Godard’s suburban years

Far from a simple backdrop, the lived environment was for Jean-Luc Godard capable of eliciting specific modes of cinematographic thought; choice of locations could impact the shape and feel of a film more than its screenplay. Prevalent in his works of the 1960s are suburban landscapes and locales, from the villas, cafés and roadways frequented by the characters of Bande à part (1964) to the high-rises of La Courneuve shown in the essay in phenomenology 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Without positing an equivalence between suburban heterogeneity and Godard’s jarring late-modern aesthetic, the author argues for the generative, transgressive capacity of a capitalist space in the throes of transformation and shot through with fragments of history. Shooting near Joinville-le-Pont and Vincennes in Bande à part, Godard pays homage to those pioneers who came before him, like Mack Sennett or Louis Feuillade. In other contexts, like the science-fiction sendup Alphaville (1965), he finds signs of the future in the present, showing Lemmy Caution moving through sleek, well-lit neighbourhoods of high-rises. The spatio-temporal rupture characteristic of Godard’s approach to suburban space resurfaces to surprising effect in Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012).

The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s

Assessing popular comedies and dramas, the author argues that in 1930s French cinema the banlieue is an ‘imagined community’ that resists transfer to a map. Its dual function as a space of social relegation and popular entertainment correlates to a specifically Parisian social geography where the affluent, verdant west contrasts sharply with the industrial northeast. Suburban locales allow the exploration of themes ranging from proletarian downfall (Le Jour se lève, Marcel Carné 1939) and murder (Cœur de Lilas, Anatole Litvak 1932) to open-air pleasure-seeking (Partie de campagne, Jean Renoir, 1936/1946) and the socialising dimension of popular song. By bringing together a variegated set of films from the left-leaning screenplays of Jacques Prévert to the Pétainist Notre-Dame de la Mouise (Robert Péguy, 1941), the author probes the tension inherent in the imagined banlieue between work and play, riches and poverty, redemption and despoilment.

Introduction

On the heels of the international hit La Haine (Hate, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), France at the close of the millennium saw a spate of bold, self-styled ‘hood’ films set in suburban council estates that critics were prompt to name – justifiably so – ‘films de banlieue’ (...

Elusive happiness: screening France’s new towns after 1968

Modern French town planning discourse was predicated on the idea that better architecture made for better, happier citizens, with rational architectural principles as the means to a fully realised modernity. After 1968, French filmmakers looked to the suburban new towns to voice the ambiguities and contradictions of rapid urbanisation. In Le Chat (Granier-Deferre, 1972), an ageing couple enter a downward social and psychological spiral as new high-rise construction menaces their decrepit suburban villa. The rough-and-ready La Ville bidon (Jacques Baratier, 1976) shows the struggle of junkmen and their marginalised families to resist expropriation at the hands of a town council that aims to develop a new town on a massive dumpsite. A spoof of streamlined post-modern living, Le Couple témoin (William Klein, 1978) parodies new town rhetoric under the guise of social experiment. The chapter concludes with a double reading of Eric Rohmer’s Les Nuits de la pleine lune (1984) and L’Ami de mon amie (1987) which by turns laud the new towns for their blend of leisure and work and deride their programmed aspect. Dysphoric and euphoric elements of suburban living are related to class-based investments and to the elusive prospect of happiness.

Tati, suburbia and modernity

The author reconsiders the commonly held notion that Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) adumbrates a negative ‘critique’ of modern suburbia as a space of alienation. The functions given to architectural forms or elements of landscaping on the one hand can be distinguished from the comic uses of these forms onscreen on the other, for instance to satirise bourgeois habits or to reaffirm the prerogatives of childlike creative engagement with the built environment. The director strikes a balance between the mockery of conspicuous consumption and the enchantment of an unruly, unpredictable object world. Attention is paid the narrative of post-war French suburban development, the thunderous reception of Mon Oncle, and the peculiar approach that Tati and chief decorator Jacques Lagrange took to set design and the Arpel villa in particular, which overtly parodies interwar French high modernism. The villa’s stark opposition to the eponymous character’s ramshackle rooming house in suburban St. Maur allows Tati to elicit a specific audience response to shared values of spontaneity and disorder that modernizing tendencies in post-war France were in the process of destroying.

Margins and thresholds of French cinema: Ménilmontant, Le Sang des bêtes, Colloque de chiens

The author addresses singularity, figural expression and transgression in three experimental shorts that picture the margins of Paris the better to interrogate the limits of cinematic language itself. To what extent might filmmakers who refuse the codes of an audience-ready cinema of the juste milieu stake a claim to an art of the periphery? Linking the working-class neighbourhood of its title to crime, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s silent Ménilmontant (1926) gestures towards melodrama even as it proposes an introduction to avant-garde film poetics. Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949), on Paris’s slaughterhouses, strikes a formal balance between poetic décor on the one hand and, on the other, the drama of livestock being steamed, stunned and decapitated. Deep generic instability and distanced humour characterise Raúl Ruiz’s off-kilter parody of surrealism Colloque de chiens (1977). Throughout these works, the internal and external borders of Paris work as zones of latent or overt violence to dissolve genre; scenes of fragmentation and dismemberment upend any pretention to a balanced and harmonious cinema of the juste milieu. The suburb becomes an ideal projective screen.

