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Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s
Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s
Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s
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Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s

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Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled 'hood' film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social types in which to anchor their fictions, from bourgeois villas and bucolic riverside cafés to post-war housing estates and postmodern new towns. For the first time in English, contributors to this volume address key aspects of this long film history, marked by such towering figures as Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Jean-Luc Godard. Idyllic or menacing, expansive or claustrophobic, the suburb served divergent aesthetic and ideological programmes across the better part of a century. Themes central to French cultural modernity – class conflict, leisure, boredom and anti-authoritarianism – cut across the fifteen chapters.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 6, 2018
ISBN9781526107794
Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s

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    Screening the Paris suburbs - Manchester University Press

    List of illustrations

    Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

    1 A street urchin in La Zone: Au pays des chiffonniers (Georges Lacombe, 1928) © Florent Matic/Les Documents Cinématographiques

    2 ‘Kindly children of misery’: whistleblowing in Aubervilliers (Eli Lotar, 1945) © Fatras/Succession Jacques Prévert

    3 Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani escape Paris for a riverside tryst in Casque d’or (Jacques Becker, 1952) © STUDIOCANAL

    4 Cruising American-style in La Belle Américaine (Robert Dhéry, 1961) © LJC Editions

    5 Feuillade's Villemomble residence doubles as Lady Beltham's villa in Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913–14) © Gaumont

    6 Le Môme Réglisse and Little Jean cross the Zone in Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916–17) © Gaumont

    7 Unsettled life in the barge film L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) © Gaumont

    8 Exiting Paris by motor car in La Glace à trois faces (The Three-Sided Mirror, Jean Epstein, 1927) © La Cinémathèque française

    9 The Baron (Louis Jouvet) and thief Pépel (Jean Gabin) philosophise on the Marne in Les Bas-Fonds (The Lower Depths, Jean Renoir 1936) © Gaumont

    10 The deceptively banal filling station of La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, Jean Renoir, 1932) courtesy Éditions René Chateau

    11 Suburbia as stage set: Alexander Trauner's décors for Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, Marcel Carné, 1939) © STUDIOCANAL

    12 The company excursion to l’Isle-Adam in Au Bonheur des Dames (Julien Duvivier, 1930) courtesy Arte Editions DVD

    13 The unemployed workers’ collective makes plans in La Belle Équipe (They Were Five, Julien Duvivier, 1936), production still courtesy Bibliothèque du Film, Paris

    14 Surrealist ‘found objects’ at the city's margins in Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, Georges Franju, 1949) courtesy the Criterion Collection

    15 Liminal wastelands as projective screen: Colloque de chiens (Dog's Dialogue, Raúl Ruiz, 1977) © Filmoblic

    16 Dr Génessier's villa-cum-clinic in Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju, 1960) courtesy the Criterion Collection

    17 A bricolage of 1920s domestic modernism: the Arpel residence in Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) © Les Films de Mon Oncle - Specta Films C.E.P.E.C.

    18 The old neighbourhood holds out against the new in Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) © Les Films de Mon Oncle - Specta Films C.E.P.E.C.

    19 Barred existence: the impoverished landscape of L’Amour existe (Love Exists, Maurice Pialat, 1961) © Les Films du Jeudi

    20 Mass housing as closed horizon: L’Amour existe (Love Exists, Maurice Pialat, 1961) © Les Films du Jeudi

    21 Spools of films no longer or yet to come: Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey in Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) © Gaumont

    22 A woman's plight under neo-capitalism: Juliette (Marina Vlady) in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) © Argos Films

    23 A shadowy gangster by the tracks in Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963) © STUDIOCANAL

    24 ‘Agents’ on duty on a deserted footbridge in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) courtesy Éditions René Chateau

    25 Getaways: the transitional landscape of Un Flic (A Cop, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972) © STUDIOCANAL

    26 Looking for change: Franck (Patrick Dewaere) in Série noire (Alain Corneau, 1979) © STUDIOCANAL

    27 Sarcelles’ dehumanising geometry: Quarante mille voisins (Jacques Krier, 1960) courtesy RTF – Institut National de l’Audiovisuel

