Martin O'Shaughnessy

French Film and the New World of Work: From the Iron to the Glass Cage

Looking at some of the most important work-related French films of recent years, this article sets out to do three things. It begins by analysing how the films narrate the exit from Fordism and the accompanying transition from the old disciplinary regime to a new one characterised by a ‘caring’ eugenics. It continues by contrasting the old Fordist and new post-Fordist human subjects and the spatial and material universes they inhabit. It concludes by evaluating the capacity of the films to renew critique.

French cinema and the political

ABSTRACT The years since 1995 have seen the return of the political to French cinema, but this is a cinema that can no longer feed off an elaborated leftist project, and that must therefore take new forms. After a brief contextualization, this article seeks to account for the novelty and effectiveness of this cinema. It first delineates its main contours, and then turns to the work of Žižek, Balibar and Rancière to cast light on certain of its key features. Žižek is used to engage with the capacity of the films to reconnect ‘subjective’ violences to the systemic; Balibar is used to explore the newness of the films spatial economy and the way they deal with the ‘unworldly’ universalism of contemporary capitalism; Rancières concept of the sensorium is mobilized to underscore the productive work the films do as they contest dominant visibilities and audibilities.

Eloquent Fragments: French Fiction Film and Globalization

French (and Franco-Belgian) cinema has witnessed a return to the real since the middle of the 1990s and should thus successfully have pinned down the impact of the globalizing economy on the sociopolitical sphere. Yet neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the frame of conventional fictions. Condemned to be a cinema of fragments by the shattering of the old leftist imaginary, has French cinema merely tracked globalizations local consequences, always letting systemic causes escape its grasp? Or has it identified successful strategies with which to restore eloquence to social struggle and suffering that otherwise seemed condemned to silence? Engaging with important films by the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guediguian, Bertrand Tavernier, Manuel Poirier, Matthieu Kassovitz and others, this paper argues the latter. French film, it suggests, has found ways to make the fragments speak to the totality, to short-circuit neoliberal triumphalism and to interpellate a nation that no longer plays its erstwhile integrational role. While none of these strategies can provide totalizing systemic critique, they do show that cinema is playing an active role in the rebuilding of a radical oppositional imaginary.

French Cinema: Globalization, Representation, and Resistance

It is now twelve years since French brinkmanship pushed American negotiators and the prospects of a world trade deal to the wire, securing the exclusion of cultural products and services from the 1993 GATT agreement and the maintenance of European systems of national quotas, public subsidies, and intellectual property rights in the audiovisual sector. The intervening period has not been quiet. Although the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was sunk when Lionel Jospin pulled the plug on negotiations in October 1998, the applications of new central European entrants to join the European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been accompanied by a continuing guerrilla battle fought by successive American administrations against the terms and scope of the exclusion. In addition, developing countries‐‐led, notably, by Brazil‐‐have been increasingly vocal in their opposition to the European regulatory and redistributive mix, which they perceive to be little more than the market protectionism of a rich man’s club. Moreover, as Jean-Michel Baer has recently argued in a perceptive overview of the cultural exception, the ability of European states to defend cultural diversity is also vulnerable to the risk-management strategies prevalent in Europe’s own cultural industries, which have accelerated the trend toward horizontal and vertical concentration amongst its major media companies. In the area of film, this has led to an increased emphasis on marketing and a concomitant reduction in the diversity of spectator choice. 1 The collection of articles in this special issue of French Politics, Culture & Society explores the terrain mapped out by the post-GATT debate on globalization, examining the way that the consumption and production of film in France is structured by the relationship between sociopolitical conditions, state regulation, and transnational economic processes. Of course, we are not

The Parisian popular as reactionary modernisation

Abstract Noting the centrality of the Parisian popular in French cinema of the 1930s, this paper looks behind its apparent nostalgia to the disavowed work of modernization that it carried out. Drawing on recent work on the transnational, it shows how representations of popular rootedness and of the cosmopolitan modern were linked responses to the new. Helping to embed cultural consumption in collective memory and identity, cinematic populism engaged with and simultaneously rejected the experiences of displacement and mixity. In some ways it can be considered to have carried out a process of democratization, shifting the common people to centre stage and inviting them to look upon their own image. Broadly speaking, however, its disavowed modernization was deeply regressive. The reflexivity it granted was counterweighted by its idealization of rooted community and folkloric cultural forms in a way that could only view the cosmopolitan new as threat and loss and which immobilised and ethnicized the popular even as it partially undid its exclusion.

Silencing the war all the better to hear it: Renoir's 'La grande illusion' (1937)

ABSTRACT This article sets out to analyse the originality of the use of sound (dialogue, song and noise) in La Grande Illusion in comparison to the classic anti-war films released at the start of the 1930s. It suggests that while those films opposed the human voice to the deafeningly inhuman soundscape of war, Renoirs film was ultimately more productive because of its ability to silence the war, and to use the voice to divide the human and reopen the space for a politics. It also shows how La Grande Illusion asks its spectator (auditor) to self-reflexively engage with his or her own stake in the production of the soundscape of war. Finally, it argues that by only ever allowing songs to provide a partial escape from the conflict, Renoir is able to maintain a political tension between their utopian potential and their historical embeddedness.

