Abstract
The long, rich history of Francophone cinematic culture has been largely absent from the pages of French Historical Studies. The current issue offers a corrective by initiating dialogue between historians and film studies specialists, and this introduction lays a groundwork by briefly sketching intellectual and cultural contexts for the articles that follow. Brett Bowles, Christian Delage, and Thibault Guichard examine films that recover voices silenced by abuses of state power or antistate terror, adding to existing work on how visual media preserves evidence of violence and so broadening our understanding of how history is constituted. Vanessa Brutsche engages a rich literature on how cinematic fictions represent the past with an article that explains how two popular films of the 1970s married historical “truths” with contemporary cultural referents to reappraise the French past and challenge illusions of progress. Kamel Ben Ouanès and Patricia Caillé’s overview of Tunisian cinema explores its complex relationship to state, civil society, and an international “Third Cinema” while reminding us how much Francophone cinema has become transnational in contexts of production and subject matter alike.
French Historical Studies n'a quasiment jamais accueilli dans ses pages la longue et riche histoire de la culture francophone du cinéma. Le numéro actuel tente de remédier à ce manque en amorçant un dialogue entre les historiens et les spécialistes des études cinématographiques. L'introduction en dessine la base : elle situe brièvement les articles qui suivent dans leur contexte intellectuel et culturel. Brett Bowles, Christian Delage et Thibault Guichard examinent des films qui redonnent voix à ceux que les abus du pouvoir d’état ou de la terreur anti‐état ont réduits au silence. Ce faisant, ils contribuent aux travaux qui examinent la façon dont les médias visuels préservent les marques de la violence, élargissant par là‐même notre compréhension de comment l'histoire se constitue. Vanessa Brutsche, quant à elle, s'appuie sur une littérature riche, spécialisée dans la façon dont les films de fiction représentent le passé ; sa contribution explique comment deux films populaires des années 1970 ont lié des « vérités » historiques à des références culturelles contemporaines pour réexaminer le passé français et débouter les illusions du progrès. Enfin, dans leur panorama du cinéma tunisien Kamel Ben Ouanès et Patricia Caillé explorent la relation du cinéma à l’état, à la société civile et au « Tiers Cinéma » international tout en nous rappelant à quel point le cinéma francophone est devenu transnational dans ses modes de production et dans les sujets qu'il traite.
Historicizing Film
Motion pictures were born in France with a public screening by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895. That film and the many Lumière productions that followed have rightly been characterized as the world's first documentaries.1 In thirty‐eight seconds La sortie de l'usine Lumière captures social hierarchy, material culture, and gender within a dense crowd of men and women leaving work. The figures move with different degrees of haste—most are on foot, a few possess bicycles—and are dressed with different degrees of refinement: some are bareheaded and others in hats, women in plain dresses walk alongside those wearing frocks adorned with collars or edged bodices. A two‐horse carriage brings up the rear, the coachman dramatically cracking his whip. But carriage and coachman are not the only elements of mise‐en‐scène in this now iconic short film. The Lumières had asked workers to return to the factory after Sunday Mass to shoot a third version of this scene. Hence, even in such an early “documentary,” this bit of “reality” had already been organized by the pioneers whose fixed, cumbersome camera carefully framed an event in which everyone appeared in their Sunday best. From the very start, the documenting function of the cinema included some minimal preparation, a hint of rehearsal.
If the Lumières were the first documentarians, other French men and women vastly enriched our notion of what filmed fictions might do. The former magician Georges Méliès surpassed the Lumières’ use of a single camera to capture events with limited staging by using multiple cameras and exploiting stop‐action photography, repeated exposures, and hand‐painted film to craft fantastic scenes from which figures vanish in the blink of an eye or detached heads speak calmly to nearby bodies.2 Alice Guy Blaché was a pioneer of film narrative who experimented with camera positioning, lighting, set design, and performative styles to tell increasingly complex stories. Initially employed by Gaumont, Guy Blaché helped train a generation of French filmmakers before moving to New York, where she founded Solax, a sizable studio and production company.3 Germaine Dulac created D. H. Films, a company that allowed her to explore form and aesthetics as she developed a presurrealist cinema, experimenting with a medium she saw not as entertainment but as “le septième art.”4
In addition to playing singular roles in shaping early motion picture production, French men and women nourished a dynamic film culture independent of Hollywood in other ways. They were instrumental in developing audiences of cinephiles by creating ciné‐clubs where film form and politics were discussed, not only in France but in French and Belgian colonies. Although indigenous African filmmaking was inhibited by the politics of the occupier, epitomized by the 1934 Laval Decree, the postcolonial era saw the birth of a dynamic African cinema in the former French colonies, whose output greatly surpassed that of other regions of the continent.5
Given all this cinematic activity in French and Francophone cultures, it is surprising that films and filmmaking have not been more visible in French Historical Studies. Since the journal's founding in 1958, it has published only eleven research articles on the subject.6 This issue is our attempt to rectify that state of affairs by opening what we hope will be a continuing dialogue between historians and film studies specialists in French Historical Studies. Carol Harrison's visionary proposal for this issue, and her welcome to two distinct approaches to film, history, and narrative, made us fully aware of how convergent our methodologies and scholarship models can be. So we begin with a very partial survey of the rich work being produced at the intersection of film and history, using as our organizing principle themes touched on by the articles that follow. We collaborated on this overview, and, to highlight how our disciplinary perspectives are both singular and complementary, we identify individual discussions of theme (Flo Martin is FM; Laura Mason is LM) in the pages that follow.
