi protagonist of the 1980s polar remains a largely two-dimensional stereotype and is, invariably, set against a more sympathetic and complex white protagonist; be they a cop, a confidant or even a pimp. Finally, in cultural, social and spatial terms (confined as they are to the immigrant districts of Paris) the North African immigrant remains excluded as the ethnic Other within the polars of the 1980s. Hence, contrary to Prolongeau’s claim, Maghrebi protagonists continue to be qualified by their ‘race’ in the polar of the 1980s. Rather than occupying the ‘lowest rung of the social scale’, North African immigrants are excluded from society through their systematic criminalisation, which focuses on a deviant minority in order to portray the perceived reality of a ­homogeneous Arab ‘community’ populated solely by drug dealers and pimps. Beyond the criminalised North African ‘community’ of the polar, two further types can be identified in mainstream French cinema of the early-1980s. Firstly, the immigrant as passive victim of French racism, which represented a continuation from both civic and militant cinema of the 1970s and was found in concerned, liberal films such as Tchao pantin (Berri, 1983) and Train d’enfer (Hanin, 1985) (see Tarr 2005: 9–10). Secondly, and of more direct relevance to the Beur Cinema that would follow, the tentative emergence of MaghrebiFrench youth as delinquent from the disadvantaged banlieue – found not only in Le Péron’s Laisse béton (1984), but also in Girod’s Le Grand frère (1982). In addition to these films by ethnic-majority French directors, a limited number of shorts and medium-length features were made by North African émigré filmmakers in the early-1980s, such as Mahmoud Zemmouri (Prends dix milles balles et casse-toi [1981] and Les Folles années du twist [1983]) and Abdelkrim Bahloul, who studied filmmaking in France in the 1970s and worked as a television cameraman before he eventually obtained funding to direct his first commercial feature, Le Thé à la menthe. The film focuses on

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the exploits of Hammou (Abdellatif Kechiche), a young Algerian immigrant, whose life is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of his mother in Paris. Even though he inhabits the same space within Paris (Barbès and Pigalle) as the Maghrebi-immigrant protagonists of La Balance, Hammou is far removed from the violence and ruthlessness of the polar. Instead he is shown to be a likeable opportunist, whose criminal activities are the actions of a resilient, streetwise figure who refuses to be victimised – much like the beur protagonists of Bâton Rouge (Bouchareb, 1985) and Le Thé au harem d’Archimède that would follow soon after. Bahloul’s portrayal of a young, dynamic and largely westernised immigrant protagonist forces audiences to reconsider the stock representation of the male immigrant worker in the 1970s as an isolated and passive victim of French racism. Elsewhere, stereotypical notions of the Algerian immigrant as a threatening presence and inter-ethnic tension between immigrant and host nation are subverted in the scenes where Hammou’s mother crosses a busy lane of traffic to offer a pot of mint tea to a policeman who is directing traffic. However, the potential integration of the Maghrebiimmigrant into wider French society is essentially closed down by the end of Le Thé à la mènthe. The final scene of the film shows Hammou boarding a plane at the airport, having been deported to Algeria with his mother after stolen goods are found in his apartment, the suggestion being that the young immigrant’s future is in Algeria rather than France. Beur Cinema: « Un film qui cherche des interlocuteurs » The 1980s mark a watershed in the representation of ethnic minorities in French cinema, due largely to the emergence of a cluster of independently released features labelled as Beur Cinema. Beur is verlan (a politically charged inverted slang) for Arabe, and the term emerged in Paris in the late 1970s as a positive form of auto-designation for the descendants of Maghrebi immigrants who had either been born or raised since a young age in France (Hargreaves 1995; Durmelat 1998). Beur Cinema thus refers to a limited number of shortfilms, video documentaries and commercially released feature films directed by French filmmakers of North African immigrant origin, whose narratives focus on the experiences of young beur protagonists and are largely dominated by themes of integration, racism, delinquency, identity and belonging in France. It is defined by French film critic Christian Bosséno (1992: 49) as a ‘cinema of social intervention’ and by beur filmmaker, novelist and activist Farida Belghoul as the work of an excluded minority trying to enter into a dialogue with the dominant societal norm: ‘un film qui cherche des interlocuteurs’ (Belghoul in Dazat 1985: 18). The emergence of a putative Beur Cinema first came to the attention of a wider French public with the crossover success of Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au harem d’Archimède. The film was an adaptation of

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the director’s semi-autobiographical novel about his experiences as the son of an Algerian immigrant growing up in the suburbs of Paris, and attracted over 500 000 spectators in France. As both a discursive and descriptive term, Beur Cinema thus functioned in the 1980s as the cinematic manifestation of a wider socio-political and cultural mobilisation of French-born descendants of North African immigrants who demanded the recognition of their rightful place in France as citizens of the Republic. Beur Cinema was notable for its refusal of existing miserabilist portrayals of the immigrant as victim or Other found in the sympathetic representation of immigrant protagonists offered by militant and mainstream French directors in the 1970s and that continued into social dramas of the 1980s. Significantly, beur films also showed their central protagonists to be as much French as they were ‘Arab’. Moreover, unlike immigrant cinema of the 1970s, Beur Cinema had the potential to reach a crossover French audience (in particular a youth audience) through its mixture of social realism and comedy, as well as through the foregrounding of attractive and resilient beur protagonists. If the overtly politicised discourse of 1970s militant immigrant cinema, such as that found in Les Ambassadeurs, is absent from the work of commercial Maghrebi-French authored films of the 1980s, so too is the sense of dual identification with North African and French culture experienced by Djamela in Voyage en capital. In Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, Madjid (Kader Boukhanef) actively resists his mother’s pleas that he turn away from France and engage with his Maghrebi heritage. Instead, it is the shared socioeconomic exclusion of the young multi-ethnic gang and their collective identity as banlieusards that provides a sense of identity and belonging for Madjid, far more than any affiliation he may feel as a result of his ethnic origins. This point is emphasised by the fact that Madjid’s appearance (jeans, leather jacket and unkempt hair) is strikingly similar to that of Pat (Rémi Martin), his white French friend. Moreover, even in the face of French racism, Madjid refuses to revert to an essentialised ethnic identity and submit to the position of marginalised victim. Instead he and Pat actively exploit French prejudices that associate Arab immigrants with criminality in order to make Madjid the object of suspicion in the metro carriage, whilst Pat walks off with the unsuspecting passenger’s wallet. This narrative strategy was emphasised by Charef in an interview following the release of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède: What I certainly didn’t want to make was a miserabilist social drama. Rather than an accusatory tone in a film designed to systematically shock the spectator, I preferred a more upbeat narrative [. . .] I didn’t want to make people, the French community, feel guilty. It wasn’t necessary to say: if the Arabs [sic] are unhappy, it must be the fault of the French. (Charef in Dazat 1985: 11)

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Figure 1.1  Beur Cinema as a cinema of transition: Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985).

Charef’s remarks indicate a conscious decision to distance his film from the oversimplified representation of the ‘good’ North African as passive victim of the ‘bad’ French racist found in militant cinema a decade earlier. The more sympathetic representation of the Maghrebi-French subject is, moreover, complicated in Le Thé au harem d’Archimède by Madjid’s apparently unrepentant delinquent activities: stealing wallets on the metro; pimping a desperate alcoholic mother from the cité to the local building site. However, the quote also reveals the extent to which beur filmmakers of the 1980s used lighter comic episodes to counterbalance the harsh socio-political realities of racism and exclusion depicted in the narratives of their films. Equally, it highlights the delicate negotiation for the beur filmmaker in exposing the negative treatment of Maghrebi-French youth, without adopting an excessively hostile stance towards a French society in which, ultimately, they have a stake. The significance and impact of the films associated with Beur Cinema of the 1980s actually far outweigh their number. For this reason, the corpus tends (somewhat problematically) to be extended by critics to include films by North African émigré directors – Le Thé à la menthe and Un Amour à Paris (Allouache, 1987) – as well as films directed by majority French ­directors – Le Petit frère, P’tit con (Lauzier, 1983), Laisse béton (Le Péron, 1984) – that share common thematic or stylistic traits. And yet as Farida Belghoul argued (Dazat 1985: 18), to include all of these films within the same generic category as beur effectively elides the different perspectives of the North African immigrant population and their descendants offered by émigré filmmakers working

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in France, the descendants of North African immigrants born or raised in France (such as Charef and Bouchareb), and finally the ­external perspective of majority-ethnic French directors. As Mireille Rosello has suggested (1996: 147–51), given the ambiguities surrounding the term, compiling lists to argue over the existence (or not) of an identifiable Beur Cinema is, in many ways, a futile task and distracts our attention from a consideration of the ways in which stereotypes of the Maghrebi-immigrant subject function. Why bother, then, to compile the list at all? Why attempt to identify the work of Maghrebi-French filmmakers under the ­collective term Beur Cinema? Possibly the most substantial critical discussions of 1980s Beur Cinema are to be found in the special editions of Cinématographe (1985) and CinémAction (1990) that were devoted entirely to this newly identified cinematic trend. In addition to extensive filmographies and interviews with filmmakers of North African origin, both publications offered an analysis of thematic and stylistic devices shared by a corpus of beur films to have emerged during the 1980s. The broader aim appeared to be to expose the work of these filmmakers to a wider audience, whilst consolidating their position within the French film industry. This approach was typified by an article by Fahdel (1990) for the CinémAction collection, in which he noted that, whilst the films of Charef, Bouchareb, Bahloul and Zemmouri (again the reader will notice that the corpus of Beur directors has been extended to include Algerian filmmakers working in France) may share common traits, such as the use of comedy and focus on youthful, westernised protagonists, there is no evidence of a common ‘Beur aesthetic’: [. . .] is it possible to have films that are beur, not solely because they speak about and are directed by beurs but also because they express through their aesthetic and their images, through their sequences or in the rhythm of their scenes a cultural specificity that can be identified as beur? Nothing is less apparent. (Fahdel 1990: 147) Significantly, whilst Fahdel rejects the notion of a beur aesthetic, he appears to accept the existence of Beur Cinema per se, continually referring in the article to films by directors of North African origin as examples of cinéma beur. Beur Cinema thus appears to be employed as a collective (and convenient) shorthand term that highlights the increasing presence (and difference) of filmmakers of Maghrebi origin; a practice which continues to this day amongst certain critics. And yet, curiously, in spite of the term’s emphasis on the ethnic origins and difference of these filmmakers as beur, many of the articles contained within the Cinématographe and CinémAction dossiers reiterate the fact that these filmmakers occupy a position within the parameters of French cinematic discourse, aesthetics and production.

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In this context, the term Beur Cinema appears to function as a form of strategic essentialism, whereby a heterogeneous minority endorses an essentialised identity in order to further their collective aims and combat the oppression or exclusion effected by hegemonic discourse. However, by identifying specifically with the difference of a particular social minority, such a strategic use of essentialist discourse inevitably carries the risk of isolating the very group it intends to empower. For French critics attempting to embrace a positive notion of Beur Cinema in the late-1980s, this delicate balance was rendered even more precarious by the negative connotations of cultural difference (namely difference as a barrier to integration and a means of producing cultural and ethnic ghettos within society) that were becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary political, cultural and critical discourse in France. Perhaps most damaging of all, however, was the fact that the notion of Beur Cinema was rejected by the very filmmakers it presumed to champion. French directors of Maghrebi-immigrant origin were reluctant to associate themselves with a reductive generic category, which, rather than considering narrative content of the film, or the aesthetic vision offered by the individual filmmaker, classified films on the grounds of ethnic and cultural difference. Beyond the commercial arena, in the early 1980s beur filmmakers were producing militant and critically acclaimed work. A range of short films, documentaries and video-based content reflecting the concerns of grass-roots political groups formed in ethnic minority communities in the banlieue began to circulate in this alternative distribution network. A collective of young French filmmakers of Algerian origin from the rundown estates of Vitry-sur-Seine (Paris) working under the name of the Collectif Mohammed directed a number of shorts on super-8 articulating the exclusion and discrimination experienced by Maghrebi-French youth. The most prominent of these films was Ils ont tué Kader (1981), a documentary exposing the racist murder of a MaghrebiFrench youth from Vitry. A section of the film was screened on French television in May 1981, allowing a wider French audience a fleeting connection with the more underground and oppositional work of beur filmmakers. Another key figure from the 1980s was Farida Belghoul, who directed the fictionalised documentaries C’est Madame France que tu préfères? (1981) and Le Départ du père (1985). Rather than focusing exclusively on the question of beur youth’s successful integration into French society, Belghoul’s films analyse from a female perspective the complex relationship between North African immigrant parents and their French descendants and the fraught question of loyalty and return to the Maghrebi homeland. In contrast to the docu-realism employed by Belghoul and the Collectif Mohammed, a more abstract aesthetic can be found in Lakhdar Lachine’s Trois garçons sur la route (1983), which, despite constructing a dreamlike narrative, still manages to emphasise the social ­realities of life for the descendants of North African immigrants living in France.

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The arrival of Beur Cinema – heralded largely it must be said by the crossover success of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède – offered the possibility of a proliferation of Maghrebi-French authored films in the late 1980s. In the event, only a very few commercial releases focusing on characters of Maghrebi-immigrant origin materialised. The few that did appear tended to emphasise the continued exclusion faced by North African immigrants – Miss Mona (Charef, 1987) – and the problematic ‘integration’ of Maghrebi-French youth – Pierre and Djamila (Blain, 1986). While established Algerian émigré directors such as Allouache and Bahloul receive modest support from state funding for two films in the late 1980s and early 1990s,6 the industry as a whole (producers, distributors, exhibitors) appeared reluctant to engage with either filmmakers or audiences of North African-immigrant origin. In many ways, it seemed left to Charef alone to capitalise on the success of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède in the late 1980s. However, even the iconic beur director showed through the choices of his subsequent features an apparent desire to distance himself from the potentially reductive ethnic marker attached to Beur Cinema. This move led to a considerable and progressive decline in audiences for his subsequent features, which perhaps (depressingly) suggests that at this time French audiences were less willing to see a beur director tackling non-beur subjects, thus reinforcing the notion of Beur Cinema as promoting an artistic ghetto for filmmakers of Maghrebi origin.7 Elsewhere, in Bouchareb’s second feature, Cheb, the upbeat ending and promise of social mobility for the young beur protagonists found in Bâton Rouge was replaced by an altogether more sombre and pessimistic narrative, focusing on a Maghrebi-French youth from North-Eastern France who is deported to Algeria (a country he does not know) and who subsequently struggles to return to France as an illegal alien. By the end of the 1980s, then, the early promise of Beur Cinema appeared to have reached an ‘impasse’ in terms of funding and narrative content (Tarr 1997: 74). In this way it reflected the political pessimism of the left in France by the late-1980s, whereby the initial euphoria surrounding the election of both a socialist president and government at the start of the decade gave way to stagnation, corruption and political scandal, and led to the return of a centre-right government to power in the second half of the 1980s. And yet, less than five years later, filmmakers of North African immigrant origin would once again offer a key contribution to a rich vein of politically conscious, social realist filmmaking in French cinema. The re-emergence in the 1990s of a committed cinema, or ‘New Realism’ (Powrie 1999), was not necessarily driven by a specific ideological or party-political affiliation. It was, however, strongly associated with a group of fifty-nine directors who signed an open call to civil disobedience – published in Le Monde and Libération – against proposed government legislation against the sans papiers (undocumented immigrants) and produced a collectively authored short film Nous, sans papiers de

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Figure 1.2  Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995): Maghrebi-French filmmaking and New Realism.

France (1997) that was screened in hundreds of cinemas across the country. While media coverage suggested that the concerns of these filmmakers were wedded to the issue of the sans papiers, the return of the political in French cinema of the 1990s was not, in fact, exclusively defined by representations of (clandestine) immigrant minorities. Rather, it covered a diverse body of films addressing a range of socio-political issues affecting contemporary France such as unemployment, delinquency, racism and social exclusion. These include, but are not exclusively linked to, immigrant narratives, ethnic minority ­protagonists and filmmakers of Maghrebi origin. Nevertheless, the return of the political in French cinema of the 1990s presented the conditions for the emergence of three of the most distinctive Maghrebi-French directors: Karim Dridi, Abdellatif Kechiche and Malik Chibane. Dridi’s second feature Bye-bye, overshadowed upon its original release by the phenomenal success of La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995) but now widely regarded as a hidden classic of Maghrebi-French filmmaking, offers a nuanced and highly sympathetic portrayal of an extended North African immigrant family living in the Le Panier district of Marseille (Tarr 2007a: 33; Higbee 2001). However, despite placing ethnicity and difference at the centre of its narrative, the idea of accepting an essentialised ethnic identity is strongly challenged through the character of Mouloud, the youngest of two Maghrebi-French brothers, who violently rejects his parents’ demands that he ‘return’ to the family home in Tunisia – a country he barely knows. Similarly,

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while La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001) focuses on the arrival of a clandestine Tunisian immigrant in Paris, the narrative is ultimately more concerned with his integration into the wider multi-ethnic community of marginal and ­working-class protagonists that he encounters in a homeless shelter in Paris. The area of 1990s New Realism in which ethnic minorities are most prevalent is undoubtedly that of the banlieue film. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that ethnic minorities formed (and still do) a disproportionately large section of the overall population in the working-class estates of the French urban periphery (Dubet and Lapoyenne 1992). Though French directors had been using the urban periphery as the backdrop for social dramas since at least the 1960s, the term banlieue film or cinéma des banlieues began to be employed by critics following the release of a cluster of five independently produced features over a period of six months in 1995: La Haine; Douce France (Chibane, 1995); Etat des lieux (Richet, 1995); Krim (Bouchaala, 1995); and Raï (Gilou, 1995). All of these films are located in the disadvantaged urban periphery and deal with issues of social exclusion, delinquency and violence, from the perspective of the banlieue’s youthful multi-ethnic male inhabitants. The significance of the historical and geographical positioning of Maghrebi-French filmmakers within the banlieue is even more apparent when compared to that of Algerian émigré directors such as Merzak Allouache, Abdelkrim Bahloul and Mahmoud Zemmouri. Tellingly, films such as Le Thé à la menthe, Salut cousin! or 100% Arabica (Zemmouri, 1997) are located in the older, more centralised immigrant districts of Paris such as Belleville and Barbès, where established socio-cultural networks of street markets, ‘ethnic’ commerce, mosques and cafés provide a more immediate connection for these émigré directors to the Maghreb than the cités of the urban periphery. Critical discussion of the banlieue film in the mid-1990s was disproportionately centred on Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, due to the film’s considerable commercial success, its multi-ethnic ‘black-blanc-beur’ trio of lead actors and the media controversy generated by its (apparently) anti-police narrative. Yet arguably the key representation of the Maghrebi-French population in relation to the banlieue from this period came a year earlier, with Malik Chibane’s directorial debut Hexagone (1994). Produced on a shoestring budget, partly funded by the community association IDRISS which Chibane had co-founded in 1985 to provide support for the local unemployed Maghrebi-French population, Hexagone took over six years to finance and was shot in a matter of weeks in the director’s own cité using a non-professional cast (with many of the technical crew working for free).8 Chibane’s film employs a realist aesthetic similar to that found in earlier films from the 1980s located in the banlieue (such as Le Thé au harem d’Archimède and Laisse béton) in order to highlight the problems facing the disenfranchised Maghrebi-French youth of the disadvantaged cité. However, Hexagone is exceptional in that it provides

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a hitherto unprecedented degree of agency to a variety of Maghrebi-French subjectivities, including women. The film thus affords a degree of ‘cultural visibility’ normally denied to Maghrebi-French protagonists that in turn fosters a sense of ‘illegitimacy’ (Chibane in Bouquet 1994: 11). In this respect Chibane’s approach differs from earlier examples of Beur Cinema, where the film’s protagonists actively reject or distance themselves from the perceived ‘difference’ of their North African heritage in favour of a multi-ethnic, Americanised youth culture. Differences between the Maghrebi immigrant population and the dominant societal norm are not displayed to advocate a form of ethnic separatism. Rather, they demystify the notion of cultural difference as an insurmountable obstacle towards integration. Chibane’s films, especially Douce France, are also significant for their non-threatening representation of Islam as an integral part of the North African immigrant population’s collective cultural identity. Finally, Chibane’s films are innovative for the greater degree of agency offered to female Maghrebi-French protagonists, reflecting the extremely limited visibility afforded to Maghrebi-French women directors in the 1990s. This fact is all the more important given the total lack of female directors of Maghrebi origin in French cinema of the 1980s and 1990s at the level of commercial feature-film production. Despite critically acclaimed video and documentary work by Belgouhl in the early 1980s, as well as short- and medium-length films made by female directors in the mid-1990s (Le Petit chat est mort [Delibia, 1991], Souviens-toi de moi [Ghorab-Volta, 1996]), a feature-length film would not be directed by a Maghrebi-French woman until Jeunesse dorée (Ghorab-Volta, 2001). Much of the strength of the intersection between Maghrebi-French (beur) and banlieue filmmaking in France at key moments since the early 1980s has come from the fact that these films function as a form of implicit or explicit social criticism of mainstream French society’s prejudices towards (and apparent indifference to) the plight of the banlieue. However, the danger in the 1980s and 1990s had been that filmmakers of Maghrebi origin working in France became associated almost exclusively with beur and banlieue filmmaking. In contrast, a select number of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the late-1990s began making a conscious decision to move ‘beyond the banlieue’ both as a site of social struggle and as an emblematic space of marginality, criminality and violence that risks trapping the Maghrebi-French protagonists it portrays in the same over-determined media stereotypes they attempt to escape. The late-1990s thus witnessed an increasing diversity of representations of Maghrebi-French subjectivities by beur filmmakers on both sides of the camera in relation to space and place as well as an interest in the history of Maghrebi immigration to France (Tarr 2007a: 35) –­ trends that, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, would be more vigorously pursued by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s.

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Projecting the Politics of the Hyphen: Defining a Corpus of Maghrebi(-French) Filmmaking Until the mid-1970s, the migration of North Africans to France was largely characterised by the cyclical movement of a male economic workforce from the Maghreb to the Hexagone. However, following the suspension of immigration from North Africa by the French authorities in the mid-1970s, a new policy of regroupement familial was put in place that allowed Maghrebi immigrant workers to be joined in France by their immediate family. The focus of debate surrounding immigration in France thus shifted from the economic to the social sphere. Politicians spoke less of the need for cheap labour imported from former French colonies and more of how to deal with the assimilation of these immigrant families into French society. As the largest and most visible minority in France, these issues were associated primarily with the North African immigrant population. Moreover, when the question of national identity and the right to citizenship for the descendants of immigrants was debated in both 1986 and 1993, discussion focused, unsurprisingly, on French youths of Maghrebi-immigrant origin as the most visible citizens of a postcolonial, multicultural French society (Hargreaves 1988: 1­–10; Rude-Antoine 1997: 101–36). In this context, Begag and Chaouite (1991: 82) note how many of the collective terms used in France to describe the descendants of North African immigrants in the 1980s – les jeunes issus d’immigration maghrébine; les enfants d’immigrés maghrébins; la seconde génération – continued to focus on notions of the immigrant and Maghrebi at the expense of their ‘Frenchness.’ Indeed, to describe the second generation as ‘immigrants’ is incorrect, given that the majority of French youths of Maghrebi-origin were born in France and therefore have rights as French citizens. As a means of combating the negative associations of immigré and Arabe, another term began to gain currency in the late-1970s: beur. As noted earlier in this introduction, beur was first used by Maghrebi-French youth from the Parisian banlieue as a self-affirmation of their own hybrid origins (Hargreaves 1995: 105–8). However, the neologism soon came up against opposition for a number of reasons. Some Maghrebi-French youth felt that, as both a concept and a descriptive term, beur had been appropriated by the media following the Marche contre le racisme et pour l’égalité (march against racism and for equality) in the autumn of 1983, dubbed ‘La Marche des Beurs’.9 Having first appeared as a term used and conceived by Maghrebi-French youth to describe their own bi-cultural heritage, the fear was that by the mid-1980s the term beur no longer belonged to those it was aiming to define. Worse, it was increasingly seen as means of identifying the descendants of North African immigrants as not entirely French: different from and thus unable to integrate into Republican France. Nevertheless, as Mireille

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introduction

Rosello has rightly observed, it would be a gross simplification to presume that all of those who objected to the use of the term beur were ‘craving assimilation into the dominant French culture’ (Rosello 1996: n.10, 171). Moving beyond the capital, Maghrebi-French youths from cities with large immigrant populations such as Lyon and Marseilles rejected the term as having little meaning beyond the vernacular of the Parisian cités from which it had originated (Durmelat 1998: 201), further emphasising the regional and localised differences that exist amongst the North African immigrant p ­ opulation and their descendants in France. Despite these concerns and objections, use of the term beur has persisted, to the point that it has now entered everyday speech in France and to the extent that it incorrectly takes the existence of a homogenous beur ‘community’ as a given. Moreover, the term is not simply used by majority-ethnic French citizens. This point is well illustrated by Beur sur la ville (Bensalah, 2011), a comedy about a hapless Maghrebi-French youth from a working-class estate in the Parisian banlieue who benefits from the politics of positive discrimination to secure a job as a policeman. Bensalah, a French director of Algerian origin (and himself a member of the beur generation), employs the term in the title of his film as shorthand. The beur of Beur sur la ville connotes both the descendants of Maghrebi immigrants and, by association, the housing estates of the deprived urban periphery in which the majority of France’s North African immigrant population still reside. This association is amply reinforced by the poster that advertised the film at the time of its release (Figure 1.3), showing the central protagonist, Khalid Belkacem (Booder), standing behind a police cordon with arms aloft and a panicked expression on his face, against a backdrop of high-rise flats and a tag line that reads: ‘They’re going to put some colour into the police’. Bensalah thus appears comfortable using beur as a means of marketing (some might even say exploiting) his film as an ‘ethnic’ product in a way that risks instantly locating its Maghrebi-French protagonists within a specific set of potentially reductive social and ethnic markers. However, most other filmmakers of Maghrebi origin are far more guarded about identifying themselves with the term. Consider, for example, an interview given by the four Maghrebi-French stars of Indigènes, Samy Naceri, Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila, following the film’s success at Cannes: S. Naceri – First of all, butter [le beurre] is what you put on your toast to have with a cup of coffee. We are Maghrebis. Beurs don’t exist.10 J. Debbouze – We are actors with origins, not actors of Maghrebi origin. S. Bouajila ­­– I’m sorry, but we are fed up with having to always explain ourselves. Beurs, beurs. . . We’ll go to the moon one day and they’ll still write that we are beurs.

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Figure 1.3  Promotional poster for Beur sur la ville (Bensalah, 2011).

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introduction

R. Zem – The term is pejorative, it’s essentialist. J. Debbouze – It’s not far off being racist. (Bouajila, Debbouze, Naceri and Zem in Pliskin 2006) The above quote clearly reflects the frustration felt by the four actors at the need to constantly define themselves in relation to their Maghrebi-immigrant origins via a term that they feel is applied to pigeonhole them as performers and members of an ethnic minority. Their intense hostility to the term beur also illustrates how the supposedly innocent act of attaching a collective identity to the French descendants of North African immigrants is, in fact, a highly complex and politically charged process. As a means of countering the problematic associations of the term beur, alternatives to the neologism have appeared, some based on regional variations, such as Rabza (Swamy and Durmelat 2011: 12). More recently, the term Icissiens has emerged as a more general term that playfully affirms the permanent presence of the descendants of all immigrants in French society.11 Finally, beur has itself been inverted to produce rebeu, a further attempt by the very people it designates to re-establish control for French citizens of Maghrebi origin over how they are defined, and define themselves. However, like the original term beur it was intended to replace, rebeu has now also passed into common speech in France, particularly amongst younger French speakers. Directors of Maghrebi origin working in France have found themselves subjected to a similarly excessive, even obsessive, impulse to categorise their films. Since the 1980s, in attempts by scholars and critics to describe the bi-cultural influences seen to shape these films and filmmakers, they have been variously labelled as exponents of: Arab, North African, immigrant, émigré, Maghrebi, Maghrebi-French, second generation, hybrid, postcolonial, diasporic, national, transnational, intercultural, accented, beur, and banlieue or urban cinema. Some of these terms – for example Naficy’s more general notion of ‘accented’ cinema to describe diasporic, exilic and postcolonial filmmaking in the West (Naficy 2001) – are largely confined to the realms of Anglo-American scholarship. Consequently, they are less contentious for directors of Maghrebi origin living in France, whose work they seek to define. However, when the term beur is employed by French critics and journalists to define the work of MaghrebiFrench directors its impact on such filmmakers is far more immediate and troublesome. As was discussed in some detail earlier in this chapter, the term Beur Cinema has, in particular, been fiercely contested by the very filmmakers it seeks to define, on the grounds that it characterises their films according to the director’s ethnic origins, rather than in relation to a consideration of the film’s genre, aesthetics and thematic or narrative approach.12 Indeed, for Carrie Tarr the various labels applied over the past three decades to filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in France are problematic either for the way that they

21

post-beur cinema

deal with the filmmaker’s origins as an excessive marker of alterity or, conversely, by eliding specific religious, ethnic and national difference through an association with the umbrella term cinéma de banlieue that renders their ethnic difference largely invisible (Tarr 1999: 172). In all the above cases, what is abundantly clear is that these filmmakers have rarely, if ever, simply been identified as ‘French’. This is despite the fact that many of them were born or raised in France from a very young age, or, in the case of some North African émigré filmmakers, have spent more of their careers living and working in France than in the Maghreb. Opposition from these filmmakers to such descriptive (and, indeed, prescriptive) markers such as beur is heightened by the fact that, rather than constituting an empowering form of auto-designation, they are almost always applied by ethnic-majority French critics or academics who enjoy a privileged position within the dominant cultural norm. Indeed, the whole notion of distinguishing filmmakers on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, gender or sexuality actually runs counter to the Republican model of integration, which sees the manifestation of difference (religious or ethnic) in the public sphere as undermining the norms and universal values to which all citizens should aspire, and, in extreme cases, as leading to a segregationist form of communitarianism (Hargreaves in Begag 2007: xviii). Ironically, then, the consistent rejection of the term Beur Cinema by a range of Maghrebi-French filmmakers since the 1980s actually points to the extent to which many of them espouse a very French attitude to the potential ghettoisation of ethnic-minority filmmaking in France, at the same time as their films display a keen awareness of how unequal the application of the Republican principle of equality can be in the real world.13 This position is further complicated by the fact that, while the generic term beur originally referred quite specifically to the second generation of Maghrebi immigrants to France, cinéma beur (Beur Cinema) or cinéaste beur (beur filmmaker) are, as we have already seen, terms that have frequently been applied to directors such as Abdelkrim Bahloul, Mahmoud Zemmouri and Merzak Allouache who are quite clearly Maghrebi émigré filmmakers. In a similar way, to speak of a ‘North African immigrant community’ or ‘North African diaspora’ in France is problematic, for while it is true to say that some of the Maghrebi immigrant population in France may share a common linguistic, religious and ethnic heritage (that of an Arabo-Islamic culture), there are also clear national differences between Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian immigrants, as well as ethnic and religious minorities within all of these national migrant populations, such as Berbers from Algeria and Morocco or Sephardic Jews from Tunisia. This situation has thus caused confusion and continues to arouse resentment on the part of North African émigré and Maghrebi-French filmmakers, as well as exemplifying the kind of careless homogenising to which the North African immigrant population are more widely subjected in French society.

22

introduction

Conscious of the complex and contentious ‘naming game’ (Durmelat and Swamy 2011: 12) associated with the North African immigrant population and their descendants in France, the terms Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers will be used in this study to describe and acknowledge the differences that exist between the two key groups of filmmakers of Maghrebi origin whose cinematic output in the 2000s forms the focus of this book. Maghrebi-French refers to those French directors of Maghrebi-immigrant origin who were either born in France or moved there at an early age. These directors share this experience of having spent their formative years in France, while also being influenced to varying degrees by the North African cultural heritage of their parents. The term Maghrebi-French, commonly used by a number AngloAmerican scholars (Tarr 2005; Higbee 2007a; Hargreaves 2011; Durmelat and Swamy 2011) is preferred here to alternatives such as ‘second-generation immigrant’, ‘of Maghrebi-immigrant origin’ and ‘beur’, for reasons already discussed (however, the term beur will be used as a specific generational marker when it applies specifically to films, filmmakers and protagonists from the mid-1980s). The term Maghrebi-French undoubtedly comes with its own problems. Firstly, it can suggest too straightforward a divide between two distinct national histories, cultural identities and social realities, whose relationship (due to a shared colonial past) is contested, complex and uneven in terms of cultural, political and economic power. Moreover the term can never hope to adequately represent the myriad individual responses to this dual cultural heritage and the fact that each individual will understand and articulate the extent of his/her affiliation to either French or Maghrebi culture – which, of course, can change over time. Such contingent identifications (Brah 1996: 194) range from an almost total rejection of North African culture to a sense of self defined solely in terms of Maghrebi/Muslim consciousness, motivated by a feeling of exclusion in both socio-economic and cultural terms from the dominant societal norm. Most, however, occupy an intermediary position: feeling an intuitive sense of belonging in France, yet still maintaining a strong attachment to their parents’ North African culture (Dubet and Lapeyronnie 1992: 96; Wallet, Nehas and Sghiri 1996: 30–9). While conscious of such potential problems, the term Maghrebi-French is preferred by this author for the way that it at least attempts to articulate the bi-cultural identity of the French descendants of North African immigrants, realising that despite its limitations this group ‘share cultural and social characteristics that distinguish them in significant ways from the majority ethnic population’ Hargreaves (2011: 31). The term Maghrebi-French is therefore preferable in the sense that it can function as an umbrella term that includes but also moves beyond the generational specificity of the term beur. As for the second term, North African émigré filmmakers, while their films may deal with similar issues and share cultural and linguistic sensitivities

23

post-beur cinema

with Maghrebi-French filmmakers, the relationship of North African émigré filmmakers to both France (the host nation) and the individual Maghrebi homeland is quite different to that of Maghrebi-French filmmakers who view France (for all its potential problems) as home. Even the seemingly neutral, descriptive terms North African and Maghrebi are not without their problems. The former, in French at least, carries with it colonial connotations, in the sense that L’Afrique du Nord was the term used to define the geographical region containing the colony of Algeria and protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia. While ‘Maghreb’ is largely free of such neo-colonial connotations, and for Brahami (2009: 7–9) the notion of un cinéma maghrébin refers to both a ‘real’ shared cultural, geographical and ‘imagined’ space that appears in the films themselves, it nonetheless remains a rather loose term. Indeed, it can be interpreted as one that, as Kamel Ben Ouanès wryly notes (Barlet 2010), is more visible or logical when a film or filmmaker journeys beyond the Maghreb and forms part of the diaspora. Yet even this notion of a North African or Maghrebi diaspora is problematic, in that, once again, it implies a homogenous ‘community’ where in fact there exist numerous ‘communities’ defined in relation to national, ethnic, religious and even generational difference. Where appropriate, then, the national or ethnic origins of individual Maghrebi directors will also be identified in the following chapters as a further difference that may affect the focus and outlook of these films. It is for these reasons, then, that this book defines the notion of MaghrebiFrench and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s as Post-Beur Cinema.14 Post-Beur is intended to reflect the fact that to understand the cinemas of the North African diasporas in France, we need to move beyond simply locking such films and filmmakers into the category of Beur Cinema as either a temporal, socio-economic or ethnic marker – or indeed of reading these films solely through the postcolonial optic or diasporic lens that the term beur might also imply. It also emphasises the fact that the cinema of the North African diaspora in France consists of French filmmakers of North African origin at the same time as it does of Maghrebi émigré filmmakers and that while these filmmakers may well have shared experiences, cultural references and thematic concerns in their work, we must also understand the significant difference that exist between them. In this respect the notion of Post-Beur Cinema functions as a means of identifying the diversity of films produced by directors of Maghrebi origin in France during the 2000s. Moreover, while not necessarily rejecting outright or specifically reacting against the earlier films by directors of Maghrebi origin, the films of the 2000s are not solely concerned with thematic concerns, representational tropes, narrative trends or modes of production that characterise Beur Cinema of the 1980s and that have exerted such a considerable influence on films by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 1990s. In this respect, Post-Beur Cinema of the 2000s

24

introduction

embraces a far greater range of narrative themes and genres than before, as well as representing a more diverse spectrum of socio-economic spaces and geographical locations. Finally, Post-Beur will also be used to designate the recent shift made by directors of Maghrebi origin firmly into the mainstream structures of production, distribution and exhibition in the French film industry. It is to this question of the mainstreaming of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s that we shall now turn our attention. Notes   1. A public organisation created in 1958, the FAS provides financial assistance with housing, professional training, community and cultural projects (including film and TV) to facilitate the integration of immigrants and their families.   2. The following beur films from the 1980s and 1990s end with their MaghrebiFrench characters at some sort of impasse in relation to their place in French society: Le Thé au harem d’Archimède; Cheb; Hexagone and Bye-bye.  3. While the term Maghreb can in fact include most or all of the territories of Northwest Africa to the west of Egypt, for the purposes of this study the term Maghreb refers specifically to the nations and peoples of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, the former French colonial territories of North Africa.   4. See for example: Vitali and Willemen (2006), Naficy (2001), Ezra and Rowden (2005), Higbee and Lim (2010).   5. Here we might list films such as Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda, 1962), Adieu Philippine (Rozier, 1963), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Demy, 1964) and Muriel (Resnais, 1963). For a detailed analysis of all these films, see Dine (1994: 215–32).  6. Un amour à Paris (Allouache, 1987) and Un Vampire au paradis (Bahloul, 1991).  7. In Miss Mona, an Algerian immigrant enters a world of transvestites and male prostitution; Camomille (1988) tells the story of a troubled (white) French youth from the banlieue, and Au pays des Juliets (1992) focuses on the experiences of three female prisoners who are let out on parole for twenty-four hours.   8. For a detailed discussion of Hexagone’s production history, see Bluher (2001).   9. For more on the Marche des Beurs, see Jazouli (1992). 10. Here Naceri is making a play on words between the French for butter [beurre] and the homonym beur. 11. At the same time, it echoes one of the key slogans used by beur activists in the 1980s: ‘j’y suis, j’y reste’ (‘I’m here and I’m staying’). The term icissiens is derived from the French word ici (here) and evokes the idea of belonging, of having a rightful place ‘here’, which is to say, in France. As Maghrebi-French comic, actor and film producer Jamel Debbouze (someone who is widely accredited with having brought the term to a wider public attention in France) stated in a 2011 interview with L’Express: ‘Moi, j’ai grandi ici. Je suis un “Icissien”’ (‘Me, I grew up here [in France]. I am an “Icissien”’) (Libiot 2011). 12. See, for example, Karim Dridi in Rouchy (1995) and Bouajila, Debbouze, Naceri and Zem in Pliskin (2006). 13. A similar Republican approach to difference is taken by French female directors in the 1980s and 1990s, who have publically refuse to be identified as ‘women filmmakers’ for similar reasons (Tarr and Rollet 2001: 1–2). 14. This term was first proposed at a round-table organised by Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy for the 20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium in San Francisco CA, 30 March–2 April 2011.

25

2. THE (MAGHREBI-)FRENCH CONNECTION: DIASPORA GOES MAINSTREAM

In many respects, and with few notable exceptions, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in France during the 1980s and 1990s has been characterised in both critical and academic discourse by notions of peripheral and auteur-led modes of production and limited exposure to niche audiences, not to mention struggles relating to funding, distribution and exhibition (Bluher 2001). The films have often been treated by academics and critics as a kind of socio-cultural document, rather than an entertainment ‘product’ aimed at mass audiences: a cinema more of interest to sociologists, journalists and academics as a reflection of contemporary socio-political realities facing North African immigrants and their French-born descendants than to producers in search of popular box-office success. This conception has been further endorsed by a broader scholarly analysis of diasporic, exilic or postcolonial filmmaking in the West over the past decade focusing on interstitial, experimental, marginal or hybrid cinema (Naficy 2001; Marks 2000; Berghahn and Sternberg 2010). Of course, the image that has emerged of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking of the 1980s and 1990s in academic and critical discourse is grounded in the very real difficulties that many of these filmmakers have experienced in securing funding as well as adequate distribution for their work – a fact that has restricted audiences for and thwarted the wider ambitions of a number of these filmmakers. Even Abdellatif Kechiche, whose films have garnered a string of awards as well as in the case of La Graine et le mulet (Kechiche, 2007) over one million spectators in France, has spoken of

26

the maghrebi-french connection

the difficulties he has confronted in securing funding for his films even after the breakthrough success of L’Esquive (Kechiche, 2004): It’s true that there’s racism in France and sometimes it’s quite flagrant. But I think that it’s more a matter of a certain milieu that owns cultural property and doesn’t want to loosen its grip on this sort of ownership. It’s a privilege to make movies and function within an artistic environment and this milieu doesn’t want to give up its privileges.[. . .] This surfaced in certain rather aggressive attacks against the film. (Kechiche in Porton 2005: 4) One way to explain the apparent marginalisation of much Maghrebi-French and North African émigré audiences from mainstream production and distribution networks is to view these filmmakers as belonging to a transitional mode of production, defined by Marks as ‘intercultural’ cinema (2000: 2–5) that is largely oppositional in its politics as well as experimental in its aesthetic practice and representation of displacement and hybridity. However, with the exception of earlier short films shot on video by beur directors such as Farida Belghoul (C’est madame la France que tu préfères? [1981]; Le Départ du père [1983]) or the work produced by the more militant Collectif Mohammed in response to police violence in the banlieue, Maghrebi-French and Algerian émigré filmmakers have preferred to work within relatively conventional approaches to narrative, mise en scène and genre. The social realist drama, often based around an episodic narrative, is by far the most common mode employed by these filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s, for example Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985), Bâton Rouge (Bouchareb, 1985), Miss Mona (Charef, 1987), Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991), Hexagone (Chibane, 1994), and Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995). Comedy – the popular French genre, par excellence – has also emerged as a genre of choice, particularly amongst Algerian émigré directors (see, for example, the work of Bahloul, Allouache and above all Zemmouri), as well as amongst Maghrebi-French directors such as Chibane and Bensalah. All of these directors use a consensual approach to the genre, employing comedy as a means of drawing attention to the ridiculous nature of many prejudices and stereotypes held against the North African immigrant population by certain sections of French society, while relishing the opportunities offered by the comedic mode to subvert received opinions through laughter. Indeed, it is important to note that, in terms of box-office results, the most successful films at reaching a broad audience in the 1990s were indeed comedies. The most important of these is arguably Bensalah’s Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (1999), a low-budget comedy that was a surprise hit at the French box-office. The film not only launched the screen career of Maghrebi-French star Jamel

27

post-beur cinema

Debbouze and director Bensalah, but it also effectively established a pathway via mainstream genre (comedy) and the use of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré stars who were popular with youth audiences to secure a place within mainstream cinema of the 2000s. Arguably the most consistently commercially successful Maghrebi-French filmmaker working in France today, Bensalah’s co-option into the mainstream is not without its complications due to the reductive and essentialised stereotypes of both majority and ethnic minority French protagonists often found in his comedies. An analysis of Bensalah’s prominent position in the industry in the 2000s later in this chapter will therefore allow us to consider how far Stuart Hall’s assertion (1996: 468) that there is always ‘a price of incorporation to be paid when the cutting edge of difference and transgression is blunted into spectacularisation’ holds true in relation to the mainstreaming of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s.

La Guerre de la culture de masse: (Re-)defining Mainstream Culture in France In English, ‘mainstream’ denotes a prevailing direction or dominant norm in terms of opinion, political ideology, popular taste or representation. As a descriptive term, it is associated with the groups, individuals, demographics, institutions, creative personnel or organisations that reside in this space of the dominant norm and can be applied to pretty much anything: from music, literature and film to politics and education. In a cinematic context, it can apply to both representation (standard codes in editing, lighting, narrative conventions, sound design, genre and so on) and to industrial practices of production, distribution and exhibition. Above all, it suggests a conventional, commercially minded approach that has broad popular appeal and is neither experimental in its style nor oppositional or subversive in its politics. As such, mainstream shares common ground with terms such as ‘popular’ and ‘middlebrow’, although these various labels are not synonymous with one another. The middlebrow certainly can be mainstream, for example, the massive popularity of the heritage film in France during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the mainstream is not necessarily middlebrow insomuch as it is not exclusively concerned with fusing elements of high and low culture for an audience with middle-class aspirations. While the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘popular’ are, arguably, more analogous, they also require certain nuanced distinctions to be made. Like mainstream, popular cinema can also be deemed a commercial cinema, in the sense of films that are viewed by mass audiences and have broad box-office appeal. However, as Dyer and Vincendeau remind us (1992: 4), the popular also has an anthropological meaning more closely related to folk culture as an

28

the maghrebi-french connection

e­ xpression of the traditions, values and experiences of the people. In contrast, the mainstream connotes a commercial imperative that looks towards a globalised mass culture to define its aesthetics and narrative form as well as modes of production and distribution more than it does to the traditions and values of one specific nation or people. The second way in which the idea of the mainstream intersects with the popular is found in the dismissive or derogatory notion of forms of mass entertainment culture aimed at the widest possible audience and with little intellectual, creative or artistic merit. For his part, Hall (1981, 232–3) suggests that there is ‘no whole, authentic autonomous popular culture’: not only does our notion of what constitutes popular culture change as a result of the historical and socio-political context in which it is experienced, but also cultural industries have the power to rework and reshape what they represent; imposing definitions (ideological positionings or cultural representations) of ourselves and others that fit more easily with the dominant societal norm. This is the way in which the French film industry has traditionally distinguished its artistic quality (as an artisanal, auteur-led cinema) against the ‘crass’ popular spectacle of Hollywood blockbusters (see Karmitz in Martel 2010). Such a description is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the multifaceted nature of French cinema production, which has its own mainstream or popular sector in which genres, stars and big budget spectacle are employed in the market place in an attempt to compete with Hollywood at the box-office (Frodon 1995: 692–4). This type of cinema, most recently labelled as a cinéma des producteurs, has been revitalised at the French box-office since the early 2000s (Ciment 2000; Higbee 2005: 297–307). As this chapter aims to illustrate, as writers, directors, producers and stars, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers have played a significant role in this recent revival of popular or mainstream French cinema. If the term mainstream is relatively anodyne in English, its recent appearance and application in France has proved more controversial. As a conceptual term, le mainstream – there is, significantly, no French translation – gained public attention in France with the publication in 2010 of Mainstream: enquête sur une culture qui plait à tout le monde by Frédéric Martel, a journalist, researcher and former diplomat to the US. The arguments about mainstream culture in France proposed in the book, which became a bestseller in 2010, were widely debated in the French media, including articles and reviews in Libération and Le Monde, interviews and discussions of the book on radio stations such as France Culture, and an appearance by the author on France 3’s flagship book review show Un Livre Un Jour. The influential weekly culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles devoted its front cover and a ten-page article to Martel’s project (see figure 2.1) to coincide with the book’s publication. One of the few negative reviews of the book, by François Cusset, a French professor of

29

post-beur cinema

Figure 2.1  Cover of Les Inrockuptibles, which included a special dossier on Martel’s Mainstream (2010).

American history, published in Le Nouvel Observateur (Cusset 2010), resulted in a very public and highly personal media spat between Martel and Cusset. The essential thrust of Martel’s argument is that the mainstream represents both the dominant current within a given culture (one that has mass popular appeal) and one that produces content with a ‘standardised diversity’. It is this standardised diversity, along with advances in communication and digital technologies, that allows mainstream culture to be disseminated today on unprecedented levels; a form of global mass culture that can reach, but also be transformed by, local audiences across the globe. While Martel argues that much of the formula for production and content is derived from American popular culture (he uses Hollywood as a key example in his study) he does not suggest that this is simply a case of the American domination of a global monoculture. Instead, he identifies the existence of multiple mainstreams – a simultaneous homogenisation and heterogenisation of mainstream culture, formed via a series of production hubs from which cultural content is exported regionally and globally.1 Mainstream is also a manifestation of ‘soft power’ in action: the potential of mass cultural forms to influence, inform and shape ideas and attitudes of society without force or coercion. Martel sees Europe (and France in particular), or at least the policy-makers, gatekeepers and artists who hold considerable influence over cultural production in Europe, as unwilling or unable to fully embrace his understanding of a global mainstream

30

the maghrebi-french connection

culture. The antidote to this elitist, anti-mainstream environment, in Martel’s opinion, comes in part from the cultural works produced by non-European immigrants and their descendants, which he sees as one of the key drivers for much of this globalised mainstream culture and the means by which Europe ‘can become once again a more dynamic society which is open to the rest of the world’ (Martel 2010: 439). There are, of course, limitations to Martel’s approach. He repeatedly speaks of the complexity and local variation of a global mainstream culture but is prone to broad and sweeping generalisations of how this mainstream culture functions and develops. Moreover, his analysis largely sidesteps the issues of how such mainstream culture is for the most part produced, disseminated and consumed within a neoliberal system (of either advanced or emerging capitalist economies) that creates massive imbalances of economic power, political influence and cultural capital. Similarly, his view of mainstream culture outside of Europe as unproblematically and wholly embracing immigrant culture needs nuancing to say the least. Nevertheless, Martel’s idea of mainstream culture as locally grounded and globally connected, his application of the concept of soft power which potentially makes the mainstream a site of negotiation and contestation between centre and margin, as well as his insistence on the importance of immigrant or diasporic culture to the development of a dynamic cultural landscape in Europe all offer useful starting points for an analysis of this apparent move towards the mainstream for North African émigré and Maghrebi-French filmmakers in France in the 2000s. Bidding for the Mainstream in the 2000s An analysis of production, distribution and exhibition trends in French cinema of the 2000s reveals that there are, broadly speaking, three areas associated with Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers. The first finds these filmmakers and their films marginalised in relation to access to funding and distribution. The majority of Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers who work on medium- to low-budget features, where the focus tends to be on social realist, episodic narratives, or low-budget comedies that focus almost exclusively on the North African diaspora in France (for example Zemmouri, Bahloul and Chibane), can be placed in this category. The second area is the middle ground, or what has recently been termed the cinéma du milieu, the domain of medium-sized budget, auteur-led productions that have potential to crossover to a more substantial audience (Vanderschelden 2009). Here the emphasis is on the artisanal and the artistic vision of the auteur, in the mould of a filmmaker such as Abdellatif Kechiche – whose output in the 2000s will be analysed in detail in Chapter 4. The first two categories outlined above essentially encompass similar

31

post-beur cinema

­ractices and positions occupied by Maghrebi-French and North African p émigré filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the 2000s have seen the emergence of a third, more mainstream space for a limited but nonetheless significant number of filmmakers of Maghrebi origin. This concerns a group of films, directors and actors (some of whom have now obtained star status) who have enjoyed notable and continued success at the French box-office throughout the 2000s; a success that far outweighs the number of filmmakers involved. These include stars such as Gad Elmaleh and Jamel Debbouze and directors such as Rachid Bouchareb and Djamel Bensalah. This movement towards the mainstream has already been acknowledged by a range of academics: Tarr (2005), Hargreaves (2011), Waldron (2007), Vanderschelden (2005) and Austin (2003). However, such analysis has tended to be confined to a specific actor, star or film. A more comprehensive and systematic study of the statistical data relating to production, distribution and exhibition in the 2000s – such as that proposed by this chapter – reveals that, rather than a few isolated successes, it is indeed possible to speak of a qualitative and sustained move to the mainstream for a group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers. If we refer to the figures in Table 2.1 that relate to distribution and boxoffice statistics, we find that between 1999 and 2010 nine films written, directed by or starring filmmakers of North African origin attracted more than one million spectators at the box-office including: Le Raïd (Bensalah, 2001) 1 456 267; Chouchou (Allouache, 2003) 3 876 572; Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006) 3 069 888; Neuilly sa mère! (La Ferrière, 2009) 2 526 475; and Coco (Elmaleh, 2010) 3 008 677. Moreover, four of the films listed attracted more than four million spectators. Evidence of this mainstream appeal is further supported by the respective box-office ranking of these films in Table 2.1. In virtually every year of the 2000s a film directed by or starring Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers is placed in the top 10 most popular French films of the year, with more films arriving in the top 20 (see Table 2.1). This consistent presence at the top of the box-office is even more impressive when it is understood that, since 1999, no more than eight features produced or coproduced in France by directors of Maghrebi origin have been released in any given year. With the exception of La Graine et le mulet, 1 007 254 spectators in France, which is quite clearly an auteur-led independent production and therefore not included in the tables below, the films listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 are overwhelmingly identified with mainstream modes of cinematic production, distribution and marketing. While box-office results can offer a crude indication of mainstream success, such figures are, on their own, insufficient to accurately explain the level of market penetration and sustained popularity enjoyed by any given film. A comparative analysis of box-office figures contained in Table 2.1 (for example,

32

2003

2003 2005 2006

2006

2007 2008

2009 2010 2010

Chouchou

Taxi 3 Il était une fois dans l’oued Indigènes

Mauvaise foi

Taxi 4 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis

Neuilly sa mère! Coco Hors-la-loi

Source: CBO cine-chiffres [www.cbo.fr] *Indicates ranking within all French films released in that year.

