Opening Remarks by Carrie Tarr; Keynote Address by Alec Hargreaves

Carrie Tarr is a Research Fellow in Film Studies at Kingston University London, UK.  Her publications on gender and ethnicity in film include Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (Continuum, 2001) and Reframing difference: beur and banlieue filmmaking in France (MUP, 2005).  She is currently involved in a research project on migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe.
See http://www.fass.kingston.ac.uk/staff/cv.php?staffnum=154‘

From Ghettoes to Globalization: Situating Maghrebi-French Filmmakers’

Alec G. Hargreaves, Florida State UniversityMaghrebi-French filmmakers first emerged during the 1980s from among the second generation of North Africans in France, known colloquially as “beurs”, leading many to refer to their work as “beur cinema”. The 1990s gave rise to the notion of “banlieue” (“ghetto”) cinema, which took its name from the “banlieues”, the socially disadvantaged urban areas with which the beurs and other minority ethnic groups are identified. Sharing the wariness of Maghrebi-French filmmakers for labels that may appear to ghettoize them, this paper argues that while the concepts of “beur” and “banlieue” cinema retain a certain heuristic value, neither category does justice to the full range of their work. While undeniably grounded in the national space of France, the work of these filmmakers is in many ways glocal, reaching from the micro-localities of the banlieues into political, cultural and commercial spaces that are global in scale.

Alec G. Hargreaves is Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. His recent publications include Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society (London/New York: Routledge, 2007) and Memory, Empire and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005).
See http://www.fsu.edu/~modlang/divisions/french/hargreaves.html

Sat, November 10, 12:00–1:30 P.M.

Place, History, Politics
Will Higbee, Sylvie Durmelat, Peter Bloom; moderated by Farid Laroussi

‘(New) Cartographies of Maghrebi-French Filmmaking’
Will Higbee, University of Exeter

Although the working-class estates of the French urban periphery are often thought to dominate the geography of Maghrebi-French filmmaking, beur filmmakers have since the mid 1990s employed an increasing diversity of socio-cultural locations through which to explore issues of Maghrebi-French experiences and subjectivities in relation to history,
ethnicity and gender as well as regional, national and transnational identity positionings. This paper will explore issues of space, place and identity as they have emerged in the work of beur filmmakers (on both sides of the camera) since the early 1980s in an attempt to outline (new) cartographies of Maghrebi-French filmmaking.

Will Higbee is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and co-director of CRIFS (Centre for Research into Film Studies) at the University of Exeter (UK). He has published a number of articles on contemporary French cinema, in particular Maghrebi-French (beur) and banlieue filmmaking. He has recently published a monograph on Mathieu Kassovitz (MUP, 2006) and is currently working on research related to national, transnational and ‘transvergent’ cinemas, using as a case study the films of Algerian émigré directors in France.

‘Screening the Algerian War in Maghrebi-French Filmmaking’
Sylvie Durmelat, Georgetown University

This paper looks at various Maghrebi-French films from the 1980s and the 1990s in the light of their references to/representations of the Algerian war, or lack thereof. Most of these films focus on the migratory experience, on the settlement in France of North African families, and on the coming-of-age stories of their children, from shantytowns to housing projects. A few films foreground the Algerian war, but most of them hint at it in a subtle, understated way, as if in passing. However as filmmakers have turned from writing the autobiography of their own generation to exploring the genealogy of their parents’ generation (in the late 1990s), the emphasis on the war has become more deliberate and common place. This paper examines the placement, frequency, nature and importance of such references to delineate the politics and aesthetics of memory that emerge from these films, their potential impact on our understanding of the war and finally the role they play in the contemporary imagination of a conflicted Franco-Algerian past and future. My thesis is that such images contribute to a purposeful carving out of a legitimate space for the Maghrebi-French within French national history, as testified by the way the recent popular and critical box office success, Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006), builds on these films to address past relations between France and Algeria.

‘Auteur Cinema and the Politics of Absorption: Beur Cinema and the 2005 Riots’
Peter J. Bloom, University of California, Santa Barbara

In the 1954 publication, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” François Truffaut privileged the role of the film director as an artist who functions as a conduit of the French literary imagination. The “politique des auteurs” as it became known was not only influential in rediscovering French Poetic Realism and European filmmakers after World War II, but established a political foundation for French filmmaking, and the identity of French filmmakers within the context of a cinema of quality. This paper seeks to examine the significance of this tradition in relation to multiple representations of French banlieue culture, asking how contemporary beur filmmakers (such as Rachid Bouchareb, Malik Chibane, and Yasmina Benguigui) take up this function within a contemporary political subculture of French film production that simultaneously privileges and ghettoizes difference through the rhetoric of universalism.  I examine how French film policy has functioned as a self-conscious marketing strategy used to promote the prestige of France abroad, privileging a certain vision of French national identity that is used to manage a deeper routed colonial crisis of rights and representation.  Finally, this paper addresses how the November 2005 riots functioned as an international media spectacle challenging the context for a politically engaged auteur cinema by pointing to a French human geography of social and racial exclusion visible abroad.

