The New Face of Political Cinema

Commitment in French Film since 1995

Martin O'Shaughnessy

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857456908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Since 1995 there has been a widespread return of commitment to French cinema taking it to a level unmatched since the heady days following 1968. But this new wave of political film is very different and urgently calls out for an analysis that will account for its development, its formal characteristics and its originality. This is what this book provides. It engages with leading directors such as Cantet, Tavernier, Dumont, Kassovitz, Zonca and Guédiguian, takes in a range of less well known but important figures and strays across the Belgian border to engage with the seminal work of the Dardenne brothers. It shows how the works discussed are helping to reinvent political cinema by finding stylistic and narrative strategies adequate to the contemporary context.

1

CONTEXTS

This chapter provides a concise account of the current state of the French socio-political and cinematic terrains. If it is driven, above all, by a sense of the urgent need to map and understand the present situation, it is also convinced that the present can only be understood, questioned and challenged if one has a clear sense of its historical roots. The chapter’s turn to the past is both explanatory and contrastive; that is, history is used both to point to the origins of the current situation and to underline its newness. If the 1968 period is privileged in this chapter, and indeed in the next, it is because it represents a high point of socio-political and cinematic radicalism. The contrast between 1968 and the present risks working in a purely negative way, underlining the profundity of the left’s political defeat and the apparent relative timidity of contemporary committed cinema. Hopefully more positive, the intention here is to take sobre stock of the present in the knowledge that strategies deployed by committed cinemas can only be gauged productively in terms of the effectiveness and timeliness of their responses to specific contexts.

Shifting Socio-political Contexts

In their highly influential Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme, Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) provide us with two ‘snapshots’ that are a useful starting point in an assessment of the present socio-political context. The first snapshot is of the period 1968–1975, a time when the authors note the activity of a social movement on the offensive, active trade unions and a consistent reference to social class in political debate. The second snapshot is of 1985–1995 when the authors find a quiescent social movement, disoriented unions and, significantly, a near disappearance of public reference to class. What happens in between, and what their work explains, is a seismic shift in the relationship between capital, labour and society more broadly. Boltanski and Chiapello suggest that capital underwent a crisis both of legitimacy and profitability in the period around 1968 when it was increasingly pressurized in Western societies by organized labour and subjected to a combination of what the authors call la critique artiste and la critique sociale. Generated by cultural producers and radical leftists, the former associates capital with unfreedom and alienating inauthenticity. Originating above all from the institutional left and trade unions, the latter targets the exploitation and poverty associated with the capitalist mode of production. The authors suggest that capitalism triumphed over both critiques, essentially by absorbing the values associated with the former and by disarming the latter. Thus, the old, massive, rigid and bureaucratic capitalist organization broke itself up and declared itself open to networking, creativity, intuition and difference in a way that made the critique of alienation and unfreedom harder to enforce. At the same time, the social critique was disabled as job security and collective drives to equality were undermined by individualization of rewards, fear of unemployment, and the loss of what had seemed a right to a full-time, permanent job. Subcontracting and outsourcing of work allowed collective agreements and labour protection laws to be bypassed and customer pressure to be applied to an atomized workforce at each stage of the production process. This dual process of co-option and disabling allowed capital to successfully reinvent itself and outflank opposition. Its success was marked – and this returns us to the snapshots – by the steady erasure of the discourse of class that had allowed the social to be described in terms of exploitation and its replacement by the politically disabling language of exclusion and inclusion. The latter locates those with full-time work among the privileged while presenting exclusion as a general social pathology and not as exploitation (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). It was this sense that work was somehow a privilege that allowed for the disqualification by important sectors of political and intellectual opinion of the 1995 public sector strikes in defence of social security rights. Deemed to be ‘included’, striking workers were accused of a selfish disregard for those truly in need, the excluded.

