From Empire World

FROM EMPIRE TO THE WORLD Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema

Malini Guha From Empire to the World

From Empire to the World Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema

Malini Guha © Malini Guha, 2015

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 5646 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5647 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5649 3 (epub)

The right of Malini Guha to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Aspects of Chapter 2 were published as “ ‘Have you been Told, the Streets of London Are Paved With Gold’: Rethinking the Motif of the Cinematic Street Within a Post-Imperial Context”, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6.2 (2009), pp. 178–89. Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Global Paris: Topographies and Dwelling Spaces

1.1 At a Historical Crossroads: Revisiting Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) 39 1.2 Parisian Networks Old and New: Topographical Journeys Through the City 52 1.3 Dwelling Space as City Space 86

Chapter 2 Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places

2.1 Dirty Pretty London: The Global Story 126 2.2 The “World” In Dirty Pretty Things 135 2.3 High and Low London 138 2.4 London Places, London Spaces 148

Chapter 3 The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures

3.1 Movements of Passage 180 3.2 Migrants on the Road: Spatial Ambivalence in Winterbottom’s In This World 184 3.3 On the Road to History: Space and Place in Tony Gatlif ’s Exils 196

Conclusion 213

Select Bibliography 227 Index 238 Figures

I.1 Playtime: “Iconic” London. 2 I.2 Barbara finally locates the Eiffel Tower, but only as an image. 3 1.1 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle: the Périphérique under construction. 42 1.2 Deux ou trois choses: interview with an Algerian boy. 50 1.3 Camille and Daiga’s hands brush in a fleeting moment of connection. 75 1.4 Caché: the Laurent home. 91 2.1 An urban crossroads: Pat and Johnny in Pool of London. 141 3.1 In This World: Shamshatoo Refugee Camp. 188 3.2 Exils: a glimpse of the banlieue. 199 Acknowledgements

This book first began as a dissertation completed at the University of Warwick. Many, many thanks to my supervisor Charlotte Brunsdon, whose support, understanding and guidance have proved invaluable to the initial shape of this project in dissertation form and its transformation into this book. Additional thanks go to my examiners Alastair Phillips and Mark Shiel, whose deeply insightful comments have remained with me during the revision process and to Arun Kumar Chaudhuri for his astute advice in the early stages of this book project. I am grateful for the con- tinuing support of the wonderful colleagues and friends I met during my time at Warwick, including Chris Meir, Amy Holdsworth, Laura Ortiz- Garrett, Faye Woods, Sarah Thomas and Tracey McVey. And I thank my early mentors Kass Banning and Bart Testa, whose respective passions served as the initial inspiration for my scholarly endeavors.

I am very thankful to my editors at EUP, including Gillian Leslie and Richard Strachan. Their efficiency in all book-related matters strikes me as unparalled. Many thanks to Rebecca Mackenzie for her help in the cover design of the book.

A heartfelt thank you goes out to my colleagues in Film Studies at Carleton University, particularly to my former colleague and friend Erika Balsom and to John Osborne, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science.

This project would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of Warwick, The Overseas Research Council and Carleton University.

I am grateful for the support of my family, including my parents, Dave and Supriya Guha, and my late grandmother, Renu Guha. A very special thank you to my Aunt Sibani Pal for her constant encouragement, affec- tion and care. Her work ethic and perseverance have always proved inspirational to all of my endeavors, scholarly or otherwise. Additional thanks goes to my UK family, Piali Ray and Niltu Raymahasay, whose viii from empire to the world

companionship and humor were very much appreciated during my PhD days. Without the love, strength and guidance of my family, nothing is possible.

This book is dedicated to my uncle, Saibal Guha, who left this world far before his time. Introduction

With a little optimism, we might consider it quite normal that the big cities of today should look like the rest of the world; their rapid spread also allows us to think that the world looks like a large city. Marc Augé1

The Time of the “Past-Present” Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) is notorious for having bankrupted its director for many reasons, not the least of which includes the building of its elaborate set, affectionately known as “Tativille”. Tativille constitutes Tati’s city-of-the-future, a Parisian cityscape comprised of high-rise modernist buildings decked in glass and in various shades of gray.2 This is the Paris that a group of American tourists in the film have apparently come to see. But Playtime situates the rise of generic urban architecture as a phenomenon that is, in fact, global in its orientation. Barbara, one of a group of these American tourists, enters a building that houses an airline ticket counter where she gazes at a series of advertisements on the wall. These advertisements promote destination locations such as the US, Hawaii, Mexico and Stockholm. Each poster contains nearly identical images of a gray high-rise building, so that cities and nations the world over seem to have fallen in step with Paris (Figure I.1) This is also true of London, as Barbara views a poster of the city earlier in the film pictured as a gray high-rise flanked by a double-decker red bus on one side, while an image of Big Ben peeks out from the other. Following on from anthropologist Marc Augé’s observations that open this book, it is entirely possible to view these elements of the film as a nascent, largely satirical anticipation of the homogenizing effects of globalization as witnessed within the built form of the global cityscape, where the world is seemingly transformed into one large city and the city itself indexes the transformation of the world. 2 from empire to the world

Figure I.1 Playtime: “Iconic” London.

While the city that Barbara traverses in the film is unfamiliar, generic and the abode of all manner of technological gadgetry that Tati, in the guise of Monsieur Hulot, subjects to innumerable forms of playful sub- version, there is more than one urban story to be found in the film.3 In an exemplary and well-cited instance of Tati’s deployment of the visual gag, Barbara is brought to a standstill while moving through a gray-glass building as she is confronted with a tantalizing view of the Eiffel Tower reflected on a glass door (Figure I.2) She turns, attempting to locate the elusive source of the image, but to no avail. While Barbara catches a fleeting glimpse of the iconic and intensely familiar Paris, she can only experience it as image. There is something incredibly filmic about this brief sighting of the Eiffel Tower, as though it were being projected onto the door, its referent cloaked in invisibility. In this instance Tati partially fulfills Barbara’s desires and perhaps even our own, for a recognizable image of one of the most photographed and filmed cities in the world. Here, the Eiffel Tower elicits an image of Paris as “capital of modernity” while the high-rise ridden landscape is emblematic of a second wave of modernity that descends upon the city in the post-war, post-imperial period. This link to the urban past is even more pronounced as Barbara and Monsieur Hulot spend a significant portion of the film moving through an exhibition, implicitly evoking the Parisian Exhibition of 1900 where the Eiffel Tower made its very first appearance. Through the juxtaposition of urban images corresponding to two distinct periods of modernization, Tati offers a depiction of Paris that blurs the boundaries between the urban past and its imagined future.4 In these introduction 3

Figure I.2 Barbara finally locates the Eiffel Tower, but only as an image. moments, Tati’s city gives rise to a visual experience of temporal and spatial hybridity, derived from the juxtaposition and co-existence of old and new. As such, Playtime operates in accordance with a prevalent thesis concerning cities more broadly; as Ben Highmore has observed, cities are always marked by a certain density, as sites of the accumulation of urban histories made manifest within the built environment but also through numerous modalities of cultural production.5 Turning more specifically to Playtime and to the historical moment of its production, the film features the rise of Paris as generic city, a subject broached and explored through very different means in other films of the period, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Yet Playtime is intent on showing us that cities essentially operate as palimpsests so that they retain their historical density, even in a film where iconic images of the cityscape have been largely relegated to the status of image. The irony here is unmistakable: that the image of the Eiffel Tower has circulated as “Paris” itself is rendered in this film as just that, simply an image. Yet Playtime suggests that a new iconicity is taking hold of the city, of all cities even, that are being superimposed over familiar images of cities that continue to denote a certain specificity, even in the face of their overexposure. In taking us from modernist skyscrapers to the Eiffel Tower and back again, this brief moment from Playtime offers up a visual corollary for the impetus of this study while also pointing towards one of of its central interventions. If the founding narrative of the study of cinematic city rests upon a particular configuration of nineteenth century modernity, 4 from empire to the world urbanization and the birth of cinema, in this book I investigate a second such configuration that brings together globalization, urban space and the cinema, taking a series of contemporary films set in London and Paris as primary case studies. These films include: Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (2000) and Caché (2005), Claire Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil (1994) Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) and Tony Gatlif ’s Exils (2004). What these films have in common is that all of them feature migrant mobilities of various types, extending from asylum seekers and clandestine migrants to the first generation of settled migrants as well as economic migrants. These films have been chosen as the basis of this study because their textual properties facilitate the exploration of two, intertwined facets of globalization that remain on the margins of the literature on global cities and cinema; one pertains to the significance of the historical past upon contemporary understand- ings of globalization, while the other refers to the transgressive nature of globalization in its ability to reconfigure established modes of classification and categorization. Existing studies of global cities and cinema, including Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in the Digital Age as well as Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context frame their arguments in accordance with the paradoxical nature of globalization, as a phenomenon marked by ever increasing modes of differentiation that continue to persist, despite its homogenizing tendencies. The global city itself subsequently emerges as a Janus-faced entity. On the one hand, the global city is defined by increased economic polarization, due in part to the pervasiveness of low-wage jobs required for the sustenance of the luxury-based economies that make global cities run.6 Economic unevenness, coupled with faster modes of mobility attributed to internet-based forms of communication and transaction, has escalated the experience of fragmentation and ephemerality within global cities, two characteristics that are similarly associated with nineteenth-century urban modernity.7 As a result, global cities partake of a central contradiction of globalization more broadly, where numerous forms of differentiation exist in tension with the production of highly unified global systems of economic flow. And yet it remains the case that certain aspects of the contradictory conditions of globalization are explored to a lesser degree than others, particularly those invested in unearthing potentially discomforting imbrications between historical past and global present. In “Notes on Globalisation and Ambivalence”, Homi K. Bhabha offers a model for thinking through these difficulties that takes the aftermath of World War II as its point of departure. Bhabha traces a genealogy of ambivalence that introduction 5 lies at the very heart of the “One World” enterprise by meditating upon a visit he took to Nuremberg, setting the stage for revisiting the pioneer- ing work of Hannah Arendt regarding the fate of the stateless, displaced peoples of the post World War II period. As Bhabha observes, a perverse and enduring consequence of various state-driven quests for global integration is the lack of what he terms a “free space” for the stateless, including figures such as the migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker, minorities and the undocumented worker.8 Bhabha refers to this as a “double-bind” between the principles of universality that are a constitutive feature of the dream of global integration and the contingent experiences of exclusion, discrimination, injustice and violence that emerge, crucially for Bhabha, within the midst of international polity geared towards globalization.9 And while the differences between the figures listed above do rest upon who is able to obtain citizenship and who is denied this right, Bhabha carefully insists that even those who are citizens of the nation state within which they reside can suddenly end up on the wrong side of state policies, depending on how migration is viewed by the state in any given historical moment.10 The stateless in particular, often deemed a “surplus” popula- tion as Bhabha tells us, are the very embodiment of the unevenness of global flows, as it is they that comprise the work force that plays a pivotal role in the daily functioning of the global city while rarely reaping any of its rewards.11 Bhabha makes the case for ambivalence, of a clear recognition of the contradictory and unresolved divides fostered by globalization, as the primary means to establish ethically and politically motivated negotiations of the contemporary world.12 What is intriguing about this conclusion is that Bhabha credits a visit to Nuremberg, and the corresponding difficulties of this encounter with both the tangible and largely intangible horrors of the past, as his primary inspiration. As Bhabha writes:

The life of memory exceeds the historic event by keeping alive the traces of images and words. Cultural memory, however, is only partially a mirror, cracked and encrusted, that sheds its light on the dark places of the present, waking a witness here, quickening a hidden fact there, bringing you face-to-face with that anxious and impossible temporality, the past-present.13

Bhabha insists that the workings of cultural memory, as that which simultaneously reflect and refract the lingering traces of historical events, are integral to a view of globalization intent on wrestling with its ambivalences and contradictions. To claim the events of the past as instrumental in understanding the workings of the global present and possibly its future is a reading of global circumstances that is often neglected in favor of what 6 from empire to the world

Saskia Sassen describes as its master image, which is that of accelerated time.14 Building upon Bhabha’s observations, going back to the past pro- duces a very different view of time and also of space, one that corresponds to the metaphor of the Moebius strip that Bhabha also draws upon to describe the way in which this mode of historical thinking bends time into a series of unusual shapes and formations.15 And while Playtime does not hold up a mirror to past traumas, Tati employs reflective surfaces to offer glimpses of the urban past that open a gateway, however brief, between the generic present of the film and an earlier phase of Parisian modernity. The recognition of the time of the past-present assumes a critical function in Bhabha’s work, as a way of enabling the interrogation of the processes of globalization from the perspective of its ambivalences and difficulties, especially as they relate to migrant and disaporic populations. The act of migration, which we might prosaically describe as “leaving one place for another”, is often temporary in its orientation, as can be the case with economic migrants, or illegal modes of migration. These forms of mobility can, of course, also result in more permanent modes of settlement closely associated with the formation of diasporas and also with the condition of exile, which denotes a banishment from home that is either forced or voluntary.16 Nomadism, in contrast, is about finding home everywhere without being bound by the fixed notions of location.17 The “stateless”, as Bhabha describes them, denote a complex set of possible conditions that may drive such populations to migrate, including movement that is forced as a result of political turmoil in the home nation, as it often the case with refugees or asylum seekers, but may also include economic forms of migration, equally “forced” into being as a result of urban impoverish- ment. These are the figures that fall under the heading of “global migrant” as their mobilities are either crucially linked to the forms of labor integral to the functioning of globalization, as manifested in cities and nations the world over, or their movement from impoverished nations to wealthy global cities is emblematic of economic unevenness on a global scale. The prevalent discourse of “Fortress Europe” is precisely about keeping these populations “out”, which rests upon the disavowal of the significance of these populations to any contemporary notion of Europe or Europe’s global cities, such as Paris and London. In this study, I extend Bhabha’s observations regarding the temporal register of the past-present to the examination of Paris and London as global cinematic cities that similarly give rise to a state of ambivalence in their depiction of migrant mobilities, returning us to the past in ways that are often unexpected and wide ranging in their implications. While all of the forms of migration noted above seem easily differentiated introduction 7 from one another, what proves interesting is that sometimes the films themselves trouble these strict distinctions, as will be explored in depth throughout the book. As such, the series of films that constitute the core corpus of From Empire to the World offer cinematic variants of precisely what Bhabha advocates, which is a politics grounded within a historically complex view of globalization that challenges its normative affiliations with speed, incessant mobility and progress. It must be noted that these films are also not devoid of ambivalence, which this book will employ in service of a productive engagement with globalization as it pertains to a certain strand of “world cinema”, a claim that will be substantiated later in the Introduction. Bhabha’s notion of the “past-present” proves instrumental in develop- ing my approach to the spatial politics of the case study films, which parts ways with much of the existing scholarship that centers on the representation of the city. Much of this literature reads the city in these films as illustrations of classic non-places in Marc Augé’s sense of the term; for Augé, non-places are defined by their lack of relationality, identity and history.18 Non-places are transitory in their orientation, designed to either facilitate passage or as temporary dwelling spaces. Phrases such as “blank city” or “non-place” are often called upon to describe the cinematic cities in these films; as the story goes, migrant narratives, especially those that feature stateless populations, transpire primarily across non-places that both liter- ally and metaphorically gesture towards their inability to belong.19 Certainly, both cities do exemplify the trend towards generic architecture at the start of their respective globalizing phases, as structural markers of their new-found status. Global city architecture tends to be generic by default; as Saskia Sassen states, high-rise structures dominate certain areas of global cities as they have been built to accommodate the proliferation of new firms.20 The London skyline began to show evidence of this generic and gentrified turn toward the global during the 1980s, as the redevelop- ment of the Docklands into Canary Wharf involved the building of a series of non-descript skyscrapers that Peter Wollen has referred to as “citadels of international capital”.21 A similar kind of financial hub, made up of its own citadels, overtakes Paris much earlier through the building of La Défense between 1958 and 1969 in the western part of the city, which similarly provides Paris with a new skyline dedicated to its burgeoning global identity.22 These buildings are illustrations of the type of architectural development that Sassen famously discusses with regard to global cities, where the built form of the city is made to accommodate its changing financial status as nodal points within a global, capitalist economy. The dominant approach to these case study films are immensely 8 from empire to the world

valuable in their emphasis on the generic space that migrant figures are often made to occupy. These spaces, which are the abode of labor and exploitation, often function as a hidden lining just underneath the glitter- ing façades of the global cityscape. However, I am interested in unearthing the often subtle interventions on offer in these films that contest the nearly automatic associations between certain kinds of migrant stories and non- places as the only urban setting within which such narratives can unfold.23 This book will demonstrate that much more complex views of urban space can be found in these films, once they are situated within a historical context that invests in teasing out the links between past and present.

The Flâneur and the Migrant In centering this book upon films that feature migrant narratives, my intention is to focus on mobilities that show up the contradictions of the globalizing process while also contesting a view of city space in these films as non-places. Just as crucially, my work on these films entails yet another return to the past by enabling us to revisit the early scholarly trends on the cinematic city and its central preoccupation with European modernity, the city and the cinema. The lines of argumentation developed by the pioneer- ing work of Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as carried through to numerous contemporary scholars, presents us with the now familiar “modernity thesis”; this thesis establishes a relationship of homology between the birth of the cinema and nineteenth-century urban modernity whereby the cinema embodies the characteristics of shock, fragmentation and intensified modes of mobility that comprise the experiential textures of modern urban life.24 Some of this scholarship, as it pertains specifically to the cinematic city, situates the mobilities of the flâneur, the legendary urban stroller, as akin to that of the cinematic spectator herself. The work of Giuliana Bruno is exemplary in this regard, as she claims:

In more particular ways, film viewing inhabits the moving urban culture of modernity: it is an imaginary form of flânerie. A relative of the railway passenger and the urban stroller, the film spectator – today’s flâneur – travels through time in architectural montage.25

Bruno’s claims in this regard return us to the work of Siegfried Kracauer, who declares the film spectator as akin to the flâneur in their incessant attraction to the “transient real-life phenomena that crowd the screen”; for Kracauer, locations such as bar interiors, buildings, and the city street, in conjunction with the use of montage which moves us from one scene introduction 9 to the next, produce the effect of chance, coincidence and possibility that enchants both the filmic spectator and the flâneur before him/her.26 In a conversation with film scholar Karen Lurey titled “Making Connections”, cultural geographer Doreen Massey offers an important intervention in response to the preoccupation with the figure of the flâneur in much of this early literature on the filmic city. As she observes:

It is not just city spaces which were “of transit” or even transitory. Empirically, one might (perhaps should) point to that other set of mobilities – the massive mobilities of imperialism and colonialism – which were underway – beyond, way beyond, the little worlds of flânerie, at the same period of history.27

