Sheila Petty¹

“INTERSTITIAL SPACES AND SITES OF STRUGGLE”: DISPLACEMENT, IDENTITY, AND BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH ACCENTED CINEMA

Abstract

This essay focuses on three “accented cinema” films that creatively blend the autobiographical, performative, fictional, and documentary to interpret how identities are created at the intersection of displacement and belonging and are shaped by selective and multiple affinities to colonial cultures, ancestral cultures, and adopted host cultures. The films represent historical “moments” and follow a historical chronology, highlighting the permanency of being displaced and displacement in France, the said Republic of Equality. Watani: un monde sans mal (Watani: A World Without Evil, 1998) by Med Hondo depicts several racist incidents in Paris, including the Sans-Papiers Affair of 1996; La Marche (The Marchers, 2013) by Nabil Ben Yadir recreates the 1983 Marseilles to Paris “Marche Pour l’Egalité et Contre le Racisme”; and Paris Stalingrad (2019) by Hind Meddeb and Thim Naccache chronicles refugees struggling to make a home for themselves in street camps in the Stalingrad district of Paris.

INTRODUCTION

Over the past two decades, documenting displacement, movement, and migratory flows of peoples, mostly from the global South, and their struggles to attain new citizenship, has become a major preoccupation of many filmmakers. Many migration narratives focus on transnational experiences of migrants and see these journeys as creating a means through which to reexamine the complexities of nationality, location, identity, movement, belonging, and historical memory. Although “human displacement” seems almost “commonplace” in globalization, Isabel Hollis-Touré warns that “the frameworks via which we understand human belonging are yet to expand adequately to accommodate the various complexities that this entails.”² Hollis-Touré further contends that “displacement” and “belonging” are inextricably linked and function simultaneously in both public and private spheres, but can be greatly disrupted by major forces such as war, climate change, and colonization.³

Almost two decades ago, Tunisian writer Albert Memmi wrote that there was still “work to be done in describing the interaction between former colonizers and the formerly colonized,” maintaining that movement and displacement are a direct result of colonization.⁴ Within this context, France’s role as a former colonizer and thus host country, and also home country for ethnic minorities with an immigration background, has been the subject of much ongoing debate. France’s colonial conquest of regions of the African continent dates back to the seventeenth century, but most colonial expansion took place during the nineteenth century in West and Equatorial Africa with the 1885 Scramble for Africa, when seven Western European powers made claims to various regions of the continent. As a result, France claimed the colonial territories of: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea (now Guinea), Côte d'Ivoire, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Dahomey (now Benin), and Niger. In his work, Ex-Centric Migrations, Hakim Abderrezzak outlines the genesis of France’s conquest of the Maghreb around 1830 by detailing how France retaliated against Algeria when the dey of Algiers purportedly swatted the French consul with his flyswatter. Simple retribution quickly transformed “into warfare against the Arabs and Berbers.”⁵ By 1912, France had colonized Morocco and then, by 1916, Tunisia, creating what were known as “protectorates.”⁶ During its occupation of the Maghreb and in the aftermath of World War II, “France encouraged the immigration of young and fit local men” to help rebuild the war-ravaged nation. Immigration laws were tightened in the early 1970s, following the “oil crisis” and “subsequent iterations” of border closings that would occur in the next decades.⁷

Although the French Revolution introduced the principle of equality of newcomers alongside the established populations of the national community, this did not always pan out with civic rights and civil rights (succession) often denied to the very newcomers France relied on to rebuild its industries after World War II.⁸ Needless to say, France’s rapidly changing population is challenging the long-held conception that its political community, based on the myth of universal Republicanism and social, cultural, and political integration, is a “finished product” to which newcomers must conform.⁹ And as Catherine Wihtol de Wenden has argued, debates concerning immigration in France reveal more about the host country than about immigration itself, “remaining largely over-determined by history.”¹⁰

This essay will focus on three films that creatively blend the autobiographical, performative, fictional, and documentary to interpret how identities are created at the interface of displacement and belonging and are shaped by selective and multiple affinities to colonial cultures, ancestral cultures, and adopted host cultures.¹¹ The essay will probe how the films interrogate notions of hospitality and what it means to be chez soi in a French metropolis rife with racism and intolerance. The films represent historical “moments” and follow a historical chronology, highlighting the permanency of being displaced and displacement in France, the said Republic of Equality. Watani: un monde sans mal (Watani: A World Without Evil, 1998) by Med Hondo, depicts several racist incidents in Paris, including the Sans-Papiers Affair of 1996; La Marche (The Marchers, 2013) by Nabil Ben Yadir recreates the 1983 Marseilles to Paris “Marche Pour l’Egalité et Contre le Racisme”; and Paris Stalingrad (2019) by Hind Meddeb and Thim Naccache chronicles refugees struggling to make a home for themselves in street camps in the Stalingrad district of Paris.