If one side of the current picture is the successful self-reinvention of capital, the other is the dismantling of the organized working class. Although the story of labour is present in Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis, it is more central to Beaud and Pialoux’s Retour sur la condition ouvrière (1999). This already classic study is specifically based on the Peugeot factory at Sochaux, but many of the transformations its authors describe have been played out across the world of work in general. They describe how the period since the 1970s has seen the dismantling of a working class that had been painfully built through the struggles of the mid-1930s Popular Front and the post-war periods. This process had been accompanied by mass unemployment, the erosion of working-class bastions, the collapse of the Communist Party and the sharp decline of trade union membership. Whereas the workers had previously been able to defend themselves by drawing on the substantial political, cultural and symbolic capital embodied in their associations, group pride and union and party representation, they were now becoming objects of compassion. Taylorist production lines had once built solidarity off which union delegates could feed. Now, although the lines are often still there, the shift to flexible working patterns, to electronic monitoring and to financial incentives for teams and individuals has helped undo the old collectivist culture and replaced it with competition and mutual surveillance. The language and practices of struggle and solidarity have come to seem outdated, something associated with an older generation of workers and union militants to which the young cannot relate. Usually employed on short-term contracts by subcontractors, the latter lack the security to buy a home or procure loans and more broadly to project themselves into the future. Although they face naked social domination they have (and this will be a key point for my own argument) no symbolic tools, no collective words to think themselves as a class or to express their disarray (Beaud and Pialoux 1999: 358). Whereas older workers can still struggle to defend group honour, the young can only fight to escape at an individual level from a succession of menial jobs (Beaud and Pialoux 1999: 360). Taken in conjunction, the works cited show the profundity of the changes to the socio-political domain since the 1970s. Not only has capital successfully revolutionized itself and substantially dismantled the organized working class, there is now no shared language to name what has happened, to label current oppressions and to federate individual grievances. This is a deeply hostile symbolic terrain for an oppositional cinema.

The work of Badiou and Balibar can help both to elucidate the consequences of this loss of an overarching oppositional political language and to bring in the vital international dimension. Writing in the mid-1980s, and thus even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Badiou suggested that a radical leftist, predominantly Marxist, worldview had imploded. This worldview had rested on three pillars: existing socialist states, Third World national liberation struggles, and the workers’ movement with its party and union components. Each of the pillars had collapsed, as emblematic examples showed. China and the USSR had become counter-examples not models. Vietnam, once the epitome of a popular struggle for liberation, had become statist. The Solidarity movement in Poland had brought home the divorce between a militant workers’ movement and a Marxism that could no longer claim to be in the vanguard of history (Badiou 1985). While the examples are, of course, from a particular historical moment, the underlying and still valid point is that a Marxist or related viewpoint is no longer available to provide an overarching, totalising vision that can connect local and specific struggles to a broader narrative of emancipation.

Balibar complements Badiou’s analysis by pointing to the rise of ‘useless’ violence in the contemporary world. Class and colonial oppressions and resistances to them were violences that could be incorporated within a positive historical narrative of emancipation. Not only is a leftist narrative no longer available to give meaning to contemporary struggles, the world now sees the elimination of large sectors of population from the productive economy. These newly ‘disposable’ masses can no longer imagine themselves positively as political subjects capable of emancipating humanity as colonized peoples or the working class might once have done. Thus, the violence done to them through their economic marginalization no longer seems open to productive narration. The often violent, identitarian responses to capitalist globalization are similarly resistant to incorporation within a narrative of progressive politics (Balibar 1997: 23–26). Castel brings some of Balibar’s conclusions closer to home. He points to the contemporary return of mass socio-economic vulnerability to Western societies who thought they had moved beyond it during the years of full employment and strong welfare states. As those previously in possession of stable employment are destabilized and others are locked into social precariousness, there is an increasing rationing of socially productive statuses and a concomitant growth in the number of ‘useless people’ or inutiles au monde (Castel 1995: 662), isolated individuals who are called upon to bear personal responsibility for their socially generated marginalization. Whereas the position of the old working class could be productively named as exploitation or as domination in ways that opened onto a challenge to the social structure, the diverse inutiles au monde are currently packaged together under the pathologizing term of social ‘exclusion’. Rather than being used to question those (central) social processes that generate it, their marginality is seen as something that must be treated so that they can become part of a society that is not itself placed in question. Castel’s inutiles au monde and Balibar’s ‘disposable’ masses point to a sea change in the representation of the social, both within a national frame and at an international level, a shift that has its clear roots in the processes of globalizing capital and in the implosion and forcible undoing of the erstwhile leftist grand narrative of opposition. This profoundly disabling configuration of the social is something that a committed cinema must challenge.