Naceri (star) Boon (dir. and star) Merad (star) Bensalah (writer and producer) UGC Elmaleh (dir. and star) StudioCanal Bouchareb (dir.) StudioCanal Debbouze (star) Zem (star) Bouajila (star)

2000 2002

Wild Bunch Distribution ARP Pathé

ARP Gaumont Mars

Warner

ARP GBVI

Ocean Films

Bensalah (dir.) Debbouze (star) Naceri (star) Bensalah (dir.) Zem (star) Allouache (dir.) Elmaleh (star) Naceri (star) Bensalah (dir.) Bouchareb (dir.) Debbouze (star and producer) Zem (star) Naceri (star) Bouajila (star) Zem (dir. and star)

1999

Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta  mère! Taxi 2 Le Raïd

Distributor

Director/star/producer (of Maghrebi origin)

Year

Title

  2 526 475(5)   3 008 677 (4)    461 613 (44)

  4 562 928 (2) 20 489 155 (1)

   789 733 (27)

  6 151 691 (1)    893 437 (20)   3 069 888 (8)

  3 876 572 (2)

10 349 454 (1)   1 456 267 (14)

  1 224 936 (11)

389 871 400

867 793

250

969 266 460

402

831 619

128

Spectators Prints (France) (rank)* (France)

  6 497   3 454   1 079

  5 263 25 838

  3 656

  6 348   3 359   6 674

  9 643

12 454   2 353

  9 570

Spectators per print (France)

Table 2.1  Mainstream distribution and exhibition of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s.

2000 2002

2003 2003

2005 2006

2006 2007 2008

2009 2010 2010

Taxi 2 Le Raïd

Taxi 3 Chouchou

Il était une fois dans l’oued Indigènes

Mauvaise foi Taxi 4 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis

Neuilly sa mère! Coco Hors-la-loi

Source: CBO cine-chiffres [www.cbo.fr] and CNC [www.cnc.fr].

Bensalah (dir.) Comedy/teen Debbouze (star) romance Naceri (star) Action comedy Bensalah (dir.) Action comedy Zem (star) Naceri (star) Action comedy Allouache (dir.) Comedy Elmaleh (star) Bensalah (dir.) Comedy Bouchareb (dir.) War film Debbouze (star and producer) Zem (star) Naceri (star) Bouajila (star) Zem (dir. and star) Romantic comedy Naceri (star) Action comedy Boon (dir. and star) Comedy Merad (star) Bensalah (writer and producer) Comedy Elmaleh (dir. & star) Comedy Bouchareb (dir.) Thriller/historical Debbouze (star) drama Zem (star) Bouajila (star)

1999

Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère!

Genre

Director/star/producer (of Maghrebi origin)

Year

Title

 4.9 14.5 20.55

 4.06 15.38 10.95

 5.01 14.52

13.67  6.46

10.7 17.71

 1.49

Budget (€m)

Table 2.2  Mainstream production of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s.

3.06 3.99 3.99

3.08 3.08 3.40

3.08 2.82

2.60 2.60

2.91 2.82

2.7

Median budget (€m) for French productions in the same year

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numbers of spectators and ranking) against all films released in France during the same year, combined with information about distribution (the number of prints that a film is released on; average number of spectators per print) provide a more detailed evaluation of a given film’s relative success. It also provides an indication of the extent to which these films are considered by both distributors and exhibitors as mainstream product. For example, comparing a combination of the figures in Table 2.1 and Table 2.2 as they relate to budget, box-office and average number of spectators per print, we see that Neuilly sa mère! (2009), scripted and produced by Djamel Bensalah, attracted over 2.5 million spectators, placing it fifth in the ranking for French films of that year, and was distributed in extremely favourable conditions on nearly 400 prints nationwide, averaging a considerable 6 497 spectators per print. This impressive set of scores is further enhanced by the fact that the film was produced for a relatively modest budget of €4.9m, making Neuilly sa mère! profitable for both its distributors and the film’s producers, since the film’s relatively modest budget obviously lowers the risk of recuperating production costs. In contrast, Hors-la-loi (Bouchareb 2010) had a budget of €20.55m, was released on a total of 400 prints, though only attracted just over 400 000 spectators – clearly a less profitable release for its producers and distributors. And yet, despite the relative commercial failure of Hors-la-loi, particularly when compared to Bouchareb’s other historical epic, Indigènes, the film’s production budget and distribution conditions clearly show that Hors-la-loi was operating within the structures of mainstream production and distribution. Put differently, producers and distributors in the French industry were confident that there was a market for this kind of film amongst a mainstream cinema ­audience in France. This issue of exactly which distribution and production companies are backing films by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré directors is an important one, as the example of Bensalah’s second feature, Le Raïd, shows. Following the crossover success of Le Ciel, writer/director Djamel Bensalah obtained funding from Gaumont for a far more expensive action comedy that attempted to emulate the successful formula established in his debut feature: rapid-fire humour grounded largely in the street culture of the cité and a comedy narrative focusing on a young, multi-ethnic male cast forced to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. However, instead of a trip to the Cote d’Azur, in Le Raïd, the banlieue youths are mistakenly hired as assassins to carry out a hit on a wealthy Canadian heiress. The heiress is involved in a televised adventure game show (Le Raïd of the film’s title) that provides the perfect excuse for lavish spectacle and action sequences, as the incompetent assassins journey from the housing projects of the neuf-trois to the jungles and mountains of South America in pursuit of their ‘target’. Despite a hefty €17.71m budget, exotic locations and lavish production values, the far-fetched

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narrative and reductive misogynistic humour of Le Raïd was poorly received by French critics who had previously embraced Le Ciel. Nevertheless, the film still managed to attract 1 456 267 spectators in France, higher than the audiences for Le Ciel. However, this apparent success must be seen in relation to the weight that was placed behind the film through access to Gaumont’s mainstream distribution channels that saw the film released on 619 prints in cinemas across France, compared to 128 for Le Ciel. Thus while the average number of spectators for Le Ciel is far higher (9 570 compared to 2 353 for Le Raïd), overall audience figures for the latter are higher, largely because of the distribution conditions. Further analysis of the data for Le Raïd’s box-office performance seems to support this observation. After the second week interest was already waning in the film, an indication that success at the box-office had been greatly assisted by the distribution and marketing mechanisms in place behind the Le Raïd, rather than a growth of audience numbers as the result of favourable reviews or audience recommendations. Moreover, if we combine figures for average number of spectators per print with the overall production budgets for both films, Le Ciel appears on balance to be the more ­commercially successful film. Figures for production budgets of the films listed in Table 2.2 offer a further justification for defining certain Maghrebi-French and North African émigré authored films from the 2000s as mainstream features. With the exception of Le Ciel all of the films listed are above the median budget, in some cases four or five times above – thus placing them in the top 15 to 20 per cent of French production in terms of their funding, according to annual data on production published online from the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC). Even if a relatively small group of filmmakers re-appears across this list (Bensalah, Bouchareb, Debbouze, Naceri, Elmaleh) such a sustained presence at the centre of the industry was unheard of for Maghrebi-French filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s, confirming a qualitative (if selective) movement towards mainstream French production. This is not to say, however, that such crossover success in the 2000s is solely due to elevated production budgets and improved channels for distribution – as important as these elements undoubtedly are. A closer inspection of the genres of the films listed in Table 2.2 reveals that the majority are either comedies or a comedy hybrid, for example Taxi 2 and Le Raïd are action comedies, while Mauvaise foi (Zem, 2006) is a romantic comedy. A number of factors explain this bias towards comedy, not least the overall popularity of the genre in France. In this respect, the preference for comedy serves as a further indication that these Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers are now located, and choosing to locate themselves, within mainstream production trends of French cinema. There is also, of course, the fact that comedies, in comparison to other genres such as the

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­ eritage film or action movie, are relatively cheap to produce. Often the biggest h expense for a comedy will come in the fees paid to established stars appearing in these films. Thus, Le Ciel capitalises on Jamel Debbouze’s existing celebrity status and young fan base outside of cinema (as a comic and TV/radio presenter) to ensure his collaboration in a low-budget comedy film, prior to his rise in the 2000s to a position of considerable influence in French film industry. Finally, this preponderance of comedy films reflects the fact that many of the biggest Maghrebi-French stars of the 2000s, such as Jamel Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh and Danny Boon (like Smaïn before them in the 1980s) began their careers as stand-up comics. Indeed, in the case of Boon and Debbouze, these Maghrebi-French stars have adapted characters and successful stage acts from their stand-up comedy shows into their films, as was the case for Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, Chouchou and Coco. That said, we must also acknowledge that comedy is not unique to these more mainstream filmmakers of Maghrebi origin and has been employed by a variety of directors across French cinema since at least the mid-1980s as a means of more subversive social commentary around issues of ethnicity and cultural difference. Indeed some of the most successful French comedies of the 1980s and 1990s directed by majority ethnic French directors – Les Keufs (Balasko, 1987); Romuald et Juliette (Serreau, 1989); Blac mic mac (Gilou, 1986) – have explored similar issues of immigration, integration, multiculturalism and difference, albeit from a quite different perspective (Tarr 1997: 67, 72). For these directors, comedy may be the preferred vehicle for discussing these potentially sensitive issues since, for the most part, comic films remain ideologically ambivalent as part of a genre that is ‘mimetic of social reality and yet distanced from it’ (Vincendeau 2001a: 24). French comedies of the 1990s and 2000s are thus able to address social issues affecting France’s ethnic minorities that rarely appear elsewhere in mainstream genre cinema. At its best, comedy becomes a means for challenging and subverting the societal norm. At its worst, it falls back on crude and problematic stereotypes; and Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers are not necessarily immune to such crude stereotyping, as the later detailed analysis of Neuilly sa mère! will demonstrate. Returning to Table 2.2, we can also see that genre plays a further role in determining funding (the size of budgets) in the sense that certain genres will almost require larger budgets due to the kind of stories they are telling and the type of spectacle they aim to provide for audiences. In both Indigiènes and Hors-la-loi the epic nature of the transnational historical narratives that these films bring to the screen (the Allied liberation of southern Europe from Nazi occupation; the French massacre of Algerians in Sétif) obviously requires a considerable amount of capital. This is not to say that films dealing with history cannot be made on smaller budgets – see for example Les Sacrifiés (Touita, 1982),

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Inch’allah dimanche (Benguigui, 2001); Vivre au paradis (Guerdjou, 1999) and more recently Les Chants de Mandarin (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2012). However, in general, such films are forced to focus on more localised, individual narratives (the arrival of an immigrant family in a provincial French town; life in the bidonville of Nanterre; the activities of a small band of outlaws in eighteenthcentury France) in order to engage with their historical subject matter. The overwhelming majority of the films listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 have thus ensured access to mainstream audiences by virtue of conventional production and distribution practices. Virtually all are taken to market by mainstream distributors such as Pathé, Gaumont, ARP, UGC and Studiocanal, who can secure favourable conditions for the release of their films. In this context another telling statistic from Tables 2.1 and 2.2 relates to the number of prints on which these films are released. With the exception of Le Ciel, all of the films listed have benefited from distribution on more than 200 prints; a privileged position enjoyed by only 25 per cent of the 500 to 580 films distributed in France each year according to data provided by the CNC (2012). The very fact that this group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré films can secure such favourable conditions for distribution suggests two things. Firstly, that exhibitors and distributors in France now believe there is a mainstream market for certain films starring and directed by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers – a position that was largely unthinkable in the 1980s and even 1990s. Secondly, it confirms that a select group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers have themselves established a place within the mainstream, not only as directors, but also as producers and stars. It is to the rise of the Maghrebi-French star in the 2000s that we shall now turn our attention. From the Cité to the Croisette: The Fabulous Destiny of MaghrebiFrench and North African Émigré Stars in the 2000s Although ‘French cinema has been slow to acknowledge the ethnic diversity of the [French] population’ (Vincendeau 2000: 41), as Guy Austin correctly asserts: ‘this is not to say that ethnicity is not at stake in the images of French film stars’ (Austin 2003: 92). As Dyer argues, ‘to represent people is to represent bodies’ (Dyer 1997: 14). Screen actors and film stars, due to the devotion and fascination that they arouse amongst audiences, connect and are more directly associated with the representations (or indeed mis-representations) of ethnicity that they embody than is the case for the ethnic-minority director behind the camera. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a select group of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré screen actors struggled to establish a presence on French screens. A common complaint from these actors, as outlined by Abdellatif Kechiche in an interview from 2007, was of a dearth of

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roles beyond the stereotype of immigrant, delinquent or criminalised Other (Lalanne et Fevret 2007). And yet, even during this period, French cinema already had its first beur star in the form of Isabel Adjani, the French-born daughter of an Algerian-immigrant father and German-immigrant mother. Attracting box-office success and critical acclaim, including César awards and an Oscar nomination, Adjani was ‘the French star of the 1980s’, with a star image characterised by dark hair but pale porcelain skin and pale blue eyes (Austin 2003: 97–100). Despite (belated) public declarations of her Algerian origins, prompted by a ‘hysterical negotiation of her star image’ in the late 1980s, as well as limited attempts to link her on-screen star image to her ethnicity, such as Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Dupeyronm, 2003), Adjani’s star image has been ‘recuperated’ by French audiences and critics since the 1990s in a way that de-emphasises ethnicity, or rather replaces a marked (Arab) ethnicity with a star ethnicity of the ‘unmarked kind: visible whiteness, stellar luminescence’ (Austin 2003: 100–5). If Adjani was the first beur film star, she is also notable as the first and still the only (at the time of writing) female star of Maghrebi immigrant origin in France.2 The situation of male actors of North African origin is, however, quite different. A list of the twenty most commercially successful actors of the 2000s – compiled by CBO Box-Office3 and based on the cumulative number of spectators for all the films that they have appeared in over the decade – includes no less that five male actors of Maghrebi-origin: Kad Merad (born Kaddour Merad, in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria); Danny Boon (born Daniel Hamidou to a father of Kabyle origin and a French mother); Samy Naceri (born in Paris to an Algerian father and French mother); Zinedine Soualem (French of Algerian origin); and Gad Elmaleh (a Jewish Moroccan émigré), with Jamel Debbouze and Roschdy Zem a little further down the list at numbers 25 and 27 ­respectively. Given that they only measure box-office success, the CBO listings are, on their own, insufficient to indicate star status in the more traditional sense of the persona or myth developed by a given screen actor that is ‘composed of an amalgam of their screen image and their private identities, which the audience recognises and expects from film to film, and which in turn determines the parts they play’ (Vincendeau 2000: 7). In this respect, we might say that the only actors who truly approach consideration as screen stars are Debbouze, Naceri, Elmaleh and possibly Zem. Nevertheless, as the notion of stardom in French culture has become more ambiguous, applied across a range of popular cultural forms and increasingly confused with celebrity in recent years (Austin 2003: 2; Vanderschelden 2005: 62), the statistics offered by the CBO listings provide a useful measure of popular (box-office) or mainstream appeal of these screen actors. Two of the names included on the list (Boon and Soualem) appear largely due to the phenomenal success of one film (Bienvenue chez les

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Ch’tis). However, the other actors who feature on the list have arguably earned their place through a more diverse body of work. Kad Merad co-starred in both Les Ch’tis and the Oscar-nominated feel-good comedy Les Choristes (Barratier, 2004) as well as starring more recently alongside Daniel Auteuil in the remake of Pagnol’s La fille du puisatier (Auteil, 2011). The CBO rankings are certainly not exhaustive in terms of actors of Maghrebi origin who have imposed themselves on French screens. However, the significance of this transformation in the 2000s should not be underestimated, a point that was reinforced by Roschdy Zem in an interview to mark his acceptance of a special achievement award at the Marrakech film festival in December 2011: You know, when we [actors of Maghrebi origin] started out, we had no point of reference in French cinema. Today films are produced around actors such as Jamel, Gad and many others [. . .] For cinema to evolve, attitudes must evolve too. France, as it exists today, coloured, cosmopolitan, cannot help but be presented in French films. (Zem in Lahrach 2011) The two actors singled out by Zem in the above interview – Jamel (Debbouze) and Gad (Elmaleh) – are two of the biggest screen stars of Maghrebi-origin (or indeed any origin) working in French cinema today. Both have made a considerable impact in terms of crossing over to the mainstream, as well as using their celebrity status and capital value as stars to extend their influence into the realms of production and direction. Although an unlikely screen star given his diminutive stature, darker skin and physical disability (in 1990 he lost the use of his right arm after being struck by a high-speed train that was passing through a station), Debbouze had risen to become arguably the most influential Maghrebi-French star by the mid-2000s. Born in 1975 to Moroccan immigrant parents living in a modest housing estate in the Parisian banlieue, Debbouze, a natural performer, starred in various minor roles in film and theatre from the early 1990s. Eventually, though, he came to prominence as much as a result of his stand-up comedy shows and work as a TV presenter. Following a highly successful career in radio, television and stand-up, including working on Canal Plus as part of the influential comedy series Nulle part ailleurs, Debbouze’s cinematic breakthrough came with his lead role in Le Ciel. Debbouze’s performance in the film accentuates the traits that had already made him popular with audiences on the small screen and stand-up circuit: a playful, inventive use of language, rapid-fire delivery and irreverent humour that is inspired by (and makes liberal reference to) his background and identity as a Maghrebi-French youth from the banlieue. The references that shape Debbouze’s performance style and wider star persona are at once global and local, combining references to American

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cinema and TV with football and rap as well as contemporary French politics as they relate to immigration, poverty, racism, violence, and social exclusion (Vanderschelden 2005: 64). Above all, though, it is Debbouze’s quick wit and his ability to improvise, combined with his use of French street-slang, Arabic and English that suggests a ‘humorous (mis-)use of language (approximations, surprising collocations, neologisms), and creative exploration of sociolinguistic traits such as accent and inflected language, identifiable elocution and dialect’ (Tellier 1998 cited in Vandershelden 2005: 65). All of these aspects were brought firmly and deliberately to the fore in Jamel’s performance as Youssef in Le Ciel. While such elements continue to inform Debbouze’s star image, they have since been augmented by the variety of roles (both leading and supporting roles) that he has subsequently played in the 2000s. The perception of both his public and on-screen persona has, furthermore, been refined by his now obvious celebrity – his status as one of France’s most famous entertainers – and by his creative and commercial influence as both a film star, producer and most recently a director, as well as continuing to work in TV and stand-up. Following on from the success of Le Ciel, Debbouze’s capital value at the box-office increased as a result of his show-stealing performance as Numérobis in Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre (Chabat, 2002) – a secondary role written especially for him by the film’s director and one of his former collaborators from his days at Canal Plus, Alain Chabat. The film attracted over 14 million spectators in France, reputedly making Debbouze the best-paid actor in 2002 due to the combination of his fee for the movie and a cannily negotiated points deal on the overall gross (Vanderschelden 2005: 47). This success coincided with his nomination for a best supporting actor César for his role as Lucien, the put-upon greengrocer’s assistant in Amélie (Jeunet, 2001), another massive box-office success, leading to a starring role in Angel-A (Besson, 2005). While both of these films essentially offered Debbouze the opportunity to play a role that was less explicitly socio-ethnically marked than that of Le Ciel, the audience’s knowledge of Debbouze’s background as a Maghrebi-French youth from the banlieue, means that, to a certain extent, such performances remain potentially marked by Debbouze’s own social and ethnic origins. Indeed, Debbouze’s next series of collaborations as both actor and producer was to prove just how central his Maghrebi origins were to be to his star image. In 2006 he starred in and co-produced Indigènes, Rachid Bouchareb’s Second World War epic about the role played by African soldiers in liberating Europe from Nazi Germany. As Hargreaves notes, Debbouze’s celebrity connections, popularity and influence were instrumental in ensuring that the film (which at that point represented the largest budget for any film directed by and starring Maghrebi-French actors) was brought to the screen (Hargreaves 2007: 205­–6). Moreover, in his dealings with politicians in Morocco, Algeria

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Figure 2.2  ‘Nos stars beurs’: promotional poster for Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006).

and France (including photo opportunities with the then conservative president, Jacques Chirac), Debbouze, along with the director Rachid Bouchareb, personally ensured that the film’s political message about the inequality in war pensions for colonial veterans became a prominent political issue in France. Though the public figure of Debbouze dominated much of the media attention around Indigènes, the film’s significance in terms of announcing the presence of not one but four Maghebi-French ‘stars’ should not be underestimated. Alongside Debbouze, the film showcased the considerable talents of Roschdy Zem, Samy Naceri and Sami Bouajila. Promotional material for the film presented an image in which the four ‘band of brothers’ were staring out towards the audience – effectively announcing the film as a star vehicle for the four actors (see Figure 2.2). Debbouze, Zem, Naceri and Bouajila were collectively awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2006 for best actor while in interviews, described as ‘nos stars beurs’, they offered a sense that the Maghrebi-French star’s time had come (Pliskin 2006).4 Of equal significance was the diversity of acting styles and range of star personas showcased by the four stars in Indigènes. Firstly, Samy Naceri played Yassir, a Berber conscript and small-time crook, who initially uses the chaos of war to plunder booty from all sides. Following the death of his brother, however, Yassir is transformed from petty thief to war hero as he sacrifices his own life in order to defend the French inhabitants of an Alsatian village from the retreating German troops. Though crafting a less charismatic persona than in his earlier career-defining role as charming taxi driver Daniel in the Taxi series, Naceri nonetheless combines in his performance as Yassir the everyday,

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unrefined (‘blokish’) traits of Daniel with a physical presence that hints at a potential menace beneath the smile. His performance is thus indicative of a star type ‘balanced between lawlessness and order that positioned him as a potential successor to Belmondo’ (Austin 2003: 136). This potential was, however to remain unrealised in the late 2000s, as Naceri became embroiled in a series of high-profile court appearances and two short spells in prison resulting from drug and alcohol abuse, violent assault, road-rage and charges of racially abusing police officers in a series of incidents between 2003 and 2005. Finally in 2007 (one year after sharing the Palme d’Or for best actor at Cannes with his co-stars from Indigènes), Naceri was sentenced to nine months in prison for stabbing a security guard in Aix-en-Provence. Co-starring alongside Naceri in Indigènes, Roschdy Zem plays Messaoud, an Algerian conscript who becomes romantically involved with a French woman he meets in one of the towns liberated by the allies – a relationship that is ultimately prohibited by the military authorities. Zem, who arguably possesses an even more imposing physical presence on screen than Naceri, essentially acts as a foil to Yassir/Naceri in the film. Whereas the latter is a selfish, petty thief, who eventually sacrifices himself for others, Messaoud is shown to be a character of integrity, if a little naïve. His noble belief in the cause for which he is fighting and essential decency are ultimately betrayed by the French military authorities, who intercept the letters he and his French lover send one another. The character played by Zem in Indigènes thus draws on the actor’s conventional ‘decency’, his physical presence and (sexual) attractiveness that has seen him enjoy one of the longest and most consistently successful careers of any Maghrebi-French actor. Since coming to the attention of French audiences in a supporting role in J’embrasse pas (Téchiné, 1991), Zem has successfully moved between roles in low-budget social dramas (L’Autre côté de la mer [Cabrera, 1997], Sauve-moi [Vincent, 2000], Vivre au paradis [Guerdjou, 1999]), popular genre films (Le Plus beau métier du monde [Lauzier, 1996], Chouchou [Allouache, 2003], 36 Quai d’Orfèvres [Marchal, 2004]) and epic blockbusters (Indigènes, Hors-la-loi). Like a number of these other MaghrebiFrench stars who have come to prominence in the 2000s, Zem has also used his success as an actor to move into directing, first with the romantic comedy Mauvaise foi and most recently Omar m’a tué (2011), the dramatisation of a miscarriage of justice from the 1990s in which a Moroccan immigrant working as a gardener was falsely accused of the murder of a wealthy French woman on the on the Côte d’Azur. The third of the four Maghrebi-French leads in Indigènes, Sami Bouajila (French of Tunisian origin), is arguably the least commercially oriented and thus the least likely to be deemed a star. Nonetheless his inclusion in this film brings further artistic weight to Indigènes in the sense that Bouajila has built a highly successfully career for himself as a ‘serious’ actor working mostly but

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not exclusively in the auteur-led independent sector of French cinema. Since his first appearance on French screens in 1991, Bouajila has attracted considerable critical success, embodying a range of characters, some of whom make explicit reference to his Maghrebi origins, while others offer little or no attempt to situate either actor or protagonist in relation to his Tunisian immigrant heritage. The roles interpreted by Bouajila in films such as Drôle de Félix (Ducastel and Martineau, 2000), La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001), Embrassez qui vous voudrez (Blanc, 2002), Vivre me tue (Sinapi, 2003), and Les témoins (Téchiné, 2007) are also notable for the breadth of characters interpreted in relation to class, familial ties, ethnicity and sexual difference. Throughout his career Bouajila has therefore embodied ‘a range of subject positions’ that ‘when coupled with an ambiguous ethnic background or heritage and tied to issues of kinship’ allow the character and the star to be ‘read as a site where ethnicity, sexuality, belonging and citizenship can be reimagined’ (Pratt and Provencher 2011: 194–208). In the case of Indigènes, Bouajila’s role as the principled (unofficial) leader of the North African troops, Abdelkader, makes him arguably a more emotionally distant character than in other films. Nonetheless it also allows him function in the narrative as the protagonist who is able to lead the other characters towards a different understanding of brotherhood and belonging in the context of both Algerian and French national identity. Working as part of this ensemble of Maghrebi-French actors, Debbouze’s performance in Indigènes confirms his existing star type at the same time as it opens new avenues to his on-screen persona. Given the nature of the film (a serious, historical epic set in World War II), the playful improvisation, tchatche (gift of the gab) and scattergun references to contemporary American, French and North African popular culture are (understandably) absent from Debbouze’s performance and his verbal delivery is far more restrained. However, there are also moments when the contemporary persona of Debbouze clearly imposes itself over the character of Saïd; most notably in the sequence where, following the liberation of a French town in Provence, Saïd/Debbouze enters into a conversation with a young female local, proudly declaring ‘when I liberate a country it becomes my country’. The potential effect of this claim is to shift the association away from Saïd (the character) and towards Debbouze, transforming the utterance into an impassioned plea for the rightful place of the French-born descendants of North African ­immigrants in contemporary France. Elsewhere the demands of the genre (a war film) and the emphasis on action means that Debbouze’s physical limitations as an actor that arise from his disability are highlighted against the physicality of Zem or Naceri and the leadership of Bouajila. Thus Debbouze’s character is an assistant to the pied noir Sergeant Martinez (Bernard Blancan): fetching food and drink, holding the mirror as his superior shaves, standing beside his commanding

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officer in battle. In a sense, this leads us back to the perceived vulnerability of Debbouze’s on-screen persona that, it is claimed, forms part of his attraction to female spectators (Vandershelden 2005: 68). Moreover, as the put-upon assistant, there are shades of his subservient performance as Lucien in Amélie. However, there are also moments in Indigènes that allow for a tougher side to emerge in Debbouze’s character, in particular the sequence where Saïd is ridiculed by Messaoud for the photo he keeps of his mother. To the surprise of all the other soldiers present, Saïd responds to this goading by drawing a knife and holding it to the throat of (the much larger) Messaoud, who is forced to capitulate. This more aggressive and ruthless side to the performance offered by Debbouze in Indigènes would be further exploited in his next collaboration with Bouchareb, Hors-la-loi, where he plays an underworld gangster in Paris during the Algerian war. Like Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh is an actor-turned-director whose rise to stardom during the 2000s has been built on his existing success as a stand-up comedian. Unlike the other actors of Maghrebi origin considered here thus far, Elmaleh is different in that he is a Moroccan Jew and that he emigrated first to North America (Québec) at the age of sixteen, before moving to France in 1991 at the age of twenty-one, where he has been based ever since. Like his contemporaries Jamel Debbouze and Danny Boon (and like Smaïn before him in the 1980s and 1990s), Elmaleh made a name for himself as a stand-up comic before gravitating towards screen acting. His first leading role came in Algerian director Merzak Allouache’s low-budget, socially aware comedy Salut Cousin! (1996). In the film Elmaleh plays Alilou, a naïve Algerian who initially journeys to Paris to deliver a consignment of designer clothes to a merchant in Barbès but ends up staying with his Maghrebi-French cousin, Mok, and finds romance with a West African immigrant who lives alongside his cousin in the 18th arrondissement. The film offers a nuanced portrayal of the North African diasporic community in Paris, from the recently arrived Algerian immigrant to the former Algerian policemen now eking out a living selling counterfeit watches in Barbès; as well as a Jewish pied noir, who speaks nostalgically of life in Algeria prior to Independence. Allouache evokes both the sense of a settled diasporic community that has a place in Paris and the proximity of Algeria to France through the arrival of new members of this Algerian diaspora. Yet he also suggests that the presence of the second generation is, in many ways, just as precarious as that of the newly arrived immigrant. At the end of the film it is Mok who is deported to Algeria for his role in an arson attack on a Parisian nightclub, while Alilou remains as an undocumented immigrant, taking his chances in Paris with his new love.5 Like Debbouze, Elmaleh has also used his celebrity status and capital value as an established star to bring favoured projects to the screen in the 2000s. In so doing, Elmaleh has arguably become more important to the films he has

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starred in than many of the directors he has worked alongside. In this respect Merzak Allouache (one of the most influential figures of Algerian cinema) was given the opportunity to direct the comedy Chouchou (2003), which attracted 3 million spectators in France, as a thank you from Elmaleh for the director giving him his first leading screen role in the late 1990s with Salut Cousin! Like the earlier film, Chouchou also tells the story of a young clandestine Maghrebiimmigrant recently arrived in Paris (the eponymous Chouchou) but this time he is a gay transvestite who performs in a Parisian club. The film’s central protagonist is, moreover, based on a stand-up character created by Elmaleh and thus aligns itself more towards the popular crossover success of camp comedies such as Pédale douce (Aghion, 1996) or La Cage aux folles (Molinaro, 1978) than the politically aware Drôle de Félix or the more sombre Miss Mona in which the Algerian immigrant’s homosexuality is used as a metaphor for his own exclusion.6 The subsequent moves made by Allouache and Elmaleh respectively seem to confirm the importance of the star in this move to the mainstream for filmmakers from the North African diaspora. Elmaleh went on to direct Coco, a €15m production released on nearly 900 prints in France that attracted over 3 million spectators and further underlined his mainstream credentials. Allouache followed Chouchou with Bab-el-web (2005), a lowbudget romantic comedy (including a cameo from Elmaleh) based in Algiers that attempts to rehabilitate the image of the working-class district where the director grew up, which despite being distributed on a respectable 100 prints, attracted a meager 50 087 spectators. Allouache then abandoned the light comic tone of Chouchou for Harragas (2009), a sombre realist drama about African immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean and arrive illegally in Europe. Unsurprisingly, given its tough subject matter and niche audience appeal, Harragas attracted little more than 10 000 spectators in France. Although Elmaleh’s screen debut in Salut Cousin! locates him firmly within the North African community, the role is, in some respects, a false ethnic/ national marker in the sense that unlike the character he plays in the film he is neither Algerian nor a Muslim. Similarly in Chouchou he again plays an Algerian immigrant. Whilst we could counter this position as a rather reductive line of argument (Elmaleh is not an Algerian immigrant but nor is he a homosexual or a transvestite like the character he plays in Chouchou), the extent to which Maghrebi-French stars remain in what Austin refers to as ‘ethnically marked’ (Austin 2003: 136) roles or the degree to which they obtain what Hargreaves describes as ‘trans-ethnic plasticity’ (Hargreaves 2002, cited in Austin 2003: 136) is a significant one in relation to their acceptance by mainstream audiences. As Dyer reminds us, audiences can choose to endorse or reject star performances at the box-office if they feel that the star type or performance strays too far from the existing star image (Dyer 1998: 98). Potentially, this has more loaded implications for the perceived acceptance or

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rejection of actors of Maghrebi origin by both mainstream audiences and producers through casting for specific roles. Unlike Debbouze, whose ethnic and socio-economic origins have remained a clear part of his star persona, Elmaleh has arguably been able to negotiate a more fluid relationship between star type and his ethnic, national and religious difference than that any other screen actor of Maghrebi origin. Thus screen performances that have been endorsed by French audiences in terms of commercial success, as well as gaining critical acclaim, have seen Elmaleh occupy a variety of roles in relation to his status as émigré/North African/Moroccan (Salut cousin!, Chouchou) as well as others that have accented his Jewishness – La Vérité si je mens! 2 (Gilou, 2001), La Rafle (Bosch, 2010), Coco. Yet this has not restricted Elmaleh’s ability to take on a number of high profile roles – most obviously La Doublure (Veber, 2006) and Hors-de-prix (Salvadori, 2006) ­– in which characterisation transcends, rather than negating or occluding, his ethnicity. Why might this be the case? We could argue that his physical appearance (fairer skin, clear blue eyes) endows Elmaleh with ‘trans-ethnic plasticity’, which allows him to play less ethnically coded roles in the manner that Hargreaves has suggested was possible for Naceri in Taxi, but not for Debbouze (Hargreaves 2002, cited in Austin 2003: 136). We might also consider that his own ethnically and religiously marked performances as a North African émigré are complicated in terms of both his Moroccan Jewish roots and his time spent studying in Canada before arriving in France at the age of twenty-one. As well as exposing him to a form of multiculturalism quite different to that found in France, this time spent in Canada meant that his arrival in France was not the typical route of migration from Maghreb to France, burdened with the symbolic colonial baggage of a journey from ex-colony to former Métropole (mainland France). Finally, the fact that his parents were wealthy enough to send him to finish his education in Canada immediately distances him in socio-economic terms from the majority of other MaghrebiFrench stars (in particular Debbouze), whose star persona is intimately linked not only to their origins as the French descendants of North African immigrants, but also as residents of the working-class French urban periphery. In all these respects, Elmaleh is granted a greater scope for social mobility than a young actor emerging from the cité, such as Jamel Debbouze, and is not so obviously hindered by the same barriers (both real and imagined) that typically limit the horizons of many Maghrebi-French citizens. Crossing Over or Selling Out? The Case of Djamel Bensalah The above issues concering casting, characterisation and ethnic markers in relation to stars such as Elmaleh and Debbouze also point to the broader question of the potential price of incorporation (in terms of artistic freedom,

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political expression and the ability to exert control over the identity and representation of character/actor/star) for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s. The margins can be reclaimed as a space of resistance and opposition for minority or excluded groups, as well as a space of artistic creativity, ‘authenticity’ and possibility, as bell hooks suggests in her well-known essay ‘Choosing the Margin as the Space of Radical Openness’ (hooks 1990). However, to reside in the mainstream is often negatively coded as occupying a space of ‘dubious complicity’ in artistic and ideological terms, or as a streamlining of culture, or a ‘subordination of cultural specificity to one hegemonic cultural strand (i.e. white and commercial)’ (Korte and Sternberg 2004: 8). This interpretation leads us to the idea of the mainstream as part of an immutable, fixed, hegemonic centre as well as the notion that moving to that centre necessarily means selling out, politically and artistically, in order to gain access to the cultural property and audiences controlled by the dominant societal norm. In the context of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking, analysis of individual films such as the immigrant and queer politics of Chouchou (Waldron 2007; Rees-Roberts 2008) seems to endorse the idea that by crossing over to the mainstream these films and their creators must, necessarily, re-negotiate a position that retreats from any militant or political engagement with socio-political realities in order to win the consensus of its popular audience. Viewed more positively, as Korte and Sternberg have suggested in their study of contemporary Black British and British Asian cinema, ‘bidding for the mainstream’ does not inevitably imply submitting to or adapting to hegemony. Rather it suggests ‘actively participating and changing a predominant cultural stream whose structures already are in the process of redefinition and which has already set in motion its own decentralization’ (Korte and Stornberg 2004: 9). In order to explore both sides of this argument, let us now turn in the final part of this chapter to the films of Maghrebi-French screenwriter, director and producer Djamel Bensalah. While a select group of directors of Maghrebi origin may have enjoyed greater box-office success in France with individual films in the 2000s,7 arguably the most consistently successful director in terms of audience popularity is Djamel Bensalah. Following the largely unexpected success of his debut feature Le Ciel (1 224 963 spectators), Bensalah has enjoyed box-office success in France with nearly all of his subsequent features: Le Raïd (1 456 267 spectators); Il était une fois dans l’oued (Bensalah, 2005) (893 437 spectators); Neuilly sa mère! (directed by La Ferrière, produced and written by Bensalah, 2009) (2 527 422 spectators); and, most recently, Beur sur la ville (Bensalah, 2011) (412 351 spectators). Even the comparative failure of his fourth feature Big City (Bensalah, 2007), a comedy/adventure/western with a cast of children, still managed to attract 313 687 spectators – far beyond the audiences achieved by most other Maghrebi-French or North African émigré directors

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of the 2000s and, according to the data on average audience attendances provided by the CNC (2012), more than most French feature films released during that decade. Precisely because of this considerable and consistent success throughout the 2000s, Bensalah has operated and received the support of mainstream production and distribution networks, working most frequently with French majors Gaumont and UGC. Moreover, occupying this mainstream position has not led Bensalah to avoid narratives that reflect his origins as the French-born descendant of Algerian immigrant parents. With the exception of Big City, all of Bensalah’s films draw directly on his own experiences as a Maghrebi-French youth from the suburbs of St Denis, engaging with questions of integration, racism and cultural identity as they pertain to multicultural banlieue youth. And yet Bensalah’s films receive little if any scholarly or critical attention in France or the Anglo-American academy. There is, for example, no entry on Bensalah in the second edition of the otherwise exhaustive Dictionnaire du cinéma populaire français des origines à nos jours (Bosséno and Dehee 2009). Nor, with only a few exceptions, have any scholarly articles (in English or French) been produced that are devoted to his work.8 Indeed, when Bensalah’s films are directly referred to in the context of a broader analysis of MaghrebiFrench filmmaking, the response is largely negative (see, for example, Tarr 2005: 170–1). Like many other Maghrebi-French and North African émigré directors (Chibane, Bahloul, Allouache, Zemmouri, Zem), Bensalah employs comedy to explore the socio-political realities facing the North African diaspora in France in a non-threatening way that aspires to connect with a crossover (ethnicmajority) French audience. What marks Bensalah out as somewhat different from his Maghrebi-French contemporaries, however, is the extent to which, from the very start of his career, he has made a conscious attempt to bid directly for a mainstream audience. Indeed we could go as far as to identify a formula within Bensalah’s filmmaking that has projected him towards this commercial success in France. Beyond his obvious investment in genre cinema (comedy, and in the case of Le Raïd, action comedy) is the fact that Bensalah’s comic protagonists from Le Ciel, Le Raïd and Il était une fois dans l’oued through to his most recent successes as co-writer on Neuilly sa mère! and writer/­director of Beur sur la ville are all drawn from a quite specific socio-cultural milieu (the world of male banlieue youth). Secondly, while his protagonists may originate from the banlieue, the action in Bensalah’s films is almost never set in the deprived urban periphery itself. Instead, he generates much of the humour in his films from a ‘fish-out-of-water’ scenario that places these banlieusard characters in environments that are unfamiliar geographically and in a socio-­ cultural context: the affluent beach resort of Biarritz; the South American jungle or slopes of the Dolomites; or a white banlieue youth ‘returning’ to the

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bled in Algeria. Indeed, it is telling that the one perceived ‘failure’ in box-office terms was Big City, a film which drew away from this tried and tested formula – a formula to which he returned with his subsequent project, Neuilly sa mère! The film, which tells the story of a young Maghrebi-French schoolboy who swaps his cité in the provinces for the exclusive and super-rich Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Mer, derives its humour from questions of class distinction as a much as it does from comedic tension that might arise due to ethnic difference. The formula applied by Bensalah is clearly popular with French audiences – after the failure of Big City, the more familiar territory of Neuilly sa mère! attracted over 2.5 million spectators in 2009. However, it is not without its risks, and for two main reasons. Firstly, by removing his youthful protagonists from the banlieue there is the potential to isolate them from any grounding in a relevant socio-political context, thus reducing the characters to barely believable caricatures (Tarr 2005: 171). Secondly, as a consequence of this displacement and the fact that the comedy in his films is largely derived from mainstream perceptions of the banlieusard (in terms of attitudes, mannerism and, crucially, in a film such as Le Ciel, language), Bensalah runs the associated risk of entrenching his Maghrebi-French and banlieusard protagonists in the very stereotypes that he aims to transcend. Born in the working-class Parisian suburb of St Denis in 1976 to Algerian immigrant parents, Bensalah began his career as an actor with appearances in TV advertisements and minor roles in the French TV series Navarro and the film L’eau froide (Assayas, 1994). In 1996 he directed his first short film Y a du foutage de gueule dans l’air, working with friends Jamel Debbouze (already well known for his work as a stand-up comedian and his TV appearances), Julien Courbey and Stéphane Soo Mongo. The sixteen-minute comedy, with its focus on the adventures of a group of school friends in St Denis, established the context for Bensalah’s debut feature, Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! Le Ciel was an unexpected crossover success at the box-office, attracting over 1.1 million spectators. To put this success into perspective, this was only the second ever feature directed by a filmmaker of Maghrebi origin, after Smaïn’s Les Deux papas et la maman (co-directed with De-Caunes, 1996) to attract more than one million spectators in France since the first Beur Cinema features began to appear in French cinemas in the early-1980s. Moreover, in Jamel Debbouze, French cinema had discovered a Maghrebi-French comic star with the potential to surpass the popular success of Smaïn in the 1980s and 1990s. In a sense, Le Ciel is the film that announces the breakthrough into the French mainstream that then occurred for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s. Not only did it launch the career of Bensalah and establish Jamel Debbouze as a Maghrebi-French comedy screen actor with true crossover potential, but it also proved to French producers, distributors and exhibitors that there was a mainstream market for genre

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cinema directed by, starring and promoting the experiences and outlook of Maghrebi-French protagonists. Thus, when considering the mainstreaming of North African émigré and Maghrebi-French filmmaking in France during the 2000s, we must, necessarily, being with Le Ciel.

Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! Banlieusards on the Beach Bensalah’s debut feature opens with Youssef (Jamel Debbouze) Christophe (Lorant Deutsch) and Stéphane (Stéphane Soo Mongo) shooting a spoof documentary about life in their cité. They convince a friend, Mike (Julien Courbey), to pose as a drug dealer, as they think that this will play better with the mainstream French audience for whom the documentary is intended. The trio’s understanding of how such stereotypes are recognised and ‘authenticated’ by mainstream France is turned to their advantage as their film wins a ­competition, with the prize of a holiday in Biarritz. As a film about banlieue youth exploring and exploiting their image on screen and the debut feature of a director of Algerian immigrant origin from the cités of St Denis, Le Ciel is clearly self-reflexive text. It begins by suggesting, much like La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), that the blanc-black-beur trio at the centre of the narrative are only taken seriously when they conform to the role of the disenfranchised banlieusard. However, Bensalah refuses to relegate his protagonists to the position of helpless victims who are unable to determine their own future or, indeed, take control of the way they present themselves to others. Firstly, they implicitly understand the power of the stereotypes that are used to identify them and employ these prejudices in a positive way to win the filmmaking competition. Moreover, the trio simultaneously challenge and conform to middle-class French prejudices surrounding multicultural banlieue youth through their interaction with affluent middle-class holidaymakers in Biarritz, principally the group of teenage girls who are renting the apartment next to the boys. By giving the three youths a camera to record their exploits on holiday, Bensalah returns the means of representation to the hands of those who are normally denied it. The film therefore offers a self-reflexive commentary on the alternative perspective of the socio-political realities of the banlieue offered by the trio, at the same time as it allows Bensalah to consider his own role – as a filmmaker who originates from the deprived urban periphery – in either endorsing or perpetuating such mainstream stereotypes. Nor is this reflection on how banlieue youth are represented in mainstream audio-visual culture in France restricted to the trio’s use of the camcorder. Le Ciel is replete with different kinds of images capturing Youssef, Christophe, Stépahne and Mike going about their daily lives: from the CCTV footage in the supermarket to the view through the peephole in the front door of the rented holiday a­ partment.

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Figure 2.3  Boyz on the beach: Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (Bensalah, 1999).

In a similar way, Bensalah and his cinematographer Martin Legrand eschew the straightforward set-ups and camera positions that we might expect to find in a more conventional comedy film. Instead they employ unexpected angles, camera movement and framing, even when capturing everyday activities, such as Stéphane cooking pasta in the apartment. The film’s self-reflexive impulse is even extended to a discussion of the current state of French cinema in the late 1990s. As the three youths stand outside the cinema in Biarritz trying to decide what film they want to see, they reject the various French films on offer, including the popular comedy hit La Vérité si je mens! Instead they opt for the Hollywood police thriller Cop Land (Mangold, 1997) starring Sylvester Stallone. However, Bensalah is careful to balance these moments of self-reflexivity with a comedy that derives much of its popular (youth) appeal from its rapid-fire comic exchanges, often irreverent tone, and the central standout performance by Jamel Debbouze. Moreover, the film’s consistent references to American and French banlieue culture brings credibility to Le Ciel at the same time as it renders the film attractive to a mainstream French youth audience. In her discussion of Le Ciel, Tarr praises the virtuosity of Jamel’s performance, as well as the attempt by Bensalah to mock the media stereotype of banlieue youth as criminalised other. However, Tarr is equally critical of what she perceives as the film’s casual misogyny, its evacuation of ethnic minority girls and women from the diegesis, as well as the suggestion of anti-Semitism that runs through certain scenes in the film – such as when Youssef recoils from an embrace with the middle-class Lydie (Olivia Bonamy) upon noticing the Star

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of David on her necklace (Tarr 2005: 106–7). In response to this final point, we could argue that, rather than endorsing an anti-Semitic position adopted by the film and its director, the scene shows the potential for prejudice to exist in all social groups even those minority or marginalised communities (such as the North African immigrant population in France) who have themselves been subjected to similar prejudice and hostility from the dominant societal norm. Youssef is, after all, shocked in this sequence by Lydia’s accusation of racism and is subsequently forced to assess his own preconceptions of others – ­indicated somewhat heavy-handedly in the film by his introspective walk along the rainy coastline soon after the confrontation with Lydia. Moreover, in narrative terms, the confrontation functions dramatically as a means of setting up the final reconciliation between Youssef and Lydia in the airport, a sequence that endorses Le Ciel’s generic categorisation as a romantic comedy or teen romance as much as it is a simple ‘fish-out-of-water’ comedy narrative. This association is important, since it indicates Bensalah’s desire to use the rom-com genre to engage with a mainstream youth audience in France, combining the edgy credibility of banlieue culture (reflected by Debbouze’s participation in the film) with the more conventional appeal of the teen romance. In this respect, Le Ciel adheres more than one would think to the narrative structure of the romantic comedy; from the cute meet, to circumstances and misunderstanding potentially thwarting the mismatched couple from getting together, and the couple’s ultimate reconciliation. The problematic romance between Youssef and Lydia is, furthermore, mirrored by the other narrative coupling of Christophe and Christelle, whose own difficulties in relating to one another result more directly from a question of class than they do from ethnic or religious difference. However, this is not to say that in exploiting the mainstream potential of the romantic (teen) comedy, Bensalah eviscerates all trace of the socio-political realities of race and class from the film’s narrative. Indeed, one of the most telling scenes occurs, precisely, as Youssef is racing to the airport in order to speak to Lydia before she returns for Paris. The suggestion in this scene is then that, despite temporarily inhabiting the same city, the pair move in such different social circles back home in Paris that any chance of them meeting again would be almost impossible. Of even greater symbolic significance is the exchange on the bus travelling to the airport, where the young banlieusard is challenged by the conductor for not possessing a valid ticket. Refusing to believe Youssef’s explanation, as well as denying his request for dispensation given the circumstances of his journey to the airport, the heavy-handed ticket inspector ends by demanding to see Youssef’s national identity card. This thinly-veiled act of racism simultaneously questions Youssef’s right to be in the country (let alone on the bus), a demand that is unlikely to be used against a white youth caught committing the same offence. Tellingly, the confrontation on the bus serves no obvious

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purpose in advancing the narrative: it is already abundantly clear by this point that Youssef is in danger of arriving too late at the airport to see Lydia. Its inclusion enacts a conflict that punctuates the expected dramatic tension of the final reconciliation from the romantic comedy for a quite different purpose. For it serves to remind the spectator that the obstacles faced by young banlieusards (especially those of non-European immigrant origin) are frequently compounded by an additional level of prejudice that mobilises ethnic and religious difference as insurmountable barriers to integration and social mobility. Bensalah’s desire to engage his audience with the familiarity and consensual comedy of the rom-com at the same time as he forces them to confront their own prejudices and those across French society towards banlieue youth is further underlined by the ending of Le Ciel. Rather than focusing on the reconciliation between Youssef and Lydia, the film instead returns to the trio of banlieusards, who, having fallen out while loading up the car, endure the lengthy car journey back to Paris from the Cote d’Azur in brooding silence – an indication of the mundane reality that awaits them in the cité upon their return from the holiday in the south of France. Indeed, as the extras on the French DVD release of Le Ciel show, Bensalah had planned an alternative ending for the film. In a fashionable Parisian apartment several months after the holiday, Youssef and Lydia were to be depicted living together and waiting for their friends to arrive for a dinner party. Clearly the decision by the director to eschew this more utopian ending for the one we see in the film suggests a desire to confront his audience with the more likely outcome for the young banlieusards after the holiday ends. However, the portrayal of the sullen teenagers journeying back to Paris is not the final image that Bensalah leaves us with at the very end of Le Ciel. As the credits roll, rough hand-held footage of the car travelling along the seafront in Biarritz – clearly meant to have been shot by the boys during their holiday – shows Youssef engaging in playful banter with the car’s other passengers (and by extension the audience), eventually proposing that ‘this [the video being shot] would make a good film’. On the one hand this short, closing scene can be perceived as a throw-away remark inserted with the credits as an in-joke, spontaneously offered by Debbouze (more than his character Youssef) for the director, crew and spectators to share. On the other hand, by effectively closing Le Ciel with this statement, Bensalah returns to the very issue that began the film: the role of cinema in forging a perception and (mis)representation of a given social reality (specifically, the lived social reality of banlieue youth) and the responsibilities that such a role brings with it. With its combination of a cultural codes and references to a multi-ethnic urban culture, allusions to French and American popular culture, verbal humour and improvisation (centred on, though not limited to, the virtuoso performance of Debbouze) as well as the use of the structure and narrative

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pleasures of the romantic/teen comedy, Bensalah was quite clearly aiming for a mainstream audience in Le Ciel. However, we cannot entirely say that the film occludes or eradicates questions of difference, prejudice and exclusion in order to appease its mainstream youth audience. Instead, and at key moments, Bensalah chooses to foreground these problematic issues, thus forcing his audience to undertake a more searching questioning of the continuing prejudices that exist in contemporary multicultural France in a manner that belies the apparently superficial and irreverent pleasures and intentions of a genre such as the teen romantic comedy.

Neuilly sa mère! From banlieue to beurgeoisie? Neuilly sa mère!, on which Bensalah collaborated with director Gabriel JulienLaferrière as both producer and co-writer, represented a returned to more familiar territory for the Maghrebi-French filmmaker after the relative failure of the child western Big City. The film sees Bensalah employing the nowfamiliar fish-out-of-water narrative, whereby Sami (Samy Seghir), a MaghrebiFrench teenager from a working-class housing estate in Chalon-sur-Saône (a small town in the Burgundy region of France) is forced to relocate to the exclusive, upscale Parisian district of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes in France, to live with his aunt while his mother works away on a cruise ship. As with his earlier films, Neuilly sa mère! sees Bensalah, this time as writer and producer, applying a series of comedy scenarios based largely on the prejudices and preconceptions held by both Sami, as the young banlieusard, and the pupils of the exclusive private school that he attends while living with his aunt. The narrative begins with a voice-over by Sami that immediately challenges (mainstream) misconceptions of the banlieue as a site of lawlessness, exclusion and social breakdown in a way that is resonant of Le Ciel. The spectator is shown idyllic images of Sami and his friends laughing by a lake behind the apartment blocks of the working-class estate. Indeed, the cité is deemed as ‘paradise’ in comparison to the picturesque centre of Chalon, where Sami and his friends are viewed with suspicion and subjected to searches by the local police. Sami’s point of view appears to be confirmed visually by an elaborate crane shot near the start of the film that sweeps up a grass bank and into the cité – instantly beautifying and rendering more spectacular the mundane environment of the housing estate. Moreover, as the crane pulls up, the cité is clearly shown as located next to open countryside, again confounding the notion of the banlieue as an urban wasteland. The spatial location of the cité also offers a visual link to earlier Maghrebi-French authored banlieue films such as Hexagone (Chibane, 1994) and Wesh-wesh: qu’est-ce qui se passe? (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2001), in which the cité borders countryside. However,

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while the opening of Neuilly sa mère! presents a positive, even romanticised, image of life on the estate that perpetuates the cité/city binary of the 1990s banlieue film (albeit in inverted form), it does not entirely ignore the limited opportunities for the young inhabitants on the housing estate. As part of the opening sequence to Neuilly sa mère! the camera also contemplates two young men, one working as a supermarket security guard, the other collecting litter on the estate. As Sami informs us, after listing the academic qualifications both men have obtained, ‘here, the only thing a degree is for is to make your family happy’. The opening sequence of the film located in the cité then gives way to a narrative twist that leads to a somewhat implausible transition to Paris where Sami is sent to live with his aunt. Aunt Djamila (Rachida Branki), we learn, is a qualified barrister, who married the (white) aristocratic owner of a multinational food producer after completing a work placement in one of his factories and now lives in an exclusive gated community in Neuilly-sur-Seine, effectively running the home and looking after her two step-children. The film proposes a Janus-faced image of the aunt. On the one hand, a potentially empowering image of the Maghrebi-French protagonist in which she appears as a qualified professional, a member of what Whithol de Wenden and Leveau term the beurgeoisie (2007). On the other hand, the backstory to Djamila’s place in the narrative undercuts her successful social mobility by effectively portraying her as a kept woman to a wealthy white, conservative French businessman, the eccentric Stanislas de Chazelle (Denis Podalydès). Djamila’s characterisation thus pushes the idea of the beurette from the cité who has made a success of herself to such excessive and improbable limits at the service of Neuilly sa mère!’s comic narrative that it renders her little more than a caricature of the beurgeoise she is supposed to be. Alongside her well-meaning, if neurotic, husband, the Chazelle household is completed by Djamila’s step-children: the rebellious Caroline (Chloé Coulloud), who welcomes Sami’s arrival though befriends him largely to challenge the privileged background in which she has been raised, and her younger brother, Charles (Jérémy Denisty), an arrogant teenager who harbours political ambitions and preposterously models himself on the gestures, rhetoric and demeanour of French president Nicholas Sarkozy (mayor of the Neuilly-sur-Seine commune between 1993 and 2002). During the first meal with the family, Charles refers to Sami as ‘racaille’ (scum), a direct reference to the insulting description infamously attached by Sarkozy as the then Interior Minister to the disenfranchised inhabitants of the deprived urban periphery who were involved in the outbreaks of rioting across the banlieues of France in the winter of 2005. Charles’s character is clearly meant to embody the perceived prejudices of the privileged residents of Neuilly to an outsider from the projects – and by locating them in the words and gestures of a pompous, privileged teenager, Bensalah immediately encourages us to ridicule them.