Massey’s comments not only pose a juxtaposition between two contrasting modes of mobility but do so along the lines of scale, suggesting the global reach of imperial and colonial mobilities ultimately overshadows those of flânerie. An appeal to this history facilitates a reconsideration of the prominent position the mobilities of the flâneur have come to occupy within early scholarship on the cinematic city. While much of this work has proved essential in rethinking the origins and formal attributes of the cinema from the perspective of urban modernity, this study situates itself within a burgeoning strand of literature in the field intent on mobilizing other narratives and ways of thinking about the interrelationships between cities and the cinema. The configurations of the past-present that can be gleaned in the films examined in this book take us back to the history of empire, as traces of this past are what linger in the seemingly generic global present. As such, Massey’s claims concerning the often marginalized place of empire within considerations of European modernity have a special relevance for this study. Scholars have argued, more specifically than Bhabha does in this piece, that the history of empire is often what remains obscured in scholarly assessments of globalization, particularly when it comes to the fate of nations that were once at the apex of the colonial world order. Political philosopher Etienne Balibar for instance, argues that the politics of exclusion between so-called “majorities” and “minorities” plaguing a variety of European nations were “reinforced by the history of colonization and decolonization and that in this time of globalization, they have become the seed of violent tensions”.28 Scholars like Timothy Brennan have boldly made the claim that considerations of the imperial past remain on the edges of contemporary accounts of globalization due to the discomforting continuities that can be grasped between the imperial world order and present day circumstances, particularly with regard to the current reign 10 from empire to the world of the US as informal global empire. As Balibar and Brennan actively suggest, going back to the imperial past is a salient method, although by no means the only one, that can bring numerous genealogies of global ambivalence into being. This book will argue that the case study films are marked by a similar gesture, enabling a cinematic version of this particular thesis on globalization to come into the light. Rather than presenting the city as a kind of generic or even blank slate, these films illustrate the often uncomfortable affinities, continuities and frictions between imperial past and global present that come to surface through the depiction of a number of migrant mobilities that feature settled populations, illegal economic migrants as well asylum seekers. As such, what this book will trace is the persistence of distinct urban imaginaries as gleaned across this corpus, ones that contest notions of the global city as lacking in specificity or as obliterating all historical markers in its wake. The migrant is not only a figure intimately associated with a view of globalization steeped in ambivalence but the act of migration is also what transformed post-imperial London and Paris into an earlier phase of spatial and temporal hybridity, attesting to the legacies of empire in the contemporary, global moment. In their Introduction to Imperial Cities, David Gilbert and Felix Driver, drawing explicitly from the work of postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and others, state:

While the cities of Europe have provided homes for non-Europeans for as long as they have been cities, it is in the social composition of the post-imperial city – in Glasgow and Marseilles as much as London and Paris – that the impact of empire can most readily be appreciated. The hybridity of these places, their overlapping territories and intertwined histories, testifies to the enduring legacy of empire.29

This observation leads Gilbert and Driver to proffer a view of the city as a site of intersection, rather than an origin, as a crossroads, rather than a center.30 This view of the urban, one that privileges the fluidity of exchanges and encounters that encompass both the built form of the city as well as its inhabitants, shares an affinity with the case study films. The city as site of intersection and even of a crossroads between past and present is most suited to a consideration of the urban in these films, in a way that is demonstrative of Bhabha’s description of cultural memory as partially encrusted mirror where reflection meets refraction on an equal footing. It should also be made clear at the outset that this book does not pose an unshakable binary between the mobilities of the flâneur and that of the migrant, even if my leanings towards Massey’s intervention suggest the introduction 11 opposite. On the contrary, the films under examination in this book often present intersecting modes of mobility, some of which evoke notions of flânerie and idealized versions of urban strolling right alongside the kinds of difficult and traumatic movements associated with various forms of migration. As Mark Betz argues in his ground breaking book Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema, part of the idealization of the mobility of the flâneur rests on how this figure both revels in the com- modified nature of urban life and stands outside of its speedy pace. Here, of course, Betz draws from Charles Baudelaire, whose flâneur is only immersed in the crowd as a condition of his anonymity within it, whose aim is to observe without attachment, in a direct echo of the ephemeral and contingent qualities of modern urban life. The flâneur retains a productive position both within the phantasmagorias of the arcades and other urban sites of commodification by also standing outside of these arenas in the guise of the observer.31 A similar argument can be made about the figure of the migrant but only in reverse; migrant figures, whether related to the mobilities of the stateless or even those of the privileged, are a constitutive part of the globalizing process whom are often made to occupy its under- side, in varying degrees, as a result of class, racial or gender difference.32 And yet, there remains something curious about the way in which the flâneur, who is by all accounts a largely marginal urban figure in terms of the way he (and crucially she) experiences city life, has assumed a position of such centrality within the literature on cinematic cities when the flâneur also might share more commonalities with the equally marginal figure of the migrant than is readily apparent.33 For instance, the flâneur is also a figure imbued within the time-space of the past-present; as Benjamin remarks “We know that in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment”, a condition that Benjamin, appropriately for this study, links to the viewing of “mechanical pictures”.34 For Benjamin, the flâneur’s wandering through the streets, which can trigger an association with any number of mythical or historical pasts, is also a source of intoxication, alongside that of being lost in the crowd.35 As the flâneur stands apart from the rapid pace of nineteenth- century modernity while remaining a constitutive part of it through his enjoyment of commodity and leisure culture, so too do the mobilites of the migrant, particularly of the stateless variety, signify outside of the conven- tional narratives of globalization that center around the image of accelerated time. Similarly, these films can also be positioned both “inside” and “outside”; as will be elucidated in further detail later in the Introduction, the directors of these films work within an auteurist tradition, making films about various types of migrants with different degrees of privilege, often 12 from empire to the world within the same film. The productive tensions produced by these and other variations of being “inside” and “outside” might allow us to see some of the points of intersection between these two modes of urban mobility. The links between cinema and migration are longstanding and wide ranging in their historical contexts. As filmmaker Patrick Keiller notes in an essay titled “City of the Future” that concerns the relationship between migration from Europe to overseas nations between 1816 and 1915 and the birth of the cinema:

the coincidence of cinema and emigration is particularly intriguing when one con- siders how much of the cinema came from the major destinations of emigrants, and that both might be seen to offer the possibility of a “new” or other world.36

Keiller allows us to develop further links between cinema, migration and the world itself, signifying a correlation between material and the imagined transformations that a convergence between these three can bring. Given this context, there is surprisingly not an abundance of literature on either migrant London or Paris in the cinema that has its origins in the study of the cinematic city, although there is of course a plethora of literature on cinema and diaspora that touches on questions of space and place.37 This book seeks to make two interventions in this regard. The first is to bring together an attention to migrant mobilities characteristic of the study of diasporic or migrant cinemas with the methods of reading for urban space and place. The second intervention is to demonstrate that these case study films do not simply feature fictionalized narratives of global migrants in the global city but in fact can be situated within the long durée of migration and urban transformation that stretches back to the post-imperial histories of both cities.

“To those with eyes to see”38 The question of visibility looms large when attempting to determine the ways in which vestiges of the imperial past retain their hold upon the present, either through the cinema or beyond. As literary scholar Bill Schwarz observes, there was no fanfare involved when the British empire came tumbling down, there were no statues or monuments erected in London to celebrate this particular end, as is also the case in Paris.39 Drawing from the scholars mentioned above, the most visible trace of the history of imperialism in both a British and French context is that of migrant and settled populations from former colonies and the spatial formations that have developed in the wake of their arrival. The significance of migrant mobilities can be used to develop a line of continuity between introduction 13

London and Paris at the end of empire and their incarnation into global cities; in both instances migrant figures, spatialities and topographies insistently yoke the past and present together so that one must be thought of in relationship to the other. This brings us to the second commonality among the case study films; while the emphasis in much current literature concerns their narrativization of the conditions of the global migrant, specters of the imperial past as related to an earlier phase of migration are also present in these films in a way that adds layers of historical density to their presentation of global London and Paris. Paris and London share a similar though not identical history of post- war migration in the 1950s stemming from former colonies as a result of labor shortages. In both cases, immigration policies become increasingly and severely restricted after these initial waves of migration. In the French context, as Carrie Tarr observes in Reframing Difference: Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France, Algerian men were recruited as “cheap, temporary labour to fuel French industry during the ‘trentes glorieues’ (the thirty ‘glorious’ years of postwar economic growth)”.40 From a socio-historical perspective, Kristin Ross notes in her canonical text about decolonization and post-war modernization, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture that:

French immigration policies took their cue from the fluctuating labor needs: a relaxed, open-door policy greeted the onset of the period of economic growth and mushrooming urban renovation in 1954, whereas a new set of stringent immigration restrictions announced the arrival of economic recession twenty years later. French modernization, and the new capital city that crowned it, was built largely on the backs of Africans – Africans who found themselves progressively cordoned off in new forms of urban segregation as a result of the process.41

