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45 Postcolonial Cinema, song, and literature Continuity or Change? (1961–2006) delphine robic-diaz and alain ruscio in 1962, a young, slightly chubby pied-noir, still quite clumsy in front of the cameras , sang for the first time on French television: “i have left my country / i have left my home / My life, my sad life / drags on without reason.” This was of course enrico Macias. France had just exited—at last—a cycle of wars that had started in May 1940, and was entering a new era with this ballad from overseas. at the apex of the empire, then during the wars of decolonization, artists—movie directors, artists, writers, singers—had often linked their productions to colonial issues, either to promote or to oppose the system.1 What happened when colonialism disappeared —or, rather, when it was erased? Cinema’s Gaze Cinematographic genres are coded narrative systems around which plots are woven . These systems often combine with one another, and after a long period of success, a particular genre can be progressively infiltrated by another, and gradually replaced by it. For instance, many contemporary action movies can be read as updated versions of swashbuckler movies: the hero rescues a fair lady and wins her love after glorious feats, illustrated by heroic scenes. Postcolonial cinema is an atypical movie genre, for it is constituted and recognized, but has completely disappeared instead of just being replaced. its existence was not conditioned by the internal evolutions of cinema, such as public taste and the evolution of technology , but was abruptly interrupted by historical events. The end of the colonies also meant the end of “colonial cinema.” yet, aftereffects sporadically appear on the silver screen—notably in decolonization war movies such as Diên Biên Phu by Pierre schoendoerffer (1992) or La Trahison by Philippe Faucon (2006)—reminiscences of a genre marked by another, the latter being legitimized by events. Much more rarely and only much later, historical melodramas have been produced that revisit the colonies by moving back in time, rereading the excesses of a racist regime in a sacrificial mea culpa fashion, such as Indochine by régis Wargnier (1992) or Outremer by Brigitte roüan (1989). 546 Postcolonial Cinema, Song, and Literature | 547 Colonial cinema is dead, long live colonial cinema.2 The latter is merely the politically correct prolongation of the former. This is confirmed by the very term used to describe it: it is not a “decolonial” or “post-decolonial” cinema, but rather a “postcolonial” cinema, that comes after colonization, the half-aborted child of colonialism. The specter of the colonies haunts postcolonial cinema, a cinema of trauma and of memory, a psychotherapy of images through which the contemporary world regularly attempts to purge itself of a fundamentally racist history. Thus, there exist compulsory rites of passage for the painful work of exorcism in which the French are engaged, such as the staged relationship of domination between the colonizer and the natives, whereby the latter supports the white man’s presence, a presence that is not as much repressive as it is maieutic. How could the natives have claimed their independence if they had been deprived of the white man’s presence? How could they have organized without an enemy against which to unite? These are a few of the tacit rhetorical principles that bind postcolonial discourse in the most recent French movies. Indochine by régis Wargnier is a perfect illustration of this, a film in which the mother-daughter relationship is played by Catherine deneuve and linh dan Pham. The young Camille, adopted by the wealthy eliane, must achieve her status as a woman by rejecting and escaping her mother. However, unable to raise the child that she had with a French officer, she entrusts him to her mother so that he can be educated in europe while she dedicates herself to a brilliant political career in the viet Minh. decolonization is seen as the adolescence of nations. although the narration explicitly underscores the need for the French to leave a country from which they remain forever outsiders, its ambiguous life lesson implies that the formerly colonized populations cannot do without a certain relationship , a degree of dependence, as suggested in the figure of the child entrusted to his adoptive grandmother, a young mixed-race child who is not disowned by his mother but instead sacrificed on the altar of the nationalist cause. regardless of how altruistic it intends to be, French postcolonial cinema only...

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