Filming History
As no few scholars have demonstrated, dialogues between film and history are almost as old as the medium itself. Film manifestos punctuate the history of film worldwide, from the silent era in the USSR (Sound and Image [1928], by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Aleksandrov) to postwar France (A Certain Tendency in French Cinema [1954], by Truffaut), postcolonial Latin America (Towards a Third Cinema [1970], by Solanas and Getino), and late twentieth‐century Denmark (Dogme 95 Manifesto [1995], by Von Trier and Vinterberg).7 Each time, the manifesto took stock of advances in cinema—whether aesthetic, political, social, or cultural—and signaled a new direction, describing the ability of film to intervene in the polis while documenting the state of the society from which the manifesto emanated.
Just as the authors of film manifestos refracted history through the lens of cinema, so historian Marc Ferro refracted cinema through the lens of history in a manifesto of his own. Writing in 1968, Ferro charged that the “cult” of written documents had so petrified historians that they disregarded film, “an incalculably rich source of information . . . [that] not only . . . illustrates known events . . . [but] adds a new dimension to knowledge of the past.”8 Ferro urged historians and archivists to more comprehensively engage this astonishing medium. He called for enhanced inventories and better preservation of available riches, imagining two ways by which motion pictures could contribute to historical scholarship: “raw footage” (documents bruts) and newsreels provided what he called “a plain representation of living society,” while genre films—whether documentary, fiction, or animation—promised to illuminate mentalités.9
In the half century since Ferro published, librarians and archivists have multiplied their efforts to inventory the cinematographic riches of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, and the French state created the dépôt légal for cinematographic works that he envisioned.10 Much has occurred that Ferro did not foresee. The means to preserve and restore film have grown by leaps and bounds, making available cinematic treasures from around the globe that we once believed lost forever.11 The digital disruption that occurred in the late 1990s further enhanced the part that film plays in the world. VHS tapes, DVDs, and online streaming have created larger audiences and extended viewers' geographic and temporal reach, taking classic and global films from ciné‐clubs, revival houses, and archives to living rooms and computer screens. The steady proliferation of lighter, cheaper cameras and more efficient sound recorders has widened the class of professional filmmakers, while the prevalence of video‐recording phones has made us all potential documentarians able to preserve events on the fly.12 There is now so much cinematic evidence of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries that it is difficult to imagine writing histories of the modern era without this crucial documentation.
Documenting History in the Making
Historians and film studies scholars, including Ferro himself, have diversified the approaches he outlined in 1968. Two contributions to this special issue use the sort of documentary footage he named to illuminate how filmed evidence helps us understand distinct acts of terrorism, one committed by the French state and another by independent militants. In so doing, the authors of these articles remind us, among other things, that even the rudest film clips do far more than provide “a plain representation of living society.”
Brett Bowles has, with painstaking labor, defined an audiovisual archive of the detention and massacre of hundreds of peaceful protestors by Paris police on October 17, 1962. That archive provides critical visual evidence to complement and enhance the firsthand accounts and documentary histories that we already possess about these events. Bowles also explains why this visual evidence was so long suppressed, how it came to be preserved, and, critically, how it was manipulated in the era's magazines, newspapers, and television broadcasts to affirm the deceptive accounts of state actors.
Christian Delage and Thibault Guichard take as their subject the role played by moving pictures in the trial for the November 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris. Like Bowles, Delage and Guichard are interested in the relationship between visual and verbal evidence. However, their concern with the administration of justice takes them onto different terrain to analyze how moving pictures were used in the courtroom to navigate a multitude of legal needs. Because the justices were determined to preserve a filmed record of the trial, they designed practices to capture the proceedings in a way that upheld, as much as possible, traditional courtroom dynamics. Because prosecutors possessed filmed evidence, the court designed ways to make use of it that would respect the condition of plaintiffs still suffering from the trauma of their experience and guard against defendants' efforts to use images as propaganda.