    28 Illicit loves: François (Jean-Claude Drouot) visits Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) in Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1964) @ Ciné-Tamaris

    29 Slated for renewal: Jean Gabin returns home in Le Chat (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1971) © STUDIOCANAL

    30 Muse Fiona (Bernadette Lafont) cruises the dumpsite in La Ville bidon (Jacques Baratier, 1976) all rights reserved Association Jacques Baratier

    31 Administering the future: Jean-Michel (André Dussolier) and Claudine (Anémone) in Le Couple témoin (The Model Couple, William Klein, 1978) courtesy Institut National de l’Audiovisuel

    32 Louise (Pascale Ogier) leaves the new town Marne-la-Vallée for Paris in Les Nuits de la pleine lune (Full Moon in Paris, Éric Rohmer, 1984) © Les Films du Losange

    33 Outcries and crises: Jean-Roger (François Négret) and Bruno (Vincent Gasperitsch) in De bruit et de fureur (Sound and Fury, Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988) © Les Films du Losange

    34 Sacrificial rites: the dark lyricism of De bruit et de fureur (Sound and Fury, Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988) © Les Films du Losange

    35 The traces that remain: the labour of history in Reprise (Hervé Le Roux, 1997) © Les Films d’Ici

    36 The reign of the multinational: layered spaces in Reprise (Hervé Le Roux, 1997) © Les Films d’Ici

    Notes on contributors

    Erik Bullot teaches cinema and photography at l’École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges. He is the author of Sortir du cinéma: histoire virtuelle des relations de l’art et du cinéma (Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, 2013) and of the two-volume Renversements: notes sur le cinéma (Paris Expérimental, 2009 and 2013). The director of over thirty films, his work has been screened at the Jeu de Paume (Paris), the CCCB (Barcelona) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

    Camille Canteux is the author of Filmer les grands ensembles (Créaphis, 2014), the first comprehensive study of documentary films made for television, the industry or the parallel documentary circuit to promote and critique France's great post-war experiment in social housing. She holds a doctorate from the University of Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne and teaches history and geography in a secondary school outside Paris.

    Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck is Professor Emerita of French at Vassar College. The author of Véracités: Ponge, Jaccottet, Roubaud, Deguy (Belin, 2009) and two books on novelist Julien Gracq, she has published on French filmmakers Claire Denis, Georges Franju, Jean-Daniel Pollet and Alain Resnais among others. She was guest editor of two issues of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies entitled Writing/Filming (2005).

    Térésa Faucon teaches film theory and film aesthetics at the Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle. The author of Théorie du montage: énergie, forces et fluides (Armand Colin, 2013) and Penser et expérimenter le montage (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010), her research in progress examines the neglected audio-visual properties of Indian cinema as well as the relationship of cinema/video to photography and dance.

    Annie Fourcaut is Professor Emerita at the Université Paris I where she is associated with the Centre for Twentieth-Century Social History. The preeminent historian of the modern French suburbs, she is the author of La banlieue en morceaux: la crise des lotissements défectueux dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Créaphis, 2000) and Bobigny, banlieue rouge (Editions de l’Atelier, 1989), and the co-editor or editor of Agrandir Paris 1860–1970 (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012), Paris/Banlieues: conflits et solidarités (Créaphis, 2007), Le monde des grands ensembles (Créaphis, 2004) and Banlieue rouge (1920–1970). Années Thorez, années Gabin: archetype du populaire, banc d’essai des modernités (Autrement, 1992).

    Margaret C. Flinn is Associate Professor of French at the Ohio State University. The author of The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–39 (Liverpool University Press, 2014), she has published essays on filmmakers Georges Lacombe, René Clair, Jean-Luc Godard as well as on the multi-media art of Chris Marker. She is presently at work on a study on contemporary European documentary film and media practice entitled New Limits of the Real.

    Tristan Jean received his B.A. in French Literature from Reed College in 2004, and his M.A. and M.Phil. in the same subject from New York University in 2011 and 2014, respectively. He works as a language educator and independent scholar in Brooklyn, New York.

