Julia Dobson

Dis-Locations: Mapping the Banlieue

Representations of the French suburbs in contemporary French film have, since the late 1980s, identified an apparent generic specificity that is linked closely to this location. I will explore the narrative tropes of alienation and exclusion—as dislocations—which have dominated the filmic representation of banlieue spaces and their populations before examining examples in which the realignment of sociocultural topographies and film space foregrounds the question of whether representations of the banlieue remain inherently and generically connected to realist discourses dominated by spatial representation of exclusions, or whether the over-determined spaces of the banlieue can act as decor, as setting and wider spatial frame. I will then focus on the presence and function of banlieue spaces and narratives in two recent French films—Girlhood/Bande de filles (Celine Sciamma 2014) and Palme d’or winner Dheepan (Jacques Audiard 2015)—suggesting that the banlieue continues to provide a complex site that both asserts socio-economic specificities and serves as a stylized setting through which to foreground other negotiations of territory and agency.

Ideal suspects? The investigation of romance in Masson's Coupable/Guilty (2008)

ABSTRACT Laetitia Masson has made four feature films since 2000 yet this ‘erratic but adventurous’ (Romney 2008: 44) director remains critically neglected. Her highly stylized, stubbornly reflexive films foreground the struggles of central female protagonists to assert their identities in the face of over-determining discourses of patriarchal constructions of gender and social exclusion. In contrast to the often bleak, realist articulations of such issues which characterize French auteur cinema of the late 1990s, Massons work mines the generic codes of the romance and the detective film to construct parallel quest narratives in order to perform striking defamiliarizations of conventions of gendered social identity. This alternative to dominant realist representations of social alienation replaces fatalistic closure with ambiguously hopeful open endings. Whilst the parallel evocation of detective and romance quests can be traced back through Massons oeuvre, this article focuses primarily on Guilty (Coupable, 2008), which, through the knowing interweaving of multiple quests for closure, knowledge and guilt, employs familiar generic codes and figures to shift spectatorial investment from the detection of an ideal suspect to the final deconstruction of a suspect ideal.

Jacques Audiard – twenty-first century auteur

Jacques Audiard is one of the best-known French filmmakers working today, his presence well established in film festival headlines, the mainstream film press and critics’ choice (including an appearance at number 85 with Un prophète/A Prophet [2009] in the recent BBC critics’ poll of the twenty-first century’s 100 greatest films [BBC 2016]).1 His national status as son of the seminal scriptwriter Michel Audiard has long been replaced by his own international profile as director, yet scholarly engagement with his hugely confident and engaging œuvre continues to lag behind his international commercial profile. The aims of this special issue are therefore twofold: to render existing engagement with his work more visible, and to bring together a set of diverse critical approaches in the hope of triggering further exploration of these films. Audiard’s credentials as exemplary twenty-first century auteur are seemingly uncontestable. Ciné-fils of France’s treasured screenwriter Michel Audiard and cinéphile who name-checks emphatically international influences, his films exhibit signature elements of mise en scène and recurring thematic obsessions, turn relatively unknown actors into bankable stars (Romain Duris, Tahar Rahim, Matthias Schoenaerts) and win an impressive array of international awards. The latter run to 54 wins and 56 nominations (source IMDB.com) including the Grand Jury prize at Cannes and wins in almost all major categories at the Césars for Un prophète in 2009. Although De rouille et d’os/Rust and Bone (2012) was, surprisingly, overlooked in the Grand Jury selection at Cannes, he went on to win the Palme d’or in 2015 with Dheepan. Further evidence of his broad cultural capital can be found in the recent inclusion of De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté/The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) on the French baccalauréat syllabus and the confirmation in interviews (and accompanying photo shoots) of his cultural branding (in reception at least) as dandy, hat-wearing, combination of contemporary European sensibility and classic American auteur – the ‘French Scorsese’ indeed (Aftab 2010). The reasons for the mismatch between commercial and media profile and academic attention are undoubtedly multiple; yet one of the primary contexts may be his lack of fit with perceived tendencies and models of contemporary French film-making. He does not fit easily into new canons or broader tendencies (such as ‘extreme cinema’, politically engaged realism or indeed popular cinema) and is not the identifiable product of a high-profile film school. Crucially, his age excluded him from being labelled as a member of the generation of filmmakers ‘le jeune cinéma’, delineated in critical work of the 1990s–2000s (see Hardwick 2008) that was important to the construction of models of French auteur film in that period (see Dobson 2012). The contribution to auteur status of Audiard’s extensive and continuing profile as screenwriter – he contributed to the writing of 20 films between 1974 and 1994 – is foregrounded in Isabelle Vanderschelden’s critical examination of Audiard’s status as screenwriter. Focusing on this critically neglected function, she reveals Audiard’s development of a writing practice that extends across the filming and editing stages of his filmmaking process. The distinctive, collaborative nature evidenced here serves, perhaps paradoxically, as a further element of his signature style as auteur. A further characteristic of Audiard’s œuvre – and one which may not fit the profile of the auteur – is the complex refashioning of existing texts, including novels. Whilst he rejects the term ‘remake’, he often chooses to work with, on and through the skeleton of an existing narrative

Bibliography for Jacques Audiard

General Dobson, Julia. 2008. “Jacques Audiard: Contesting Filiations.” In Kate Ince (ed) Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, edited by Kate Ince, 38–58. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dobson, Julia. 2010. “Asserting Text, Context and Intertext: Jill Forbes and French Film Studies.” In Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives, 1985–2010, edited by Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy, 117–126. Bristol: Intellect Rouyer, Philippe and Yann Tobin. 2012. “Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: qu’est-ce que le discours amoureux aujourd’hui.” Positif 616: 9–14. Rouyer, Philippe and Claude Vassé. 2005. “Entretien avec Jacques Audiard: et si tuer quelqu’un au cinéma, c’était difficile?” Positif 529: 21–25. Tirard, Laurent and Thomas Baurez. 2006. “Jacques Audiard.” Leçons de cinéma 2. Paris: Nouveau monde éditions.

Special affects: reconfiguring melodrama in De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone, Audiard, 2012)

Abstract Jacques Audiard’s De rouille et d’os/Rust and Bone provides a further example of this filmmaker’s sustained attention to the powerful narrative, filmic and affective impacts of genre hybridisation – in this case the knowing mix of realist and melodramatic modes. This article sets Audiard’s film in the broader critical context of shifting approaches to melodrama and argues that Rust and Bone represents an important re-purposing of the melodramatic mode that reconfigures the trope of embodied suffering associated with melodrama, to resituate the body as a site of affective communication, social agency and resistance. The article concludes by suggesting that, whilst critical and popular reception of the film has focused on its use of the special effects used to support Marion Cotillard’s performance as a double amputee, the film’s re-purposing of melodrama can be seen to create a special affect that is no less striking.

Audiard A–Z

A is for Anti-hero. Audiard’s films demonstrate a sustained lack of interest in the moral or sentimental appeal of their central characters, but rather strive to ensure that we engage with and admi...

Retrospectives and projections: celebrating ten years of Studies in French Cinema

This issue constitutes the first in a very special volume that celebrates ten years of Studies in French Cinema, and presents a selection of the exciting work being undertaken by scholars of French cinema based in the UK (the subsequent two issues of 2010 will focus on work from contributors based in France and in the US). This considerable milestone coincides with the forthcoming decade shift from the ‘noughties’ to the ‘tens’ that may suggest some distancing from rather artificial ‘turn of the century’ comparisons, selections and lists. It seems timely, however, to offer a brief reflection on the scope of research