This particular history of post-imperial mobility is fueled by the capitalist aims of post-war modernization in France. The segregation of mainly Algerian and other North African migrants into the grands ensembles located in the Parisian banlieue continues to be relevant to the dynamics of the city in contemporary times, as evidenced by a series of well-known films about life in the banlieue such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995), as well as by Beur filmmakers including Abdellatif Kechiche, Malik Chibane and Mehdi Charef, among others. As will be explored in the Parisian sections of the book, what Ross deems as “the event” of French modernization in the post-war period had the effect of inscribing a set of “center-periphery” relations made manifest within the built form of the city that not only transformed the center of Paris into a tourist site for its own inhabitants but also created a series of class- and racially-based divisions between the 14 from empire to the world center and the banlieue. Ross describes this spatial formation as a temporal lag, freezing into place relations of inequality that have yet to completely thaw out in the present.42 A second mode of mobility related to the end of empire is that of the pied-noirs, French settlers in Algeria, most of whom were repatriated back to France after the signing of the Evian Accords that granted Algeria independence in 1962.43 If the migration of Algerians following the end of French imperial rule can be classed in economic terms, that of the pied-noirs is frequently characterized as a form of exile.44 What followed the collapse of empire in the British context was a similar wave of migration from former colonies, one that became more pronounced beginning in the post-war period, although the migration and settlement of those from the colonies to Britain precedes the event often viewed as the moment of the arrival, which was the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948.45 As Paul Gilroy observes in Black Britain: A Photographic History, the arrival of the Windrush “appears as an occurrence drawn almost at random from deep in the middle of a stubbornly hidden but entire history”.46 The post-war labor shortage of 1948 in Britain sparked this particular pattern of migration, associated with both the end of the War but also the impending end of imperial rule.47 These migrants, traveling from African countries, the Caribbean and Asia, arrived as passport holding British citizens, a right that was slowly stripped away from them by various acts of legality, including the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 which restricted the flow of migration and finally the Immigration Act of 1971, which effectively put an end to this “primary migration”.48 The arrival and settlement of these migrants worked, as Gilroy observes, “to alter Britain’s bomb-battered cityscapes”.49 Within the context of West Indian migration, places such as Notting Hill and Brixton became prominent areas of settlement while Southall and Spitalfields became among the strongholds of Asian settlement.50 These Paris and London stories also diverge in very significant ways, establishing an enduring set of spatial formations that remain discernable within the case study films. London presents a somewhat different case from Paris. The diffuse nature of post-war modernity as experienced in London, particularly with regard to urban planning, is related to what Katherine Shonfield designates as the lack of centralized planning initiatives in the city.51 As Shonfield demonstrates in her work on the reconstruction and reinvention of London in the post-war period in relationship to cinema, London is a city without a definitive center.52 Migrant areas of settlement in the city did not correspond to a center-periphery model, whereas Ross argues that in the Parisian context migrants from introduction 15

North African countries in the immediate postcolonial period were mostly relegated to banlieues outside the city center. The migrant imaginary of post-imperial London, in topographical terms, is spread out across the city, but it is an imaginary that bears seemingly little relationship to London’s post-war modernity as detailed in either popular or official discourse, which often concentrates on the imagination of “swinging” or “underground” London. In moving from a topopographically inspired account of the transformations migrant mobilities have wrought upon the physical landscape of both cities, I now turn my attention to the work of scholars that develop theoretical and highly politicized interpretations of the impact of post- imperial modes of migration upon these two cities in terms of their narration within official, public discourse. While there is a vast literature on this subject as it pertains to both cities, which spans across numerous disciplinary contexts, I have narrowed my focus to insights gleaned from the work of Bill Schwarz and Kristin Ross because they offer readings of this history that not only resonate with one another, but also with the way in which the films chosen for this study conjure particular figurations of the post-imperial past in the present. As such, a correlation can be posed between the work of these authors and the work of the films on this subject. In The White Man’s World, the first installment of Bill Schwarz’s expan- sive and magisterial book series on memories of empire as lived and experienced within post-imperial Britain, he delves into the darker narrative of post-imperial reinvention in the London context, arguing that England was essentially re-made as “a white man’s country”; one of his central claims is that the figure of the white man emerges in all of his prowess at the exact historical moment of his supposed demise, alongside the gradual eradication of the imperial world.53 Schwarz positions the black migrant as the figure who brings the colonial past back into the former heart of empire, disrupting the view of British decolonization as a largely exterior experience.54 Ross makes a parallel assertion in the French context, arguing that France did indeed experience the effects of decolonization, firstly through the fact of migration from Algeria and other North African nations whose labor made aspects of France’s modernization possible, but also through a particular mode of displacement-cum-substitution as the former imperial glory of the nation is replaced by the new-found splendor of post-war modernity.55 The question of visibility returns once more; not only was the end of empire not memorialized as such but the process of decolonization was rendered through official discourse as an anterior experience, only affecting the colonies themselves but not their colonizers. 16 from empire to the world

Migrant narratives tell us a different but interrelated story with that of post-war modernity, as it appeared in both cities. These histories of migration unveil the forms of labor that made the splendors of post-war urban modernity a reality while also acting as a testament to the histories of empire that made such forms of migration possible in the first place. These narratives then gesture towards the imperial past as much as they do towards the post-imperial present and future that we have termed “global”. In accounting for the complex reasons why the case study films lead us back to histories of empire while seemingly only telling the story of the contemporary global city, Schwarz again offers an explanation that resonates with considerations of the cinema in this vein. He makes a number of observations concerning how memories of empire are trig- gered in the present moment that allow us to think through the question of not only why traces of the past remerge in the present but, even more significantly,how this might take place. Schwarz notes that the experience of empire in the former imperial nation is not necessarily one of forgetfulness, but one where certain desires, fears, anxieties and even longings for empire are simply not named as such.56 Schwarz makes a compelling argument for the act of displacement as one of the key ways in which markers of the imperial past are made manifest in the present. As Schwarz states:

Forgetfulness might seem to suggest that memories of empire have been forever obliterated, nowhere to be heard or seen. Yet as I suggest later, if an entire historical experience has disappeared from contemporary memory, or by some means has been repressed so that it has little or no purchase on current public discussion, traces of this history may enter popular consciousness through more surreptitious means. Memories of that history may be displaced, appearing in unlikely forms or locations where they may not seem to belong. These memories do not simply vanish from the social landscape, but appear – unasked – at unexpected moments. They can be discerned too in other stories, which on the surface may seem to have little to do with the imperial past.57

A number of salient assertions can be discerned from this extended passage from Schwarz, which dovetails with Ross’ claims regarding a similar experience in the French context. The first is that signs of the imperial past retain an elusive quality within the contemporary moment due to the unduly popular notion that the process of decolonization only occurred in the colonies themselves and not in former imperial nations.58 Following on from the first assertion, when signs of the imperial past do force their way into the present, they do so in unexpected ways and, crucially for this inquiry, sometimes in narratives that, on the surface, have nothing to do with the imperial past. To draw upon the invaluable work of Stuart Hall in this regard, “‘the colonial’ is not dead since it lives on in its introduction 17

‘after effects’, but these ‘after-effects’ are not identical to the past, but bear an affinity to it in reconfigured form”.59 While traces of empire often appear in displaced fashion in the contemporary moment, what Hall allows us to add to these observations made by Schwarz and others is that these vestiges of the past may also be viewed through the lens of affinity, even in the face of their alteration. It is these insights that prove critical in making the argument that the six case study films about global cities also tell us narratives of the aftermath of the imperial past and, in doing so, ultimately narrativize the conditions of the global city in largely unfamiliar terms. Raymond Williams’ conceptualiza- tion of the relationship between art and historical reality are illuminating in this respect and I draw upon his observations here as a way of connect- ing the assertions by Schawrz and Hall very specifically to workings of artistic production: as he writes, “art reflects its society and works a social character through to its reality in experience. But also, art creates, by new perceptions and responses, elements which the society as such, is not able to recognize”.60 The difficulty of recognition emerges then not only as the outcome of historical repression but a very condition of artistic works, including the cinema, that attempt to engage with the complexities of these social and historical realities. As such, this book draws upon the notions of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration as conceptual tools to examine the myriad ways in which the ambivalent nature of the global city is brought to life by these films. Bhabha’s notion of the “past-present” is also employed as a structuring principle for the entire book. These six texts operate as points of departure, as each film leads outwards, towards either older or contemporaneous films that allow for the examination of a broader history of representation, rather than the examination of individual films in isolation. As such, this book proposes revisionist readings of a number of canonical films while also drawing upon those same films to provoke unexpected interpretations of the six case study films. It is clear that the end of empire was experienced in a similar though not identical manner in both Paris and London, the effects of which continue to resonate in the global present. Paris and London have been subjected to innumerable forms of comparative study, which is inclusive of recent work on the nature of imperial cities, on post-war housing projects, as well as scholarship pertaining to the cinema, including comparative research on British and French national cinemas.61 What warrants bringing these two cities together for the purposes of this study returns us to the films themselves; through narrational and stylistic means, these films crystallize the conditions and, ultimately, the politics of displacement, affinity and 18 from empire to the world reconfiguration that scholars such as Ross and Schwarz have delineated as specific to London and Paris in their post-imperial and now global guise. The ghosts of the imperial past continue to haunt these global metropo- lises due to the inability of their nation states to bring about a true reckon- ing with the history of empire. And yet what proves equally interesting are the divergences between these particular Paris and London stories that enable us to consider different ways in which global cities are still imbued with traces of the recent imperial past, as discerned through cinematic means and within a corpus of work that features a wide variety of migrant mobilities that relate to the post-imperial past as well as the global present. The cinema and the city converge in both instances, as these films offer representational counterparts to an experience of the urban that bears a relationship to its past that is, in effect, difficult to see. This book unabashedly engages in close visual and auditory analysis of the films in question, where London and Paris as “cities of the crossroads” emerge through usages of sound, mise en scène, color and narrative encounters. My central contention is that it is only through the work of close analysis that the spatio-temporal dynamics of the past-present lend themselves to visibility. But this type of textual analysis is made complex in this book as I also draw upon the work of cultural geographers and anthropologists, including the work of Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, among others, in an effort to “translate” their methods of reading actual spaces and places as applicable to the cinema. This aspect of the book brings me in line with what I see as the reinvigoration of close visual analysis in recent years, where complex theoretical and historical frameworks involving broader forms of cultural analysis are made specific and concrete in their emphasis on the details of the films in question.62

