Beur & Banlieue Cinema by Kévin Drif

      Today’s special episode is by Kévin Drif. Kévin is currently a PhD student in the department of French studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the contemporary cultural representations of children of Maghrebi immigrants in France, mainly in cinema and television, and the way this youth must constantly negotiate with French republicanism to reconcile their North African ancestry with their French identity in a country so adamant to reject ideas of social multiculturalism. While he is working on the importance of education and schools in French cinema and literature and their interactions with children of immigrant origins, Kévin is also currently designing a project about the contemporary representations of French Maghrebi youth in television series through a cultural studies lens which could provide important insight about the precarious social and political positions of this part of the population in contemporary France.

            In today’s episode he explores Arab immigrant cinema in France.

Kévin Drif:

Hi Gary, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. In this episode, I’ll explore the history of the way French Cinema has portrayed French youth of immigrant origin and how this on-screen translation of social, political, and cultural realities allow us to understand the precariousness of their position in French society. Before I dive into the main genres of cinema at play in these representations, a quick historical background might be helpful in order to fully understand the marginalized position of these populations in France. A first important question to answer is where do these populations come from? Well, it is no secret that France’s colonial history participated greatly in the population diversity that the country has been continually pushing back since the early 20th century. France’s colonial history dates to the 16th century, yet when it comes to the identities portrayed in contemporary French cinema, the second French colonial empire initiated by the invasion of the North African country of Algeria in 1830, later fully conquered in 1903, constitutes the historical origin for the diversity of contemporary French population. France’s occupation of Algeria, the later protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, and the creation of the confederation of French West Africa in 1895, installed a strong French control and presence on the African continent. One that manifested itself in many areas of public life. Politically, France demonstrated a strong grip on its colonies’ institutions, economically this colonizing power laid claim to most natural resources available in foreign territories, and culturally and socially France made sure to control every aspect of public life to shape its colonized populations as obedient colonized subjects through education for example. This colonial rule over a substantial part of the African continent eventually came to an end after WWII with the decolonization movement that intensified in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In this process, Algeria constitutes an exception as the colony which received the most French settlers on its soil, thus creating new taxonomies of French citizenships outside of France. The aftermath of Algeria’s rise to independence in 1962 was then followed by a certain difficulty to welcome French families who settled for generations in the colony and never set foot in France, called pieds noirs, Algerian families who helped France during the conflict known as harkis, and Algerian men looking for work. These new arrivals and the subsequent second and third generations of North African origin born in France shook the French Republic to its core by confronting its refusal to incorporate notions of race and ethnicity in its national identity.

