Representing ethnicity in contemporary French visual culture

Joseph McGonagle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526107497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remain one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. Troubling visions is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies - ranging from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France's popular TV series Plus belle la vie - it explores how ethnicities have been represented in contemporary France across a wide variety of different media. Its innovative, interdisciplinary approach and novel subject matter will complement university courses that focus on contemporary French society and visual culture. It will interest those researching and studying French and European film and photography, ethnicity in post-colonial France and visual culture generally.

1

Changing notions of national identity: engaging with ethnicity

As the Introduction made clear, since the early 1980s France has experienced an important period of significant political and social change. Many prevailing notions of national identity were redefined as the descendants of post-World War Two migrants to France (and especially those of Maghrebi heritage) came of age. Laws on nationality and citizenship were repeatedly revised, and controversy raged over measures that purportedly challenged the primacy of French republican universalism as well as others that sought to bolster it. The relations between ethnicity and national identity duly became a subject that recurred regularly in the media, and one that often attracted fierce debate. The furore generated by the creation of the Ministère de l’Immigration, de l’Intégration, de l’Identité nationale et du développement solidaire following Nicolas Sarkozy’s election as president in 2007 proved a particular case in point. It quickly became known more by shorthand terms such as the Ministère de l’immigration et de l’identité nationale, which reflected the frequency with which Sarkozy and his government chose to dwell on both these areas and their desire to present them as profoundly linked.

Moreover, the ruling UMP party’s predilection for focusing on French national identity and positioning immigration as threatening to it formed a key hallmark of Sarkozy’s presidency and was seen by critics as a deliberate strategy to attract National Front voters. The announcement by the Minister of Immigration and National Identity, Éric Besson, that he had earmarked November 2009 to February 2010 as a time for reflection and national debate on the values of French national identity – just ahead of regional elections in March 2010 – was symptomatic of such government policy. This initiative also formed part of a wider instrumentalisation of history, memory and national identity during Sarkozy’s reign, whose approach lacked both in subtlety and sophistication. To cite one of many examples: Sarkozy’s commissioning of a report to scope out plans for a future museum of French history; a project that, as Thomas (2010: 3) points out, was ‘diametrically opposed in its aims and aspirations to the conceptions of French history that have defined the CNHI’. Opened in 2007, the CNHI (Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration) – later rebranded the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration and belatedly inaugurated by President Hollande in December 2014 – has provided a highly visible and important space within the French capital for visitors to engage with the historical and contemporary legacies of migration across French society. Moreover, the centrality of visual culture among both its permanent and temporary exhibition spaces underlines its primacy in enabling visitors to explore the many complexities of this area: complexities that often seemed to escape many French politicians in power throughout this period.

This wider era was also characterised by a series of polemics about the relationship between French national identity and ethnic and religious differences in French society more generally, epitomised by the introduction of legislation, which came into force in April 2011, outlawing the covering of the face in public. Specifically targeting Muslim women who wear garments such as the niqab or burqa, it marked a significant development in the evolution of legislation and government policy since the late 1980s regarding the wearing of garments on religious and cultural grounds. This had been largely spurred by the events known collectively as the three headscarf affairs, which saw governments move from prohibiting in state schools garments judged to be conspicuously religious in character – such as the headscarf – to eventually banning there any visible symbols whatsoever that were deemed to be religious. Whereas such legislation focused upon the highly symbolic space of the state school classroom and other areas classified as part of the French republican public sphere, the jurisdiction of the “burqa law” extended beyond these to cover all public space: a major change that instigated a widespread debate about French republican values and the place of Islam in France. Such controversies highlighted once again the extent to which the relationship between national identity and ethnicity, along with religious and cultural diversity, remains a contested field in France. As this chapter will demonstrate, this has certainly been the case within French visual culture since the 1980s too, where France and Frenchness in relation to ethnicity have been represented in contradictory ways.

On the one hand, France’s ethnic diversity has clearly been more readily acknowledged within visual culture, and growing numbers of ethnic minorities have appeared and risen to prominence across it. Since the 1980s, the visibility of French citizens of black and Maghrebi heritage in cinema has notably increased and several French male actors of minority ethnic heritage – such as Jamel Debbouze, Gad Elmaleh and Jacques Martial – have become stars. Conversely, blockbusters such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) – commonly abbreviated to Amélie and discussed at the end of this chapter – and his Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004), along with popular films such as Nicolas Philibert’s Être et avoir (2002) and Christophe Barratier’s Les Choristes (2004) nostalgically posited France both historically and in the contemporary era as an idealised, white and largely ethnically homogenous space: a vision of France that clearly resonates abroad too, given their international success. This chapter will therefore probe the parameters of such trends both within cinema and more widely across contemporary French visual culture. It will do so by examining – via a series of detailed case studies – several of the ways in which ethnicity in relation to France and Frenchness has been represented visually since the 1980s.