Around the World While this book engages with one facet of the globalizing experience in relationship to the neglected temporalities of the “past-present”, there is a second constitutive feature of globalization explored in this book. This relates to the inherently transgressive nature of globalization, in breaking down boundaries that extend beyond those that stand in the way of the movement of capital across the globe. As Frederic Jameson has argued early on, the study of globalization, in keeping with the phenomenon itself, disrupts disciplinary boundaries in often productive ways, by fostering interdisciplinary research methods that prove necessary to the comprehension of its complexities.63 A complementary line of investiga- tion, one that runs parallel to my consideration of the depiction of the city introduction 19 in these films, accounts for what I delineate as the “world cinema” status of these texts. While bringing together material grounded in the study of the cinematic city with that pertaining to the “world cinema turn” in film studies is not a form of disciplinary disruption, it still constitutes a “path not taken” in most studies on either subject. It is my contention that these particular films not only allow us to interrogate more commonplace conceptions of the global that render the imperial past mute but that these films also enable an inquiry into yet a second iteration of “the global” infiltrating film studies through the category of world cinema. It is safe to say that a world cinema turn has slowly but surely begun to overtake the branch of cinema studies previously concerned with the study of both national and transnational cinemas, while also extending its reach towards even broader disciplinary matters related to the naming of university courses and degree programs, conference calls for papers, and institutions as well as publisher book series.64 While there are continuities as well as overlaps between each of the three categories, one of which concerns the differentiation between films of this type and Hollywood cinema writ large, there are also significant differences. With regard to world cinema in particular, the notion of circulation has gradu- ally emerged as one of its central leitmotifs. As Lúcia Nagib claims in her “positive” definition of world cinema, “world cinema, like the word itself, is circulation”.65 Her assertions in this regard build upon the framework established by Dudley Andrew, among others; in an “Atlas of World Cinema” for example, Andrew establishes an analytical atlas of various forms of mapping as a way of charting what he refers to as a “process of cross-polination” that moves beyond the confines of national cinemas.66 As is clear from the observations outlined above, the emphasis on circulation plays a central role in the desires of a number of scholars writing about world cinema to expand the parameters of national cinema studies to more accurately reflect and engage with the global nature of film production, distribution and exhibition. The politicized impetus of this analytical expansion involves seeking out the circulatory routes of a variety of film cultures that may indeed bypass Hollywood cinema altogether and its designation as touchstone for the entirely of the world’s cinema.67 It is also the case that the rise of specifically digital modes of distribution and exhibition are responsible for the degree to which circulation is poised as a definitive optic through which world cinema should be viewed, practices that perhaps the term “transnational” does not always adequately encompass. For instance, in a second piece on this topic, Dudley Andrew points to the way in which digital models of circulation contribute to a culture of simultaneity within what he terms “the global 20 from empire to the world sublime”, whereby everything seems to be available at all times, working to banish any form of temporal delay.68 The emphasis on circulation in some of this discourse on world cinema resonates with what are considered to be the transgressive qualities of globalization as related to mobilization. But there are scholars who have expressed reservations about the questions and concerns that fail to retain a foothold within current trajectories of world cinema scholarship. In Screening World Cinema, an early edited collection on the subject, editors Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn foreground the ambivalent nature of the term “world cinema” that rests on its collusion with marketing strategies that often use the category as a branding tool intended to market difference in its most palatable form.69 While the authors find ways to retain a usefulness for the category, as that which can be attuned to the dynamics of both inclusivity and distinctiveness as related to cinema very specifically, they still sound warning alarms when it comes to the politics of the discourse; as they note, the kinds of political and ethical questions that were once an integral component of the study of third cinema, for example, seldom make their way in discussions and debates on world cinema. As they state, “the rise of world systems and global capitalism has tended to place issues of exploitation, dependency and power differences between regions outside the discursive frame”.70 It would seem that the genealogy of global ambivalence deftly illu- minated by the work of Bhabha is matched by an analogous current of ambivalence that runs through the world cinema enterprise, where political and ethical questions concerning power and privilege between regions are not prioritized as the question of circulation takes center stage. But even more to the point, perhaps we can stipulate that the world cinema turn in film studies is itself a symptom of globalization and not merely a methodological tool designed to register and interrogate globalizing effects upon the cinema. This claim is inspired by the work of John Mowitt who argues in his Introduction to Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages that an earlier turn towards media within film studies operates as a symptom of globalization in posing a definitive challenge to the postcolonial by “offering to better name the world historical situation that has arisen at the so-called end of history, that is, in the wake of both colonialism and as the official story has it, empire”.71 Following on from Mowitt’s observations to this effect, perhaps the turn towards world cinema also aims to “name” the current world order and the place of cinema within this order “better” than the national and even than the transnational. What makes this analogy even more intriguing is that certain film scholars advocated for a transnational view of cinema as a direct challenge to the introduction 21 relevance of the postcolonial.72 And yet we have arrived at a juncture where perhaps even the transnational is now already ripe for replacement. In the case of world cinema, what might this turn be symptomatic of? If we build on the observations made by Grant and Kuhn, the argument can be made that the homogenizing tendencies of globalization do indeed render its differentiating effects less than visible and perhaps it comes as little surprise that a similar argument can be made about studies of world cinema that marginalize more difficult political questions. If we continue in this vein, there is a scholarly trend within the study of migrant and diasporic cinema that might also be rather symptomatic of this particular face of globalization. Historically, scholarship on migration and cinema as it relates specifically to questions of racial difference vis-à-vis the conditions of exile and diaspora, draws much of its fodder from a cultural studies approach.73 Such an approach focuses intently on identity politics and its attendant concerns with hybridity and difference, as heavily influenced by the central tenets of postcolonial theorists including, but not limited to, the canonical work of Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy. Indeed, as is already apparent and will become more so, this book also draws some of its conceptual fodder from the insights of these scholars. Certainly, many studies on migrant and disaporic cinema continue to operate from a cultural studies perspective, a pertinent example of which is Yosefa Loshitzy’s Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema.74 However, a recently edited collection might be suggestive of an impending “world cinema turn” within studies of migration and cinema. In Migrant Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, editors Claudia Sternberg and Daniela Berghahn develop broad links between migrant cinema, Europe and the category of world cinema that situates contemporary migrant cinema at the interface of European cinema and world cinema as discursive entities. They pronounce European migrant cinema as that which has, in fact, precipitated the “world cinema turn” for European cinema, in its redefinition of what counts as European cinema in the first place.75 Migrant and diasporic cinema attests to the histories of migratory movements to Europe, and as such, to the shifting nature of Europe in response to these mobilities, one that acknowledges the presence of the world within and constitutive of Europe itself. Sternberg and Berghahn then situate migrant and diasporic cinema as a kind of catalyst for thinking about European cinema in global terms. What is perhaps startling is their sidestepping of the ambivalence that accompanies any designation of world cinema by claiming that European 22 from empire to the world cinema should openly embrace its increasing world cinema status by “uti- lizing the exotic appeal of the other to rebrand itself”.76 While the authors make ample mention of many of the ambivalences of the term touched upon in this Introduction, their conclusions simply reinforce a view of world cinema, in its European variation, in market driven terms. It is a view of European cinema that privileges its ability to circulate, one that, for Sternberg and Berghahn is enhanced by its migrant content in forging links with more than one area of the globe. It is almost too easy to see how such a pronouncement is rather symptomatic of the logic of late capitalism as the lever of globalization, where the demands of the market take prec- edence over politics or other ethically driven considerations. In these few sections, I have sketched seemingly competing views of world cinema, where the emphasis on circulation can be placed in opposition to the political concerns raised by Grant and Kuhn that enable us to view some of the borders that might very well stand in the way of the circulatory prowess of world cinema. They also allow us to pose the question of just how “worldly” world cinema as a category is, as some scholars have gone as far as to simply situate the category as Western in its scope, while others like Sternberg and Berghahn view the category in terms of its use-value for rebranding European cinema in global terms.77 And yet, there is no reason why these two approaches to the topic cannot be merged in a way that might attend productively to the very contradictions that the conditions of globalization presents. The question of circulation must be addressed within any concept of cinema that is global in its orientation and especially given the networked, as well as increasingly digital, modes of circulation and distribution that have come to define the cinematic experience of our times.78 But an emphasis on circulation does not necessarily preclude a simultaneous emphasis on politics. Dudley Andrew’s concept of décalage for instance combines the two approaches into a kind of politics of circulation, whereby the prevail- ing notion of the global sublime is reworked by considerations of various temporal delays that are still inherent to the process of cinema, including the gap between production and distribution, those that exist between different spectators located the world over and, also, through the often belated discovery of filmmakers that continually renew historical accounts of the cinema.79 This book offers another such model for bringing an attention to circulation together with its political implications in my consideration of the case study films as instantiations of world cinema, one that runs alongside the methodology devised for considerations of urban space outlined earlier in the Introduction. In the same way that Bhabha’s notion introduction 23 of the past-present facilitates a historicized view of the contradictory circumstances of the global, these observations can also be extended to the working concept of world cinema that I adopt in this book. To start, what constitutes the world cinema status of these films? Certainly, these films do not fall into the category of “cinemas outside of the West”, for which the term “world cinema” is often used as shorthand. But if circulation is our initial optic, then we can begin with their primary exhibition context, which is that of the film festival. After all, world cinema is first and foremost, a festival category.80 Each film has made the rounds on the festival circuit, having been screened at Cannes, London, Toronto, and Berlin, to name a few. Many of these films have won prizes at such festivals.81 Some of these films are also co-productions that have transpired across a variety of national contexts, solidifying their global affiliation in economic terms.82 All of the case study films confirm their links to both Europe and “the world” by foregrounding various facets of migration that extend from the content of their narratives, to their exhibition contexts and in some cases, their funding. These filmmakers, which include Haneke, Denis, Winterbottom, Gatlif and Frears, all operate within an auteurist tradition, to varying degrees of fidelity.83 While there is no question that each of these directors can be described using the phrase, “global film auteur”, it is also the case that their films are not global in quite the same way. Haneke and Denis are the filmmaking successors to a long legacy of European modernist cinema, as exemplified in their aesthetic choices, modes of storytelling and auteurist status. Indeed, much of the scholarship on the films of both Denis and Haneke cannot help but rehearse certain biographical details, designed to illuminate their central thematic and formal preoccupations.84 While Chocolat (1988), Denis’ first film, is what garnered her international attention and recognition, so that J’ai pas sommeil does not inaugurate a significantly new moment in her career, the same cannot be said about Code inconnu. As noted by Peter Brunette, Code inconnu is Haneke’s first French film and one that Brunette speculates was intended, on the heels of the mixed reception of Funny Games (1997), to expand his art house audience.85 While the submerged presence of colonial history has always granted Denis’ films a certain global orientation, Haneke’s work begins to take on a global resonance through his migration dramas, which coincide with the dawn of his French language films and international recognition on an increasingly wider scale. Winterbottom and Frears present a different case from Haneke and Denis. Winterbottom and Frears’ “migrant films” resurrect traces of an older, canonical, and distinctly British form of social realist cinema in 24 from empire to the world order to tell the tales of the new “social problem”, that of the refugee or asylum seeker making their way to the British Isles. As such, the migrant content of some these films, in addition to their exhibition context, is where a global turn can be discerned. Gatlif presents yet a third case. Exils is the film that garners Gatlif recognition on the film festival circuit and is also a film that marks a significant departure from his previous work that centers on Romany or Gypsy culture. Scholar Sylvie Blum-Reid positions Exils as a film that brings “the world” to the domain of French filmmaking and I would add that the film achieves this goal through a reconfigured version of Gatlif ’s reliance on the generic category of the road movie as storytelling framework.86 And yet, as will be argued in the third chapter of the book, in this film Gatlif also employs methods of narration that are more abstract than his previous films, bringing him in line with some of the recognizable tenets of European modernist filmmaking. What is immediately apparent are certain ambivalences that are tied to the narratives of circulation that I have devised concerning these films. To draw upon Bill Nichols’ early work on festival films, their circulation at major festivals might ensure that they are received within a “humanist” rather than explicitly politicized framework, one more invested in teasing out their universal appeal rather than their regional distinctiveness.87 In the case of some of these films, they are not explicitly migrant-authored, leading to further speculations regarding their authenticity and even the motivations of their directors in presenting migrant narratives. These ambivalences are precisely what make these particular films ideal world cinema texts, as films that mobilize the very tensions that are a constitutive feature of the category itself. There is then the question of exactly what is mobilized by these films, one that takes us from context back to text. This book develops an expanded account of “world cinema as circulation” by turning its attention to the forms of filmmaking mobilized by these texts. Each chapter of the book explores the way in which certain modalities of filmmaking, modernist art cinema in the French context and social realism in the British context, are reconfigured in the case study films not only in light of their migrant content but also in ways that attest to their world cinema status, or as films destined for global consumption. It is here that the transgressive constituents of globalization become relevant to the practice of textual analysis of films that themselves narrativize the conditions of the global. Bhabha’s notion of the past- present assumes a renewed significance in this context, as a concept that draws our attention to the shifting nature of certain forms of filmmaking that, at least in part, can be said to index the world cinema turn within introduction 25

