Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat (review)

Scholars of classical French cinema will know that a great deal has been written about ‘colonial’ cinema, with attention often returning to a relatively few well-known films, typically set in North Africa, that come to stand in for the broader corpus. At the same time, it is often assumed that the same cinema is a prolongation of the broader colonial project and somehow delivers (or betrays) a propagandist message. Yet popular cinema is a more complex object than this, and ‘colonial’ film is a research object with an illusory coherence. Seeking to develop a more adequate approach, Colleen Kennedy-Karpat broadens the object of study to include exoticism more generally and moves well outside the familiar corpus of films to discuss neglected works and less studied performers. She convincingly demonstrates that, while a colonial setting may indeed place limits on what a film can say or show, ‘colonial’ cinema also shares features with the exotic and, to that extent, needs studying in terms of the pleasures it offers rather than its uneven propaganda value. Her argument is laid out across a series of chapters, each of which discusses a particular trope, location, or persona. She considers le cafard, or, as she calls it, ‘assimilation anxiety’ (which she frames as a reversal of Homi Bhabha’s colonized ‘mimic man’), interracial love, and métissage, and, finally, French cinema’s representation of the Far East and the roles played by the famous star of the period, Sessue Hayakawa. Consistent with her general line, Kennedy-Karpat seeks to problematize dominant understandings of how ‘colonial’ film operates. Thus, for example, when she looks at the question of interracial love and métissage, she shows that films are more open to boundary transgression than is often assumed and that interracial relationships are not necessarily condemned to tragic outcomes. She also emphasizes how films not centred on the military are often melodramas that explore women’s desires and offer fantasies of empowerment and transgression, not least when actors like Annabella move into exotic ‘drag’. This willingness to challenge the taken-for-granted and to explore the neglected is very welcome and is supported by an impressive knowledge of the films, stars, and broader cinematic and sociocultural contexts. However, the book is also frustrating in a number of ways. First, it is rather mechanical in its approach to its corpus, working through the films individually and spending a lot of time recounting their plots. Secondly, and relatedly, it focuses on events and characters at the expense of the more visual or indeed auditory dimension of the exotic. Thirdly, the exotic, either as a cinematic genre or as a broader object of cultural inquiry, is rather taken for granted and needed more developed theoretical discussion. Indeed, one wonders whether, having served to problematize the coherence of the colonial, the exotic itself risks become a falsely coherent object that masks the instability of a corpus that offered shifting pleasures to a mixed audience. Notwithstanding this, the book is welcome for its willingness to open up new ground and challenge dubious critical orthodoxies.