(FM) Delage and Guichard explain how media in the V13 case reversed trials' usual legal dichotomy by making visible not the accused, who were off‐screen because they blew themselves up or refused to participate in the legal play enacted around them, but the surviving victims—injured or otherwise traumatized survivors and their families—and, through them, victims rendered voiceless by death. This was so, in part, because the mise‐en‐scène was governed by a judicial system determined to approximate impartiality as closely as possible. As Delage and Guichard chronicle, every shot in this narrative was carefully scripted, even those of the 115 voiceless people killed on November 13, 2015, whose photographs were presented to the court by their loved ones.
The dichotomy absence/presence blurs in the V13 trial as, the authors show, audiovisual media gave voice to the voiceless. Still photographs appeared on film while testimony from members of families of the silenced ones was recorded. This strategy framed the voicelessness of the deceased, frozen in photographs, even as it gave them voice through family members who ventriloquized, eulogized, and grieved. Reimagining the voiceless in this particular audiovisual text operates a vertiginous mise en abyme of absence/presence that extends beyond the limits of the trial itself to intervene in history and shape the archive. This, of course, raises the question of what happens when archival material is inaccessible, when even still photographs of an event are not to be found.
Brett Bowles touches on these issues in “Fragmentary, Censored, Indispensable: The Audiovisual Archive of October 17, 1961” as he fashions an archive from long‐hidden visual fragments that he brings to light. In his case, to reimagine the archive means to remember it: to (re)collect its scattered elements and reattach its members into a cohesive body. He confronts two silences: that of the Algerians killed by Maurice Papon's police and that of the media, which enforced a forty‐year “blackout.” Hence Bowles's suturing together of films of the time, forty years after their making, offers access to a richly nuanced audiovisual archive that is distinct from either the anarchive or the state archive, the latter of which, no matter how significant its opening, reproduces from on high an official view that obliterates Algerian victims' individuality.13
(LM) The reimagining of archival evidence described by Bowles and by Delage and Guichard may be situated within intersecting literatures they cite on the relationship of cinema to histories of justice, state crimes, and postcolonialism. Their texts may also be situated within the rich body of cinematic works that document events which might otherwise have vanished because their extraordinary violence hobbles our understanding or because state actors tried to obscure the crimes against humanity for which they were responsible. As filmmakers find unusual ways to recover and safeguard traumatic or besieged memory, their films broaden our notion of what history is.
The work of Cambodian‐born director Rithy Panh offers but one example. Panh was eleven when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge and his family was deported to a rural labor camp, where his father, mother, sisters, and nephews died. At the age of fourteen, he escaped to Thailand and eventually made his way to France, where he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques.14 Since 1989 Panh has devoted his formidable filmmaking skills to documenting the Khmer Rouge reign of terror and its aftermath.
S‐21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) foregrounds perpetrators of mass violence by returning ten men to the interrogation center of Tuol Sleng where, as guards, they participated in the torture and execution of as many as seventeen thousand people. As Panh runs his camera from a considered distance, the men reenact labor they performed more than two decades earlier. They mimic locking and unlocking doors, taking prisoners into cells and chaining them up, distributing water, demanding silence, and typing confessions. What might, in another context, appear to be staged performances are here something else entirely: bodily expressions of traumatic memories. As Deidre Boyle explains, a person “exposed to trauma . . . experiences ‘speechless terror’ that cannot be readily organized on a linguistic level. Failure to arrange memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized . . . as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”15 Such bodily expressions of past acts do not merely instruct audiences but, crucially, become evidence that refutes official claims of innocence and breaks silences that traumatize survivors by denying their experience.
Ten years later Panh's astonishing Missing Picture (2013) turned the camera on those who suffered, refracting the experience of millions of Cambodians through Panh's account of his years under the Khmer Rouge. With tiny, painted clay figures, carefully composed dioramas, and voice‐over by an actor speaking in the first person as Panh, the film briefly recalls life in prewar Phnom Penh and then details the suffering that followed Pol Pot's seizure of power. This intimate, stylized representation recalls a world whose full contours had been obscured for decades, and Panh's testimony gains resonance from his unusual method, the intimacy of which brings viewers closer to the past even as its artificiality suggests our distance.
