James S. Williams

Scandal in the ink : male and female homosexuality in twentieth-century French literature

Contexts looking on the black side a season in Hell from self-defence to self-assertion AIDS writing in France and the gay self-image pederasty and the cult of youth lesbian (re)visions.

Aberrations of Beauty: Violence and Cinematic Resistance in Haneke's The White Ribbon

This essay analyzes Michael Hanekes new film The White Ribbon (2009), focusing on its exceptional plastic qualities and intensive use of sound. It is argued that an ironic, disjunctive practice of montage exposes and resists the narrative of ritualized punishment, thereby transforming the ““games”” of violence previously rendered in Hanekes cinema in primarily visual terms.

Romancing the Father in Claire Denis's35 Shots of Rum

This article explores how 35 Shots of Rum (2009) marks a radical shift in Claire Denis9s method both formally and thematically. Through a highly personal homage to Ozu that decisively ““corrects”” Late Spring (1949), Denis romances the figure of the Father in order to move beyond violence and fragmentation.

‘C’est le petit livre rouge / Qui fait que tout enfin bouge’: The case for revolutionary agency and terrorism in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise

This article argues that Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1967 film, La Chinoise, has been over-read as prescient of les événements of May ’68 and not taken seriously enough as a far-reaching interrogation of the political limits of revolutionary violence and terrorism. By examining in close detail the film’s explosive, anti-realist style and ironizing textual strategies, focusing in particular on the set-piece train sequence with philosopher Francis Jeanson, I claim that Godard is both attacking the state terrorism of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic and firing a warning to the new generation of student agitators that the path of revolutionary terrorism entails illusion, error and catastrophe. I suggest finally that part of the reason for the relative lack of terrorist activity in France post-’68 may be attributed to La Chinoise which, while revealing the precariousness of all political action and discourse (including cinematic), stimulates its viewer into further critical reflection, notably on the potential for terrorism within language itself.

Performing the Revolution

During one of the passionate debates between directors and audience that led to the closure of the Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard declared: ‘There’s not a single film showing the problems of workers or students today — we’re late! We must show solidarity!’ Godard believed this unique cultural forum should be used to screen militant films and documentary footage of the events taking place. It never happened. In fact, the film festival was already in the final stages of closing down, since directors like Alain Resnais and Claude Lelouch had withdrawn their films, and Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Monica Vitti and Terence Young had resigned from the jury. The regret that cinema somehow ‘missed’ the events and ‘arrived’ too late for its moment of destiny with revolutionary history haunts cinematic thinking about the period. Already Marcel Hanoun’s 1968 film, L’Ete (Summer), a short poetic and psychological film made in June with footage of Paris street graffiti, relayed the in-comprehension and trauma of the events as experienced by a disturbed young woman who decides to leave the capital for the country and yet remains unable to articulate her condition, dreaming only of being reunited with her lost revolutionary boyfriend. Again, what was most desired never happened.

The Time Is Now: Pressure, Guerrilla, and the (Re)invention of Black British Cinema and History

James Williams considers how and why John Ridley9s acclaimed 2017 television series Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic/Showtime) 9reradicalizes9 early black British radical cinema, specifically Horace Ove9s 1975 film, Pressure , the first feature-length work by a black British director. For Guerrilla9s fictional narrative about a Black Power terrorist cell in London in 1972 pursues an option that Pressure , about the gradual radicalization of a young black British teenager in West London, resolutely avoids, namely militant violence. A close comparative study of both works in terms of characterization, cinematic style, the depiction of urban space, and the representation of violence highlights the originality and overlooked significance of Ove9s pioneering film. It also suggests that Ridley reinvents the story of Black Power in early 1970s Britain in order to intervene in more contemporary debates taking place in the US about diversity and the function of revolutionary violence to effect social change.

Neoliberal violence and aesthetic resistance in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006)

Abstract Abderrahmane Sissakos celebrated Bamako (2006) stages a public trial of the debt policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Africa in a shared courtyard in Bamako. By putting both western and African film aesthetics and modes of spectatorship also on trial through formal strategies of address and mise en scène, it appears a stylised return to the politically engaged social realism of Ousmane Sembène. Yet, by allowing an astonishing array of matter (human and non-human, real and fictional) to drift graphically into its frame and intrude into the very law of the economic and geopolitical, Bamako also insists on material process and aesthetic friction, opening up new hybrid spaces of spectatorial speculation and interpretation in postcolonial art cinema not bound by the demands of allegory and ideological thinking. Focusing in close detail on the intricate, self-reflexive rifts and fractures of montage in two discrete episodes (an extended scene of migration testimony, a suicide followed by funeral procession), the author shows how Sissako’s poetic investment in form not only exposes but also directly resists the hegemonic violence the film implacably relates. Such formations of violent beauty demand we reconceive the very nature of political aesthetics and the function of screen violence.

