New Spaces for French and Francophone Cinema (review)

In his short Preface drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of social space, the editor James Austin correctly states that in France 'the cinema is well-poised to engage in a spatial politics, to be an art of space producing its own space or spaces, and thus potentially redefining the space of France and the francophone world' (p. 3). Hence the guiding aim of this volume is 'to explore how the filmic realm has been invested with spatial representations that in turn seek to reconfigure the French spaces of city, suburb, metropole, and (former) colony and the subjects that move through them' (p. 3). The collection is neatly organized into three main sections, each containing three chapters. The first is of a general and rather generic nature, offering up-to-date surveys on the evolution of auteurism since the Nouvelle Vague (Michel Marie), the stereotypical portrayals of French national space and 'Frenchness' for international export (Roger Celestin), and the negotiation of transnational identities by women directors (Catherine Portuges). The second, on specific representations of the city, suburb, and countryside, is more focused and ambitious. Ludovic Courtade's incisive close reading of Robert Guédiguian's Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars persuasively demonstrates that the film, by essentializing the 'eternal' French landscape, effectively evacuates politics in relation to both space and time — as if the search for spatial identity were the only alternative to the current crisis in socialism. The editor himself contributes a useful historical account of the typically negative portrayal of suburban space in French film, evident even in films such as Les Triplettes de Belleville, while Margaret C. Flinn's subtle theoretical engagement with Chris Marker's Chats perchés reveals the full stakes of Marker's digital video practice of occupying the city with painted cats in the interests of a new autonomous collective politics. In the final section, on postcolonial issues, Guy Austin provides a well-informed and contextualized analysis of the treatment of the Algerian War in contemporary French cinema, which, since 2000, has repeatedly returned to the site of trauma to the point that filming now takes place in Algeria. Panivong Norindr exposes the compromises of Rachid Bouchareb's big-budget Indigènes, critiquing in particular its reactionary elements of conservative nationalist pedagogy. He concludes powerfully that if colonialism encouraged a spatial confusion among colonial subjects about which country is the patrie, Indigènes ultimately erases cultural difference and elides colonial history because it signally fails to narrate the story of French colonial repression in the Maghreb during the Second World War. Dominic Thomas rounds off the volume with a solid overview of the contested relations between African and French cinema, showing how some African films, notably by the Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo, successfully negotiate African/European space. Overall, this wide-ranging yet uneven volume offers a stimulating and accessible introduction to an increasingly central topic in French film studies. However, with so much exciting primary material under discussion, it is a pity that only Flinn's chapter contains visual illustrations (a still from Chats perchés grins provocatively on the front cover).