Rithy Panh's films, and those of others who use motion pictures to chronicle state crimes and genocidal violence, are not simply primary sources that serve the work of professional historians.16 They are a form of history unto themselves.17 They may meet the needs of international tribunals pursuing human rights violations or reconciliation commissions restoring domestic peace or historians piecing together a larger picture, but they also stand alone as singular means of preserving the past. For, as Peter Goodrich has argued, “an image is greater than an oration” because of the sheer “force of the visual.” “Color . . . can bear its own meaning, subvert appearances, displace perception by invoking affects, references, and associative chains that were not present in the figures, symbols, mottos, and words of the painting. . . . Music . . . , camera angles, tracking shots, montages, cut‐aways, flashbacks, and animatrix do unique work,” as do somatic expressions of memory, like those in S‐21. Through such means, filmmakers exploit motion pictures' capacity to convey experience that eludes words.18
Filming Historical Fiction
(LM) Fictions about the past take historians in different directions. Although fiction films do not make the same claims to authenticity as raw footage, formal documentaries, or essay films, they play a critical role in shaping popular memory because they so often attract large audiences.
Natalie Zemon Davis initiated a new sort of conversation about these sorts of films with a 1987 article that looked well beyond whether historical fictions had gotten their facts straight. The challenge was not to re‐create the past, she argued, but to “tell about it” in ways that evoke the historians' craft and strive for “authenticity” rather than “truth.” Setting aside the usual markers of verisimilitude—an era's clothing, furnishings, or buildings; color, design, and mise‐en‐scène that mimic period paintings or photographs—Davis explained how the directors of three classic films achieved authenticity by using light and space to evoke the particularity of the past, eliciting performances that captured social or gendered tensions, and integrating plot points that echoed prejudices or belief systems of the moment depicted.19 Davis's essay was as important as Ferro's in identifying new ways of thinking about relationships between film and history. If, at that time, she continued to identify academic history as a normative measure by which other representations of the past should be judged, by century's turn she had joined the American historian Robert Rosenstone in taking cinematic fictions more fully on their own terms to ask how they challenge written histories and invent new means of representing the past.20
It is perhaps unsurprising that Rosenstone led the charge in formulating radically new ways of thinking about fiction films and history, for he had already explored new kinds of historical writing and been involved in the making of Warren Beatty's blockbuster Reds. Rosenstone insists that we accept film as unique: “It is impossible to judge history on film solely by the standards of written history, for each medium has its own kind of necessarily fictive elements.”21 He makes his case using independent films that challenge mainstream representations of the past by rejecting narratives of progress, subordinating individual to collective experience, and suggesting the possibility of alternate outcomes. At the same time, Rosenstone highlights how filmmakers exploit possibilities unavailable to authors of written texts. Sound and vision impart immersive vividness; contemporary actors offer new ways to think about historical figures; plots collapse together categories that are usually broken out analytically in written texts, permitting characters to experience the effects of politics, culture, race, class, and gender simultaneously, much as they are lived. Perhaps most important, the movies Rosenstone admires insist that long‐gone events matter very much, a sentiment he finds lacking in too much academic history. Rather than assessing how well historical films—independent or mainstream—hew to or depart from textual norms, Rosenstone concludes, historians should judge them on their own terms and learn from them.
Antoine De Baecque goes farther still, arguing that almost from the moment of invention, cinema moved in parallel with written history because both forms of expression confront the difficult problem of conjuring lived experience as realistically as possible. Thus De Baecque argues in tandem with Gilles Deleuze that cinema and history must “reach . . . out to . . . [one an]other . . . but [each] on its own terms and for its own needs.”22 To make that case, De Baecque ranges widely. He analyzes films that reconstitute the past—often in wildly idiosyncratic ways—to speak to their director's present. He also considers movies that do not necessarily depict history but into which history “erupts,” enabling filmmakers to limn the state of their nation or their times. Cinema can give form to history, he concludes, “because it is able to display the reality of a time by arranging fragments of it according to an original organization: mise‐en‐scène. . . . In this way . . . cinema makes history visible.”23 Like Davis and Rosenstone—indeed, more forcefully still because of his twinned identities as film scholar and historian—De Baecque insists that we treat film form and content with equal seriousness to make clear the very particular ways by which motion pictures depict the past.
Vanessa Brutsche's “Retro Visions: Scandalous Politics in Resnais's Stavisky (1974) and Chabrol's Violette Nozière (1978)” emerges from this body of scholarship, for she deftly combines formal analysis of mise‐en‐scène in two 1970 “mode retro” films about 1930s political scandals with a historical account of how the movies were received. Using such methods, she explains why the 1930s became so important to filmmakers, critics, and audiences at the the end of the Trente Glorieuses and how arguments about representations of scandals past illuminate particular ways of thinking about history.
