Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 000, 0000000000 2002
Martin O'Shaughnessy
The Shifting Identities of French Popular Cinema
_France on Film: Reflections
on Popular French Cinema_ Edited by Lucy
Mazdon London: Wallflower
Press,
2001 ISBN 1 903364-08-6
pbk 180 pp. This book's dual thrust is
indicated by its title. _France on Film_ suggests an
interrogation of national identities and their filmic
representation. Through consideration of history and
heritage, gender and ethnicity, place and community, the
book broadly delivers what the reader had been led to expect
on this score, with its almost exclusively 1990s focus
giving a decidedly contemporary relevance to the whole. The
second half of the title suggests sustained reflection on
the popular. The book partially delivers on this count.
While some of the pieces do engage perceptively with the
popular (without necessarily having a shared understanding
of how it might be defined), others touch on it more
tangentially, while yet others ignore it completely. This is
a shame. A sustained analysis of what the popular might mean
now would have been most timely. The book's dual identity is
confirmed in Mazdon's introduction. It begins with an
interesting and nuanced consideration of how French cinema's
identity and the popular or art cinema appeal of individual
films may shift as they traverse national frontiers and move
between viewing contexts. This discussion, which uses
Kassovitz's _La Haine_ as its primary illustration, also
suggests how popular films must be multiply-coded to
assemble diverse audiences. Discussion of multiple coding,
surely a core issue for an analysis of the popular in its
national and transnational dimensions, is picked up in only
a few of the book's chapters and only given an international
dimension in Mazdon's own piece on _Chacun cherche son chat_
and in Maria Esposito's piece on _Jean de Florette_. Mazdon
moves on from discussion of the shifting popular to suggest
that the book explores both French identities and the
diversity of French cinema. She makes rather brief comments
on identity. She suggests that the films considered show
that current French cinematic production, when not tempted
by the safety of heritage, engages in a constant
renegotiation of identities. This claim is backed up by
ensuing chapters, but more could perhaps have been done to
draw out connections and to develop a systematic discussion
of what shifting identities might mean for the popular.
Mazdon raises a third issue when she suggests that the films
considered show the diversity of French cinema. This
evocation of diversity would seem in part an admission of
the book's own internal diversity, its focus on two themes,
identity and the popular, that never fully come together. As
a result of this internal diversity, I shall continue this
review by first dealing with the cluster of chapters which
address the popular as a central concern, before turning my
attention to those which don't. Esposito's opening piece on
the shifting pleasures of _Jean de Florette_ is a good
starting point for a consideration of the complexities of
the popular. Her account of the film suggests that its main
appeal to a French audience is its ability to offer a firm
point of cultural, historical, and national reference during
a decade (the 1980s) marked by flux, instability, and
conflict. But she also suggests that the film is able to
engage with present concerns through its exploration of the
destructiveness associated with materialism. This blend of
reassurance and contemporary relevance might seem to closely
parallel accounts of British heritage cinema. Yet Esposito
suggests the specificity of the French heritage genre by
showing how the film's characters (predominantly peasants),
its locations (the family house, the bar, the village), and
its setting (the wild Provencal landscape) differ from a
more upper-class and pastoral English variant, opening up
more 'democratic' access to the past. Thus, while French
heritage has the same middle-brow appeal as its English
variant, one that, as Esposito notes, is culturally
validated by literary, musical, and painterly references,
and feeds off the experiences of mass tourism, it would also
seem to be able to tap into more broadly shared 'folk'
memories of mass post-war migration and collective internal
exile. This reviewer is not entirely convinced by this line
of argument. Internal migration and the destructive clash of
tradition and modernity were indeed vital issues when Pagnol
wrote the text (_L'Eau des collines_) upon which Berri's
film adaptations are based. It is doubtful that they still
were in the highly urbanised 1980s. The pleasures of _Jean
de Florette_ are surely more vicarious than vital, more
consumerist than nostalgic, and more to do with (internal
and international) tourism than exile. Nevertheless,
Esposito goes a long way towards explaining the film's
diverse appeals to French and foreign audiences. Mazdon's analysis of
Klapitsch's _Chacun cherche son chat_ provides another
thorough exploration of how a film can appeal to diverse
internal and international audiences by offering multiple
and shifting pleasures. Mazdon shows how the film constructs
a generalised Frenchness and mobilizes traditional
expectations of French light romantic comedy in order to
reach an international audience. She also shows how the film
provides a detailed exploration of spatial and social
concerns that has a much more specific appeal to a French
audience. Her analysis is further developed by detailed
delineation of a soundtrack that blends the traditional,
national popular with more contemporary French and