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Figure 2.4  Sami as ‘fish out of water’ in Neuilly sa mère! (La Ferrière, 2009).

As in Bensalah’s previous films, the Maghrebi-French youth from the banlieue encounters prejudice in this new environment at the same time as his own prejudices towards the unknown are challenged. Upon arriving at the Place de la Défense, the Parisian financial district that borders Neuilly, Sami immediately dismisses the city as a ‘wasteland’. He periodically sends messages back to his friends in Chalon, making them think that he is living in one of the rougher districts of the Parisian banlieue. In response, his friends ask him if there are tanks on the street, revealing that they are just as susceptible to the media misrepresentations of the deprived urban periphery as Sami’s new classmates in the private school he now attends. (And, as if the spectator needed any further reminders of the class divisions upon which the film is also based, one of Sami’s new classmates is a young girl named Sophie Bourgeois.) The comment by Sami’s friends from Chalon also suggests that the fish-out-ofwater comic narrative employed by Bensalah in Neuilly sa mère! has as much to do with the differences between Paris and the provinces as it does with ethnic difference. Nevertheless, in the eyes of his Neuilly classmates, Sami is unambiguously qualified as an outsider from the cité as the site of both socioeconomic exclusion and the site of the ethnic Other. In a similar approach to that found in Le Ciel, references to both banlieue street culture (such as the soundtrack by Cut Killer, who famously performed as the DJ in La Haine) and American popular culture abound in Neuilly sa mère! The film’s opening sequence from the estates in Chalon uses a track by US West Coast rapper Dr Dre, while the method of introducing each of Sami’s friends with a freeze-frame and name tag offers an inter-textual reference to

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both La Haine and in turn to Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1974), from where Kassovitz borrowed the idea in the first place. Such cultural references provide a counterpoint in the narrative to the bourgeois residence of the de Chazelle’s and Saint-Exupéry, the Catholic private school attended by Sami and Charles. However, they also function to engage with a mainstream French youth audience, for whom a commercialised version of the American-influenced multiculture of the banlieue has now been firmly incorporated into popular youth culture in France. The reality of this cultural crossover is illustrated when Sami’s classmate and rival for Marie’s (Joséphine Japy) affections confronts him with a spontaneous rap performance in the playground, intended to intimidate the Maghrebi-French youth from Chalon. Filmed from a low angle with the young, white would-be rappers aggressively postulating directly into the camera – the classic set up for the kind of music rap video that dominates channels such as MTV in France and across the western world – Sami’s classmates claim to deliver ‘true’ rap with a ‘real message’. Aside from the obvious humour derived from a trio of white, privately educated teenagers mimicking rappers from the working-class cités, the vignette also serves to emphasise the extent to which hip-hop has become firmly integrated (since at least the mid1990s) into mainstream French youth culture. In this respect the sequence also mirrors the type of crossover appeal derived from Bensalah’s screenplay that places a banlieue youth in one of the most affluent and conservative areas of Paris. The second key way in which the narrative of Neuilly sa mère! echoes that of Le Ciel is through the teen/school romance that blossoms between Sami and Caroline, the daughter of the Chazelle’s neighbours. As in Le Ciel, Neuilly sa mère! operates through the conventional generic structures of the cute meet to the misunderstanding between the potential couple, opposition to their union from a third party, and a final reconciliation that provides narrative resolution. Despite these narrative similarities, the experimentation with camera angles and different modes of surveying the Maghrebi-French banlieusard found in Le Ciel is replaced with far more conventional (mainstream) modes of lighting, camerawork and editing, all of which are placed firmly at the service of the teen romantic comedy narrative.9 The final scene in Neuilly sa mère! further confirms the more conventional path taken by the film, in contrast to the ending of Le Ciel discussed earlier. Despite Sami’s protestations at the start of the film that Chalon was the only place he would live, he and his mother relocate to the Cité Pablo-Picasso, a neighbouring HLM estate in Nanterre, in order for Sami to attend SaintExupéry. Just as importantly, the relocation allows Sami to be with Marie, who is now clearly identified as his girlfriend. Unlike in Le Ciel, then, the banlieue boy finally gets his uptown girl. However, any temptation to read this as progress towards the mixed-race couple that Tarr notes is so consistently denied

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in French cinema and even in films by Maghrebi-French directors in the 1980s and 1990s (Tarr 2005: 10–12) should be tempered by the context of Neuilly sa mère!’s narrative resolution. For the final message of the film appears to be that, in order for the Maghrebi-French banlieusard to get the white girl, he must detach himself from his origins in the multi-ethnic cité and integrate into the conservative, bourgeois environment of Neuilly-sur-Seine (though still being kept at a safe distance in the Cité Pablo-Picasso). Early in the narrative, soon after Sami arrives in the de Chazelle household, he recoils in disgust from the pork products that he finds in the kitchen while looking for a snack – an obvious reference to the cultural and religious difference of his North African immigrant origins. Aunt Djamela comments on the mix of food found in the family fridge in the following way: ‘we don’t force anyone to do anything here: everyone does as they please’. Despite the apparently liberal attitude in the de Chazelle household, Sami eventually discovers that the key to his successful integration into the affluent society of Neuilly-sur-Seine is, in fact, far more closely aligned with the advice given to him by the head teacher at Saint-Exupéry (Josiane Balasko) soon after his arrival at the school: ‘it’s up to you to make an effort to fit in’.10 In the final analysis, the impression left by Neuilly sa mère! is quite unlike Bensalah’s earlier films: in order for the Maghrebi-French community to access the mainstream they must ultimately leave their difference behind. Conclusion Popular or mainstream culture, and, in the case of this chapter, mainstream cinema, may indeed be the cultural terrain where the most intense manifestations or representations offered by hegemony in relation to difference (ethnicity, class and sexuality) are to be found. And yet it is precisely for this reason that the mainstream is the arena in which such reductive representations can and should be most actively (and effectively) contested. In other words, the mainstream is the terrain in which Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers can most directly challenge the political and socio-cultural influence of the dominant societal norm. It is also (and, just as importantly) the arena in which the modes and methods of representation employed by the dominant norm to win and shape consent – ensuring that the power of the social majority over subordinate groups appears as both legitimate and natural – can be most exposed to scrutiny and before the biggest possible audience. In this chapter we have certainly found evidence that a shift to the mainstream has occurred in the 2000s for some Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers. In particular this can be seen in the way that a growing number of bone fide Maghrebi-French and North African émigré stars have an increasing influence within the French film industry. However, as the analysis in this chapter of Djamel Bensalah’s career since the crossover success of Le Ciel has shown, while certain of Bensalah’s

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comedies display the potential to foreground the difference of the North African diaspora in a way that is both productive and challenging to mainstream audiences, too often his films appear to fall back on the largely reductive practices, structures and representational tropes employed by other mainstream, ­majority-ethnic-authored comedies dealing with issues of exclusion, difference and multiculturalism in contemporary French society. Indeed with Beur sur la ville (2011), it appears that Bensalah may have reached something of an impasse insofar as the film attracted smaller audiences than his previous features and was roundly panned by most critics for its unimaginative use of stereotypes in relation to immigrant minorities and banlieue culture (Ardjoum 2011). And yet, the realm of popular comedy in which Bensalah operates is not the only mainstream space, in terms of genre, where Maghrebi-French filmmakers have announced their presence in the 2000s. In the next chapter we shall turn our attention to the way in which certain directors of Maghrebi origin, most obviously Rachid Bouchareb, have, in far more confrontational ways than Bensalah, attempted to redefine the Eurocentric focus of the French historical epic or heritage film’s take on colonial history. Notes  1. Examples of such multiple mainstreams offered by Martel include: Bollywood cinema’s popularity in India and with Indians resident outside India; the regional influence of Manga, J-pop et K-pop in East-Asia; and telenovelas in Brazil which are exported across central and South America.   2. At the time of writing (June 2012) one of the most prominent actresses of Maghrebi origin is Aure Atika (who was born in Portugal to a Moroccan mother and a French father and grew up in Paris), though she cannot be classed as a star and has only enjoyed lead roles in a small number of films. Two other young Maghrebi-French actresses who have begun to establish themselves following success in films directed by Abdellatif Kechiche in the 2000s are Hafsia Herzi and Sabrina Ouazani.   3. Source: http://www.cbo-boxoffice.com.   4. The award was also shared with Bernard Blancan, who plays the role of Sergeant Martinez in Indigènes.   5. For a detailed analysis of this film, see Rosello (2002).   6. For a detailed discussion of Maghrebi-French protagonists in queer French cinemas of the 2000s, see Provencher (2007), Rees-Roberts (2008) and Waldron (2009).  7. Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006) attracted over 3 million spectators in France; Chouchou (Allouache, 2004) 3.8 million spectators in France; and Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Boon, 2008) 20.4 million.   8. Tarr has written sections on Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère!, Le Raïd and Il était une fois dans l’oued (Tarr 2005; 2009) though these form part of chapters or articles looking at a range of films and filmmakers, not specifically Bensalah.   9. We could argue that this change comes as a result of the fact that Neuilly sa mère! is written and produced, not directed, by Bensalah. However, as Bensalah’s input into the commentary on the French DVD release of Neuilly sa mère! shows, his involvement on set went beyond that of the producer or writer. 10. One of French cinema’s leading comic stars, Balasko also appeared in a cameo role in Le Raïd.

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3. COLONIAL FRACTURE AND THE COUNTER-HERITAGE FILM

As suggested in the previous chapter, the 2000s have been marked by a qualitative move towards the mainstream for a number of directors and actors of Maghrebi origin, a shift that has led to a greater variety of genres being used by these filmmakers in their work. At the heart of this chapter is an attempt to understand how what will be termed the counter-heritage cinema of MaghrebiFrench directors in the 2000s engages with wider public debates around the memorialisation of France’s colonial past (see for example Chevènement 2001; Rousso 1998; Ricoeur 2004; Blanchard et al. 2006). Writing in the late 1980s, outlining his concept of lieux de mémoires or sites of memory, historian Pierre Nora presciently described the concerns that would characterise subsequent debates in the following two decades: We have gone from the idea of a visible past to an invisible one; from a solid and steady past to our fractured past; from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history (Nora 1989: 17). Central to Nora’s thesis is the often conflictual relationship between memory and history. For Nora, memory is a perpetually active phenomenon that binds us to both past and future. It is affective, partial and, by its very nature, simultaneously multiple and specific (Nora 1989: 8–9). Put differently, there are at least as many memories as there are groups that remember. History, on the other hand, is a representation or narrative account of events, based on

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an organised knowledge of the past, distanced from any direct relationship to its subjects by its mode of interrogation of the past (Nora 1989: 9). Lieux de mémoires, then, are the spaces, monuments, archival objects and cultural texts (films, novels, songs and so on) that we use to stand in for the ‘loss’ of memory. Since there are no longer spontaneous memories, argues Nora, we must create (historical) archives and sites of memory – an act that leads us to think of both the institutionalisation of memory and history, on the one hand, and memory as the site of a counter-history, or alternative archive, that is created by ­marginal or disenfranchised groups, on the other hand. Whereas Nora views an antagonistic relationship between history and memory, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (2004) argues that without m ­ emories – things remembered – there could be no history. We are thus constantly involved in negotiating a representation – or evaluating a ­misrepresentation – of the past via a process that is filtered through history (what Ricoeur describes as the historiographical operation) and memory (Dauenhauer and Pellauer 2011). Moreover, Ricoeur argues that while certain facts may be ascertainable as based in historical ‘truth’, simply searching for this historical truth is not as important as exploring why certain versions of history are foregrounded at particular moments and seeking to understand what relationship a given ‘history’ has to individual and collective memories of the same event. The analysis of the politics and ethics of history and memory put forward by historians such as Nora and philosophers such as Ricoeur leads us inevitably to the controversial question of the memorialisation of France’s national and colonial past. The concept of memorialising encompasses the collective investment in monuments and other sites of memory, legislation promoting specific days of remembrance sanctioned by the state (and protests against such legislation), and acts of remembrance observed by specific communities or groups. It also concerns cultural texts, such as film, that engender a memorialisation of the past through acts of representation. All these acts of memorialisation bridge the gap to some extent between history and memory, as well as personal and collective or ‘social’ memory. As Cubitt points out, bound up in memorialisation is the forestalling of forgetting that is viewed less as a pragmatic precaution and more as ‘a moral imperative or pious duty’ (Cubitt 2007: 144). The act of memorialisation is therefore potentially highly contested and one that intersects with the ethics and politics of history and memory: how and by whom should the past be remembered? To what end? The right to represent the past produces sites of memory that, potentially, are less concerned with ‘what actually happened’ than they are with the influence of a particular version of history on successive presents. In practice the political and ethnic consequences of memorialising the nation’s history are often tested out against traumatic or contested moments in France’s recent past. If, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the focus of such

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debates was largely concerned with Vichy and collaboration with the Nazis (see, for example Rousso 1998), since the start of the 2000s attention has shifted to another occluded and potentially more divisive moment in recent French history: the Algerian war. For many years, the history of Algeria’s armed struggle for independence from France remained a largely taboo subject for French historians, politicians and, indeed, filmmakers. Prior to the declassifying of military archives pertaining to the war in the 1990s, legislation passed by successive French governments had actively colluded in a process of fabricating a collective amnesia around the war. Indeed, it was not until as late as 1999 that a law was passed in the French parliament formally designating the Algerian conflict as a war (Hargreaves 2005a: 3). Unlike Vichy, atrocities committed during the Algerian war were not legally qualified as war crimes, meaning that no French military personnel or politician could be held accountable in a court of law (Stora and Leclère 2007: 18). The declaration of independence in Algeria on 19 March 1962 marked a symbolic moment in the ultimate decline of the French colonial empire. The consequences of decolonisation also led to a rapid reconfiguring of relations between France and her former colonies, so that ‘[a]lmost overnight, centuries of overseas expansion and rule seemed to disappear from public consciousness in France’ (Hargreaves 2005a: 1). This systematic, institutionalised process of forgetting framed a political narrative of French disengagement from North Africa (the ‘invention of declonisation’) that made the messy episodes of French colonisation and the war for independence disappear, allowing the French to forget that Algeria had been an integral part of France since the 1830s and to escape many of the larger implications of a shared past (Shepard 2006: 2). However, at the same time as France rushed to forget, many of its citizens struggled to cope with the sense of loss and disruption caused by what they perceived to be the abandonment of one of the nation’s oldest colonies.1 Nor is it a question of the war having affected only a small minority: historian Benjamin Stora claims that of the 60 million inhabitants in France in the mid-2000s, over six million have been affected by the Algerian war through their own involvement in the conflict or by that of their parents (Stora 2006: 60).2 The malaise caused by this institutionalised process of ‘forgetting’ in the decades following Algerian independence has been compounded by a lack of consensus in France as to what the decolonisation of Algeria actually means. What emerges is a fragmented series of contested memories of the Algerian war and a contested notion of how the war itself should be memorialised (Harbi and Stora 2004: 9­–10). Paradoxically, as more time passes and more of these opposing memories – personal testimonies, historical studies as well as cultural representations of the conflict – permeate the public sphere and enter social memory, so the history of the Algerian war becomes more, not less, contested

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(Stora 2012). The difficulty that France has in dealing with the events of the Algerian war comes not simply from the fact that this is a painful and shameful episode in the nation’s recent past. The history of the war and its postcolonial legacy in France today reveals divisions that contrast with the tendency of French historians (and the broader nationalist ideology) to view national history in terms of a singular, homogenous past. In this respect, we must be mindful of the Maghrebi-French authored heritage films analysed in this chapter as another, potentially subversive, historical narrative or ‘site of memory’ that can be used to challenge this neo-colonial perception of a single, homogenous and Eurocentric national past. Moreover, given the ongoing and interrelated nature of the multiple histories of colonial history and, more specifically, the Algerian war for independence, it becomes almost impossible to speak of simply ‘replacing’ one history with another, or offering a historical narrative of events that is exclusively ‘French’ or ‘Algerian’. As the example of memorialising and representing the Algerian war shows, historical events are not simply isolated occurrences of human experiences but rather ‘variables of the plot’ (Ricoeur cited in Ashcroft 2001: 87), whose prominence within any given account of history is determined by the reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting. Moreover, in the context of cinematic narratives of the Algerian war, it is not just a concern with an ‘authentic’ historical narrative but also the way that history and memory are represented by those whose understanding of events is shaped second-hand by a backdrop of collective or social memory, giving a sense of the past that often extends beyond what they themselves personally remember. The Algerian war thus emerges as a contested site of both personal and collective memory, where opposing memories of the conflict confront one another. At the same time, it is a discursive site of social memory, where different versions of this history are played out, transmitted and disseminated through various means: political rhetoric, personal memoirs, historical analysis and cultural representation. Such divisions emerge not only between supporters of the war and those French citizens who opposed the war for ideological reasons, or between disputed historical accounts of the conflict, but also amongst a new generation of French citizens, the descendants of Algerian immigrants, the harkis and pieds-noirs exiled to France, who have inherited an often partial version of these events from their parents and who struggle to make sense of these conflicting accounts in relation to their own place within the French nation’s past and present. The problems arising from this collective amnesia on the part of the French nation and its institutions towards the history of the Algerian war is in fact symptomatic of wider problems concerning France’s relationship to its own colonial history. Despite the greater visibility of various lieux de mémoires relating to France’s colonial past, such as the recently opened Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Museum of the History of Immigration),

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historians Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (2006) argue that the (post-)colonial still remains firmly outside of France’s national history. The resulting fracture coloniale produced by this disconnect between the nation’s multicultural postcolonial present and its colonial past thus demands a critical rethinking of the legacy of colonialism that has been sorely lacking from the political, social and cultural sphere in France (Blanchard et al. 2006: 11–15). Without such a move, argue the proponents of the notion of fracture coloniale, French society will remain in a state of crisis, unable to move forward and challenge racism, Islamophobia, a refusal of multiculturalism and the continued ‘ethnicisation of social relations’ against both newly arrived immigrants and the French-born descendants from former French colonies (Blanchard et al. 2006: 25; Stora and Leclère 2007: 50). The controversy and division caused in France by these questions of colonial fracture and memorialising the colonial past are well illustrated by reactions to article four of the now infamous law of 23 February 2005, in which specific reference was made to the ‘requirement’ for the secondary-school history curriculum in France to stress the ‘positive benefits of French colonialism’. The clause provoked an outcry from French historians, writers and intellectuals, as well as governments of former French colonies, that eventually led to article four being revoked.3 The dubious act of promoting the ‘positive’ legacy of French colonialism in Africa was again thrown into the media spotlight two years later in a speech given by Nicolas Sarkozy to university students in Dakar. In the speech, the newly elected French president acknowledged the negative aspects of French colonialism but also beseeched his audience not to blame French colonial rule for Africa’s current ‘problems’ and to recognise the ‘benefits’ brought to Africa by the ‘good’ French colonisers.4 Leaving aside the crass arrogance and condescending, neo-colonial tone of the speech, Sarkozy’s address is revealing for its insistence on an anti-repentance approach to French colonial history that refuses to judge the past though the ‘prejudices’ of the present. As a self-appointed ‘anti-repentant’, Sarkozy, who is far from alone in the position that he adopts, sees dwelling on the past and apportioning blame to present-day France for the ‘crimes’ of French colonialism as both futile (how can the present population be held accountable for the actions of the past?) and divisive (to dwell on these events simply contributes to social or colonial ‘fracture’ within the nation).5 This position is in turn challenged by ‘repentants’ who demand that the past be interrogated because they feel the history of the oppressed has been ignored, thus creating an act of injustice. This polemic is further provoked, Blanchard suggests (2010: 2), by an inherent contradiction between a conception of the French Republic as the birthplace of the droits de l’homme (human rights) and the colonial project that saw France engage in a process of systematic and institutionalised ­exploitation, racism and violence.

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Nora’s concepts of sites of memory, the tension between history and memory and the notion of memory as multiple and fragmented, along with Ricoeur’s formulation of the historiographical operation, are of obvious relevance to a study of what this chapter considers to be the counter-postcolonial heritage films produced by Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers in the 2000s. As shall be argued, in the 2000s, it is in the domain of the historical narrative or heritage film – widely perceived as the most conservative, middlebrow and hegemonic of representational trends in contemporary French cinema – that the most visible and potential transformative challenges to the denial of colonial history have emerged. It is to the heritage film and its discontents that this chapter shall now turn its attention. The French Heritage Film, Colonial History and Postcolonial Counter-Heritage Though not a genre per se, the French heritage film, with its emphasis on historical narratives, literary adaptations and quality production values, has aligned itself with the concerns and tastes of middle-class and middlebrow majority French audiences since at least the mid-1980s. High profile successes such as Yves Robert’s Pagnol diptych La Gloire de mon père (1990) and Le Château de ma mère (1990), Indochine (Wargnier, 1991) and Germinal (Berri, 1993) confirmed the heritage film as a ‘hegemonic’ presence in French cinema of the 1990s, in the sense that it reflected a rise in the average age of cinema audiences in France (Powrie 1999: 2) at the same time as concerning itself with a view of history, culture and national identity that was almost exclusively Eurocentric. Moving into the 2000s, the heritage film has maintained a significant presence in terms of production and box-office success in the form of Le Pacte de loups (Gans, 2001) (5.4 million spectators); Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, 2004) (4.4 million spectators); and La Rafle (Bosch, 2010) (2.9 million spectators). Despite such continuities, it could be argued that Powrie’s description of the ‘hegemonic’ presence of the heritage film in the 1990s lessened in the following decade and for (at least) three distinct reasons. The first came as a result of the renewed success of popular French comedy in the 2000s, culminating in the phenomenal success of Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Boon, 2008) (20.4 million spectators) and most recently Intouchables (Toledano and Nakache, 2011) (19.2 million spectators). Such success has ensured that comedy has been firmly reinstated over and above the heritage film as the dominant popular genre of French cinema – if, indeed, it ever went away (Palmer 2011: 118). A second challenge to the heritage film’s hegemony of the 1990s came in what appears as a calculated attempt on the part of the filmmakers and their backers to appeal to a younger audience. A number of high-profile productions thus

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emerge in the 2000s – most obviously Le Pacte de loups and Vidocq (Pitof, 2001) – that incorporate elements of the Hollywood-style action movie as well as references to Chinese (Hong Kong) cinema of the 1970s through the inclusion of explosive, choreographed fight scenes. This marks a significant shift from heritage films of the 1980s and 1990s, where their status as mainstream French (national) cinema was defined principally by their difference from Hollywood (Vincendeau 1995: 30-2). Finally, and of most direct interest to this study, the dominant presence of the heritage film in French cinema of the 2000s is challenged by the emergence from the mid-2000s of a cluster of Maghrebi-French-authored films that are concerned specifically with exploring and exposing France’s colonial history and emphasising its direct impact on the nation’s postcolonial present. If we estimate that between 35 and 40 feature films directed by directors of Maghrebi origin have been released in France between 2000 and 2011, it is significant that six of these films, or approximately 15 per cent of the total (Inch’allah dimanche [Benguigui, 2001], Indigènes [Bouchareb, 2006], Cartouches gauloises [Charef, 2007], Hors-la-loi [Bouchareb, 2010], Les Hommes libres [Ferroukhi, 2011], and the TV film Nuit Noire [Tasma, 2005]), have been devoted to Franco-Algerian colonial histories, narrated from the perspective of Maghrebi-immigrant protagonists. It is therefore possible to argue that the significance of these films far outweighs their number and that they contribute to a wider trend of historical dramas produced in France during the 2000s that either explicitly or implicitly address the issues of memorialisation or trauma of the Algerian war and its aftermath, or on French colonialism more generally.6 Finally, this interest in historical narratives amongst Maghrebi-French directors can also be seen to incorporate narratives that predate the presence of an extended North African diaspora in France: Zaïna, cavalière de l’Atlas (Guerdjou, 2005), Vénus noire (Kechiche, 2010) and Les Chants de Mandrin (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2012). Obviously, this historical turn in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking since the 2000s did not occur in isolation. These films react to production trends and dominant modes of representing history on screen in French cinema at the same time as they draw on existing representations of colonial and immigrant history offered by a handful of directors of Maghrbeiorigin working in France in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally they are informed by, and contribute to, more general debates taking place in both France and the Maghreb in the 2000s about how this shared colonial past should be remembered and portrayed on screen. In order to understand the reasons for this historical turn in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in the 2000s, it is therefore necessary to consider how these films have developed in relation to earlier historical narratives directed by filmmakers of Maghrebiimmigrant origin, as well as to the heritage film in France since the 1980s.

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Re-presenting Franco-Maghrebi History in the 1980s and 1990s Though the heritage film came to prominence in France in the 1980s, the trend for historical narratives, literary adaptations or films about history did not simply begin at this time and can be traced back to the earliest years of French cinema with multiple silent adaptations of works by canonical authors such as Hugo and Dumas (Pidduck 2005: 30–7). Oscherwitz identifies a nineteenth-century interpretation of francité in the French heritage film, which is defined by a tendency to generate ‘heritage space’ rather than narrative space, a nostalgia for the Revolution and Third Republic, and a privileging of past over present. Yet despite this attachment to the past, Oscherwitz opines that French heritage films are less about representing the past or shared history than they are about valorising and recreating a past that serves to counter or allay ­anxieties of the present (Oscherwitz 2005: 193). French heritage films of the 1990s cannot therefore simply be seen be seen as a wholesale retreat to the past to avoid the realities of the present – for example, La Reine Margot (Chéreau 1994) has been interpreted as an allegory of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Austin 1996: 167), while Ridicule can be read as a commentary on the political scandal that emerged in France during the 1980s when untested blood supplies used to treat hemophiliacs were found to come from donors who were HIV positive (Rosello 1999: 82). Modifying Oscherwitz’s original position, then, we might read the heritage film as embodying a retreat from a series of specific political issues relating to the present. Films such as the Pagnol diptych, Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources or Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990) thus withdraw to the nostalgic safety of a place and time (late-­nineteenth-century Province, pre-Revolutionary France) at the very moment when France was undergoing a series of very public debates around questions of national identity, multiculturalism and citizenship – debates that were, moreover, excessively focused on France’s non-European immigrant population and their French-born descendants. Indeed, even those heritage films of the 1990s, such as Le Colonel Chabert (Angelo, 1994), that are darker in tone avoid locating their narratives in the spatio-temporal ­location of the French colonies. A cluster of heritage films relating to colonial history does, however, emerge in the early 1990s. These can broadly be divided into two groups.7 The first are made with relatively modest budgets and directed by French women – Chocolat (Denis, 1988), Outremer (Rouan, 1990), Bal du gouverneur (Pisier, 1990). In these films, whose position broadly reflects an anti-colonial mentality, France’s colonial past is viewed through the subjectivity of young female protagonists, employing the dynamics of the paternalistic family unit as microcosm of French colonial rule (Hayward 2005: 249). The second group or trend, which

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emerged in the early 1990s and had a far greater impact at the box-office, can be more directly aligned with what is understood by the heritage film of the late 1980s and 1990s, include epic reconstructions of French colonial history such as L’Amant (Annaud, 1992), Indochine and Diên Biên Phú (Schoendoerffer, 1992). In these films we are offered a specifically Eurocentric view of colonial history that portrays the French colonies as historical spectacle – with no allegorical or historical link to the present day – thus ensuring the continued denial of colonial fracture (Rollet 1999; Tarr 1997: 62–3). While Powrie identifies Indochine, Diên Biên Phú and others as ‘postcolonial’ heritage films (Powrie 1999: 6), in many ways ‘neo-colonial’ would be a more appropriate label, since the representation of France’s colonial past offered by these films shows little or no appreciation of the (former) coloniser’s continuing agency over the narrative of history and no real recognition of the legacy of the colonial past on France’s postcolonial present. As a cinematic lament for a nostalgic, exoticised and highly selective view of France’s colonial past (Norindr 1996: 138–40), the neo-colonial heritage film of the 1990s thus conveniently sidesteps the brutality, exploitation and institutionalised violence of the colonial system, and indeed, the postcolonial legacy of the history of ‘Greater France’. Or, as is the case in Indochine, the neo-colonial heritage film incorporates them into the ‘epic’ spectacle of the historical narrative represented on-screen. This retreat to the past can therefore be seen as a means of addressing, memorialising and in some cases even celebrating France’s colonial history without actually having to make a conscious link to the contemporary reality of a Republican model for citizenship and national identity that was increasingly incapable of adapting to the realities of a pluri-ethnic, multicultural French society, whose very existence had come about a direct result of immigration from former French colonies. And yet, like the (neo-)colonial heritage film’s view of history, the survey of historical narratives in French cinema of the 1990s outlined above only tells part of the story. It certainly is true to say that the majority of filmmakers of Maghrebi descent working in France in the 1980s and 1990s were more preoccupied with social realist narratives that dealt with issues of immigration, integration, racism and exclusion in the here and now of contemporary French society than in the colonial past. However, a handful of films directed by Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers during this period – Les Sacrifiés (Touita, 1982), Les Folles années du twist (Zemmouri, 1983), Sous les pieds des femmes (Krim, 1997), Vivre au paradis (Guerdjou, 1999) – presented an alternative to the Eurocentric view of colonial history found in French cinema of the 1990s. All four films locate the struggle against colonial oppression in a specific historical moment, that of the Algerian war. While Zemmouri’s Les Folles années du Twist takes place in Algeria and proposes satire and absurdist comedy as, paradoxically, the only sane means of dealing

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with the trauma and violence of the war, the other three films are located in France and consider the role played by the Algerian diaspora in the struggle for freedom from French colonial rule. As such they offer a model that would be taken up years later by Bouchareb in his historical epic Hors-la-loi. Locating the films in the immigrant quartiers and bidonvilles on the outskirts of Paris is significant in that it shows how the Algerian war cannot simply be portrayed as a conflict that took place ‘elsewhere’ (and thus outside of French history). Moreover, through the depiction of in-fighting between the FLN (National Liberation Front) and MNA (Algerian Nationalist Movement) in the bidonvilles of Nanterre, Les Sacrifiés reminds spectators of the fact that that this was not simply a war that pitted ‘French’ against ‘Algerian’ but also French against French and Algerian against Algerian – a historical ‘truth’ that was, for varying motives, denied by both the French and Algerian authorities at specific points during and after the war. Indeed, so concerned were the Algerian authorities in the early 1980s to suppress Touita’s ‘unofficial’ version of not just French colonial but also Algerian national history that, according to Touita, they secured the distribution rights in the Maghreb in order to withhold the film from Algerian screens (Touita in Dhoukar 1990: 182). Released more than a decade after Les Sacrifiés, Sous les pieds des femmes and Vivre au paradis share with Touita’s film a desire to re-examine the complex and precarious situation faced by Algerian migrants in France during the war. The former is, however, perhaps more closely linked to Touita’s film in the sense that it delivers a ‘pointed critique of the FLN [and] denounces [French] police violence’ (Durmelat 2011: 101). Sous les pieds des femmes is also, of course, notable for the way in which it considers the Algerian war and its effect from both an émigré and, just as importantly, a female perspective. For its part, Vivre au paradis directly addresses one of the most shameful and controversial events in the history of Maghrebi colonial migration to France, through its depiction in a seven-minute sequence of the events of 17 October 1961, where scores of Algerian immigrants protesting against an imposed curfew in Paris were attacked and killed by the police, with bodies being dumped in the Seine. While the depiction of these events unambiguously locates the film in the historical context of the Algerian war for independence, the narrative of Vivre au paradis is also concerned with a broader history of North African post-war migration to France. Moreover, the fact that Vivre au paradis (like Sous les pieds des femmes) is a film about first-generation Algerian generation immigrant history and the Algerian war, directed by a second-­ Maghrebi-French or beur filmmaker, complicates Frodon’s observation (2004: 76) that the Algerian war has not made its way into collective French memory (or its cultural ciphers such as cinema) due to the fact that it is located outside, rather than inside of, the nation’s past. In this chapter, the above Maghrebi-authored films, and those like them that

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followed in the 2000s, will be seen to promote a counter-heritage cinema. The term is intended to highlight the way that such films draw on the iconography and representational practices of the heritage film – such as a self-awareness of the act of historical reconstruction and questions of authenticity (Vincendeau 2001b: xviii) – while challenging dominant neo-colonial or ‘anti-repentant’ modes of re-presenting and memorialising the past found in earlier mainstream heritage films of the 1980s and 1990s. Admittedly, it would be somewhat naïve to argue that the four films listed above, released across two decades, viewed by niche audiences, and confined to the margins of the industry in terms of funding and access to commercial distribution and exhibition networks, offer a highly visible alternative to the neo-colonial heritage films of the 1990s. Nevertheless, the presence of these dissenting voices should not go unremarked since they arguably sow the seeds of historical counter-narratives that culminated in the crossover success of Bouchareb’s Indigènes in 2006. Indeed, the fact that Rachid Bouchareb, along with Alain Bréhat of 3B productions, was the co-producer of Vivre au paradis only serves to reinforce the argument that Maghrebi-French and North African émigré directors working in the 2000s were well aware of earlier attempts by filmmakers of Maghrebi-origin to ­challenge the dominant cinematic narrative around France’s colonial past. Broadly speaking, we can identify two tendencies in Maghrebi-Frenchauthored counter-heritage films of the 2000s towards the representation of colonial history, the Algerian war and the history of Maghrebi immigration to France. The first employs the techniques of the heritage film (big budget productions, stars, large-scale reconstructions of historical events) to offer a ­ counter-history or alternative memorialisation of France’s colonial past capable of reaching a mainstream audience. They are concerned specifically with offering an alternative or corrected version of the existing (national) historical narrative as it relates to colonialism, immigration or the Algerian war. In French cinema of the 2000s we are talking specifically about the historical epics directed by Rachid Bouchareb (Indigènes and Hors-la-loi) that will be analysed in detail in the final part of this chapter. We might also include Ferroukhi’s Les Hommes libres in this category, since, like Indigènes, the film attempts to foreground the role that was played by North African colonial subjects in the struggle against Nazi tyranny in World War II. In the case of Les Hommes libres, the Paris mosque (originally constructed in the 1920s by the French state as a recognition for the contribution of Muslim colonial troops in the Great War) forms the backdrop for a historical drama that explores the contribution of Algerian immigrants to the Resistance. The second of these tendencies concerns historical films by directors of Maghrebi origin, generally working on far more limited production budgets and with a more restricted access to mainstream audiences. These films, such as Cartouches gauloises and Inch’allah dimanche, provide an intimate,

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highly subjective portrayal of individual experiences of colonial trauma and the history of immigration. Here the intention is not necessarily to replace one dominant historical narrative with another, nor to represent protagonists who play a pivotal role in altering the course of grand historical events. Taken individually, the narratives of these films are not sufficient to inform or instigate wider social political change. Rather they are concerned with exploring the personal memories of ‘ordinary’ North African immigrant protagonists to foreground a more nuanced, collective understanding of ‘national’ historical events as shaped by multiple perspectives. In this case they may even function as a cinematic investigation into personal family histories of immigration or North African colonial history. Here then, we are concerned less with a memorialisation of colonial history than with uncovering personal memories of this past that inform a wider collective social memory concerning immigration and colonialism in France. The concern in these films with what is now commonly refered to as ‘history from below’ offers a further link in the context of French cinema to the ‘new history film’ of the 1970s (Forbes 1992: 231–44). It is from this perspective of ‘history from below’ that such films are able to challenge the hegemonic and Eurocentric grand narratives of colonial history and Maghrebi immigration to France. What all of these historical films by directors of Maghrebi origin share is a desire to speak for a previous generation who were either denied a voice or else chose, for fear of reprisals, out of political powerlessness or due to a sense of the socio-economic precariousness of their situation in France, to remain silent. Effectively, films such as Vivre au paradis, Sous les pieds des femmes, Inch’allah dimanche and Indigènes, are part of the generation of artists described by Azouz Begag as ‘les bâtisseurs de la mémoire’ (the builders of memory) (Begag in Médioni 1999: 60). Inch’allah dimanche Inch’allah dimanche was the first narrative feature film directed by the Maghrebi-French TV producer, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Yamina Benguigui. By the time of the film’s release, Benguigui was already relatively well known in France, due largely to the success of her documentary on North African immigration to France, Mémoires d’immigrés: l’hertitage maghrébin (1997) which was first screened on television and subsequently in cinemas in France, following the response by television audiences and critics to the programme. However, even this previous success could not guarantee Benguigui access to significant production funds or mainstream distribution for her first narrative film: Inch’allah dimanche was made for a modest budget of €2.33m, released on 70 copies in France and attracted a total audience of 88 612.

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The film begins with text superimposed onto a black screen, establishing the historical context for the narrative that will follow, namely the policy of regroupement familial undertaken by the French government in the mid1970s that allowed North African immigrants already working in France to bring their immediate family to reside with them in the Hexagone. This opening sequence proceeds to depict the traumatic departure of Zouina (Fejria Deliba) from the port of Algiers to France. Having boarded the boat with her three children and mother-in-law, Zouina rushes back down the gangway to embrace through the iron railings the female relatives who have come to say goodbye. The soundtrack is dominated by the anguished cries of her mother and extended family. The port is shot in sepia tones, indicating a sense of nostalgia on the part of the migrant for a ‘lost’ Algeria, while also giving a warmth to the image that contrasts with the cold, grey palate that dominates upon Zouina’s arrival in France. With its emphasis on period reconstruction and historical fidelity (indicated by the attention to costume and décor as well as the opening text which establishes the historical moment in which this narrative is located), Inch’allah dimanche displays a concern with recreating the past similar to that found in mainstream heritage films of the same period. However, the film’s subject matter (North African immigration to France) ensures that the narrative emerges in a counter-heritage space, reconstructing a highly personalised experience of a particular history that has traditionally been located outside of the national consciousness. Any sense that we might be moving towards a grand historical reconstruction of this particular moment in the history of Algerian immigration to France (history from above) such as might be offered in the heritage film is thus quickly replaced by an intensely personal narrative of exile and the trauma of displacement experienced by Zouina (history from below). On the one hand, Zouina’s exile is emphasised by her geographical destination – she does not arrive in one of the bidonvilles or immigrant neighbourhoods of the larger French cities but rather in Saint Quentin, a small, provincial town in the Picardie region. On the other hand, the film qualifies her in broader terms as the exiled agent of a marginalised history of migration that has been elided in the ‘official’ histories of both Algeria and France – despite the fact that, as a newly arrived immigrant, effectively she can now claim to be part of both these national histories. In the context of Maghbrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking, Inch’allah dimanche is distinctive, not only because it represents one of the few feature films directed by a Maghbrebi-French woman to date but also for the degree of agency it gives to the female immigrant protagonist at the centre of its narrative. We are offered hardly any insight into the husband’s thoughts and feelings about his emigration to France. So intensely is the narrative focused on Zouina that she appears in virtually every scene of the film.

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Figure 3.1  Zouina arrives in the French provinces, Inchallah dimanche (Benguigui, 2001).

Nor does Benguigui attempt to present the outcome of regroupement familial in idealistic or nostalgic terms as a longed-for reunion between husband and wife. In the scene where Zouina’s husband arrives to collect his family from Saint Quentin station, Zouina greets him with a brief, emotionless embrace while her thoughts, presented in voiceover in Arabic, suggest that she barely remembers her husband’s appearance (‘I had forgotten that he had a moustache’). Later, when alone for the first time since leaving Algeria, in the marital bedroom of her new family home (a poorly furnished, unwelcoming terraced house), she weeps uncontrollably. For his part, after working in France for ten years, Zouina’s husband Ahmed (Zinedine Soualem) seems equally uncomfortable with the family’s arrival. In many ways he affects his own narrative of separation, exchanging the male world of the immigrant foyer for the unfamiliar environment of the family home.8 He shows no sympathy for Zouina’s distress at being separated from her extended family in Algeria, devoting far more time and attention to his mother and soon resorting to the violent abuse of his wife for what he perceives as her attempts to undermine his authority. If Inch’allah dimanche offers a history from below of Algerian immigration to France, it is one in which the memories of the film’s central protagonist are doubly marginalised due to Zouina’s status as, on the one hand, a newly arrived immigrant to France and, on the other, as a woman constrained (in the immigrant home at least) by the patriarchal traditions of an Arabo-Islamic, Maghrebi culture. Any sense of solidarity or hope for Zouina’s future in Inch’allah dimanche is, in fact, offered by the French women whom she befriends, rather than

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from within the diasporic community that she mistakenly thinks will offer her support. Zouina’s mother-in-law, Aïcha (Rabia Mokeddem) is presented as an overbearing and interfering matriarch who bullies her daughter-in-law, is suspicious of any attempts made by her to engage with the outside world and tacitly supports her son’s violence towards his wife. When, unbeknown to her husband, Zouina finally manages to track down Malika (Amina Annabi), the only other Algerian women in the town who has also come to join her husband, she is met with the same suspicion and hostility shown by her mother-in-law and ejected from the women’s home. In contrast, her young French neighbour, Nicole (Mathilde Seigner), is a working-class divorcee who speaks to Zouina about female emancipation, offering her gifts of make-up from the factory where she works in an attempt to build up Zouina’s confidence. The tensions created by the ongoing feud between Zouina and her other xenophobic neighbour are largely diffused by moments of comic relief and eventually resolved. Even Madame Manant (Marie-France Pisier), the widow of a French colonel killed in Algeria, agrees to help Zouina in her search for Malika. The French widow’s presence in the narrative even elicits a rare moment of sympathy for Aïcha, when Madame Manant’s gift to Zouina of a book about Algeria provokes Zouina’s mother-in-law to spontaneously recollect the physical abuse she suffered as a servant in colonial Algeria. It is through this seemingly incongruous coupling of the Algerian immigrant (Zouina) and the military widow (Madame Manant) that memories of the Algerian war surface momentarily in the narrative of Inch’allah dimanche. The two women first meet by chance in a military cemetery, itself a lieu de mémoire and thus a symbolic choice of location on the part of Benguigui, given its function as a key site of memorialisation of the nation’s past. Here the widow, whose grief is still palpable, tells Zouina of her anguish that her husband’s body was never recovered; left in an unknown location in Algeria instead of being buried on French soil. At a subsequent meeting in Madame Manant’s home, where her husband’s army medals adorn the walls, Zouina studies photographs documenting his military service in Algeria, accompanied by the non-diegetic soundtrack of a Berber song whose lyrics evoke the French army’s torture of Algerians during the conflict. The opposing memories of the Algerian war contained within the Berber song and the French military photographs should logically confirm the insurmountable barrier between Zouina and Madame Manant. Instead, as the song continues to play in the background, the two women come into closer contact with one another as their friendship blossoms before us on-screen. While this clearly ‘symbolic reconciliation’ (Durmelat 2011: 100) displays the extent to which even opposing French and Algerian memories of the war cannot be separated neatly from one another, we might also interpret this scene as yet another instance in Inch’allah dimanche where a modern, western female solidarity is able to transcend any

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barriers put in its way and is, ultimately, presented as by far the best solution for Zouina’s future in France. The alternative to integration is for Zouina to remain effectively imprisoned in her home as victim of Arabo-Islamic patriarchy and ­ghettoised by her difference as a member of a marginalised immigrant minority. Inch’allah dimanche is thus consistent with the progressive Republican credentials displayed by Benguigui in her other documentaries and television dramas. Ultimately it is a film that is as concerned with emphasising the ‘right’ path for the contemporary integration of women of North African immigrant origin into French society as it is with memorialising the history of Algerian immigration and regroupement familial as a counter-heritage or part of collective social memory in France. In this respect, rather than presenting a simple ‘memory of immigration’, the film’s final sequence, where Zouina finds the strength to stand up to her husband after the kindness shown to her by a local bus driver, can be viewed as a kind of wish fulfillment on the part of Benguigui of the self-empowerment offered by the modern, westernised French Republic to the oppressed female immigrant. Cartouches gauloises Released in 2007, Cartouches gauloises, the eighth feature film written and directed by veteran beur filmmaker, playwright and novelist Mehdi Charef, shares similarities with Inch’allah dimanche in terms of its production budget (€1.79m), audience reach (99 875 spectators in France) and the way it presents a largely conciliatory narrative about one of the most contentious periods in France’s colonial history (the Algerian war) based on the director’s own memories of events. In part, the conciliatory nature of the film can be explained by the fact that Cartouches gauloises was a Franco-Algerian co-production, receiving support from both the CNC (France) and the Algerian Ministry of Culture. Charef’s approach to the history and memorialisation of the war in Cartouches gauloises aims to offer a measured and conciliatory view of events that, while in no way eliding the violence and trauma caused by the conflict, nonetheless attempts to find common ground between its protagonists. The film’s title itself illustrates this point: referring, on the one hand, to the French cigarettes that Charef associates with his youth, indicating the everyday presence of France in Algeria during the colonial period and, on the other hand, to the meaning of cartouches as (bullet) cartridges – evoking colonial oppression and the violent struggle for liberation in Algeria. Central to this strategy of consolidating multiple histories and memories of the war in the film’s narrative is the character of Ali (Mohamed Faouzi Ali Cherif), an Algerian schoolboy (and Charef’s alter-ego). Ali’s job delivering newspapers allows him to move between all areas of a divided society in the

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Figure 3.2  Ali as witness to Franco-Algerian colonial history in Cartouches gauloises (Charef, 2007).

death-throes of French colonial rule. The young boy’s ubiquitous presence across and within multiple spaces in French-Algerian colonial society – from the French army barracks, to the brothel where Algerian prostitutes serve French colonials and soldiers, to the colonial districts of Algiers , to his local village where FLN insurgents are being sheltered – thus permits the film to present the final days of the Algerian war from all perspectives: FLN fighters and supporters, harkis, pieds-noirs, even French soldiers. Cartouches gauloises is highly unusual in that it refuses to takes sides and is thus diametrically opposed to the fragmented, contested ‘war of memories’ that has typically characterised the memorialisation of the Algerian war. It depicts the violence of the French army against indigenous civilians and the FLN at the same time as it portrays the bloody reprisals of the moudjahidins (Algerian freedomfighters) against the pieds-noirs landowners. Similarly, the French army is portrayed as a marauding presence (raiding villages, randomly killing suspected ‘terrorists’, raping villagers) as well as a force for good (offering health-checks and medicine to Algerian children). Ali’s youthful and relatively innocent perspective also permits access to these various viewpoints in a non-judgemental way. Unlike Zouina in Inch’allah dimanche, who is largely cut off from the community around her, Ali is the eyes and ears through which a decisive moment in French and Algerian (colonial) history is presented on screen. Acts of war permeate the childhood spaces as well as the routine of Ali and his friends: the mother’s bedtime story about freedom fighters; the bombing of a French café to which Ali delivers newspapers; the moudjahidin shot by French soldiers under the railway bridge, where Ali and his friends have built a den. However, it is not merely Ali’s childlike innocence but also the fact that he and his friends construct an alternative kind of reality; not so much shielding the spectator from the violent realities of the

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war but, rather, isolating us in a particular moment of childhood nostalgia through which all these events are effectively filtered. For example, while the traumatic departure of pied noir families is foregrounded in the film, the anguish experienced by the adults of a sense of humiliation of defeat and exile from ‘their’ land to France is treated by Ali primarily as regret for the gradual departure of his gang of friends. As with Benguigui’s witnessing of Algerian immigration to France and the policy of regroupement familial, Charef’s representation of the final days of the Algerian war is coloured by the fact that the film is semi-autobiographical. Yet this intimate act of witnessing history on-screen is also bound up in the wider societal debates around colonial fracture and the memorialisation of colonial history taking place in France during the 2000s. Finally it is related to Begag’s idea of filmmakers of Maghrebi origin as being ‘builders of memory’, constructing a history of Maghrebi immigration to France on behalf of their parents who, for various reasons, chose to remain silent.9 In this respect, Charef’s historical narrative, like most others produced, written and directed by French filmmakers of North African origin since the late 1990s, is located between the act of witnessing (often traumatic) first-hand memories of colonial oppression or exclusion and the realm of ‘post-memory’; the way in which second or subsequent generations relate to and reconstruct the cultural, historical or collective traumas experienced by their parents – experiences that the second generation may remember only as the narratives and images with which they grew up but that are ‘so powerful that they appear to constitute memories in their own right’ (Hecker 2008: 67). Thus in Cartouche gauloises many of the events that we see in the film – the harki soldier’s aggressive confrontation of Ali’s mother in the street, the murder of Ali’s aunt by French soldiers for sheltering FLN fighters, Ali’s friendship with the projectionist at the local cinema, where he finds refuge from the chaos of the conflict that surrounds him – were witnessed first-hand by Charef as a young boy. Charef had in fact been working on the screenplay for four years prior to the film’s production and had held onto the idea of the film for much longer. In part, the delay in completing the screenplay and moving the film into production had come from an act of self-censure: certain scenes (such as the killing of his aunt by French soldiers) were so traumatic for the director to revisit that he was afraid of committing such memories to the page. Charef was also concerned that a French audience would perceive the subsequent screenplay as the act of ‘the little Algerian settling scores with France’ (Charef cited in Chemin, Gramard and Mam 2007). As with virtually all other Maghrebi-French filmmakers approaching similar historical subjects, Charef’s depictions of an already contested history are further complicated by the fact that he is personally invested in both French and Algerian society and history and thus cannot simply choose sides.

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As a result, Cartouches gauloises considers a history of the Algerian war that refuses the position of the anti-imperial nationalist narrative that dominated Algerian cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s (Armes and Malkmus 1991: 65–6). However, it also rejects more recent Eurocentric interpretations of colonial history found in the French heritage film of the 1990s, which have mostly denied or elided the more controversial and painful aspects of French colonialism in favour of a personalised sense of colonial nostalgia. Charef’s narrative is undoubtedly imbued with nostalgia but it is for the childhood friendships that were shattered in the aftermath of the war, not for the colonial system itself. Particularly striking is the agency given to the pied noir community in the narrative. Even as the violent conflict continues between the FLN resistance and the French army, Cartouches gauloises depicts the routine of everyday relations between the pieds-noirs and the indigenous Algerian population that in some cases even suggests genuine friendship and empathy between the coloniser and colonised. The local station-master’s plea to Ali (‘don’t forget us, or there’ll be nothing left of us’) is a retrospective acknowledgement of the fact that remembrance of the pieds-noirs’ presence in Algeria and the trauma of their departure and exile to France is dependent on the individual and collective (folk) memoires of both the pieds-noirs and the local Algerian population. The pieds-noirs will effectively be written out of both Algerian national history (as part of the colonising presence) and of French national history, as the presence in Algeria of European settlers is one that the nation will rush to forget following the demise of the colonial empire. The main crime of the pieds-noirs, Cartouches gauloises seems to suggest somewhat simplistically, is to ‘have loved Algeria too much’ (Durmelat 2011: 106). In depicting such a balanced range of perspectives, however, Charef risks presenting little more than a series of vignettes about the final days of the Algerian war – evacuating the very real war of memories that continues to this day, with arguably an even greater intensity. The narrative also seems to compress the chronology of the war itself. For by the time that the narrative of Cartouches gauloises take place (April–May 1962), certain of the events depicted on screen, such as the French army’s ground war against FLN insurgents and the bombing of French public spaces by the FLN, in fact belonged to a much earlier period in the war and appear to be included largely for dramatic effect. Indeed, in spite of the chaos and violence depicted in the film, which undoubtedly existed in and beyond the final days and weeks of the conflict, the war was effectively over –­ and had been for many months as far as politicians in France and Algeria were concerned. Even if sporadic violence did take place at this time most of it was, in fact, perpetuated by militant factions within the pied noir community, who vehemently resisted Paris’ abandonment of ‘French Algeria’. It was not, therefore, a question of if the French would depart but rather when and how. This sense of fatalism is imbued in the narrative of Cartouches gauloises. As

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s­ pectators, we are immersed in the endgame of a brutal war for independence that had been preceded by an equally traumatic period of colonial occupation. Indeed, it is precisely this sense of fatalism that, in some ways, also allows Charef to perceive this historical moment from all sides. And yet, in an extended interview following the release of Cartouche gauloises, Charef appeared to deny the film’s quite obvious engagement with colonial history: But it isn’t a film about the Algerian war. I couldn’t make that. It is simply about what happened there, in this little village at this particular time between a group of school friends. (Charef in Chemin, Gramard and Mam 2007) In a sense we might read this remark by Charef as indicative of the trauma he experienced during the war itself. A trauma that denies recourse to historical reconstruction of anything other than vignettes of a conciliatory narrative, returning to the traumatic event as ‘that which simultaneously demands urgent representation but shatters all potential frames of comprehension and ­reference’ (Guerin and Hallas 2007: 3).