    Roland-François Lack teaches French and film at University College London. His research, showcased on the Cine-Tourist website, bears on the ways in which films map the places they show, and the knowledge that films produce about them. He has published essays on popular literature and early French film, on French New Wave directors (Godard, Rivette, Rohmer) as well as on actress Bernadette Lafont. He co-edited with Patrick Ffrench The Tel Quel Reader (Routledge, 1998).

    Co-editor Philippe Met is Professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Editor-in-Chief of French Forum and has written widely on literature and film, including several books (as author or editor) and some seventy articles. With Jean-Louis Leutrat and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues he published Les aventures de Harry Dickson: scénario de Frédéric de Towarnicki, pour un film (non réalisé) par Alain Resnais (Capricci, 2007). He is completing a book on fantastic and horror cinema and editing The Cinema of Louis Malle, Transatlantic Auteur.

    Jean-Louis Pautrot is Professor of French and International Studies at Saint Louis University. His books include Pascal Quignard (Gallimard, 2014) and Pascal Quignard ou le fonds du monde (Rodopi, 2007) as well as La musique oubliée (Droz, 1994), which discusses the relations between music and literature in the work of Sartre, Vian, Proust and Duras. He has written on Jacques Tati and Alain Resnais and edited The André Hodeir Jazz Reader (University of Michigan Press, 2006).

    Keith Reader is Professor at the University of London Institute in Paris. He has published widely in the area of twentieth-century French cultural studies. Among his many books are The May 1968 Events in France (Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), Robert Bresson (Manchester University Press, 2000), La Règle du jeu (I.B. Tauris, 2010), The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier (Liverpool University Press, 2011) and, with Phil Powrie, French Cinema: A Student's Guide (Bloomsbury, 2002).

    Co-editor Derek Schilling is Professor of French at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches modern and contemporary literature and film. He is the author of Eric Rohmer (Manchester University Press, 2007), Mémoires du quotidien: les lieux de Perec (Septentrion, 2006) and of a forthcoming study on literary representations of the French suburbs between the wars, entitled Banlieues de mémoire: géopoétique du roman français de l’entre-deux-guerres.

    Guillaume Soulez is Professor at the Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he teaches courses in film and media theory and the history of television, with an emphasis on serial forms. He is the author of Quand le film nous parle: rhétorique, cinéma, télévision (Presses universitaires de France, 2011) and, with Laurent Jullier, of Stendhal, le désir de cinéma (Séguier, 2006).

    Malcolm Turvey is Sol Gittleman Professor of Film and Media Studies at Tufts University. The author of The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011) and of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008), he is completing a book entitled Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism.

    David Vasse teaches cinema studies at the Université de Caen. The author of a study on the return of auteur cinema in France, Le nouvel âge du cinéma d’auteur français (Klincksieck, 2008), he has published Catherine Breillat, un cinéma du rite et de la transgression (Éditions Arte/Complexe, 2004) and Jean-Claude Brisseau: entre deux infinis (Rouge Profond, 2015), the first monograph devoted to the filmmaker.

    Acknowledgements

    Portions of Chapter 1 appeared in French as ‘Aux origines du cinéma de banlieue: les banlieusards au cinéma (1930–1980)’, Sociétés et représentations (Dec. 1999): 113–27 and are translated with permission. Chapter 4, commissioned for this volume, has been published in French Cultural Studies 25.3/4 (2014): 387–95 and appears here by consent of the journal's editor. Chapter 5 reworks by permission portions of Margaret C. Flinn, The Social Architecture of French Cinema 1929–1939 (Liverpool University Press, 2014). Edited by Philippe Met, Chapter 15 reprises passages from David Vasse, Jean-Claude Brisseau: entre deux infinis, Aix-en-Provence, Rouge Profond, 2015, with the express permission of the publisher.