Filming Work and the Work of Film

HIS ARTICLE WILL EXAMINE three relatively recent French documentaries about work, Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud’s Paroles de Bibs (2001), Marc-Antoine Roudil and Sophie Bruneau’s Ils ne mouraient pas tous mais tous etaient frappes (2006), and Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier’s Un Monde moderne (2005). It will draw heavily upon the writings of Jacques Ranciere to think about the general relationship between the aesthetic and the political, and those of Jean-Louis Comolli to explore the more specific relationship between cinema and the world of work. The article arises out of two seminars devoted to the question “que peut le cinema?” or “what can cinema do?” Recognizing the complexity of this apparently simple question, it narrows its focus by concentrating on a cluster of recent films, asking not what cinema can do, but what a certain type of cinema can do now. It also separates the question “what do these films try to do?” from “what do they achieve?” As Ranciere has noted, and as I have attempted to summarize elsewhere, committed art tends to take its effects for granted, or seeks to control them in a way that denies the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter. 1 Thus, for example, committed art assumes that the showing of revolting things can stir us, that pedagogic stories will instruct us, or that taking art out of its normal surroundings will bring about a parallel shift in response to it. The Brechtianism that was so influential in critical art and notably in the committed cinema of the post-1968 period combined the aesthetic shock generated by the collision of different sensoria with the more traditional corrective representation of behaviors. It sought to tame indeterminacy by bringing the distance that typifies the aesthetic encounter within the artwork itself. Yet, it could seem to guarantee its effects only because it was received in a transparently divided political context. Now, under contemporary conditions of consensus, when dissent struggles to be heard, the critical collision of divergent elements risks becoming an empty mechanism. The old recipes no longer function in the way they once seemed to. 2 It is for this reason that I have chosen to focus on some contemporary films in order to ask what committed cinema can do now. I concentrate on work-related films because they have been such an important strand of recent French cinema, especially but not only documentary. Comolli, a veteran critic and filmmaker, has been one of the most perceptive analysts of work-related films. At a general level, he suggests that, born as a sortie d’usine rather than an entree d’usine, cinema has generally

Thinking Contemporary Political Cinema with Cantet

This article focuses particularly on two Laurent Cantet films, Ressources humaines (Human Resources, 2000) and Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012). Its main thrust, however, is to use Cantet’s work to pose more general questions about the functioning of a political cinema at the current moment. Firstly, it examines how the director hollows out his own voice to accommodate other, often disempowered or marginalized voices at a time when the radical or institutional left no longer provides a collective language of opposition. Secondly, drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of ‘being with’, it looks at how the films stage the interplay between individuals, groups and broader social contexts and notes that, if characters cannot stand alone as isolated individuals, nor can they simply merge back into some broader collectivity. Again, it suggests that this uneasy position is expressive of the current moment. Thirdly, the article looks at the uncomfortable place the films open up for the spectator who is neither reassured about the acceptability of the status quo nor given some easy utopian alternative but is instead forced to work out his or her stance in a conflicted field. The article concludes by arguing that this obligation to work out where one stands pulls together the director, the characters and the audience. In deeply conflicted times, when not taking a position is not an option, and ready-made standpoints are no longer available, they must work out their stance, as must we.

Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema

larity of the Front National. Despite its brevity, Wieviorka’s book provides a much-needed critical analysis to a general audience that is accustomed to simplistic and sensationalist accounts of the ‘irresistible’ rise of the new Front National. Its strength lies in its critical study of the limits of the normalisation process and touches on some crucial elements which have helped render the Front National so prominent in the early part of the twenty-first century. While this book will not provide enough depth for an academic audience and the lack of historical analysis is an issue, it offers a good critical starting point for those wishing to acquire a more nuanced understanding of the Marine Le Pen phenomenon.

European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film-Making in Contemporary Europe

fascism only in his introduction and conclusion, and does not allow the concept to intrude too much into his narrative. He follows recent historiographical trends in rejecting essentialist and reductionist definitions, in recognising the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the category, and the subjectivity of its usage. However, in seeking to explain how fascist ideas were diffused in society, it seems odd that he should dismiss the domain of the nationalist leagues and their successor parties as ‘this relatively small and marginal arena’ (18). He seems thereby to ignore much recent work (especially on the Croix de Feu/Parti social français), and indeed to lay himself open to the charge that his ‘nonconformists’ were considerably more ‘marginal’! It adds to the impression that Amzalak is on shakier ground once he steps outside the confines of his central theme. Not all the errors in the text can be attributed to poor proof-reading, there are factual errors as well. Most strikingly, a passage on the events of 6 February 1934 records that ‘Daladier opted for a violent repression of the protest, using his Prefect of Police, Chiappe, as his henchman’ (98). In reality, it was Daladier’s removal of Chiappe from office that provided the main pretext for the 6 February demonstrations. It would be misleading, however, to conclude on this negative note, for this study undoubtedly enriches our understanding of the period. It also has unintentional contemporary resonance, as global economic crisis and political disillusionment once again promote the false allures of technocratic government. References