A North Wind THE NEW REALISM OF THE FRENCH- WALLOON CINÉMA DU NORD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY NIELS NIESSEN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ADVISER: CESARE CASARINO NOVEMBER, 2013 © Niels Niessen, 2013 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ideas sometimes come in the middle of the night yet they are never fully one’s own. They are for a very large part the fruits of the places and organizations one works or is supported by, the communities one lives in and traverses, and the people one loves and is loved by. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the support I received from the following institutions: the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huygens Scholarship Program of the Dutch government, the Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds (The Netherlands), and, at the University of Minnesota, the Center for German & European Studies (and its donor Hella Mears), the Graduate School (and the Harold Leonard Memorial Fellowship in Film Study), as well as the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. As for my home department, I could not have wished for a warmer and more intellectually vibrant community to pursue my graduate studies, and I express my gratitude to all who I have worked with. A special word of thanks to my academic adviser, Cesare Casarino, who has taught me how to read many of the philosophies that, explicitly or implicitly, have shaped my thinking in the following pages, and who has made me see that cinema too is a form of thought. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee: Tim Brennan, Rembert Hueser, Richard Leppert, and John Mowitt. Furthermore, I would like to thank the friends that I have made in Minneapolis. In particular I thank Nichole Neuman, who has made me see the beauty of the Minneapolis, and St. Paul. I would also like to thank my parents, for their continuous support throughout the years. Finally I thank Adair Rounthwaite, with whom I ii began my Mid-Western adventure. Our lives have split, but this project continues to bear the traces of our life together. iii CONTENTS Acknowledgments i Contents iii Introduction—A North Wind 1 1. A Cinema of Life: Rosetta and L’humanité 23 2. Cinéma du Nord: A Transnational Region and its Cinematic Manifestations 90 3. Cinéma du Nord: A Transnational Regional Cinema 169 4. A Cinema of Life: New Realism 233 Bibliography 305 1 INTRODUCTION | A North Wind “Vent du Nord,” the French regional newspaper La Voix du Nord exclaimed on May 25, 1999. “The battle of humanity has been won: the jury’s big blow to the cinema professionals,” the Walloon newspaper Le Soir headed that morning in a similar triumphant spirit. And reporting about the same event, Le Monde stated on its front page: “A Rosetta, pour l’humanité.”1 This event was the closing ceremony of the 1999 Cannes International Film Festival, where the Walloon filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the Palme d’or for Rosetta (1999, BE/FR), while the northern French Bruno Dumont was awarded the Grand Prix for L’humanité/Humanity (1999, FR). In addition, both films’ leading actresses, Emilie Dequenne and Sévérine Caneele, as well as the leading male actor from L’humanité, Emmanuel Schotté, were laurelled with the festival’s most prestigious acting prizes.2 This wholehearted embrace of the jury, which that year was presided by David Cronenberg, of these two at first sight bleak and grim portraits of human struggle in northern francophone Europe caused a controversy the size of which the festival had not experienced since the 1987 Golden Palm for Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan/Under the Sun of Satan, perhaps not coincidentally another film entrenched in the “enfer du Nord,” the Hell of the North. (Pialat’s response to the booing 1 “Vent du Nord,” La Voix du Nord (May 25, 1999), p. 1; Luc Honorez, “La Bataille de l’humanité est gagnée: la formidable baffe du jury aux professionels de la profession,” Le Soir (May 25, 1999), p. 12. “A Rosetta, pour l’humanité,” Le Monde (May 25, 1999), p. 1. 2 See also: “Palmarès festival de Cannes dont Palme d’Or aux frères Dardenne pour Rosetta,” video, Soir 3 (France 3) (May 23, 1999), http://www.ina.fr/cannes/1997-2010/video/ CAC99022160/palmares-festival-de-cannes-dont-palme-d-or-aux-freres-dardenne-pour- rosetta.fr.html (accessed February 23, 2013). 