    Translations: Chapters 1, 12 and 14 were translated from the French by Derek Schilling. Chapter 6 was translated by Nicole Dunham and revised by the editors. Chapter 10 was translated by Samuel Martin. Chapter 15 was translated with the support of Institut de Recherche sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) by Christopher Roberston and revised by the editors.

    Introduction

    Philippe Met and Derek Schilling

    On the heels of the international hit La Haine (Hate, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), France at the close of the millennium saw a spate of bold, self-styled ‘hood’ films set in suburban council estates that critics were prompt to name – justifiably so – ‘films de banlieue’ (Jousse 1995; Vincendeau 2000). Heralded by the ground-breaking yet overlooked Le Thé au harem d'Archimède (Mehdi Charef, 1985) and illustrated by such features as Douce France (Malik Chibane, 1995), État des lieux (Jean-François Richet, 1995) and Wesh-wesh: qu'est-ce qui se passe? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2001), the distinctively French subgenre showcased multi-ethnic youth whose daily struggles and frustrations are compounded by rampant unemployment, disenfranchisement and conflicts with authority and the institutions of the State. Invariably, action unfolds in and around the graffiti-laden housing blocks of pauperised cités whose peripheral status exacerbates the protagonists' ambivalence toward the French capital, which attracts even as it excludes.

    Highly mediatised and culturally resonant, this trend in contemporary cinema reflective of a pluri-ethnic European democracy in transition has garnered well-deserved critical attention. The film de banlieue – which the English term ‘suburb film’ largely fails to render – has been singled out for its crucial role in unveiling how spatial relegation and territorial confinement correlate to minority ethnic status, and by extension to an existence defined by sharply compromised, if not foreclosed futures. For Carrie Tarr, approaching France's ‘cinema of difference’ entails a coincidental ‘double focus’ on Maghrebi-descendent beur and white-authored banlieue films (2005: 7; 49); the ethno-cultural position of ‘in-betweenness’ experienced by the French-born children of North African immigrants mirrors the banlieue's own intermediate spatial character and concomitant ‘placelessness’ (21). Emphasising for his part the ‘mainstreaming’ of Maghrebi-French cinema, as well as a burgeoning North African émigré film culture, Will Higbee attests to the continued purchase of the banlieue film on France's screens into the second decade of the new century. Even as directors seek to combat stereotype and to steer clear of caricature by moving ‘beyond the banlieue’ in critically self-aware fashion, they work within a recognisable set of themes, décors and social types that the trend-setting, independent films of the 1990s had put into wide circulation (Higbee 2013: 4; 17).

    One unintended effect of the banlieue film's enduring critical and popular acclaim, then, has been to hide from view a longer history of French cinema's engagement with the suburban milieu and its diverse landscapes. It is the aim of this book to present that longer history to an Anglophone audience in all its depth, scope and complexity. In point of reality, the composite record of cinematic forays into the suburb, we argue, offers far more than a prehistory of the postcolonial banlieue film. The blighted council estate or cité is but one of many cultural forms to have imprinted the collective imaginary in France through stories told on the big screen, and not all suburban narratives hew to the parameters of social realism. In place of a narrowly defined ‘film de banlieue’, the fifteen chapters in this volume conjoin diachronic and synchronic perspectives to advocate for a layered, multifaceted understanding of banlieue cinema across various film genres, modes and ideological perspectives.

    Indeed, from the medium's inception at the turn of the twentieth century, filmmakers in France have looked beyond the city's gates for inspiration and content. Screen representations of greater Paris in particular track the evolution of location shooting, extending from the single and multi-reel films of Pathé and Gaumont before World War I, to fiction features of the 1970s and 1980s shot in postmodern new towns. Across the century, the Paris region today known as Ile-de-France saw unprecedented growth as swaths of farmland, forests and brownfields were developed for industry, housing and infrastructure. In the suburbs, scriptwriters and directors found a vast reservoir of architectural forms, landscapes and human types – including the generic banlieusard, or suburbanite – through which to anchor their fictions and harness film's unique potential to ‘record and reveal physical reality’, to recall the words of Siegfried Kracauer (1960: ix). From the villas and vacant lots of silent pre-war and wartime serials, to the bucolic riverside guinguettes featured in poetic realist works of the 1930s, and on to the shantytowns, motorways and outsized housing estates (grands ensembles) of the second post-war, the suburban milieu came to form a privileged site in the French cinematographic imaginary.