The first section addresses the work of a photographer whose images encompass two major national celebrations held during this period: the 1989 bicentenary of the French Republic’s founding and the events held to mark the year 2000. Both occasions provided opportunities to reassess the French republican legacy and to reassert its enduring relevance (Leruth 1998, 2001). Luc Choquer – subject of a major retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2010 – addresses both these symbolic moments in his photography and is considered first in this chapter. His book Planète France (1989) depicts France during the mid-to-late 1980s and, by incorporating traditional signifiers of Frenchness and republican insignia, interrogates notions of nationality and citizenship in late twentieth-century France. His follow-up DVD-ROM, Fragments du futur (2001), collates images of France’s inhabitants throughout the 1990s and shows a distinct change in tone, positioning France as a place of increasing ethnic diversity. His subsequent book, Portraits de Français (2007) supplements these predecessors by adding images of France post-2000: all three will be studied to assess how France and French society are represented in Choquer’s work and how his depictions of them evolve over time.

Attention will then turn to a film that similarly shows ethnicity playing a pivotal role in contemporary France: Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Drôle de Félix (2000). Its eponymous hero – the highly unusual choice in French cinema of a Frenchman of Maghrebi heritage who is also gay and HIV-positive – travels the length of the mainland in search of his father and, by avoiding many major cities, allows the film to showcase less urban landscapes in French provinces. The film provides an absorbing portrait of France and French society as Félix’s journey progresses, during which the connections between ethnicity and national identity in pre-millennial France are probed. Although merely a modest success at the French box office, the film has attracted sustained attention from critics in the decade following its release: its afterlife as an object of analysis will therefore also be briefly considered, pondering why the film has been privileged in this way.

The following section will then scrutinise another integral part of contemporary French visual culture – television – by focusing on an area of increasing public debate and media scrutiny: the under-representation of ethnic minorities on French television screens. As will become clear, French television channels’ relative inertia in this area compared to other European broadcasters and the general slow pace of change are compounded by the peculiar challenge French programme makers face: namely, how to better reflect the ethnic diversity of French society without flouting the tenets of French republican universalism, which theoretically outlaws any quota-based system and therefore powerfully inhibits the recognition of societal difference.

The chapter then closes by returning to cinema to assess a rare example of the issue of representativeness and ethnicity raised in the French film industry. Although a huge success in France and an international box-office hit, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001) attracted controversy due to the perception that his film pointedly obscured the ethnic diversity of contemporary central Paris. The brevity of the resulting polemic in France was revealing – such criticism predictably dismissed by many commentators almost as quickly as it was raised – but the fact that the issue was broached at all in French cinema was striking and tellingly exposed both the fault lines that define it as a subject in contemporary France and the ideological stakes at play.

By analysing such a variety of different works that engage directly with questions of ethnicity and Frenchness, this chapter examines several important themes and tropes that have recurred throughout French visual culture during this period. Crucially, it will also demonstrate that notions of French national identity across these different media, as testified by this range of works, have remained far from static since the 1980s.

No place like home: France and French society in the photography of Luc Choquer

Although yet to acquire the widespread recognition enjoyed by some of his contemporaries, the photographer Luc Choquer has developed a compelling body of work since the 1980s which explicitly interrogates contemporary notions of France and French society. Planète France, Choquer’s first book publication, established his trademark style of brightly coloured flash photography and marked a distinctive divergence from black-and-white postwar humanist photography, which had increasingly come back into vogue in France from the mid-1980s onwards. His preference for carefully composed portraiture also differentiated him from much reportage-style photojournalism: a particularly popular genre of photography in France. This was undoubtedly why the editor and fellow photographer Claude Nori, quoted on the book’s jacket, described it as no less than ‘le premier portrait contemporain de la France et de ses habitants’ (the first contemporary portrait of France and of its inhabitants).

Focusing solely on life in mainland France, Choquer’s book characterises the métropole in a number of ways. An emphasis upon French cultural life and heritage runs throughout, with shots of the Palais Garnier in Paris and a portrait of the popular band Les Rita Mitsouko along with nods to the worlds of art, fashion and sport. The main focus, however, remains upon “planet” dwellers and the spaces they inhabit, with the camera often penetrating domestic spaces. Frequently it is the quirkiness of life that catches Choquer’s eye and his wry look at French society encourages viewers to see it afresh.