These films’ narratives detangle issues of movement, displacement, and states of belonging in France, and underscore that identities are no longer forged through oppositional pairings of displacement and belonging but in the interstitial spaces created through resistance and ongoing struggle, building relational and fluid intermixing of levels of identities.¹² Achille Mbembe has argued that “identity is formed at the interface between the rituals of putting down roots and the rhythms of estrangement, in the constant passage from the spatial to the temporal, from geography to memory.”¹³ Mbembe advocates “developing a technique of reading (lecture) and writing (écriture) that would also be an aesthetic of opening and encounter.”¹⁴ The writing is necessarily “closely linked to a way of reading (lecture) the archives of the present.”¹⁵

In light of this, it is useful to consider “accented style” or accented cinema, a term coined by film theorist Hamid Naficy to describe exilic and diasporic cinema, and the positionality of filmmakers who identify with and inhabit the exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial “interstitial spaces and sites of struggle.”¹⁶ This style arises from feelings of displacement and an inherent sense of memory of “the traditions of exilic and diasporic cultural productions that preceded them.”¹⁷ The filmmakers acquire two sets of voices from their heritage and lived experiences. Such an approach is driven by aesthetic and narrative ingenuity, including “self-reflexivity and autobiographical inscription, historicity, epistolarity,” “multilinguality,” and “resistance to closure.”¹⁸ Naficy extends the meaning of being interstitial as “being located at the intersection of the local and the global” mediating between disparate categories.¹⁹ Subjectivity and identity are determined in these interstitial moments, at the interface of the local and the global, the personal and the political. Naficy contends that the very structure, organization, themes, and visual style of accented filmmakers’ works transform “displaced subjects into active agents of their own emplacement.”²⁰

It is useful here to recall Laura Marks’ theoretical model of enfolding (forgetting or hiding) and unfolding (remembering) of knowledge. According to Marks: “The past persists, enfolded in virtual form, and some of its facets may unfold to some degree in the present.”²¹ Stefanie Van de Peer takes Marks’ idea further by suggesting that “sensitive information . . . can be revealed and liberated, or unfolded through the act of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ in the audio-visual art of documentary.”²² This model helps cut across binaries, showing how knowledge can transcend time and space constraints and journey through transnational and global mediascapes. Taking this into consideration, the essay will demonstrate how the three accented films’ narratives “unfold” representations of displacement and belonging through their innovative uses of cinematic time and space: multilinguality, irony, and testimony and witnessing. I contend that this unfolding of knowledge creates a counter-archive or anarchive that challenges the master narrative of the archive.

SANS PAPIERS: WATANI

Mauritanian-born filmmaker Med Hondo lived the immigrant experience and depicted it in many of his films. Born in the village of Ain Ouled Mathar, Mauritania, Med Hondo (Mohamed Abid Hondo) came to filmmaking through a circuitous route that began with his training as a chef in a Moroccan hotel, eventually leading him to immigrate to France. Once in the metropolis he discovered that as an African immigrant his education was discounted, forcing him to earn his living through several menial jobs including dockworker and fruit picker. Disillusioned with his experiences in French society, Hondo began studying drama under the renowned stage actor Françoise Rosay. Creating his own theatre company, Shango, with African and Caribbean friends, Hondo concentrated on the performance of works by Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka, Guy Menga, and others.²³ Cast in a number of film and television projects, Hondo developed an avid interest in cinema which he adopted as a means of artistic expression.²⁴ Hondo’s immigration trajectory is considered by Naficy to be of the accented “exilic” category, and he describes Hondo as a “Mauritanian exile filmmaker . . . working in France.”²⁵

His first feature film, Soleil Ȏ (France, 1970), documents “L’Invasion noire” (1950–70s) and France’s systemic racism and exploitation of immigrants as inexpensive laborers relegated to menial jobs and continued poverty. With Med Hondo, one cannot speak of a formula by which his films are made, but a common thread, however, is the focus on humanity and African experiences within the flow of global histories, migration, and diaspora. Furthermore, over the course of his career, Hondo relies on and continuously develops tropes such as the use of metaphor, irony, and testimony.