    For the likes of Louis Feuillade, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné in the first half of the century, as for Georges Franju, Maurice Pialat and Alain Corneau in the second, the Parisian banlieue is, in its dramatic impact and symbolic weight, arguably on a par with Paris itself, and this despite a steep anti-suburban bias brought about by centuries of state centralisation. No less than the streets of the capital, which have always featured prominently in French films (and in critical studies about them: see Binh 2003 and Block 2011), the banlieue – shot on location or, more rarely, recreated in the studio – can impart an impression of reality or unreality, novelty or ordinariness, danger or enjoyment. Whether they are made to appear as idyllic or menacing, expansive or claustrophobic, the spaces that filmmakers selectively frame and recompose on the editing table are plural by definition, and are integrated to each narrative so as to convey diverse ‘structures of feeling’, a term Raymond Williams used to designate the manner in which cultural production mediates the particulars of the lived historical world (1973: 1–8). The rhythms, topographies and evolving patterns of sociability peculiar to the banlieue have accordingly prompted directors to question the material conditions and constraints that determine the shape and colour of modern life.

    How then to account for this heterogeneous filmic material, which reflects and reconfigures a no less heterogeneous social and topographical reality? Screening the Paris Suburbs makes no claim to exhaustiveness: Paris' outskirts have inspired, in part or in whole, well over one hundred features and shorts, far too many for this selective account to cover in full.¹ Our intent was to blend and to place into dialogue scholarly approaches that privilege, on the one hand, one or more works for the screen by a given director, and, on the other, transversal explorations of a genre (e.g. the crime film, the industrial documentary, the essay film) or a set of associated themes (mobility and freedom, community and class conflict, transgression and marginality, leisure and happiness, etc.). Collectively, these discussions of the ways in which film historically has registered and rendered meaningful the suburban habitat respond to the geocritical project described by Bertrand Westphal, one that ‘probes the human spaces that the mimetic arts arrange through, and in, the text, the image, and cultural interactions related to them’ (2011: 6). The fact that our chronological endpoint coincides with the emergence of the banlieue film as media phenomenon circa 1995 means furthermore that nearly all titles discussed were directed by the male professionals who for decades dominated the industry, setting high barriers to entry for female aspirants with a few remarkable exceptions, like Agnès Varda in her ironically titled Le Bonheur (1964) that turns around a suburban love triangle, and Dominique Cabrera, whose documentaries Chronique d'une banlieue ordinaire (1992) and Une Poste à La Courneuve (1994) highlight social conscience and the limits of local solidarity.

    The opening Chapter 1 by urban historian Annie Fourcaut, ‘On the origins of the banlieue film’, frames the full historical span of our volume. In her overview, Fourcaut traces the development of working-class suburbia from the 1920s to the 1970s, pointing to the mythical, derelict ‘Zone’ outlying Paris's line of nineteenth-century fortifications as a creative social and spatial matrix from which subsequent film production would draw its types and themes, and highlighting the transformation of the industrialised, working-class ‘black belt’ of the inter-war into a politically active ‘red belt’ after World War II. Representational codes, Fourcaut argues, generally outlived the evolving material reality of greater Paris: well into the era of standardised, state-subsidised modern housing, filmmakers would continue to exploit stock images of suburban poverty and decrepitude alongside the popular longings for escape or respite, even as they gestured toward the ethnically diverse, embattled world of the banlieue film to come.

