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The Cinema of Yamina Benguigui

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The Cinema of Yamina Benguigui HISTORY, GENRE, POLITICS: THE CINEMA OF YAMINA BENGUIGUI by Teresa Johnson-Evans B.A. French, California University of Pennsylvania, 1997 M.A. French, West Virginia University, 2000 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2009 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Teresa Johnson-Evans It was defended on July 10, 2009 and approved by Sabine von Dirke, Associate Professor, German Roberta Hatcher, Assistant Professor, French and Italian Lina Insana, Associate Professor, French and Italian Dissertation Co-Advisor: Philip Watts, Associate Professor, French and Romance Philology, Columbia University Dissertation Co-Advisor: Giuseppina Mecchia, Associate Professor, French and Italian ii Copyright © by Teresa Johnson-Evans 2009 iii HISTORY, GENRE, POLITICS: THE CINEMA OF YAMINA BENGUIGUI Teresa Johnson-Evans, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation illustrates the ways cinema intervenes into questions of history, politics, immigration, and national identity and community through the films of contemporary French filmmaker Yamina Benguigui (1957-). This study traces these interventions from her earliest films in the mid-1990s to her most recent productions in 2008. France, and the way it is represented to and by its people, has been undergoing significant transformations in recent decades as a result of an increasingly multicultural population and external pressures due to globalization and European unification. Benguigui’s corpus reflects these tranformations and the evolution of these debates while also contributing to them, thereby consolidating her status as a cinéaste engagée. A range of theoretical texts inform the analyses of Benguigui’s films. Colonial theory, as articulated by Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, illustrate to what extent the colonial dynamic continues to structure contemporary French society decades after decolonization. Jacques Rancière’s La mésentente (1995), a rethinking of the concepts of democracy and politics, provides the framework for an examination of Benguigui’s cinema as political practice. Benguigui’s films intend to open an imaginary space for immigrants and their descendants in French national narratives; Benedict Anderson’s theory of “imagined communities” is therefore particularly relevant to her cinematic project. iv This dissertation is organized thematically, beginning with an analysis of the ways Benguigui’s films address colonial history and its consequences in the latter half of the twentieth century. The second chapter is an examination of her preferred genres—the documentary and tragicomedy—and how they serve her cinematic and political project. Her films are situated within the documentary tradition as well as within French and Italian comedic conventions. The relationship between politics and cinema is studied in chapter three. Benguigui’s most recent films, treating social unrest and inequalities in French society, have assumed an overt political cast, but a political project can be traced throughout her cinematic corpus. Yamina Benguigui advocates for a more inclusive and egalitarian society; this study illustrates the role art can and must play in these struggles. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 2.0 HISTORY ................................................................................................................... 16 2.1 FEMMES D’ISLAM (1994) .............................................................................. 21 2.2 MÉMOIRES D’IMMIGRÉS, L’HÉRITAGE MAGHRÉBIN (1997) .......... 23 2.3 PIMPRENELLE (2001) .................................................................................... 40 2.4 INCH’ALLAH DIMANCHE (2001) ................................................................ 45 3.0 GENRE ....................................................................................................................... 76 3.1 DOCUMENTARY ............................................................................................. 79 3.2 TRAGICOMEDY ............................................................................................ 117 4.0 POLITICS ................................................................................................................. 135 4.1 LA MÉSENTENTE: INTEGRATION ......................................................... 150 4.2 POLICING AND POLITICS ......................................................................... 163 4.3 COMMUNITY ................................................................................................. 176 5.0 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 186 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 195 vi 1.0 INTRODUCTION In the past decade, events have occurred in France that demonstrate to what extent it has not adequately addressed its colonial heritage, whose repercussions continue to manifest themselves within French society. Some of the more spectacular incidents include the 2001 soccer match between the French and Algerian national teams, a match that the media had deemed an historical event and “lourd de symboles”1 because such an encounter had not taken place in forty years. What could have been a symbolic gesture of historical healing between the two countries, as it took place almost forty years after Algerian independence from French colonial rule, instead came to an abrupt end when fans began swarming the field waving and wrapped in Algerian flags. Approximately a half-decade earlier, on May 8, 1945, the waving of the banned Algerian flag in Sétif, Algeria had provoked riots and massacres, resulting in the deaths of more than thirty thousand Algerians, according to some estimates.2 The 2001 soccer match was indeed “lourd de symboles,” but this was not exactly the symbolic token many had anticipated or desired. More recently, in 2008, a small number of fans booed the singing of la Marseillaise at a soccer match in Paris between Tunisia and France, mirroring a similar incident during a France- 1 Yves Bordenave, “France-Algérie, une rencontre aux multiples enjeux,’ Le Monde Online Edition. 6 Oct. 2001. <www.lemonde.fr>. 4 July 2009. 2 Gilles Millet, “Les mercredis de l’histoire”: Sétif, l’autre 8 mai 1945,” Liberation Online Edition 10 May 1995. <http://www.liberation.fr/medias/0101143027-les-mercredis-de-l-histoire-setif-l-autre-8-mai-1945>. 4 July 2009. 1 Morocco match in 2007.3 Coincidentally, the Tunisian singer Amina Annabi, who played the role of Malika in Yamina Benguigui’s 2001 film Inch’Allah dimanche, was present at the France-Tunisia match to sing the Tunisian national anthem. The perceived insult to the Marseillaise infuriated French president Nicolas Sarkozy and other politicians and led to the decision to stop future matches immediately should the French national anthem be booed. Such confrontations were not limited to the soccer field, however. In 2000, a riot broke out in a suburb of Strasbourg as a result of an incident involving a young man who had allegedly robbed several banks. When the police entered the neighborhood where he was reportedly hiding out to arrest him, a few hundred of the neighborhood’s residents, primarily young men of Maghrebi origin, confronted them with various projectiles and proceeded to “s’attaquer à divers symboles (la Cité de justice, la Caisse d’épargne, quelques boutiques du centre commercial).”4 These spaces were symbolic because the rioters have either been the targets of these institutions (the law) or excluded from them (the economic life of France). In 2005, in Seine-Saint-Denis (Saint- Denis was also the site of the 2001 soccer match), riots would again erupt as a result of the electrocution deaths of two young Maghrebi Frenchmen who had been pursued by the police. Some called the unrest and violence that occurred there the worst since 1968.5 Another outbreak of violence would occur two years later in 2007 in Val d’Oise, a Parisian commune that neighbors Seine-Saint-Denis. These episodes, which all took place in France, can be interpreted as symptomatic of an historical relationship between France and its former colonial subjects that has not yet been reconciled. 3 Bruce Crumley, “Booing the Marseillaise: A French soccer scandal,” Time Online Edition 15 Oct 2008. <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1850831,00.html>. 4 July 2009. 4 Stephen Beaud and Michel Pialoux, “Révoltes dans les quartier: émeutes urbaines, violence sociale,” Le Monde diplomatique 18 July 2001. 5 Elaine Sciolino, “Paris suburb riots called ‘a lot worse’ than in 2005,” 27 Nov. 2007. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/world/europe/27iht-riots.4.8500200.html>. 4 July 2009. 2 On the other hand, progress has been made, although in much less spectacular fashion than the incidents previously mentioned. 2003 was celebrated as the “Year of Algeria” in France, whose aim was to “open up the field of dialogue, to bring sharing and culture into the heart of relations between peoples.”6 A museum dedicated to the history of immigration in France opened in 2007,7 and in recent decades there appears to be more willingness and openness on the part of the French state to discuss the colonial era and the decades following decolonization
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