French cinema emerges from a political and social landscape set against the French republican model of integration, which in theory aims to be inclusive but tends to be exclusionary in practice. Films treating difference and discrimination encounter a French discourse of universalism and egalitarianism grounded in the principles of republicanism, which discourage the separation of ethnic, religious, racial, and other identities. Some critics have argued that France’s “colorblind” ideology results in the elimination of difference, while others have suggested that the French project does not seek to repudiate difference but instead to “move beyond it.” A number of contemporary French films have tackled this contradiction by building discrepancy and ambiguity into the form itself. The three papers gathered in this panel will examine specific cinematographic techniques used by acclaimed filmmakers in order to interrogate how difference is staged and confronted.

Several recent documentaries directed by Afro-French women testify to how normative understanding of the supposedly universal French identity have excluded the lived experiences of Afro-descendant and genderqueer persons (Mariannes noires[2015]; Trop noire pour être française[2015]; Afro-Diasporic French Identities[2011];Vibrancy of Silence[2017]). Assistant Professor Abigail E. Celis will consider two films, Alice Diop’s Vers la tendresse(2015) and Amandine Gay’s Ouvrir la voix(2017), that investigate the role visual registers play in creating and negotiating difference. Drawing on research in intercultural cinema and the senses (Marks 2000; MacDougall 2005), she will argue that these two films create a cinematic space of haptic looking, revealing and rewriting French identity as a deeply embodied rather than abstract production. Professor Celis will examine the aesthetic construction of Gay and Diop’s films, specifically extreme close-ups and voice-overs, in order to determine how a cinematic space of attentive listeningis generated. These films, she claims, not only fill a vacuum of representation within a context where few cinematic images of Afro-descendant and postcolonial subjects circulate, but their aesthetics perform new visualizations of difference in contemporary France.

While Gay and Diop’s documentary practices refigure the racialized body as embodied, Claire Denis, an acclaimed French filmmaker, has been criticized for eroticizing the other through extreme close-ups and long-takes. Critics have decried Denis’s shooting style as reinforcing commonplace racist stereotypes. Tamara Tasevska, Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, will present a paper that offers an alternative interpretation of Denis’s work. Tasevska will focus on the optics of chromatic and light in Denis’s two recent films, 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and White Material (2009), arguing that these films contribute to constructing, reiterating, and refuting ideas about whiteness and racialized others. Drawing on the decolonial writings of Franz Fanon, Tasevska will suggest that the films’ eroticization of bodies, as well as environments, serves to document transgressions of racial and sexual boundaries and offers alternate models of intimate connection.

In keeping with Abigail Celis’s and Tamara Tasevska’s focus on the determinant role visual grammar plays on the construction and reception of difference, Assistant Professor Charlotte F. Werbe’s presentation will address how inter-ethnic confrontations and social media are staged in Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2018). While films treating the immigration crisis are typically framed through the perspective(s) of refugees, Happy Endadopts an altogether different approach. Although the film is set in Calais, home to the notorious Calais Jungle, a refugee encampment, the plot revolves around a wealthy family. Professor Werbe’s presentation will examine how violence is framed in scenes depicting face-to-face altercations and scenes featuring social media (e.g., Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube). The cinematography of the former, characterized by fixed and distant camera shots, gives way to ambivalence and passivity. On the other hand, the proximity, speed, and overall excess of the social media snippets encourage visceral reactions, such as disgust and horror. Professor Werbe does not intend to criticize new communicative technologies, but rather to consider how the palpable presence of social media in Happy Endoffers a vantage point for considering social interactions that occur beyond the confines of the internet. This presentation will argue that the contrast generated through the remediation of social media in cinema grants access to the realities of social engagement and community in contemporary France; where difference is not necessarily shunned or marginalized, but instead remains invisible.

With an explicit focus on cinematography, in particular how cinema mediates experiences of marginalization, these three papers will add nuance to a burgeoning field of scholarship devoted to examining cinematic representations of difference.