(FM) Both Stavisky and Violette Nozière were sufficiently distant in time from their audiences to either reconfigure or create anew viewers' popular memories of the events depicted. In other words, these historical films targeted not historians, who knew the intricate workings of events on which the fictional narrative is based, but audiences largely unaware of past conditions and circumstances. The didactic dimension of such films depends on their mise‐en‐scène (e.g., the reconstitution of historically accurate sets, costumes, language) and their effect on the viewer (sustained by point of view, composition of shots, montage, etc.). Their historicity may be defined as transvergent: they follow a regime of historical “truths,” diverging to create specific affects for a contemporary audience only to converge once again with a more factual past. This notion of transvergence, which I borrow from Marcos Novak, is useful to tease out how a historical fiction documents and dynamically orients events on screen.24 Viewers, whose time—and possibly location—differs from those of the events represented, sit in front of screens with their own contemporary cultural references and values—their “horizon of expectations,” to borrow Hans Robert Jauss's formulation for literature—that shape how they attribute meaning to the filmic narrative.25
Turning to her films' reception, Brutsche distinguishes not just the intended emotional truth the fiction directors elicited but the relevance of that truth to contemporary issues.26 Chabrol's Violette Nozière, about the trial of a young woman accused of parricide, touched on gender issues that were front and center in the 1970s, in part because of the 1972 Bobigny abortion trial, which led to the 1975 Loi Veil legalizing contraception and abortion in France. Violette Nozière turned up the volume on an active debate about women's rights by inviting viewers to reappraise “past” (and still prevailing) views of women and patriarchy through its account of the 1930s. Alain Resnais's Stavisky operated a close‐up on French antisemitism and xenophobia before the Nazi occupation to debunk the myth embedded in a post‐’68 nostalgia for “the good old days.” As Brutsche argues, this mise‐en‐scène of a flawed national narrative agitated audiences and critics by challenging illusions of “progress.”
Casting Isabelle Huppert in the role of the protagonist also participated in this reappraisal, as the twentieth‐century French cinema star both embodied historical character Violette and alluded to previous films in which she played ambiguous (and sometimes perverse), victimized women.27 As Jean‐Louis Comolli has argued, a recognizable actor who plays a historical character encourages a double‐edged reception. In this case, Huppert's star body “blurs” that of Violette Nozière: it contains a “ghost” of the represented woman, blurring 1930s and present through the actress's performance.28 A similar phenomenon occurs with Jean‐Paul Belmondo as Stavisky in Resnais's film. Belmondo (who also produced the film) brought the aura of his previous role as a 1930s mobster in La scoumoune (José Giovanni, 1972), so when he appeared on screen in Stavisky, he was recognizable as a 1930s character whose narrative has become much more complicated because of French antisemitism and xenophobia.
Writing/Righting a History of a Postcolonial National Film: Tunisia as a Case Study
(FM) Kamel Ben Ouanès and Patricia Caillé’s careful search for a history of Tunisian cinema reframes how one can reimagine a distinct archive of national production in the postcolonial nation. Sifting through Francophone texts that do not readily circulate outside Tunisia, the authors retrace the circuitous postcolonial route of what used to be called a “cinema of small nations,” following its evolution from the 1960s to the present.29 The “cinema of small nations” assumed a complex relationship with the state's filmic discourse that supported the new nation but retained political independence and addressed both domestic and diasporic audiences. Yet, as Andrea Khalil pointed out, the cinema of the Maghreb has never been national only: “Its relation to an ‘outside’ . . . both frees and restricts the production of North African cinema.”30 This dynamic rapport to the “outside” has expanded and taken many forms over the past sixty years, such as attracting production funds, competing with the first (Hollywood) and second (European) cinema in “A” festivals, and searching for an audience beyond borders and beyond the diaspora abroad. Furthermore, Ben Ouanès and Caillé list contributors to the history of Tunisian cinema who are theoreticians (critics and academics such as Tahar Chikhaoui, Sonia Chamkhi, or Ben Ouanès who also produce and direct films) and practitioners (festival organizers like Tahar Chériaa, filmmakers like Férid Boughédir, heads of amateur film federations like Naceur Sardi), each of whom provides a different “outside” with or against which Tunisian film is created.
At the time of the Third Cinema manifesto, Tahar Chériaa, while endorsing the anti‐imperialist, socialist views of Octavio Getino and Fernando A. Solanas, refused to join the nonaligned countries and opted to define Tunisian cinema as Arab and African. The creator of the first Arabo‐African film festival (and the oldest film festival on the African continent), the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, in 1966, he also published an essay in the form of a guide to the future of Arab and African cinema, which declared the need for each national cinema to receive state financial support and further instructed: “Your cinema will be activist, will be first and foremost a cultural act, and will have a social and political value, or it will not exist.”31 (The resulting tension in a country ruled by an increasingly authoritarian government was best illustrated by the imprisonment of director Nouri Bouzid in the 1980s.) Chériaa's articulation of Tunisian cinema within a larger Arabo‐African film practice was mirrored by Férid Boughédir's historical documentaries, Caméra d'Afrique (1983—released in the United States in 2021 under the title Twenty Years of African Cinema) and Caméra arabe (1987). In their representation of the development of cinema on the African continent and in the Arab world, these two films focus on the pan‐Arabic and pan‐African dimensions of the emerging cinema of both regions. They also emphasize the tools and the discourse needed to resist the neocolonial form of financial dependency on France that soon took over diasporic and Franco‐Tunisian productions.