European filmmaking. As Thomas Elsaesser and others have observed, the traditional lines between commercial cinema and art cinema, as well as those between national and international cinemas, are increasingly blurred and it is precisely these forms of transgression that will be explored in each chapter as that which signifies the “world cinema” status of certain European films and their directors.88 While the rubric of circulation currently employed within world cinema discourse does not necessarily preclude the expanded usage that I propose in this book, its typical deployment does suggest that the notion of circulation refers more directly to the mobility of texts around the world and not what is necessarily mobilized by these texts.89 As such, this book makes the case for the significance of viewing formal characteristics of the cinema as an integral component of the narratives of circulation currently in vogue among world cinema scholars. A major contention of this study is that the circulation of the case study films only tells half their story, if we do not wed our consideration of the routes along which these films travel with a view to their textual properties. Furthermore it is only within the texts themselves, in conjunction with their movement across the globe, where the ambivalences inherent to the very concept of world cinema can be discerned. These ambivalences are not just related to the evocation of the past-present as manifested within the narrational content of these films, but also the modalities of filmmaking utilized in the telling of these migrant stories. Finally, rather than viewing migrant cinema as a subset of world cinema that can revitalize European filmmaking along the lines of the exotic, films featuring migrant mobilities are often marked by contradictions and ambivalences that are entirely in keeping with the status of minorities, as well as the stateless across much of the Western world. It is this recognition that catapults us into the domain of the political, so that studies of world cinema with a specifically textual focus do not have to be written out of the narrative of “world cinema as circulation”. There is a further question of why I have chosen to work with such a small corpus of films, given the broad scope of this project. In part, my emphasis on a limited number of films is a response to the often unwieldy nature of the term world cinema. If we take Elsaesser’s work on this subject as an illustration of this tendency, he offers a list of topics that a world cinema text can potentially address. This list runs the gamut from films that tackle human rights issues or diasporic identities, to those that assume an ethnographic stance through the mobilization of fantasy or folklore, as well as politically militant films that operate within a third cinema vein, to those that deal with postcolonial histories and so on.90 This 26 from empire to the world list inadvertently begs the question then of what isn’t a world cinema film. But conversely and productively, what Elsaesser’s list simultaneously foregrounds is the notion of a multiplicity of “world cinemas”. As such, this book engages in the exploration of one of the many types of world cinema in existence, in accordance with a depth, rather than breadth, model. The significance of the book’s title, From Empire to the World, has finally come into focus. Moving from “empire to the world” denotes a historical shift towards the global, one that pertains in equal measure to cityscapes and their representation as world cinema texts. But this shift, importantly for this study, is accompanied by ambivalence, some of which concerns traces of the imperial past that refuse to disappear and remain present in unlikely forms and iterations. To return to the motif of the crossroads, these films not only depict the city at a crossroads but also exhibit these tendencies at the level of form, where established modes of filmmaking are crossed with other genres in the telling of other stories. Migrant figures and their corresponding narratives prove crucial not only in relating the experience of the global city “from below” in all of its historical density but also in thinking more expansively about the changing face of what counts as European cinema in its current global phase. This book not only explores the lingering traces of older urban imaginaries as they appear within these contemporary global city films, but also the conventions of longstanding filmmaking traditions that appear in these films, often in reconfigured form. The ambitiousness of this project, in my attempt to bring together what are normatively viewed as two separate modes of inquiry, may lead to more questions than answers, and to perhaps a messier kind of methodology in place of precision. I hope what is gained are insights that can only be produced by forging unexpected connections, leading to alternate ways of thinking about the notion of the global, as it continues to transform the way we think about cities, about spaces and about the cinema itself. The shape and scope of this book is derived from my desire to concep- tualize alternative models of the global cinematic city, in alignment with scholarship that posits a series of counter-narratives of globalization, while also wanting to contribute to ensuing debates on world cinema, as a recent example of a global turn transpiring within film studies. This book is organized into three chapters. The first chapter, “Global Paris: Topographies and Dwelling Spaces”, is divided into three subsections. The first part, “At a Historical Crossroads: Revisiting Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967)”, engages in a brief meditation on Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, situating the film as “master text” introduction 27 for the chapter as its preoccupations and staging of the spatial dynamics of the modernized post-war Paris lays a foundation for the analysis of topographical space and dwelling space that will consume the following two subsections. The second part of the chapter, “Parisian Networks Old and New: Topographical Journeys Through the City” develops a reading of J’ai pas sommeil and Code inconnu as “network narratives” in their urban variation. The network narrative is something of a global form that can be located across a variety of world cinema texts but in these films I argue that the network narrative is subject to particular modes of reconfiguration in order to tell a series of migrant narratives that bring the past and present together through encounters and collisions. In both films, the network narrative, as rendered in its modernist, art cinema form, gives rise to an exorbitant experience of the global city. While the notion of the exorbitant city, coined by Ackbar Abbas, is often used to describe the current state of Asian cities, I will argue that exorbitance in the case of these two films is one way of grasping the kinds of relationships they develop between the imperial past and the global present as they emerge through distinctly topographical means.91 The last section of this first chapter, “Dwelling Space as City Space”, takes a different tack, investigating the way in which Haneke’s Caché seemingly takes a generic, global Paris as its backdrop, only to plunge us into a much more specific, detailed and historical narrative of the city’s division into center and periphery during the post-war period. This “other story” comes to life in the film through contrasting dwelling spaces that make room for the significance of both the exterior and the interior to the study of the cinematic city. A coda near the end of the chapter inves- tigates the relevance of Haneke’s depiction of “polarized Paris” through a comparison with Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive (2003) and Claire Denis’ 35 rhums (2008). The second chapter of the book turns its attention to cinematic London. Entitled “Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places”, this chapter takes Dirty Pretty Things as its central focus in order to situate the film within a wider historical continuum of “migrant London” cinema. This chapter zooms in on the continuities as well as salient differences Dirty Pretty Things presents with earlier films featuring migrant London. In doing so, this chapter examines the longevity of social realist modes of storytelling and its “global turn” as evidenced by films like Dirty Pretty Things and a number of its contemporaries. The first part of the chapter, “Dirty Pretty London: The Global Story”, provides an introduction to some of the existing literature on the 28 from empire to the world film, particularly in relation to the kinds of anxieties that have lead to its pronouncement as a near textbook illustration of a global city film. The second subsection, “The ‘World’ in Dirty Pretty Things”, establishes a reading of the film as “world cinema text” in light of its generic hybridity. “High and Low London”, the third subsection, moves in the opposite direction by placing Dirty Pretty Things in relation to a series of “end of empire” films from the 1950s. As such, this section stages a departure from an interpretation of Dirty Pretty Things as a film that allegorizes the conditions of global London in order to chart a history of representation of post-imperial migration to the city, vestiges of which retain their place in this contemporary film. More specifically, this section takes its cue from the film itself in investigating the concept of the “dirty/pretty” as a bifurcated understanding of city space, one that scholars argue has its origins in a Victorian imaginary of the city but is subsequently re-tooled in the telling of other urban stories. Basil Dearden’s Pool of London (1950) assumes the role of “master text” in this subsection, as I take the reader through an analysis of this film, wherein its “race-relations” storyline forges a divide between iconic or high London and its low or migrant counterpart, an opposition explicitly mobilized by Dirty Pretty Things, but also an earlier Frears migrant drama, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). A second line of continuity can be sketched in formal terms as generic hybridity looms large across these films, extending to Dirty Pretty Things whereby the film’s “Londons” are differentiated through stylistic as well as narrational means. The final subsection, “London Places, London Spaces”, draws on the work of Doreen Massey in order to establish a contrast between the reading of the spaces of London in Dirty Pretty Things and its contemporaries, including Last Resort (2002) and the representation of London as “place” that emerges from a consideration of films about Caribbean migration and settlement including a number of “social problem films” including Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959), Roy Ward Baker’s Flame in the Streets (1961), as well as a grouping of films made in the 1970s and 1980s such as Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975), Anthony Simmons’ Black Joy (1975 ), Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980) and Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981). The significance of interior space to narratives of global migration to London is matched by the significance of the street to that of the post-imperial migrant, as will be examined in the chapter. The third chapter, “The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures”, operates as an addendum to this book in its aim to offer a wider applicabil- ity for the methods of reading for city space developed in the previous chapters. This chapter positions the journey narrative of the cinematic introduction 29 city as integral to the larger story of migrancy and the city. Narratives of migration have always been a feature of cinematic cities, as conjured through the depiction of the journey from the country to the city in films such as Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) or Ruttman’s Berlin Symphony of a City (1927), as well as journeys that are transnational in their scope. As one of the key tropes of migrancy is that of mobility, sketched specifically in relation to post-imperial London and Paris earlier in the Introduction, narratives of arrivals and departures are just as significant for the purposes of analysis as those set within the space of the city. As such, movement both away and towards urban spaces can be theorized as part of the cinematic story of the migrant in the city. This chapter, in focusing on In This World and Exils, essentially brings together the two urban narratives of global migration that have been explored in separate chapters throughout this book. What warrants bringing the two films together in a single chapter is that journeys to or from cities is a shared narrative not only between global London and Paris, but many other global cities. It is the processes of globalization that drive migrants to the global city so that the journey itself is just as significant as the moment of arrival or that of departure. In addition to this, the generic context of both films takes us back to different incarnations of the road movie genre, which we can postulate as a global form. As Timothy Corrigan argues, the road isn’t just an American setting for symbolic enactments of male hysteria but is also a path leading to the discovery of other rituals, geographies and subjectivities.92 As I will argue in different ways with regard to these films, both of them position the journey toward and away from the global city as journeys of ambivalence.