international musical forms so that the film explores
cultural collisions while reaching out for different
audiences. Mazdon is very aware of its apparent nostalgia
for classic French cinema but could have taken her analysis
further to explore how this extraordinarily intelligent but
apparently slight film is in fact a meditation on the
cinematic popular and its conditions of possibility. A
mythologised people's Paris and the pleasures and
sociabilities of seemingly rooted communities lay at the
heart of the French popular. Klapisch's film shows that with
the capitalist redevelopment and gentrification of the
capital, and with the increased internationalisation of
image circulation, the sociological and cultural bases of a
certain popular are also vanishing. The film's attention to
presidential elections that fail to concern the characters
and to the inevitable exclusions of community building
suggest that it is also very conscious of the popular's
hidden violences and its habitual marginalisation of the
political. Powrie's chapter on
Guediguian's _Marius et Jeanette_ considers the
representation of working class Marseilles, another key site
for popular Frenchness, while again engaging with the
relationship between the political and the popular. Powrie's
convincing central thrust is that Guediguian's film hovers
between nostalgia (both for a lost political commitment and
for the classic French popular cinema of the 1930s) and
utopia and thus avoids serious engagement with politics and
class conflict in the present. He feels that the film is
saved from simplistic sentimentalism by its recourse to some
techniques of Brechtian distanciation, but would overall
seem to suggest that it fails to develop a convincing
politicisation of the popular. While broadly agreeing with
this account, I would suggest that the film is perhaps more
politically effective than initially appears. Its evocations
of past struggles, present wreckage (as figured by the
abandoned cement works that plays a central role in the
film), and potential utopian community converge to refuse
the apparent permanence of neo-liberal triumph. Failing to
represent struggle in the present, it struggles against the
present. Powrie makes connections
between Guediguian and Pagnol and Renoir and their very
different mobilisations of the popular. Outside of Paris,
Pagnol's Provence and particularly Marseilles were key sites
of screen Frenchness. Powrie shows how, even as Guediguian
connects with Pagnol, he reinscribes the ethnic diversity
that was always part of the city but which earlier populisms
stigmatised or erased in their search for cosy community. It
would have been interesting here if Powrie had developed
this line of analysis to show how a political cinema can
mine populist tradition for audience appeal and for utopian
possibility but must at the same time rework it to purge it
of regressive baggage. This is surely what Renoir's earlier
engagement with populism had already taught us. It is
interesting to note, incidentally, that mass political
mobilisation in the mid-1930s, as in the mid-1990s, created
an opening for a politicised popular cinema that both fed
off and worked against the more prevalent depoliticised
variant. Powrie's chapter is very
usefully complemented by Darren Higbee's consideration of
Dridi's _Bye-Bye_. Higbee's account shows how the film
bridges and blends two versions of the port city, evoking
both its strong working class heritage and its now very
visible ethnic diversity, a characteristic again reinforced
by a decidedly eclectic soundtrack. With a utopian dimension
tied to the integrative capacity of shared neighbourhoods
and labour, the film also engages head on with racism as it
explores the central character's attempt to negotiate a
fluid identity between the dual fixities of tradition and
negative stereotyping. Higson shows how this aspect of the
film addresses ethnic minorities in particular while seeking
to educate the broader population. He also indicates how the
story's general appeal is reinforced through its
universalising central dynamic of guilt and responsibility
and through its participation in the broad return of the
social that was such a key feature of post-1995 French
cinema. Updating our image of one the loci classici of
French populist cinema, Dridi's film shows how popular
cinema can be a vehicle for making minority experiences
speak to a majority. This point takes us back to the key
issue of the politics of how popular cinema assembles its
audience, whether it seeks general appeal by erasing
diversity or whether it does so by making diversity speak to
the general. Another chapter that
interestingly explores movement out from the specific is Lyn
Thomas's reading of Veysset's acclaimed first film _Y
aura-t-il de la neige a Noel_. Thomas's assured account
shows how a combination of realism and the folk tale allows
the film to ground itself in the experience of the director
while speaking to shared experiences of childhood. This dual
thrust allows it to plot its own highly distinctive way
between expectations that high-cultural cinema bear the
author's mark and the popular's push to a more general,
impersonal address. Two other chapters develop
the intertextual appeal of the popular, its ability to feed
off and rework inherited popular forms from within and
beyond the cinema. Darren Waldon provides a thoughtful and
persuasive account of Balasko's _Gazon Maudit_, while Anne
Jackel examines the multiple appeals of the smash hit of the
decade, _Les Visiteurs_. The two pieces show how the films
draw on familiar comic traditions. Centred on a comic duo
richly rooted in international and gallic comedy (e.g.