Book Review: Jean-Pierre Boulé and Arnaud Genon: Hervé Guibert, l’écriture photographique ou le miroir de soiHervé Guibert, l’écriture photographique ou le miroir de soi. By BouléJean-PierreGenonArnaud. Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2015. Pp. 373. €24.00.

the dead horse gradually sinking into the ground that constitutes the novel’s central image, an image to which Tame pays particular attention (p. 255). Against the continual, irresistible cycles of the natural world Simon sets, with unsentimental stoicism and a certain grim humour, our doomed efforts to secure the prolongation of our existence through literature and art, that is, in isotopias. When The Flanders Road was published in France in 1960, the lieutenant riding alongside Simon on that fateful day – by then a retired colonel of dragoons by the name of Cuny – wrote to the author to congratulate him on the vividness of his evocation of the ambush in which the captain died: for M. Cuny, therefore, the isotopia was all too real. Tame’s conclusion – that the greater the stress of war, the greater the human tendency to seek refuge in imaginary (‘isotopic’) worlds – is also borne out in his fine discussion of André Malraux’s most ambitious novel, L’Espoir (1937). It is a work that combines journalistic reportage with fiction and as such allows the creator to enter into the ‘possession of the real’ (p. 166). In this novel, Tame concludes, ‘the revolution in Spain is, for Malraux, a space of opportunity, conquest and repossession’ (p. 166). General Franco, having defeated the Republican government in 1939, did not manage to ensure the survival of the authoritarian regime he established. When he died in 1975 his fascist revolution died with him, so in that sense the Spain of the pre-Franco era ‘repossessed itself’. But at great cost, as in all wars: the illustration on the cover of Tame’s volume is of a large Allied cemetery in Holland. Viewed at sunset, covered in autumn leaves, it is a ‘thanatopia’ – another of Tame’s neologisms – if ever there was one.

Vision, Mystery, and Release in the Reverse Field: Bruno Dumont's L'il Quinquin

While working around a basic plot-line of betrayal, Bruno Dumont’s L’il Quinquin references the codes and cliches both of comedy and television crime series by using the serial format to convey the work of a serial killer, and fully exploiting the possibilities for expanding characterization and reduplicating key actions and motifs. Comedy has always been present in Dumont’s work, of course, but only in small doses and only implicitly. If in Humanity the absurdity and burlesque effects were often just plain odd, in L’il Quinquin the laughter is frontal and explicit. It ranges from brutal black humor and caricature to social parody and satire of the police, the Church, science, and the media (long-standing themes in Dumont), and from physical gags and carnivalesque farce to vaudeville grotesquerie. L’il Quinquin swings constantly between the genres of light comedy, murder mystery, social drama, and the study of rural life.

Queering the Diaspora

In a recent overview of queer migration scholarship, Eithne Luibheid makes the crucial point that queer migration is at once a set of grounded processes involving heterogeneous social groups and a series of theoretical and social justice questions that implicate – but also extend beyond – migration and sexuality strictly defined, refusing in the process to attach to bodies in any strictly identarian manner (2008: 169).1 Yet queer migration scholarship is also directly informed by an understanding of sexuality as constructed within multiple and conflicting relations of power, including race, ethnicity, gender, class, citizenship and geopolitical location. For this reason it engages with histories and subjects that reflect both alienation from white gay communities and histories of multiple diasporas forged through colonialism and transnational capitalism. Much of the expanding and pioneering body of scholarship reveals that queer migrants comprise essentially ‘impossible’ subjects with unrepresentable histories that exceed existing categories, thereby requiring scholars to foreground and challenge regimes of power and knowledge that generate structures of impossibility where particular groups are concerned, and to re-examine how individuals negotiate them. Overlapping, palimpsestic histories of imperialism, invasion, investment, trade and political influence create ‘bridges for migration’ between and among nation states (Luibheid 2008: 173).2