Notes 1. Marc Augé, “Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World”, in: Michael Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Field (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 179. 2. As is well known, the structural design of “Tativille”, the name given to Tati’s set of Paris, was based on a number of architectural sources, including the Esso Building, found in the Parisian financial sector, built in the 1960s and known as La Défense. This is a particularly pronounced example of the confluence between the material city and its cinematic counterpart. 3. For an analysis of Playtime’s indulgence in the comedic potentialities of modern architecture, see: Iain Borden, “Playtime: ‘Tativille’ and Paris”, in: Neil Leach (ed.), The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 217–35. 30 from empire to the world

4. As Iain Borden notes, “Tativille Paris is one Paris-world among many others . . .” (p. 231). 5. Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 5. 6. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 8, 13, 328. 7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 295–6; M. Castells, “Space of Flows”, p. 316. 8. Homi K. Bhabha, “Notes on Globalization and Ambivalence”, in: David Held and Henrietta L. Moore (eds.), Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), pp. 38–9. 9. Ibid. p. 41. 10. Ibid. p. 40. 11. Ibid. p. 39. 12. Ibid. p. 43. 13. Ibid. p.43. 14. S. Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization”, Public Culture, 12.1 (Winter 2000), p. 213. 15. H. K. Bhabha, “Notes on Globalization”, p. 43. 16. In my differentiation between these terms, I follow in the footsteps of John Durham Peters in “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora”. For Peters, both diaspora and exile are marked by displacement, but diaspora lacks the kind of anguish that accompanies notions of exile, which constitutes a form of punitive banishment, whether voluntary or forced (pp. 19–20). Diaspora is always collective in its scope, but exile may be solitary (p. 20). While this is not the place to offer an extensive review of the literature of all of these terms, Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg provide a useful overview in their introduction to European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Filmmaking in Contemporary Europe. See: Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds.), “Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe” in: European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Filmmaking in Contemporary Europe (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 12–49; John Durham Peters, “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon”, in: Hamid Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 17–41. A classic text in this regard is of course, Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 17. J. D. Peters, “Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora”, p. 21. 18. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 77–8. 19. To take one example, when writing about Dirty Pretty Things and other films in a similar vein, Yosefa Loshitzky notes that they “persistently deconstruct iconic images of the classical European cities that make for easily consumed introduction 31

picture postcards views. The famous monuments and landmarks of these cities are either absent from the films or stripped of their traditional cultural capital, assuming the role of outdated icons in an impoverished urban fabric, a non-place” (p. 746). One of the central arguments that this book will make concerns a certain nuancing of the use of “non-place” as a term too often used to describe places that are not simply not iconographic in their orientation. Other examples of this nature will be cited throughout the book. See: Yosefa Loshitzky, “Journeys of Hope to Fortress Europe”, Third Text 20.6 (November 2006), pp. 745–54. A second example that explores the role of non-places in the films In This World, Dirty Pretty Things and Io, l’atro is Sandra Pozanesi’s, “The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe”, Third Text 26.6 (November 2012), pp. 675–90. 20. S. Sassen, The Global City, p. 328. 21. Peter Wollen, “The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era”, in: Lester D. Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 31. 22. Christopher Darke, Alphaville (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 31. 23. Interestingly enough, scholars such as Manuel Castells who write extensively about the global city also argue that declarations concerning the loss of place are premature. For Castells place remains as significant as it ever was, retain- ing the promise of the global city to facilitate new alliances that can flourish across various forms of urban culture and activism. See: Manuel Castells, “Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age”, in: Stephen Graham (ed.), The Cybercities Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 82–93. 24. See: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in: Hannah Adrendt (ed.), trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 217–51; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London: Oxford University Press, 1960); Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in: Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.), The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994); Tom Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology”, Screen 32.2 (1991), pp. 184–96; Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism”, in: Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 72–99; Giluana Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric”, in 32 from empire to the world