Laurel and Hardy, but also Bourvil and De Funes), _Les
Visiteurs_ plays to an essentially national audience by
rooting itself in French history and language. Based on a
reworked eternal triangle, _Gazon Maudit_ plays on familiar
stereotypes of the fiery Spanish woman, the lesbian dyke,
and the southern macho. The cast and creative drive of both
films spring from the cafe-theatre movement of the 1970s.
Despite these convergences, as the analyses show, the films
take the popular in decidedly different directions. _Les
Visiteurs_ uses what is essentially a family romance to
explore and contain historical discontinuity and thus, it is
argued, reassure the French faced with contemporary
uncertainties. Balasko's film uses a very different family
romance to destabilise gender identities and filmic
relations of agency and objectification and thus
participates in the more general questioning of sexualities
and identities that has been a strong characteristic of
French cinema in the 1990s. What is interesting -- and what
the multi-author, discrete chapter format does not leave
room to explore -- is how the two films illustrate how the
popular can be a vehicle for taking both the conservative
and the radical to a broad audience. On broadly the same
territory as _Gazon Maudit_, _Ma Vie en rose_ likewise uses
the traditional heterosexual family of domestic comedy as a
starting point for a radical destabilisation of gender
expectations. Lucille Cairns's cogent and informed analysis
of the film is more interested in its sexual politics than
its popular appeal, but she does linger a little on the
latter, evoking the film's combination of fantasy and kitsch
to suggest how it may appeal to both consumers of romance
and knowing postmodern intellectuals, but leaving as an
unresolved paradox the question of how a film centred on
transsexuality could garner a mainstream audience. This
capacity can perhaps be explained. Firstly, as Cairns notes,
the central character is a decidedly cute child and thus his
decidedly minority orientation is mediated to a broad public
by the universalising imperative to protect the young.
Secondly, he is located within a sympathetic family whose
own troubles dealing with his identity offer ways into the
film for heterosexual adults. Like _Gazon Maudit_, then, the
film's use of the family is complex, using it to cushion the
impact of the radically challenging while at the same time
reworking it from within. Summarising the argument
thus far, we can see how the book opens up space for a rich
and multi-facetted exploration of the contemporary French
cinematic popular, whilst often leaving the vital work of
synthesis to the readers themselves, in a way that is
perhaps typical of multi-author collections. What seems at
this stage to emerge are a series of key questions about the
popular. The first question might be about who is
represented, and how a popular community in which the
audience can recognise itself is assembled and demonstrated
on screen. If French cinema traditionally figured popular
community by centring a homogenised version of the common
people and celebrating a supposedly shared national popular
culture, it would seem that this move has now become
problematic due to social and cultural shifts, the refusal
of minorities to remain invisible, and, not least, the
destruction of communities in key locales (Paris,
Marseilles) where the popular took on flesh. A second,
related question is one of address, and of how the popular
assembles an audience by encoding different readings and
mobilising varied pleasures. This question assumes new
dimensions at a time when the previously marginalised are
becoming routinely visible. Films centred on sexual or
ethnic minorities have to rework popular traditions from
within, while finding ways to make their concerns speak to a
broader audience. Some of the chapters show different
strategies by which this is achieved. A third question,
again not unrelated, is about the problematic encounter
between the popular and the political, an encounter that, as
Powrie and Higbee's chapters show, again requires a
reworking of inherited popular forms and
traditions. None of the three chapters
yet to be discussed engage seriously with the popular,
although they could potentially be linked to those already
considered by issues of identity and sexuality, history and
heritage. Howard Seal writes about Jacques Audiard's _Un
Heros tres discret_ and how it uses a destabilising blend of
fiction and document to problematise representation of the
wartime period. He concludes that the film ultimately fails
on two counts. Firstly, by allowing audience mastery and
stable identification for too much of the time, it
insufficiently explores film's own role in constructing the
past. Secondly, it fails to look sufficiently at what Vichy
represented and what collaboration signified. Both points
are convincingly argued, but perhaps somewhat unfair in that
the film is surely primarily about the connivance between
individual and collective drives to mythologise the
past. Emma Wilson writes
interestingly about one of the most controversial French
films of recent years, Breillat's _Romance_. She locates the
film firmly in an art cinema tradition, noting its
engagement with erotic literature, its authorial
expressivity, and its modernist interplay of word and image.