Like Soleil Ȏ, Watani: un monde sans mal (Watani: A World Without Evil, France, 1998) begins with a prologue that creates the same centering of Africa, its pillaging and slavery, the resulting diaspora, and the effects of colonization with the Scramble for Africa at the 1884–85 Berlin or Congo Conference. Images of artist renderings of African bodies and newspaper clippings of atrocities spew out of a map of Africa as though being vomited by the continent. Chaos is created through animation and movement of the images and is punctuated by a grating cacophony of sounds and a voice-over that briefly explains the slave trade, the Black Atlantic, and dispersal of Africans. This prologue ends with an intertitle asserting, “L’Afrique se lèvera!” (Africa will rise).²⁶

The central narrative of the film involves parallel stories of despair and individual choice as Hondo plots out the journeys of two men, Patrick Clément, a white bank executive, and Mamadou Sylla, a Black garbage collector, who lose their jobs on the same day in Paris. Sylla’s trajectory involves institutionalized systemic racism, bureaucracy in the endless search for employment, and a precarious existence with threatened homelessness and displacement for him and his family. Clément’s trajectory involves abandoning his job search and joining an ultra-right-wing organization that plans terrorist attacks and kills immigrants at night, dumping their bodies in the Seine. This action recalls scenes from 17 October 1961 when French police beat and brutalized Algerian immigrants protesting France’s treatment of them on French soil during the Algerian War of Independence. Some 200 were left dead that day, many of whom had been handcuffed and thrown into the Seine to drown. According to Aboubakar Sanogo, “Watani, Hondo’s final film of the ’90s, was deemed too violent for younger audiences in France, its topic being the symbiotic rise of neofascism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the wake of economic turmoil.”²⁷ This is cruel irony, given that inconceivable violence had been enacted on Algerians in their host country. But perhaps it was this very exposure of a grisly incident in French history with which the government was most concerned. The official account listed only three Algerian deaths and downplayed the violence claiming that gangs and vendettas were the cause.²⁸ Police documents, as the official archive, were then sealed for the next fifty years, entombing the truth. Yet, barely two years later, various accounts of this “repressed” incident via film, literature, theater, and popular media began to surface from this “watery tomb” to constitute what Lia Brozgal terms the “anarchive, [a] rogue collection of cultural texts [. . .] with ramifications for our understanding of France and Algeria’s historical entanglements and for ongoing negotiations of multiculturalism within contemporary France.”²⁹

Watani exposes the lingering violence and legacies of French colonialism and their consequences for identity formation in the French metropolis. The “to be continued” revolutionary space for debate that Hondo created in Soleil Ȏ is opened up again in Watani where Hondo advocates, “Ce monde – refusons-le” (Let’s refuse this world), thus cautioning the viewer against passivity, complicity, voicelessness, and the false promises of integrationist discourse in the metropolis.³⁰ Dominic Thomas helpfully reminds us “that the word ‘immigration’, in French, at least, pertains simultaneously to the migratory process and to the post-migratory experience as it relates to integration, ethnicity, race and multiculturalism.”³¹

Hondo plays with this enshrined principle of indivisibility and builds a cosmopolitan frame with extreme low angle and straight on medium-long shots of the European Union flags at La Défense and crowds of black, brown, and white faces near the beginning of the film. This foreshadows the contradiction between principles of equality and democracy both within the French Republic and the European Union and the actual measures of control in immigration practices. Hondo cannot resist irony here and superimposes an expressionist-style painting of an African street cleaner over the sea of faces as a rap song, “Aide-toi, lève-toi. Personne ne le fera pour toi” (Help yourself. Get up, no one else will do it for you), is laid over the visual track (reminiscent of Peter Tosh’s “Get Up Stand Up” from his Equal Rights album).³²

Like the films of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, Hondo’s work is all about a call to action, and just as Soleil Ȏ possesses an elliptical narrative structure, Watani’s is more dialectical and layered as scenes of racism, violence, unemployment, and disintegration clash, pushing the narrative forward. Identity that was once about the value of a human being is now about the value of paper, as suggested by identity cards, job applications, social security, and resumes correctly configured for the colonizer who manages bureaucratic institutions such as employment offices. These are the gatekeepers who have power over the lives of immigrants, and they are the new African kinglets first presented in Soleil Ȏ.

Invisibility and voicelessness transformed into action are central to Watani. Brief moments of rest or catharsis occur during the mime performance scenes in the park—but even here, Hondo layers them with irony as the performer, who pretends to be invisible, copies the gestures of passersby. In a further ironic twist, Hondo only films certain footage in color, such as graffiti art and African paintings, and retains the central narrative in black and white. The bar where Clément is indoctrinated is called “Black and White,” further underscoring that the fates of migrants and those of the larger French society are indissolubly linked.