Andrew Weber and Emma Wilson (eds.), Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), pp. 14–28; Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 25. G. Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric”, p. 14. 26. S. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 170. 27. Karen Lurey and Doreen Massey, “Making Connections”, Screen 40.3 (Autumn, 1999), p. 231. 28. Etienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 8. 29. Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 15. 30. F. Driver and D. Gilbert, Imperial Cities, p. 5. 31. Charles Baudelaire (trans. Jonathan Mayne), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Da Capo Press, 1966), p. 9. To also draw upon Walter Benjamin’s infamous work on the flâneur in this regard, in Arcades Projects, he writes “In 1839 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of flânerie in the arcades” (p. 422). 32. Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 132. 33. This valuable insight is indebted to one of the anonymous readers of the book. I also make this argument in full recognition of the class affiliations of the flâneur, as inherently bourgeoisie, as that which tempers a reading of this figure as marginal in every respect. It is the status of the flâneur as “outsider”, whose activities place him at the remove with the speedy pace of modernity where we might be able to establish links between this figure and that of the migrant, particularly as they relate to the case study films. 34. W. Benjamin, “The Flâneur”, pp. 419–20. 35. Ibid. pp. 416–17. 36. Patrick Keiller, “The City of the Future”, in: Patrick Keiller, From The View From The Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London and New York: Verso, 2013), p. 135. 37. Giluana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari is a cogent example of some of the scholarship on migration and early cinema more specifically. With respect to literature on migration, exilic and diasporic cinema, Hamid Naficy’s foundational text, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, often engages in a distinctly spatialized analysis. 38. This is a phrase excerpted from a longer phrase by Bill Schwarz in “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible” where he writes, “to those with eyes to see, the urban formations of our own times hold together introduction 33

many inchoate traces of competing historical times, all jumbled together”. See: Bill Schwarz, “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible”, in: Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 269. 39. Bill Schwarz, “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible”, p. 272. 40. Carrie Tarr, Reframing Difference:Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 5. 41. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (London and Boston: MIT Press, 1995), pp.151–2. 42. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 12. 43. Alex C. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds.), Postcolonial Cultures in France (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 18. 44. Ibid. p. 18. 45. Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi- Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 1. 46. Paul Gilroy, Black Britain: A Photographic History (London: Saqi, 2007), p. 77. 47. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 133. 48. Peter Freyer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 373. 49. P. Gilroy, Black Britain, p. 63. 50. P. Gilroy, Black Britain, p. 68; J. White, London in the Twentieth Century, p. 138. 51. Katherine Shonfield,Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 146. 52. Also see: Matthew Taunton, Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 53. B. Schwarz, “Postcolonial Times”, p. 271. 54. B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World, p. 11. 55. K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 78. 56. B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World, p. 31. 57. Ibid. p. 54. 58. Ibid. p. 5. 59. Stuart Hall, “When was ‘the postcolonial’? Thinking at the limit”, in: Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York: Routledge,1996), p. 248. 60. Raymond Williams, “On Structure of Feeling”, in: Jennifer Harding and E. Deirdre Pribam (eds.), Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 42. 61. While comparative work on London and Paris as imperial and post-imperial cities will be elaborated upon shortly, a cogent example of a recent comparative text in the film studies vein is: Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley 34 from empire to the world

(eds.), Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). 62. In particular, I am inspired by the recent work of Mark Betz and Rosalind Galt in this regard. See: Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Cinema; Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing The Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 63. Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. xi. 64. There are a pleathora of edited collections on the topic of world cinema that span the late 1990s to the present day. The following texts, which constitute the early literature in the field, follow a “national cinemas” approach to the topic by including sections from major national cinemas around the world: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); John Hill and Pamela Church-Gibson (eds.), World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer, Traditions in World Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Martha P. Nochimson, World on Film: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). A second strand in the literature seeks to problematize the “national cinemas” approach through a variety of means, including the championing of circulation as analytical optic that is in keeping with with transnational studies of cinema but also by narrowing their focus to specific topics rather than surveying broad film movements. This particular strand of the scholarship on this subject leans toward a theorization of some of the conceptual difficulties raised by the term “world cinema”. These texts and articles include: Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 45.2 (Fall 2004), pp. 9–23; Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (eds.), Screening World Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema: Identity,Culture and Politics in Film (New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2006) Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Lúcia Nagib, Realism in World Cinema (New York: Continuum Press, 2011); Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds.), Theorizing World Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012); Tiago de Luca, Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013). Numerous presses have a world cinema series, including Edinburgh University Press, Anthem Press, I. B. Tauris, among others. In terms of institutional adoptions of world cinema, the Film Studies Program at Carleton University (my institution) contains The World Cinema introduction 35

Forum, intended to showcase filmmakers from around the world as well as a second year undergraduate course on world cinema. The introduction to Remappping World Cinema also contains a meditation on the MA programme in World Cinema at the University of Leeds (p. 8). 65. Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema”, in: Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 35. 66. Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema”, p. 10. It should also be noted that his approach to this topic, like others writing in this field of study, draws upon some of the central conceits of Franco Moretti’s work, including his article “Conjectures of World Literature”, New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000), pp. 54–68. For instance, Andrew employs the metaphor of “trees” to describe the way in which national cinemas are gen- erally discussed, versus the metaphor of waves that is conducive to the study of the global influence of certain film movements (p. 12). This corresponds to Moretti’s use of the tree as an analogy for the study of national literature, while he reserves the wave for those wishing to specialize in world literature (p. 68). 67. As Bhaskar Sarkar argues in “Tracking ‘Global Media’ in the Outposts of Globalization”, it is only by exploring alternate routes of circulation that a truly global media theory can come into being, one, as Sakar puts it, “that does not take Hollywood as its presumed epicenter and reduce all other cultural industries to its satellites” (p. 53). See: Bhaskar Sarkar, “Tracking ‘Global Media’ in the Outposts of Globalization” in: Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 34–58. Lúcia Nagib makes a similar argument in “Towards a positive definition of World Cinema” when she argues viewing world cinema through the lens of circulation allows Hollywood cinema to emerge as one cinema among others rather than resid- ing at the apex of film history (p. 34). 68. Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema”, in: Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 82. 69. Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (eds.), Screening World Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1. 70. Ibid. p. 5. 71. John Mowitt, Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xv. 72. A cogent example lies in the work of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their now canonical text, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (deemed by Dudely Andrew as the first “world cinema text”), part of a larger trend involved in displacing the centrality of the postcolonial as historical 36 from empire to the world

and theoretical tool for the reading of more recent migrant and diasporic cinema often associated with notions of globalization. For Shohat and Stam, the postcolonial is characterized by its homogenizing tendencies that work to disavow distinctions between different colonial formations. A second example can be located in the introduction to Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Editors Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden posit the transnational as a more flexible term, more appropriately suited to the study of phenomenon not explicitly tied to imperial or colonial pasts. See: Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (eds.), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). 73. A pertinent example is Lola Young’s Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 74. As she notes in the introductory chapter, Screening Strangers draws from a cultural studies approach employed to further her aims regarding the study of European identity as it pertains to a specific grouping of films (p. 10). See: Yosefa Loshitzky, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 75. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 37. 76. Ibid. p. 40. 77. An example of the former takes us to the introduction of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. Editors Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim delineate world cinema as a category that refers to “cultural products and practices that are mainly non-Western”, in concert with “world music” and “world literature” (p. 1). This claim is of course in opposition to the arguments made by Sternberg and Berghahn, whereby European cinema can take up residence within world cinema at large due to the forms of migrant and diasporic cinema that originate within the con- tinent. These are just two examples of a wide range of conceptual difficulties the term world cinema raises, as “the world” itself seems to elude the forms of totalization that the very notion of world cinema seems to initially imply. 78. I use the term “networked” in this context to refer to the festival circuit. 79. D. Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema”, pp. 81–6. 80. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 504. 81. Gatlif, for instance, won the Best Director’s Prize at Cannes in 2004 for Exils while Haneke won the same prize for Caché in 2005. In This World was awarded the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003. introduction 37

82. Co-production details are as follows: J’ai pas sommeil is a French/German/ Swiss co-production; Code inconnu is a French/German/Romanian co-production; Caché is a French/Austrian/German/Italy/American co- production; Exils is a French/Japanese co-production. 83. While the label of auteur is irrefutable with regard to Haneke, Gatlif and Denis, both Frears and Winterbottom present a somewhat different case, as the latter work across a wide variety of genres. There are, however, discernable consist- encies across their respective bodies of work, making the label of “auteur” also applicable in both cases. For Frears, social realism remains the central touchstone informing the stylistic aspects of all of his films, while for Winterbottom there are central thematic and stylistic preoccupations that recur throughout his career, including a definitive interest in the reflexive blurring of the boundaries between the fictional and the real that pertain quite strongly to his War on Terror trilogy, of which In This World is the first installment. 84. While some scholarship on Haneke’s films draws upon his own writings or statements about his films with great frequency, some of which I will utilize in Chapter 1 of the book, Denis presents a different case. Authors including Judith Mayne, Martine Beugnet and Janet Bergstrom offer accounts of Denis’ childhood, as the daughter of a colonial officer, who grew up in a variety of West African colonies before moving to France at a young age. What is exemplified in their writings on the subject is often an attempt to explicate the difficult nature of Denis’ filmmaking through recourse to her biography, which is situated within a wider historical, colonial context. See: Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004); Janet Bergstrom, “Opacity in the Films of Claire Denis”, in: Tyler Stovell and Georges Van Den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 69–102. 85. Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p. 72. 86. Sylvie Blum-Reid, “Away from Home? Two French Directors in Search of their Identity”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26 (2009), p. 1. 87. Bill Nichols, “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit”, Film Quarterly 47.3 (1994), p. 20. 88. T. Elsaesser, European Cinema, p. 498. 89. A good example of an author invested in the analysis of filmic texts is Dudley Andrew. In “An Atlas of World Cinema”, he argues that individual films should be examined as “maps” of any number of geopolitical co-ordinates, which manifest themselves both thematically and stylistically, that can then be placed on a map (p. 16). In this case and as Andrew himself states, he operates against Franco Moretti’s conception of “distant reading”, where the text itself diminishes in importance to what is larger than itself, which may include the charting of genres or systems or that which is smaller than itself, which includes the analysis of tropes, or devices. 38 from empire to the world

90. Ibid. p. 509. 91. Ackbar Abbas, “Cinema, The City and The Cinematic”, in: Linda Krause and Patrice Petro (eds.), Global Cities in Cinema: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in a Digital Age (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 145. 92. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (London and New York, Routledge,1992), p. 160.