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This is the first collection of essays about French-language road movies, a particularly rich yet critically neglected cinematic category. These films, the contributors argue, offer important perspectives on contemporary French ideas about national identity, France’s former colonies, Europe, and the rest of the world. Taken together, the essays illustrate how travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to reimagine space and move beyond simple oppositions such as Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, and East and West.

Introduction – Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt

Chapter 1: On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais – Laura Rascaroli

Chapter 2: The Constant Tourist: Passing Intimacy and Touristic Nomadism in Drôle de Félix – Florian Grandena

Chapter 3: Brittany, No Exit: Travelling in Circles in Manuel Poirier’s Western – Thibaut Schilt

Chapter 4: Troubling Return: Femininity and Algeria in La Fille de Keltoum – Darren Waldron

Chapter 5: Going Nowhere Fast: On the Road in Contemporary Algeria in Tariq Teguia’s Rome plutôt que vous – Joseph McGonagle

Chapter 6: Times on the Road: Identity and Lived Temporality in Benoît Jacquot’s À tout de suite and L’Intouchable – Glen W. Norton

Chapter 7: Tourism and Travelling in Jean-Luc Godard’s Allemagne 90 neuf zéro and Éloge de l’amour – Ewa Mazierska

Chapter 8: Under Eastern Eyes: Displacement, Placelessness and the Exilic Optic in Emmanuel Finkiel’s Nulle part terre promise – Michael Gott

Chapter 9: Nowhere to Run, Somewhere to Hide: Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps – Martin O’Shaughnessy

Chapter 10: Traffic in Souls: The Perils and Promises of Mobility in La Promesse – David Laderman

Chapter 11: Mobility and Exile in Claire Denis’s 35 rhums – Michelle Royer and Miriam Thompson

