Seeing Through Race in Contemporary French Cinema

The goal of this essay is to set the stage for a longer conversation about what it means “to race” French cinema, that is, to attend to the hermeneutics of race in cinematic production from France. Through against-the-grain readings of Intouchables and Entre les murs, this article explores the deep ambivalences about race that are coded in these films’ representational strategies. Attention to details, star-texts, and paratexts allows us to understand these movies as staging the complicated, on-going negotiations between the realities of contemporary France and the nation’s attachment to “a certain idea” of itself, that is, between republican realities and republican values.