Other Tunisian filmmakers also resisted the call for Third Cinema, from the very first generation of directors trained in Paris, Łódź, or Prague until today. Unlike Getino and Solanas, who considered it bourgeois (as part of Second Cinema), these filmmakers believed auteur cinema had a place in their filmic patrimony, especially given the tradition of cinephilia in Tunisia that started in colonial and postcolonial ciné‐clubs.32 This was especially crucial in the Bourguiba and Ben Ali years.33 The history of Tunisian cinema is linked to yet another global “outside” phenomenon: the digital disruption associated with satellite dishes and illegal DVDs, TV and computer screens, and, finally, smartphones. Tightly connected with the politics of the country (pioneer filmmaker Selma Baccar was even elected to the postrevolutionary National Assembly that wrote the new Constitution), Tunisian cinema acquired new institutions (e.g., schools, theaters, a national cinema center) and became even more professional after the 2011 Revolution.
One could also trace with Will Higbee the trajectory of Tunisian cinema from national to “accented” diasporic cinema (as Hamid Naficy would call it)34 and from French coproductions to other forms of collaborations and coproductions that took distance from France to inscribe themselves in a “cinéma‐monde.”35 Today Tunisian cinema targets transnational themes and boasts transnational funding, producers, and creative and technical teams.36 For example, Kaouther Ben Hania's latest film, The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), coproduced by Tunisia, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Turkey, and Cyprus, features a Syrian protagonist at the intersection of two worlds in 2011: the world of refugees and the rarefied sphere of contemporary art. However, for one highly successful filmmaker like Kaouther Ben Hania, how many Tunisian filmmakers find themselves on the brink of disaster, given the present state of their country's economy?
Ben Ouanès and Caillé’s account of a Tunisian film history that still needs to be written is deployed in call‐and‐response between film and the recent history of the nation. It shows that, from the politically active, amateur cinema of cinephilic clubs at the time of independence to the films by directors trained abroad that critique the power in place (Nouri Bouzid, Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, Moufida Tlatli) to postrevolutionary documentaries and fictions directed by filmmakers trained in Tunisia and abroad (Leyla Bouzid, Kaouther Ben Hania, Alaeddine Slim), Tunisian cinema has heeded Chériaa's call to be activist or, as Nouri Bouzid called it, un cinéma d'intervention, that is, a body of work that sustains civil society and resists political pressures. In that, Ben Ouanès and Caillé’s piece offers an intriguing metacinema and metahistory sidebar account of contemporary Tunisian history in the slightly deforming mirror of the cinematic screen.
(LM) Ben Ouanès and Caillé’s account of a Tunisian cinema that developed in dialogue with cinemas beyond its borders while answering local needs may be positioned alongside scholarship that is identifying how French cinema is negotiating its evolving place in the world. Whereas film scholars once described a distinctively metropolitan and almost exclusively white French cinema based on shared notions of aesthetics, genre, and auteurship, a growing number have begun to highlight the multicultural and transnational dimensions of French filmmaking.
