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Debates about (and resistances to) France's changing identity as a plural, multi-ethnic society are thus at the forefront of public preoccupations. This book aims to assess the ways in which filmmaking in France might contribute to such debates by foregrounding the voices and subjectivities of ethnic others and thereby reframing the way in which difference is conceptualized. The core focus is the appearance and after-effects of two related phenomena in the history of French cinema, cinéma beur and cinéma de banlieue. The book traces the history of beur filmmaking practices from the margins to the mainstream, from low-budget autobiographically inspired features to commercial filmmaking, and assesses their effectiveness in addressing questions of identity and difference. It attempts to gauge the significance of place in the construction of identity through an analysis of films set in the multi-ethnic banlieue. The book also assesses the extent to which the inscription of displacement and identity in films by emigre Algerian filmmakers overlaps with or differentiates itself from that found in beur cinema. For filmmakers of Maghrebi descent, filmmaking is more than just a question of representation, it is also a way of negotiating their own position within French society. Bensalah's Le Raïd demonstrates how the themes of beur filmmaking can be recuperated by beur filmmakers as well as by white filmmakers. Ameur-Zaifmeche's difficulties in making Wesh wesh illustrate how beur filmmaking may still take place in the interstices of the French film industry.
. In 1993, Susan Hayward wondered if beur cinema would get recuperated, be returned to the outer margins or sustain its visibility on the periphery (Hayward 1993 : 288). Ten years later, the diversity of beur filmmaking testifies to each of these possibilities. Bensalah’s Le Raïd demonstrates how the themes of beur filmmaking can be recuperated by beur filmmakers as well as by white filmmakers (as in the Taxi trilogy), while Ameur
based), Rachida Krim (a fine artist) and Abdel Kechiche (an actor). Others obtained their first chance through co-directing, Kamel Saleh with well-known rap star Akhenaton, comedian Smaïn with white filmmaker Jean-Marc Longwal, and actress and screenwriter Zakia Bouchaala (formerly Zakia Tahiri) with husband Ahmed Bouchaala. Thus directors of Maghrebi origin operate within a range of filmmaking practices. For the most part, however, they are confined to
, not just in terms of white filmmakers but also Black filmmakers. JB: What would you say that it is that Black filmmakers today are facing? KO: The possibilities of being able to push the boundaries is limited in many respects by self-censorship. Think about Kara Walker as a Black artist; to push the boundaries that
see, the lucky thing with me in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially because of that whole movement, the radical movement [which encompassed the British Black Power movement], there were white film-makers who I had [previously] worked with, who were supporting the type of film that I was making. So when I made Pressure they came and they said, ‘listen, we will help you. We know that you do not have the kind of budget that you will need, so we will come in and help you’. And they would give me a certain amount of time […] a week for free working [for me]. 30
American dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell, in Twenty Looks Or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church , first performed in 2010, enacts a radical juxtaposition in his rewriting ‘the minimalism and neutrality of postmodern dance with a new set of signs.’ 35 The white filmmaker Jennie Livingston, with her 1991 documentary film Paris Is Burning , introduced the underground ball culture of
African Americans that were ‘presented everywhere’. 15 As Allyson Nadia Field observes in her discussion of ‘uplift cinema’, an African American cinema of self-representation and self-reliance, ‘the goal was not to rely on white filmmakers to change their characterisation of Black people but to provide a model for Black filmmakers – an emerging Black filmmaking practice – that would avoid the
story arc that most films feel they need: in other words, some of the explanation for the drastic pruning of characters relates to the change of medium rather than the adaptation by a white film-maker of a black novelist’s work. While it might seem harder to explain, the decision to organise the film around the perspective of the white characters can best be seen as a redirection, not a dissolution, of critique. We know that the project began with the director’s unease at his position as a visitor to a damaged, impoverished country. The film borrows Laferrière