2 and whistling that befell him has become legendary: “If you don’t like me, let me tell you, I don’t like you either,” upon which he raised his fist, in triumph and bitterness.3) Though most of the Cannes audience and commentators in the international press could live with the jury’s unanimous choice for Rosetta as best film, its abundant acclaim of L’humanité, and of both films’ amateur and first-time actors, created bad blood, not in the last place because with that choice the jury passed over contenders such as The Straight Story (David Lynch), Felicia’s Journey (Atom Egoyan), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch), and Todo sobre mi madre/All about my Mother (Pedro Almovódar), as well as these films’ professional actors. “Clearly Cronenberg, after the Cannes furore over Crash, seemed determined to remain controversial,” The Guardian commented. “La palme de l’exigence,” Le Monde wrote, lamenting the jury’s lack of consideration for the acting profession. And Almodóvar, who still did win the prize for best director, paid homage in his speech to Lynch, Egoyan, Jarmusch, and Arturo Ripstein, implicitly critiquing the jury’s anti-establishment statement.4 In fact that statement the jury, by voice of the British actress Kristin Scott Thomas, had already announced at the festival’s opening ceremony, when Thomas reminded the congregated stars of the war going on in the Balkan: “This evening, I can’t and don’t want to forget that with what is going on two hours by plane from here, cinema is more precious to us 3 “Palmarès festival de Cannes dont palme d'or aux frères Dardenne pour ‘Rosetta’,” video, Soir 3 (France 3), 1999; “Palme d’or à Maurice Pialat pour son film Sous le soleil de Satan,” video (Antenne 2) (May 20, 1987), http://www.ina.fr/cannes/1978-1996/video/CAB87019039/palme-d- or-a-maurice-pialat-pour-son-film-sous-le-soleil-de-satan.fr.html (accessed February 23, 2013). 4 Derek Malcolm, “Belgian Film’s Surprise Cannes Victory,” The Guardian (May 24, 1999), p. 2; Jean-Michel Frodon, “Le jury du 52e Festival décroche la palme de l'exigence,” Le Monde (May 25), 1999. 3 than ever, like a counter poison. I would have liked this evening to be entirely festive, but Cannes cannot be reduced to its shine and its glamour. We’ll still need films to testify, and to fight forgetting and indifference.”5 Without further speculation about the jury’s precise motivations, and leaving aside the question of whether Rosetta and L’humanité are more political forms of cinema than, say, The Straight Story and Ghost Dog, what is certain is that this heated Sunday in the French South meant a triumph for the cinemas of the French North and the Belgian South, and in fact provided a glimpse of a cinema traversing the French-Belgian border. As Serge Toubiana, president of the Cinémathèque française since 2003, observed that year in Cahiers du cinéma: “It is not so much Belgium or France that won this year at Cannes, but this rough and proud Nord that with ups and downs produces a regional cinema, the primary virtue of which is to maintain a certain flame, or to entertain a true anger.”6 This transnational regional cinéma du Nord is the subject of this study. Roughly speaking, the “Nord” to which this cinema from and of the North owes its names consists of the French northernmost administrative region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and Wallonia, the predominantly francophone Belgian South. Besides the French language, their geology, and their relatively cold and rainy climate, these bordering regions share a long common socioeconomic trajectory, including their coal mining past. Major industrial centers for most of the nineteenth century, Wallonia and the French North have been 5 “Ouverture du festival,” video (France 2) (May 12, 1999), http://www.ina.fr/fresques/festival- de-cannes-fr/fiche-media/Cannes00335/ouverture-du-festival-1999 (accessed February 21, 2013), translated from French. 6 Serge Toubiana, “Le Cinéma retrouvé,” Cahiers du cinéma 536 (1999): 22-3, pp. 22-3. 4 struggling economically for a long time, and especially so since the late 1950s, when their coal mines were depleted and their industries superannuated. In Rosetta, which is set and was shot in Seraing, a suburb of Liège, this crisis becomes visible in the protagonist’s subproletarian struggle for “a normal life,” starting with a job. In L’humanité, whose story largely takes place in Bailleul, a small town near Lille, it provides the setting for the film’s carnal-spiritual quest for “humanity.” The cinéma du Nord, I argue, expresses and, moreover, is driven by this crisis. It expresses this crisis in the sense that it consists of a body of films that explicitly or implicitly engage with the question of how these regions’ uneven transition from a socioeconomic structure directly inherited from the first Industrial Revolution to a diversified and more precarious post-industrial economy has affected the social fabric, down to the structures of people’s quotidian lives. The cinéma du Nord is driven by this crisis in the sense that the emergence of Wallonia and Nord- Pas-de-Calais as small yet prominent sites of filmmaking and film production cannot be seen as separate from their more general endeavors to reposition themselves as European centers after decades of recession.