What’s left of the ‘red suburb’? Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise as case study

On 10 June 1968, in front of the Wonder battery factories in Saint-Ouen, an outraged young woman refuses to return to work despite the trade union’s vote to end the strike. Filmed by an anonymous camera operator, the altercation gives rise to the fabled ten-minute direct film Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder. Tracking down this same woman twenty-five years later, French documentarian Hervé Le Roux makes another film, the aptly titled Reprise (1995), which charts the evolution since 1968 of the working class in the former ‘red belt’ around Paris. His investigation, which results from a negotiation between a place, its inhabitants and a film crew, aims to reconstruct, trace by trace, the relevant places and their social makeup. Arguing for Reprise as a film de banlieue in the strongest possible sense, the author shows how Le Roux weaves working-class left activism back into the site in Saint-Ouen, letting himself be swept along in his depiction by neighbourhood dynamics and popular memory. Rather than trying to revive a more or less faded ‘red suburb’, the film works with the place as it is, providing stark contrast in tone and purpose to its virtual screen contemporary, La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995).

Erasing the suburbs: the grands ensembles in documentary film and television, 1950–80

The author explores a three-decade transformation in the audio-visual construction of the grands ensembles, the large-scale housing projects that well before the riots of 2005 had come to typify the blighted French suburb. Analysis is based on films commissioned by the French housing ministry and on television broadcasts aired from the 1950s to the 1980s. The earliest promotional films opposed the grands ensembles to the historic working-class suburbs outlying Paris: where the latter habitat was overcrowded and unhealthy, the rationally planned modern estates promised order, comfort and hygiene. Period documentaries amplified these contrasts the better to ‘erase’ from memory the pre-modern suburb and to make cost-effective mass lodging a national cause. As early as the mid-1960s, the author notes, negative aspects of the grands ensembles – shoddy construction, poor transportation, and scant amenities – came to dominate French screens. From the early 1970s onward, the largest estates were portrayed as immigrant spaces deserted by the middle class and beset with poverty and crime. The state’s attempt to redress the suburb’s image by launching the mixed-use villes nouvelles in the 1970s and 1980s proved unsuccessful, so indelible were these images of suburban blight.

The banlieue wore black: post-war French polar, from Becker to Corneau

This overview charts the evolution from the 1950s to the 1980s of the French detective or crime film (le polar). Proto-noir films shot before World War II had been primarily centred on Paris, a trend furthered in post-war works which regularly conjoined seedy Pigalle and the glamorous Champs-Elysées as two sides of the same coin. From Jacques Becker (Casque d’or, 1952; Grisbi, 1954) to Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Doulos, 1962; Le Samouraï, 1967) via Jules Dassin (Rififi, 1955), a gradual shift toward suburban locales takes place around new genre conventions and motifs. The suburbs variously lend themselves to hideouts, shootouts and executions; to the sale of all things illegal or counterfeit; to the gloomy atmospherics of railway tracks, deserted roadways and abandoned villas. A subsequent generation of directors would exploit the multi-faceted social and geographical reality of the modern housing estates that encroached upon traditional allotments of single-family homes and pockets of suburban wasteland; Henri Verneuil’s mainstream caper Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) thus portrays a disorientatingly mutating Sarcelles. Most decisively, Alain Corneau’s naturalistic noirs Série noire (1979) and Choix des armes (1981) add a sociological dimension to the genre by broaching questions of violence, alienation and devastation.

A crucible of emotions: Maurice Pialat’s L’Amour existe

By turns elegiac and polemical, Maurice Pialat’s twenty-minute essay film L’Amour existe (1960) encompasses at once an individual life, the history of France from the pre-war period through WWII and the Trente Glorieuses, and the visual representation of the banlieue from Impressionist painting to poetic realism. The ineluctable push of time is embodied in the forward motion of trains, buses, bicycles and people, as well as in slow tracking or panning shots that survey the impoverished landscapes of greater Paris from dawn to dusk and into the night. The author underscores the formative qualities of an intimate, unseen and lost space in which suburban beauty lays hidden, and where, in keeping with Pialat’s chosen title, ‘love exists’. Behind the overwhelming forces of poverty, routine and modernization that its richly layered commentary denounces, L’Amour existe points to what these forces have silenced, what could have been revealed but remained invisible and unsaid. The critical faculty of the movie camera to reveal hidden realities in the apparently bleakest of worlds is reaffirmed.