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 mod- ernist 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 phe- nomenon 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 emblem- atic 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 dis- tinct 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).