Hors-la-loi and Indigènes: Memorializing the Past, Confronting the Present Of all the Maghrebi-French-authored films of the 2000s that deal with the memorialisation of Franco-Maghrebi colonial history, the most prominent are undoubtedly Indigènes and Hors-la-loi, directed by veteran Maghrebi-French director Rachid Bouchareb.10 Indigènes narrates the hidden history of the pivotal role played by colonial soldiers from Africa in the Allied liberation of Europe from Nazi oppression during the Second World War. Despite its focus on French colonial history, the film employs the generic codes and conventions of the Hollywood war movie (Hargreaves 2007: 205), playing out its grand historical narrative through the experiences of four colonial soldiers from North Africa: Saïd (Jamel Debbouze), Yassir (Samy Naceri), Messaoud (Roschy Zem) and Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila). As is now well known, Indigènes enjoyed critical and commercial success in France and abroad on a scale previously unheard of for a Maghrebi-French director, attracting 3 million spectators and numerous awards, including a collective best actor award for the five male leads at Cannes and a nomination for best foreign-language film at the 2007 Oscars. As a result of the film’s phenomenal success as well as its perceived influence on changing the law concerning war pensions and French attitudes relating to the debt owed to African colonial soldiers, Indigènes tends to be remembered more for its political or sociological impact than its cinematic or artistic merits (Hargreaves 2007: 205).

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Mainstream success has, perhaps inevitably, brought wider public scrutiny of Indigènes’s historical representation of France’s colonial past and its relationship and relevance to the nation’s postcolonial present. As a result, a number of historians, critics and scholars have subsequently approached the film with greater caution and certain reservations. In most cases, the concern is less with the historical ‘facts’ as they are represented to us in the film than it is with the ethical implications of how Bouchareb uses and applies this representation of history to the political imperatives of contemporary debates about the memorialisation of France’s colonial past. Mireille Rosello describes experiencing a mixture of ‘political satisfaction and deep malaise’ on viewing the film, attributing this ambivalence to a tension in the film’s narrative that ‘changes a historical canon rather than our relationship to a historical truth’ (Rosello 2011a: 117­–18). The result is, she concludes, an uncomfortable opposition that ‘pretends to split ethics and politics’ when the relationship between fictional historical rewritings and historical progress is ‘always the site of an ethical dispute’ (Rosello 2011a: 123). Rosello’s issues with the film, then, are not to do with its politics or even its portrayal of historical events but with the way that this ‘new’, politically effective version of history apparently refuses any subsequent scrutiny of its own version of historical truth (Rosello 2010: 111). Elsewhere, historian Nicola Cooper argues that the limited historical timeframe of the film also allows Indigènes to engage in its own act of forgetting, conveniently sidestepping the more controversial and divisive events of Franco-Algerian colonial history, such as the Sétif massacres and indeed the Algerian war itself (Cooper 2008: 101). Furthermore, Cooper opines that the narrative’s focus on anti-Nazism allows for the easier inclusion of the indigenous Other into the history of an embattled France as the good (subservient) colonial subject, leading to a situation whereby colonial nostalgia may well be ‘more greatly underscored than any postcolonial comment’ intended by the director (Cooper 2008: 94–8). For his part, Alec Hargreaves welcomes Bouchareb’s attempts to bring such colonial injustice to the screen but questions the gloss that the film appears to place on colonial troops coerced into fighting for France, a criticism that was similarly levelled by numerous Algerian reviewers of the film (Coly 2008: 154). Hargreaves also draws attention to the slippage that occurs in both the film’s narrative and in numerous interviews given by the director and the film’s stars between the ‘nous’ (‘us’) of France’s postcolonial ethnic minorities and the ‘ils’ (‘them’) of the colonial troops who fought for France (Hargreaves 2007: 212). This ambiguous shift is seen most obviously in Saïd’s declaration that ‘when I liberate a country, it becomes my country’ which in the film appears to be uttered as much by Debbouze the Maghrebi-French star as by the ­character he plays.11 Saïd/Debbouze’s utterance thus obscures significant

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differences between the experiences of two distinct generations. On the one hand, the colonial soldiers who fought for France and then mostly returned to the Maghreb, in some cases subsequently fighting against France for independence from colonial rule. On the other hand, the Maghrebi-French actors who play them in the film, whose stake in legitimising the Maghrebi diaspora’s rightful place in France more than half a century later is bound up in a quite separate set of historical, cultural and political circumstances. In this context, Durmelat proposes that Bouchareb’s attempt to promote a sense of legitimacy and collective identity for the second generation through foregrounding the sacrifice of their parents’ or grandparents’ generation ‘verges on [a] consensual hagiography’ that effectively validates the director’s Republican credentials (Durmelat 2011: 105). That such problems arise in Indigènes is, arguably, indicative of the risks that must be taken by Maghrebi-French filmmakers (and what is at stake) in offering a counter-narrative to the (neo-)colonial heritage films of the 1990s such as Indochine. The very fact that Bouchareb is willing to take such risks in challenging a neo-colonial vision of France’s colonial past, while at the same time moving into the hegemonic space (in terms of production, distribution and exhibition) of the heritage film, is what makes Indigènes is a key intervention in Maghrebi-French filmmaking of the 2000s. The danger of the film’s narrative being hijacked by a right-wing, neo-colonial interpretation, whereby the colonial troops’ sacrifice is seen as ‘a nostalgic view in which colonialism was beneficial and the native were both complicit and grateful’ (Cooper 2008: 98) need not necessarily be viewed as a failing on the part of the filmmaker. Many iconographic moments of the film, such as the colonial soldiers raising the French flag at the end of the first battle sequence, can be read as either positive/ empowering or negative/reductive acts precisely because the representation is filtered through a social memory of a disputed collective national past and events that are open to multiple and often contested interpretation. The events depicted speak both to a specific history of French colonial exploitation and a broader historical narrative of European liberation from Nazi tyranny, offering a lieu de mémoire, or, as Rosello defines it, an ‘event of memory’ (Rosello 2011a) that is simultaneously national and transnational (pan-European and diasporic). The disputed significance of Indigènes’ representation of the role played by French colonial troops in the war thus returns to Nora’s notion of memory as constructing a fractured past in the ‘discontinuity of history’ (Nora 1989: 17). The argument that Indigènes offers a potentially reductive image of the compliant colonial servant is further weakened if we consider the images that accompany the film’s opening credits. Included within the montage of archival stills – similar in many senses to those that are taken by the official French army photographer after the first battle that forms part of an ‘official’ national

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archive of the conflict – are images of Hitler and Pétain signing the armistice between France and Germany in June 1940, and the arrival of General de Gaulle in Algeria on 30 May 1943. Read against the narrative that unfolds, these images evoke neither a nostalgic view of colonial dominance nor one that represents the united struggle against the Nazis to elide the imbalance of power, exploitation and racism suffered by the indigenous troops under colonial rule. Instead, they suggest a weakened French nation/colonial master, whose liberation from Nazi occupation depends on the assistance from its colonial troops, thus disrupting theories about the dependence of the colonisers on the colonised as well as the self-abnegation of the colonisers themselves (Coly 2008: 154). Finally, while Bouchareb’s decision in Indigènes to focus exclusively on the voluntary conscription of colonial troops is undoubtedly partial, it needs to be understood as more than simply a strategy to construct a politically consensual narrative that renders the film’s political message more palatable to a mainstream (French) audience. The fact that Indigènes shows that some (though certainly not all) Algerians allowed themselves to be slaughtered in battle to save France and free Europe from Nazi occupation thus runs counter to the view offered by Algerian nationalism, whereby the historical narrative of the postcolonial nation is founded on revolt, resistance to colonial rule and independence (Stora in Coly 2008: 154). Indigènes highlights what is for Algerian nationalists the inconvenient historical truth of voluntary conscription, in a move that is all the more contentious given that the director is himself of Algerian origin. Bouchareb is thus prepared to challenge hegemonic histories of the North African colonial troops’ role in the Second World War, regardless of whether such histories are constructed by the former coloniser or colonised. It is perhaps unsurprising that a Maghrebi-French filmmaker whose worldview is informed by both Algerian and French historical, cultural and ideological perspectives should choose to occupy an interstitial position in relation to these historical events. Indeed, it is Bouchareb’s recognition of the ambivalent experience of French colonial troops as simultaneously fighting against Nazi tyranny and (French) colonial racism that distinguishes Indigènes (in quite different ways) from both the French (neo-)colonial heritage films of the 1990s and his later historical film, Hors-la-loi. As Rosello rightly suggests, Indigènes remains fiercely committed to its political aim of exposing the shameful treatment of colonial veterans by France by presenting an alternative history of the Allied liberation of Europe to its audience. However, by the end of the film any notion of historical progress or a better historical truth having ‘solved the problem of forgetfulness’ (Rosello 2010: 111) is far from certain. The final scenes of Indigènes, set in the present day, depict Abdelkader, the sole surviving North African veteran, as an old man living a precarious existence in an immigrant foyer in France, while the

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text superimposed over the final image of the film demands the restitution of colonial veterans’ rights in relation to their pensions. In many ways, it is the retrospective knowledge of Indigènes’ contribution to the successful campaign for the recognition of colonial veterans’ rights that allows us to view the film in such absolute terms as having solved the issue of recognising the debt owed by France to its colonial soldiers.12 And yet, despite the repeal of the law that had frozen colonial veterans’ pensions at the time of the film’s release in 2006, the reluctance to directly confront the less palatable ‘truths’ of France’s colonial past that had allowed the status quo to remain for decades had not simply disappeared overnight. Indeed, as was referred to earlier in this chapter, in many ways, with the election of Sarkozy in 2007, the influence of the ‘anti-repentants’ on the public debate over the politics and ethics of memorialising France’s colonial past was as strong as ever. The real risk taken by Bouchareb in Indigènes, then, was to attempt to make a film that was both militant in its political objectives and consensual in its desire to engage a crossover, majority French audience in the question of memorialising France’s colonial history. The film directly confronts its audience with the paradox identified by Blanchard (2010: 2) of France as the birthplace of the droits de l’homme and as one of the most brutal and exploitative colonial regimes, at the same time as it argues for the rightful place of these colonial troops in a Franco-Algerian history of the Second World War. As both the co-producer of Vivre au paradis and director of the short animated film L’Ami y’a bon (2005), whose exploration of the injustices suffered by the tirailleurs sénégalais (colonial marksmen from Senegal) upon their return to West Africa after fighting for the French in the Second World War is more directly confrontational than Indigènes, Bouchareb would have been aware of the risk of alienating potential financial backers, as well as distributors for the film in France, with an accusatory narrative that exposes the brutality of France’s colonial past. To this end, whereas Vivre au paradis portrays the events of 17 October 1961 as an act of violence against colonial immigrants who remain clearly qualified as outsiders in the Métropole, and L’Ami y a bon depicts the brutal repression of colonial subjects in West Africa (located in both geographical and historical ‘elsewhere’), Indigènes qualifies the injustices against colonial troops in the Second World War as a specifically ‘French’ problem that continues into the present day. The wrongs of France’s colonial past are therefore deliberately presented in the film as an injustice that continues to affect colonial veterans from the colonies as well as an affront to the French-born descendants of the North African colonial troops who gave their lives to ensure the freedoms enjoyed in France today and, by extension, an assault on the Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity upon which the modern French nation state was founded. It is in this context that Bouchareb justifiably sees the story of Indigènes as ‘100% French’ (Bouchareb in Frois 2006).

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The conflation in Indigènes of the historical perspective of the North African colonial soldiers and the present-day perspective of France’s postcolonial ethnic minorities of Maghrebi immigrant origin therefore forms part of Bouchareb’s strategy to transfer this historical narrative from the margins to the centre.13 On the one hand this blurring of boundaries is directly related to the fact that audiences are more likely to engage with the historical figures of the North African colonial troops interpreted by French stars of North African origin. On the other hand, if, as Cubitt argues, ‘to evoke a collective past is always to annex earlier experiences to a present social conception’ (Cubitt 2007: 17), the blurring of boundaries between the past of colonial veterans and the present of postcolonial minorities in France found in Indigènes seems entirely understandable, if not inevitable, given the film’s political objectives as well as the contemporary thesis of colonial fracture being debated in the French media and academy at the time of the film’s release. This final point raises the issue of a different kind political ‘responsibility’ involved in evoking these painful events in European colonial history, similar to that discussed by Paul Gilroy (2007: 233) in response to Caché’s (Haneke, 2001) more oblique references to the violent attacks on Algerian immigrants by French police in Paris on 17 October 1961. In this respect the danger of blurring boundaries and offering only a partial view of certain events (such as the issue of voluntary conscription of North African troops) that risks conflating the history of North African colonial troops with the current situation for postcolonial ethnic minorities in France appears to be outweighed in Bouchareb’s mind by the need for such a counter-narrative of these events to exist and have a direct impact beyond the margins of the French film industry. As interviews given to promote the release of Indigènes repeatedly show, such a responsibility was clearly felt by Bouchareb and the stars of Indigènes (Frois 2006, Pliskin 2006). The effect that such a calculated move has on the politics and ethics of history and the memorialisation of France’s colonial past returns us to Rosello’s critique of Indigènes and forces us to ask that if Bouchareb’s own view of history is partial and for strategic political reasons conflates the past with the present, is this version of French colonial history any more legitimate than the Eurocentric one that precedes it in the neo-colonial heritage films of the 1990s? Is the question less one of historical ‘fidelity’ than of ideology; of a deciphering, as Ricoeur might put it, of the reasons why one particular interpretation of history and memory might appear at the time that it does? Such questions dominated media discussion over Bouchareb’s second and far more controversial historical epic of the late 2000s, Hors-la-loi. Released four years after Indigènes, during which time Bouchareb directed the low-budget, post-7/7 drama London River (2009), Hors-la-loi was the eagerly anticipated second instalment of the director’s self-styled trilogy of Maghrebi history in France.14 Apart from the opening prelude set in the 1925,

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Hors-la-loi’s narrative effectively continues where Indigènes ended, at the end of the Second World War in 1945. The film then traces a history of the Algerian war as experienced by the Algerian immigrant population in France, another blind spot in both French and Algerian colonial history. Bouchareb recounts his grand historical narrative from the perspective of three brothers – Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) and Saïd (Jamel Debbouze) – who emigrate to France following the Second World War and forge differing lifestyles for themselves, with varying commitment to the struggle for independence being fought in both Algeria and on the streets of the French capital. The film used four of the ensemble of five actors who had proved so successful in Indigènes, again relying heavily on the presence of Jamel Debbouze as one of the film’s co-producers and stars. In terms of funding, Bouchareb once more looked to an international co-production to raise the €20.55m budget, an unprecedented sum for a feature directed by a Maghrebi-French filmmaker, drawing on investment from Tunisia, France, Belgium and Algeria. Horsla-loi also followed Indigènes in terms of its mainstream production values, large-scale recreation of historical events and locations and mixture of generic influences from both French and American classical cinema, though this time the references were more to the policier, political thrillers of the 1970s and American gangster films than to the war film. When interviewed on the film’s release in France in September 2010, Bouchareb spoke of his desire that spectators would derive pleasure from Hors-la-loi’s high production values and cinematic spectacle, at the same time as they discovered a part of recent French history that was not taught in schools (Bouchareb 2010). However, any sense that the film would be welcomed across the political spectrum in the way of Indigènes had already been dismissed four months earlier with the storm of political protest that erupted around Hors-la-loi’s gala premier at the Cannes film festival. Problems began when, in advance of the festival, a copy of the script was passed onto Hubert Falco, French secretary of state for military veterans, who proceeded to mount his critique of the film based on the comments received from a general and military historian. The protests at Cannes were then initiated by Lionel Luca, the UMP (centre-right) minister for Alpes-Maritimes, who had not seen the film either but also based his opposition on second-hand remarks gleaned from Falco. Luca attacked the film as ‘anti-French’ and a falsification of history (Stora in Vallaeys 2010). The film’s director, producers and stars as well as the festival organisers were then subjected to a barrage of intense hostility from a loose coalition of right-wing protestors including army veterans, pieds-noirs and harkis, and an extremist group calling itself ‘Vérité histoire Cannes 2010’, who promised to disrupt the film’s participation in the festival. In an attempt to calm tensions, local government officials organised a commemoration to honor ‘all the dead’ of the Algerian war on the morning of the film’s screening

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at Cannes. In the end, the festival premier of Hors-la-loi took place with protests outside the screening but no serious disruption or confrontation; though, as Roschdy Zem remarked ruefully some months later, the press appeared more interested in the polemic surrounding the film than the film itself (Zem in Verghol 2010). The section of Hors-la-loi that so offended its right-wing detractors comprises a sequence very near the start of the film of roughly seven minutes’ duration (in a film with a total running length of two hours and eighteen minutes). It concerns the massacre of Algerians in and around Sétif – a small, predominantly Muslim town in the Constantine region of Algeria – that took place at the end of World War Two. On 8 May 1945, demonstrations by Algerian nationalists took place across the country to coincide with the end of the Second World War in Europe. In Sétif, these demonstrations focused on demands for the release of Messali Hadj – the leader of the Algerian independence movement, who had been arrested the previous month. More radical members of the crowd began to call for Algerian independence and brandished the Algerian flag, a defiant act that was illegal under French colonial rule. One demonstrator who displayed the Algerian flag was shot dead by a policeman and, in the subsequent violent confrontation with pieds-noirs and the local police, around 100 European settlers were killed. In the days and weeks that followed, armed European settlers, with the support of legionnaires and French troops who were drafted in to maintain order, exacted brutal reprisals in Sétif and the surrounding area on a massive scale, killing between 10 000 and 12 000 Algerians (according to recent estimates made by French historians).15 The Sétif massacres are thus a key moment in history for the Algerian nationalist movement and have been described by certain historians as the first act of the Algerian war for independence. Bouchareb would have been fully aware of the significance of these events for Algerian nationalists and the controversy surrounding Sétif as a key site of colonial repression, excluded from both history books in French schools and almost entirely absent from French screens until the release of Hors-la-loi.16 Given the controversy caused by Bouchareb’s depiction of these events, it is worth pausing to describe here the Sétif sequence from Hors-la-loi in some detail. The sequence begins just over six minutes into the film and follows directly from a montage of documentary footage showing Allied soldiers and French civilians celebrating the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation. Archive newsreel footage of the celebrations bleeds directly into the filmed reconstruction of the Sétif massacres, as Bouchareb matches the grade and colour of both sets of images, accompanied by a caption that reads ‘Sétif, Algérie, le même jour’ (‘Sétif, Algeria, the same day’), before transforming the grainy, blackand-white (faux) newsreel footage of Algerian demonstrators into the higherquality image used for the remainder of the feature film. The suggestion then

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is that, at the very moment of Europe’s liberation from Nazi occupation, an act of violence and brutality comparable to those perpetrated by the Germans was being committed by the occupying French colonial powers in Algeria. Establishing shots of the demonstration that switch between close-ups of local Algerians chanting slogans of equality and freedom and more detached images of European settlers rushing to board up the windows of their homes and businesses are combined with an exchange between two brothers: Abdelkader, who wants to attend the demonstration, and Saïd, who prefers to continue with the boxing match he has organised. The action moves directly to shots of armed French colonial gendarmes and local European settlers preparing to confront the demonstrators. We are then led into the crowd, following from Abdelkader’s point of view, as French plain-clothes policemen sweep into the centre of the demonstration and shoot a teenage boy holding an Algerian flag. French police and pieds-noirs proceed to fire into the crowd of Algerian demonstrators; some respond in a similarly violent manner, while most run in panic. The scene is then met with the arrival of French soldiers who, with overwhelming force, begin to fire indiscriminately on any Algerians in their path, entering homes and enacting summary executions of suspected militants. The final part of the sequence returns the focus towards the brothers: Saïd arrives home to find his father and other family members have been murdered, while Abdelkader is arrested and marched away by the French army, past countless bodies laid out in the streets of Sétif. The message of this sequence is clear: an initially peaceful demonstration in Sétif is met with excessive violence by the French colonialists, in a confrontation that leads to the death of a handful of Europeans and countless Algerians. As spectators, our sympathy is undoubtedly meant to lie with the Algerian demonstrators. Bouchareb films events from the point of view of the crowd and personalises the violence of Sétif through the brothers’ traumatic experience and individual loss, while the police, army and pieds-noirs are presented as anonymous aggressors. The main objection from opponents to the film such as Luca and Falco (who, again, it should be noted, made their accusations based purely on accounts of the screenplay that they had read, not the screenplay itself) was that the representation of the Sétif massacres focused exclusively on the violence committed by French troops and pieds-noirs, not the attacks immediately after the first shooting of the Algerian demonstrator that left around 100 Europeans dead and led to the reprisals from colonial forces. As the above description of the sequence demonstrates, Bouchareb clearly does depict the Europeans as the aggressors and concentrates (for both political and dramatic effect) on the reactions of the Algerian demonstrators. However, he also shows a small number of the demonstrators confronting and even killing pieds-noirs and so does not entirely deny the Algerians’ role in the violence. Indeed, given that the death toll on the Algerian side was over one

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hundred times higher than that of the Europeans, the director’s decision to focus overwhelmingly on the violence committed by the French police, army and pieds-noirs seems justifiable. From a historical perspective, the real inconsistency comes from the way that events that in reality took place over a period of weeks have been concentrated into a few minutes of screen time, thus giving the impression that the demonstration, attacks and reprisals all took place on the same day. Moreover, the stylised transition from newsreel footage in Paris to the streets of Sétif – accompanied by the caption that situates us within a specific historical moment – functions to locate the narrative that follows as part of a wider Franco(-Algerian) history at the same time as it promotes the historical ‘authenticity’ of the version of events as they unfold on screen. In a sense, then, we are returned to Rosello’s critique of Indigènes, in that Bouchareb appears unable (or unwilling) to separate a politics and an ethics of history in his depiction of the Sétif massacres. Given the broad historical sweep of Hors-la-loi’s historical narrative, a protracted section of the film showing the demonstrations in Sétif and then the reprisals taking place over a period of weeks in the town and surrounding areas would not have made either practical or dramatic sense in a two-hour fictional narrative.17 However, to manipulate history on screen in this way thus lays the film open to potential charges of ‘falsification’ and bias from those such as Falco and Luca, seeking entirely to discredit the film’s version of colonial history and thus deny any agency to a Maghrebi-French perspective on these events. As a result of the controversy at Cannes, in the weeks following the release of Hors-la-loi across France in September 2010, the vast majority of the extensive press coverage of the film moved far beyond the kind of critical reviews one might expect for the release of a high-profile, big-budget French ­production. Instead, numerous articles in a range of French newspapers and magazines – including interviews with eminent French historians such as Benjamin Stora (Stora 2010; Vallaeys 2010), Pascal Blanchard (Blanchard 2010), Pierre Kauffer (Lorain 2010) and Jean-Pierre Roux (Roux 2010) – were devoted to a discussion of the veracity and authenticity of Bouchareb’s film as a historical account of the Algerian war. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, given their own methodological approach to historicising French colonial history, Stora (2010) and Blanchard (2010) concluded that, despite the manipulation of the chronology of events of the Sétif massacres for dramatic effect and the exigencies of feature film-making, Hors-la-loi’s depiction of events was broadly accurate in the sense that the shooting of an Algerian demonstrator provoked violence from both Algerian and European settlers that was followed by an excessively brutal response from the French army. Looking beyond Sétif, Kauffer (Lorain 2010) has argued that, in its representation of the political violence undertaken by the FLN in France, Horsla-loi is dominated by the imperative for cinematic spectacle rather than

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historical verisimilitude. As Kauffer notes, scenes such as the audacious attack by Messaoud and Abdelkader on the police commissariat, the machine-gun ambush on the truck carrying a platoon of harki soldiers, or the trafficking of arms from Germany to Paris that leads to the final gun battle with the police in which Messaoud is killed all add to the spectacle of Hors-la-loi as a political thriller, though are far removed from what historians know of the way the FLN conducted its operations in France. This observation was supported by Stora (2010), who noted that Algerian resistance in the Métropole operated on a far more clandestine level, meaning that scenes such as the one in the factory where Abdelkader openly attempts to recruit Algerian immigrant workers to the FLN could not realistically have taken place. The consensus of historians involved in the very public debate in the French media around the Hors-la-loi’s representation of the Franco-Algerian colonial history seemed to be that, in spite of the inconsistencies and dramatic embellishments outlined above, the film played a valuable role in combating the amnesia surrounding the Algerian war, the Sétif massacres and the history of Algerian immigration to France. The fact that Hors-la-loi was, precisely, a work of fiction, made such inconsistencies acceptable, if not entirely unproblematic. Stora (2010) spoke of the film producing a ‘métaphysique de la guerre’ (critical reflection of the war), while Jean-Pierre Rioux (2010) suggested that, in relying on psychological realism and emotional impact rather than any idealist or ideological emancipatory view of history, Bouchareb had created a historically located cinema of action, adventure and emotive individualism that blurred the traditionally established boundaries between history and fiction as well as the three conventional modes of memory: historical, fictional and cinematic ‘truth’. In contrast, for French cinema critics, this deference to the spectacularisation of political violence and (colonial) history, described by Libération film critic Philippe Loiret (2010) as ‘postcolonial entertainment’, was seen as evidence of the film’s debt to Hollywood cinema and as detrimental to the overall impact of Hors-la-loi’s political message regarding the memorialisation of immigrant history and the Algerian war (Sentinel 2010; Kaganski 2010; Loiret 2010). Numerous French reviewers noted the influence of Once Upon A Time in America (Leone, 1984) on the film’s immigrant narrative, as well as The Godfather: Part I (Coppola, 1972) and The Godfather: Part II (Coppola, 1974) in the way in which the film places the violent power struggle involving a criminal underworld, an organisation that is ‘outside of the law’ (referring back to the French title of Hors-la-loi), against the internal struggles of an immigrant family melodrama. Indeed, the scene where Saïd murders the aging caïd (tribal chief) in Sétif to avenge the confiscation of his father’s land twenty years earlier can be directly linked through both its narrative context and visual presentation to the scene depicting Vito Corleone’s revenge killing

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Figure 3.3  Hors-la-loi (Bouchareb, 2010): the gangster film as counter-heritage.

of the Sicilian mafia boss in The Godfather: Part II. In promotional interviews for Hors-la-loi, Bouchareb confirmed the influence of Coppola and Leone on the film in both narrative and visual terms. Though much was made by critics of this connection to post-classical Hollywood, Bouchareb’s film can in fact be seen to connect with a disparate range of American, European (French) and even Algerian cinematic antecedents. For example, few, if any (including Bouchareb himself), have commented on the possible association between Hors-la-loi and an Algerian film of the same title, Les Hors-la-loi (Fares, 1969). Produced at a time when the Algerian film industry was nationalised, Les Hors-la-loi is a film that was also influenced by American genre cinema (this time the western) and whose narrative tells the story of three young men who meet in prison after the Second World War and join the struggle for independence upon being set free. Moreover, despite such direct comparisons with American cinema, the spectacularisation of politics in Hors-la-loi aligns the film as much with French civic and militant cinema of the 1970s such as Le Complot (Boisset 1973). The influence of two other French/European films are also writ large on Hors-la-loi’s narrative of anticolonial resistance. Firstly, the anti-imperialist classic, The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo 1966), for its direct reference to the Algerian war, as well as its treatise on the justification of political violence in the course of liberation from a colonial oppressor. Secondly Melville’s L’armée des ombres (1969) for the way that it explores the moral dilemmas faced by a clandestine ­organisation resisting an occupying force. Like L’armée des ombres, Bouchareb’s historical political thriller depicts members of a clandestine resistance army (in this case the FLN) who are forced to make dubious moral decisions and utilise violence, sometimes against their own people, in order to achieve the greater political aim of liberation. At the end of L’armée des ombres the individual fates that befall the ‘heroes’ questions

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the French myth of unified resistance against the Nazi occupation. In contrast, Hors-la-loi ultimately shies away from the murkier political realities touched on earlier in the film to present the death of both Messouad and Abdelkader as a noble and heroic sacrifice that ensures the victory of Algerian nationalism. As Abdelkader lies dying from a bullet wound on the platform of a Parisian metro, cradled in the arms of Saïd, Inspector Faivre (Bernard Blancan) who has been pursuing the ‘terrorist’ cell, whispers into his ear: ‘It’s over, you’ve won.’ As the final line of the film makes clear, in its denunciation of French colonial violence and brutality, Hors-la-loi presents a partial and partisan history of Algeria’s struggle for independence. Moreover, despite the director’s claims to the contrary (Bouchareb 2010), Hors-la-loi offers a more militant and less conciliatory memorialisation of French colonial history than Indigènes. In part this is due to the fact that, unlike the Allied liberation of France from Nazi occupation, for much of French society the Algerian war remains an event located outside of the nation’s collective past. However, like the French, the postcolonial Algerian state has also sought to erase certain memories of the war for independence, particularly those involving Algerian immigrants in France. The presence of the Algerian diaspora in France had, in fact, always proved problematic for an Algerian nationalist movement whose principal aim had been to liberate the country from the European coloniser’s political, cultural and economic influence. Despite their substantial financial contribution to the armed struggle for liberation, Algerian immigrants in France were, at best, overlooked in the Algerian narrative of postcolonial independence and, at worst, viewed as traitors for their decision to migrate to the former Métropole and remain in the country following independence (Durmelat 2011: 95). Like Les Sacrifiés almost thirty years earlier, Hors-la-loi therefore portrays the power struggle in the bidonvilles on the outskirts of Paris between the FLN and MNA that set Algerian against Algerian. This broader observation about differing loyalties within the Algerian immigrant community is also illustrated on a personal level by the actions of the three brothers at the centre of the narrative: Abdelkader remains fiercely loyal and ideologically committed to the struggle for independence as he rises up through the ranks of the FLN in France; Messaoud appears motivated as much by family loyalty as anything else, despite his experiences as a colonial soldier in Indochina; while Saïd places financial gain as a pimp, nightclub owner and boxing promoter above any commitment to the Algerian nationalist cause. Potentially more controversial for an Algerian audience is the scene where a select group of FLN leaders meets in Geneva to sanction the demonstration in Paris that will lead to the violence of 17 October 1961, in full knowledge that such a demonstration will risk being met with violence by the French authorities. Not only does this scene suggest a hostile and dismissive attitude amongst Algerian nationalists to the sacrifices made by Algerian immigrants in France, but it also chooses to

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do so by evoking one of the most symbolic and notorious incidents of colonial brutality towards Algerian immigrants on French soil. Bouchareb’s commitment to rehabilitating the memory of a diasporic community that has been systematically written out of official histories of the war for independence by both French and Algerian authorities for decades thus continues the strategy of providing a corrective to the hegemonic histories emerging from both sides of the Mediterranean. The intense debate around Hors-la-loi’s representation of the Algerian war, provoked in part by the excessive reaction to the film from the right-wing protestors at Cannes, is unsurprising given the ongoing ‘war of memories’ surrounding French colonial history and, in particular, the Algerian war. However, it is telling that the historical accuracy of events in other recent French films dealing with the Algerian war by ethnic-majority French directors such as L’ennemi intime (Siri, 2007) or La Trahison (Faucon, 2005) have not been held up to such intense scrutiny – suggesting a greater sense of suspicion surrounding the motivations of a director of Algerian origin embarking upon such a project. Bouchareb echoed this sentiment in an interview that coincided with Hors-la-loi’s release in which he made a pertinent and provocative comparison with La Rafle (Bosch, 2010), a French film released earlier in the same year that dramatised the Vichy government’s role in the round-up of French Jews at the Vel d’Hiv: The problem isn’t Sétif, it’s talking about an entire period of history that is never seen in French cinema . . . We [French filmmakers of Maghrebi origin] are [also] part of French cinema, but certain sections of French society are afraid to see what our films show them. Yet who would say that La Rafle is an anti-French film? (Bouchareb in Santucci 2010) The comparison with La Rafle was certainly an apposite one to make. Horsla-loi was released in September 2010 on 400 screens in France (well above the national average) having been made for a budget of €20.55m, figures that put it in an exclusive club of French super-productions. Despite such favourable conditions for its release, the considerable media attention following the film’s controversial screening at Cannes earlier that year, as well as the box-office appeal of its co-stars Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila and, above all, Jamel Debbouze, Hors-la-loi attracted a disappointing 431 613 spectators in France – some two and a half million fewer than Indigènes four years earlier. In contrast, La Rafle, produced for a similar budget, distributed in similar conditions and released in March of the same year, attracted almost three million spectators in France. In her analysis of cinematic representations of the Algerian war, Durmelat (2011: 105) argues that Bouchareb seems to have offered a more conciliatory

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representation of France’s colonial past in Indigènes, deliberately avoiding the more sensitive events of the Algerian war in order to establish his Republican credentials before launching a more controversial exploration of the war for independence. While Durmelat’s reading of Bouchareb’s strategy appears wholly accurate, it is telling that French audiences chose not to embrace the memorialisation of the hidden history of the Algerian war offered by Horsla-loi in the same way they did the history of colonial veterans in Indigènes. Audience response to Hors-la-loi would appear to indicate that, despite the willingness of French producers and exhibitors to back such a film, the ‘war of memories’ and issues of colonial fracture that surround the Algerian war for independence are, regrettably, still too controversial and problematic for the majority of French audiences to openly engage with, even half a century after the end of la guerre sans nom. Notes   1. France invaded Algeria and colonised the country in the 1830s. In 1848 the constitution of the Second Republic ended Algeria’s status as a colony, declaring the occupied territories an integral part of France.  2. Stora (2006: 60) further qualifies the numbers of first-generation protagonists affected by the war as follows: 1.2 million veterans; 1 million pieds-noirs; 400 000 Algerian immigrants to France; 100 000 harkis who fled to France after the war.   3. For a complete record of the legislation, see http://www.admi.net/jo/20050224/ DEFX0300218L.html. For a detailed analysis of the semantics of article four and their wider significance, see Rosello (2010: 14–16).   4. For a full transcript of the speech, see http://www.afrik.com/article12199.html/ [last accessed: 17/7/12].   5. See, for example, Chevènement (2001).   6. These include Mon colonel (Herbiet, 2006), L’ennemi intime (Siri, 2007) and La Trahison (Faucon, 2005).   7. Powrie (1999: 6) identifies three dominant strands of the heritage film in the 1990s: ‘postcolonial’, ‘Vichy’ and ‘official heritage’.   8. His discomfort is particularly evident in an early scene where the family arrive at their new home for the first time, accompanied by one of the father’s friends, whom the father repeatedly asks to come into the house for a coffee, impeaching him ‘Do not forget me’.   9. In an interview following the release of Cartouche gauloises (Chemin, Gramard and Mam 2007), Charef evoked precisely this kind of difference between himself and his father’s generation in terms of attitudes towards speaking out about the past. 10. Bouchareb worked first as a writer and director in French cinema and TV from the mid-1980s, and as a director and producer from the mid-1990s. 11. Probably the clearest example of this slippage outside of the film itself can be found in a press interview with Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila, Samy Naceri and Jamel Debbouze following the film’s success at Cannes (Pliskin 2006). 12. By the time the film was released, the main demands made by Bouchareb at the end of the film had in fact already been met (Rosello 2011a: 115–16). 13. A close analysis of interviews given by Bouchareb and the stars of Indigènes following the film’s release (for example Pliskin 2006, Frois 2006) suggests that they were entirely conscious that such a slippage would occur but felt it was an acceptable risk

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to take if the film’s political message was to be communicated in the most efficient way to the widest possible audience. 14. Bouchareb has spoken of his plans for an (as yet) untitled third historical film that would deal with the history of Maghrebi immigration to France from the 1960s to 2000s (Bouchareb 2010). 15. There is still considerable disagreement concerning overall numbers of dead in the Sétif and Guelma massacres, with estimates ranging from 7 000 to 40 000. Part of the problem lies in the French use of artillery and aircraft to do much of the killing and the reliance on settler vigilantes who set up resistance-style courts to pronounce summary judgments, with the result being that a large percentage of juvenile and adult males in the Guelma district were murdered. For a detailed discussion of the above issues, see Thomas (2011). 16. Stora claims that before Hors-la-loi only two television documentaries had been produced about the Sétif massacres and screened in France and no feature films. 17. The narrative of Hors-la-loi spans almost forty years, from the confiscation of indigenous lands by French colonial powers in 1925, to the Sétif massacres in 1945, the Indochinese war as experienced by Messouad, and finally to the Algerian war for independence as experienced by Algerian immigrants in Paris.

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4. OF SPACES AND DIFFERENCE IN THE FILMS OF ABDELLATIF KECHICHE*

In previous chapters of this book, it has been argued that Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking has undergone a transformation in the 2000s that brought certain filmmakers firmly into the mainstream. In the case of actor, writer and director Abdellatif Kechiche, a different (but no less significant) kind of evolution has taken place. Kechiche was born in Tunisia and arrived in France at the age of six. He grew up on a working-class estate on the outskirts of Nice, not far from the city’s famous Victorine studios. During his youth, he indulged a passion for cinema through regular trips to the Nice cinématèque, where he first discovered many of the great French actors – Michel Simon, Jules Berry, Harry Baur, Arletty – and later directors such as De Sica, Pasoloini, Pialat and Sautet (Kechiche in Morice 2007). After studying acting at the Conservatoire de Nice he embarked on a career in the theatre that led to a limited number of film roles, most notably as the lead in Le Thé à la menthe (Bahloul, 1984) and Bezness (Bouzid, 1992). Reacting against what he saw as the paucity of meaningful roles for MaghrebiFrench actors, beyond stereotypical portrayals as immigrants, delinquents or criminals, Kechiche began to develop his own screenplays in the 1990s (Kechiche in Morice 2007). Though encountering the usual problems facing first-time film­ makers with attracting funding, in the space of a decade, through a series of four films starting with La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001), to L’Esquive (2004), La Graine et le mulet (2007) and most recently Vénus

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noire (2010), Kechiche has moved from being a relatively unknown theatre and screen actor with aspirations to direct to becoming one of the most critically acclaimed filmmakers working in France today.1 Despite securing a three-picture deal with Claude Berri, one of France’s most influential producers (that was cut short by Berri’s untimely death in 2009), his films are not commercially driven and, with the exception of La Graine et le mulet, have attracted only modest audiences.2 However, his mode of humanist storytelling – intimately observed but resolutely non-partisan and politically engaged without being ideological driven – as well as his ability to draw subtle performances of considerable intensity from his (often non-professional) actors have won him almost universal praise from French critics, leading to numerous awards at the French Césars and festivals across the world. Kechiche’s auteurist credentials are further enhanced by his public association with debate around the so-called cinéma du milieu in French cinema – m ­ id-budget, independent, artistically ambitious productions that currently struggle to find funding.3 Hence, in a national cinema that has traditionally defined itself in relation to the artisanal and its artistic qualities rather than commercial imperatives, Kechiche arguably now occupies a position firmly within the centre of the auteur-led independent sector of French cinema. There is a moment early in Kechiche’s award-winning third feature La Graine et le mulet that aptly reflects the transformation that both the filmmaker and his Maghrebi-immigrant protagonists appear to have undergone in the 2000s. It occurs when Slimane (Habib Boufares) reveals to Karima (Farida Benkhetache) his eldest daughter and her husband José (Olivier Loustau) that he is to be laid off from the shipyard in the southern French port of Sète where he has worked for over thirty years. José summarises both the broader economic climate and his father-in-law’s predicament in the following way: ‘It’s simple. They no longer want French workers’. The logic of José’s argument is as direct as it is familiar: in search of ever greater profits, French companies would prefer to source cheap migrant labour than pay a French workforce what it is worth. However, the true significance of José’s remark is, precisely, to whom the comment refers. For the ‘French’ worker in question, Slimane, is a Tunisian immigrant, the very person who would previously have been identified as the foreigner ‘stealing’ French jobs. This incidental line of dialogue – located in a secondary scene early in the film as part of a broader strategy within the narrative to introduce the spectator to Slimane’s extended family – is symbolic of a change in the on-screen perception of the North African immigrant. As discussed in Chapter 1, the roles assigned to Maghrebi protagonists in French cinema during the 1970s and 1980s reflected the broader perception of their temporary, economic and thus marginal presence in France. In La Graine et le mulet, without recourse to polemic or overt politicisation, Kechiche refuses this well-established stereotype.

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Moreover, without eliding or denying their difference, Kechiche’s film already seems to have moved beyond the theme that so preoccupied earlier Beur Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s of affirming the rightful place of North African immigrants and their descendants in France – see, for example, Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985), Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991) and Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995). Kechiche’s film is certainly not the first North African émigré or Maghrebi-French-authored feature to have received a favourable reception from critics and public alike. La Graine et le mulet is, however, notable for the critical discourse that surrounded its release. Rather than framing Kechiche’s work in the context of beur filmmaking, in a way that places him simultaneously within and outside of French national cinema, most French reviewers made a point of identifying the Frenchness of Kechiche’s particular brand of social cinema, that located him as the latest in a line of great ‘humanist’ auteurs (Kaganski 2007 and Delorme 2007: 11). Jean-Michel Frodon, former editor of Cahiers du cinéma and one of France’s most influential cinema critics, typified this inclusive response, describing La Graine et le mulet as: ‘not a beur film, nor a film about immigrants but a film about France today’ (2007: 10). In contrast, seven years earlier, reviews for Kechiche’s debut feature La Faute à Voltaire were formulated very much in the context of a film ‘about’ ­immigration by a director of immigrant origin.4 The principal aims of this chapter are twofold. First, to analyse how far the apparent transformation in the 2000s from ‘immigrant’ to ‘French’ filmmaker suggested by the critical reception of Kechiche’s work is reflected in the films themselves, and to question whether such a transformation, if it exists, is part of a wider shift in the way that Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers are viewed as part of French ‘national’ cinema as opposed to immigrant, postcolonial or ethnic minority filmmakers. Second, in response to this question, this chapter will focus more specifically on the significance of the diegetic spaces employed and represented in Kechiche’s films to date. Many French reviewers (Masson 2007: 14­–15; Frodon 2007: 9–10) along with Anglo-American academics (Swamy 2007; Esposito 2010; Vincendeau 2010) have rightly commented on the importance of language in determining the structure, identity and ‘authenticity’ of Kechiche’s films. His screenplays typically employ references to or gain narrative inspiration from canonical texts: Ronsard and Voltaire in La Faute à Voltaire; Marivaux and Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds in L’Esquive; Arthurian legend in La Graine et le mulet (Kechiche in Morice 2007). This dense network of intertextual references is combined with an ability to recreate the vernacular of the particular social milieu in which his films are set. So successful has Kechiche been as a writer in the latter respect that critics have often presumed there is much improvisation in his films, when in fact they are meticulously crafted and tightly scripted (Kechiche in Morice 2007). Language in Kechiche’s films,

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particularly as it is used by his female protagonists, emerges as a means of interrogating essentialised notions of personal or collective identity, as well as the site of a potentially inclusive and enriching encounter between immigrant and French culture – as illustrated by the celebrated sequence in La Graine et le mulet where a multi-ethnic, working-class group of family and friends discusses life and love over a Sunday lunch of couscous. However, if language functions to include, it can also exclude: many of Kechiche’s male protagonists – most notably Slimane in La Graine et le mulet and Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) in L’Esquive – are emotionally and socially marginalised by their inability to express themselves and communicate effectively with those around them. While not wishing to downplay the obvious importance of language in all of Kechiche’s films to date, this chapter argues that the spaces in which these words or silences occur are just as important.

La Faute à Voltaire: Constructing Community Beyond the Diaspora La Faute à Voltaire tells the story of Jallel (Sami Bouajila), an ‘illegal’ Tunisian immigrant recently arrived in Paris. By focusing on the experiences of a marginal North African immigrant, Kechiche’s debut feature appears to occupy ground similar to that of many previous films by North African émigré or Maghrebi-French directors, for example Voyage au Capital (Akika, 1977), Le Thé à la menthe, Miss Mona (Charef, 1987), and Salut cousin! (Allouache, 1997). However, the key difference in La Faute à Voltaire is that the community that Jallel eventually surrounds himself with is largely located beyond the Maghrebi diaspora in Paris. Jallel’s connection to the North African immigrant population is most obviously evoked in the film through the Bar Alhambra – a local Tunisian-run bar where he meets and falls in love with Nassera (Aure Atika), a Maghrebi-French waitress. Ultimately, however, Jallel finds his place in an alternative community that emerges from amongst the friends he makes (both immigrant and French) in the homeless shelter, psychiatric hospital and whilst working in the metro – to the point where the diasporic space of the Bar Alhambra disappears from view by the end of the narrative. The potential for solidarity between a broader, dispossessed underclass that is suggested, if not fully realised, in La Faute à Voltaire thus aligns the film more generally with the return of the political in French cinema since the mid-1990s (O’Shaughnessy 2007) than it does with what Tarr refers to as beur and banlieue filmmaking (Tarr 2005). The realist ‘immigrant’ narrative commonly found in North African émigré filmmaking is re-imagined by Kechiche as an allegorical tale that engages as much with mainstream French cultural references as it does with markers of immigrant, diasporic or ethnic difference (Williams 2011; Nettelbeck 2007). As such, La Faute à Voltaire can be said to locate its debates around inclusion and exclusion of immigrants in France

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and the failures of the French Republican model to accommodate these immigrants firmly within the orbit of French ‘national’ cinema, rather than the more ­isolated, essentialised spaces of beur or banlieue cinema. This narrative strategy is reflected in the various spaces that constitute the film’s cine-spatial landscape: the homeless shelter, the Bar Alhambra, the psychiatric hospital, the Paris metro, the square in an unidentified working-class neighbourhood where a game of pétanque turns into an impromptu bal (dance). All of these various spaces play a vital role in establishing Jallel’s simultaneous presence and absence in Paris (and thus France). On the one hand, he is highly visible and comes into contact with wider French society; for example when he is selling fruit and later roses on the metro. On the other hand, he remains largely invisible to the majority since he inhabits the liminal, overlooked spaces of the immigrant centre, the homeless shelter and the psychiatric hospital. Interestingly, though, even as a newly arrived immigrant, Jallel is afforded a far greater degree of mobility than many earlier protagonists of Maghrebi origin. In beur or banlieue films, for example, where movement outside of the cité tends to be extremely limited, any attempt made by characters to transcend the banlieue often ends in failure. At the end of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985), Madjid is arrested by the police after journeying to the coast in a stolen car, while in Hexagone (Chibane, 1994) the Maghrebi-French characters are refused entry to a nightclub in central Paris – a common metaphor for exclusion in beur and banlieue filmmaking (Reader 1995: 13). In contrast, though Jallel’s presence in Paris may be overshadowed by his ‘illegal’ status and his ultimate deportation – police checks are a constant threat as he works in the metro – he is nonetheless able to move within the central spaces of the French capital. Just as importantly, he is able to connect with an alternative community that exists within Paris. This ability to circulate in central Paris mirrors Jallel’s transformation from ‘political to poetical refugee’ (Esposito 2011: 231). Indeed, his conscious decision to move from selling first fruit then Macadam (a newspaper sold to benefit its homeless vendors) to roses is motivated, Jallel informs a friend, by the freedom to wander in the city that selling flowers affords him. The greater mobility of the immigrant protagonist is further linked to cultural capital. Jallel reads and recites poetry from Ronsard on the metro, suggesting a familiarisation with the mainstream canon of French literature that is far removed from either the image of the poorly educated, inarticulate migrant worker, or the association of Maghrebi-French with a westernised/ Amercianised youth multiculture from the banlieue. While not represented as the immigrant flâneur – since Jallel is observed as much as he is observing – La Faute à Voltaire nonetheless offers a somewhat romanticised vision of the immigrant as a member of an excluded underclass in Paris, an image that its further confirmed by his participation in the impromptu neighbourhood party that takes place following a game of pétanque. The respite and sense of

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optimism offered by such moments of collective participation only adds to the shock of Jallel’s sudden deportation at the end of the film. Of all the locations evoked in La Faute à Voltaire, undoubtedly the most symbolically charged is that of the Place de la Nation and, in particular, Jules Dalou’s statue, Le Triomphe de la République – erected to mark the centenary of the 1789 revolution – that dominates the square and the entrance to the metro station. Different views of the statue are used by Kechiche as the film’s opening and closing images, in particular the allegorical figure of Peace, a voluptuous female nude with arm outstretched, holding a long-stemmed rose. The square and statue also features in two key scenes in the film. The first of these is where Jallel and Lucie (Elodie Bouchez) meet under the statue as the romance between them develops. Secondly, and more ominously, it is the symbolically charged site of Jallel’s arrest by the police at the end of the film that leads to his deportation from France to Tunisia. The imprint of the location on the film does not end there. As both Williams (2011: 396) and Nettelbeck (2007: 309) note, the rose offered by Peace in the statue mirrors the flowers that Jallel will sell in the metro, while the final image of the film of Peace’s naked rear transports us back to an earlier moment in the narrative where Lucie exposes herself in a similar fashion to Jallel – embodying the promise of perceived bounty and beauty of the host nation to the newly arrived immigrant. The statue and Place de la Nation thus offer a ‘symbolic and narrative anchor to the film’, with Lucie/Peace becoming the ‘very image of France that Jallel has learned to love [. . .] provoking in him caution and frustration and hope’ (Williams 2011: 402). There is a certain irony in this visual connection, however, given that Lucie is shown to be emotionally unstable and far more dependent on Jallel’s support than he is on hers. That Jallel should be arrested in this location clearly indicates the apparent inability of the French Republic to extend these values of equality and liberty to the vulnerable, marginal individuals who are excluded from the nation and denied the dignity, support and shelter that they so desperately need from France. The potential for the immigrant or former colonial subject to contribute more widely to the wellbeing of the nation and its citizens is, moreover, placed in a grander historical context in La Faute à Voltaire in the sequence when, as they wait for Nassera to arrive, Nono (Sami Zituni) and Franck (Bruno Lochet) inspect the list of war dead in the town hall that includes soldiers from former French colonies. Thematically, then, this scene offers a flashforward to the subject of Bouchareb’s Second World War epic Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006). Just as Kechiche denies the myth of France as the benevolent protector of the migrant, so he problematises the notion of the unconditional welcome from the North African diasporic community. Jallel’s precarious status as clandestine migrant is certainly never ignored in the film. Indeed, La Faute à Voltaire’s narrative is clearly structured around the immigrant’s trajectory, beginning with

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Figure 4.1  Jallel, the poetical refugee in La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001).

his arrival in France and ending with his deportation. Nevertheless, for significant sections of the film the immigrant narrative is displaced as the love story between Jallel and Lucie is foregrounded; from their meeting in the psychiatric hospital to the couple’s subsequent reunion that culminates with the community party and the lovemaking scene only moments before Jallel’s arrest and deportation. As Nettelbeck notes, the romantic plotline is consciously universalised by Kechiche: ‘this is primarily the story not of the migrant and the Frenchwoman, but of two needy people brought together by circumstance’ (Nettelbeck 2007: 309). Similarly, the enduring friendships that Jallel establishes, most notably with Franck (Bruno Lochet), the Breton whom he befriends in the homeless shelter, are not centred on the familial, ethnic or community ties that supposedly bind the extended North African immigrant population in Paris. This distance between Jallel and the French descendants of North African migrants he encounters in Paris is initially highlighted by his unfamiliarity with the term rebeu (a derivative of beur) in his first meeting with Nono in the homeless shelter. Jallel will subsequently attempt to dissimulate such difference by commenting to Nassera ‘so you’re a beur then?’ at their first meeting. Moments later, as the discussion in Bar Alhambra extends to the question of Jallel’s origins, he remarks ‘we’re all cousins’ before offering to buy all the other customers a drink. Jallel’s attempt to ingratiate/integrate himself into the established North African immigrant community is also an attempt to cover his tracks – maintaining the pretence established at the point of his application for a visa and repeated to Nono in the homeless shelter that he is an Algerian, since he has been told by his uncle that Algerian immigrants are more

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s­ympathetically received due to French guilt over the war in Algeria. At the same time, Jallel’s exclamation of belonging to an extended Maghrebi diasporic ‘family’ echoes the grand but ultimately meaningless sentiment of Republican universalism towards the clandestine Tunisian immigrant. The illusion of the all-embracing diasporic community, like that of the tolerant Republic, is soon exposed in La Faute à Voltaire. On the one hand, Jallel is undoubtedly assisted by his extended family (the uncle) when he arrives in France. On the other hand, he is rejected by the settled diasporic community when Nassera agrees to an arranged marriage as a means of regularising Jallel’s illegal status in France, only to abandon him moments before the ceremony. This damaging effect of Nassera’s rejection of Jallel is to send him into a bout of depression so severe that he is hospitalised – entering hospital under a false name in order to access the medical care denied to him by his clandestine status. La Faute à Voltaire thus offers a fragmented and at times ambivalent perspective on the relationship between the newly arrived or clandestine immigrant and the wider North African immigrant population, one that is quite different to that found in early émigré and Maghrebi-French films of the 1980s and 1990s, where the newly arrived immigrant is typically embraced by the extended diasporic community. Kechiche similarly rejects the idea that, as the newly arrived immigrant, Jallel must choose to either isolate himself within the culture of homeland or reject that community in an attempt to integrate fully into the host nation. Jallel’s cultural capital (his ability to access, understand and relate French cultural texts to his own lived experience) is unproblematically combined with his association with North African culture (primarily through language and music) 5 that maintains the diasporic subject’s nostalgic links to the homeland. Nevertheless, Kechiche’s films differ from those of earlier Maghrebi-French and North African émigré authored directors in the extent to which they employ and adopt mainstream French cultural texts. Compare, for example, the centrality of Ronsard’s poetry or Dalou’s statue as an allegorical device within the narrative of La Faute à Voltaire, to the use of raï (Algerian pop music) in 100% Arabica (Zemmouri, 1997) or the inclusion of a sympathetic, North African émigré elder in Les Soeurs Hamlet (Bahloul, 1998), who enlightens the younger Maghrebi-French protagonists as to the Arabo-Berber heritage and values that inform their sense of identity. In its final analysis, La Faute à Voltaire suggests that it is state institutions such as the immigration service and not the ordinary citizens encountered by Jallel that are incapable of adapting to the reality of an increasingly multicultural, pluri-ethnic French nation. Kechiche emphasises this point through the mise en scène in the final moments of the film. The joyous celebration of the bal, captured with a mobile, handheld camera that integrates the spectator into Jallel’s alternative community, is juxtaposed with his arrest and deportation from Place de la Nation, filmed in a single, detached long-take. By aligning

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our sympathies so unambiguously with the fate of Jallel, the poetical refugee, Kechiche asks us to embrace the founding values of the Republic that were influenced by Voltaire’s writing and are embodied in Dalou’s statue in the film, in order to re-imagine the possibilities of the nation as both real and imagined community in France.