Peter J. Bloom is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His book French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in March 2008.
See: http://www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/people/professors/bloom/index.html

Sat, November 10, 5:00-6:30 P.M.

Cultural Identities, Tradition and Integration
Vinay Swamy, Patricia Geesey, Michel Cadé; moderated by Robert Stam

‘Evolving Tradition, Evolving Identities: Malik Chibane's Urban Trilogy’
Vinay Swamy, Vassar College

This paper foregrounds Malik Chibane's La Trilogie urbaine, comprising of three films - Hexagone (1994), Douce France (1995) and Voisins, voisines (2005) - to consider how, in the eyes of this cineaste, beur and banlieue life has evolved from the mid 1990s through the turn of the millennium.  In presenting teenagers, young adults, parents, as well as retirees in the three films, Chibane not only emphasizes the particular issues faced by his marginalized protagonists at each stage of life, but he also gives us an inroad into understanding the changing nature of tradition (be they French, Maghrebi, or other) and its intimate relation with the politics of identity formation in suburban locales.
In particular, focusing on the latest film, Voisins, voisines, and the way in which it integrates hip-hop culture with its understanding of "Frenchness", this paper will debate the ways in which, while the Republican ideal of integration remains at the heart of Chibane's project, his films nevertheless attempt to allow for ethnic, class and cultural difference as inevitable and even necessary manifestations of a healthy Republic.  In so doing, the paper will suggest that Chibane's project straddles the so-called communitarian/Republican divide that has been the subject of much debate in contemporary France.

Vinay Swamy is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College, NY, where he teaches contemporary Francophone literature and film.
He has published articles on postcolonial English and Francophone (including Maghrebi-French) novels and films, and is at present working on a book length study tentatively entitled 'Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Resistance in Postcolonial Metropolitan French Novels and Films'.

 ‘A Space of Their Own? Women in Maghrebi-French Filmmaking’
Patricia Geesey, University of North Florida

This paper will analyze how space is constructed and occupied by women protagonists in films that depict the Maghrebi-French community, focusing especially on women in public and private spaces. The films to be examined in this light include: Malik Chibane's Douce France (1995), Zaïda Gorab-Volta's Souviens-toi de moi (1996), Yamina Benguigui's Inch'Allah Dimanche (2001), and Abdellatif Kechiche's L'Esquive (2003).

Patricia Geesey is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Florida. She has published articles on Maghrebi literature and cinema, and North African immigration in France, and is currently preparing a translation of Mouloud Feraoun's La terre et le sang. 

‘Hidden Islam: The Role of Religion in Beur and Banlieue Cinema’
Michel Cadé, University of Perpignan

French cinema has rarely deigned to represent the Muslim religion on screen.  One might think that beur and banlieue cinema, the directors of which are often of Maghrebi descent, as are its principal protagonists, might have been tempted to remedy this deficit.  Surprisingly, though, the near invisibility of Islam remains the norm, despite the hopes raised by Medhi Charef’s founding film, Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (1985).  If some signs of adherence to Islam are briefly visible – the gesture of praying, prohibited foods – most of these films generally ignore its spiritual reality; instead they are dominated by a discourse of integration which tends to erase the characteristics of a significant part of the French population. Paradoxically, directors who choose screenplays based on the geographical perspective of a return to the homeland, or on Muslims who are not of Maghrebi origin, provide a particular space for the representation of Islam. It is as though the desire to integrate the children and grandchildren of Maghrebi immigrants has as its corollary, in this strand of French filmmaking, the distancing of the Muslim religion.

Michel Cadé is Pro Vice Chancellor of Perpignan University, where he is also Professor of Contemporary History, and President of the Jean Vigo Institute, the Euroregional Cinémathèque responsible for the festival of film history and criticism Confrontations. His research focuses on cinema and society, particularly the representation of class and immigration in French cinema, and he has written widely on these and other topics. His publications include L’Histoire de France au cinéma (with Marcel Oms and Pierre Guibert) and L’Ecran bleu, a study of the working class in French cinema.