Watani also targets a specific moment in history. Here, it is the “affaire des sans-papiers” of the Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle Church in the 18th arrondissement of Paris in 1996. Dominic Thomas points out that this crisis was the “turning point in the history of governmental responses” to immigration control in France.³³ Foreigners—mostly from West Africa—whose identity documents and visa papers had expired, or were in irregular situations, “sought refuge” in Paris’s 11th arrondissement Saint-Ambroise Church in March 1996 “while awaiting a decision on their petition for amnesty and legalization.” By June, they had moved to the Church of Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle, which was “stormed” by over 1,500 police officers on 23 August.³⁴ The Sans-Papiers generated much sympathy from a large section of the general public, and they acted “contrary to expectations” by not hiding and instead demanding visibility in the public sphere. In fact, as Thomas indicates, the Sans-Papiers challenged “the first constitution of 1791” which promises the protection of all citizens’ rights.³⁵

The documentary footage and recreated scenes of the three hundred men, women, and children who camped for several months in the Church of Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle, locked in a dispute with the French government over their legal status, with some resorting to a hunger strike, are presented in a mise-en-scène which echoes some elements of the baptism scene in Soleil Ȏ. A tracking shot around the exterior of the church creates an image of a fortress, which quickly comes to resemble a prison or slave pen. A group of Africans face the camera in direct address as it zooms out to long shots, showing their mouths taped shut and standing in front of crucifixes that have been Africanized. As Muslim Sans-Papiers begin to pray, a male voice-over intones, “Mes frères et mes soeurs, vous avez-bien fait de choisir la maison de Dieu. Vous êtes ici chez vous. Soyez les bienvenus. C’est ici le lieu de votre protection” (Brothers and Sisters, you made the right choice coming to God’s House. You are at home here—welcome. You will be protected here.”³⁶ The voice-over continues by assuring the group that if they think that the present days are bad, the future will be much worse and, in fact, accurately predicts the future, as Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, has demonstrated an even deeper hatred towards Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African immigrants.

Given this complex terrain, how is it possible today to forge a sense of identity and belonging within interstitial spaces of displacement? When the police break down the doors to the church, the Sans-Papiers are far from voiceless as they are being evicted, and Hondo further layers the soundtrack with Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream.” Hondo is unfolding knowledge about nonviolent resistance, but here, it is also enfolded in irony. The film’s poster is an ironic reference to La Marianne, the French national symbol for liberty, democracy, and freedom from dictatorships. The portrayal of La Marianne as statues in town halls and in La Place de la Nation in Paris is often paired with the French national motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, a motto that does not connote the same resonance of social justice for all citizens of France. In fact, La Marianne, or “Madame la France,” as many immigrants in France call her, has become the symbol of discrimination.

Thomas has shown how the “sans-papiers thus compel us to reckon with a range of cultural, political, and sociological elements that individually and collectively contribute to the process of defining a lieu de mémoire, a space very much inscribed in collective memory.”³⁷ Sites (Church of Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle) and monuments (La Marianne) bear witness to performances of identities that take on transnational inflections and are enfolded and unfolded across time and space. The film ends with close-ups of immigrants looking at the camera in direct address as the credits roll, collectively unfolding the challenge to the viewer to refuse current sites of inhospitality.

THE MARCH AND PERMANENT MARCHERS: LA MARCHE

The Franco-Maghrebi community is by far the largest ethnic minority in France, disrupting social categories in a system ill-equipped for census reporting or vocabulary descriptors beyond the two categories of “French or foreign.”³⁸ These categories, argues Caroline Trouillet, are constructed according to specific historical, social, and economic contexts and the politics of hospitality.³⁹ These categories or labels are built to be static and fixed, with spaces and distances set up in Manichean fashion between “French” and “not really French” and “immigrant” and “not really immigrant.” The spatial and social segregation created by these polarities forces occupants back into static spaces of ethnic origin and sets up the desired category of belonging (appartenance as a Français de souche) to the French nation as the immigrant’s (Français issu de l’immigration) ultimate achievement.⁴⁰ By the mid-1980s, however, the descendants of Maghrebi immigrants began to force a reassessment of established forms of French republicanism for the whole nation and to advocate that all live in harmony and embrace difference. Mounting police violence and racist attacks against “Arabes de France” in 1983 led increasingly frustrated sons and daughters of Maghrebi immigrants to organize what is considered France’s “longest and largest [nonviolent] demonstration march.”⁴¹ “La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme,” a five hundred-mile march from Marseilles to Paris modelled on the peaceful activism of the 1960s American civil rights movement, was organized to “symbolically” recreate the same route taken by immigrants arriving in southern France who made their way north during the 1950s and 1960s and to awaken France to the racism and discrimination in its midst, signaling for the country a turning point in the sociopolitical consciousness and cultural production for the new generation.