As a geographical manifestation of the precarious positions of these newly arrived North African populations, it is telling that upon their arrival to France they were forcefully put in shantytowns on the outskirts of big cities and later on in public housing projects still at the periphery of cities to avoid any contact with the rest of the population. These suburban zones, called banlieue in French, will become the main space represented in cinema portraying these populations over the past 40 years. In other words, the term banlieue refers to the rundown, multi-ethnic, working-class, or poor housing projects built hastily in the second half 20th century at the peripheries of cities like Paris to accommodate the increasing number of North African and Sub-Saharan migrants in France. Over time, the banlieue and its cités, high-rise public housing complexes, became in the French imaginary synonymous with non-white racial minorities, poverty, “otherness”, and more problematically, framed by ideas of violence, insecurity, and threat to the national order. Over decades, the at once geographically and socially marginalized inhabitants of the banlieue, have been forced to cope with poor housing conditions, a faltering education system, and high rates of unemployment. Before the 1980’s French cinema was not really interested in filming and giving screen time to the banlieue and more specifically to non-white French subjectivities. Before the 1980’s a lot of French cinema either focused on Paris or similar big cities or what we call in French, the province or countryside. Yet even though banlieue cinema was coined as such in 1995 there were several attempts at shooting this space and its inhabitants in a more politically engaged way. You have two famous examples from 1960 of films taking place in the banlieue but not really addressing the diversity of the population living within it, Jean Carné’s Terrain Vague or wasteland (1960) and Maurice Pialat’s L’amour existe (1960). Unfortunate both are more interested in the geographical banlieue and not its racial, social and cultural diversity. But then, starting with Mehdi Charef’s Le thé au harem Archimède released in 1985, a new wave of second generation of North African origin directors decided to shoot the banlieue they grew up in to address topics usually marginalized in French cinema, such as their difficulty to reconcile their hybrid identity torn between their parents’ cultural and religious heritage and a Frenchness that denies their racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds. This movement became a cinema genre known as beur cinema, a genre that is oftentimes drawn from the personal experiences of its directors. Beur being the word used by this generation to refer to themselves and reaffirm their hybrid identity in France and the white dominated French cinema landscape. The word beur sends back to the word Arabe or Arab, using a French slang practice called verlan, which relies on the reversal of syllables, and refers to the second-generation children of North African immigrants in France. Beur films mostly existed outside of regular production circuits, most of them were shown in festivals and some got lost and were never digitized. Beur films were usually low budget and their directors lacked proper training in cinema which gives these films a documentary like feeling that adds to the authenticity of the psychological exploration of the characters. There is a strong similarity with Italian neorealism and its realist almost documentary feel because of the lack of financial support that led to the use of real locations instead of build sets, and the use of nonprofessional actors. Overall, both genres share their interest in both the individual and the collective, bridging the gap between personal experiences and the larger social context that shapes these experiences through an open critic of authority. One interesting thing about beur cinema is that one would think that young French of Maghrebi origins would use their art to affirm their cultural hybridity and social precariousness by criticizing the institutions in place but in reality, most of these directors have been described by scholars as having a strong desire to blend with mainstream cinema and to adopt a stance of social assimilation in French society. In the case of Medhi Charef’s seminal film Le thé au Harem d’Archimède, portraying the story of two young male friends living in the banlieue, Pat and Majid, one white and one of North African origin, the scholar Carrie Tarr identifies a dilution of Majid’s hybrid identity in whiteness because of his friendship with Pat, and also an evacuation of common representations of racism and islamophobia which tends towards an assimilation project. According to Tarr, beur filmmakers tried to appeal to a wider audience and as such had less leeway in their representational choices, which could explain their support for the model of assimilation rather than exploring multiculturalism. While I agree with Tarr’s reading to an extent I also strongly believe that directors such as Charef, or Karim Dridri, who portrayed social relationships and contacts between different racialized identities could also easily be read as a call for tolerance and acceptance of French society for its immigrants and children of immigrants’ population. After a decade of production of beur films, the appropriation of the word beur in the 1990’s by far-right political actors and the growing racism and islamophobia in France in the same period led to a rebranding from a genre anchored in ethnicity to one defined by spatiality. This is why this genre was then replaced, some said subsumed, by banlieue cinema, coined for the first time in the Cahiers du cinéma in 1995, and introduced by the release of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, or Hate in its English translation, the same year. The importance of space for this cinema genre was clearly identified by a scholar named Will Higbee who wrote that just like Westerns in the 1950’s in Hollywood, banlieue cinema is a genre primarily defined by its geographical location. Just for fun I wanted to test that theory and I realized that out of 30 banlieue films that I am using as a corpus for my research almost all of them, 25 out of 30, use