Keith Reader

The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s

This article looks at representations of the banlieue in the cinema of the 1930s – a period before the term banlieue was synonymous with deprivation and violence as, especially since Matthieu Kassowitz’s 1995 film La Haine, it has subsequently tended to become. The work of Claude Autant-Lara and Maurice Lehmann (Fric-Frac, Circonstances atténuantes) and that of Anatole Litvak (Cœur de Lilas) receive close attention along with two more widely known films, Marcel Carné’s tragic Le Jour se lève, whose banlieue is topographically unsituated but could well be Parisian, and Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne where the countryside near Paris provides the setting for two bucolic idylls that offer a different, less grim view of the banlieue than that nowadays current.

Radical French Thought and the Return of the ‘Jewish Question’

Impossible as a ‘placid ornament’ (88). Generally, though, he relies too much on the interviews, taking what the actresses say at face value rather than analysing it as what it is, a discourse. this is because he is too invested in the—common yet doomed—desire to find the ‘real person’ behind the screen persona. thus he also has little to say about the media construction of stardom, and the way French stars, in the period he is covering, have had, willy-nilly, to engage with celebrity culture. His terminology is at times vague: virtually every actress discussed is a ‘star’; for instance, Julie Gayet is judged a ‘fully-fledged star’ (160), which she has certainly never been in terms of her film career. nevertheless, the book offers an original take on French female stardom and is a useful resource. although at times impressionistic, LaSalle gives serious attention to French cinema’s exceptional range of very good actresses who deserve to be better known. Ginette Vincendeau King’s College London

France and the Middle East: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Contemporary France

The longest-lasting geopolitical conflict of our time has evident repercussions in France, the country with the largest Arab-Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe. France indeed is home to more Jews than any country bar Israel and the United States. This combines with the aftermath of (de)colonisation in the Maghreb and that of the Occupation to give the conflict (as I shall hereinafter refer to it for brevity) particular resonance in France. The shadows of Drancy and of Charonne continue to hang heavy over the mémoire populaire of Jews and Arabs. The most spectacular manifestation of this has been killings motivated by racial hatred. The 1980 bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and the 1982 shooting attack on Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant in the Marais—both to this day unsolved—provided hideous illustrations of this, along with in more recent years the 2006 torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in the Paris banlieue and the March 2012 shooting of four Jews, three of them children, by MohammedMerah in Toulouse. In the Halimi case racial hostility was found by the courts to be an aggravating circumstance in a financially motivated crime, but the fact that remains that Halimi would not have been selected as a victim unless, as a Jew, he had been supposed to be wealthy. Arabs have themselves, and on a much larger albeit less spectacular scale, been the victims of hate-crime killings, though not perpetrated by Jews. The most recent example known to me was the 2005 murder of two Arabs by Roma in Perpignan, while Fausto Guidice (Guidice 1992) in Arabicides put at more than 200 the number of Arabs killed in France in the previous 22 years—a horrifying total that includes ‘tirs sur cible, meurtres de voisinage, tortures, bavures policières et ratonnades’ (Tristan 1992). Not all—or even most—of these violences, of course, are rooted in the conflict; ‘bavures policières’, for instance, by and large stem frommore straightforward institutional and

Israël a déménagé/Un état commun entre le Jourdain et la mer

conflictual contexts that have generated the film’s dénouement. As Tarja Laine explains, this is part of Haneke’s key strategy to use film as a way of making the spectator ‘confront their own engagement with visual displays’ (253). As a reciprocal relationship is established, with efforts and demands made upon the spectator, Haneke, according to Laine, disturbs ‘the act of viewing’ and in the process brings about an affect of doubt about the very status of the filmic image (see in this respect Roderick’s chapter on Benjamin’s theory of the image as constellation to investigate France’s relationship with its past in Hidden) (225–236). With a detailed filmography and bibliography on Michael Haneke’s films, the co-editors have produced an excellent collection that is indispensable as a critical resource for Haneke specialists. It is also a volume that is sufficiently accessible to the curious cinema-goer who wants to know more about the films of Michael Haneke.