L’Esquive: Redefining the Banlieue Film If La Faute à Voltaire re-thinks existing conceptions of the North African immigrant that appear in both French cinema and French society more generally, L’Esquive engages in a similar way with the most iconic and potentially problematic space of Maghrebi-French filmmaking: the banlieue. The film explores the relationships and tensions between a group of adolescents on a working-class housing estate (cité) as they prepare a school production of the eighteenth-century French comedy of manners Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730) by Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux. L’Esquive employs a similar narrative strategy of cultural collision to that found in La Faute à Voltaire, though this time it is Marivaux’s (word-)play that co-habits with the explosive verbal sparring (or tchatche) of the young inhabitants of the cité, directly challenging the commonly held notion of the deprived urban periphery as a cultural wasteland. Kechiche spent a total of six months casting, rehearsing and finally shooting on location in the Franc-Moisins housing estate in the working-class suburbs of Saint Denis, north of Paris. In the opening scene of L’Esquive, which lasts little more than two minutes and effectively acts as a prelude to the action that follows, we are plunged, at the characters’ level, into the world of the deprived urban periphery. The scene depicts a small multi-ethnic group of male youths from the cité in heated discussion, ‘reacting aggressively to an affront to their masculine honour in a way typical of the banlieue film’ (Tarr 2007: 135). As the discussion intensifies, Krimo (the film’s taciturn and sullen Maghrebi-French male lead) jogs into view and takes his place in the group. The scene gives the sensation of being very suddenly and immediately immersed into the heated exchange between the teenage boys. On the one hand, this is due to the camera’s position in the centre of the group, with the conversation being followed by swift, seemingly improvised pans or rapid cuts from one extreme close-up to another (an approach to framing, camera movement and editing that has now become a recognisable part of Kechiche’s visual style) as the rows of high-rise flats on the estate blur into the background. On the other hand, there is a sense of an aural assault on the spectator; a combination of the sudden opening, the rapid delivery and barely comprehensible slang used by the film’s young protagonists. The scene thus introduces us to the adolescent world of the cité in which the narrative will unfold, the rapid-fire tchatche of the teenagers that will dominate

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the soundtrack, as well as establishing Krimo as a detached and somewhat uneasy participant in the world of the posturing, male banlieue youth. However, it also sets up something of a fausse piste in relation to the narrative that will unfold. For while Kechiche will remain true to the universe of the adolescent banlieusard, his film offers significant agency to the young female protagonists of the estate; a group that, with few previous exceptions (most obviously Jeunesse dorée (Ghorab-Volta, 2001) and Douce France (Chibane, 1995) have been systematically marginalised in the diegesis of the banlieue film. While characters such as Krimo’s best friend, Fathi (Hafet Ben-Ahmed), conform to the mainstream media stereotype of the young alienated banlieusard, it is undoubtedly the young women who come out on top in L’Esquive. Nowhere is this made more apparent than in the unrealisable romantic coupling of the forceful, verbally explosive and self-confident Lydia (Sara Forestier) and the introverted, taciturn and largely passive Krimo.6 The female protagonists of L’Esquive do not depend on or defer to their male peers. Attempts to coerce or directly control the young women are met with refusal and verbal rebuttals. At times this can produce a sinister dynamic, such as Fathi’s violent confrontation with Frida (Sabrina Ouazani), as he attempts extract information from her about the exact nature of Lydia and Krimo’s relationship. Elsewhere, this confrontation is played out to comic effect, such as Fathi’s lamentable attempts to control which of the young women sits in the car when Lydia and Krimo are brought together by their friends to clear the air. All of the central female protagonists – Lydia, Frida and Magalie (Aurélie Ganito) – are thus given uncharacteristic space to articulate their opinions and to refuse a position of passive objectivity in the presence of their male peers. This female agency is also reflected in the girls’ speech acts, which are peppered with masculine referents. They talk about having ‘balls’ (couilles) and, tellingly, refer to each other as ‘brother’ (frère), appropriating the vernacular of the young male adolescents from the estate for their own purposes and in an attempt to determine their own futures. The verbal agency granted to the female protagonists is further reinforced by their prominent physical presence in exterior spaces of the cité, where they congregate to exchange gossip, discuss their aspirations and even confront one another. This representational strategy is, again, rare in the banlieue film, where external spaces tend to be exclusively coded as masculine (Higbee 2001b: 199–200). In one scene approximately half an hour into the film, Lydia is sat with a group of girls on a bench in the children’s playground, as Krimo stands nervously on the fringes of the frame trying to attract her attention. Krimo’s marginal position in this scene is further reinforced by the fact that his perspective on the action is shot by hand-held camera positioned over his shoulder (see Figure 4.2). However, the re-appropriation of the public spaces of the cité in L’Esquive is not uniquely related to gender. Typically, the banlieue film (including those films by directors of Maghrebi-origin) has used

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the alienating architecture of the cité itself as a visual metaphor for the banlieusard’s exclusion, with protagonists shot against a backdrop of overbearing tower blocks and the dead-spaces of rooftops, stairwells and basements – see for example the mise en scène of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, La Haine (Kassovotz, 1995) and Ma 6-T va crack-er (Richet, 1997). Kechiche at times employs the cinematic potential of the cité’s dehumanising post-war architecture. However, he also relies on a selective and symbolic use of these locations that can run counter to the more traditional spatial tropes of the banlieue film; one that is, in turn, informed by shot selection and depth-of-field. The use of the long shot that frames the youthful protagonists against a backdrop of the cité is therefore largely reserved for the scenes in which the schoolchildren are rehearsing the play in the open-air. Alternatively, it is employed when groups of male youths, led by Fathi, gather to discuss activities in the cité (such as Krimo’s involvement in the school play). The latter scene involving the male gang functions to reinforce the existing visual lexicon of the banlieue film. The former – rehearsals for the play – serves a quite different function, embedding the words and gestures of Marivuax’s drama into the very landscape of the cité, questioning the ‘divide between high and low cultures and the legitimacy of territorial distinctions traditionally associated with them’ (Swamy 2007: 59). In other words, Kechiche challenges the assumption of the banlieue as a cultural wilderness, or a space simply to be coded in representational terms by ‘urban’ cultural forms such as hip-hop.7 Instead, the juxtaposition of ‘high’ cultural references to Marivaux’s play with street slang foregrounds the creativity, resourcefulness (and humour) of these supposedly alienated young people as well as their ability to embrace and engage with the French cultural mainstream in spite of the socio-economic and cultural dynamics that ­perpetuate their exclusion from wider French society. Alongside the external spaces of the cité, the classroom becomes a pivotal site of the performative encounter between street culture and marivaudage. More than this, the school functions as a metonymic space of integration, given its prominent role within the state as (theoretically) promoting the history, values and traditions of the French Republic. A number of L’Esquive’s key scenes are thus located in the classroom, such as when the teacher reminds her students of the central message of Marivaux’s play: that we are all prisoners of our own social condition, unable to disguise the gestures, language and behaviour that define social class. The scene has been criticised for its apparent acceptance of a social determinism that effectively condemns the schoolchildren to a position of perpetual marginality as inhabitants of the working-class cité (Tarr 2007: 138). Viewed in this more negative light, the schoolteacher (and by extension the education system) has already given up on Krimo and his peers and the school is thus far removed from its idealised status as the temple of the Republic. However, the ultimate success of the school production, which gives

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rise to spontaneous celebration amongst students and their families, combined with the film’s tendency to subvert and challenge established stereotypes of the cité and its inhabitants, suggests that L’Esquive does not entirely concur with this more fatalistic view of class and social mobility.8 Interpreting the film from a slightly different angle, Nettelbeck argues that the inclusion of Marivaux’s comedy of manners in L’Esquive is further evidence of Kechiche’s use of ‘canonical artifacts of French culture as markers to expose the social, psychological and cultural obstacles that stand in the way of those who dream of integration into French society’ (Nettelbeck 2007: 308). While this assertion is broadly correct, there is one crucial distinction between the desired ‘integration’ of Jallel in La Faute à Voltaire and Krimo and his peers in L’Esquive. While the former is concerned with the position of the recently arrived, clandestine immigrant in the host nation, L’Esquive focuses on young banlieusards for whom the notion of ‘integration’ is a misnomer, since they are French by birth. In L’Esquive, exclusion is largely due to internal divisions within French society that limit the social mobility of the poorest members of society. While these are, of course, also compounded by prejudice against the North African immigrant community and their French descendants, it is not the same as the marginalised position occupied by the émigré in relation to the host nation. Indeed, any distinction between North African émigré and Maghrebi-French protagonists is further complicated in L’Esquive by the fact that Kechiche’s narrative effectively focuses on third-generation Maghrebi-French protagonists (the children of beurs). The beurs, who reached majority in the 1980s, were involved in cultural, associative (community-based) activism as well as the wider socio-political debate surrounding the changing nature of French national identity. They were therefore able to see the possibility of greater social mobility and integration into French society, even if this was not actually realised. In contrast, the subsequent (third) generation of MaghrebiFrench youth, described by Begag as jeunes ethniques, or ‘young ethnics’, has ‘never known anything other than the ethnically stigmatized environment into which it was born’ and remains largely pessimistic about the possibility of social mobility and advancing beyond the limited horizons of banlieue (Hargreaves in Begag 2007: ix). Amongst the jeunes ethniques, Begag makes three further, key distinctions between the rouilleurs (‘rusters’ or those who form a disenfranchised underclass in the banlieue and display a mistrust or hostility towards state institutions), dérouilleurs (‘de-rusters’ or those who have managed to succeed in school or the workplace, in spite of the considerable obstacles before them) and intermédiaries (the undecided majority, caught between the two extremes of seemingly immutable social exclusion and the possibility of achieving greater social mobility and adopting an ambiguous – even ambivalent – position in relation to dominant state institutions) (Begag

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Figure 4.2  Krimo, the intermédiarie, covets Julia from afar in L’Esquive (Kechiche, 2004).

2007). It is possible to identify members of all three groups in L’Esquive: Fathi as a rouilleur; Rachid and Frida as dérouilleurs; and, arguably, Krimo as the symbolic intermédiarie – the one character who moves between the two groups and whose future direction is far from certain at the end of the film. The interaction between Krimo and his mother also points towards a shift from Beur Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Although a secondary figure in the diegesis, the mother is presented as almost entirely westernised (she offers Krimo pasta for dinner) and there is no conflict over cultural or national allegiances between mother and son, in sharp contrast to division between Madjid and Malika in Le Thé au harem d’Archimède. Kechiche is therefore less concerned with recognising the ‘arrival’ of a new generation of Maghrebi-French youth in French society, as did the beur and ­banlieue films of the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, than he is with highlighting the institutional structures and local socio-economic realties that, two decades on, continue to ensure marginalisation of these young French citizens of Maghrebi origin. This crucial distinction might also provide a response to criticism that the film largely ‘ignores’ Krimo’s ethnic difference (Tarr 2007: 138–40). Despite their obvious socio-economic exclusion, to plead for the rightful place of these (third generation) Maghrebi-French protagonists in France would be a rather strange political claim for L’Esquive to make, given that these young people have been born and raised in France and have only a partial and, in some cases, an extremely weak connection to the North African culture and homeland of their first generation parents or grandparents. Nor is it possible, for the reasons outlined above, to construct the film in terms of

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an ‘immigrant’ narrative that explores the split between host and homeland. If the young protagonists of L’Esquive have ‘roots’ or origins, these are found in the multicultural working-class estates of the French urban periphery far more than they are in the bled of their parents or grandparents. In this respect, Kechiche does not deny the ethnic difference of the Maghrebi-French protagonists. Rather, he suggests that exclusion on the grounds of such difference is one of a range of factors that result in their continued marginalisation. L’Esquive thus explores the complex and often fraught set of social codes, relationships and interactions that the teenage inhabitants of the cité must navigate in relation to their peers, parents and state institutions (the school and police). In this respect, and despite the film’s extremely localised setting and socio-political concerns, the film evokes both the specificity and universality of the teenagers’ experiences. The aspirations, anxieties, frustrations and desires (particularly as they relate to matters of the heart) of these young people are portrayed as, essentially, no different to those of other French adolescents (Tessé 2004: 52–3). This potential universality is also illustrated by the various generic categories that can be applied to L’Esquive. Beyond the cinéma de banlieue rubric, the film can also variously be described as a teen romance, a coming-of-age narrative, a comedy of manners, a film about putting on a play, or a teenage (high-)school movie (Tarr 2007: 133). Viewed in this light, L’Esquive speaks of ongoing social inequality within contemporary French society, acknowledging the role played within this imbalance of power by ethnic discrimination but refusing to construct its debate in the conventional terms of the banlieue film as an exclusively territorial conflict between alienated, ethnically coded banlieue youth and the state (most commonly the police). Thus, when the potentially clichéd moment of the police search does appear in L’Esquive (the only time in the film we are aware of the police presence in the cité), the heavy-handed treatment of the (mostly) innocent group of banlieue youth does not signal the film’s explosive climax, as in La Haine (Higbee 2006: 91). Rather, the narrative continues to its conclusion with no further, explicit reference to the incident. As abhorrent as the confrontation with the repressive agents of the state might be, L’Esquive therefore presents this instance of institutional violence and prejudice as a ‘reality’ that multiethnic banlieue youth must contend with on an almost daily basis. Moreover, the fact that the police stop-and-search scene in L’Esquive involves all of the central teenage protagonists shows how fine the balance between inclusion and exclusion is for the intermédiaries, not to mention the potential of such aggressive police tactics to make even the dérouilleurs question their efforts to integrate into mainstream society and escape the confines of the banlieue. Kechiche continues with the strategy established in La Faute à Voltaire of cautiously embracing Republican ideals in principle, whilst presenting misgivings about the system as it exists in practice.

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Though we cannot be sure of the final outcome, the degrading act of the police search is displaced by an altogether more uplifting sequence in which Lydia and Farida perform Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard to rapturous applause from teachers, students, family and friends. Just as significant as this performance, however, is the staging of Farid ud-Din Attar’s twelfth-century tale The Conference of the Birds by a group of younger primary-school children that precedes it. If Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard is intended as a transcultural act of ‘open sourcing’ the French literary canon to multi-ethnic banlieue youth (Williams 2011: 418–20), the performance of The Conference of the Birds functions to ‘ensure the universality of great human artistic achievement remains universally accessible’ (Nettelbeck 2007: 317), offering an idealised allegory of the inclusive universality of the French Republican tradition. Moreover, this adaptation of twelfth-century Persian (not Arab) poetry is performed by a multi-ethnic cast of French schoolchildren, who unlike Krimo and his peers are, as yet, untouched by the cynicism and hostility of the wider world. The suggestion then is that such imported stories and cultural traditions, which, over time, may become part of the fabric of French culture, have as much to teach its citizens as those by Marivaux, Hugo or Voltaire. Williams’s notion of an ‘open-sourcing’ of French culture in the films of Kechiche therefore flows in both directions: on the grander cultural level of the performance of The Conference of the Birds and on the level of everyday cultural practice, through to the fact that the slang employed by all the youthful inhabitants of the cité is a mix of French, inverted slang and Arabic. Significantly in L’Esquive it is Lydia, the white French banlieusard, who is most vocal in her use of the Arabic phrase Inch’allah (‘God willing’) in the exchanges with her female peers in the cité. Despite the elation of the final performance, and in a narrative formula that has since become his trademark, Kechiche refuses to leave the spectator with a simplistic, happy ending. Standing alone outside the school hall, Krimo is excluded from the collective achievement of the play. Much has been made Krimo’s isolation as a metaphor for the continued exclusion of MaghrebiFrench youth in French society and the failings of the (Republican) education system to foster a truly inclusive space of integration and social mobility (Nettelbeck 2007; Tarr 2010; Swamy 2007). Moreover, the final image of Krimo brooding in his room, refusing to respond to Lydia’s calls from the estate below (an act that returns us to Krimo’s calling for Magali at the start of the film) is seen by Tarr as confirmation of his exclusion at the same time as it denies the ‘beur youth his white French object of desire’ (Tarr 2007: 139). And yet, if Krimo’s socio-economic position, his harsh and suspicious treatment at the hands of the police, the absence of a father figure and the failings of an education system to provide a more inclusive environment are laid bare in L’Esquive, so too is his agency in deciding to isolate himself from the

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c­ ommunity at the end. In contrast, Fathi and his gang are shown as prominent members of the audience, suggesting that the school play is not solely accessible to the dérouilleurs. Presumably for reasons of pride, Krimo cannot bring himself to enter the school building and watch the play, in the same way that he cannot answer Lydia’s calls for a connection, romantic or otherwise, as she stands calling up to his room. Contrary to Tarr’s claim then, the white object of desire is not denied to Krimo, rather he denies it to himself. Nor, unlike the ending of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, must the central protagonists rely on the solidarity of a (white) French peer at the end of the film. As Kechiche himself states: If I want these kinds of interventions in my films [the unexpected disruption caused by individual protagonists], it’s because I don’t want solely to lay the blame at the level of [French] society. I want there to be complications that are not simply caused by institutions . . . (Kechiche in Lalanne and Fevret 2007) In this respect, then, even in this most bleak of endings, Kechiche offers Krimo the dignity that comes with agency – an agency largely denied to those protagonists of earlier beur and banlieue films and one that emphasises the subtlety and complexity of the portrayal of banlieue youth found in L’Esquive.

La Graine et le mulet : Convivial Multiculture and the Space of the Working Class Against most expectations, including those of Kechiche himself, L’Esquive triumphed over more mainstream opposition such as Les Choristes (Barratier, 2004) and Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, 2004) at the 2004 Césars. This high-profile success led to a rejuvenation of commercial interest in the film, resulting in over 400 000 spectators for L’Esquive by spring 2005, a highly respectable result for a film shot on location in the banlieue with a mostly non-professional cast and a budget of a little more than €1m. Following this success, Claude Berri, one of the most influential producers in France, offered Kechiche a three-picture deal that elevated his status within the ­industry – further supporting the argument for his trajectory from immigrant to national filmmaker in France during the 2000s.9 For his first project with Berri, Kechiche returned to one of his earliest and most personal scripts: La Graine et le mulet. (A reference to the film’s title actually appears in La Faute à Voltaire on the cover of the homeless newspaper that Jallel sells on the metro, retrospectively forming an in-joke for aficionados of Kechiche’s films). The film tells the story of Slimane, a first-generation immigrant from Tunisia who, upon being made redundant from his job as a

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shipyard worker, attempts to transform a dilapidated barge into a floating couscous restaurant. Originally, Kechiche had intended to cast his father in the lead role and shoot in the areas of Nice where he grew up. However, the death of his father in 2004 not only caused the film to remain on hold for a number of years, but it also led Kechiche to decide to film in the neighbouring Mediterranean port of Sète, to provide some emotional distance for the ­director from the project (Delorme and Frodon 2007: 15). If La Faute à Voltaire is concerned with the fate of a newly arrived illegal Tunisian immigrant and L’Esquive focuses on Maghrebi-French banlieue youth, La Graine et le mulet revolves around the relationships within an extended Tunisian immigrant family who are very much part of their local working-class community. However, as we shall see, La Graine et le mulet continues to explore the themes and strategies already in place in Kechiche’s first two features: the concern with the Republican model in a postcolonial French society; the prominence of strong, female protagonists; a desire to subvert and offer alternatives to the stereotypical representations of North African immigrants and their French descendants typically found in French cinema and the media. The film also marks the maturation of Kechiche’s signature style that had been developed first tentatively in La Faute à Voltaire and more explicitly in L’Esquive: the use of everyday locations, a mixture of professional and non-professional actors and the exploitation of the theatrical, performative potential of the selected locations and architecture of the film. Finally, La Graine et le mulet confirms Kechiche’s preference for shooting on digital with a two-camera set up, combining static shots with hardly any pans or tracking with a second, roving camera that locks in on close-ups and extreme close-ups on the actors, as much to gauge their response to the action that is unfolding in a particular situation as to a focus on the speaker. The advantage of this technical set up, one that is not restrained by the cinematic apparatus and is undoubtedly motivated by Kechiche’s own background as a screen actor, is that the camera can move freely between the characters, while preserving the integrity of the interaction between the actors within the same take. This approach was facilitated by Kechiche’s use of lightweight, relatively unobtrusive HD digital cameras (first experimented with in collaboration with his regular cinematographer, Bulgarian émigré Lubomir Bakchev), allowing for far more expansive and expressive takes, even with two cameras running at the same time and in relatively poorly lit interior locations.10 In socio-spatial terms, La Graine et le mulet is, first of all, defined by its setting in the port of Sète. The film’s geographical location, on the Mediterranean coast, facing out towards North Africa, offers the possibility of the port functioning as a cross-cultural contact zone between France and the Maghreb. However, unlike the larger, more industrial southern port of Marseilles that features in films such as Bye-bye, Comme un aimant (Saleh

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and Akhenaton, 2000) and Samia (Faucon, 2001), Sète is not considered a symbolic point of arrival and departure. Nor is it depicted as a historical point of cultural intersection between France and the Maghreb. Of equal significance for a film that seeks to locate its Maghrebi protagonists in relation to class as much as ethnic difference is the fact that, while the port remains a major commercial fishing centre, the town’s economy is increasingly dependent on tourism. In the opening scene of La Graine et le mulet we are immediately introduced to this tension between the old and new economies of Sète, as the camera is placed alongside a group of tourists taking a boat tour of the port led by Majid (Sami Zitouni), Slimane’s eldest son. As the boat navigates the port’s interior canals leading to the harbour, Majid draws the tourists’ attention on one side to the piles of scrap metal destined for Turkey, lamenting the fact that ‘France used to make ovens, now it seems we’ve run out of matches’. Through the opening sequence, Sète is thus introduced as a port that is rapidly losing links to its industrial past, the working-class community of fishermen and shipyards being reduced to little more than a sideshow for the pleasure cruises that pass by. As Kechiche has himself acknowledged, speaking in an interview on the UK DVD release of La Graine et le mulet, it is this theme of the loss of a traditional place for the working-class families of Sète within the local economy that preoccupies the director more in La Graine et le mulet than the question of the place of the North African community (and their French-born descendants) within French society. Locating La Graine et le mulet in Sète, Kechiche continues the trend established earlier in the 2000s by certain Maghrebi-French filmmakers of moving away from the Parisian urban periphery, and more specifically the run-down housing estates on the fringes of Paris as the exclusive setting for beur protagonists (see Tarr 2005; Higbee 2007a). However, unlike other films released since 2000 in which the Maghrebi-immigrant protagonists actively journey beyond the banlieue into new and unfamiliar spaces of la France profonde (provincial France) , or else attempt to reconnect with their Maghrebi-roots through a return to the bled (for example Ten’ja [Legzouli, 2004]; Exils [Gatlif, 2004]; Bled Number One [Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006]), the spaces occupied by the protagonists of La Graine et le mulet are, precisely, settled and familiar.11 Kechiche thus emphasises the sedentary nature of the North African diaspora in France rather than the displacement or a continuing search for place that dominates the narratives of so much Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking. The protagonists of La Graine et le mulet may well undergo change, most obviously due to the effects of Slimane’s redundancy, but Sète is their home and even the first generation of immigrants have no intention of leaving. Following news of his redundancy, Slimane politely entertains his sons’ ­suggestions that

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he return to the bled. And yet his response, which comes through his subsequent actions and not words, is to set up his own business (the couscous restaurant-boat moored in Sète), building a legacy for his children in France, not the Maghreb. Moreover, unlike other films by Maghrebi-French filmmakers, or focusing on protagonists of Maghrebi-descent situated on the south Mediterranean coast, the port location does not connote a desire for return to the Maghreb and the ambivalent pull between host and homeland for the diasporic subject. Whereas in Bye-bye, Ismael is repeatedly framed staring out across the Mediterranean at the boats carrying passengers between France and the Maghreb, the view from the window of Slimane’s lodgings looks out onto the internal waterways of Sète, not out to sea. Similarly, the boat that Slimane buys and restores with his redundancy money (named La Source, thus evoking a sense of roots or origins) is not intended as a vessel to transport him back to the Maghreb. Rather, the floating restaurant remains on the waterways of Sète – destined for, of all places, Quai de la République. In fact the boat never arrives at this prime tourist location due to problems with red tape and is, instead, (symbolically) moored near the Hôtel de l’Orient. As in La Faute à Voltaire then there is an obvious interest in the interaction between space and language – the naming of locations in towns and cities to evoke the Republic, and the sense of how accessible these spaces are. This is not to say, however, that markers of ethnic difference are absent from La Graine et le mulet. Consider, for example, the extended family meal sequence sixteen minutes into the film, which brings together members of the multi-ethnic working-class community of Sète – friends and extended family – who are of Tunisian, Italian and Russian origin. In cinematic terms, the sequence is a tour de force that identifies Kechiche as a worthy successor to auteurs such as Renoir and Pialat for its honest and respectful depiction of social relations and human interaction. What distinguishes Kechiche from earlier/other Maghrebi-French directors, though – and what marks out La Graine et le mulet as a landmark film in the history of Maghrebi-French filmmaking – is that the director fully acknowledges the difference of his Maghrebi-French and North African immigrant protagonists, without ever making this the determining or deciding factor surrounding their place within French society, or indeed their identification as Other. Kechiche’s film also departs from earlier beur and Maghrebi-French filmmaking in the sense that he refuses to play on a sense of generational conflict between first-generation North African immigrants and their French-born descendants. Instead, the Maghrebi-French protagonists display a profound respect and genuine affection for their parents (a clear reflection of the intensely personal nature of this project for Kechiche as a homage to his father). It could therefore be argued that La Graine et le mulet, like the rest of Kechiche’s oeuvre, is profoundly Republican in character. It is no accident

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that the most explicit discussion of difference takes place over the family meal in the private/domestic sphere, while the difference on display at the opening night of the restaurant is quite clearly contained within a space that intends to transfer the intimacy of the family couscous meal to the public space of the restaurant. Similarly, the title of the film itself, La Graine et le mulet (‘the grain and the mullet’), provides a reference to the key ingredients of the North African dish at the centre of the film’s narrative, without (in line with the French Republican model) drawing attention to its difference – unlike the more exotic sounding title Couscous chosen for the film’s UK release. However, this is not to say that Kechiche offers a naïve or unproblematic representation of the realities of living with difference in La Graine et le mulet. While Slimane finds acceptance and tolerance within the working-class community in Sète, he confronts a hostility bordering on casual racism when he meets with the health and safety inspector from the council, who continually reminds him of how things are done ‘here’ (in France), the implication being that Slimane is not ‘from here’. Furthermore, La Graine et le mulet explores what Avtar Brah (1996: 172) describes as the contingent nature of diasporic identities: how, in a variety of social and cultural locations or situations and depending on the location of the utterance, act or social relations, the difference of diaspora for the North African immigrant population manifests itself in local, regional, national and transnational terms. Most obviously this occurs in the symbolically named Hôtel de l’Orient, the bar and hotel owned by Slimane’s partner Latifa (Hatika Karaoui) which provides lodgings and a communal meeting point for many of Sète’s North African émigré workers. The sights and sounds of the North African diaspora (the traditional food, song and dance of the Maghreb) are foregrounded in the bar. Similarly, when Slimane ascends the staircase to his lodgings, his footsteps mingle with the sound of traditional North African music emanating from his neighbour’s room. And yet, rather than suggesting a state of enforced exile or longing for the North African homeland, the bar instead stands as a marker that the presence of the immigrants who lodge there is anything but temporary. In this respect it is also more firmly identified as a space of sedentary diasporic community than the Bar Alhambra in La Faute à Voltaire, where Jallel makes connections but fails to establish lasting and dependable friendships within the local diasporic community. The terrace of the Hôtel de l’Orient functions as focal space for the North African émigrés who lodge there to pass the time and to gossip. The sequence in which they sit outside the bar discussing the complications of both Slimane’s personal life and business venture identifies them as a chorus within the film, a dramatic technique which has led a number of critics to draw comparisons with Pagnol’s films of the 1930s12 – a further suggestion that the difference being displayed in La Graine et le mulet here is as much meridional as it is Maghrebi.

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Figure 4.3  Slimane stares out onto the waterways of Sète from the diasporic space of the Hôtel de l’Orient in La Graine et le mulet (Kechiche, 2007).

Various social spaces, public and domestic, are represented in La Graine et le mulet: the port as both a site of work and leisure; the bank where Rym (Hafsia Herzi) and Slimane apply for their loan and offices at the town hall where they request the relevant permissions to open their business; the shipyard and quayside where Slimane renovates La Source; the modest workingclass apartments of Slimane’s estranged wife. Of these various locations, the port, family home and Hôtel de l’Orient are the principal geographical locations of the film. It is, however, in the space of the boat that Slimane renovates and transforms into a floating couscous restaurant that all of the protagonists who occupy the various spaces of the film converge in the final third of La Graine et le mulet. Indeed, the boat is the central location for the final hour of the film. The boat therefore functions as a space of encounter, performance and intercultural exchange that is both real and metonymic. Moreover, its function within the narrative evokes Gilroy’s description of the ship in the context of the Black Atlantic (a counterculture of Modernity that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once) as a ‘mobile element that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places they connected’ (Gilroy 1993: ix). The boat itself is representative of the transformation of Sète from an industrial port to a city whose economy is increasingly dependent on the service industries of the restaurant trade and tourism. Significantly, Slimane begins his renovation of the boat in an area of the port that now appears devoid of any industrial activity. As he arrives with Rym on the back of his moped to inspect the boat for the first time, idle cranes surround scrap metal on an empty

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­ uayside, seeming to reinforce Majid’s earlier comments about the decline of q manufacturing and industry in France while also endorsing the notion that there is no future in the shipbuilding economy for Slimane. He must look elsewhere. When his renovation of the boat is complete, Slimane then transports the vessel from the vestiges of the industrial port to the site of Sète’s new economy: the quayside dominated by leisure boats and restaurants. Like the Hôtel de l’Orient, the boat itself offers a further indication of the sedentary nature of the North African immigrant population within Sète. Just as Slimane’s view from the Orient bar does not look out across the Mediterranean, the floating restaurant is, as we have already noted, moored on the waterways of Sète. But whereas the Hôtel de l’Orient is overwhelmingly identified as a relatively closed diasporic space associated with the local North African immigrant community, the boat offers the possibility of intercultural exchange between French and North African protagonists. In this respect, the boat also functions as a point of convergence for the public and private in the film – it is where the ‘couscous d’amour’ prepared lovingly by Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk) for family and friends is transformed by Slimane’s business venture into an object of capital exchange: ‘ethnic’ cuisine for a paying (French) clientèle. The boat is therefore simultaneously presented in the film as a real social space (the floating restaurant) and a performative one. Most obviously, it is the space in which the North African émigré band provides musical entertainment to accompany the meal. It is also the location where Rym performs her belly dance – a calculated and increasingly desperate risk to buy time as Slimane searches in vain for Souad, Majid and the missing couscous. Kechiche has spoken of the theatricality associated with the extended meal scenes in La Graine et le mulet and how the boat continues this sense of spectacle and performance (Domenach and Rouyer 2007: 20). La Graine et le mulet thus continues Kechiche’s strategy of integrating performance into everyday spaces found in La Faute à Voltaire (reciting poetry in the metro; singing along to Brassan in the Parisian courtyard) and L’Esquive (rehearsing for the Marivaux play in the public spaces of the cité). The interior of the boat is decorated with drapes, palm-trees and clichéd paintings of camels resting by an oasis, while the invited friends and prominent local businesspeople and members of the town council must wait on the quayside in darkness, bursting into spontaneous applause as Slimane illuminates the boat, opens the doors and quite literally lets the drama of the evening unfold. The boat is also 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. Slimane’s youngest daughter, Olfa (Sabrina Ouazani) welcomes French

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guests onto the boat by placing her hand on her heart (a typical Arab greeting), indicating a potentially convivial space that can promote tolerance and respect through intercultural exchange. However, Kechiche quickly dismisses any possibility that the boat should turn into some utopian site of unproblematic multicultural harmony. The assembled local dignitaries congratulate Slimane on his ‘success’ in patronising terms that verge on neo-colonial paternalism, describing his business venture as ‘a human adventure’ and joining together in a nervous chorus of ‘Inch Allah’ to toast the restaurant’s opening night. Local French restaurateurs who have been invited to the opening use language that is couched in racist undertones: one comments on how granting the permit for the restaurant proves that ‘we’re not savages’. However, Kechiche refuses any simplistic division between ‘us and them’ that divides the bad French (racists) from the innocent Maghrebi protagonists by suggesting, through the context of these remarks, that such hostility could be motivated as much by a fear of further competition in an already overcrowded market than any deep-seated and aggressive racist beliefs. Moreover, the director shows that the Maghrebi protagonists of his film are equally susceptible to applying stereotypical ­judgements, such as when Lilia suggests that the best way to placate the French guests who are becoming increasingly impatient for their meal to be served is to ply them with alcohol. Finally, despite being a space conceived, constructed and presided over by Slimane, the boat is ultimately a space that is dominated and directed by the women of the film. Though it is Slimane’s vision (and physical labour) that transforms the wrecked boat into a floating restaurant, it is Rym who convinces the bank to lend money and the council to grant a permit for the business. Similarly, while a taciturn Slimane presides over the front of house, the women are the driving force behind this new entrepreneurial venture. In contrast, Majid flees his responsibilities at the restaurant when his mistress arrives with her husband as one of the invited guests from the council, while Rhiad bows his head and mumbles to his sisters when attempting to cover for the absence of his elder brother. Even Slimane eventually abandons the restaurant to embark on a futile and ultimately tragic search for the missing couscous, leaving the women to hold the fort and deal with the increasingly impatient diners. In the end it is Rym who takes a calculated risk, reducing herself to eroticised object (much to the delight of the men on the boat) by performing a belly dance in a desperate attempt to buy time, while her mother returns to the Hôtel de l’Orient to prepare more couscous for the invited guests. And yet, just as Kechiche rejects the boat as site of unproblematic convivial multiculture, so he also refuses to identify it as a utopian sight of female solidarity. An uneasy truce exists between Slimane’s daughters and the women of his new ‘family’. Karima and Olfa are barely able to contain their disgust

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when Latifa and Rym arrive u ­ nannounced on the opening night. Elsewhere, the women of the family (led by Souad) are shown as complicit in hiding Majid’s serial adultery from his Russian immigrant wife Julia (Alice Houri) by receiving calls and passing on messages from his mistresses. Perhaps most troubling, though, is the fact that Rym’s presence as a forceful, uncompromising and fiercely independent, young female voice in the film (a sight that is all too rare in Maghrebi-French filmmaking) is undercut by her belly-dancing performance at the end of the film. Even if we read her performance as a calculated risk, provocatively objectifying her femininity and exposing her body at the end of the film to save the restaurant from disaster on the opening night, her highly sexualised performance and the camera’s fetishising fragmentation of her body through extreme close-ups, combined with the lascivious gaze of both the assembled French guests and the North African musicians, presents an unsettling and potentially disempowering image of this protagonist. For his part, Kechiche describes Rym’s performance as an act of ‘love’ for Slimane, though ‘sacrifice’ might be a more suitable description. Rym temporarily sacrifices her position as an empowered and highly capable young woman in order to perform as the objectified, exotic ‘Arabian’ dancer to placate the increasingly impatient guests. In the same way, Slimane’s sudden (and we presume fatal) collapse, that is caused, significantly, by the selfish actions of youths from the nearby cité and not by the machinations of the state, is a form of sacrifice, in that it displays the physical and emotional toll that his attempts to make a success of the restaurant and to leave a financial legacy for his children will have on the Tunisian émigré. This theme of sacrifice is further echoed in the conversation in the hotel between Rym and one of the émigré musicians, who suggests that the younger generation will never truly understand the sacrifices made by their parents in emigrating to France. The love and respect towards the parents’ generation, emphasised by the film’s final dedication to Kechiche’s father, is, in fact, a common theme that runs through all of Kechiche’s work and in direct contrast to the generational conflict that characterises the films of many other Maghrebi-French directors. Ultimately, Kechiche refuses a schematic discourse around the integration of the Maghrebi diaspora in France, which might demonise the French while presenting the North African and Maghrebi-French protagonists as entirely virtuous ‘victims’. Nor does he offer an ending that embraces a naïve and excessively optimistic view of either gender equality or convivial multiculture in postcolonial France, which could, for example, have come in the form of an upbeat ending closing on resolution and success for Slimane and his extended family. Instead we are presented in La Graine et le mulet with an honest portrayal of multiculturalism and intercultural exchange as a work-in-progress in contemporary France, with its ‘vitality, conflicts, hopes and contradictions’ (Kaganski 2007).

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Vénus noire: Performative Space and the Encounter with the Other Vénus noire, Kechiche’s eagerly anticipated fourth feature, was simultaneously a notable departure and further confirmation of the thematic and stylistic continuity that have characterised the director’s films to date. The film recounts events from the final five years in the life of Sara Baartman, a Khoekhoe tribeswomen from the Cape Colony, who lived from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century and has since become a national icon in post-apartheid South Africa. Transported as a servant from South Africa to Europe in 1810 by Hendrick Caezar, Baartman was exhibited before audiences in England and Paris, obtaining celebrity as the original ‘Venus Hottentot’, an object of curiosity, fear and prohibited (sexual) desire, first sold to a bourgeois consumer culture of the exotic in the freak shows in London and then to the libertine salons of nineteenth-century Paris. Baartman was, furthermore, the subject of ‘scientific’ observation by French scientists under the direction of Georges Cuvier, Professor of Natural History in the Collège de France. The fascination of nineteenth-century audiences and scientists with Baartman has thus placed her at ‘the intersection of gendered and racial stereotypes in the rise of European scientific racism’ (Scully and Crais 2008: 302). The extreme responses in Europe to Baartman’s physique both before and after her death was due to her steatopygia (a genetic condition characterised by the presence of excessive fat in the buttocks) and elongated labia. Depictions of Baartman are found in scientific and anatomical drawings from the period as well as playbills and aquatint posters, cartoons, paintings and sculptures produced both before and after her death (Holmes 2007). The role of such ephemera in constructing the image of Baartman is alluded to in Vénus noire by the newspaper cuttings announcing the ‘Venus Hottentot’ that Sara Baartman (Yahima Torres) pins to the wall of her bedroom in London – an act that suggests a degree of agency as well as a self-reflexivity regarding her status as both a performer and object of fascination. Following her premature death in 1815 from either smallpox or tuberculosis (Willis and Williams 2012: 28), Baartman’s brain, skeleton and (most disturbingly) genitals were preserved and exhibited in the Parisian Musée de l’homme at the instruction of Cuvier. Here they remained on display, along with a modeled casting of her body, until 1974, before finally being repatriated to South Africa in 2002 at the request of President Mandela and the South African government, following protracted legal dispute and even debate in the French National Assembly. Indeed, it was the intense media coverage in France of the repatriation of Baartman’s remains that Kechiche claims was his first encounter with Baartman, and which led him to direct Vénus noire (Kechiche in Libiot 2010). Whereas Kechiche’s first three films deal with the socio-political realities of Maghrebi-French protagonists in contemporary France, Vénus noire is a

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transnational historical narrative, focusing on an African tribeswomen from the Cape, set in London and Paris between 1810 and 1815 – two decades before the French colonisation of Algeria would begin the cycle of colonial contact and migration that established the North African diaspora in France. Consequently, the film was shot in three languages (English, French and Afrikaans), employing an international cast of professional actors and hundreds of extras, with an attention to ‘authentic’ historical reconstruction (costumes, set design, props, recreation of historical locations), consistent with the production values of the heritage film and thus opening up a spatial reading to yet another contested space: the ‘space’ of French history. The mise-en-scène of the freak shows in London evokes the opening sequence of Les Enfants du paradis (Carné, 1942), while scenes involving Cuvier’s lectures to the French academy, the courtroom appearance of César and Sara, as well as her performances in the salons of Paris, expand Vénus noire’s narrative focus beyond the intimate worldview and resolutely local horizons of the central protagonists in his earlier films. Despite these clear differences from his previous films, Kechiche was reluctant to see Vénus noire as a radical departure in terms of either cinematic style or thematic focus (Kechiche in Libiot 2010). The film’s elevated budget (€12.7m), an almost inevitable consequence of the detailed cinematic reconstruction of historical locations, does not necessarily align Vénus noire with the mainstream production practices and middlebrow audiences of the ‘hegemonic’ heritage film of the 1990s (Powrie 1999: 12).13 Rather, Vénus noire is more readily associated with the production orbit of the medium-budget, artistically challenging, auteur-led cinéma du milieu, an observation that is reinforced by the participation in the film of veteran independent producer/ distributor Marin Karmitz. Similarly, though benefitting from an international cast of established actors, Vénus noire maintains Kechiche’s preference for showcasing unknown acting talent, with the casting of screen debutante Yahima Torres, a Cuban émigré living in Paris whom the director encountered by chance on the streets of Belleville. Finally, Kechiche continued to work with trusted creative collaborators: cinematographer Lubomir Bakchev and editor, co-writer Ghalia Lacroix (also the director’s wife). Such artistic continuity ensured that traits from previous films – such as the visual style of largely static camera positions combined with the use of zoom and extreme close-ups, an emphasis on performative spaces and the body as spectacle, the dynamic use of language surrounding a taciturn central protagonist, a linear but expansive plotline (the film runs to just over two-and-a-half hours), and the refusal of an optimistic narrative resolution – remain prominent elements in Vénus noire. Performative spaces, the act of looking and questions of power and agency involved therein endure as central concerns in Vénus noire. From the film’s opening scene, where Cuvier (François Marthouret) emerges from behind the

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Figure 4.4  Sara performs as the Venus Hottentot for Parisian salon society in Vénus noire (Kechiche, 2010).

curtains of the auditorium to deliver a lecture on the science of racial hierarchy, to the courtroom in which the African Association attempts to prove that Sara is being held in conditions tantamount to slavery14, and the prostitutes in the Parisian brothel parading themselves in front of clients, the film is essentially a mise en abyme of performance. Central to this preoccupation with performance are Baartman’s various appearances as the Venus Hottentot in the freak shows of London, the salons of Paris and as an anthropological ‘subject’ before the assembled French scientists at the Jardin du Roi (yet another example of the symbolic naming and inscription of space in Kechiche’s films). The exploration of the performative (female) body and the body under duress found in La Graine et le mulet, where Rym’s bellydance is cross-cut with Slimane’s aging frame being pushed to expiration as he chases after the young boys who have stolen his moped, is extended to even more uncomfortable limits in Vénus noire. In one particularly disturbing sequence, as she performs to a private audience in a Parisian salon, a clearly intoxicated Sara is subjected to a harrowing objectification that effectively amounts to sexual assault. The assembled libertine public are encouraged by Sara’s new master, Réaux (Olivier Gourmet), to embark on a tactile and ocular exploration of the Venus Hottentot’s body in order to better understanding their own (sexual) desires and overcome their own inhibitions.15 The sequence is filmed in graphic detail by Kechiche and, beyond any question of representation of the characters themselves, arguably verges on exploitation of the young and inexperienced Cuban actress playing Baartman. Unlike the female protagonists of Kechiche’s earlier films, however, Sara is a taciturn figure, unable to articulate her feelings and emotions in a manner

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that more closely approximates male characters such as Krimo and Slimane. Baartman’s various performances as the Venus Hottentot are thus analogous with the life-size cast of her body that stares back blankly at the audience from Cuvier’s lecture – an icon that is repeatedly observed, analysed and contemplated by various intra-diegetic audiences in the film (as she is by the spectator themselves) without us gaining any greater insight into her motivations or desires. Frequently the spectacles in which she performs as the Venus Hottentot begin with an establishing shot that frames Baartman from behind, obscuring her face and looking out towards the expectant audience. She is thus endlessly represented in Vénus noire and, while clearly evoking sympathy, is essentially presented to us as unknowable. The danger of this representational strategy, which is consistent with Kechiche’s refusal across all of his films to claim an absolute knowledge or truth over his protagonists, is that Sara/Torres is reduced to a cipher that mobilises gender and race as markers of perpetual otherness. While portraying the degrading spectacle of the Venus Hottentot, Kechiche similarly refuses to pass simplistic and moralising judgements on any of his characters. By way of an example, the apparently hedonistic urges of the libertine spectators in the Paris salon are thrown into doubt when, upon seeing Sara’s tears, they withdraw on mass and demand that Réaux bring his show to an abrupt and unexpected end. Similarly, the African ‘savage’ of the freak shows is, from the first instance in Vénus noire, portrayed as a calculated performance on the part of Sara, encouraged by Caezar (Andre Jacobs) and designed to satisfy the expectations of her European audience. Tellingly, in one particular performance, Sara refuses the role assigned to her as an object of fear and fascination. Instead she holds her audience momentarily transfixed by the beauty of her musical performance, a transgression in performing the Hottentot that is instantly rebuked by Caezar. The image Sara presents to a paying public is thus far removed from the figure in the film who, during the day, rides in a horse-drawn cart and promenades in European dress through the streets and parks of London with the aid of her two African servants. The historical perspective of Sara as helpless victim of European racism is further scrutinised in the courtroom scene, where she refuses to define herself before the judge as a slave, insisting that she has entered into a contract with Caezar to perform of her own free will. Even the supposedly noble and compassionate intervention of the African Association is left open to the possible interpretation of being seen as a self-serving act of paternalistic self-aggrandisement on behalf of the ‘civilised’ Europeans defending a helpless African tribeswoman. Nevertheless, in line with recent American scholarship, Kechiche’s nuanced characterisation of Baartman resists ‘substituting an emphasis on agency where agency appears impossible’ (Scully and Crais 2012: 304). Thus the violence inflicted on Sara by Ceazar for her refusal to expose her genitalia to

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Cuvier during his ‘scientific’ observation of the Venus Hottentot casts doubt on the veracity of her earlier afternoon stroll as the act of a free woman – a position that seems to be confirmed by the fact that Caezar eventually sells Sara to Réaux. Like the freak show and the scientific observation, then, the promenade ultimately appears as yet another form of performance for Sara, emphasising in the case of the Venus Hottentot that race and identity are ­‘constantly performative’ (Scully and Crais 2012: 304). This ambiguous line between reality and performance is repeatedly exposed in Vénus noire. As Caezar’s barrister argues in the London courtroom, those who choose to see in Sara a victim of slavery and exploitation ‘confuse reality with representation’. Kechiche further blurs this boundary with a cinematic representation of Baartman constructed through what might best be described as an aesthetic of detached intimacy. The repeated use of extreme close-ups on Sara/Torres’s face at key moments in the narrative (such as in advance of and during the performances in London) reveals Sara either with her eyes shut or with head lowered and eyes downcast, as if affecting a psychological and emotional retreat from the world around her. This use of the close-up, developed by Bakchev and Kechiche in L’Esquive and La Graine et le mulet, reaches its apogée in Vénus noire; and not only during Sara’s performances as the Venus Hottentot. This fact is well illustrated by the scene where Baartman is interviewed by the Parisian journalist, Charles Mercallier, after her performance at an exclusive party hosted by a Parisian socialite. Sara offers monosyllabic responses to Mercallier’s questions but her emotional distress is writ large across the screen as the camera maintains an unflinching close-up on her face. Although conventionally employed to evoke an emotional connection or to suggest intimacy with a given character, in Vénus noire the close-up functions instead as a marker of Sara’s alienation. It is also appears in the mise en scène as a more traditional means of fragmenting and thus fetishising her body, emphasising the fact that ‘for most Europeans who viewed her, Sarah [sic.] Baartman existed only as a collection of sexual parts’ (Gilman 1985: 85). The violence visited upon Sara’s body is at once physical and psychological but Kechiche makes little distinction between the perpetrators, who come from all levels of society. Even the degrading and increasingly base acts she is required to perform as a prostitute in Paris seem less barbaric than the final clinical violation inflicted by Cuvier, who purchases her corpse and eviscerates her genital organs, on the pretense of transforming them into an object of scientific knowledge. Indeed, Cuvier’s repeated requests in the Jardin du Roi that Sara agree to a scientific examination of her genitalia are, ultimately, not that far removed from those of clients in the brothel that she expose herself, since the ultimate aim of both sets of demands is control over the black, female body.

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Vénus noire is not only Kechiche’s most ambitious project to date in terms of the logistics and scope of the production, it is also his bleakest. The sobering endings of his previous films (Jallel’s deportation; Krimo’s apparent withdrawal from cité life; Slimane’s dramatic death) are all undercut with a sense of solidarity and the potential for change through intercultural exchange (Williams 2011). In contrast, the narrative of Vénus noire moves to Sara’s death through acts of degradation, exploitation, objectification and violence. Whereas community is presented in Kechiche’s other films as a point of potential (and, in some cases, actual) salvation, in Vénus noire the only community Sara encounters are the audiences at her shows, or the superficial solidarity of the prostitutes who work together to make money. The French news footage of the repatriation of Baartman’s remains to South Africa in 2002 that accompanies the final credits offers some kind of hope at the end of the film. However, it is literally detached from the diegesis by virtue of being embedded in the credits, as well as being historically distanced by more almost two centuries from the film’s narrative. When questioned about the relentlessly bleak tone of Vénus noire, Kechiche responded that his intention was to remove any idea of the film as entertainment (Kechiche in Libiot 2010), a fact reflected in the modest box-office results (217 147 spectators in France) given the film’s substantial budget and distribution on over 100 prints nationwide. The director’s militant opposition to the anticipated narrative and visual pleasures typically associated with the heritage film thus set him apart from the various Maghrebi filmmakers in the 2000s (Zem, Debbouze, Bensalah, Elmaleh) who have increasingly negotiated a crossover to the mainstream. Instead, Kechiche maintains his position as a comitted artist that locates him within the traditions of an auteur-centric French national cinema, whose artistry defines it in relation to the commercial imports that dominate the box-office (Powrie 1999: 8). Moreover, if the film evidences the historical turn found in other Maghrebiauthored features of the 1990s and 2000s, it does so not specifically in relation to the ‘localised’ colonial history of France and North Africa. Instead, Vénus noire exposes the Eurocentric construction of knowledge, embodied by Cuvier and, equally, implicitly accepted by the popular audiences who pay to see the Venus Hottentot perform. Cuvier’s lecture on the biological evidence for the superiority of Europeans over Africans forms a different and far more sinister canonical French text to those of Ronsard, Marivaux, Voltaire and Hugo that undergo allegorical transformation in Kechiche’s earlier films. It articulates a scientific racism that would drive and help justify not just French but also European colonial expansion through the nineteenth and twentieth century. Indeed, Kechiche has argued that, though historically located in nineteenth century France, the film’s bleak exploration of the violence, humiliation and degradation that was produced by European encounters with a non-western

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Other in fact speaks directly to an increasing lack of tolerance and hospitality in France towards the Other that has been revived since the mid-2000s (Kechiche in Libiot 2010).16 As with criticism of his previous films, though, the question remains as to how politically significant the universalising tendencies found in Vénus Noire actually are, and whether Kechiche’s clear commitment to the principles of the Republican model lead to a ‘subversion that is itself self-subverting’ (Williams 2011: 400; Nettelbeck 2007: 308). Nevertheless, and again in keeping with his earlier films, Kechiche refuses to convert his filmic narrative into an accusatory tract that identifies Sara Baartman as the powerless victim of European racism. Instead, the director describes the mode of narration in Vénus noire, as ‘(hi-) story without a filter’ (Kechiche in Faradji 2010)17. It is, therefore, quite possible to apply an allegorical reading to Vénus noire, as a film that exposes the historical origins of Eurocentric racism that would propel the rapid and brutal colonial expansion of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the colonisation of the Maghrebi that would effectively lead to the mass migration of North African immigrants, such as those of Kechiche and his family, to France. However, in the final analysis, Kechiche prefers to locate the film’s narrative themes in relation to the personal. When interviewed, he has thus described the ‘mysterious’ story of Sara Baartman that first attracted him to the possibility of making this film in the early 2000s and the universal theme of ways of looking at the Other that are explored in Vénus noire, rather than investing in some essentialist notion that the project was motivated by the fact of their shared ‘African’ origins or the desire to construct an anti-colonial narrative (Kechiche in Ly and Gendron 2011). Kechiche’s desire not to reduce the film to a question of the relationship between director and subject as racial, ethnic or cultural ‘outsiders’ thus echoes the much earlier refusal of beur filmmakers in the 1980 and 1990s to define their art through ethnic categorisation. The desire to qualify his connection with Baartman in universalist terms rather than through the optique of cultural/ethnic difference also speaks to the strong Republican impulse in Kechiche’s work. Indeed, we might say that it is, precisely, his commitment to these Republican ideals (married with a critique of the way that these ideals are often derailed by human failings) that has ­characterised Kechiche’s filmmaking from La Faute à Voltaire to Vénus Noire. Conclusion Although consistently grounded by their location in specific historical moments and socio-economic environments, the diegetic spaces evoked in Kechiche’s films function simultaneously as real, symbolic and performative spaces of limitation and transformation. They are, moreover, sites of encounter in which cultural, ethnic and gender difference confront the symbols, institutions and

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canonical cultural texts of the dominant cultural norm or host culture. This encounter invites us to re-evaluate accepted ideas of Frenchness, as well as the forging of new kinds of personal and social identities in relation to both the French nation and the place of the North African diasporic community or ethnic other within that nation. In his first three films at least, this leads to what Williams (2011: 400) has deftly described as ‘the real business of cultural de-symbolisation and de-essentialisation’ at work in Kechiche’s films. Such transcultural encounters within the first three films reveal ‘personal identity and development as a fluid process: the “performed” in collective solidarity with others’ (Williams 2011: 401). In Vénus noire, however, the performative encounter between Sara Baartman and nineteenth-century European society is configured in an altogether more negative fashion. Unlike Rosello’s concept of the performative encounter with another subject in which ‘new subject positions, a new language and a new type of engagement’ are able to ‘replace the script’ of pre-existing protocol (Rosello 2005: 1–4), in Vénus noire, Sara’s position as the African ‘savage’ is already overloaded by the violence and prejudice of nineteenth-century European ‘scientific’ racism, making any initial encounter between self and other almost impossible. This chapter has focused on the way in which Kechiche employs cinematic space to reinforce the continued significance of fixed associations with gender, ethnicity and class at the same time as he redefines the individual’s relationship to these collective identity positionings. Put differently, his films refuse to identify their protagonists as prisoners of their social environment, while simultaneously acknowledging the continued effect on their identity of the social milieu from which they emerge. In the process, Kechiche’s first three films re-define the contemporary social spaces that have repeatedly featured in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking, such as the cité, the workplace and the immigrant foyer, as spaces of potential cultural and social enrichment rather than immutable sites of exclusion. For while such cine-spatial locations may be inscribed with a difference that has the potential to mark its inhabitants as Other to a mainstream audience, they are never as fixed or absolute as more Eurocentric readings of these films and filmmakers would have us believe. Indeed, it is from these supposed spaces of difference and alterity that discourse and representations can emerge with the potential to transform our understanding of French national and cultural identity in the postcolonial present. Kechiche’s films thus explore the spaces of difference as well as the differences that such spaces make to our understanding of ­contemporary French society. One further consequence of this subtle interplay between the local dynamics of French immigrant culture and the possibility of exchange in films such as La Faute à Voltaire or La Grain et le mulet is a movement beyond localised, national and ethnic boundaries. However this is not to say that Kechiche’s

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cinema can be vaguely labeled as transnational or marginalised within the national framework as a sub-national, diasporic or accented cinema. In his films it is less a sense of identifying a ‘space’ for a marginalised immigrant community on the margins of the nation and more (in the first three films at least) of how protagonists of Maghrebi immigrant origin negotiate their personal and collective place within French society. The trajectory in Kechiche’s cinema from illegal immigrant (La Faute à Voltaire) and marginalised ‘young ethnics’ (L’Esquive) to the extended presence of a ‘French’ working-class Maghrebi population (La Graine et le mulet) and finally to a transnational historical narrative (Vénus noire) that considers the social majority’s regard to the immigrant Other, suggests a far greater integration into the imagined community of nation (and indeed French national cinema) than that achieved by Beur cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, there can be little doubt of Kechiche’s commitment to the principles of the French Republic, as articled in the following response from the director when interviewed upon the release of Vénus noire: I am French. It’s not only a question of nationality. I am guided by the ideals of the Republic and the Enlightenment. That is what made me want to become a filmmaker. (Kechiche in Libiot 2010) Such commitment extends beyond the simple referencing of French cultural texts or Republican values and traditions. As Kechiche has consistently argued, the differences in his films are based far more on class than they are on ethnicity. Guided by a sceptical embrace of the Republican tradition, fully aware of its limitations and failings in the real world, Kechiche’s cinema clearly shows how Maghrebi-French filmmaking in the 2000s has moved definitively away from a position of ‘immigrant’ cinema to occupy a legitimate place within the nation. Rather than fighting for cultural visibility on the margins of French cinema, Kechiche’s cinema simultaneously reiterates the values of the French Republican tradition at the same time as it redefines the relationship of the Maghrebi-immigrant population to the imagined community of the French nation. Notes   1. For details on the various problems experienced by Kechiche in funding his films, see Tarr (2005: 208, note 14), Porton (2007) and Lalanne and Fevret (2007). As this book goes to press (June 2013), Kechiche has just been awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes festival for his latest film, La Vie d’Adèle/Blue is the Warmest Colour, due to be released in France later this year.   2. Audiences for Kechiche’s features to date are follows: La Faute à Voltaire 82 437; L’Esquive 535 165; La Graine et le mulet 1 007 254; and Vénus noire 217 636 (source: CBO Box-Office).   3. For more on Kechiche’s relationship to debates around the cinéma du milieu, see Vandershelden (2009).

