Gemma King

Introduction: Mobility across media in the Francophone world:

This introduces the special issue on mobility across media in various areas of the Francophone world. Articles treat the notion of mobility as understood in film, literature, visual art and advertising and explore how genres as well as national traditions intersect. They explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world.

Contemporary French cinema and the langue de passage: From Dheepan to Welcome:

In contemporary films like Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015) and Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009), effects of (post)colonialism, immigration and globalisation transform French spaces into multilingual ones, in which language use is impacted by a complex network of spheres of influence. This article offers a new approach to understanding the place of the language in French films about border-crossing in today’s Europe. It paraphrases terminology from Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet to examine the films Dheepan and Welcome, in which the French language is crucial to migrants’ survival, but in temporary and conditional ways. Finally, the article analyses how French co-exists alongside other languages such as Tamil, English, and Kurdish in such films, and proposes a new term for understanding the use of language by shifting and migrating subjects: the langue de passage.