“La Marche” is especially significant because it is considered the first national protest of its kind in France and marks the rise in public and political visibility of the “second generation” of Maghrebi immigration;⁴² it also denotes the historic moment in France when the Arab and Amazigh generation emerged.⁴³ “La Marche” is considered by many as the epic (epopee in literary terms) that engendered other stories and narratives.⁴⁴ “La Marche” is often also called “La Marche des Beurs.” By the 1980s, the second generation of Maghrebi immigrants “came to be known by the neologism ‘Beurs’; following the paradigm of the French back-slang verlan, arabe inverted, with an apocope.”⁴⁵ According to Laura Reeck, the neologism provoked a number of permutations such as “beurgoisie” and “Beurette.”⁴⁶ The labels have been asserted, co-opted, and then resisted by writers and cultural producers as mainstream media and political entities appropriate these designations: immigrant born in France, écrivain de banlieue, Beur, post-Beur. Around the time of “La Marche,” Beur and banlieue cinema was coming into prominence starting with short films and documentaries produced in artisanal conditions outside normal production and distribution circuits.⁴⁷ In 1985, with the sponsorship of renowned filmmaker Costa-Gavras, Mehdi Charef produced the award-winning feature film, Thé au harem d’Archimède. This led the way for an explosion of films that brought Maghrebi immigrant and second-generation experiences to the world. Will Higbee, Carrie Tarr, and others have aptly demonstrated how labels such as “cinéma de banlieue” used for describing Maghrebi-French experiences gloss over religious, ethnic, and national differences and thus lead to the suggestion of a “homogenous” community.⁴⁸ Despite their contested nature, it has been argued that these terms possess “historical significance” within the scholarly lexicon.⁴⁹

“La Marche” was conceived by Toumi Djaïdja as a response to the rise in racist attacks and murders of Maghrebi immigrants and youth in the early 1980s. On 20 June 1983, during a street riot in the ZUP des Minguettes suburb of Lyons, Djaïdja, the son of an immigrant Algerian family, was shot in the stomach by a police officer while attempting to shield a child being attacked by a police dog. During his recovery in the hospital, Djaïdja crafted the plan for “La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme,” which was inspired by nonviolent marches and demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. What began as a small group grew exponentially to some 100,000 supporters by the time it reached Paris. The left-wing newspaper Libération headlined the marchers’ arrival in Paris in December at the Elysée Palace to meet with President Mitterand who promised (but never carried through) to make development of the ZUP and ZUS a national priority. While the march was in progress, on 14 November 1983, Habib Grimzi, an Algerian youth on holiday in France, was beaten to death and thrown out the window of the Bordeaux–Vintimille train by three new recruits to the French Foreign Legion; no passengers on the train intervened or tried to help.⁵⁰ This crime drew added attention to the march and the growing racism in France. Activist historian Pascal Blanchard contends that this murder marked an important turning point of the march. While the general public felt apathetic about the march prior to Habib’s death, Blanchard argues that the murder fostered greater awareness of the march because the crime was:

Triplement inacceptable—inacceptable parce que ce sont des militaires, que c’est d’une violence absolue et que personne dans le train n’a bougé. On a compris soudain le message de ces jeunes: vous ne bougez pas face au racisme, face à une société qui nous oublie, qui nous exclut.⁵¹

The march helped spawn a similar march in 1984, “Convergences,” and the organization SOS Racisme. By the late 1980s, the movement splintered into factions due to differing opinions on the best model to follow: French republican integration or multiculturalism.

To commemorate thirty years since “La Marche,” several European-born children of African and North African immigrants began producing cultural texts to counter the official archive of these little-known events and to create their own stories and documentation from their own viewpoints. Among these is Nabil Ben Yadir, a Belgian actor and filmmaker of Moroccan descent known especially for his first feature box-office success, Les Barons (2009), a comedy which depicts the daily adventures of four young multiethnic unemployed male friends living in the Molenbeek-Saint-Jean suburb west of Brussels as they navigate interstitial spaces of ethnic tradition and urban modernity. Ben Yadir further explores the themes of friendship and interpersonal and group dynamics in La Marche. In an interview with Cineuropa, he explains that he wanted to focus on the broader history of “The March,” which meant, for him, the warm and hostile receptions of towns along the way, the death of Habib Grimzi, the march of the torches—the reality of incidents during the event lost in official histories. By consulting many of the original marchers, he was able to draw out much of this occluded history. One major concession he was forced to make involved the size of the group. The actual march began in Marseilles with thirty-two marchers and Ben Yadir decided that this was too large even for an ensemble cast. He settled on ten characters around which he could create interlinking stories of individuals contributing to a larger cause.⁵²