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  4. See, for example, Barlet 2001 (http://www.africultures.com/php/index. php?nav=article&no=1754) in which Kechiche is described in the opening paragraph as a ‘Tunisian filmmaker’.   5. For a detailed discussion of the use and significance of Arab and Berber music in La Faute à Voltaire, see Williams (2011).   6. Tarr (2007: 138–9) finds this casting of a professional white actress in the central role of Lydia (Sara Forestier) as problematic in the sense that she ‘outshines’ the non-professional Maghrebi-French female actresses, viewing it as a concession to ensure a greater accessibility to a white, mainstream crossover audience. For his part, Kechiche has argued (Lalanne and Fevret 2007) that the decision to cast Forestier came about, partly, from a desire to not be accused of an inverse racism in selecting a solely beur cast.  7. Kechiche claims to have consciously avoided the inclusion of any hip-hop in L’Esquive, feeling that the film was ‘already sufficiently “chatty” [bavard]’ (Kechiche in Lalanne, 2004).  8. L’Esquive thus offers a less pessimistic view of the school as agent of integration than that found in Entre les murs (Cantet, 2008).   9. In the event, only one of the three films was completed, due to Berri’s sudden and untimely death in 2009. 10. For more on Kechiche’s use of DV cameras and his collaboration with Bakchev, see Guichard (2007). 11. See Chapter 5 for a detailed analysis of these return narratives. 12. Numerous reviewers have picked up on this point when writing about the film. See, for example, Kaganski (2007) and Vincendeau (2008). 13. The budgets for Kechiche’s previous features were as follows: La Faute à Voltaire €1.6m; L’Esquive €1.3m; and La Graine et le mulet €6.14m (source: http://www. cbo-boxoffice.com). The average budget for a French feature film in 2009, the year the film was made, was €5.10m. (source: CNC bilan, 2009: http://www.cnc.fr). 14. The court appearance in Vénus noire is based on real events. The Slave Trade Act (abolishing slavery) was passed in Britain 1807, only three years before Sara Baartman’s arrival. The conditions in which Baartman was ‘exhibited’ were therefore of concern to the African Association. 15. As he beckons the guests closer, Réaux cries: ‘Approchez-vous et dépassez votre gêne!’ (‘Come closer and overcome your inhibitions!’). 16. Kechiche describes this process as beginning with the progression of Le Pen to the final round of Presidential elections in 2002 and seen most recently in the government’s mass expulsion of Roma people from France in the summer of 2010. 17. Kechiche plays here on the dual meaning in French of histoire as both ‘story’ and ‘history’.

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5. HOME, DISPLACEMENT AND THE MYTH OF RETURN: JOURNEY NARRATIVES IN THE 2000s

Tony Gatlif’s award-winning feature film Exils (2004) begins with darkness, followed by a shot of what initially appears to be the contours of an unidentified, barren landscape. As the camera pulls back, the image is in fact revealed to be the naked back of Zano (Romain Duris), the French son of pied noir exiles. The opening scene reaches its chaotic crescendo: Zano surveys the view of the péripherique from the window of his high-rise apartment, before sending a glass of beer crashing to the street below; revolutionary slogans, delivered in Spanish and English to a strident rhythm, boom from the speakers in Zano’s room, as Naïma (Lubna Azabal), a young Maghrebi-French woman, lies naked on the bed, devouring a soft cheese, while drumming along to the music with her spoon. This anarchic visual and aural assault on the spectator, which is disorienting and beguiling in equal measure, is brought to a sudden halt as Zano turns to Naïma and says: ‘And what if we went to Algeria?’ Naïma’s immediate response to Zano’s suggestion is to fall about laughing, so preposterous does this notion of returning to the Maghreb first appear. However, Zano’s innocent and playful proposition sets the couple on a meandering, complex and emotionally transformative journey to the Maghreb in search of their very different Algerian roots. It also signals a key strand of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking that emerges in the 2000s – that of the journey narrative or road movie which takes its Maghrebi-French protagonists on a ‘return’ to their parents’ or grandparents’ diasporic homeland. The emergence of a cluster of these return narratives in the 2000s in fact continues a representational shift that has been taking place since the late

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1990s, whereby French cinema has witnessed a reconfiguration of the representational politics of place and space in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking. Maghrebi-French protagonists are increasingly shown onscreen moving beyond the banlieue, which has previously functioned as both the locus of Maghrebi-French identity and an emblematic space of marginality, criminality and violence (Higbee 2007a: 42–3). One of the most noticeable trends within this opening-up of the cinespatial landscape for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré film­making is the increasing number of road movies or journey narratives that have appeared since the late 1990s. The journeys depicted are at once physical (travelling through space and time) and metaphorical (leading to a greater self-­ understanding on the part of the protagonist) and can pose as many problems as they provide answers. They are not necessarily entered into voluntarily (the destination is not always a desired location) and are often structured around seemingly random events within an episodic narrative depicting a fragmented journey beset by obstacles. If we were to compile a basic list of such journey films directed since the late-1990s by Maghrebi-French or North African émigré filmmakers (or films directed by non-Maghrebi directors in which characters of North African origin are the central protagonists), it would include upwards of twenty titles and a variety of sub-categories: journeys across France that lead to a discovery of identity and place within the nation (Jeunesse dorée [Ghorab-Volta, 2001], Drôle de Félix [Martineau and Ducastel, 1999]); voyages beyond the diasporic axis of France and the Maghreb (Le Grand voyage [Ferroukhi, 2004]); histories of (first-generation) migration from the Maghreb to France (Inch’allah dimanche! [Benguigui, 2001], Vivre au paradis [Guerdjou, 1999]); contemporary journeys to France by illegal North African immigrants (Salut Cousin! [Allouache, 1997], Adieu [Arnaud des Pallières, 2004]). However, by far the most significant grouping within these journey films are those which focus on the ‘return’ of Maghrebi-French protagonists to North Africa: L’Autre monde (Allouache, 2001) ; La Fille de Keltoum (Mehdi Charef, 2002) ; Exils (Gatlif, 2004); Ten’ja (Legzouli, 2004); Il était une fois dans l’oued (Bensalah, 2005); Bled number one (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006).1 Though the above list is largely focused on low- or medium-budget, auteurled independent productions, offering an interpretation of the return narrative that is firmly located within the bounds of social realist narrative filmmaking, it also includes Bensalah’s mainstream comedy Il était une fois dans l’oued. This highly original film subverts the typical accounts of migration by making the journey of ‘return’ centre on Johnny Leclerc (Julien Courbey), a white youth from the working-class Parisian banlieue. Johnny, who also calls himself Abdel Bachir, is, to the incredulity of almost all around him, convinced that he is in fact an Algerian Muslim, sequestered from his homeland and adopted

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by his Alsatian father and Norman mother. He thus contrives to stow away in the trailer of his Algerian neighbours’ car as they travel to the family home for the summer holidays, in order to initiate his own return to the bled.2 The fact that Il était une fois dans l’oued attracted more than 800 000 spectators in France suggests that, by the mid-2000s, the previously marginalised and potentially miserabilist narrative theme of the myth of return for the North African diaspora – seen most obviously in Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991) and Bye-bye ­ (Dridi, 1995) – was now able to crossover to a mainstream audience in France, albeit in the form of a popular comedy that parodied the idea of return to the Maghreb for exaggerated comic effect.3 It is a sample of this cluster of independently released return narratives from the 2000s that are of particular interest for this chapter, and above all for the ways in which they bring into question supposedly fixed notions of the here and there of host and homeland in the diasporic imaginary. We should not be that surprised to learn that themes of displacement, border crossing or the journey as a metaphor for the quest for identity are present in such films. Everett (2004: 18–19) argues more generally for the road movie or journey narrative as a common trope in European and American cinema for articulating and constructing narratives of exile and displacement. Elsewhere, Naficy (2001: 222–3) identifies journeys of escape, emigration, exploration or return as key features of diasporic, exilic and postcolonial filmmakers working in the West. What is noticeable, however, is the increase in return narratives that have appeared in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking since the early 2000s, and the way in which they all engage to various degrees with the possibility of intercultural exchange between France and the Maghreb via the clearly symbolic figure of the Maghrebi-French traveller. This approach contrasts with the handful of return narratives produced by Maghrebi-French filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s – Le Départ du père (Belghoul, 1983), Bye-bye, Cheb, Souviens-toi de moi (Ghorab-Volta, 1996) – where the possibility of ‘return’ for Maghrebi-French youth to a country and culture that they do not really know is fraught with difficulties and ultimately rejected for a future, however uncertain, in France. As Carrie Tarr states in her analysis of these films from the 1980s and 1990: ‘even if the establishment of their identity in France continues to be problematic, the prospect of crossing the border to Algeria or other countries of the Maghreb presents a threat to the beur’s westernised identity’ (Tarr 2005: 189). Arguably it is in Cheb that this position is most forcefully articulated. The vast majority of the film takes place in Algeria and focuses on the attempts of Merwan, a youth of North African origin, who has lived in France since early childhood but does not possess French nationality, to return to France following his deportation to the Maghreb. In spite of the fact that Merwan is to all intents and purposes French (having been raised, educated and socialised in

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France), his legal status as an Algerian national allows the French authorities to deport him on the basis that his history of minor criminal offences makes him a threat to public order.4 Upon arrival in Algeria, Merwan’s passport is confiscated and he is forced to undertake military service in a country and culture that is entirely alien to him. This fact is highlighted by his inability to speak Arabic but most explicitly through Bouchareb’s construction of cinematic space and the Maghrebi-French protagonist’s relationship to the environment that surrounds him. Merwan’s physical alienation in the desert where he undertakes army training is thus coupled in subsequent scenes with the social and cultural exclusion he experiences in the urban spaces of Algiers. Following his deportation from France he receives a hostile reception from the Algerian border guards upon arriving at the airport, who refer to him as both ‘immigrant’ and ‘delinquent’ (voyou). He first glimpses the streets of Algiers through the grill of a police van and is left to fend for himself in the city until the next morning when he is expected to report to the barracks to begin his military service. Wandering the streets of the casbah in westernised dress, the camera tracks Merwan from a high angle, emphasising his vulnerability as the crowded streets empty to leave the Maghbrei-French youth standing alone within the old, more distinctly Arabic (as opposed to neo-colonial) part of the city. Algeria is thus viewed in Cheb as the site of alienation and repression for Maghrebi-French youth. It is also a space in which Merwan along with his girlfriend Malika – who is lured to Algeria by her family on the pretence of a holiday but then held against her will in the family home – are both symbolically stripped of their identity as their French passports are confiscated upon arrival by the Algerian police. Through his repeated identification as immigré, Merwan is rejected by Algerian society, in much the same way as he has been ostracised by the French authorities. Similarly, Malika remains trapped in Algeria, where patriarchal law attempts to erase all evidence of her identity as an independent woman. Denied the relative freedom enjoyed in France, she must wear traditional Muslim dress and submit to the authority of her uncle. Finally, in a desperate attempt to re-enter France, Merwan strikes a deal with a white French youth he meets in Morocco: in exchange for the use of his passport, Merwan will perform the young man’s military service. There is an obvious irony, then, in the fact that Merwan’s return to France is conditional upon adopting the identity of a majority ethnic French youth. The myth of return to North Africa that confronts the Maghrebi immigrant in the 1980s and 1990s is configured as precisely that: a myth, an attempt to return to idealised notion of home, fixed in a past that no longer exists. For the second generation, the notion of return itself is even more problematic. How can you return, these films seem to ask, to somewhere you are not from, or in some cases to somewhere you have never been? Thus for the second ­generation

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of North African immigrants born and raised in France, how realistic is it to speak of a return to a country and culture (the Maghreb) that they do not really know or whose language, customs and traditions they have inherited piecemeal from their parents? The problematic notion of return for the second generation, and their extremely hostile response to any attempt by their parents to make them leave France for the bled, is powerfully evoked in Karim Dridi’s Bye-bye. The film tells the story of two brothers, Ismaël (Sami Bouajila) and Mouloud (Ouassini Embarek) who arrive in Marseilles from Paris to stay with their extended family en route to the family home in Tunisia. Ismaël, the elder brother, is torn by loyalty to his parents’ demands that Mouloud ‘return’ to Tunisia, on the one hand, and his sibling’s stubborn refusal to leave France, on the other. The film uses its location in Marseilles (historically a key point of entry and departure for migrants between France and the Maghreb) to great effect. Most obviously this appears in the leitmotif of Mouloud staring pensively out to sea at the boats leaving the port and across the Mediterranean towards the Maghreb. If Ismaël still feels the pull of the diasporic homeland, Mouloud is violently opposed to even the slightest suggestion that he return to the bled. In one of the key scenes from Bye-bye, seated at the dinner table with his uncle, aunts and cousins, Mouloud directs a disrespectful verbal tirade to Ismaël against the idea of return: ‘Nobody wants to go back, so why do I have to? I couldn’t care less about your shitty bled!’, for which he receives a slap from his elder brother. Ultimately, however, Ismaël relents, recognising that return for Mouloud is unworkable and disobeys the law of the father by refusing to put his brother on a boat bound for Tunisia. Mouloud’s violent opposition to the bled in Bye-bye along with Merwan’s desperate attempts in Cheb to escape from the Maghreb and effect his own return to France typify the attitude of Maghrebi-French protagonists to the notion of return to the Maghreb in French cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, recent journey narratives from the 2000s have chosen to offer a more sympathetic take on the myth of return. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to an examination of three recent journey narratives: Exils, Ten’ja and Bled number one. These three films (released in France between 2004 and 2006) have been chosen since the distinct origins of their respective directors (and their relationship to the Maghreb) result in three very different responses to the key themes of return, home and the politics of displacement for the Maghrebi-French subject. They also offer a range of narrative and aesthetic responses to the representation of myth of return in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking. Analysing their different responses to themes of return, home and the politics of displacement, this chapter will also attempt to gauge why this shift should have occurred in the 2000s.

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Finally, it will use these return narratives from the 2000s as a means of problematising Hamid Naficy’s notion of language and the accent in ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy 2001) as articulating a politics of hybridity and displacement that only seems to flow in one direction: from non-­western homeland to the western host nation. Instead, it shall be argued that films such as Ten’ja force us to question what happens when the accent is inverted via a journey that takes the Maghrebi-French protagonist in the opposite ­direction, from France to the Maghreb.

Ten’ja or the Myth of Return For the first generation of North African immigrants who arrived in France as economic migrants during the trente glorieuses (the thirty years of economic prosperity following the end of the Second World War), the mythe du retour (myth of return) was the commonly held belief that their place in France as economic migrants was temporary and that they, along with their children, would eventually return home to the Maghreb. By investing in this myth of return, many of the first generation were, unlike their French-born descendants, more accepting of their marginalisation within French society.5 The pull between the ‘here’ of the host country and ‘there’ of the homeland evoked by the myth of return, and its idealisation of the supposed ancestral homeland, appears to be one of the defining features of the diasporic experience (Cohen 1997: 184–5). However, if this myth of return is central in the first generation’s understanding of their displacement as a diasporic community and in the deep attachment to their Maghrebi roots, the same cannot be said for their ­descendants who were born and raised in France. In Ten’ja (whose Arabic title literally means ‘the land is here’ or ‘the land has returned’), Hassan Legzouli attempts to reclaim the myth of return that is so roundly rejected in the 1990s by Maghrebi-French directors such as Bouchareb (Cheb) and Dridi (Bye-bye). This difference can perhaps be explained by the director’s status as a Moroccan émigré in France. As an émigré filmmaker, even one who has lived in France for over twenty years, Legzouli presumably has a greater emotional investment in the notion of return to the Maghreb than Maghrebi-French filmmakers who were either born or raised in France. Ten’ja’s greater investment in the return narrative as a means of reconnection with Maghrebi roots is also made possible by the fact the film focuses on an older Maghrebi-French protagonist (Nourdine) who appears economically and socially integrated into French society. Unlike the youthful outsiders of Cheb and Bye-bye, Nourdine (Roschdy Zem) is a self-employed taxi-driver in his mid-thirties, whose rightful place in France is never brought into question. Legzouli’s largely uncritical (re-)investment in the myth of return identifies Ten’ja as the most conventional of all the return narratives considered in

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this chapter. Interestingly, it is also the most orthodox in terms of narrative structure and film form. The film draws extensively on the established codes and iconography of the road movie genre: the open road, a voyage undertaken by car, the journey as a metaphor for self-discovery. Following the death of his father, Nourdine journeys from Nord-pas-de-Calais to the Middle-Atlas mountains in southern Morocco to honour his father’s last wish that he be returned home and buried in Aderj, the village of his birth. Nourdine initially views the journey as a burden, though this position changes following various encounters en route to the bled. He befriends Mimoun (Abdou El-Mesnaoui), an impoverished porter from the local morgue, who dreams of emigrating to Australia to be reunited with his ‘true love’ and Nora (Aure Atika), a graduate from Casablanca, who, in spite of a university education, can only provide for her family as the mistress of a rich businessman. Both act as guides for Nourdine on the various stages of his journey, intermediaries and interpreters of a country and culture that he is only beginning to understand. The fact that Nora and Nourdine share similar-sounding names further emphasises this connection. It is also worth noting that both Mimoun and Nora are, like Nourdine, relatively marginal figures in Moroccan society. Nourdine’s dislocation from his Moroccan parents’ Arab-Berber heritage is emphasised by the box of his father’s possessions that he carries with him: letters, family photographs, a record of his father’s favourite song and a newspaper cutting of his father meeting President Mitterrand while working as an immigrant miner in Sallaumines (Nord-Pas-de-Calais). These markers or fragments of a displaced identity bring to mind Begag and Chaouite’s observation (1991: 48–50) of how the French-born descendants of North African immigrants only inherit selective elements of their parents’ culture (religious traditions, fragments of language), constructing a ‘cultural myth’ which is partially absorbed rather than directly lived. For Nourdine these objects not only articulate a link to his father’s past and Maghrebi heritage, but they also enable him to make connections with those he encounters in the here and now of contemporary Moroccan society. On a trip to a local souk with Nora, Nourdine is initially represented as a western tourist: the camera mirrors his ethnographic gaze across the market, he expresses surprise to Nora that there are so few ‘ethnic’ products on sale (pots and rugs) and amusement at the fact that there are babouches (traditional leather slippers) on sale branded with the Puma sportswear logo. As they wander further into the souk, Nourdine hears a cassette recording of his father’s favourite song, which he asks Nora to translate for him. Nora is initially disinterested, saying that she prefers modern pop music. Eventually, however, she concedes, explaining the song’s central theme of honouring a promise of remembrance (‘Oh Lord, give me your hand! I promise not to forget you’). These words carry an obvious significance for Nourdine, given the journey he has undertaken. Moreover,

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by gifting his father’s record to Nora towards the end of the film, Nourdine strengthens the material, emotional and cultural connections he has made with both the Morocco of his family’s past and the Maghreb of the present ­(embodied by Nora and Mimoun). Nourdine’s return to his North African roots in Ten’ja permits the reconfiguration of a fragmented diasporic identity (connecting with the past though memories and material objects) at the same time as it suggests a re-connection with the space and place of ‘home’ in the present. When Nourdine finally arrives in the place where Aderj appears on the map, he is told by a man sitting by the roadside that the village no longer exists, as all its occupants (like Nourdine’s father) have long since departed in search of work. The diasporic imaginary of home constructed by his father is thus fixed in a past moment that does not necessarily correspond to the present. The central purpose of Nourdine’s journey, to return the father’s body to his village, is furthermore denied by this narrative twist: ‘home’ as a physical location is lost. We may well have expected this revelation to prompt an exploration in the final part of the film of the very significance of place and home for the exile or diasporic subject. And yet, the desire to retain this ‘personal and culturally specific link to the imaginary’ of home (Morse 1999: 64) common in diasporic or exilic cinema is undiminished in the final act of Ten’ja. Dressed in traditional costume, carrying the coffin on foot along a narrow mountain path (assisted by local inhabitants of a neighbouring village), and accompanied by a diegetic soundtrack of traditional Arab/Berber music, Nourdine finally returns his father to the earth of the ancestral home. These visual markers are further enforced by Nourdine’s repetition at the graveside of a phrase uttered to him in Arabic by his father following an aborted trip to Morocco when he was a teenager: ‘Where did this branch come? From this tree.’ Through the connections made between landscape, tradition, familial duty and ‘roots’, Ten’ja effectively bypasses any consideration of the problematic notion of return for the Maghrebi-French subject. Instead, the narrative emphasises the re-grounding of Nourdine’s North African identity from past to present. The act of coming home is identified as central to this reconciliation, rendering the myth of return for both first and second generation of the Maghrebi diaspora in France as necessary and enriching. While the film attracted only modest audiences upon its release in France (just under 20 000 spectators in a nine-week run)6, its treatment of the themes of return and reconciliation for the Maghrebi-French protagonist was generally well received by French critics (see, for example, Barlet 2004). In contrast, Moroccan reviewers criticised Legzouli for what they saw as a largely romanticised portrayal of return destined for a ‘European audience in search of exoticism’, which glossed over the socio-political realities of contemporary Moroccan society (prostitution, drugs, clandestine emigration, the ­repression

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of ethnic Amazighs) (Bernichi 2006: 42). The SUV that Nourdine drives through the breathtaking scenery of the Atlas mountains partially insulates him from these socio-political realities that might destabilise idealised notions of home and return. Similarly, the potentially symbolic act of traversing the waters from France to the Maghreb and then crossing the border into Morocco is largely uneventful. The only problem experienced by Nourdine has nothing to do with his own passage into Morocco but concerns irregularities surroundings the paperwork for transporting his dead father’s body. Even this is eventually overlooked by sympathetic border guards, who regard Nourdine as Moroccan (not French) and allow a fellow countryman to pass with his father’s body.7 Nourdine affirms this position by stating to the border guards ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m Moroccan too’, seemingly eliding in this one utterance the complex negotiation of hybrid identity that takes place in so many other Maghrebi-French films. However, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, the fluid and contingent mobilisation of supposedly fixed identities such as ‘French’ and ‘Moroccan’ is in fact far more complex. In the film’s final scenes, which function as something of an epilogue to the burial of the father, Nourdine returns to Tangiers to pay off Mimoun’s debts to a local people-trafficker. They part, addressing one another as ‘brothers’, and the film ends with a freeze-frame of Nourdine looking back at Mimoun through his rear-view mirror. The reconciliation of the Maghrebi-French protagonist with his North-African heritage thus appears complete. However, just like the family photos that Nourdine carries with him, this idyllic image of reconciliation is fixed in time, isolated from the complex and evolving historical, socio-economic and cultural context in which it takes place. By suspending narrative time in this way, Legzouli diverts attention from the fact that Nourdine, like his father before him, will make his home in France, while Mimoun, now free from his creditors, is also intent on leaving Morocco for Europe. The ending of Ten’ja thus offers a further indication of Legzouli’s desire to endorse an integrated and largely unproblematic representation of the myth of return for the Maghrebi-French protagonist.

Bled number one and the Politics of Displacement If Legzouli displaces the socio-economic, cultural and political context of return in Ten’ja’s more conventional road-movie narrative, Maghrebi-French director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche locates what we might term the politics of displacement for the Maghrebi-French protagonists at the very heart of the return in Bled number one. Released in 2006, Bled number one was the followup to the filmmaker’s critically acclaimed debut feature Wesh-wesh: qu’est-ce qui se passe? (2001). Though set apart by their respective geographical and socio-cultural locations, the two films are closely linked in a variety of ways.

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First, through their production methods of (ultra-)low-budget DV filmmaking8 combining a concern for the politics of film form with a quasi-documentary approach (location shooting, episodic narrative, the use of largely nonprofessional actors, including the director’s family and friends). Second, Bled number one continues Ameur-Zaïmeche’s practice of exploring broader socialpolitical issues through a study of local communities and the micro-politics of the family, focusing on the imposed return of a Maghrebi-French man to the family home (the bled of the film’s title) to analyse not only the personal problems caused by this enforced displacement of the Maghrebi-French protagonist (Kamel) to an essentially alien North African culture, but also also the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism that remains in Algerian society, even after the end of the civil war. Through its focus on the relationship between Kamel (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche) and Louisa (Meryem Serbah), his largely Westernised Algerian cousin who is ostracised by her family for seeking to break free from an abusive relationship with her husband, Bled number one also addresses the inequality, injustice and often violent repression experienced by women in a rigidly conservative and patriarchal Algerian society. The final link between Ameur-Zaïmeche’s two films is the character of Kamel, played by the director himself, who guides us through both narratives. In Wesh-wesh, having previously been deported to Algeria following his release from prison in France as a victim of the double peine, Kamel returns illegally to the only home he knows: the run-down housing estate in the Paris suburbs where he grew up. Bled number one, on the other hand, begins with Kamel arriving in the family home in North-East Algeria. Despite attempts to integrate into the local community, Kamel ultimately experiences a profound sense of alienation in Algeria. By the end of the film he discusses with one of his cousins from the village his desire to escape across the border to Tunisia and then return illegally to France. The narratives of Wesh-wesh and Bled number one are therefore bound together by the character of Kamel and the theme of the double peine. This connection is compounded by the ambiguous ending in Wesh-wesh, where we hear the gunshots fired by the police in pursuit of Kamel but do not see the consequences of this action. It is therefore possible that Kamel is arrested and re-deported to Algeria, rather than being shot to death. If this is indeed the case, then the return narrative of Bled number one can be placed either before Kamal’s initial return to France at the start of Wesh-wesh or after his subsequent (re-)expulsion to Algeria. Ameur-Zaïmeche has encouraged this ambiguity when interviewed by stating that ‘whether we think of it as a sequel or a prequel isn’t important’ (Vassé 2006: 4). Viewing the sequencing of the films in this way (as an open, uncertain chronology) thus serves to reinforce a reading of Kamel as caught in a perpetual cycle of exclusion from both Maghreb and French society. Kamel’s journey to the Maghreb is, quite obviously, an enforced return.

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Ameur-Zaïmeche describes the protagonist as an ‘exile’ but at the same time ‘flexible and mobile, which is how he transforms his deportation into a journey of discovery’ (Vassé 2006). This internal ‘journey of identity’ (Naficy 2001: 237) involves a mixture of observation and engagement as well as more detached contemplation of Kamel’s relationship to his ancestral home. Dislocation from the bled for the Maghrebi-French protagonist is primarily articulated through film form in Bled number one. The film’s opening sequence is constructed through a series of four shots: a long tracking shot of the road leading into the bled (presumably, given the height and angle of the camera, shot from the roof of a moving vehicle); a much briefer view of the same street from inside the taxi that is transporting Kamel to the village; a third tracking shot perpendicular to the taxi of a young boy running through the streets alongside the taxi; and, finally, a long shot of Kamel exiting the taxi to be greeted by his uncle and male cousins. The opening sequence establishes the formal techniques that will be repeated throughout the film: a blending of documentary with fiction and an aesthetic strategy of distanciation of Kamel from his socio-cultural environment. As the camera navigates its way into the heart of the community in this opening sequence, the lines between documentary and fiction are immediately blurred. Many of the villagers in the street, clearly conscious of the camera’s presence, meet its gaze – one man even smoothes his hair back while looking into the camera lens. And yet, the supposed objectivity and distance created by the pseudo-documentary gaze is destabilised by the variety of perspectives used in this opening sequence – in particular the cut to the shot of the small boy running alongside the taxi that is clearly meant to reflect Kamel’s point of view and offer a more intimate connection to the bled’s inhabitants. Distanciation is, nonetheless, clearly embedded as part of the aesthetic structure of Bled number one. Ameur-Zaïmeche repeatedly films his protagonists and their environment using a combination of long shot and zoom. Spectators therefore observe the bled from a position of detachment. They are removed, not only from the physical environment of the bled, but also from moments of intimacy shared by characters on screen, such as the welcome afforded to Kamel upon his arrival in the village, or his interaction with Louisa on the beach. Moreover, this distanciation is as much aural as it is visual, with the spectator frequently being denied access to what the characters are saying during these key and intimate exchanges. The implied cultural distance between Kamel and the villagers is further evoked by the physical barriers (doors, shutters, bodies) that frequently block the path of the camera, preventing the spectator/Kamel for having full and unimpeded access to the cine-spatial environment of the bled. The most sinister example of this blocking of the camera comes when Bouzid (Abel Jafri) closes the door from the terrace before administering his savage beating of Louisa off-camera.

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The function of this formal strategy in Bled number one has as much to do with emphasising Kamel’s profound sense of displacement and dislocation as excluding the spectator. While Bled number one suggests the potential for connection between Kamel and the physical environment of the bled, he is ultimately alienated by the strict gender divisions that regulate community interaction. This is well illustrated during the feast of Zerda, where ‘Kamel la France’ (as the villagers call him) oscillates between active involvement in the ceremony (leading the bull from the lorry) and semi-detached observer (reduced to a bystander at the moment of slaughter). The use of the nickname ‘Kamel la France’ indicates that Kamel is simultaneously accepted and designated as Other within the bled community. He is also visually singled out from the other villagers by the bright orange hat that he wears throughout the film. Elsewhere, Kamel’s otherness is alluded to by the fact that he can understand much of the Arab dialect spoken around him but is only able to respond in French or broken Arabic. Similarly, when first sitting on the terrace of the family home, he draws attention to the call to prayer emanating from a nearby mosque but admits that he is not a practising Muslim (he doesn’t pray). When initially taking part in the social rituals involving the men of the village, such as the dancing on the evening of the feast of Zerda, Kamel appears integrated. However his estrangement effectively begins when he laughs off a suggestion by one of the male elders that to eat with the women during the feast is sinful. His desire to spend time with the women of the village – ­especially his cousin, the more liberal and Westernised Louisa – betrays his unease and uncertainty as to his place in bled society. Upon learning that Bouzid has beaten Louisa for allegedly ‘shaming’ the family, he confronts his cousin in front of the other men-folk, who disapprove of Kamel’s intervention. Kamel is then rapidly ostracised by the men in the village, highlighted by the fact that he is now referred to as ‘Kamel le voleur’ (‘Kamel the thief’, indicating the reason for his deportation from France), rather than ‘Kamel la France’. This unravelling of Kamel’s place within the community is reflected by the surreal moments that punctuate the narrative and subvert the docu-realist aesthetic. The morning after his confrontation with Bouzid, Kamel is shown deep in thought, staring across the lake, accompanied by an atmospheric blues-guitar soundtrack. The camera then pulls back to reveal the guitarist (journeyman French rock musician Rodolphe Burger) playing on the hillside next to Kamel/ Ameur-Zaïmeche, complete with amp and microphone. In many respects, Bled number one is as much about the marginalisation of Louisa in a patriarchal society that refuses to acknowledge her right to independence as it is about Kamel’s alienation as a hybrid subject who cannot fit in. It is no surprise, then, that the narrative brings these two characters together. And yet, Ameur-Zaïmeche pessimistically shuts off any possibility for the emergence of a progressive, liberal and modernised Algeria by having

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Figure 5.1  Distanciation and the politics of displacement in Bled number one (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006).

Louisa locked away in the psychiatric hospital after her failed suicide attempt that results from the loss of her son and ostracism by her family. The hospital becomes the only place in which Louisa can truly find her voice and express her ‘sinful’ desire to become the Algerian Billy Holliday without being judged, while the ‘disturbed’ women given refuge from abusive husbands (real patients from the hospital), who are interviewed on camera, express a sense of transnational female solidarity, crying: ‘Long live Algeria, long live France, France we love you, Algeria we love you, Chinese [women], German [women], American [women]’. Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and located on the outskirts of an unidentified town, the psychiatric hospital becomes (ironically) the only space in Bled number one where any optimistic exchange or intercultural ­dialogue between French (western) and Maghrebi culture seems possible. As in Maghrebi-French films from the 1990s, Ameur-Zaïmeche exposes the myth of return for the Maghrebi-French protagonist as just that: a myth. The bled is far from the idealised homeland of the first generation of North African immigrant parents (Begag and Chaouite 1991: 44). Indeed, as the film’s narrative unfolds, there is an increasingly bitter irony to the chosen title Bled number one, which would seem to qualify the bled as the ultimate or desirable destination for Kamel. However, while earlier films such as Cheb identified the Maghrebi-French protagonist as outsider in Maghreb society from the outset, Bled number one shows that Kamel has tried and failed to initiate an intercultural dialogue between his French and Maghrebi roots. For Kamel, the bled, rather than France, has now become the space of exile and displacement, a fact that is graphically illustrated in the film’s final scene, which shows Kamel

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reduced to a darkened silhouette wandering aimlessly on the hillside to the accompaniment of Burger’s blues-inflected, improvised guitar solo.

Exils: Encoding Home, Embodying Exile Though he is perhaps best known for his Gypsy trilogy (Latcho drom [1993], Mundo [1995] and Gadjo dilo [1997]), Tony Gatlif has directed nineteen films to date. In Exils Gatlif explores the themes of exile and displacement that characterise much of his work, through the story of two young lovers journeying from the Parisian banlieue to Algeria via Spain and Morocco. The film is also an intensely personal narrative for Gatlif, who was born in Algiers in 1948 and moved to France at the end of the Algerian war. While the director’s (Andalusian) Gypsy origins are well documented in his filmography to date, his connection to the Maghreb is less well known. This fact was acknowledged by Gatilf himself in a speech at Cannes in 2004 following the award for best direction for Exils, where he described the film as ‘a desire to examine my own scars . . . the land of my childhood: a journey of 7000 km by train, car, boat and on foot and 55000 meters by film’ (Gatlif cited in Marsaud 2004). Like Bled number one, Exils displays an acute awareness of the politics of exile and displacement. Although the director’s own experience of uprooting is undoubtedly projected onto his protagonists, Gatlif rejected any romanticised notion of return for himself as a filmmaker, claiming emphatically that the film was not ‘about’ Algeria, a county that he did not know. Instead, he described Exils in more universal terms as ‘a film about children of exile searching for their origins’ (Gatlif cited in Marsaud 2004). Gatlif is thus equally concerned in Exils to highlight the exile and (illegal) migration of impoverished North Africans from across the Maghreb to Europe as he is to narrate the return of the Maghrebi-French subject to North Africa – a fact that is further reflected by the director’s decision to place the film’s title (Exils) in the plural. The ‘return’ of the young lovers to North Africa in Exils is quite different from that presented in Ten’ja or Bled number one, and not least because Zano is the French descendant of pied noir parents (exiled to France following Algerian independence in 1962) and Naïma the French descendant of Algerian immigrant parents. In contrast to Ten’ja and Bled number one, the journey undertaken by Zano and Naïma is not enforced, nor is it prompted by a sense of familial duty. It is circuitous, impulsive, often random and at times incomprehensible to those they encounter (such as Habib and Leila, Algerian siblings travelling illegally across Europe, who struggle to understand why Zano and Naïma would leave the wealth and comfort of the global north in order to ‘return’ to Algeria). Compared to the illegal immigrants they meet who are moving north away from the Maghreb, the young lovers risk nothing in their adventure south to

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Figure 5.2  Zano and Naïma, the ‘right kind of migrants’, drift from France to Algeria in Exils (Gatlif, 2004).

the Maghreb, a fact that is emphasised by the scene in which the Spanish police arrest two immigrant workers Zano and Naïma are travelling with, while they are left to continue their journey as holders of French passports. Zano is shown to possess a childlike fascination and playful approach to the journey. It is only when he finally arrives at the former home of his parents and grandparents that he comprehends the enormity of their loss and exile, weeping uncontrollably before the strangers who now occupy the apartment. The pair also engage in a kind of exilic tourism as they return to Algeria, taking a detour to a Flamenco festival in Seville and participating in a Sufi trance ritual in Algiers, filmed in its entirety by Gatlif in an intimate documentary style that contrasts with the more stylised approach to form and mise en scène found elsewhere in the film. Despite the privileges enjoyed by Zano and Naïma as the right kind of exilic travellers, their journey is nonetheless one of discovery and intercultural dialogue between France and the Maghreb. The presence of Zano as the descendant of pieds-noirs exposes the fact that the movement and exchange of people, culture and commodities between France and the Maghreb during the colonial period has resulted in (post-)colonial exiles of European and non-European origin in France. This further nuances our understanding of exactly who belongs to the North African diaspora in France and of what the return to ‘roots’ or ‘home’ entails for the descendants of the postcolonial exiles (both Arab and pied noir) in such journey narratives. However it is Naïma’s return to Algeria that prompts the most profound journey of self-discovery in the film. In contrast to Zano’s playful energy and self-confidence, Naïma is reserved and appears uncertain of her place in either France or the Maghreb. When the couple arrive in Algiers she is verbally abused in the street by a complete stranger for dressing immodestly and later, during a visit to the family of Leila and Habib, confides to Zano that she feels ‘a stranger everywhere’.

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Though of Algerian origin, she is, like Kamel in Bled number one, distanced from the culture of the Maghreb due to her inability to speak Arabic. When asked by Habib if her name is Arabic, she simply replies ‘it’s just Naïma’, refusing to define her identity in terms of ethnicity. By presenting Naïma in this way, Gatlif arguably risks perpetuating the stereotype of the Maghrebi-French protagonist trapped between two cultures found in Beur Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. And yet, Naïma is not a helpless victim marginalised by her own hybridity. While she initially refuses to acknowledge the Arabic origins of her name to Leila and Habib, when a Spanish gitano at the flamenco festival asks where she is from, telling her she looks like a Gypsy, she vociferously identifies herself (in incorrect Spanish) as an Algerian from France (‘soy Algerina . . . de Francia’), endorsing Avtar Brah’s understanding (1996: 153–5) of diasporic identity as contingent and shifting, in a process of constant renegotiation. Key to the exploration of a more fluid concept of identity in Exils is a cinematic aesthetic structured around displacement and movement. Gatlif displays a preoccupation with displaced framing or fluid and shifting surfaces in the film, which are also projected onto the bodies of the film’s exilic subjects. From the opening shot of the film, an extreme close-up of Zano’s naked back, the body is identified as a key site of exilic trauma and identity. Later, in one of the scenes from the abandoned mine in Albacete (Spain), Zano recounts his family’s history in Algeria and the death of his parents in a car crash – formative events that motivate his journey to the Maghreb. His narration is accompanied by an abstracted reflection of his face in a pool of water that is surrounded by darkness. The reflection (like Zano himself) is in a constant state of movement and transformation: it refuses to fix the exilic or post­ colonial subject, denying us a clear view of exactly who Zano is. As such, it is in direct contrast with the final freeze-frame of Nourdine in Ten’ja that was discussed earlier in this chapter. Exils is a road movie and so, unsurprisingly, movement is key to the film’s aesthetic – there are repeated shots from the characters’ perspective looking out on a shifting landscape from the inside of buses and trains. Zano and Naïma are also often depicted as moving against the flow. They fight their way through the mass of oncoming refugees displaced by the earthquake in Algeria and are shown walking through the streets of Algiers as those around them remain motionless: a visual metaphor of their dislocation from the Algerian culture and society that surrounds them, despite their physical presence in the Maghreb. Upon arriving at the grandparents’ family home in Algiers, Zano expects to find a sense of closure. Instead, there is only alienation and the grief of exile. Traces of his family are to be found in the material space of the apartment: the décor remains largely unchanged, furniture is still in place, photos of his parents and grandparents hang on the walls. However, time has inevitably

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moved on and these fragments from a lost past are not sufficient to bridge the gap to the present, illustrating just how far removed Zano (and by extension Gatilf) is from contemporary Algerian society. In the end, however, both Zano and Naïma do achieve some form of reconciliation and reconnection to the Maghreb. For Naïma this comes from her participation in the Sufi trance ritual, through which she seems able to exorcise the ghosts of her past. For Zano, some form of closure is offered by a visit to the family cemetery in Algiers, where he leaves his personal stereo playing on top of his grandfather’s headstone. This gesture could be read as an attempt to establish a link between a form of expression that is central to Zano’s own sense of self (earlier in the film he comments that ‘music is my religion’) and his (European) ancestral heritage from the Maghreb. However, the fact Exils ends with the couple walking away from the grave, re-commencing their journey with no indication of where they will go next, identifies them as symbolic (and to an extent romanticised) nomads. Above all, Zano and Naïma’s return to Algeria is evidence of a loss of belief in a fixed sense of either home or identity. In this respect it shares with a number of other contemporary European road movies what Everett (2004: 17) describes as a recognition that ‘identity is increasingly fluid and migratory, an ongoing process articulated and constructed through our own spatial and temporal journeys.’ Return Narratives: Displacing the Accent in Diasporic Cinema One further question that arises in an analysis of these return narratives from the 2000s is the potential for such films to ‘displace’ or ‘invert the accent’, thus problematising the notion of diasporic and exilic cinema in western filmmaking formulated in the early 2000s by Hamid Naficy as ‘accented’ and ‘interstitial’. For Naficy, accented cinema is an umbrella term used to define the thematic concerns, aesthetics and industrial practices of diasporic, exilic or postcolonial filmmakers from the global south working in the global north (Naficy 2001: 17–62). Working within this framework, accented cinema produced by exilic, diasporic and postcolonial filmmakers is placed on the margins both culturally and industrially in relation to mainstream western cinema, and, above all, Hollywood, which Naficy identifies as ‘free from overt ideology or accent’ (Naficy 2001: 23). Leaving aside the problematic issue of whether mainstream cinema such as Hollywood is or is not accented, one of the outcomes that Naficy’s analysis is less attentive to is a consideration of what happens to the accent (as a marker of difference but also cinematic style) when the diasporic filmmaker or protagonist ‘returns’, or is displaced to his/her homeland outside of the West. For, as we have already seen, in films such as Ten’ja, Bled number one and Exils the very act of return, the crossing of borders (both real and imagined), does

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not lead to resolution. Instead, the journey itself entails a re-negotiation of the Maghrebi-French protagonist’s relationship to both French and Maghrebi cultural and national identity. In other words, in the return narratives of the 2000s that are imbued with a sense of mobility and movement taking them away from the supposed centre of the West, the accent shifts, is displaced or even inverted and in often complex ways that require us to re-evaluate Naficy’s concept of accent as a marker of both inclusion and exclusion for the diasporic subject. Of the three films analysed in this chapter, it is perhaps Ten’ja that offers the most nuanced consideration of this shift of the accent. What happens to the accent in films by postcolonial or diasporic filmmakers, such as Legzouli, who journey outside of the West and return ‘home’ to the site of displacement or exile? In effect these films ask us to question exactly what position is being negotiated: host/home, diasporic/indigenous, western/Arabic, insider/outsider and, indeed, accented/non-accented. In so doing, they also raise questions about the so-called politics of the hyphen in contemporary Maghrebi-French filmmaking. The complexity of this situation becomes abundantly clear if we return to the example of the sequence that appears about ten minutes into Ten’ja. Here, Nourdine negotiates first at the border and then in the morgue for his father’s body to cross into Morocco – ending with the coffin being returned to Nourdine’s car accompanied by the recital of prayers by a local imam. The sequence in question complicates the identification of accented and nonaccented style precisely by moving outside of a location in the West. Take, for example, the moment when Nourdine removes his father’s body from the morgue to the sound of the imam’s prayers. In terms of Naficy’s accented cinema, these audio-visual, religious and ethnic markers would immediately qualify this scene as ‘accented’; in other words as linked to an ethnic minority in the (western) host culture. And, indeed, for many French and western spectators this sequence remains precisely that. However in the context of where this action takes place (in Morocco) and, by extension, for a Moroccan, Muslim or North African émigré audience, such elements are emphatically not accented. Rather, these are the sounds and rituals of the familiar, the dominant norm, of home. What is more, for the Maghrebi-French spectator, as for Nourdine, it can be both these things: familiar and unfamiliar, accented and non-accented. In other words, the journey undertaken in these films by both protagonist and spectator has the potential to displace the accent. Nourdine’s position as both insider and outsider in Ten’ja is, therefore, under continual negotiation in this sequence. At passport control, he is unproblematically accepted by the border guard as Moroccan because of his passport and his parents’ origins. This position is supported by Nourdine’s own assertion that, as far as he is concerned, he is indeed Moroccan (as he says to the guards ‘For me, I’m also Moroccan’). In other words, Nourdine affirms

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Figure 5.3  Nourdine and Mimoun connect over mint tea in Ten’ja (Legzouli, 2004).

his position at that particular moment as not occupying an interstitial space between two nationalities and two cultures, such as that which Naficy suggests is occupied by accented filmmakers and protagonists of accented films. And yet, his initial response to the Moroccan officials when asked what his nationality is is to return the question to the guards by replying ‘What does it say on my ­passport?’ – a far less emphatic affirmation of his Moroccan identity. Moreover, during the same conversation with the border guards, he is also marked as different due to what the guards describe as his ‘funny’ Algeriansounding accent when he attempts to speak Moroccan Arabic. This comment, also picked up on by Mimoun and Nora, becomes something of a running joke in the film. Indeed it is later explained in a conversation with Nora as resulting from the fact that Nourdine spoke very little Arabic with his parents and so picked up much of his Arabic from other members of the Maghrebi diasporic community in France, which is dominated by Algerian immigrants. Nourdine’s shifting status as insider and outsider continues in the sequence following the release of his father’s body, as he prepares for his journey to Aderj in the Atlas mountains. Sitting outside a local café in Tangiers with Mimoum he is largely indistinguishable in terms of dress and appearance from the other men on the terrace. Indeed, in many ways, the character who stands out most is Mimoun, drawing attention to himself by virtue of his outfit (a tracksuit with the green and red colours of the national flag and the word ‘Maroc’ emblazoned in bold letters on the back) as well as his position as a social misfit who is barely tolerated by the other customers in the café (see Figure 5.3). And yet, as the scene progresses, Nourdine is once more exposed as an

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­ utsider, not only due to his accent when speaking Arabic but also because o of his gestures and lack of knowledge of local customs and behaviour, for example, the way he pours the mint tea that Mimoun orders for them. Significantly, then, what becomes accented in Ten’ja is, precisely, Nourdine’s western/French gestures, customs and outlook. It is his Frenchness that is Other-ed. Nevertheless, we cannot simply read this as a straight reversal or inversion of the accent. Nourdine’s status as the descendant of North African immigrants marks him out as different in Morocco in similar ways as it does in France (in relation, for example, to his ‘funny accent’ or appearance as an ‘Arab’ face in western dress). If the accent in Tenj’a is not simply inverted, perhaps a better way to describe it is as scrambled or displaced. What becomes abundantly clear in this sequence, as elsewhere in Ten’ja, is that accent as a marker of difference or interstitiality is under constant negotiation for the Maghrebi-French protagonist in the narrative precisely because of this journey to the diasporic homeland. For at least one Moroccan reviewer (writing for the Maroc-hebdo), the whole conceit of the film and the ‘accent’ it displayed was problematic, since it presented a decidedly European outlook. The journalist in question criticised Legzouli for overlooking the real social problems facing ordinary Moroccans through the film’s desire to present a reconciliation between the national homeland and the diasporic subject, describing Ten’ja in scathing terms as a ‘Franco-Moroccan co-production aimed more at a European public in search of exoticism’ than a Moroccan audience (Bernichi 2006: 42). Finally, and in this respect, we might also think about the western ‘accent’ that Ten’ja displays in terms of genre, given that the film is, in many respects, a highly conventional example of road movie – a genre whose typical iconography, codes and conventions is intimately associated with Hollywood and western cinema. In Ten’ja, then, for all of the reasons outlined above, we do not have a simple return narrative predicated on the dual territoriality of the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of host and homeland that is central to any understanding of diaspora. There is no cosy or simple ‘returning’ of the accent into a homogenous homeland where it all makes sense. Instead, as the scene with the border guards exemplifies, what we actually have is a constant re-negotiating of Nourdine’s diasporic identity. Ten’ja thus seems to aptly reflect Avtar Brah’s description of diasporic space as a conceptual category that is both: inhabited by those who have migrated and their descendants as well as those who are constructed and represented as indigenous – the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ are constructed and contested. (Brah 1996: 209)

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Ten’ja shows us, then, that Naficy’s notion of an accented cinema is far more complex than identifying a place on either side of an insider/outsider, western/ non-western, accented/non-accented binary. The film effectively destabilises what Naficy refers to in his book as ‘the politics of the hyphen’: the use of terms such as Maghrebi-French, British-Asian or African-American as a means of providing a ‘vertical link’ that emphasises descent relations or roots (Naficy 2001: 16). The continually shifting parameters in which Nourdine’s Frenchness and Moroccan-ness are located, examined and tested in the narrative leads us to question how far the ‘Moroccan’ in French-Moroccan is the same as the ‘Moroccan’ in Moroccan-French. Are the two interchangeable? Which of them is the ‘authentic’ position and which (if any) is strategic or reactive? Ten’ja’s displacing or scrambling of the accent also forces us to explore how the Maghrebi homeland functions as a framework for regulating transplanted identities within the diaspora. Indeed, can it really function in this way for second- or third-generation Maghrebi-French subjects? Nourdine’s transformative journey in Ten’ja therefore shows us that we cannot take for granted the vertical link that Naficy speaks of in diasporic cinema. The binary relationship between the ‘here’ of the host nation and ‘there’ of the homeland is, in fact, far more fragile and susceptible to change than the myth of return would have us think. That is not to say, however, that this myth of return is totally without purchase. For what we also find in Ten’ja, along with other return narratives from Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking of the 2000s, is an exploration of the politics of proximity and distance in the construction of national, transnational (diasporic) and cultural identity similar to that described by Radhakrishnan whereby ‘we can know places that are distant as much as we can misunderstand and misinterpret the places that we inhabit’ (Radhakrishnan 1996: 209). Indeed, for all their unfamiliarity for Nourdine, the dramatic landscape of the Atlas mountains through which he travels is, in fact, evoked in the opening moments of the film. As Nourdine begins the journey with his father’s coffin, he pulls out onto a motorway in Nord-pas-de-Calais. On the horizon we see the peaks of the slag-heaps from the coal mines in which Nourdine’s father worked, subtly mirroring the form of the Atlas mountains that Nourdine will encounter when in Morocco. Thus, for Nourdine, the space of the diasporic homeland is simultaneously known and unknown, real and imagined. This point is emphasised towards the end of the film when Nourdine finally arrives in the valley where his father’s village was located, only to find that it no longer exists and has literally turned to rubble. Nevertheless, by the end of the film, as Nourdine enlists the help of locals from a neighbouring hamlet in the Atlas mountains to transport his father’s coffin by foot over streams and narrow mountain paths for burial on

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the site where the old village used to stand, the idea of homeland and return attains a kind of mythical or even spiritual status. Conclusion The three films analysed in this chapter are representative of the proliferation of return narratives in Maghrebi-French and North-African émigré filmmaking in France since the early 2000s. If we were looking to explain this recent increase in return narratives, we could point, most obviously, to the fact that conditions in Algeria (the ultimate destination in many of these films) were simply too dangerous to contemplate shooting in for much of the previous decade due to the civil war that ravaged the country between 1992 and 1998.9 However, as Ten’ja shows, such return narratives do not need to be set exclusively in Algeria. Just as plausible is the fact that by the 2000s, the French-born descendants of Maghrebi immigrants are by and large more integrated than in the 1980s and 1990s, when beurs were the focus of a series of broader debates around citizenship and national identity in a postcolonial, multicultural France. In the political climate of the 1980s and 1990s most beur filmmakers and political activists were, for obvious reasons, more concerned with arguing for the rightful place of Maghrebi-French youth in France than they were in investing the possibilities of opening up an intercultural dialogue with their North African heritage by journeying to the bled. However, it should also be noted that Ten’ja, Bled number one and Exils are all films produced on extremely small budgets of between €1m and €2m, attracting modest audiences in France of 19 750, 6 8010 and 310 046 spectators respectively.10 Even if such journey films can be seen as indicative of a greater confidence on the part of Maghrebi-French youth as to their place within contemporary French society, they are not attracting significant interest from mainstream producers or engaging crossover audiences in France. The differing relationship of these three directors to the Maghreb itself inevitably effects how the act of return is articulated. What is curious, however, is that all three directors, regardless of their origins, choose to explore the myth of return through Maghrebi-French (as opposed to North African émigré) protagonists. This suggests that Maghrebi-French protagonists remain, due to their perceived interstitiality, the symbolic focus of intercultural exchange between France and the Maghreb. In Ten’ja, Legzouli’s position as a Moroccan émigré living in France clearly compels him to offer a more positive view of the myth of return for both first-generation Maghrebi immigrants and their French-born descendants. Bled number one’s negative representation of the lack of possibilities for dialogue between the MaghrebiFrench protagonist and the conservative community of the bled, on the other hand, appears to be determined by the fact that Ameur-Zaïmeche was raised

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from a young age in France. Gatlif’s position is arguably the most complex. While effectively a part of the North African diaspora in France, having been born and raised in Algiers, the influence of his own Andalusian Gypsy origins means that the ‘return’ journey to the Maghreb undertaken by Zano and Naïma is as much an opportunity for a more general exploration of themes of nomadism, uprooting and exile in a narrative that travels through France, Spain, Morocco and Algeria rather than directly from Paris to Algiers. By moving the journey film beyond the dual territoriality of France and Algeria as displayed to contrasting effect in Ten’ja and Bled number one, Exils offers its Maghrebi-French and pied noir protagonists the opportunity to reground their identity and thus ­re-examine the place and significance of ‘home’ within the diasporic imaginary. For more than twenty-five years now, the overriding focus of criticism and scholarship on Maghrebi-French filmmaking has been to consider these films in the context of debates around inclusion and exclusion within postcolonial France. However, as these more recent return narratives suggest, Naficy’s concept of the accent can work both ways: flowing away from the West as well as towards it. What these films also call for is an understanding of how a Maghrebi-French identity is negotiated and accepted (or not) from both within and outside the West. Far from some fixed marker of difference, the accents in these films, like the protagonists themselves, are floating, contingent signifiers that refuse to be contained within an essentialised ethnic, linguistic or national identity positioning. Notes   1. If we were to incorporate return narratives by filmmakers of non-Maghrebi origin, we would also add Un Aller simple (Heyneman, 2001), Les Chemins de l’oued (Gaël Morel, 2003).   2. For a detailed and illuminating analysis of this film, see Abderrezak (2011).   3. For more on the mainstreaming of Maghrebi-French filmmaking in the 2000s, see Chapter 2 of this book.   4. The term double peine refers to legislation introduced in 1945 that permits the expulsion of any foreign national following release from prison in France and makes no distinction between foreigners arrested of a crime while on French soil and those who have resided in France for a number of years or since a young age. Having been banned in 1981 and then reinstated between 1986 and 1988 (Hargreaves 1995: 189–92), the double peine was formally abolished in November 2003 (except for cases of national security). However, accusations remain that the process of expulsion is still practised in France (see Geraud 2009).   5. For more details, see first- and second-generation accounts of the myth of return documented in Benguigui (1998).   6. Source: http://www.cbo-boxoffice.com.   7. This could not be further from the experience of Merwan, the young MaghrebiFrench protagonist in Cheb, discussed earlier in this chapter.  8. Wesh wesh was shot for a miniscule €0.23m, Bled number one for €1.04m (source: http://www.cbo-boxoffice.com).