She uses this last feature to show how the film is both
highly cerebral and frankly corporeal, and thus engages with
sex as both mental construct and physical act. Commenting on
the undecideable status of the film's action, its suspension
between fantasy and the real, she notes how it demonstrates
the dependence of desire on fantasy. She notes too, and in a
way that chimes broadly with other chapters' exploration of
the destabilisation of gender roles, how it undermines the
classic distinction between activity and passivity by
showing a character who actively chooses passivity. She
shows convincingly how the film takes its lead character
through various stereotypical roles before leading her to
some form of autonomy, thus building into itself a reflexive
historicisation of women's representation. She explores
finally how it gives a voice to women's violation and
pleasure, thus overturning a long-standing silencing. A
substantial case is thus assembled to push us to see
_Romance_ as a ground-breaking and progressive text. This
reader is now reasonably convinced of the former quality,
but deeply sceptical of the latter, on the simple grounds
that a film that seems incapable of seeing relations between
men and women in anything other than sado-masochist terms
seems tied by the regressive forms it apparently struggles
against. Alison Smith's exploration
of _Nikita_ converges to a degree with Wilson's piece by
focusing on issues of fantasy and domination. Arguing that a
fantasy must have an author, she locates a decentred
authorship in the authoritarian control centre within which
Nikita is reclaimed by the State. This decentred fantasy
allows the viewer to resist identification, and thus both to
escape the totalitarian reach of a narrative where every
action is always watched, and to avoid siding with the
barbarian psychopaths of the start or the homicidal
authoritarian apparatus of the main body of the film. Smith
reads the end of the film optimistically, suggesting that
Nikita's disappearance signifies her evasion of surveillance
and thus escape from the repressive consciousness of the
centre. Like the repressed unconscious, Nikita will still be
there but beyond control. Although this reading is
innovative and challenging, it does not attempt to account
for the popular appeal of the film. Might one take the
notion of decentred fantasy in a different direction and
suggest, echoing the earlier argument, that popular cinema
must offer multi-centred fantasies to assemble a fractured
audience? Such a reading might consider how _Nikita_ (the
film, but also the character), offers to be all things to
all people, combining the pleasures of sadistic control,
spectacular violence, ludic role play, and tender romance,
detaching them from fixed identities to facilitate a
postmodern consumerist pick-and-mix of spectatorial
pleasures. It is, in conclusion,
undoubtedly difficult to give structure and coherence to
collective works, especially when each chapter focuses on a
different film rather than a shared theme. But the relative
fluidity of such volumes allows one to read them with more
freedom than single author works, to carve one's own
preferred structure out of relatively malleable raw
material. _France on Film_ is no exception to this rule.
Providing a series of loosely joined but intelligent and
well-written analyses of recent French film, it allows one
to focus, as one prefers, on representations of identity or
on the multi-facetted popular, and to assemble a rich and
shifting array of connections and convergences. It will
undoubtedly find a diverse audience and offer it a range of
pleasures. Nottingham
Trent University,
England Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Martin O'Shaughnessy, 'The
Shifting Identities of French Popular Cinema',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 27, September 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n27oshaughnessy>.
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