The collapse of grand narratives has been a commonplace of intellectual discussion since the 1980s and notably since the publication of Lyotard’s seminal The Postmodern Condition (1984). To the extent that grand narratives are oppressive and constraining (leaving no room for diversity and foreclosing alternative possibilities), their collapse can be seen as opening space for the emergence of a multiplicity of smaller, more diverse, less deterministic stories that, permitting choice and debate, are implicitly more democratic. While not entirely rejecting such a position, the argument developed in this book will follow very different lines. Firstly, its core concern is not the undoing of grand narratives as a generic category but the consequences of the collapse of an overarching leftist worldview. Secondly, while it is acutely conscious of the tyrannical potential of grand narratives in general and a leftist grand narrative in particular, it is profoundly unconvinced that, under current conditions of neo-liberal triumph, the collapse of the leftist imaginary has opened a space in which liberatory smaller stories can develop. Rather, in ways that will be developed in chapter 3, the suggestion will be that it has become difficult to tell any progressive story at all. The leftist imaginary that once gave a language, meaning and direction to struggles and brought oppressions to visibility is no longer available. It leaves in its wake not a space of freedom but one characterized by meaninglessness, isolation, silencing and invisibility. Operating on this scarred terrain, a committed cinema can no longer be the same. It must be a cinema that registers defeat but that also resists it by refusing the invisibility of class, by reconnecting marginalization to the central processes that drive it and by finding ways to restore meaning to ‘useless’ suffering and struggle.

Le Mouvement Social and the Revival of Opposition

The picture of political defeat and social retreat, disarray and fragmentation that emerges above needs to be balanced by the revival of a diverse socio-political opposition that has made its presence increasingly felt since the mid-1990s and notably since the public sector strikes of December 1995 signalled a collective refusal of neo-liberal policies. This opposition is sometimes gathered under the umbrella term, le mouvement social. Such an appellation bears the risk of implying an organizational unity and ideological discipline that a relatively fragmented oppositionality clearly neither has nor necessarily wants (Crettiez and Sommier 2002: 20–24). However, it does usefully indicate the divide, if not the divorce, between oppositional groups and those party and union actors who might traditionally have structured them. The social movement is not simply social because it as yet lacks an overarching political project, it is also social because the conventional political arena of state and parties seems unable or unwilling to challenge the neo-liberal consensus.

The social movement needs to be apprehended both in its diversity and in certain convergences. First the diversity: 1995 suggested a renewal of combativeness amongst public sector workers, an attitude maintained, although with less dramatic impact, by subsequent mobilizations by teachers, researchers, railway workers and others to defend jobs and pension rights and to resist creeping privatization of the state sector. However, the private sector failed to mobilize in 1995 and is largely the site of local and sometimes desperate defensive actions that take place against a background of a broader passivity and demoralization. In contrast, other groups traditionally thought incapable of mobilizing – the unemployed and the homeless – have undertaken highly visible actions, sometimes strictly local, sometimes national in their dimensions and sometimes (the European unemployment marches of 1997 and 1999) international. At the same time, the counter-globalization movement has grown in strength and visibility. ATTAC is its most prominent organization and the internationally circulated Le Monde Diplomatique one of its chief intellectual forums. French counter-globalization has been strongly represented in successive World and European Social forums. Repeated actions have also taken place in opposition to government policies perceived as racist as well as against the extreme rightist Front National that consistently registers electoral scores in the high teens. There has been, for example, a long-established campaign against the double peine, a discriminatory statute whereby non-French nationals can be doubly punished for crimes, first by imprisonment and then by expulsion from France. There has also been, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, a sometimes little reported and sometimes high profile campaign in support of the sans-papiers. Anti-racism and anti-fascism, the constant motivation of campaigning by groups such as the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, attract short-lived mass mobilization at times of perceived urgency, such as when, against expectations, the Front’s leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round of the French presidential elections in 2002. France has also seen repeated mobilization around issues such as gay rights and environmentalism. If feminism can no longer claim the impact it enjoyed in the heady days of the 1970s, it has certainly not been quiescent in recent years. The campaign for political parity may in the end have had a somewhat disappointing outcome, with legislation being insufficiently radical to challenge the more important bastions of male political power. It nonetheless served to bring at least some of the questions raised by feminism back to the fore. At the same time, there have been other lower profile but nonetheless important feminist campaigns, triggered notably by threats to welfare regimes and reproductive rights and by enhanced awareness of the level of violence against women.