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  9. Following the overturning of democratic elections in 1992, the secular military government brutally repressed opposition with death squads and mass detentions while the militant Islamic opposition responded with suicide bombings, assassinations and death threats in an attempt to destabilise the nation. It is estimated that more than 150 000 Algerians (many of them innocent civilians) lost their lives in the political violence that dominated between 1992 and 1998 when the nation was effectively in a state of civil war (Bonner, Reif and Tessler 2005: 3). 10. All figures: http://www.cbo-boxoffice.com.

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6. SCREENING ISLAM: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MUSLIM COMMUNITY IN FRANCE IN THE 2000s

Given the extent to which the integration of France’s North African Muslim population has been foregrounded in public debates over immigration, integration and national identity since the late 1980s, it is perhaps surprising that representations of Islam have remained marginal in Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking. This is even more so the case when it is considered that films by directors of North African origin have tended to foreground narratives addressing contemporary socio-political realities concerning the Maghrebi immigrant community and their French descendants. In other ways, however, this structuring absence of Islam since the 1980s finds a clear precedence in French cinema from as far back as the colonial period, in which Islam was reduced to a series of signs associated with the picturesque and exoticism (Cadé 2011: 43). This lack of cinematic visibility given to the rites and rituals of Islam can also be viewed as evidence of the more widespread reluctance of mainstream majority French filmmakers to engage with such a potentially divisive political issue as French Islam. Finally, it speaks to how the influence of laïcité extends into the cultural sphere more generally. Whilst the stylistic and thematic concerns of certain directors may well be discussed critically in relation to their own religious upbringing, background or faith (the influence of Bresson’s Catholicism on his earlier films, for example [Reader 2000: 5–7])1, the representation of religion of any type has never been a significant thematic concern, aesthetic influence or narrative focus in French cinema (Boitel and Hennebelle 1988; Hennebelle 1996; Cadé 2011). The aim of this chapter is to consider to what extent this situation has changed in the

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2000s as a result of key interventions by a select group of French directors of Maghrebi origin who have sought in specific films to challenge the stereotypes, fears and ignorance that the presence of Islam continues to provoke in many sectors of French society. Until the post-war settlement of North African economic migrants, Islam was almost non-existent in France. Today, it is the country’s second religion, with between 4 and 5 million followers, the largest Muslim population in Europe (Giry 2006: 87). Although generally viewed as a homogenous religious community, the Muslim population in France is actually divided along lines of creed, national origin, ethnicity and generation. Moreover, as a religious doctrine with its origins firmly outside of Europe, Islam has often been (mis-) represented as a major barrier to the integration of North African immigrants into French society. Such a perception is invariably influenced by interpretations of the country’s Republican traditions, and, more specifically, the politics of laïcité. Enshrined in French law since 1905, the separation of church and state was originally introduced to weaken the considerable political influence of the Catholic Church (Cesari 2002: 36). In practical terms, laïcité means confining expressions of religious difference to the private sphere. The concept plays a particularly important role in primary and secondary schools, which are seen as the key public spaces where young French citizens learn of the values that embody the (secular) Republican tradition. Contrary to certain assumptions, however, laïcité is not inherently anti-religious. Indeed, freedom of religious expression is a constitutional right in France. Rather, as Giry argues, the concept is in fact ‘fundamentally liberal’ and ‘mandates the privatisation of religion precisely in order to guarantee its free exercise’ (Giry 2006: 89). The problems, of course, arise when the principles of laïcité are hijacked to serve the political and ideological agenda of specific groups within France. For the best part of a century, the leaders and followers of France’s main religious groups have, for the most part, maintained an uneasy truce with the separation of church and state. More recently, however, the increasing prominence of Islam has been perceived by some in France as having ‘introduced new confusion over boundaries between public and private space and led to renewed controversy over religious freedom and political tolerance’ (Cesari 2002: 36). One symbolic point of tension relates to the wearing of the hidjab or Muslim headscarf in schools. In March 1989, three Muslim teenage girls were suspended from their state school in Creil (50 km north of Paris) for wearing the hidjab to class. The incident sparked a major political controversy: the anti-racist youth movement SOS Racisme appealed against the decision on grounds of discrimination; politicians backing the suspensions argued in defence of the Republican tradition of laïcité. The fact that only a small minority from within France’s Muslim community opposed the suspensions

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suggests that the whole incident had been caused less by the unassimilabilty of Maghrebi immigrants and their descendants and had more to do with an oversensitive interpretation of the laws on laïcité in schools on the part of one head teacher and the subsequent handling of the controversy by the various political parties (Hargreaves 1995: 127). Indeed, the 1989 headscarf affair, like similar incidents over the wearing of religious symbols in schools in the 1990s and 2000s (and a law in 2011 specifically banning full face-veils in public) have come to the fore at specific moments of political sensitivity towards questions of immigration, integration and national identity, as well as being prompted by ‘concerns about political Islam in the world and at home’ (Bowen 2009: 442). Such incidents are therefore as much concerned with the politicisation of laïcité in relation to the integration of France’s Muslim population as they are to do with defending the principles and values of the secular French Republic. Perhaps the real significance of the headscarf affair was that it marked the moment when ‘the integration of immigrants in France became a religious matter’ (Giry 2006: 91). Prior to this point, North African immigrants had been seen as simply immigrant workers or ‘Arabs’. Now they were ‘Muslims’. If the headscarf affair of 1989 had ‘opened political eyes to Islam’s growing appeal to French-born Muslim youth’ (Cesari 2002: 39), the build-up of internal security and efforts to create a specifically ‘French Islam’ began in the 1990s when violence spilled over from the civil war in Algeria. In the summer of 1995, a small group of radicalised French Muslims –acting under the instructions of the GIA –­ planted bombs in the Paris metro in protest against the French government’s support for the military regime in Algeria, killing nine people and injuring a further twenty-seven.2 Intense media attention followed the police hunt for the prime suspect, Khaled Kelkal, a petty criminal turned jihadist, who was eventually shot dead in an armed confrontation with the police that was screened on French television only minutes after the killing had taken place. The involvement of young Maghrebi-French youths in these attacks, combined with the fact that the Muslim community in France appeared to have emerged so rapidly in a secular nation, prompted fears from certain sections of French society of the potential threat ‘from within’ of Islamic fundamentalism – a threat that French politicians have consistently exploited for their own political ends (Bowen 2009: 439). This way of thinking about Islam as historically, politically and culturally opposed to western/European modernity and located firmly outside of the West is part of a centuries-old perception of the relationship between ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’ that has periodically resurfaced in France and across Europe (Franco 2001). In the colonial context, there is also a clear history of an institutionalised suspicion of Islam that continues to haunt contemporary attitudes to France’s Muslim population. In French Algeria, for example, while local Catholics and Jews could become French, Muslims could not obtain

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c­ itizenship without first denouncing their faith, constructing a way of viewing Islam as a barrier to Frenchness that, arguably, still exists in France today (Giry 2006: 90). Such positions have become even more firmly entrenched in the 2000s following 9/11, the terrorist attacks on the transport systems of Madrid (2004) and London (2005), and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist in 2004 (Bleich 2009: 353). More recently, in March 2011, the murder of seven people (including three children) in Toulouse by Mohamed Merah, a 24-year-old, alienated French-Algerian and self-proclaimed jihadist, who was himself killed after a stand-off with French anti-terrorist police following the series of gun attacks, revived memories of the Kelkal incident. Finally, the shooting of 33-year-old Jérémy Louis Sidney, the alleged leader of an Islamist terrorist cell, following anti-terrorist police raids in Paris, Cannes and Strasbourg in October 2012, was followed two weeks later by a survey published in the right-wing daily newspaper Le Figaro, suggesting that six out of ten French people believe the influence of Islam in France is ‘too big’ and that 43 per cent see the religion as a ‘threat’ to national identity (Guénois 2012). If the above summary appears to paint a wholly negative picture of the situation for Muslims in France today, the reality, as it can be measured by the attitudes of French Muslims themselves, is actually far more positive. According to a series of surveys carried out in the past decade, most Muslims in France – more than half of whom, it is estimated, are French citizens3 – have adopted French cultural norms and endorse Republican values, including the concept of laïcité (Giry 2006: 93). The majority of Muslims in France therefore appear to keep their religious beliefs in line with Republican values and, when asked to choose a primary indicator of their identity, define themselves as French first and Muslim second (Bowen 2009: 451). In response to the presence of French Muslims, government policies regarding Muslim institutions and practices (for example the construction of mosques, establishing private religious schools, regulating halal butchery and the training of imams) have been developed since at least the mid-1980s. These exist alongside initiatives introduced by successive ministers intended to engage in dialogue and consultation with more moderate Muslim groups France. The most recent incarnation, the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman, was conceived by the previous socialist government but introduced by Sarkozy as Interior minister for the centre-right UMP party in 2002.4 Such initiatives, which have as much to do with the political ambitions of the incumbent government ministers as they do with establishing a coherent dialogue between France’s political elite and the leaders of its Muslim communities, are characterised by Bowen (2009) as oscillating between two opposing approaches. The first, which includes the 2004 legislation banning the wearing of religious symbols in schools as well as security crackdowns on suspected Islamic

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extremists in the 1990s, sends a clear message to those who would, as Prime Minister Raffarin put it when speaking in the French parliament in in February 2004, ‘place their communalist affiliation above the Republic’s laws’. The second, in contrast, intends to reach out to Muslim groups by encouraging practical measures (such as building mosques) to ensure that they enjoy equal rights to worship as other faiths, but with the consequence that they could be more easily observed and controlled if they were ‘out in the open’ (Bowen 2009: 444–9). While such initiatives reflect the current opinions of the political elite and policy-makers about the place of Muslims in France, the attitudes of Muslims themselves are just as important in understanding the perceived place of ‘French Islam’ in the Hexagone. In the case of Muslim émigrés from the Maghreb, religious and national identity tends to be viewed as one and the same (Cesari 2002: 42). Religious adherence thus functions for first-generation immigrants as a means of maintaining a connection with the homeland, of integrating themselves into the diasporic community, at the same time as maintaining a distinction between themselves and the host nation. In contrast, the descendants of Maghrebi immigrants born and raised in France are less likely to be practising Muslims (Tribalat 1995: 91–109). Many adhere to Islamic traditions, such as fasting during Ramadan or not drinking alcohol, as a means of affirming a sense of cultural belonging rather than religious observance. Even those who consider themselves to be practising Muslims may be distanced from their parents’ understanding and practice of the religion. This difference can result from the second (and subsequent) generation’s limited knowledge of classical Arabic, the shared language of all Muslims across the world (Bowen 2009: 451). However, it can also emerge because their own sense of religious practice has been influenced by their socialisation and education in a secular Republic. In some cases, young Muslims have even forged a new and complex conception of citizenship as ‘French’ Muslims by disentangling political and national identification and emphasising the ‘civil rather than civic dimension of their religious faith’ (Cesari 2002: 43). A key consideration here is the extent to which these young French Muslims see themselves as having a stake in the social, political and economic systems of the Republic, ‘striving within the system rather than attacking it’ (Bowen 2009: 440). And yet, while most Muslims in France are able to adhere to a form of Islam that is largely compatible with the Republican values of laïcité, a mistrust and misunderstanding of Muslims remains prevalent in France: Failing to recognize cultural and social differences amongst Muslims, many French people have been misled by the coincidence of local increases in Islamic visibility and the rise of political Islam within the Arab and Muslim world. In their confusion, they wrongly associate peaceful French

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Islam with the wider movement of Islamic ­fundamentalism. (Cesari 2002: 37–8) While this position has in part been perpetuated by (mis-)representations of Muslims in the French media and extreme-right-wing politicians, by far the greatest obstacle to changing attitudes seems to come from within France’s mainstream political elite, whose coded suspicion of Muslims and ‘failure to treat the issue of Muslim integration seriously’ allowed the far-right Front National and Mouvement Pour la France parties to set the tone for discussions of this issue in the early 2000s (Giry 2006: 101). This mixture of ambivalence and misunderstanding is well illustrated by Sarkozy’s call in the aftermath of the 2005 riots for local imams to mediate with the youths and restore calm. His appeal not only incorrectly assumed that the imams had any influence over the rioters themselves, but it also reinforced the mistaken impression, widely reported in the French media at the time, that ‘Islam had something to do with the problem’ (Giry 2006: 95–6). The danger facing the continued integration of Muslims into French society, then, comes as much from attitudes from the French mainstream as it does from radicalised elements within the Muslim immigrant population who refuse to submit to the values and practices of laïcité. The situation is compounded by a combination of indifference from the intellectual and political classes and hostility from Islamophobic far-right parties that feeds on the anxieties and misunderstanding of a significant proportion of the general public towards a religion and culture that they have limited direct contact with. Faced with such hostility and, in some cases, limited prospects for socio-economic mobility, Muslims in France, particularly those born and raised in the Hexagone, might see a more radicalised Islamic identity emerging from a supranational Muslim community as the only one left to them (Giry 2006: 101). Cinematic Representations of Islam in Maghrebi-French and North African Émigré Filmmaking of the 1990s In the case of films by directors of Maghrebi origin that have emerged since the 1970s, the engagement with Islam on a thematic, socio-political or narrative level has been extremely limited. In militant cinema of the 1970s such as Voyage en capital (Akika, 1977) and Les Ambassadeurs (Ktari, 1977), the North African immigrant’s marginality is overwhelmingly linked to his socio-economic exploitation, while French racism is directed at such characters as ‘Arabs’ and not ‘Muslims’. Moving into the 1980s and 1990s, films by directors of Maghrebi origin tend to limit themselves to passing references to Islamic traditions and rituals, associated almost exclusively with first-­generation immigrants, such as the mother praying in Le Thé au harem

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d’Archimède (Charef, 1985) or the Muslim wake that Miloud stumbles upon when fleeing Ludo’s racist gang in Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995). Elsewhere in Le Thé à la menthe (Bahloul, 1984), belief systems of the Maghrebi immigrant community are more readily associated with superstition than religion, such as when Hammou approaches a local marabout (Muslim holy man) to procure a love potion in order to woo his French neighbour. Even when locations clearly associated with Islam appear – such as the Paris mosque where Nosfarabi seeks refuge in Un Vampire au paradis (Bahloul, 1991) – they are more readily associated with the ethnic difference of the Maghrebi immigrant community than the Muslim umma (community or brotherhood). Alternatively, in the films of Algerian émigré directors such as Bahloul (Le Soleil assassiné, 2002) and Allouache (L’Autre monde, 2001), Islam tends to be identified with the fundamentalist violence and intolerance of the civil war that ravaged the country during the 1990s. In 100% Arabica (Zemmouri, 1997), a musical comedy whose narrative revolves around the conflict in an immigrant neighbourhood of Paris between a group of rap-raï artists and thugs who have taken control of the local mosque, the presence of organised religion is ultimately presented as hapless, ineffectual, prone to corruption and roundly rejected by the local Muslim community (Higbee 2007b: 58–9). The film consciously avoids treating the presence of fundamentalism in the community as a problem concerning the wider integration of Muslims into French society. Instead it is coded in allegorical terms as a reference to the intolerance and violence employed by radical Islamists in Algeria against the rights of artists to freely express themselves (Higbee 2007b: 58–9). As such, the film also echoes Zemmouri’s own experiences as a political exile in France who has received death threats for the representation of Algerian society and Islam offered in his earlier films (Tarr 2005: 188). The apparent reluctance of Maghrebi-French directors in the 1980s and 1990s to deal with the potential tension caused by Muslim integration is most logically read as a further indication of Beur Cinema’s desire to offer a consensual image of its youthful protagonists, who are more invested in the codes and practices of a westernised youth culture than the religious and cultural heritage of their immigrant parents. Indeed it is interesting that images of parents praying in both Le Thé au harem d’Archimède and Bye-bye relegate the act of religious observance to a separate, private space within the immigrant family home. Islam is therefore marginalised, even in the domestic sphere that is usually deemed an ‘acceptable’ space, in Republican terms, for the manifestation of personal religious difference. A more radical distancing from Islam is to be found in Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991). Upon arrival in Algeria following his deportation from France, Merwan, the film’s central beur protagonist, observes Muslims praying in the streets through the grille covering the window of the police van that transports him across the city. Through the mise en scène

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Bouchareb thus evokes the young beur protagonist’s profound alienation from the Arabo-Islamic culture in which he finds himself. Two (or possibly three) exceptions to this absence of films from the 1990s dealing with Islam by directors of Maghrebi origin are found in Hexagone (Chibane, 1994), Douce France (Chibane, 1995) and La Nuit du destin (Bahloul, 1997). In both Hexagone and Douce France, Maghrebi-French director Malik Chibane foregrounds differences between the Maghrebi immigrant population and the dominant societal norm, not to advocate a form of ethnic separatism but rather to demystify the notion of cultural and religious difference as an insurmountable obstacle towards integration. Chibane’s films are also significant for their non-threatening representation of Islam as an integral part of the North African immigrant population’s collective cultural identity. This is done more subtly in Hexagone, where the timeframe of the narrative is structured around the festival of Eid. The traditional sacrificial slaughter of the sheep in preparation for the feast of Eid – a reference to the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his eldest son as a display of his obedience to Allah – is edited in parallel with the death of Sami (the elder brother of the film’s central protagonist) from a drugs overdose. The juxtaposition of these actions thus suggests the allegorical ‘sacrifice’ of a lost generation of beur youth, who languish in the run-down housing estates of the deprived urban periphery. In Douce France, Chibane engages more directly, and to comic effect, with the symbols and practices of Islam, in particular the headscarf, as a means of exploring Islam’s place in France. Mainstream media depictions of Islam in the 1990s as a breeding ground for fundamentalist terrorist groups are flatly contradicted in the film by the portrayal of a peaceful Muslim community who have removed traditional minarets from the proposed design of their new mosque so as not to offend ‘French’ sensibilities. Similarly, the decision by Chibane to include the protagonist of Farida (Fadila Belkebla), a devout French Muslim of Algerian origin who wears a headscarf, questions the widely held belief in France that for a young Muslim woman to wear a headscarf or veil she must have been coerced by family members or community elders (Ternisien cited in Giry 2006: 96). Moreover, the hostile and at times hysterical response of majority ethnic French characters in Douce France to Farida’s headscarf – such as the concierge who brands her ‘a terrorist . . . a daughter of Hezbollah’ simply for wearing the foulard – suggests that the main barrier to the successful integration of Muslim immigrants into French society comes not from their beliefs or religious practices, but from French prejudices and fantasies relating to Islam. Nevertheless, the film’s final sequence, in which Farida discards her headscarf following a chance encounter with two Maghrebi women in the airport restroom, suggests that the price which must be paid for successful integration is arguably not as unproblematic as Chibane’s positive pro-integration stance

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might at first suggest. Farida’s tearful expression does not suggest the euphoria of emancipation but rather an overwhelming sense of loss; a feeling that, as the director has himself suggested, in order to be accepted she must discard the foulard as a symbol of religious difference that marks her unassimability to French society as a Muslim woman (Chibane in Hurst 1995: 15). If Douce France uses a highly charged religious symbol (the headscarf) as a means of examining the tensions and contradictions of French Islam, La Nuit du destin (1997) employs a key date in the Muslim calendar to structure the film’s narrative and initiate an exploration of the rites, practices and attitudes of Islam within part of the North African Muslim immigrant community in Paris. (The film takes place during Ramadan and its title refers to the twentysixth night of the festival when Muslims commemorate the revelation from Allah received by the prophet Mohammed). Significantly, the film is a policier (crime thriller), a genre that has typically relegated North African immigrants to the confines of a criminalised underclass, existing outside of the norms of French society and thus qualifying their status as outsider or Other. In contrast, in La Nuit du destin the Muslim immigrant community is shown to be the victim of organised crime, while their cooperation with the police (and above all that of Mr Slimani (Gamil Ratib), as the sole witness to the murder) is crucial if the criminals are to be brought to justice. Bahloul uses the murder inquiry, led by a white French detective, Inspector Leclerc (Philippe Volter), as a means of introducing the (majority French) spectator to the local North African Muslim community, its traditions and practices. Despite hostility and suspicion from certain sectors of both the police and the local Muslim community, a sense of respect for individual beliefs is eventually endorsed in the narrative both by Leclerc’s careful negotiations with the North African immigrant population and in the tolerant attitude displayed by Mr Slimani towards his own children’s lack of engagement with Muslim traditions. Although neither film seeks to deny the obvious religious difference of the North African Muslim immigrant population, both Douce France and La Nuit du destin offer a view of Islam that can potentially co-exist peacefully with French society. However, the compromises required to reach this position, as Farida’s final act of removing the headscarf in Douce France amply demonstrates, must come from the assimilation of the Muslim community into the secular French state, rather than any greater understanding or tolerance of religious difference on the part of the French majority. Indeed, the marginal presence of both films at the French box-office – attracting 1 784 (La Nuit du destin) and 18 273 (Douce France) spectators respectively – underlines just how limited the potential of such films to encourage crossover French audiences to consider the question of the place of Islam in contemporary French society actually is. Moreover, as Cadé has noted (2011: 48–9), until the mid-2000s of the four of five films to have placed Muslim

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faith at the centre of their narrative, two were, in fact, popular genre films aimed at a mainstream audience, directed by majority-French filmmakers. The first, Black mic mac (Gilou, 1986), is a comedy that focuses on a Sub-Saharan Muslim immigrant community’s battle with the local authorities to avoid eviction from a working-class neighbourhood in Paris and has been criticised for offering a reductive portrayal of Sub-Saharan immigrants, though not for any offensive representation of Muslim immigrants (Tarr 1997: 67). The second film, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (Dupeyron, 2003), tells the story of the relationship between a young Jewish boy and an aging Arab immigrant shopkeeper in Paris. However, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran effects a double distancing from a direct association with Islam in contemporary France by virtue of being set in the 1960s and focusing on a Turkish rather than Maghrebi Muslim as its central character. Narratives focusing on Muslim protagonists are certainly rare in French cinema, and it is also true that the majority of films by directors of Maghrebi origin produced since the 1980s have chosen not to foreground the religious rites and practices of Islam. However, in this respect, they are not necessarily any different from other French directors of Jewish or Christian origin, who also tend to avoid structuring their films around an exploration of religious difference or matters of faith. When religious rites and practices appear, they do so in a broader context of religious difference as a marker or ethnicity that emphasises communal or familial ties. Even in La Vérité si je mens! (Gilou, 1997), one of the most commercially successful majority-French-authored comedies of the 1990s, which focuses specifically on the Sephardic-Jewish community in Paris, Jewishness is portrayed through ethnic markers of community, language, commerce and endogamy as much as it is through the ­religious practices (McGonagle 2007:172­–5). Although less prominent in Maghrebi-authored films since the 1980s, the significance of the (albeit brief) appearance of Islamic practices in many of these films arguably functions in a similar way to that of La Vérité si je mens as a broader marker of cultural or ethnic difference. In Roschdy Zem’s romantic comedy Mauvaise foi (2007), for example, the families of a Maghrebi-French musician and his Jewish (French) fiancée are initially divided along religious lines – though no scenes appear in the film to show the families as either devout or even practising Muslims or Jews. In some cases, such as the films of Abdellatif Kechiche, whose first three features focus extensively on the experiences of the North African diaspora in France with barely a reference to Islam, we might well concur with Cadé’s position and see this absence as an attempt to reinforce the filmmaker’s commitment to the secular Republican tradition in France. However, the fact that the rituals and practices of Islam often occupy a peripheral place in the narratives of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers need not

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necessarily be interpreted as a conscious attempt to marginalise the religion’s significance. Rather, the glimpse of everyday Islamic rites and rituals in films such as Bye-bye and Le Thé au harem d’Archimède identifies their presence in the diasporic family home or community as routine and familiar, without automatically suggesting that all members of the North African immigrant population are practising Muslims – least of all the French descendants of firstgeneration migrants. In so doing, the portrayal of everyday acts of religious devotion in these films offers an understated (perhaps too understated) counterpoint to the more sensationalised representation of Islamic fundamentalism and the threat from within posed by French Muslims found in the mainstream French media since the 1990s. Given this general reticence on the part of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers, it is telling that since the mid-2000s, at least three films have been released that make the question of Islam’s place in both France and Europe a central concern in their narrative, namely: Le Grand voyage (Ferrouki, 2004); London River (Bouchareb, 2009); and Dernier maquis (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2008).5 The remainder of this chapter will focus on these three films and the tensions they articulate between the particular demands of national assimilation to a secular state required by Muslims living within the French Republic, on the one hand, and the inherently transnational nature and outlook of Islam on the other. Transnational Islam: Le Grand voyage and London River Much of the debate surrounding the place of Islam in France since the 1980s has focused on the tension between a particular vision of French Islam that recognises individual religious freedoms at the same time as demanding the assimilation of Muslims into the secular Republic. However, as a religion that numbers an estimated 1.6 billion followers worldwide, or about 23 per cent of the world’s population,6 Islam cannot solely be viewed in France as contained within national boundaries. French Muslims are linked to a transnational community of fellow believers, or umma, in a variety of ways. Firstly, and as in virtually all religions, Muslims in France are bound to common rituals and religious practices that unite all believers, regardless of their ethnic origins or geographical location. Most obviously these encompass the obligatory rituals of worship (salat) that, in theory, require all Muslims to turn and face Mecca (not, it should be noted, the ‘host’ nation of France, nor the diasporic homeland or bled in North Africa) to pray five times daily. French Muslims are further bound to the concept of the umma, by the use of classical Arabic as the common language of the Qur’an, the recital of prayers and Islamic scholarship, the development of a global Islamic jurisprudence, and, finally, the requirement of all Muslims, wherever possible, to complete the hadj or

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pilgrimage to Mecca (Saudi Arabia) at least once in their lifetime (Bowen 2004: 881–3). Thus while Muslims in France are clearly invested in a sense of identity related to their faith that is interpreted at a local and national level, as both ‘French’ Muslims and due to their involvement in the practices, politics and activities of their local Muslim communities, they ‘necessarily maintain solidarities and linkages with Islamic cultures and movements beyond France’ (Cesari 2002: 49). This sense of a transnational Muslim community or umma can lead to a sympathetic identification on the part of French Muslims of Maghrebi origin with other Muslims across the globe, and not solely those from North Africa. In certain cases, disaffected Muslims in France may even choose to identify directly any sense of discrimination or exclusion they might experience in France with the oppression of fellow Muslims in other parts of the world such as Iraq, Palestine or Kosovo (Cesari 2002: 44). The combination of the above elements produces a sense of Islam’s transnational character that, as Bowen (2004: 882) suggests, is ‘diffuse but powerful, and derives its power from the ways in which rituals reproduce, and histories remind Muslims of, the shared duties and practices of Muslims across political boundaries.’ Viewed in this light, there is a clear potential for tension between the pressures for French Muslims to conform to the traditions of a secular Republic, on the one hand and, on the other hand, adherence to a religion that simultaneously locates itself within and beyond such national boundaries and characteristics. One film that engages directly with transnational dimensions of Islam is Le Grand voyage, the debut feature by Maghrebi-French director Ismaël Ferroukhi, a filmmaker who established himself as a screenwriter for both film and TV in the 1990s.7 Embedded within the narrative of Le Grand voyage is a preoccupation with border crossing(s), the journey as a means of re-defining the geo-political territory that is Europe, and the re-evaluation of an identitypositioning for the North African immigrant population as both European and Muslim. Le Grand voyage opens with a sequence in which Réda (Nicolas Cazalé), a young student, cycles freely along countryside roads. The only indication of Réda’s dual French/Moroccan heritage at this point comes from the fact that film’s title is superimposed over the opening images in both French and Arabic. This apparent sense of freedom is, however, soon replaced with one of constraint: Réda must agree to drive his aging father (Mohamed Madj), a devout Muslim immigrant, on a pilgrimage from their home in the workingclass cité of Bouches-du-Rhône across southern France through Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and finally Saudi Arabia to Mecca. For the father, the journey forms part of his religious duty as a Muslim, the hadj representing one of the five pillars of Islam. In contrast, for Réda, who is not a practising Muslim, the journey has no spiritual significance and is seen as a hindrance, since by accompanying his father he will miss sitting the exams for his baccalauréat and the chance to enter university. Ferroukhi thus subverts

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the typical association of the road movie with freedom and self-discovery, in the process establishing an immediate tension between devotion to Islam and belonging to the (French) nation. The fact that Réda will miss the opportunity to sit the exams that would mark the culmination of his schooling in the secular French education system – the school being one of the ‘sacred’ spaces of the Republic in which the principles of laïcité must be preserved at all costs – is surely a deliberate choice by Ferroukhi. It is used to suggest the potential conflict between Islam and state, as well as the clash of attitudes and priorities between the first-generation (Muslim) migrant and his westernised agnostic son. Réda’s conviction that his place is firmly in France is further indicated by the fact that he has a French girlfriend (Lisa), whom we never see on screen but whose presence is evoked by the various phone calls he makes to her until his mobile phone is confiscated by his father.8 En route to Mecca, father and son complete a 5 000 km journey from ‘old’ to ‘new’ Europe and beyond in their battered Peugeot estate. The traditional iconography of the road movie is, once again, turned on its head. Rather than promoting mobility and agency, the car becomes a restrictive space, controlled by the father who imprisons Réda and takes him away from where he wants to be.9 Although the narrative is clearly focused on a trajectory that moves the father–son relationship from conflict to eventual resolution, Ferroukhi also presents a series of chance encounters with various characters, including a group of pilgrims that the father and son meet as they travel across the Jordanian desert. This meeting with fellow Muslim pilgrims from a variety of ethnic and national origins illustrates the heterogeneity of the Muslim community at the same time as it evokes the collectivity of the umma. However, the sequence also highlights Réda’s status as an outsider, whose association with Islam has far more to do with his Arabo-Islamic cultural heritage than it does with any sense of religious devotion. Réda is largely excluded from the community of the pilgrims by his status as a non-practising Muslim, his westernised dress as well as the fact that, unlike his father, he does not speak classical Arabic and so is unable to converse with the other pilgrims in the shared language of the umma. When his father and the other pilgrims pray together, Réda retreats to the other side of the sand dune to trace the name of his French girlfriend (Lisa) into the sand, emphasising his isolation from the extended Muslim community. If the meeting with the pilgrims in Jordon simultaneously underlines the collectivity of the umma and Réda’s separation from it, the earlier encounter with Mustapha (Jacky Nercessian) – a good-natured Turk who resolves a dispute between Réda and the officials at the Bulgarian–Turkish border – displays the quite different approaches to religious doctrine that might exist within this transnational Muslim community. Upon meeting Réda and his father, Mustapha identifies himself as a fellow Muslim and expresses his respect for

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the journey undertaken by the pilgrims, inviting them to take tea in his home and to act as their unofficial guide as they journey to Istanbul. During this conversation, Mustapha also reveals that he had previously spent a number of years in France as an economic migrant, adding that their common experience of migration to France make them ‘compatriots, of sorts’. While Réda responds enthusiastically to the Turk’s offer of hospitality, the father instantly and repeatedly rejects what he perceives as his liberal and westernised approach to Islam. He refuses to converse with Mustapha in French, remains outside in the car while Réda takes tea in his home, and violently confronts his son when Réda returns drunk after a night out with their Turkish host.10 The encounter between Réda and Mustapha thus reflects the gulf between father and son in the narrative, not to mention Réda’s commitment to western values and modes of behaviour, regardless of whether they clash with his father’s beliefs. The temporary alliance that Réda makes with Mustapha also resonates with Avtar Brah’s notion of diasporic identity as contingent and in constant flux: Though boundaries may be drawn around a variety of criteria – ethnicity, national identity, language, religion, memories of shared history, a belief in common origins [. . .] they are subject to the specific criteria invoked in a given situation [. . .] to political, cultural and economic c­ ontingencies [. . .] the question of when and where these borders are imagined and instituted, or how they may shift, change weaken or dissolve is crucial. (Brah 1996: 175) Hence, while the father flatly refuses to acknowledge his presumed bond with Mustapha as a fellow Muslim, Réda identifies with his more westernised outlook and the time spent in France as the most apposite or (to borrow Brah’s terminology) contingent alliance available to him at precisely the moment when he feels he is moving ever further from the westernised French society that he knows best. It is surely no coincidence that Ferroukhi contrives in the narrative for this encounter to take place in Istanbul, traditionally viewed as the symbolic geographical, cultural and religious crossroads between the Christian West and the Islamic East. The overall impression left by the encounter with Mustapha is that, just as it is impossible to define a single homogenous Muslim identity, so the identity of the Maghrebi protagonists in Le Grand voyage cannot simply be reduced to their affiliation to Islam as either a spiritual or cultural marker of identity. Instead, Réda and his father negotiate a series of identity positionings throughout the film that change according to the (cultural) settings and scenarios they find themselves in. For the father this is a move from being identified as a diasporic subject in France (a Moroccan immigrant who has lived in France

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Figure 6.1  Generational conflict between Réda and his father in Le Grand voyage (Ferroukhi, 2004).

for thirty years), to being guest or (pilgrim) traveller as he and Réda journey across the Balkans, and finally to Muslim ‘brother’ upon his arrival in Mecca. Indeed, the further east that Réda and his father travel towards Mecca, the more the latter is shown to be in the familiar territory of a predominantly Islamic culture. In this context, the use of language in Le Grand voyage is key to illustrating how the balance of power shifts between father and son in Ferroukhi’s ‘Babelized road movie’ (Rosello 2011b). As the pilgrimage nears Mecca, so the father is increasingly able to communicate with those around him, both in classical Arabic with fellow pilgrims and through non-verbal signs of communication, such as the scene in Sofia where he completes a currency exchange with a local dealer solely through gestures and a handshake. At the same time, Réda’s attempts to converse in both French and ‘globish’ are shown to be increasingly futile the further east he travels (Rosello 2011b: 268–9). Moreover, as the incident at the Turkish border shows (where, significantly, it is Réda’s passport, not his father’s, that is invalid), it is not simply an inability to communicate but also a lack of knowledge of the local codes or customs within a predominantly Islamic society that is the cause of Réda’s problems. When in Syria, he angrily confronts his father for giving money to a woman in the village where they have stopped to take on water, failing entirely to comprehend the father’s gesture as an act of charity that forms one of the five pillars of Islam and a requirement for all Muslims travelling to Mecca. Through this emphasis on multi-linguality, contingent identities and the transnational reach of the umma, Le Grand voyage refuses to limit its

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­ nderstanding of the Maghrebi-French and North African immigrant identities u either to the national sphere (the place of Maghrebi-French population within France) or a perspective that focuses exclusively on the diasporic axis between host nation (France) and homeland (the Maghbreb) (Rosello 2011b: 271). This approach is enabled by the fact that father and son are journeying from France to Mecca and has four immediate consequences in the film. Firstly, Ferroukhi refuses to look west to a European identity that is preoccupied with its relationship to the cultural imperialism of the US, such as the westernised youth culture found in beur films of the 1980s like Le Thé au harem d’Archimède and Bâton rouge (Bouchareb, 1985). Secondly, precisely because the narrative is located for such a brief time in France, the binary positions of insider/outsider, French/Arab that are routinely applied to the North African immigrant population and their descendants in France simply do not feature in the narrative. With the exception of the other pilgrims they meet in Jordan, who view them as part of a wider globalised Muslim ‘family’, Réda and his father tend to be viewed as ‘foreigners’ and ‘French’ outsiders – such as when they try to report the theft of money from their hotel room in Turkey and are addressed by the police in French.11 Thirdly, this choice to locate the narrative east towards Mecca suggests that the diasporic axis is not the only key influence that shapes the individual and collective identity of France’s North African immigrant population. Finally, and as a direct consequence of this move beyond the diasporic axis of host nation and homeland, the film ­considers Islam’s place within Europe more generally. The journey in Le Grand voyage from the ‘old’ Europe of the West to the ‘new’ Europe of the accession states of the Balkans and beyond raises the question of just where exactly Europe (as a socio-cultural, geographical and political entity) starts and finishes. Moreover by contrasting the devout Muslim father with Réda’s lack of religious observance, Le Grand voyage illustrates the extent to which a Muslim identity in modern Europe can be based as much on cultural origins and traditions as on spirituality – reflecting Ferroukhi’s own position as a ‘non-practising Muslim’ (Ferroukhi in Baudin 2004). Consequently, for much of the film Réda is unable to understand and respect the true significance of the pilgrimage for his father. Neither does he undergo a radical transformation or conversion upon arrival in Mecca. Instead, he is set apart from the other pilgrims in Mecca, a fact that is graphically illustrated in the sequence where, in his yellow t-shirt and jeans, Réda pushes against the mass crowds of pilgrims who are dressed in traditional white robes (irham) as he desperately searches for his missing father. Ultimately, it takes the extreme event of the death of Réda’s father to prompt a reconciliation of sorts between father and son. Having identified his father’s body, a grief-stricken Réda is depicted respectfully, and with loving care, washing his father’s body in accordance with Islamic ritual, discovering

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‘age-old gestures that he did not realize he knew’ (Cadé 2011: 46). This act is followed by another reference to the pillars of Islam (charity), as just before getting into the taxi that will take him to the airport and home to France, Réda pauses to give money to a woman begging in the street. The significance of this gesture, mirroring the father’s earlier act of almsgiving in Syria, suggests a greater sense of understanding and respect on the part of Réda for his father’s religious beliefs. This greater understanding on the part of the westernised Réda was also intended, claimed Ferroukhi, to ‘rehumanise a community whose reputation is smeared by an extreme minority using religion for political ends’ (Jaafar 2005: 66). However, the fact that it takes the death of the father for this reconciliation to occur hints at the gulf that still exists between the first-generation Muslim immigrant and his Maghrebi-French son. The ritual washing of the body is thus qualified as the attempt of a grieving son to connect with his deceased father, rather than evidence of Réda’s conversion from non-practising to practising Muslim. In many respects, by locating the film firmly in the transnational Islamic sphere, Ferroukhi foregrounds the contradiction of viewing a Muslim identity as solely ‘French’ or ‘European’, given that Islam is ‘transnational without being either “post-national”, in the sense of succeeding an earlier space bounded by state boundaries, or “European”, in the sense of delimiting itself to a bounded European entity of normative value’ (Bowen 2004: 891). Le Grand voyage is a landmark French film for the extent to which it centres its narrative on questions of Muslim faith, rituals and identity, refusing to represent Islam as ‘an unknown set of dogmas that is either feared or treated as a block of alterity’ (Rosello 2011b: 257) and also due to the fact that it was the first feature film ever to be given permission by the Saudi authorities to film inside the walls of Mecca (Guerand 2005). However, for all these qualities, the film’s consideration of the place of Islam in France or indeed Europe is limited in the sense that Réda’s reconciliation with his supposedly non-European Otherness (his father’s Islamic heritage) must be negotiated away from Europe (in Mecca) and at a safe distance from the secular nation state (France) in which religious difference is often cited as one of the key barriers to integration for the ­country’s Maghrebi-immigrant population and its French-born descendants. This need to move beyond France in order to safely discuss the potentially problematic issues of Muslim integration into French society appears to be further endorsed by London River (Bouchareb 2009). The film tackles the even more incendiary issue of home-grown Islamic terrorism in Europe by locating its narrative in the aftermath of the bombing of the London transport network in July 2005 by a group of radicalised British Muslims. The narrative thus follows the desperate attempts of two parents, Elizabeth (Brenda Blethin), a Christian from a small farming community on Guernsey, and Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté), a Muslim émigré from West Africa, who works for the

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f­ orestry commission in France, to find their missing children, presumed victims of the bomb attacks. Although locating its narrative in the midst of a real instance of ‘homegrown’ Islamic terrorism in Europe, inserting documentary footage of the London bombings from radio and TV at key points in the film, London River in fact makes strenuous attempts to distance the film from exploring the motivations of the young British Muslims who carried out these attacks. Instead, Bouchareb focuses on the search conducted by Elizabeth and Ousmane, which temporarily unites the parents in grief. Moreover, the fact the film takes place in London and not Paris, Lyon or Marseilles allows its Franco-Algerian director to explore the tensions of the Islamic community’s place in European society without having to locate it in a specifically French context, such as the bombing of the Paris metro by disaffected French Muslims in 1995. Finally, that fact the narrative takes place in Britain, whose system of embracing an Anglo-Saxon model of multiculturalism is quite different from the French Republican model of assimilation, allows London River to effect a triple distancing of the perceived problem of homegrown Islamic f­ undamentalism from France in geographical, cultural and ideological terms. Despite the potential for tension and conflict between Muslim and Christian communities set up by the London bombings, the emphasis in London River is ultimately on establishing universal human links that transcend religious, ethnic or national difference. Elizabeth’s initial hostility towards Ousmane – when she discovers that her daughter and Ousmane’s son (a practising Muslim) were in a relationship she recoils from shaking his hand – is therefore not ultimately qualified as a racist gesture. Rather as the relationship between the two strangers develops, it can be read as the action of a distressed mother from a provincial environment who has arrived in London and is not sure exactly whom she can trust. And while the opening sequences of the film are replete with religious (Christian) iconography,12 Bouchareb refuses to present an unbridgeable divide generated by religious difference. Elizabeth and Ousmane are ultimately constructed as characters that display more common traits than they do differences. Both work the land, both speak French, both have a strong religious faith, both are united (to some extent) in the grief that they experience for the loss of their children. Similarly, framing and editing are used to emphasise both their division – for example in the police interrogation and exiting the hospital – and to evoke a sense of common ground, such as the repeated individual shots of the two characters looking out of car windows, or walking along deserted country paths at the start of film. As Elizabeth remarks in French to Ousmane after a meal in the flat that their children shared, ‘our lives aren’t so different’. Equally, Bouchareb is at pains in the narrative to qualify the terrorist attack on London as the action of an extremist minority that in no way reflects

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the beliefs and values of the wider Muslim community. The first time we are introduced to Muslims from the local Finsbury Park Mosque in north London ­– which has in real life been identified with Islamic fundamentalism through its association in the 1990s with the radical cleric Abu Hamza – is when we meet the imam (Sami Bouajila) sending members of the mosque to help distressed relatives of suspected victims of the terrorist attacks, who are searching for their loved ones at local hospitals. Moreover, in his first encounter with Ousmane, Bouchareb has the imam deliver a carefully worded speech in which he emphasises that the mosque is not concerned with politics, only ‘prayer and faith’. The portrayal of Islam found in London River thus conforms to earlier representations offered in the handful of Maghrebi-authored feature films from the 1990s and 2000s (such as Douce France, La Nuit du destin, Le Grand voyage and M. Ibrahim) that present Muslim protagonists as devout and peaceful. The question of the broader socio-economic and ideological causes of the radicalisation of European Muslims is entirely ignored in London River. Similarly, the indirect role that European governments may have played in pushing these Muslims towards extremism through, on the one hand, antiterrorist legislation that appears, by default, to single out Muslims as a threat to national security and, on the other hand, a supportive stance to US-led invasions of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is conveniently sidestepped by the film in its decision to focus on the response of the victims and not the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks.