The film opens with a long shot view of high-rise apartment buildings at night and three young men in medium long shot sitting on one of the building’s steps, backs to the audience, gazing out at the nightscape as an intertitle announces, “Lyon—Cité des Minguettes.”⁵³ A fourth youth joins them and an abrupt reverse angle shot (that crosses the 180-degree line) introduces us to the characters. Although the filmmaker clearly situates the story space in terms of geography, the choice of character blocking, camera angles, and shots is meant to convey a sense of disorientation and chaos. Mohamed, played by Tewfik Jallab and representing Toumi Djaïdja, attempts to convince his friends to attend the SOS Minguettes meeting with him. Farid and Kefta are listening to “Hexagone” by Renaud on a Walkman, which belts out the lyrics “Mais depuis des éternités L’a pas tellement changé la France. La France est un pays de flics. À tous les coins d’rue y en a 100. Pour faire régner l’ordre public, Ils assassinent impunément” (Nothing has changed in France for an eternity; this is a nation of cops . . . with 100 on every street corner . . . to keep public order, they assassinate with impunity).⁵⁴ As the song plays, a dog begins barking and the youth run to see what is causing the trouble. The camera movement is frantic, keeping pace with the running youth and the chaos of the barking and police. As Mohamed pounces on the dog to save the child it is attacking, one of the police officers shoots him. The next scene begins with a series of close-up shots of hands washing off blood in a sink and ends with medium-long shots of Mohamed’s friends and a priest gathered in a hospital waiting room, while the soundtrack emits a very upbeat rendition of Charles Trenet’s “Douce France / Cher pays de mon enfance / Bercée de tendre insouciance / Je t’ai gardée dans mon coeur!” (Sweet France / Dear country of my childhood / Cradled in tender carefreeness / I have kept you in my heart).⁵⁵ The song continues over tracking shots of the Minguettes, apartment buildings, and a montage of shots of newspaper headlines of racist attacks, posters calling a halt to immigration, images of French television programs, and sports events as the opening credits roll: “Mon village aux clocher / aux maisons sages où les enfants de mon âge ont partagé mon Bonheur / oui, je t’aime et je te donne ce poème / Oui, je t’aime dans la joie ou la douleur” (My town with a bell / And noble houses where children of my age have shared my happiness / Yes, I love you and I give you this poem / Yes, I love you in joy and in pain).⁵⁶

In the first five and a half minutes of the film, Ben Yadir lays out the inciting incident: Mohamed is shot by police for protecting a child and decides to take action. The filmmaker structures Mohamed’s quest as a journey narrative within the road movie template but hybridizes it and layers it with several other genre inflections, thus expanding narrative typology. La Marche is an historical film with an ensemble cast whereby individual goals and desires are subsumed into a collective goal (the “je” in the “nous”) as declared by Mohamed early in the film: “On est français aussi!” (We are also French!).⁵⁷ Irony becomes a structuring trope as image and soundtrack often clash and create an interstitial space for the audience to think about the issues depicted. Much of the film is shot in half-tone lighting, which adds to the dreary, claustrophobic, and menacing atmosphere of the banlieues and the often-dangerous conditions of the trek. Danger and irony are both foregrounded when two racist truck drivers point a rifle at Monia, a daughter of immigrants, after she corrects their French. Monia’s aunt, Kheira, is beside herself with fear and anger and screams that they could have shot her. The incident is seemingly forgotten, but further down the road, when Monia goes off by herself to telephone her parents, she is attacked off-screen and stumbles back to the group, a cross having been carved into the flesh of her back.

In his review of the film, Olivier Barlet notes that the film opens important doors but closes others.⁵⁸ For example, the character arcs are well-developed, producing a “we shall overcome” if we stick together message. By contrast, some of the sociopolitical context is glossed over. For example, scenes of surveillance and infiltration of the march by The Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux, often called Renseignements Généraux (the intelligence service of the French police until 2008) punctuate the narrative at various moments, their initial goal being to shut down the march. As the narrative progresses, the Renseignements appear to sympathize with the marchers’ point of view. Furthermore, Ben Yadir seems reluctant to explain immigrant hostility towards the marchers because they have attracted media attention. But most significantly, during one assembly meeting with local immigrants toward the end of the film, Mohamed is accused of being a “son of a harki”⁵⁹ without any substantive explanation of the significance of this term. Certainly, Maghrebi and French audiences would understand its underlying implication of treachery, but other global audiences unfamiliar with the Algerian War of Independence might think the immigrants are simply cursing Mohamed in Arabic or local slang. Half of the original marchers were indeed children of Algerians, including harkis, but activists of French origin formed the other main component. The mixing of French and Arabic, the historicity, epistolarity (Farid keeps a journal of their journey),⁶⁰ and self-reflexivity through irony force a comparison with Naficy’s accented cinema. “Hate is not the answer” is the message of this character-driven road movie advocating nonviolence, one of a first of many decolonization tours.

In recalling Laura Marks’ model, ways of thinking and being in two different geographical locations (India [Gandhi] and United States [Martin Luther King Jr.]) and across time periods (early twentieth century and 1960s) are enfolded into another time and space (France in the 1980s). Unfolding the knowledge reveals global, rhizomatic links to philosophies of nonviolent resistance and activism, as well as utopic ideals of different communities living together in harmony and happiness. In the French context, following “La Marche” of 1983, these ideals were short-lived because it was never clearly determined by anyone if inclusion would necessitate a multicultural model or would translate into full membership within the French republican model.