    The siting of early movie studios in and around the French capital had long-term consequences for the promotion of the suburban landscape as an object rich in visual interest and in narrative potential, observes Roland-François Lack whose focus in ‘Lumière, Méliès, Pathé and Gaumont’ (Chapter 2) lies on the forerunner years 1896 to 1920. Quick to capitalise on the diversity of views afforded by the half-urban, half-rural neighbourhoods outlying suburban studios at Vincennes, Montreuil and Joinville-le-Pont, directors of the silent era developed practices that, not without editing-room sleight of hand, creatively reconfigured actual topography to the ends of popular entertainment. Viewers of burlesque chase films and of crime serials proved largely indifferent to the precise real-world localisations of the streets, buildings and topographical features projected on screen; what mattered most to them, affirms Lack, was the rapport established between narrative form and mood, between a given character and a sense of place, as in the comic films of Max Linder and the serials of Louis Feuillade – works not coincidentally prized by the Surrealists, who themselves were fascinated by the ragged indeterminacy of the Paris outskirts.

    Tropes of movement and passage in works of the 1920s and 1930s qualified suburbia as a locus of temporary release from the constraints of the modern metropolis as well as from a cumbersome rural past, explains Jean-Louis Pautrot in ‘Roads, rivers, canals: spaces of freedom from Epstein to Vigo’ (Chapter 3). In the suburb, with its manifold roads and waterways, world-weary individuals momentarily reinvent themselves, finding a means of escape if not of outright liberation. The ‘transient space’ par excellence of inter-war cinema, the suburb proves integral to the forgotten subgenre of the river film (le film fluvial), of which Jean Vigo's depression-era paean to sexual and social freedom, L'Atalante (1934), is one late example. Commenting on works by Jean Epstein, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, Pautrot highlights scenes in which movement – experienced, for instance, behind the wheel of a boat or motorcar – opens up the individual to phenomenological discovery and to psychological renegotiation of the sentiment of reality. Epstein's silent masterwork La Glace à trois faces (1927) affords an understanding of the ‘accelerating transformation of the world’ in which the suburb is not simply a place one escapes to, but a place inescapably touched by death.

    In his broad assessment of popular comedies and dramas of the 1930s (Chapter 4), Keith Reader suggests that the banlieue of inter-war sound cinema is as much an ‘imagined community […] as one localisable on a map’. Its dual function as space of socio-economic relegation on the one hand, and as space of leisure and entertainment (song, dance) on the other, recalls a specifically Parisian social geography opposing an affluent, verdant west to the poorer industrial northeast. Examining Marcel Carné's tale of proletarian downfall Le Jour se lève, Anatole Litvak's murder mystery Cœur de Lilas and Jean Renoir's more genteel Partie de campagne, among other features that seduced audiences of the day, Reader underscores the tensions characteristic of suburban popular sociability separating work and play, poverty and riches, redemption and despoilment.

    The ‘progress’ of industry notwithstanding, idyllic or pastoral representations of the suburban milieu remained common across the 1930s, with the waterside guinguette as a leading topos. Yet escaping from the city to idealised sites of leisure was only temporary and the rewards tenuous, argues Margaret C. Flinn in ‘Julien Duvivier and inter-war banlieutopia ’ (Chapter 5). In her close analysis of La Belle Équipe (1936), Flinn points to the ‘narrative failure’ of community to take hold in the banlieue despite the best intentions of Duvivier's protagonists: like all utopian projects, their attempt to establish a micro-society free of the ills of urban centre and provincial village is hampered by the vestiges of class structure and cultural allegiances. Rather than evaluate the workers' collective enterprise in La Belle Équipe solely in terms of ‘failure’ or ‘success’, Flinn casts the very construction of the riverside dancehall as an architectural metaphor for community, in relation to the spatial theories of Louis Marin and Michel Foucault and in the context of themes that coalesced mid decade around France's Popular Front.