Despite the range of the above mobilizations – and the list is far from complete – certain commonalities can be identified (Crettiez and Sommier 2002: 20–22). As we have noted, these diverse movements all tend to operate with considerable independence from traditional union and party actors. Their distance from conventional political mobilization is accentuated by a refusal of centralized and hierarchical organizations and a marked preference for decentralized networks and direct democracy. The 1995 strikes were faithful to this pattern. They were led from the base and not from the top, and were driven by the cross-union and cross-trade ‘coordinations’ which first emerged in the 1980s and whose preferred mode of deliberation and decision making was the daily general assembly in which all had a voice. The 1995 strikes were also typical of other components of the social movement in that, although they began to evolve a set of principles in clear opposition to neo-liberalism, they had no longer-term social project. Other elements of the social movement also typically mobilize around specific goals rather than broader social projects. These shared features suggest some of the limitations and ambiguities of contemporary social mobilization. Seen in one way, the social movement might seem to present the politics of the future, one that has learned from the errors of the past and can see the undemocratic or even totalitarian potential of hierarchical organizations, programmatic politics and grand narratives of emancipation. Yet seen in another way, the movement might seem to highlight the current lack of serious opposition to globalizing capital. Short-term, local struggles without broader ambitions and defensive and broadly consensual anti-fascism hardly suggest a truly radical social programme while the unstructured multiplicity of groups makes joint mobilization problematic. The radical credentials of the social movement are thus, as a number of commentators have noted (e.g., Hewlett 2004: 9–10), profoundly ambiguous. A strengthening of the politics of counter-globalization in both its anti-capitalist and internationalist dimensions would seem to be the obvious way for this ambiguity to resolve positively by allowing for the federation of core contemporary struggles against fascism, racism and social exclusions and in defence of migrants, state sector workers and egalitarian public service provision.

Taking in conjunction, the different changes evoked point to the radical newness of the socio-political terrain, a newness whose key points might be summarized as follows:

1. The traumatic undoing of the organized working class and the massive loss of influence of those institutions (the unions, the Communist Party or PCF) which both represented it and framed its struggles.

2. The collapse of a leftist, predominantly Marxist, grand narrative of opposition that connected local, national and international dimensions and past and present instances of resistance within an overarching frame.

3. The displacement of a polemical, class-based vision of the social by a politically disabling narrative of exclusion.

4. The fragmented, often individualized face of contemporary social suffering and its substantial loss of an adequate voice.

5. The rise of ‘useless’ suffering and violence no longer open to productive incorporation within a progressive narrative.

6. The emergence of an as yet fragmented and ambiguous but also vibrant and assertive social movement substantially disconnected from institutional politics.

Collectively, these changes constitute a radical transformation of the broader socio-political context in which a committed cinema must work and to which it must respond. But as we shall now see, they are paralleled by a similarly radical transformation of the cinematic terrain since the heyday of committed cinema in the years following 1968.

A Transformed Cinematic Terrain

The radical cinema that so flourished in the years after 1968 was one that saw itself as part of a broader project of socio-political transformation. Its double ambition was to make itself a vehicle for this broader project and to revolutionize its own means of production, expression, exhibition and reception. It was a cinema that found itself in frontal opposition to a state that was essentially considered to be a guarantor of the power of capital, still exercised direct political censorship and maintained a stranglehold on television, the public’s principle source of information. It was a cinema too that was able, to some extent, to by-pass commercial channels of production, distribution and exhibition due to the existence of a vibrant associative sector, political and union actors (essentia...