Muslim Women in French Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Short Films

Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France is the first comprehensive study of cinematic representations of first-generation Muslim women from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) in France. Situated at the intersection of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and film studies, this book uses the multi-layered concept of ‘voice’ as an analytical lens through which to examine a diverse corpus of over 60 documentaries, short films, téléfilms (made-for-television films), and feature films released in France between 1979 and 2014. In examining the ways in which the voices, experiences, and points of view of Maghrebi migrant women in France are represented and communicated through a selection of key films, this study offers new perspectives on Maghrebi migrant women in France. It shows that women of this generation, as they are represented in these films, are far more diverse and often more empowered than has generally been thought on the basis of the relatively narrow range of media and cultural productions that have so far reached mainstream audiences. The films examined in this study are part of larger contemporary debates and discussions relating to immigration, integration, and what it means to be French.

Maghrebi Migrant Women in France and French Cinema

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Short Films ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

The introduction provides a general overview of the place of Maghrebi migrant women in France and outlines the book’s purpose, scope, and methodology. The study adopts the concept of ‘voice’ as a framework through which to critically examine the representations of Maghrebi women in a diverse corpus of documentaries, short films, téléfilms, and feature films, and the introduction draws on scholarship in post-colonial, film, and gender studies. It sets out the book’s key questions, including: In what ways do cinematic depictions of first-generation women challenge dominant perceptions about this generation, and notably the idea that the women are silent and disempowered? Do films depicting Maghrebi women invite audiences to come to a better understanding of the women’s subjective perspectives, and if so, by what means? What opportunities and constraints do the formal conventions characteristic of the four types of films present in representing first-generation women? To what extent is the question of Islam raised, and can it be said that this shapes the representations of Maghrebi women in a particular way? The introduction concludes with a description the fieldwork undertaken to construct the study’s cinematic archive.

First-Generation Women in Short Films

2016 ◽  
pp. 74-102
Author(s):  
Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
Potential Channels

This chapter examines key short films featuring Maghrebi migrant women in France through an analysis of objects such as letters, a play script, food, photographs, and clothing items. It highlights the extent to which such objects are crucial to giving expression to the experiences of Maghrebi women through this particular medium, where meaning must necessarily be communicated in a short period of time. These objects have multi-layered meanings and serve as potential channels for communication and understanding between first-generation women and people who are different from them, most notably because they have not shared the women’s experience of migration and exile and in many cases do not speak the women’s mother tongue. This analysis highlights the ways in which the women negotiate, navigate, and cross various cultural, linguistic, psychological, and spatial boundaries or barriers that exist in their lives. The cultural productions discussed in this chapter include films directed by Fejria Deliba, Ismaël Ferroukhi, Faïza Guène, and Catherine Bernstein.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
pp. 186-192
Author(s):  
Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Silent Generation ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Patriarchal Culture

This book challenges the notion that first-generation Maghrebi migrant women, as a group, constitute a uniformly silent generation and are victims because of their status as immigrants, Muslim women, or women in a traditionally patriarchal culture. The cinematic representations of first-generation women are diverse, and while some of the films examined in the study do not necessarily invite viewers to identify with the first-generation women portrayed in them, the majority of them do promote an appreciation of the experiences and hardships lived by this generation of women. The book concludes with a discussion of feature films depicting Maghrebi women protagonists that are in production at the time of writing (directed by Hafsia Herzi and Fejria Deliba, respectively). These films suggest that first-generation women from the Maghreb in France continue to serve as inspiration for filmmakers in France.

scholarly journals Cinematic Representation of the Roma’s Social Position and Mobility: A Comparative Analysis of Two Czech and Slovak Feature Films

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-396
Author(s):  
Daniel Škobla
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Central Research ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
The World ◽  
Viable Model