    Departing from the strict social geographies of popular narrative filmmaking, Erik Bullot (Chapter 6) addresses marginality and transgression in three experimental or otherwise unclassifiable short films by Russian émigré Dimitri Kirsanoff, Frenchman Georges Franju and Chilean expatriate Raúl Ruiz. Bullot asks, with respect to the recurrent ‘identity crises’ of France's film industry, whether directors who refuse the reassuring codes of an audience-ready cinema of the juste milieu might stake a claim to an art of the periphery. The three shorts on view each expose the internal and external borders of Paris as zones of now latent, now overt violence that contributes to the dissolution of film genre. Scenes of fragmentation, decapitation and dismemberment posit the suburb as ‘a trap door into which fragmented bodies disappear unimpeded’, thus negating any pretence to a balanced and harmonious cinema of the juste milieu.

    The unnerving, chilling potential of suburban locales was no secret to Franju, whose masterpiece Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960) remains a unique gem in the horror genre. Tristan Jean (Chapter 7) sees a strong correlation between Franju's directorial sensibility and eccentric position with respect to France's film industry, and the ‘geographically and culturally peripheral status’ of the villa-cum-clinic where Dr Génessier subjects his unsuspecting victims to murderous experiments. If Franju's work routinely defies generic classifications, it finds continuity in its recourse to nocturnal suburban settings that exploit ordinary motifs to fantastical effect. Portrayal of a secluded, economically privileged locale in proximity to the capital ‘cuts against the grain of contemporaneous representations of the banlieue’, notes Jean of Les Yeux sans visage, which rejects the nostalgic tone adopted in Casque d'or (Jacques Becker, 1952) and in Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958).

    This last picture, well known in the Anglophone world, has long been held as a negative critique of the bland, alienating qualities of modern suburbia. Malcolm Turvey (Chapter 8) takes issue with that prevailing assessment by distinguishing in Mon Oncle architectural function proper from the comic and ludic uses to which these built forms are put. The Arpel villa with its porthole windows and stacked cubes is itself less an exemplar of the architecture of the 1950s, argues Turvey, than a savvy parody of inter-war French high modernism. Tati thus strikes a balance between the mockery of conspicuous consumption attendant to France's post-war economic boom and the comic re-enchantment of an unruly, unpredictable object world that is functional in name only.

    Changing angles, argues Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck in her reading of L'Amour existe, is precisely what Maurice Pialat aims to do in his depiction of the Paris outskirts circa 1960 (Chapter 9). By turns elegiac and polemical, Pialat's documentary short encompasses an individual life from childhood to adulthood; the history of France from the pre-war period through World War II and the ‘Trente Glorieuses’; and visual representations of suburbia stretching from Impressionist painting to poetic realism. Cardonne-Arlyck underscores the formative qualities of an intimate, unseen space in which ‘impenetrable beauties’ lay hidden, and where love can and, indeed, does exist. Behind the forces of poverty, numbing routine and modernisation that it denounces, Pialat's plangent film essay uncovers what in the banlieue could have been revealed but had remained unsaid, a content that the camera and voiceover narration can never recover in full.

    The layeredness of the suburban habitat – its peculiar manner of conjoining different textures, forms and histories so as to offer these up all at once to the eye – explains in part its lasting appeal to filmmakers. In her essay on Jean-Luc Godard (Chapter 10), Térésa Faucon ushers the reader through a host of suburban landscapes and locales, from the villas, cafés and roadways of Bande à part (1964) to the high-rises of La Courneuve in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967). She exposes the generative and transgressive capacity of a capitalist space in the throes of constant transformation that is shot through with fragments of a long cinema history reaching back to the silent era. In other contexts, like Alphaville (1965), Godard seeks out signs of futurity in present-day forms, showing Lemmy Caution moving through sleek, well-lit neighbourhoods of high-rise towers. Referencing Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, Faucon underscores Godard's insistence on indeterminate, liminal spaces where random movements and perspectival shifts complicate any clear-cut divisions between inside and outside.