TOUJOURS SANS PAPIERS: PARIS STALINGRAD

Laura Reeck writes that by “2005, violence replaced the hopeful slogans of the Beur marchers of the 1980s . . . and the stakes were issues of justice, the urban environment, and the lack of opportunity.”⁶¹ Narratives of exclusionism and containment abound in film and literature whereby the African or Maghrebi protagonist is constructed “as banlieusard insider but an outsider of the French workplace.”⁶² In 2007, a collective of banlieue writers and artists known as Qui fait la France? published a manifesto stating: “Nous refusons de demeurer spectateurs des souffrances dont sont victimes les plus fragiles, les déclassés, les invisibles” (We refuse to remain spectators of suffering by victims who are the among the most fragile, the underclassed, the invisible).⁶³ Dominic Thomas writes that one of the collective’s main objectives, at the time, was to call out imposed inaccurate stereotypes of the banlieues. The collective also strove to position their literary and artistic expression firmly within French space rather than on the fringes of society looking in.⁶⁴ Home is France, and the social, cultural, and political reality is about “a French population at home within France’s borders.”⁶⁵ This mode of engagement and expression still pertains to filmmakers who are concerned with reconnecting French republicanism to reality and creating a counter-archive to mainstream accounts of lived realities.

In 2019, French-Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb directed, along with French filmmaker, cinematographer, screenwriter, and co-director Thim Naccache, a reflexive cinéma vérité feature documentary film, Paris Stalingrad (France, 2019), about refugees arriving in Paris from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan. Born in France and based in Paris, Meddeb considers herself a citizen of both sides of the Mediterranean, and her work focuses on representations of youth social protests and movements of peoples. Naccache has worked in documentary filmmaking and television series production in France.

In Paris Stalingrad, the directors use irony and oral storytelling tropes to build the film’s narrative and visual structures, thus opening up a reflexive space for audiences to engage in a larger discussion of the precarious condition of the migrant in globalization. Its multilinguality—refugees speak their Indigenous languages—and cinéma vérité frame allow the camera to follow the lived realities of the migrants, and there is a restless quality to the handheld camera work. It supports the witnessing of the female voice-over (Dina Amer): “The exile is in constant motion. He can’t stop anywhere. His presence is always undesired.”⁶⁶ Mobility and movement are inextricably linked to displacement and homelessness. In an interview, Meddeb describes the genesis of the film:

I witnessed the French state’s violence against these new immigrants and decided to film their daily life, between police raids, massive arrests, and closed immigration offices. I made this film to share my experience of their side of the story. Until that night, when I met Souleymane, a Sudanese teenager who lost everything during the war in Darfur. Whenever others denied his humanity, whenever he faced torture, slavery or abuse, Souleymane found solace in the one thing nobody could take from him: his poetry. For him, each poem is a way to say the unspeakable, to sublimate the violence he endured throughout his journey. I film Souleymane in his Parisian wanderings, to the beat of his poetic ramblings.⁶⁷

In the film, Souleymane Mohamed, an eighteen-year-old refugee from Darfur, arrives in Paris after a five-year journey and finds comfort in poetry as he struggles to survive in the street camps near Stalingrad metro station. He creates an anarchive through verses such as “Exile is a Liar . . . / it lures you with illusions,”⁶⁸ which he recites as the image track depicts iconic, romantic, tourist images of the Eiffel Tower from the vantage point of Pont Neuf. This is an ironic construction of postcard-perfect image and narration of despair. The surface of the construct depicts beauty and serenity because the truth of the vista has been enfolded and rendered invisible by the official archives. But the narration jars and forces the viewer to look into the scene’s deep structure, unfolding and bringing attention to the occluded history of the 17 October 1961 drowning of Algerians at that very spot in the Seine following demonstrations in central Paris. Hollis-Touré contends that “in the history of postcolonial migration, the creation of a heritage and discourse of memory that might recognize migrants, or demonstrate their belonging within a historical narrative, has also involved spatial negotiations.”⁶⁹ The reverse setup occurs in another scene in which Souleymane recites an uplifting poem:

Oh, our planet. Mother of all dreams /

You bring happiness to mankind /

You give us love. From Paris to Calais /

No more borders! Freedom for all! /⁷⁰

As Souleymane speaks, the image track reveals a sequence of images of the Stalingrad metro station, including refugees jostled by police and a pregnant refugee woman being kicked in the stomach by a passerby. Edward Said has described exile as “unbearably historical” and its scale in contemporary times prevents it from ever being viewed as humanitarian.⁷¹ For Said, each experience of exile is unique with globalization creating a patchwork of experiences generated on the basis of separate and individual historical imperatives. This suggests that exiles have an urgent need to reconstitute broken lives and cultures, and in order to bear the pain of dislocation, create political structures within which to view their cause as just and to provide a sense of identity in a world of otherness.

