Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France

2. Hidden Islam: The Role of the Religious in Beur and Banlieue Cinema

French cinema has had little if any interest in portraying Islam, a religion that was only minimally present in metropolitan France before the Second World War (Cadé 2006,1058–75).1 Relegated to shabby spaces—grudgingly conceded to the Maghrebi immigrants of the postwar period—it was nearly invisible at the national level.2 Thus, Islam has hardly been a part of the projection nationale (Frodon 1997). In colonial cinema, Islam was reduced to a set of signs associated with the picturesque—mosques silhouetted against the sky,gestures of prayer—which were more or less linked to the traditional and the quaint (Benali 1998). In French cinema at large, Islam remained unspoken as well as unseen and was ignored as an element in the identity of the rare immigrant workers glimpsed in films in which the action took place in France. While Maghrebi immigrants became more visible in the cinema of the 1970s, due to the primarily militant perspective of many of these films (often with negligible ticket sales), references to Islam were neglected, perhaps in an effort not to alienate spectators (Cadé 2004). Both the social and cinematic contexts changed in 2 HIDDEN ISLAM The Role of the Religious in Beur and Banlieue Cinema Michel Cadé 42 HIDDEN ISLAM the 1980s. The election of François Mitterrand as president of the Republic in 1981, the rise in power of the National Front in the 1983 municipal elections , the March of the Beurs—those young people of Maghrebi descent born or raised in France—against racism and for equality that same year, and the formation of sos Racisme in 1984 (Becker and Ory 1998) coincided with the release of the first films directed by young Beur directors, the most exemplary of which remains Mehdi Charef’s Le thé au harem d’Archimède (1985). Since then a Beur cinema has continued to evolve, characterized as much by the origins of its directors as by the situations dramatized, and is generally tied to the difficulties of life in the banlieue or in the rundown neighborhoods of certain urban centers. As a result, a new genre of French cinema can be delineated: banlieue filmmaking, as evoked by Carrie Tarr (2005), relies for its dramaturgy mainly on the difficulties experienced by young people of Maghrebi origin (or of sub-Saharan African descent, for the latter often share with the former the same religious affiliation) in integrating into French society. Its filmmakers are not necessarily of Maghrebi descent but generally bring a particular focus to the problems posed by the integration of minorities of diverse ethnic origins into French society. Among these filmmakers are Thomas Gilou—who has successively focused on the insertion of immigrants of sub-Saharan, Maghrebi Muslim, Maghrebi Jewish, and Latin American origins into the national community—and Philippe Faucon, who was born in Oujda, Morocco, in January 1958 and is married to a woman of Maghrebi origin.3 The authority of these directors to cinematically represent the banlieue and the problems of its inhabitants over the last thirty years cannot be called into question without endorsing a notion of ethnic legitimacy that would radically break with the terms of the French social consensus. I will therefore not distinguish among the diverse ethnic origins of the filmmakers in constituting the corpus that serves as the basis for this study, even while observing that the majority of them in France today would be called French (though some, such as Merzak Allouache, are not) of Maghrebi descent to whom the banlieue-born substantive Beur has frequently been affixed. A preliminary observation: of the some 130 French films produced between 1981 and 2003 that Carrie Tarr has identified as more or less corresponding to the categories considered above (2005, 213–18), to which it would be appropriate to add some fifteen or so films made since then, more than half do not evoke the Muslim dimension of their protagonists, and some, such as Malik Chibane’s Nés quelque part (1997) or Coline Serreau’s Saint Jacques MICHEL CADÉ 43 . . . La Mecque (2005), even try to subsume Islam into a kind of syncretism founded on the more or less clearly affirmed dominance of Christianity.In this respect,one cannot overlook that Abdellatif Kechiche—the French filmmaker of Maghrebi descent who is the current darling of the French media and has also achieved considerable success with the public4 —does not allude in the...