    Traditionally one of the most popular genres on French screens, the polar is the object of ‘The banlieue wore black’ (Chapter 11), Philippe Met's overview of the genre's evolution from the 1950s to the 1980s.While proto-noir and poetic realist films shot before World War II as well as thrillers from the immediate post-war were primarily centred on Paris, from the 1950s onwards a gradual shift toward suburban locales – visible in the iconic career of Jean-Pierre Melville – was implemented through a number of genre conventions and motifs: hideouts, shoot-outs, railway or subway stations and tracks, deserted roadways, half-built or abandoned villas. The next generation foregrounded the multifaceted reality of new council estates that encroached upon traditional allotments of single-family homes and surrounding wastelands. Even more decisively, Alain Corneau in Série noire (1979) and Le Choix des armes (1981) added to the genre an insightful sociological dimension by broaching issues of violence, alienation and devastation.

    The grands ensembles seized upon by feature film directors were present throughout metropolitan France, nowhere more so than in the Paris region. Camille Canteux (Chapter 12) explores a three-decade transformation in the televisual and documentary construction of these large-scale housing developments, which well before the riots of autumn 2005 had come to typify the blighted French suburb in the public eye. Early promotional films commissioned by the State housing ministry cast the historic working-class suburbs rimming Paris as overcrowded and unhealthy, in opposition to the rationally planned new estates further afield that promised order, modern comfort and hygiene. As early as the mid 1960s, however, negative aspects of the grands ensembles came to dominate French screens, and by 1970, the largest estates were portrayed as immigrant spaces deserted by the middle class and beset with poverty and petty crime. The French State's attempt to redress this stigmatisation by launching the mixed-use villes nouvelles in the 1970s and 1980s proved largely unsuccessful, shows Canteux, so pervasive were the images of suburban blight.

    Modern French town planning discourse took it as a given that better – that is, rational – architecture would make for better, happier citizens. This position met with opposition in the 1970s as filmmakers looked to the burgeoning new towns to voice the ambiguities of rapid, top-down development. In ‘Elusive happiness’ (Chapter 13), Derek Schilling asks what sorts of individual and collective compromises the realisation of planned environments entailed in the wake of the failures of May 1968. Le Chat (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1972) portrays an estranged couple who live their final days in a decrepit suburban villa slated for demolition; La Ville bidon (Jacques Baratier, 1976) the struggles of junkmen and their families to resist expropriation; and Le Couple témoin (William Klein, 1978) the gadget-obsessed excesses of aseptic, postmodern living. More ambivalent is the position of Éric Rohmer, whose protagonists in two installments of the Comédies et proverbes cycle (1981–87) laud the new town model for its felicitous conjunction of work and leisure even as they lament its programmed quality. Each of these pictures of the 1970s and 1980s expresses an imaginary solution – destructive in some cases, blithely euphoric in others – to the contradictions of suburban living.

    Little known to Anglophone audiences, Jean-Claude Brisseau has been singled out by French critics for having voiced, along with Mehdi Charef in Le Thé au harem d'Archimède (1985), themes that would form the core of the banlieue film a decade later. As David Vasse notes in his reading of La Vie comme ça (1978), Les Ombres (1981), L'Échangeur (1981) and De bruit et de fureur (1988) (Chapter 14), Brisseau mixes gritty, documentary-like authenticity with surreal flights of the imagination to create atmospheric narratives in which primal urges and paroxysmal violence are unleashed against the contemporary backdrop of home, school and workplace. In Brisseau's critique of political and sexual economy, the concrete jungle of France's devastated and maligned cités is exposed as the locus for contrary forces of subjugation and liberation across gender and generational lines. Vasse shows Brisseau to be both a precursor in his foregrounding of the systemic violence that is endemic to the cités, and a maverick whose idiosyncratic vision of human relations sat poorly with viewers and critics of the day.

    Suburban violence has imprinted itself upon the collective imaginary in other, less spectacular yet perhaps no less pervasive, ways, notably through labour and its gradual effacement. Our historical overview concludes with an investigation of the layered temporality of the Paris ‘red belt’ (ceinture rouge) immediately outlying Paris. These working-class bastions were a primary theatre for the struggles of May and June 1968, and encompassed the location of the storied, ten-minute direct film La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder, in which a young woman is shown refusing to return to work despite the trade union's vote to end the strike. Twenty-five years later, documentarian Hervé Le Roux ventures to track down this same woman in

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