The filmmakers are concerned with bearing witness to the constant precarity of the exile and the violence endured by migrants. Meddeb explains, “I decided to keep a record, to show what my city imposes on newcomers.”⁷² Voice-over punctuates the film at key moments, narrating historical events:

On October 24, 2016, the Jungle of Calais is destroyed. Hundreds of people flock to Paris. They gather around street camps near Stalingrad station. Autumn has begun. Nights are getting colder. People organize. They hang tent cloths between the trees to protect against the wind and rain. . . . A few days later, the government announced it would give shelter to the 4000 people living in Stalingrad.⁷³

The street camp had become a community of its own, and refugees looked out for each other. When the police break up the camp to move the refugees to shelters, cracks begin to appear in the system. For example, the refugees are not afforded equal treatment, with some gaining access to everything, including French lessons, while others get nothing and were placed in hotels for a month with no food. The political strategy is transparent: the Right can be satisfied that the police are clearing out the refugees and the Left can be satisfied that the refugees are being given shelter. But, in fact, this is systemic racism, which becomes even more blatant when the city government fences off the area once occupied by the refugees, creates recreational spaces with signs for “Parisians only,” and loads a pile of boulders under the bridge at Porte de la Chapelle so no one can sleep there, sheltered from the rain and elements. The voice-over intones, “Defending our borders is now taking place in the heart of our cities.”⁷⁴

One of the stated goals of the refugees is the ten-year residence permit. They reassure each other that if all goes well, they will obtain the coveted ten-year residency. Ironically, this was one of the petitions of the 1983 March—the ten-year residency and work permit, which President Mitterrand ended up according to all immigrants, not just North Africans. Souleymane’s journey is ultimately a success story. He is transferred to Nancy, in the eastern region of France, where he finds a good job as an auto mechanic. He acquires his residence permit and has a home. But at the end of the film, he speaks wistfully about his friends in the Stalingrad Street camp and the sense of solidarity they shared, some of whom were sent back to Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, where their lives are clearly in danger and where they “don’t want to kill or fight,”⁷⁵ as one Afghan refugee (a former teacher) puts it.

Movement and displacement are recurring tropes in the film. As the voice-over emphasizes:

As far as the outside roads, and even beyond, in the suburbs of Paris and the cities of St. Denis and Aubervilliers or St. Ouen, wherever he is, an exile is immediately removed. The police make sure camps are not forming. The possibility to create a community with a sense of solidarity that once lived in Stalingrad is gone.⁷⁶

This narration is laid over a visual track depicting several Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), special mobile French police force members pulling at migrants’ tents and destroying what little they possess.

CONCLUSION

The films discussed in this essay are all part of French cinematic history and contribute significantly to the “expansion and decentralization of the parameters of French-language film production itself.”⁷⁷ The films are journeys of resistance, always in movement, like the denominator, “permanent Marcher,” espoused by several 1983 marchers, because stasis means cultural death. Hamid Naficy cautions that accented filmmakers’ journeys are more than just “physical and territorial,” but are also “psychological and philosophical.”⁷⁸ He maintains that a significant aspect of the journey is the quest for identity, sloughing off the old one and forging a new one. Identity is an ongoing process of becoming—a performance whereby “each accented film may be thought of as a performance of its author’s identity.”⁷⁹

As migrant bodies suffer crises the rest of the world fails to understand, sovereignty and control over one’s own story in one’s own Indigenous language (declared a human right by the United Nations) is perhaps the most precious thing that remains, regardless of all that one loses during migration. Although certainly not a recent theme in cultural expression, migration, displacement, and mobility stake out urgent claims and space answering Achille Mbembe’s call for the development of “an aesthetic of opening and encounter,” whereby identities are intrinsically global in scope because they have been shaped by a confluence of transnational forces.⁸⁰

The filmmakers join their films’ characters and subjects as “permanent marchers” in the long journey for civic and human rights and the right to live with dignity in their host country. They transformed social movement in French spaces, including “the streets of Paris, but also transformed those streets into an area where otherwise marginalized individuals could now belong together.”⁸¹ The films’ characters are all “social agents” with “transformative impact on the areas they inhabit” even when denied hospitality in the host nation and thus forced into the position of “permanent ‘guest.’”⁸²

The filmmakers provide their subjects ways of belonging and all three films work to build anarchives that are instructive but not didactic. They are acts of resistance, defying “totalizing gestures, . . . containment, . . . coherence. . . and master narratives” of a journey.⁸³ The outcomes of expression are fluid and remediated into multiple iterations for contexts that evolve over time, including global pandemics and refugee crises.

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