Dernier maquis: Islam in the Workplace, a Religion Apart If London River and Le Grand voyage choose, for different reasons, to locate their Islamic protagonists and transnational narratives firmly outside of the boundaries of the secular French nation, Dernier maquis aligns them directly with the experience of working-class Muslim immigrants in contemporary France. Seen by many as one of the truly original voices to have emerged within the auteur-led independent sector of French cinema over the past decade, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s films have consistently garnered critical acclaim from festival organisers and highbrow critics in France. However, unlike Abdellatif Kechiche, another director of Maghrebi immigrant origin who has also been consistently fêted by French critics in the 2000s, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s more explicitly politically engaged films have been unable (or unwilling) to combine critical plaudits with a substantial, crossover audience for his films in France.13 His debut feature Wesh-wesh, qu’est ce qui se passe? (2001) followed the welltrodden path of beur and banlieue filmmaking by employing an episodic realist narrative that focuses on the experiences of a young Algerian youth living in a run-down housing estate on the Parisian deprived urban periphery. His second feature, Bled number one (2006), depicts the same Maghrebi-French

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­ rotagonist struggling to come to terms with ‘returning’ to the family home in p rural Algeria after deportation from France. With its focus on a Muslim immigrant workforce of both Maghrebi and Sub-Saharan origin, Dernier maquis forms the third part of what the director describes as a trilogy of films addressing contemporary socio-political issues facing immigrant minorities in France. However, while manifestations of religious difference are almost entirely absent from Wesh-wesh, or largely incidental and haunted by a ‘patriarchal chauvinism’ in Bled number one (Cadé 2011: 44), they are most deliberately brought to the fore in Dernier maquis. The episodic narrative of Dernier maquis is relatively simple and revolves around events that unfold in a pallet-repair business owned by Mao (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), a French Muslim. Located on a remote industrial site on the outskirts of Paris, bordered by a canal and directly beneath an airport flight path, the workshop and yard of the pallet business is the arena in which a dispute between the workers and their boss will unfold. The spatial continuity of this location, combined with the shifting industrial landscape created by the distinctive red pallets that dominate the mise en scène that are moved around the yard by the workers, give the film a theatrical quality. Tension arises in the narrative when Mao constructs a small mosque for his (mostly) Muslim workforce and makes the mistake of appointing an imam without first consulting his employees. Significantly, then, while the localised politics of religion are shown to be a potential site of conflict in Dernier maquis, Mao’s proselytising in the (semi-public) space of the workplace is not seen as posing a challenge to the Republican principles of laïcité.14 None of Mao’s workers complain about the construction of the prayer room – quite the opposite, in fact. As Mao explains to the imam in a private meeting, actively promoting Islam in the workplace is, in his opinion, desirable, since it improves both the spiritual well-being and productivity of his workers (‘It [Islam] is good for the heart, it’s good for the spirit, it’s good for the body, it’s good for work’). Rather than producing a conflict between a religious minority and the secular French majority, narrative tension in Dernier maquis is in fact generated within the Muslim community by Mao’s unilateral appointment of the imam. The move is opposed by certain employees on the grounds that it is undemocratic and affords Mao (the boss) undue influence over his workers in a space of worship. These concerns are subsequently confirmed when, in a private meeting with Hadj (Larbi Zekkour), Mao instructs his newly appointed imam to oblige all workers to attend Friday prayers and to keep a particularly close eye on the activities of the garage mechanics, or risk losing all funding for the mosque. This sense of surveillance and control has an ominous resonance with government attempts in France in the 1990s and 2000s to build new mosques as part of a state-sponsored ‘French Islam’ in order to survey the Muslim

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­ opulation. It is evoked in the mise en scène by the choice of a fixed highp angled shot in the scene where the workers enter the new mosque for the first time. The camera is positioned directly above the entrance to the mosque, as if secretly recording the movements of the workers as they arrive for Friday prayers. Mao’s apparently benevolent act of providing a place of worship for his fellow Muslims is thus exposed as cynical ploy to divide and control the workforce. The theme of the potential for political corruption of organised religion when it is permitted to yield power and influence outside of the private sphere is therefore applied specifically to Islam in Dernier maquis. However such corruption is not unique to Islam. Indeed, in the broader context of French history, it could equally refer back to the excessive political influence of the Catholic Church in French society during the late nineteenth century that led the legal separation of church and state in France. The subsequent tension between Mao and the more militant members of his workforce (in particular the garage mechanics who are of Maghrebi origin) extends the confrontation from the politics of religious protocol to the realm of class struggle. Mao informs the garage mechanics that he is going to shut down the garage, citing economic reasons as the basis for his decision. In a desperate attempt to save their jobs, four of the Maghrebi-French mechanics mobilise to occupy the yard. A violent confrontation ensues, as the workers first attack Mao and then barricade themselves in the workplace – at which point the film comes to an abrupt end. This final emphasis on the potential for the continued existence of a class-based political consciousness amongst the immigrant workers in Dernier maquis should not necessarily come as a surprise, since it appears as a recurring theme in all of Ameur-Zaïmeche’s work to date. For example, while his first film, Wesh-wesh, is clearly focused on the multicultural urban space of the banlieue, the fact that class attitudes may run deeper than ethnic solidarities is offered as a distinct possibility in certain scenes of the film (O’Shaughnessy 2007: 76). Similarly, the chosen title for the film in question, Dernier maquis, refers more directly to the final act of resistance by the workers in occupying the yard than it does to the theme of the relationship of Islam to the workplace that has dominated the narrative up to this point. With its focus on tension between bosses and workers played out in an industrial environment, Dernier maquis appears to draw on the dramaturgy of class struggle found in French political cinema of the 1970s. The film also resonates with the changing emphasis of the political in French cinema since the 1990s, defined by O’Shaughnessy (2007: 33–4) as possessing a ‘capacity to bring underlying socio-economic violence to the surface’ while marking a shift from an aesthetic of (ideological) totality to an aesthetic of the fragment that indicates a new, more raw and immediate engagement with socio-political struggles. Thus in Dernier maquis, while class struggle persists, the workers are not unionised to fight the bosses. Some do not even have the correct papers

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to work in France, highlighting a different kind of precariousness and threat of social violence (expulsion and exploitation as clandestine workers) that hangs over certain members of the workforce. Similarly, the final blockade of the yard only serves to underline the rift between, on one side, the mechanics of Maghrebi origin, who form part of the settled North African diaspora and, on the other, the Sub-Saharan African labourers, who are identified as recently arrived immigrants and thus outsiders. The key difference between O’Shaughnessy’s reading of the place of class struggle in Wesh-wesh and the consideration of class found in Dernier maquis, then, is that in the latter film Ameur-Zaïmeche does not suggest that class attitudes may run deeper than ethnic difference or religious affiliation. Rather, Dernier maquis explores a social dynamic and industrial environment in which these two elements are, to all intents and purposes, inseparable. This fact is well illustrated by the opening sequence of Dernier maquis. The detached, observational view of the workplace that starts the film (a fixed long take of workers shifting pallets from one side of the yard to the other) is immediately followed by a tracking shot that takes us through the maze of pallets in the yard. The camera finally comes to rest on an individual worker, Hadj, who is spraying the pallets in the distinctive red that forms a prominent visual reference point in the mise en scène. Hadj then stops to take a break from work with a co-worker Titi (Christian Milia-Darmezin). The conversation quickly turns to religion, with Hadj, a devout Muslim, advising Titi, a recent convert to Islam, of the responsibilities and duties that must be observed by a good Muslim in order to enter paradise –­as well as answering Titi’s questions about how to become an imam. Rather than confining this conversation to the private sphere (the home, immigrant foyer or mosque, for example), AmeurZaïmeche instead uses Dernier maquis’ industrial location as the backdrop for discussing and representing the daily rites, rituals and protocol of the Islamic faith, in a manner that is rarely seen on French screens. Consequently, Dernier maquis features a series of sequences that either involve the direct representation of Islamic rituals or discussions between characters that lead the spectator to engage with the philosophies and practices of Islam and, by extension, its place within a modern, industrialised and apparently secular French nation. One of the most remarkable sequences in this respect comes the first time that salat (the formal practice of Muslim worship) is observed in the newly constructed prayer room, approximately twenty-five minutes into the film. In terms of shot selection, the sequence, which lasts about ten minutes, combines a series of medium close-ups on specific rituals – such as the muezzin’s call to prayer – with two extended, single takes shot from the back of the prayer room. Rather than showing an excerpt or brief montage of these rituals and practices, Ameur-Zaïmeche presents the call to prayer, the prayers themselves and the exchange of greetings between worshippers after

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the prayers have finished in their entirety. The focus on the elected muezzin, a West-African immigrant worker (Mamadou Kebe), reciting the call to prayer allows the spectator ample time to contemplate the significance of this religious ritual, as well as foregrounding a vocal performance of extraordinary beauty. The sequence also emphasises the solidarity of those worshipping at the mosque through its use of the single, long take and the medium close-ups of North African, Sub-Saharan African and even some white/European Muslims embracing after prayers. Yet the proposed unity of the umma is shown to be an illusion as immediately after prayers have finished the controversy over Mao’s appointment of the imam erupts. The film is therefore less concerned with presenting a clash between the secular state and Muslim community or between the followers of different faiths in France as it is with a confrontation between Muslims that is variously understood in terms of ethnic, national and class difference. However, even this point is complicated in the narrative since the chosen imam, Hadj (of North African origin), is supported by the West African workers but opposed by the mechanics who are also of North African origin. In a similar way, despite exposing the cynicism and political manoeuvring of Mao in opening the mosque, Ameur-Zaïmeche refuses to oversimplify the motivations and loyalties of his characters in order to fit a Manichean binary of ‘bad’ bosses against ‘good’ workers. This point is perhaps best illustrated by the divisions that surface in both the mosque and on the picket line between the Maghrebi-French garage mechanics and the Sub-Saharan immigrant labourers. The latter group refuse to support the strike since their allegiance to the appointed imam and loyalty to their chef du village (who in turn has formed a shady alliance with Mao) trumps any wider connotation of class solidarity with the Maghrebi-French mechanics. Finally, any sense of a Muslim immigrant minority being oppressed by a ‘French’ majority in the film is further complicated by the fact that Mao is himself a practising Muslim of Maghrebi immigrant origin. Ameur-Zaïmeche uses the presence of such discussions and the representation of Islamic rituals (such as the salat) in the diegesis, alongside the dispute that is sparked by Mao’s appointment of the imam, as a means of exploring Islam’s relationship to the workplace and by extension its position in a secular French society. Such issues are similarly evoked through Ameur-Zaïmeche’s approach to film form and style rather than being articulated through extended, expository exchanges between protagonists. As with the earlier discussion between Hadj and Titi, Ameur-Zaïmeche is less interested in the first sequence that takes place in the mosque in suddenly having his Muslim protagonists engage in an intense intellectual or scholarly debate as to the religious philosophy of Islam, something that would seem rather incongruous in the context of a narrative involving poorly educated immigrant workers. Thus,

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Figure 6.2  Call to prayer from the pallet mosque in Dernier maquis (AmeurZaïmeche, 2008).

in his role as spiritual advisor to the Muslim workers, Hadj offers little more than vague calls for ‘sincerity’ and tolerance to his flock. Instead, the complications that arise in the workplace between religion and the principles of laïcité are illustrated by the extent to which the influence of Islam is embedded into the very fabric of the workplace via the mise en scène itself. In response to the imposition of Mao’s mosque, the garage mechanics construct their own alternative prayer room in the workplace from the pallets stacked across the yard, with a hose typically used for washing down the pallets serving as the source of water for the worshippers to use to perform their ritual ablutions in advance of prayers. In one of the film’s most memorable images, the muezzin stands atop of the walls of the pallet mosque, incanting a call to prayer, that mixes with the sounds of the industrial environment as a plane flies overhead (see Figure 6.2). This sense of embedding the private rituals and practices of salat into the semi-public, material space of the workplace mirrors the approach taken by the filmmakers when shooting on location in an industrial estate for Dernier maquis. Ameur-Zaïmeche has commented that filming Dernier maquis on location forced the crew were to adapt (artistically speaking) to the pre-existing industrial landscape they encountered.15 Just as the alternative mosque is constructed from the material objects found in the workplace – the pallets upon which Mao’s business functions and generates capital – so religion is almost never a private matter in the film. Every religious act or object in Dernier maquis is somehow related to the politics, modes of production and capital exchange within the workplace. Thus the garage mechanics propose to repair the damaged bodywork on the car owned

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by the friend who arrives with a selection of rugs for their alternative mosque, effectively offering their labour in exchange for the ‘gift’ of the prayer mats. Given that for Mao’s Muslim workers religion is embedded in the very site and everyday activities of the workplace, it is perhaps inevitable that a religious dispute should be the catalyst for wider social confrontation in the film. However, by depicting religion as a source of conflict in this way, Dernier maquis risks endorsing the very principle of laïcité (that religion should be firmly confined to the private sphere) that the film appears to challenge. And yet while the film identifies Mao’s proselytising and the construction of the mosque in the workplace as ultimately divisive, Ameur-Zaïmeche in no way presents Islam as a barrier to integration of Muslim immigrants into French society. Rather, the director exposes in Dernier maquis the impossibility of separating personal religious belief from individual and collective interaction in the socio-economic sphere. Indeed, in Dernier maquis the divisions, decisions and behaviour of the immigrant workers are influenced far more by their faith than by the guiding principles of the secular Republic. Dernier maquis’ atypical foregrounding of religion (and more specifically Islam) within a socio-political drama thus separates the film from both French political cinema since the 1970s and from earlier socio-realist narratives in beur and banlieue filmmaking that centre on characters of Maghrebi origin while strenuously avoiding a representation of the characters’ identity that foregrounds an affiliation to Islam. In interviews given to the press at the time of the release of Dernier maquis, Ameur-Zaïmeche seemed well aware of the film’s potential significance in terms of the paucity of representations of Islam found in French cinema. Noting the long history of Islam in France, the director expressed a desire that, in attempting to redress this imbalance, his film might open spaces for a debate around the access for Muslim immigrant minorities to a greater sense of dignity and, in some cases, even citizenship (Ameur-Zaïmeche cited in Widemann 2008). In his highly favourable review of the film for Cahiers du cinéma, Cyril Neyrat argued for Dernier maquis’ significance as a new type of political cinema that understood the place of Islam and the political role that the religion could play in contemporary French society: [. . .] that the freedom of cultural and religious expression for minorities could be the vector for a political uprising, an emancipation, a secular affirmation at the heart of a French society full of contradictions. To create a Dernier maquis means to open a working-class, democratic space at the very heart of the site of cultural and economic alienation. (Neyrat 2008: 21) Despite this ringing endorsement of Dernier maquis’ deft combination of class struggle with immigrant politics and religious difference, a number of factors

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make it difficult to assess how the film can offer a genuine discussion of the place of Islam in the workplace in wider French society. First is the fact that the film’s immigrant, male workforce is firmly isolated from any social, political or cultural interaction with the outside world. This isolation is further evoked by the pallet yard’s geographical location on the very extremity of the city, bordered by a canal and tucked away at the end of a road on an industrial estate that leads nowhere.16 In a similar way to the cité in the banlieue films of the 1990s, Mao’s business is thus qualified as a space at once geographically, culturally and socially removed from the rest of society – ghettoising the film’s Muslim immigrant protagonists, rather than, as Neyat sees it, transcending religious difference to produce a democratic working-class space at the very site of cultural and economic exclusion. Second, the absence of any female Muslim protagonists in the narrative, who, as wearers of the headscarf, have often been placed at the very centre of recent debates about France’s Muslim community, limits a more inclusive exploration of Islam’s place in French society. Indeed, the overriding focus in Dernier maquis on the Muslim immigrant as male worker actually harks back to militant and civic cinema of the 1970s in which the Maghrebi-immigrant Other was often classed as a purely economic presence in France, located firmly outside of the socio-cultural or familial sphere. Finally, the religious difference that proved the catalyst for the division between Mao and his mechanics is all but evacuated from the final moments of Dernier maquis which reverts in both tone, focus and form exclusively to the notion of class struggle. The last time the mosque appears on screen, moments before this scene, it is depicted as a private space of isolation; Mao sits alone in the prayer room late at night, apparently contemplating the personal and economic cost that creating a mosque in the workplace has caused to his business and his authority as boss. Conclusion As the effective displacement of any reference to Islamic symbols or rituals in the final moments of Dernier maquis suggests, while a select number of recent Maghrebi-authored features have gone a long way to redress what Cadé (2011: 41) describes as the ‘quasi-invisibility’ of Islam in French cinema, screening Islam remains fraught with difficulties and tensions. Moreover, the audience figures in France for the three films analysed in detail in this chapter – Le Grand voyage (77 413 spectators), London River (16 888 spectators) and Dernier maquis (29 021 spectators) – appear to suggest that there is little interest, or desire, amongst mainstream French audiences to engage with narratives that place the experiences of France’s Muslim community as their main focus. For his part, Michel Cadé has argued that films by directors of Maghrebi origin from the 2000s which promote a more ‘salient’ relationship with Islam

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can only do so when ‘the films take place beyond French borders, thereby eliminating the problematic of integration’ (Cadé 2011: 50). This position helps to explain why in Dernier maquis the Muslim immigrant community appears so isolated from the rest of French society. It can also account for why London River must, by necessity, locate the even more incendiary issue of intégrisme (Islamic fundamentalism) in an immigrant neighbourhood of the English capital that is culturally, geographically and ideologically (in terms of its approach to multiculturalism and the republican tradition of laïcité) clearly located outside of France. However, in relation to Le Grand voyage, the position is more complicated. By situating its narrative beyond French borders, Le Grand voyage’s depiction of Islam is in fact concerned with the transnational dimension of the umma. Indeed, by locating this film outside of France, Ferroukhi might also be affirming, in the most positive sense, that integration for Réda as a Maghrebi-French youth is emphatically not the issue. Implied within both this chapter and, indeed, Cadé’s engaging and informed analysis of representations of Islam in contemporary French cinema (2011) is the need for French cinema to offer a more prominent and normalised space to France’s second religion. However, any discussion of the desirability for a greater visibility of Islam in the films of directors of Maghrebi origin in the 2000s risks foregrounding an approach that defines their work primarily in relation to their ethnic and religious differences rather than by the dramatic, thematic or aesthetic content of the films themselves. Put differently, how often is the work of a Catholic or Jewish filmmaker in France examined and interrogated in relation to how their films seek to offer a representation or cinematic meditation on their religious heritage? Viewed from this angle, the relative lack of enthusiasm from directors of Maghrebi origin to foreground or explore Islam in their films can be seen as a kind of self-censorship, a reluctance to offer any representation of Islam that might risk being distorted by the negative stereotypes that continue to be associated with the Muslim community in France, or, more generally, a refusal to be ghettoised from the outset as little more than ethnic-minority or Muslim filmmakers. Notes   1. As Reader (2000: 7) notes: ‘Few Catholic artists, however, have found the institutional life of “their” Church a congenial or inspirational topic, and its declining importance in Bresson’s later work is not of itself particularly surprising’.   2. The Groupement Islamique Armé (GIA) was the armed wing of the radical Islamist group the Le Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) who opposed the military-backed Algerian government in the country’s bloody civil war during the 1990s.   3. Accurately estimating the size of France’s Muslim population is complicated by the fact that, for reasons of egalitarianism, identifying citizens on the basis of national origin, religious or ethnic difference is forbidden by French law. The last census to record religious affiliation was conducted in 1872 (Giry 2006: 89).

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  4. For more details on these various initiatives and their consequences, see Cesari (2002), Giry (2006) and Bowen (2009).   5. One further film that should be mentioned here is Dans la vie (Faucon, 2008). The film, directed by a French filmmaker of pied noir origins (Faucon was born in Morocco), has been analysed by Tarr (2010: 326–30) due to its complex consideration of Jewish­–Arab relations in a Franco-Maghrebi context. It is, moreover, seen by Cadé as the most nuanced representation of Islam in France to date in French cinema (Cadé 2011: 51–2). However, given that the focus of this study is specifically based around the films of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré (and not pied noir) filmmakers, Faucon’s film is beyond the scope of this book and will not be analysed in the final section of this chapter.   6. Figure taken from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2011).   7. Born in Morocco, Ismaël Ferroukhi emigrated to the south of France with his parents in 1965, aged three. He grew up in Crest in the Drôme region (Baudin 2004). Ferroukhi co-wrote Trop de bonheur (Kahn, 1994) with the director (a childhood friend) and then went on to write various TV films in the late 1990s and early 2000s before directing Le Grand voyage.   8. In his review of the film for Télérama, Aurélien Ferenczi (2004) refers to the facts that Réda is sitting his bac and has a French girlfriend as ‘tangible signs of integration’.   9. At one point when they are travelling through Italy, despite being unable to drive himself, the father literally wrests control of the vehicle from Réda by unexpectedly pulling on the handbrake, nearly causing the car to crash. 10. Interestingly in the sequence that precedes the confrontation, Mustapha explains to Réda, employing an anecdote involving a wise Sufi Master, how his interpretation of Islam can accommodate the fact that he drinks alcohol – further distancing him from Réda’s father’s more conventional observance of Islamic laws. 11. It is perhaps significant that this is the only time when the father is shown conversing in French rather than Arabic in the film. 12. These include: Elizabeth participating in a service at her local church; Ousmane studying religious paintings in a church near his place of work; as well as the Christian cross that is prominently displayed in the chapel of rest that the two parents attend to identify unclaimed bodies from the attacks. 13. Wesh-wesh (2001), 63 997 spectators, France; Bled number one (2006), 68 010 spectators, France; Dernier maquis (2008), 29 021 spectators, France; Les Chants de Mandrin (2012), 12 601 spectators, France. 14. Though the workplace is not subject to the same stringent legal controls as schools with regard to the wearing of religious symbols and other acts of proselytising, the issue of religion in the workplace has been widely debated in France in the 2000s. See Berthou (2005) and Bouzar and Bouzar (2009). 15. As illustrated by the film’s musical socre, which combines reed instruments (such as the saxophone) with rhythms derived from the mechanical sounds of the pallet yard. There is also the stylised use of colour (above all the red pallets) in the film. See the interview on the French DVD release of Dernier maquis for more details. 16. The proximity of the industrial estate to the outlying countryside and its location beneath a flight-path on the very extremities of the city evoke the locations in iconic banlieue films such as Hexagone and indeed Wesh-wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe?

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7. CONCLUSION: POST-BEUR CINEMA

Speaking in 1989, after the initial promise of Beur Cinema appeared to have reached an impasse, Algerian émigré director Abdelkrim Bahloul summarised the situation facing filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in France: The North African was absent from films, or else was shown in a stereotypical way [. . .] because the Maghrebi community didn’t have the means to take hold of its own image [. . .] As filmmakers from this community we don’t want to restrict ourselves to the problems of immigration. Our imagination is far greater than that. It is because we are aware of the limitations and the misrepresentations offered in other films that we feel compelled to speak [in our own films] about these issues, time and time again. (Bahloul in Coutault 1989: 58) The position arguably remained much the same for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers during the 1990s. Whilst the decade was marked by the emergence of a number of important new voices in MaghrebiFrench filmmaking (from grassroots directors such as Malik Chibane and Zaïda Ghorab-Volta to those with mainstream aspirations such as Djamel Bensalah and actor Jamel Debbouze), the number of features directed by filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in the 1990s was still extremely small.1 Moreover, those films that did emerge during this period were almost all either comedies or social realist narratives depicting issues such as immigration, integration and social exclusion from the perspective of North African immigrants and

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their French-born descendants. In short, they remained for the most part trapped within the essentialist categories of beur and banlieue filmmaking that had become over-determined from without. According to the perspective of certain filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in the 2000s, little has changed. Writing in 2007, Zaïda Ghorab-Volta, director of the acclaimed (medium length) feature film Souviens-toi de moi (1996), and the banlieue film/road movie hybrid Jeunesse dorée (2001), described how her refusal to conform to a typecast ethnic minority perspective as ‘a beurette from the outer-city projects’ had led to her working not simply as an independent filmmaker but entirely ‘outside the system’ (Ghorab-Volta 2007: 52). And yet, while not losing sight of the obstacles faced by filmmakers such as Ghorab-Volta, Chibane, Ameur-Zaïmeche and even Kechiche, the 2000s has been a transformative decade for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers working in France. In contrast to the 1990s, the 2000s witnessed a rise in the number of films by directors of Maghrebi origin (approximately 30 features between 2000 and 2010, or an increase of 50 per cent). Analysed in isolation, this rise appears quite substantial. However, when compared to the global average across the whole of the French film industry in the 2000s of 141 films per year, the actual average number of three features produced per year is less impressive and proof that filmmakers of Maghrebi origin are still a decidedly small minority within French cinema as a whole. Furthermore, much of this increase in production for Maghrebi-French and North African émigré authored films in the 2000s can actually be traced to a select group of filmmakers who have directed three or sometimes even four features across the decade: Merzak Allouache, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Rachid Bouchareb, Mehdi Charef, Djamel Bensalah, and Abdellatif Kechiche. Even a cursory glance at this list of names reveals that at least half are well-established directors who have been working in film and TV in France since the mid-1980s. In this respect, we could be forgiven for thinking that, as in French cinema more generally, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking in France functions as un système à deux vitesses (a two-tier system). Nevertheless, new talent has emerged on both sides of the camera in the past decade in the shape of directors such as Abdellatif Kechiche, Rabah AmeurZaïmeche and Djamel Bensalah, and stars such as Jamel Debbouze and Gad Elmaleh. Above all, though, it is the range and variety in the output of directors of Maghrebi origin since 2000, as well as their refusal to be confined to the perceived ghetto of beur and banlieue filmmaking – exploring new genres, socio-economic spaces and characters seemingly denied to them in previous decades – that most obviously distinguishes their work from that of the 1980s and 1990s. From the political engagement and stylistic innovation of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s award-winning, low-budget digital features to Kechiche’s humanist ensemble narratives, focusing on multicultural, working-class

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c­ ommunities that have led him to be described by a number of French critics as the natural heir to Renoir, Sautet and Pialat (Kaganski 2007; Delorme 2007: 11), to the counter-heritage of Rachid Bouchareb’s historical epics and, finally, the capital value of stars such as Jamel Debbouze and Gad Elmaleh, MaghrebiFrench and North African émigré filmmakers now occupy prominent positions across almost all areas of contemporary French cinema: from experimental auteur-led productions to the cinéma du milieu and mainstream blockbusters. In many cases, then, as argued in Chapter 2’s analysis of the quantifiable shift to the mainstream for a select group of directors and actors of Maghrebi origin, the significant presence of these filmmakers in contemporary French cinema far outweighs their number. More than just the simple fact of mainstream success, these filmmakers of Maghrebi origin show an apparent desire to explore and in certain cases subvert a range of cinematic genres. In this context it is revealing that for his debut feature as a director, Mauvaise foi (Zem, 2006), the Maghrebi-French star Roschdy Zem chose the romantic comedy as the vehicle for exploring Jewish–Muslim relations in France. While comedy has proved a mainstay of many Maghrebi-French and North African émigré films since the early 1980s, Zem’s decision signals a conscious move into the realm of the more identifiably mainstream generic space of the rom-com (one that also has strong associations with American cinema). This move allowed for the Maghrebi-French protagonist (played by Zem himself) to emerge as a desirable romantic male lead for both Maghrebi and majority French spectators, at the same time as it places the mixed-race couple at the centre of the narrative – something that has often remained unrealisable in previous narratives by directors of Maghrebi origin (Tarr 2005: 10–13). The role of music in Mauvaise foi also offers a clear indication of Zem’s desire to locate his film beyond the potentially reductive socio-ethnic markers of beur or banlieue filmmaking. Despite having original music composed for the film by Souad Massi (a contemporary female Algerian artist, who draws on a variety of influences from rock, folk and Portuguese fado to Chaâbi), the soundtrack to Mauvaise foi is largely dominated by western pop and rock music.2 In a similar way, Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006) is heavily influence by American war films such as Saving Private Ryan (Speilberg, 1998) and Glory (Zwick, 1989) (Hargreaves 2011: 36) and, as argued in Chapter 3, Hors-la-loi (Bouchareb, 2010) employed references from the Godfather: Part II (Coppola, 1974) as much as it did from The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) or even L’Armée des ombres (Melville, 1969). Mauvaise foi therefore reminds us of the extent to which Maghrebi-French filmmaking in the 2000s has looked, more than ever before, to Anglo-American popular culture as a point of reference beyond the disputed identity positionings located in the diasporic axis between France and the Maghreb. As such, Post-Beur Cinema of the 2000s negotiates a place that, as well as positioning itself with the diasporic axis of France and

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the Maghreb, intersects with the transnational cultural sphere identified by Bill Marshall as the French Atlantic (Marshall 2010). As Hargreaves (2005b, 2011) points out, Maghrebi-French filmmaking has always looked to align its protagonists with global and local cultural r­ eferences – in particular the influence of African-American culture – which has in turn allowed them to reshape the cultural mainstream in France. However, the key difference between Beur Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s and Maghrebi-French filmmaking of the 2000s is the apparently greater potential for such multiple local, national, diasporic and transnational identity positionings to co-exist on screen – rather than being presented as opposing alternatives as a way of defining the protagonists of Maghrebi origin. Thus, in Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Charef, 1985), Madjid clearly rejects the Arabo-Islamic culture of his Algerian parents in favour of an identification with a westernised, multi­ ethnic banlieue culture. Conversely, in Mauvaise foi, Ismaël is able to engage with and even defend his Maghrebi and Muslim origins alongside the ‘French’ and Anglo-American cultural references that also inform his sense of identity. The manner in which the relationships between French and Maghrebi cultural influences are able to coalesce rather than be placed in de facto opposition is also evident in the proliferation of return-journey narratives in the 2000s discussed in Chapter 5. Films such as Ten’ja (Legzouli, 2004), Exils (Gatlif, 2004) and Bled number one (Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006) do not necessarily present the return to the diasporic homeland as a simple or celebratory homecoming or reconnection with Maghrebi roots. Nevertheless, they do offer a far more open cinematic space in which this inter-cultural dialogue or exchange can take place, especially when compared to earlier Maghrebi-French-authored return narratives such as Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991) or Bye-bye (Dridi, 1995), where the idea of return to the bled and reconnection with Maghrebi roots was closed down almost from the very inception as both undesirable and virtually unachievable for the descendants of North African immigrants in France. Developments across a whole range of genres and modes of production associated with Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers of the 2000s seem to support Bahloul’s earlier claim that the imagination of these artists extends way beyond narratives centred on representations of immigration and integration of the North African immigrant population in France. However, this is not to say that these filmmakers have simply left such socio-political issues behind in the past decade. Maghrebi-French and North African directors continue to make crucial interventions into contemporary debates in France concerning immigration, integration, social exclusion and colonial fracture. In the case of Rachid Bouchareb’s historical epics Indigènes and Hors-la-loi, the influence of such interventions – whether it is perceived or actual – has reverberated in public debate that moves way beyond audiences in film theatres or festival circuits. Away from the mainstream, such political

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conviction is writ large in the films of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche and is also found in Harragas (2009) by veteran Algerian director Merzak Allouache. Tellingly, Allouache defines himself not as an émigré director but as a cinéaste de passage: a filmmaker whose movement between France and Algeria to make his films is dictated by the political, artistic and economic conditions associated with each new project. Harragas portrays the desperate attempts made by young Algerians who undertake perilous sea-crossings in small boats from coastal towns in Algeria to Spain in order to illegally enter ‘Fortress Europe’.3 This low-budget, Algerian-French co-production blurs documentary-style images with the psychological realism of more conventional western narrative filmmaking in order to depict the sense of hopelessness and despair felt by a lost generation of Algerian youth. Though the film only attracted modest audiences on its limited release in France, Harragas is nonetheless a timely illustration of the way that directors of Maghrebi origin continue to produce films engaging directly with contemporary socio-political issues affecting both France and the Maghreb. Moreover, Allouache’s presence as a self-proclaimed cinéaste de passage underlies the complex position occupied by filmmakers of the North African diaspora(s): maintaining a presence that is simultaneously ‘between’ and within the film cultures and industries of France and the Maghreb (Higbee 2007b: 62). Elsewhere in the 2000s, Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers have continued to employ the cinematic vernacular of social realism and popular comedy as a means of exploring contemporary socio-political realities, while simultaneously affirming and in some cases reassessing the intimate association of Maghrebi-French youth with the banlieue. Voisins, voisines (Chibane, 2005), a rap musical and the final instalment of the director’s self-styled ‘urban trilogy’, is a case in point. The film continues Chibane’s approach of combining consensual comedy with a sensitive portrayal of community interaction and difference in order to challenge the preconceived prejudices of the dominant societal norm toward the deprived urban periphery and its inhabitants. However, rather than focusing exclusively on the experiences of Maghrebi-French banlieue youth as in his first two features (Hexagone, 1994 and Douce France, 1995), Voisins, voisines foregrounds a cosmopolitan, working-class apartment block that includes French residents of Algerian, Spanish, Sub-Saharan African, Roma and Portuguese origin as a means of exploring social relations in the multicultural community of the Parisian banlieue.4 Similarly, the film uses rap music not as a marker of ethnicity or delinquency, but rather as an integral part of the sonic fabric of the cité as well as a means of structuring narrative exposition. Moussa (Insa Sané), a successful rap star, returns to the cité of his youth to gain inspiration for his new album from the daily activities of fellow residents of Mozart apartment block. Hip-hop culture directly informs the aesthetic of Voisins, voisines, in

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particular the application of the principles of scratching and sampling into the editing style. However, Chibane repeatedly subverts the clichés of violence, machismo and marginality associated with both the cité and hip-hop culture at the same time as his film attempts to valorise the creativity of this urban art form and the important role rap music has played in shaping the identity of the banlieue.5 That Chibane should choose to explore the global and local cultural interconnections of hip-hop – an art form imported from the AfricanAmerican communities of urban America, then appropriated by French artists (mostly of immigrant origin) before crossing over to the French mainstream – seems a particularly apposite choice. For his work, like that of other diasporic directors of Maghrebi origin, is always located within a complex matrix of national, transnational and ‘glocal’ identity positionings. One further Maghrebi-authored banlieue film that has attempted to challenge dominant stereotypes of the deprived urban periphery – though this time in relation to gender – is Des Poupées et des anges (Hamidi, 2008). In the manner of Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, the film’s Maghrebi-French director, Nora Hamidi, is also the author of the eponymous novel from which the film is adapted. However, if Le Thé au harem d’Archimède considers the experiences of Maghrebi-French youth from the deprived banlieue almost exclusively from the perspective of its male protagonists, Des Poupées et des anges foregrounds the point of view of two young Maghrebi-French sisters, Lya (Leila Bekhti) and Chirine (Fejria Deliba). As with Ghorab-Volta’s Jeunesse dorée (also a low-budget female-authored banlieue film), Hamidi frames her central female protagonist’s cultural creativity as a means of promoting a greater sense of agency at the same time as it allows the director to reflect on her own position as a woman director working with the male-dominated banlieue filmmaking tradition. Lya writes poetry and performs her compositions as a means of expressing her frustration and anger at her own exclusion but also the treatment of her mother at the hands of her abusive and violent father (played by Samy Naceri). Like the music videos that they resemble, Lya’s raps are clearly codified as isolated moments of performance through the use of editing, camerawork and sound. They are also symbolically charged in spatial terms: Lya’s solitary performances to camera take place in locations, such as the rooftops of the HLM blocks, that have become near-iconic spaces of exclusion and marginality in banlieue films like Le Thé au harem d’Archimède and La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995). As in L’Esquive (Kechiche, 2004) Hamida attempts in Des Poupées et des anges to reclaim such spaces as sites of resistance and empowerment for the female Maghrebi-French protagonist. In this respect, Des Poupées et des anges also shares with Kechiche a desire to redress the gender imbalance that has characterised Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmaking on both sides of the camera since the 1970s (Tarr 2005: 10–13).

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Interviewed in the early 1990s for an article in Le Nouvel Observateur entitled Y-a-t’il une culture beur? (‘Is there a Beur Culture?’), sociologist and author Azouz Begag offered the following response: ‘As I see it, this [beur culture] is not a culture, it is a temporary social phenomenon in which people describe where they come from so that they can subsequently put this behind them’ (Begag cited in Mahdjoub 1997: 198). Begag’s more general position on beur culture resonates with Bosséno’s description of Beur Cinema of the 1980s as a cinema of transition that navigates a path from ‘immigrant’ to ‘national cinema’ (Bosséno 1990: 146–7). In the context of this book, to identify Maghrebi-French and North African émigré filmmakers as Post-Beur is to suggest that they occupy a position that has clearly moved beyond Beur Cinema as either a potentially essentialising category or a cinema of transition. However, this is not to say that filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in the 2000s are now fully (and unproblematically) integrated into French national cinema, leaving such a position of difference or interstitiality ‘behind them’. Nor is it to say that these filmmakers have entirely left behind the social, cultural and identity politics that were urgently brought to the screen by Beur Cinema in the 1980s. Instead filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in the 2000s have embraced the visibility of their difference to articulate a position that is simultaneously within and beyond French national cinema in its approach, influences and outlook. Post-Beur Cinema thus brings into question how fixed ideas of a national film culture are constantly being transformed by protagonists (and indeed filmmakers) who have a presence within the nation but who may find their origins, like their cinematic influences and thematic concerns, lie at least partially beyond it. A Post-Beur Cinema of the 2000s is therefore characterised by an interfacing of its themes, filmmakers and indeed production practices with the global and local, national and transnational in a way that is not characterised solely through a postcolonial or diasporic optic. Furthermore, it moves away from the fixed binaries of national/transnational cinema as well as insider/outsider, French/Maghrebi, citizen/immigrant, while still recognising the imbalance of power that exists in and because of the difference embodied by these filmmakers.6 Since 2000, what we might call Post-Beur Cinema has thus been able to accommodate, without contradiction, a film by a French director of Tunisian origin that places its faith in the principle (if not the practices) of the philosophies of the Enlightenment and the French Republic – La Faute à Voltaire (Kechiche, 2001). It is also reflected in a film such as Indigènes (Bouchareb, 2006), whereby a postcolonial, counter-heritage narrative exists alongside cinematic references to the Hollywood war film, in order to re-write a history of colonial injustice and in the process confirm the place of Maghrebi-French citizens in a postcolonial France. Similarly, it reveals that affiliation with a non-diasporic axis can be just as strong in these films, as the exploration

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of a Muslim and European identity in Le Grand voyage (Ferroukhi, 2004), ­analysed in Chapter 6, illustrates. Evidence that this shift in the 2000s continues to extend the influence of Maghrebi-French filmmakers into hitherto unchartered territory can be found in Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s most recent feature, Les Chants de Mandrin (2012). Like Vénus noire (Kechiche, 2010) two years before it, Ameur Zaïmeche’s historical narrative is located in advance of the history of mass Maghrebi immigration to France. However, if Vénus noire is still broadly linked to the theme of colonial fracture through its focus on the emergence in the nineteenth century of a scientific racism that would justify French colonial expansion through the nineteenth and twentieth century, Les Chants de Mandrin is entirely distanced in historical, geographical and narrative terms from colonial history. Instead the film focuses on a band of outlaws roaming southern France in the 1750s, following the execution of their leader, the folk hero Louis Mandrin. As with all of his previous films, Ameur-Zaïmeche directs and acts in the lead role of the film as Bélissard, a loyal follower of Mandrin. He also casts a number of other actors of Maghrebi origin who have appeared in his previous films as members of Mandrin’s gang. As Olivier Barlet (2012) notes in his review of Les Chants de Mandrin, the presence of Ameur-Zaïmeche and other actors of Maghrebi origin in this historical film is not necessarily anachronistic: an Arab presence in Europe at this time was not new, Arabic had been taught at the Sorbonne since the reign of François I and there was already a curiosity about the Orient in eighteenth-century Europe. Nevertheless, the fact that the North African origins of these actors are never once referenced or even alluded to in the narrative – nor indeed, in the names of their characters (Bélissard, La Buse, Malice) – is highly significant in the sense that the film refuses to attach any importance to their ethnic origins in relation to the ‘French’ roles that they play. What is more, the outlaws are explicitly identified as freedom fighters, embraced by the people for their proto-socialist, proto-Republican beliefs. They set up contraband markets for local villagers, selling their goods cheaply since they refuse to add the levies imposed by the Crown on items such as salt and tobacco, and describe the poetry lauding the actions of Mandrin (the inspiration for the film’s title) that they distribute to the villagers as ‘les prémices de la République’ (‘the beginnings of the Republic’).7 That, almost thirty years after the release of Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, a low-budget historical narrative directed by an established Maghrebi-French auteur of Algerian origin can usurp the space occupied by the more conventional heritage film to recount the tale of a protoRepublican gang of outlaws in which the majority of roles are played by actors of Maghrebi origin is a timely and telling indication of the advances that have been made by filmmakers of the North African diaspora(s) in France since the 2000s, from immigrant to (trans-)national cinema and beyond.

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Figure 7.1  Post-Beur, proto-Republican outlaws in Les Chants de Mandrin (AmeurZaïmeche, 2012).

Notes 1. On average two films a year by directors of Maghrebi origin were released in France during the 1990s. The average number of French films released each year (where France was the sole or major producer) across the same decade was just over 110 (source: CNC: www.cnc.fr ). 2. Fado is a form of popular song that originated in Portugal in the nineteenth century. It tends to be characterised by mournful vocal performances and songs whose lyrics evoke a sense of longing, loss or melancholia. Chaâbi literally means ‘popular’ in Arabic and refers to a musical style that emerged in the Maghreb at the beginning of the twentieth century drawn from the vocal traditions of Arab-Andalusian music. However, in Mauvaise foi, the signature tune associated with Clara and Ismaël is a guitar-based pop/rock melody; the couple dance to ‘their’ song, Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’; while the first song that Ismaël chooses to play to his unborn child is Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’. 3. The film’s title comes from the Arabic harrãga (‘those who burn’) and refers to those who attempt to illegally cross the Mediterranean from Africa. More specifically it alludes to the practice of burning documents (such as a passport or identity cards) in order to demand asylum upon arrival in Europe. 4. Chibane has stated that the apartment block ‘F’ in which the characters live is symbolically labelled as ‘F’ for France (Hargreaves 2011: 32). 5. For example in the scene where Paco (the newly appointed concierge of the Résidence Mozart) confronts a group of young men loitering in the foyer of the apartment block. Rather than trading insults or resorting to violence, the young men offer a spontaneous a cappella performance that combines rap with beat-boxing (where the human voice is used to mimic the beats and instrumentation that normally accompanies the rapper’s vocal delivery). 6. In this respect Post-Beur Cinema is concerned with similar debates concerning diasporic, transnational and even what might be termed transvergent cinema. These

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theoretical positions have been explored in detail by this author in the following articles: Higbee (2007b), Higbee (2007c), and Higbee and Lim (2010). 7 Interestingly, this focus in Les Chants de Mandrin on everyday people and the region, rather than kings, the Court and the capital, evokes the new historical film of 1970s French cinema – such as Les Camisards (Alio, 1972) – more than the counterheritage films of other Maghrebi-French directors of the 1990s and 2000s, discussed in Chapter 3. For more on Les Camisards and the 1970s new historical film, see Forbes (1992: 231–6).

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200

Index

100% Arabica (1997), 16, 103, 160 17 October 1961, 70, 85, 92 Accented cinema, 3, 5, 21, 128, 153, 146–50; see also Naficy, Hamid Adjani, Isabel, 39 Algerian civil war (1990s), 139, 153n9, 160, 180n2 Algerian War for Independence (and cinematic representations of), 1, 5, 45, 63–4, 67, 69–71, 73, 75–81, 83–4, 85, 86–95, 102–3, 143 Allouache, Merzak, 3, 11, 14, 16, 22, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 43, 45–6, 49, 60, 99, 131, 160, 183, 186 Ameur-Zaïmeche, Rabah, 3, 4, 38, 55, 67, 113, 131, 138–42, 151, 164, 172–8, 183, 185, 186, 189–90 Arabic (language), 41, 74, 110, 133, 135, 137, 141, 145, 147, 148, 164, 165, 166, 168, 181 Atika, Aure, 60n2, 99, 136 Atlas mountains, 136, 138, 148, 150 Baartman, Sara, 120, 122–7, 129 Bahloul, Abdelkrim, 3, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 22, 25n6, 27, 31, 49, 162, 182 Bakchev, Lubomir, 112, 121, 124, 129

banlieue and banlieue cinema, 2, 3, 4, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21–2, 25, 27, 35, 41, 49–60, 99–100, 104–13, 131, 143, 172, 174, 178, 179, 181, 183–7 Bâton Rouge (1985), 9, 14, 27, 169 Battle of Algiers (1966), 91, 184 Begag, Azouz, 18, 22, 72, 78, 107, 136, 188 Belghoul, Farida, 9, 11, 13, 27, 132 Benguigui, Yamina, 38, 67, 72–6, 78, 131, 152n5 Bensalah, Djamel, 2, 3, 19–20, 27, 28, 32–6, 47–60, 125, 131, 182, 183 Berber (language and culture), 22, 42, 75, 103, 129n5, 136, 137 Berri, Claude, 8, 66, 68, 97, 111, 129n9 beur, 18–24, 102, 110, 129n6, 132, 151, 161; see also Beur cinema, Post-Beur cinema and Beurgeoisie Beur Cinema, 5, 7, 8, 9–14, 17, 21, 24, 50, 76, 98–100, 108, 128, 145, 160, 172, 178, 182–5, 188 Beur sur la ville (2011), 29–30, 60 beurgeoisie, 55, 56 bidonvilles, 70, 73, 92 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008), 33, 34, 39, 60 Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy), 116 Black mic mac (1986), 37, 163

201

post-beur cinema

Blanchard, Pascal, 61, 65, 84, 89 bled, 49, 109, 113–14, 132, 134, 136, 140–3, 151, 164 Bled number one (2006), 6, 113, 131, 134, 138–42, 145, 146, 151, 152, 164, 172–3, 181n5, 185 Boon, Danny, 33, 34, 37, 39, 45, 60, 66 borders/border crossing, 55, 57,132, 138, 146, 165, 167, 179, 180 Bouajila, Sami, 19, 21, 25, 33, 34, 42, 43–4, 80, 86, 93, 94, 99, 134, 172 Bouchareb, Rachid, 1–3, 12, 14, 27, 32–6, 41–2, 45, 60, 67, 70–1, 80–95, 98, 101, 132–3, 135, 152, 160–1, 164, 169–72, 183, 184, 185, 188 Bye-bye (1995), 2, 4, 15, 25n2, 27, 98, 112, 114, 132, 135, 160, 164, 185 Cadé, Michel, 162, 179, 181n5 Cahiers du cinéma, 98, 178 Cannes film festival, 19, 42, 43, 80, 86–7, 89, 93–4, 143 Cartouches gauloises (2007), 67, 72, 76–80 CBO Box Office, 33, 34, 39, 40, 60n3, 128n2, 129n13, 152n6, 153n10 Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), 34, 36, 38, 49, 76, 129n13, 190n1 Charef, Mehdi, 2, 10, 11–12, 14, 27, 67, 76–80, 94, 98, 99–100, 131, 160, 169, 183, 185, 187 Cheb (1990), 2, 4, 14, 25, 27, 98, 132–5, 142, 152, 160, 185 Chibane, Malik, 2, 15–17, 27, 31, 49, 55, 100, 105, 161–2, 181–3, 186–7, 190 Chouchou (2003), 32, 33, 34, 37, 43, 46–8, 60 cinéma du milieu, 97, 128n3, 184 civic cinema, 6, 8, 91, 179 Coco (2010), 32, 33, 34, 37, 46 Collectif Mohammed, 13, 27 colonial fracture (fracture coloniale), 61–72, 78, 82, 85, 94, 185, 189 colonial history, 1, 2, 4, 61–72, 76, 78, 79–87, 90–4, 125 comedy, 2, 10, 12, 19, 27–8, 34, 35–7, 40, 43, 45, 46, 48–50, 52–5, 58, 60, 66, 69, 107, 109, 131–2, 160, 163, 184, 186 Comme un aimant (2000), 112 Conseil Français du Culte Musulman, 157

202

Coppola, Francis Ford, 90, 91, 184 Cut Killer (DJ), 57 Cuvier, Georges, 120, 121, 123, 124–5 Dalou, Jules, 101, 103, 104; see also Le Triomphe de la République Debbouze, Jamel, 1, 3, 19, 21, 25, 28, 32–4, 36–7, 39–42, 44–5, 47, 50–4, 80–1, 86, 93, 94, 125, 182, 183, 184 Dernier maquis (2008), 164, 172–9, 180–1 Des Poupées et des anges (2008), 187 diaspora, 22, 24, 31, 45, 46, 49, 60, 67, 70, 82, 92, 99, 113, 115, 119, 121, 132–3, 137, 144, 149, 150, 152, 163, 175, 186, 189 distribution (of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré films), 1, 3, 4, 13, 25–6, 28–33, 35–6, 38, 49, 70–2, 82, 125 double peine, 139, 152n4 Douce France, 16, 17, 105, 161–2, 172, 186 Durmelat, Sylvie, 25n14, 82, 93, 94 Elmaleh, Gad, 3, 32–4, 36–40, 45–7, 125, 183–4 exhibition (of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré films), 3, 4, 14, 26, 28, 31–3, 36–40, 46–8, 50, 71, 82, 97, 121, 128n2, 137, 151, 179, 185, 186 Exils (2004), 113, 130–4, 143–6, 151–2, 185 Ferroukhi, Ismaël, 67, 71, 131, 165–70, 180, 181n7, 189 FLN (National Liberation Front), 70, 77, 78–9, 89–91 Fonds d’Action Sociale (FAS), 2, 25n1 French Atlantic (Bill Marshall), 185 French colonial cinema, 6, 69 French Islam, 17, 65, 154–64, 173, 178–80 French Republican tradition, 18, 22, 25n13, 69, 76, 82, 84, 94, 99, 103, 109–10, 114–15, 126, 128, 155, 157–8, 160, 163, 171, 173, 180, 189 Frodon, Jean-Michel, 70, 98 gangster film, 1, 8, 86, 90 Gatlif, Tony, 113, 130–1, 143–6, 152, 185

index

Ghorab-Volta, Zaïda, 2, 3, 17, 131, 132, 182–3, 187 Guerdjou, Bourlem, 38, 43, 67, 69, 131 hadj (pilgrimage to Mecca), 164–5 Hargreaves, Alec, 3, 4, 23, 41, 46, 47, 81, 185 Harki 1, 64, 77, 78, 86, 90, 94n3 Harragas (2009), 46, 186 heritage film, 28, 37, 44, 66–73, 79, 82, 83, 85, 121, 125, 189, 191n7 Herzi, Hafsia, 60n2, 116 Hexagone (1994), 2, 16, 25n2, 27, 55, 100, 161, 181n16 hip-hop (rap music), 58, 106, 129n7, 160, 186, 187 Hollywood, 29–30, 52, 67, 80, 90–1, 146, 149, 188 Hors-la-loi (2010), 1, 33, 34, 35, 37, 43, 45, 67, 70, 71, 80, 83–95, 184, 185 Icissiens 21, 25n11 Il était une fois dans l’oued (2005), 33, 34, 48, 49, 60, 131–2, 152n2 immigration, 4, 5, 17, 18, 37, 41, 64, 69, 71–6, 78, 90, 95n14, 98, 103, 154, 156, 182, 184, 189 Inch’allah dimanche (2001), 38, 67, 72–6, 77, 131 Indigènes (2006), 41–5, 60, 67, 71–2, 80–6, 92–4, 101, 184, 185, 188 integration, 3, 5, 9, 13–14, 16–17, 22, 25, 37, 49, 54, 59, 69, 76, 106–7, 110, 119, 128, 129n8, 154–6, 159–61, 170, 178, 180, 182, 185 Islam (and cinematic representations of), 17, 65, 154–81 Islamic fundamentalism, 139, 180, 160, 164, 171–2, 180 jeunes ethniques, 107–9 Jeunesse dorée (2001), 17, 105, 131, 183 Kauffer, Pierre, 89, 90 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 3, 4, 9, 15, 16, 26–7, 31, 32, 39, 44, 60n2, 67, 96–129, 163, 172, 183, 187, 188, 189 L’ami y’a bon (2005), 85 L’armée des ombres (1969), 91, 184 L’Esquive (2003), 27, 96, 98, 99, 104–11, 117, 124, 128, 129n7,n8,n9,n13, 187

La Faute à Voltaire (2001), 16, 144, 96, 99–104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 125–8, 129n5,n13 La Graine et le mulet (2007), 26, 32, 96–9, 111–19, 122, 124, 128, 129n13 La Haine (1995), 15–16, 51, 57–8, 106, 109, 187 La Marche des Beurs, 18, 25n9 La Nuit du destin (1997), 161–2, 172 La Rafle (2010), 47, 66, 93 La Vérité si je mens! (1997), 52, 163 laïcité, 154–9, 166, 173, 177–8, 180 Le Ciel, les oiseaux et . . . ta mère! (1999), 2, 4, 27, 33–8, 50–5, 57, 58, 59, 60n8 Le Grand voyage (2004), 131, 164–70, 172, 179, 180–1, 189 Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730), 104, 110 Le Raïd (2001), 32–6, 48–9, 60n8 Le Thé à la menthe (1984) 3, 8, 9, 11, 16, 96, 99 Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (1985), 2, 4, 9–11, 14, 16, 25, 27, 98, 100, 106, 108, 111, 159, 160, 164, 169, 185, 187, 189 Le Triomphe de la République (1899), 101, 103, 104 Legzouli, Hassan, 113, 131, 135, 1376, 138, 147, 148, 149, 151, 185 Leone, Sergio, 90, 91 Les Ambassadeurs (1977), 2, 6, 10, 159 Les Chants de Mandrin (2012) 4, 67, 181n13, 189–90, 191n7 Les Deux papas et la maman (1996), 2, 50 Les Hommes libres (2011), 67, 71 Les Hors la loi (1969), 91 Les Inrockuptibles, 29–30 Les Sacrifiés (1982), 38, 69–70 lieux de mémoires, 61–2, 64, 75, 82 London River (2009), 85, 170–2, 179–80 mainstream, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 17, 25, 26–60, 71, 72, 81, 86, 99–100, 121, 131–2, 146, 151, 154, 163, 182–5 Marivaux/marivaudage, 98, 104, 106–7, 110, 117, 125 Martel, Frédéric, 29–31, 60n1 Mauvaise foi (2006), 33, 34, 36, 43, 163, 184–5, 190 Mecca, 164, 165, 166, 168–70 Mémoires d’immigrés (1997), 72

203

post-beur cinema

memorialisation of colonial past, 4, 61–2, 67, 71, 75–8, 80–1, 85, 90, 92, 94 Merad, Kad, 33, 34, 39–40 militant cinema, 2, 6–8, 10–11, 13, 27, 84, 91, 159, 179 Miss Mona (1986), 14, 25, 27, 46, 99 MNA (Algerian Nationalist Movement), 70, 92 Muslim headscarf, 155–6, 161–2, 179 Naceri, Samy, 19, 21, 25, 33–4, 39, 42–4, 47, 80, 187 Naficy, Hamid, 21, 132, 135, 140, 146–8, 150, 152 Nettelbeck, Colin, 101, 102, 107, Neuilly, sa mère! (2009), 32–5, 37, 48–50, 55–60 New Realism, 14, 16 Nora, Pierre, 61–2, 66, 82 O’Shaughnessy, Martin, 174–5 Once Upon a Time in America (1984), 90 pied-noir, 44–5, 64, 77–9, 86–9, 94n2, 130, 143, 144, 152, 181n5 Post-Beur cinema, 24–5, 25n14, 182–91 postcolonial, 3, 5, 18, 21, 24, 26, 65, 67, 69, 81, 83, 85, 90, 92, 94, 98, 112, 119, 127, 132, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152, 188 postcolonial heritage film, 66–72 production (of Maghrebi-French and North African émigré films), 4, 17, 24, 30–6, 46, 66–7, 71, 72, 76, 82, 93, 97, 121, 139, 184–5, 188 Raï music, 103, 160 rebeu, 21, 102 regroupement familial, 18, 73–4, 76, 78 return narratives, 113, 130–53, 185 Ricouer, Paul, 61–2, 64, 66, 85 road movies 130–2, 136, 138, 145–6, 149, 166, 168, 183 romantic comedy (rom-com), 34, 36, 43, 46, 53–5, 58, 163, 184 Ronsard, Pierre, 98, 100, 103, 125 Rosello, Mireille, 5, 12, 19, 60n5, 81–3, 85, 89, 94n3 Roux, Jean-Pierre, 89 salat, 164, 175–7 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 56, 65, 84, 157, 159

204

Sète, 97, 112–17 Sétif, 37, 81, 87–90, 93, 95n15–17 Smaïn, 37, 45, 50 Sous les pieds des femmes (1997), 69–70, 72 Souviens-toi de moi (1996, 17, 132, 183 stars and stardom, 1, 3, 19, 27–9, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38–47, 50–1, 59, 60n2,n10, 71, 81, 85–7, 93, 94n14, 183–4, 186 Stora, Benjamin, 89, 90, 94n2, 95n16 Sufi/Sufism, 144, 146, 181n10 Swamy, Vinay, 25n14 Tarr, Carrie, 21, 52–3, 58, 60n 8, 99, 110, 111, 129n6, 132, 181n5 tchatche, 44, 104 Ten’ja (2004), 135–8, 146–52 The Battle of Algiers (1966), 91, 184 The Conference of the Birds (1177), 98, 110 The Godfather: Part I (1972), 90 The Godfather: Part II (1974), 90–1, 184 transnational (cinema), 3, 4, 5, 21, 37, 82, 115, 121, 128, 150, 164–6, 168, 170, 172, 180, 185, 187–8, 190n6 umma, 160, 164–6, 168, 176, 180 Venus hottentot, 120–5; see also Baartman, Sara Vénus noire (2010), 4, 67, 96, 120–8, 129n2,n13 verlan, 9 Vivre au paradis (1999), 38, 43, 69–72, 84, 131 Voisins, voisines (2005), 186–7 Voltaire, 104, 110, 125 Voyage en Capital (1977) 6, 7, 10, 99, 159 Wesh-wesh: qu’est-ce qui se passe? (2001), 55, 138–9, 152n8, 172, 173, 174–5, 181n13 Williams, James, 101, 110, 127 Zem, Roschdy, 19, 21–2, 25n12, 33, 34, 36, 39–40, 42–4, 80, 86–7, 93, 94, 125, 135, 163, 184 Zemmouri, Mahmoud, 8, 12, 16, 22, 27, 31, 49, 69, 103, 160