AbstractThe focus of this article is on two Czech and Slovak films, My Friend Fabián (Můj přítel Fabián, 1955) and Gypsy (Cigán, 2011). While the former emerged in the 1950s, in the period of socialist industrialisation, the latter was released in the period of post-socialist consolidation of capitalism. Theoretically this article relies on a mix of approaches from film studies, social anthropology, post-colonial studies and archival research. The central research question is how cinematic representation of Roma were approached in the past and how they have changed over time. The film My Friend Fabián is replete with colonial tropes of uninhibited dancing, singing and exotica stereotypes and depicts imaginary Roma as incompetent individuals who are subject to the paternalistic care of the White socialist functionaries. At the same time this film presents a viable model for Roma integration and social advancement via education and full-fledged integration into the working class. In contrast, the film Gypsy is much more respectful towards Roma, contemporary performers and characters are real Roma and their film destinies are realistic. But the world that surrounds film characters is the world of total racial exclusion, which offers no hope and no prospects whatsoever for Roma and their social advance.

scholarly journals Europa bije się w piersi. Recenzja książki „Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina” Krzysztofa Loski

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 185-191
Author(s):  
Piotr Czerkawski
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Very High

EUROPE REPENTANT. REVIEW OF POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE: ETHNO-REPRESENTATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA BY KRZYSZTOF LOSKAThe subject of the present paper is a book „Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina”  by professor Krzysztof Loska from the Jagiellonian University, focused on an attempt to analyse the cinema of the Old Continent from post-colonial point of view. The review underlines a valuable contribution to Polish film studies that the book makes and emphasizes the scale of research underta­ken, as well as the manner accuracy and the ability to perform a witty interpretation of each and every movie. In accordance to the reasoning included in the review, all these features can be noticed in parti­cular in the chapters dedicated to the French cinema. In the present paper the author also pays attention, though, to omission of few movies that are strongly tied to the subject of Loska’s considerations and some irrelevance of the chapter named „Hybrydowość...” in relation to the rest of the book. However, those little concerns do not affect a very high rating of the quality of the reviewed book.                                                                                   Translated by Kordian Bobowski

Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Domain

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

scholarly journals Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Methodological Nationalism

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

Nicht nur Slapstick: Stummfilme als unterschätzte Zeugen der Medizingeschichte

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (25) ◽  
pp. 1818-1827
Author(s):  
Dennis Henkel ◽  
Eelco M. Wijdicks ◽  
Axel Karenberg
Keyword(s):  
Medical Profession ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Illegal Abortion ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Short Films

AbstractMedicine in silent film has a long history. Although the silent era in cinema was dominated by burlesques (using escaped “lunatics”) a number of themes emerged after systematic review. The cinematic representation of medicine coincided with the discovery of X-rays. During this “roentgenomania”, short films were produced showing groundbreaking X-ray images, which fitted perfectly into needs of dramatic cinema. But soon the “cinema of narration” evolved: Starting just after the turn of the century, the short film “The Country Doctor” was able to address complex interplay between duties and limitations of the medical profession. This was followed by numerous feature films on infectious diseases, which often used tuberculosis as a centerpiece of its story. Directors often took advantage of the well-known stereotype of the omnipotent physician. But in certain medical fields, such as psychiatry or surgery, a more ambivalent figure of the doctor was portrayed, f. e. in “Hands of Orlac” (1924). Silent cinema also offered interesting ideas on the healing powers of the medium itself: in “The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs” (1912) a film screening could cure the patient of fears after reenactment. Finally, a closer look at the early era of film echoes how social conflicts where dramatized, especially in the case of nationwide birth control. How illegal abortion kept the society on its edge, was most clearly shown in the adaption of the scandalous play “Cyankali” (1930).In addition to discussing various topics in the cinematic representation of medicine, this brief overview shows that silent movies were a new and true art form, representing an exceptional resource for historians of film and medicine.

Muslim Women in French Cinema

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
LESLIE KEALHOFER-KEMP
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
French Cinema
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