Chapter 12: Gatlif’s Manifesto: Cinema is Travel – Sylvie Blum-Reid

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Technology Policy

Public Policy

Political Science

Popular culture

Cultural Studies

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	19 mars 2013
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781783200689
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2850€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover images are courtesy of Cinefi le Ltd.
( www.cinefile.co.uk ) and Sophie Dulac Distribution ( www.sddistribution.fr )
Cover designer: Edwin Fox
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-662-3
eISBN 978-1-78320-068-9
Printed by Charlesworth Press, UK
Contents
Introduction
Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt
Chapter 1: On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais
Laura Rascaroli
Chapter 2: The Constant Tourist: Passing Intimacy and Touristic Nomadism in Drôle de Félix
Florian Grandena
Chapter 3: Brittany, No Exit: Travelling in Circles in Manuel Poirier’s Western
Thibaut Schilt
Chapter 4: Troubling Return: Femininity and Algeria in La Fille de Keltoum
Darren Waldron
Chapter 5: Going Nowhere Fast: On the Road in Contemporary Algeria in Tariq Teguia’s Rome plutôt que vous
Joseph McGonagle
Chapter 6: Times on the Road: Identity and Lived Temporality in Benoît Jacquot’s À tout de suite and L’Intouchable
Glen W. Norton
Chapter 7: Tourism and Travelling in Jean-Luc Godard’s Allemagne 90 neuf zéro and Éloge de l’amour
Ewa Mazierska
Chapter 8: Under Eastern Eyes: Displacement, Placelessness and the Exilic Optic in Emmanuel Finkiel’s Nulle part terre promise
Michael Gott
Chapter 9: Nowhere to Run, Somewhere to Hide: Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps
Martin O’Shaughnessy
Chapter 10: Traffic in Souls: The Perils and Promises of Mobility in La Promesse
David Laderman
Chapter 11: Mobility and Exile in Claire Denis’s 35 rhums
Michelle Royer and Miriam Thompson
Chapter 12: Gatlif’s Manifesto: Cinema is Travel
Sylvie Blum-Reid
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Index
Introduction
Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt
This volume is the first to concentrate on French-language road movies, a particularly rich and understudied body of works that deserve critical attention as complex representatives of contemporary European travel cinema. Although the great majority of the films discussed in the ensuing chapters—whether they were made in France, North Africa or Belgium—received some funding from the French government (CNC) or French-based production companies, we favour the term ‘French-language’ road movie rather than simply ‘French’ (or ‘francophone’, which has a different connotation in academic discourse) to acknowledge the sometimes peripheral positioning of the Hexagon in these films. At the same time, while the language of Molière is the common denominator of these travel narratives, it is occasionally a minority language heard intermittently and is not always spoken by the main characters on-screen. Indeed, the border-crossing inclinations of the genre generate an often polyglot battery of films that tackle identity questions from a transnational perspective, addressing post-Wall and postcolonial preoccupations linked to diverse locales, from Algeria and India to Germany and Poland. Part of the allure of these films lies in the nuanced perspectives they offer on contemporary French identity as well as on France’s position vis-à-vis its own shifting identity, its former colonies, a new ‘borderless’ Europe, and the rest of the world. The travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to re-imagine space, focusing on flows and connections and moving beyond the limiting spatial signifiers suggested by such oppositions as centre and periphery, Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, East and West, North and South. Contemporary road movies stage crucial discussions on Europe’s so-called open border policies and shifting migration patterns. This volume will show that, in the French context specifically, these films represent a polyphonic contribution to the ongoing debate on France’s national identity.
Though the term ‘French-language road movie’ encompasses a variety of approaches and routes, these films can be divided into two fundamental categories that might be labelled—provisionally—as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. Those in the positive category use travel motifs to celebrate the possibilities of transnational identity in contemporary France and Europe. The films that might be read as negative, in contrast, engage with a darker side of transit by turning their lenses towards travellers in distress, be they clandestine refugees, economic migrants or asylum seekers. Loosely applying these labels to the title of this volume, positive films are more closely associated with open roads and by extension mobility, while those on the negative side are primarily concerned with the implications of closed borders. We would like to propose that these do not represent contradictory impulses, but are rather two sides of the same coin. The same French and European propensity to control borders and police immigration is responsible for the constant reproduction of internal barriers, whether social, cultural, psychological or legal. These are the same static and inflexible parameters that positive road movies react against through recourse to movement as a liberatory trope.
Open Roads, Closed Borders
In The New Face of Political Cinema , Martin O’Shaughnessy argues that the migrant is a key figure in contemporary discourse because ‘he or she is an incarnation of the opacity of the new world and of our uncertainty about how we should deal with it’ (2007: 143). However, while, as O’Shaughnessy continues, the policing and exclusion of migrants seem to offer the government the ‘comforting reassurance of the rooted belonging of the settled population’ (2007: 143–44), other French voices are pushing back against the fixity and stagnation that follows from imagining France and Europe as a closed space. The social historian Patrick Weil has suggested that the French government must take into account the new realities of population movements and find more flexible parameters of identity. The state, he argues, must seek to ‘regulate’ rather than ‘control’ immigration, which he contends is no longer a point A to point B voyage with the fixed goal of sedentary immigration, but an ongoing process of ‘migration in movement’ (2005: 46). This observation is related to the status of retired workers from abroad, who wish to travel back and forth between their native land and the place where they worked and lived for a large part of their life. Weil also frames the question around the vantage point of the younger generations, the prototypical travellers present in what might be termed the self-exploration road film, in which the route leads to a discovery of roots or an examination of one’s place in society. With few exceptions the protagonists in the films addressed here are young people on a personal, cultural or economic quest.
Weil illustrates the variety of vantage points on citizenship held by young people by citing a case study on the relationship of Maghrebi-French youth towards citizenship: ‘in the course of their life, these young people will perhaps circulate from one approach to self-identification to another. They may also wish to identify not with a religion but rather with a career, a gender, or a political or union affiliation’ (2005: 106). The key concepts in his analysis are circulation and individual agency. As Michel Wieviorka has remarked, the identification of an individual with a collective identity can no longer be simply transmitted or imposed; in what he calls the ‘multicultural reality of France’, it is a question of choice (1999: 418). These notions of movement and choice are brought to the forefront in many of the films addressed here and in the contemporary French-language road movie in general. The difficulty comes in assessing the links between the cinematic travellers driven by free choice and those less fortunate who leave home in search of work or to escape poverty or conflict.
French cinema has experienced a recent surge of interest in the plight of those commonly referred to as the sans-papiers, undocumented migrants often passing through France on their way to the United Kingdom. The recent wave of films on this topic includes Nulle part t erre promise (Emmanuel Finkiel, 2008) Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009), Harragas (Merzak Allouache, 2009), Eden à l’Ouest / Eden is West (Costa-Gavras, 2009), Les Mains en l’air (Romain Goupil, 2010) and Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011). Earlier films addressing the issue in a French context include Clandestins (Denis Chouinard and Nicolas Wadimoff, 1997), Bleu le ciel (Dominique Boccarossa, 2001), Depuis qu’Otar est parti/Since Otar Left (Julie Bertucelli, 2003), Code Inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages / Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Michael Haneke, 2000), Roma wa la n’touma / Rome plutôt que vous / Rome Rather Than You (Tariq Teguia, 2006), Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002) and Passeurs de rêve/Beyond Our Dreams (Hiner Saleem, 2000). These films document—and in some cases address indirectly—voyages to or through France or other Western European countries, sometimes by migrants originating in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, though more frequently from the East, a trajectory made more feasible by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of borders within the Schengen zone.
Another subcategory of the French-language road film involves movement in the oppo