This occurs particularly in his treatment of French republican institutions and insignia, such as in the portrait of two légionnaires (Choquer 1989: 61). Dressed in uniform and staring impassively into the camera, they should cut imposing figures. By picturing them both full-length while mirroring each other in stance and pose, however, Choquer lends them the air of marionettes: a potentially rather acerbic comment on the role the French Foreign Legion has played in buttressing French foreign policy. Furthermore, the prominence of their uniforms and the range of colour and texture shown recall some of the portraiture for which the artists Pierre and Gilles became famous (Pierre et Gilles 2007) and chime with the humour and hyperrealism their images often evoke. The embrace of a similarly kitsch aesthetic here also accentuates the légionnaires’ alterity within this landscape, despite their location being Aubagne, the Legion’s headquarters. Moreover, by photographing them away from any recognisable sign of military life and in dimly lit, barren surroundings Choquer renders them rather alien to his planet: the camera’s low angle and their upright stance, along with the luminosity of the camera’s flash which bounces off their bodies, might even suggest that they have been beamed down from the sky shown above. With no identifiable landscape or other figures in shot, the portrait emphasises their otherness in Choquer’s world: a fitting allusion given the legionnaires’ association with deployments beyond rather than inside France, and underlining the resolutely metropolitan focus of the wider book.

Choquer’s idiosyncratic view of life in France and French society extends to other images that include symbols of Frenchness and the Republic. So rather than show the bicentennial celebrations of 1989 in full swing, his photograph ‘Marie, Simon et Anne, après une fête commémorative de la Révolution, 1989’ (Choquer 1989: 57) instead captures their aftermath by showing a tired white woman and two white children, posing in front of a house at night, presumably having returned home from festivities. They make a striking tableau: no one smiles or looks at the camera directly and the boy’s tugging of the woman’s shawl and the girl’s apparent slumber suggest they had posed at length. Since the time of carnival has elapsed, however, the woman’s tricolour cockade and the costumes they wear are no longer of use. This sense of obsolescence is reinforced further by the stylised way in which the costumed figures are arranged and by photographing them once their composure seems lost, a choice that also subtly highlights the artifice of the pose within portraiture more widely. Representing bicentennial celebrations through the family and children might traditionally connote the continued relevance and renewal of the French Republic. These subjects, however, seem distracted and their costumes out of kilter. The staleness of the proceedings seemingly implies that the vision of republicanism celebrated bears little resemblance to life in late-1980s France, and that its legacy may now be out-of-date.

French Revolutionary colours are also found elsewhere. In one image (Choquer 1989: 25) a tricolour flies high above four white boules players, middle-aged or older in appearance, standing outside a large hut. The symmetry between their bodies and the flagpole implies their rectitude as citizens, while the plaque behind them marked ‘Cabanon No 35’ indicates subdivision and order. The boules that each player carries – a quintessential, albeit caricatural, marker of Frenchness – infer the ludic, but the formality of their V-shaped arrangement and the leading woman’s rather guarded expression also connote a certain defensiveness, which is accentuated by the players’ cordon-like formation, providing a barrier between viewers and the hut and flag behind.

Humour is created, however, by the disjuncture between the casualness of their dress – summer clothes and beachwear – and more formal demeanour. Moreover, the seriousness of some of their expressions is somewhat subverted by the sorry state of the tricolour above them, which flies raggedly with a large tear between its white and red segments. By showing it flying in reverse, Choquer creates a sense of disorientation heightened by the camera angle, which forces viewers to tilt their heads to the right to observe the group straight on. Viewing the photograph therefore becomes mildly dizzying: entirely in keeping with Choquer’s sideways look at symbols of French national identity.

These three photographs therefore question the vitality of certain archetypal symbols of France and the French Republic, associating them with long-established traditions and older generations. In contrast, the majority of images in Planète France feature the young: epitomised by the book’s front cover, which shows two young male swimmers posing side-by-side. Their contrasting skin colours – one boy is white, the other is black – also herald the ethnic diversity of Choquer’s planet, which he depicts in an intriguing way.

Two portraits stand out. The first (Choquer 1989: 43) shows a young black woman, perched upon two boxes, between a pair of decorative curtains adorned with paper cocktail umbrellas that hang behind her on a windowless wall. The playful air this creates is accentuated by the doll shown beside her and the toy held by her son, seated below. She is shown wearing a fluorescent pink leotard – whose colour matches her large hoop earrings and lipstick – and the light catches her raised right thigh, which is uncovered above her black knee-length socks. This striking combination of décor and dress suggests an air of performance and fantasy, perhaps leading viewers to ponder the agency of the sitters and query their complicity in such image making.

As the only black woman photographed in Planète France, this portrait is already unique: it is exceptional in other ways too. Its inclusion acknowledges metropolitan France’s significant black population and, although the viewer is given no details about her ethnic heritage, were one to presume that she is of Martinican or Guadaloupean heritage, the portrait could be interpreted as a comment on the prominence of mothers in many Caribbean culture...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Changing notions of national identity: engaging with ethnicity
• 2 Shaping spaces: representing people of Algerian heritage
• 3 From the past to the present: parameters of Jewish identity
• 4 A multi-ethnic metropolis: representations of Marseille
• Conclusion
• References
• Filmography
• Index