in a recurring way extreme long shots of housing projects, either as an establishing shot and/or throughout the film to spatially represent the banlieue as an enclosed and isolated space far away from the city center only perceptible on the horizon. banlieue cinema, oftentimes directed by white French directors, focuses on the social reality of the banlieue and offers a representation of its ethnic and racial diversity, thus expanding the representation spectrum of identities on screen to not only North African descendants but also to Black and other immigrant identities. Compared to Beur cinema, banlieue cinema seems to be even more overtly politically engaged in contestation and is more interested in analyzing the violence, both symbolic and physical, at play between banlieue youth and French authority and culture. La Haine was released in a specific social-political context in France when in the 1990’s there was a growing racism and islamophobia in the country and a rise of right extremist political parties during elections with politicians using the banlieue and its diverse population as an ideal scapegoat for national fears of violence and insecurity. Banlieue films then provided a counter-discourse and humanized banlieue populations and more importantly youth oftentimes regarded as a collective group enacting violence rather than individual victims of institutionalized racism and geographical segregation. These films highlight the fracture sociale overtly mentioned by freshly elected President Jacques Chirac in the same year and frontally addressed the thorny question of social and cultural integration, the rejection of the idea of multiculturalism, and the erasure of racial minorities or immigrants’ subjectivities prevalent in contemporary French society and cinema. Banlieue films usually follow the same narrative tropes and share similar aesthetic choices. The definition of banlieue cinema shared by most ties the genre to its geographical location, the banlieue, and to a narrative of social and racial exclusion through common tropes such as criminality, police violence and the physical and metaphorical representation of the banlieue as a carceral space. These narrative motifs, often coupled with specific aesthetics and formal choices on screen anchor banlieue cinema in an idea of realism, such as the use of a somber color palette, an intensive use of closeups to convey solely negative emotions such as anger and sadness, the reliance on rap music to emphasize the violence of the banlieue space. All these elements find their roots in La Haine, which became the quasi blueprint for the cinematic representation of the banlieue for more than a decade. The fact that the film became very successful critically and with audiences obviously participated in that. But I have to say that the degree of over-aestheticization in La Haine was never really met afterwards because directors wanted to re-anchor the banlieue in an even stronger realistic feeling. While La Haine is the film usually mentioned both in France and internationally when it comes to the French banlieue I would like to also shed light on the subsequent and recent productions portraying the banlieue onscreen. One of the most important points I want to make, one that had been debated both by scholars and film critics over the years, is the positionality of the directors vis-à-vis their films. With La Haine, and a considerable amount of banlieue films in the 2000s, banlieue cinema has been made by white directors and most of them had no direct ties to this space. Even though I strongly believe that with enough research and care anyone could write about anything, this trend in banlieue cinema made by white directors had a direct impact on the narratives and stories depicted on screen. This impact was aptly summarized by Carrie Tarr who wrote that banlieue films by white French directors concentrate more on violence and confrontation, whereas those by non-white directors are more interested in exploring individual problems of identity and integration, with the underlying danger that white directors might replicate stereotypes rather than deconstruct them. Fortunately, there has been a shift since 2010 where white bourgeois directors lost interest in banlieue cinema probably because it did not appeal to a larger audience and give them as visibility as more mainstream or highbrow productions. Positively this led to a reclamation of the banlieue on screen by a new generation of directors of Black and North African descent with a willingness to either question old classics of banlieue cinema with a more contemporary and nuanced lens or by expanding the genre to new avenues such as documentary, science fiction or even queer readings. This new roaster of directors includes the now acclaimed black French director Ladj Ly who won the César, or a French Oscar, for his first feature film Les Misérables released in 2019, read by some as a re-actualized and more politically engaged version of La Haine. Even though banlieue cinema is not a cinema genre that is commonly studied or even taught in France or abroad, over the past thirty years more than 60 films centered around the banlieue life have been directed. And to this day, new and seasoned directors keep releasing new films about the banlieue, for example recently I watched a film called Avant que les flammes ne s’éteignent, directed by Mehdi Fikri and released in 2023, about the battle of a French Algerian family against the police administration after the wrongful killing of a boy by police officers during a routine control, a new film just came out in March 2024 called HLM Pussy, HLM is a French acronym for public housing, about banlieue teenage girls who seek revenge against their sexual aggressors, just to give two examples. To conclude while this episode focused on the cinema medium, I wanted to mention before we part ways that narratives about the banlieue have also permeated other art forms, namely literature and music, and within my research my goal is be to expand this cultural ecosystem of the banlieue space and its inhabitants to the realm of television where the multiplicity of streaming platforms and sources of funding are now allowing new writers and directors to tell stories about the banlieue in new and innovative ways.