A sizable cohort has challenged received notions of French film as narrowly national and elitist, rigidly protected, and under seemingly perpetual threat from Hollywood by studying production, distribution, and trade regulation. Vanessa Schwartz's It's So French: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (2007) looks back to the mid‐twentieth century to make a case for the emergence of a transatlantic cinema culture after World War II. Forged by trade agreements and international productions, nourished by popular press and the film festival at Cannes, embodied by Brigitte Bardot and Gene Kelly, this transatlantic culture marketed notions of Frenchness that shaped identity and imagination in France and the United States alike. The new global culture did not, however, “replace” national culture, she concludes, but became “an idiom through which an additional identity formed.”37
Others locate the global or transnational dimensions of French film culture in more recent trends. Anne Jäckel argues that state regulation and funding initiatives in the late twentieth century imparted flexibility by fostering international coproductions and “large‐budget pictures” able to compete with American blockbusters while protecting and subsidizing French and foreign auteur films. In sum, she concludes, “France's film policy has made a vital contribution to the production of a transnational, world cinema.”38 Graeme Hayes and Martin O'Shaughnessy are less optimistic. Their introduction to a special issue of French Politics, Culture, and Society about French cinema after GATT expresses fear that new production and distribution networks are eroding a distinctively French film culture by undermining small cinemas and making it harder for independent filmmakers to find their audiences.39
In addition to those concerned with French cinema's place on a global stage are scholars who consider how the world (or, more properly, the postcolony) inflects metropolitan film culture. In this regard, Higbee's Post‐Beur Cinema: North African Emigré and Maghrebi‐French Filmmaking in France since 2000 is exemplary. Higbee begins with a long view of how filmmakers born in the Maghreb or in France of Maghrebi parents have enriched French cinema since the 1980s. If a first wave, “beur cinema,” challenged majority white depictions of Maghrebi immigrants and their children as helpless victims or menacing criminals and a second wave, “banlieue films,” “demystif[ied] the notion of cultural difference as an insurmountable obstacle [to] integration,” filmmakers of Maghrebi origin or descent have continued to deepen their impact on French film culture since the turn of the century, resisting essentialized categories of ethnicity, space, or geography to take as given a multiethnic and multicultural metropole.40 Meanwhile, directors whom Higbee calls cinéastes de passage, that is, those who have one foot in France and the other in the Maghreb, have taken on new topics beyond either shore.41 Their narratives may be centered locally, but they also tackle the effects of globalization or make visible a broader Mediterranean context.
Two recent films—Farid Bentoumi's Rouge / Red Soil (2020) and Leyla Bouzid's Une histoire d'amour et de désir / A Tale of Love and Desire (2021)—express some of these transnational and transcultural preoccupations. Rouge, set in an isolated town far from the banlieue, is concerned with toxic waste, whistleblowing, and class. The hero (played by Zita Hanrou) is a nurse newly returned to her hometown to care for workers in the factory where her father (played by Sami Bouajila) has been a valued employee for decades. That both are of Maghrebi descent is affirmed but far from being the most important point in a movie focused on environmental hazards, corporate malfeasance, and the bitter choices imposed by threats of unemployment. Une histoire d'amour offers an equally complex portrait of ethnically Maghrebi characters and the world they inhabit. Directed by the Tunisian Bouzid and funded by French state organizations and independent production companies, the film frustrates stereotypes at every turn. Ahmed (Sami Outalbali) is French of Algerian descent, well educated but sexually conservative, and firmly rooted in the metropole. Indeed, we are reminded several times that he does not speak Arabic. Farah (played by Zbeida Belhajamor) is the immigrant, recently arrived from Tunisia, but also the more progressive figure: confident, cosmopolitan, and sexually experienced. The film leaves open the question of whether these two differ about sex and gender because of national origin or class or personality. The setting, too, violates our expectations: Ahmed lives in the banlieue but attends the Sorbonne, rather than a suburban university, and returns home not to an ill‐kept, graffitied neighborhood like those too often rendered on screen but a quartier of gleaming white buildings that abut a spacious lawn. In the end, both movies highlight how young directors are appropriating traditional aesthetics and genres to craft a broader sense of French cinema that better reflects a more expansive understanding of French society.
Conclusion
There is undeniable temerity in trying to summarize the vast interdisciplinary field of film and history in these few pages. Our hope is that this rapid survey offers those unfamiliar with the field some tantalizingly useful suggestions, and that those already familiar with film and history may recognize themselves and perhaps find something new as well. Much has been done but much remains to be done, as is suggested by the contributions that follow and their reflections on evolving historical, methodological, archival perspectives.
We would like to recall, too, that not all articles initially proposed and accepted for this issue appeared. This is overwhelmingly because of COVID. Writers fell sick, or feared falling sick, or took on exceptional care responsibilities. We are sure that many—among the published and unpublished—found their ability to write impaired by the anxiety, grief, and frustration imposed by a novel virus and, more important, by the world's failure to meet the challenges that virus raised. We do not doubt that other journals, other writers, other editors, encountered similar issues. We note this here to ensure that it will be part of the public record and to underscore our gratitude to the authors and editors who worked so steadily to produce this issue.
Now, let the conversations begin!
Notes
Dixon and Foster, Short History, 7.
Neibaur, review of Georges Méliès.
Millar, “Alice Guy”; Macmahan, Alice Guy Blaché.
Flitterman‐Lewis, To Desire Differently.
Diawara, African Cinema, chap. 3; Georg, “Entre infantilisation et répression coloniale.”
Using search terms “movies or films or motion pictures or cinema or tv or television” for French Historical Studies, we identified 14 titles, from which we excluded three short texts about using film in the classroom. By comparison, French History (founded 1987) has published 1 research article about film or television; French Politics, Culture, and Society (founded 1984) has published 32; and Modern and Contemporary France (founded 1984) is at the head of the pack, with 175. Modern and Contemporary France's especially rich content is probably linked to its self‐definition as multidisciplinary.
