French Women Directors Negotiating Transnational Identities Authors(S): CATHERINE PORTUGES Source: Yale French Studies, No
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French Women Directors Negotiating Transnational Identities Authors(s): CATHERINE PORTUGES Source: Yale French Studies, No. 115, New Spaces for French and Francophone Cinema (2009), pp. 47-63 Published by: Yale University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679754 Accessed: 28-03-2016 13:09 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679754?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Yale French Studies http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.212.181.40 on Mon, 28 Mar 2016 13:09:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CATHERINE PORTUGES French Women Directors Negotiating Transnational Identities The cinematic representation of transnational processes over the past decade has engaged a number of women filmmakers in France, ex tending earlier discourses of national cinema and postcoloniality. As Frangoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have argued, "The transnational . can be conceived as a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cul tures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center."1 The fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, launched by young directors to protest the hegemonic filmmaking practices of a stu dio-based system, constitutes a point of departure for many of these filmmakers and a frame of reference for this essay.2 For just as New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette used the jump cut, the tracking shot, real-time long takes, and camera move ments to call attention to the cinematic apparatus in a provocative manifesto, so, too, do these transnational directors propose innova tions worthy of attention. Borrowing from avant-garde, independent, and commercial film practices of French and European cinema, and combining them with the specificities of diasporan filmmaking, French women filmmakers are calling into question the validity of both national cinema and cul tural identity as assumed or fixed representational concepts. A number 1. Minor Transnationalism, ed. Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-21. 2. See Antoine de Baecque, La nouvelle vague. Portrait d'une jeunesse (Paris: Flam marion, 1998). YFS 115, New Spaces for French and Francophone Cinema, ed. James F. Austin, ? 2009 by Yale University. 47 This content downloaded from 131.212.181.40 on Mon, 28 Mar 2016 13:09:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 48 Yale French Studies of these bilingual and bicultural directors, themselves transnational products of Mediterranean and African contexts trained in Western universities and film schools, practice a form of filmmaking that resists authoritarian hegemonic discourses. Although they do not necessarily constitute a movement, their filmmaking strategies similarly gesture at once toward and away from the cultures of their primary affiliation, implicating the viewer in a nomadic trajectory from a context familiar to Western audiences toward a less familiar space, and back again. Tra versing these increasingly permeable geographical and interpersonal boundaries, such films call into question hierarchies of power that in scribe immigrant female others within the parameters of a "host" na tion?in this case, France.3 The directors considered here, all of whom work in both documen tary and fiction genres, suggest only part of the vibrant filmmaking community in contemporary French cinema whose achievements fur ther attest, should such confirmation still be necessary, to the inno vative contributions of women to moving image practice since the earliest days of silent cinema. Likewise, cinema itself has, from its in ception, been a transnational art and industry, from pre-narrative cin ema, to international silent film and the avant-garde.4 Disrupting and widening the horizons of contemporary visual culture, Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman, Josiane Balasko, Catherine Breillat, Aline Isserman, Diane Kurys, Tonie Marshall, Brigitte Roiian, Vera Belmont, Coline Serreau, and Agnes Varda all produced new work in the 1990s, explor ing issues of national identity and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and marginality and displacement. Other noteworthy French co-produc tions have been located on the transnational margins of filmmaking, such as very recent work from the younger generation of women film makers including Isild Le Besco's Charly (2007); Zina Modiano's Vie privee (PrivateLife) (2005), LolaDoillon's Et toit'es sur quil (fust About Lovel, 2007), Celina Sciamma's Naissance des pieuvres (Water Lilies, 2007), Mia Hansen-Love's Tout est pardonne (All is Forgiven, 2007), EmmanuelleCuau's Tres bien, merci(Very Well, Thank You, 2007), and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2007). Claire Denis, a leading innovator of this generation who had worked 3. See Carrie Tarr, "The Porosity of the Hexagon: Border Crossings in Contempo rary French Cinema," Studies in European Cinema 4/1 (May 2007): 7-20. 4. See Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Leo Charney (University of California Press, 1995). This content downloaded from 131.212.181.40 on Mon, 28 Mar 2016 13:09:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CATHERINE PORTUGES 49 previously with a number of New Wave directors, pays homage to one of her mentors in her 1990 documentary Cinema de notre temps: Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (Cinema of Our Time: Jacques Rivette, the Watchman). As a French West African woman with a profound under standing of contrasting continental geopolitics, Denis was also in spired by the work of the younger generation of filmmakers who shared her commitment to the motif of foreignness, otherness, and strange ness. In Beau travail (1999), one of the few films by women directors to focus on masculinity and the male body in an intimate, personal me diation, Denis contemplates the erotic and professional attachments among men in the French Foreign Legion in a former French colony. In Beau travail Denis again demonstrates the feel for African landscape evident in her first feature film, Chocolat (1988), where scenes of do mestic life take place at a remove from public space between African servants and pied-noir families, as in the powerful connection between Aimee, a white woman in her twenties, and Protee, her Cameroonian servant. As her career has progressed, she has determinedly followed her own path, at times eschewing narrative for the pleasures of the vi sual. In 35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum, 2007), Denis traces a whole com munity of characters from France's working underclass, anchored by a father-daughter relationship, framing them within a milieu that de fines their aspirations yet circumscribes their lives. Working in co-production and through independent circuits beyond conventional structures of production, distribution, and exhibition, these filmmakers are charting the presence of otherness in contempo rary representational modes, incorporating in the process autobio graphical elements that cross boundaries of genre, combining fiction and nonfiction, as well as animation and experimental formats. By chronicling the multilayered dispersals, exiles, and migrations of dias poric populations, including personal narratives of their own families and their entourages, they problematize integration, solidarity, and hy brid identities. As I have suggested elsewhere, the mise-en-scene of the earlier generation of directors "destabilizes hegemonic ideas of na tionality, sexuality, and the family"5 in which the Hexagone is figured 5. Catherine Portuges, "Le colonial feminin: Women Directors Interrogate French Cinema/7 Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone World, ed. Dina Sherzer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 80-102. I propose in this article a "second wave" of films directed by women, examining female subjectivity and women's roles in the colonial past to explore history, memory, and fam ily. This content downloaded from 131.212.181.40 on Mon, 28 Mar 2016 13:09:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 50 Yale French Studies as a multicultural zone of intergenerational protagonists and immi grant populations. In a career that spans nearly six decades, Agnes Varda, now in her eightieth year and one of the major figures of postwar cinema (her first feature, La pointe courte, 1954, is a precursor of the French New Wave), has remained an active inspiration for generations of women directors. She has, moreover, controlled production and distribution through her own company, Cine Tamaris. In her view, being a female filmmaker " . means separating yourself from your mirror and the image that society proposes for you, leaving the kitchen, going outside, looking at others, choosing and negotiating