MacKenzie, Film Manifestos.
Ferro, “Société du XXe siècle,” 581. LM's translation.
Ferro, “Société du XXe siècle,” 581. LM's translation.
CNC Patrimoine, “Dépôt légal,” http://www.cnc-aff.fr/Internet/ARemplir/DepotLegal.aspx?Menu=MNU_ACRCHIVES_3 (accessed Oct. 8, 2022).
See, e.g., the programs of the Cinema Ritrovato festival (https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/) organized in association with the Cineteca Bologna, in turn associated with several film preservation societies. See http://fondazione.cinetecadibologna.it/en/restaurare. See also Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, supported by his World Cinema Foundation, which is responsible for restoring and rereleasing the Moroccan director Ahmed El Maânouni's documentary Transes / Trances (1981). See https://www.film-foundation.org/. Other examples include transnational researchers' grants to restore and digitize classics, such as Will Higbee and Florence Martin's UK Arts and Humanities Research Council grant to restore and digitize Farida Benlyazid's Door to the Sky (1988) and Faouzi Bensaïdi's Edge (1997), or International Film Festival crews such as Africa in Motion in Edinburgh. See https://www.africa-in-motion.org.uk/resources/africas-lost-classics/restorations/.
Sean Baker's Tangerine, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by Magnolia Pictures, is notable for being the first professional film made on an iPhone. See Erbland, “Eleven Movies Shot on iPhones.” The importance of amateurs catching events on the fly was driven home by the documenting of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis and the casual racism of L'Ile‐Saint‐Denis police, whose mockery of a suspect who had jumped into the Seine was captured on smartphones in 2020. See Pladson, “French Police Watchdog to Investigate ‘Racist’ Incident.” LM thanks Meghan Emery for bringing the latter incident to her attention.
The latter also constitutes but one episode of the troubling saga of France and former colonies with postcolonial archives; coincidentally, at the time of the writing of this introduction, French president Emmanuel Macron had just returned from a “friendly visit” to Algeria, where he promised l'ouverture complète des archives (the complete opening up of the archives) in order for both states to look at the history of the occupation from 1830 to 1962. See Le Figaro, “Macron signera samedi à Alger.”
Canet, “Filmmaker as Activist.”
Boyle, “Shattering Silence,” 100; see also Alkan, “Refiguring the Perpetrator.”
Filmmakers pursuing similar projects in other parts of the world include Claude Lanzman, Shoah (1985); Patricio Guzman's entire body of work on Chile; Leïla Kilani, Our Forbidden Places (2008); Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir (2008); and Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). See also Ten Brink and Oppenheimer, Killer Images; and Guynn, Unspeakable Histories.
De Baecque, Camera Historica.
Goodrich, “In Flagrante Depicto,” 973.
Davis, “‘Any Resemblance.’”
Davis, Slaves on Screen.
Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 36.
De Baecque, Camera Historica, 13.
De Baecque, Camera Historica, 28.
Novak, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis.”
Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.
Film history is full of such examples, to name a few: Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator (1940), Ousmane Sembène's Camp de Thiaroye / Camp of Thiaroye (1988), Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), and Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes / Days of Glory (2006).
See, e.g., Faustine et le bel été (Nina Companeez, 1972), Les valseuses (Bertrand Blier, 1974), Je suis Pierre Rivière (Christine Lipinska, 1976), and La dentellière (Claude Goretta, 1977).
Comolli, “Historical Fiction.”
Florence Martin, quoted in Hjort and Petrie, Cinema of Small Nations, 213.
Khalil, introduction, xi.
Chériaa, Ecrans d'abondance, 173. FM's translation.
Corriou, “La consommation cinématographique.”
See Krichen, Le syndrome Bourguiba.
Naficy, Accented Cinema.
Martin, “Cinéma‐Monde.”
Higbee, “Introduction.”
Schwartz, It's So French, 6. On Gene Kelly, see Bouarour, It's so queer!
Jäckel, “Inter/Nationalism of French Film Policy,” 33. See also Vanderschelden, “Strategies for a ‘Transnational’/French Popular Cinema,” which considers how the financing, production, and marketing of blockbusters allowed France to tap into global markets and compete domestically with American films.
Hayes and O'Shaughnessy, “French Cinema.” For an account of how small cinemas shaped French, specifically Parisian, film culture, see Smoodin, Paris in the Dark.
Higbee, Post‐Beur Cinema, 17.
Higbee, “Moroccan Diasporic Cinema.”