Understanding the Mandatory Language Policy for Immigrants and the Impact on Beur Cinema in France

This article seeks to fill gaps in the literature regarding French cinema's treatment of immigration. Previous investigations of this theme have tended to position immigrants as objects, individuals perceived as creating problems, and as individuals using violence to resolve issues. This article highlighted in French films under a new genre, Beur Cinema, notably in the film Fatima This research discusses French cinema's depiction of immigrants' experiences with cultural negotiation mainly related to the French government's policy of Language Mandatory as one of the requirements for migrants to be granted citizenship. This article will also discuss the portrayal of the French government’s policy toward immigrants and how immigrants cope with the barriers and offer solutions to the problems in Beur cinema. The film Fatima, which was first published in 2015, will be analyzed by its cinematographic signs using the theory of cinematographic semiotics. This study finds that what has been understood as the cause of the lack of integration of immigrants is mainly that the residence permit is not justified. This research finds that the challenges of immigrants are also represented by difficulties in adapting to language skills, daily life routines, raising children, and even communicating with their diaspora community and the local residents.

Cleansing Macau's Image as the ‘Wickedest City in the World’: Eurasia, Long Way, and Luso-tropical film production in Macau in the 1950s

This article discusses the Eurasia Film Company (hereafter Eurasia), which was established in Macau in 1954; the making of its film Long Way, released in 1955; and more generally the issue of film production in Macau in the 1950s. This was a period of crisis for Portugal: despite the beginning of decolonization in the post-war era, the regime's policy was to preserve the colonies. It appropriated ‘Luso-tropicalism’, a theory developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, which argued that the Portuguese had created a harmonious hybrid civilization in the ‘tropics’ through biological and cultural miscegenation. Luso-tropicalism became a major propaganda tool used by Portugal to deflect decolonization. Eurasia, which had links to the colonial government, presented a Luso-tropical ideal not only in terms of the content of the film Long Way which celebrated interracial love but also by its very nature—it was a Sino-Portuguese enterprise that also had Eurasians as shareholders—and in its production method. Its main objective was to propagate a positive image of Macau, in response to its pervasive negative portrayal in the international press and films, which often characterized it as a centre of vice. Long Way specifically responded to Hollywood and French films set in Macau by using similar elements, plot, and characterization, but it transformed Orientalist tales of crime, smuggling, and sin into a Luso-tropical story of refuge, order, and interracial love. Eurasia aimed to cleanse Macau's image and thereby justify Portuguese sovereignty in the territory in a period of crisis and uncertainty marked by decolonization, the Cold War, and tense Sino-Portuguese relations.

Filming and Feeling between the Arts: Pascale Breton, Suite armoricaine and Eugène Green, Le Fils de Joseph

This chapter discusses the intersections between cinema, literature, painting and music in two recent French films: Pascale Breton’s Suite Armoricaine and Eugène Green’s Le Fils de Joseph [The Son of Joseph, both 2016]. With special reference to Proust, Georges de La Tour and Caravaggio, the author argues for the significance of the other arts in these works as a means of interrogating questions of belonging, personal growth and transmission. Drawing on Jacques Aumont’s notion of artistic ‘migration’ as well as on Alain Badiou’s concept of cinema’s ‘breached frontier’, where ideas can pass through the invocation of other art forms, the chapter explores cinematic intermediality as a privileged vehicle for making ideas and emotions apprehensible in a non-verbal, sensory mode.

Racialised voices of Maghrebi-French women in films

Performances in the media (Bell and Gibson 2011; Bucholtz and Lopez 2011) are rich multimodal resources, which enable the analyst to look into the social practice of language ideologies and highlight discursive strategies that contribute to unequal power relations in society. This article examines the overt and covert racialisation of Maghrebi-French female voices in French films. After analysing the discursive patterns associated with migrant women of first and second generations (mothers and daughters), it brings to the forefront the processes by which their voices are marked, arguing that they perpetuate discriminatory discourses of gender and race. It finally considers the dynamics between the erasure/racialisation of ethnic voices in films and politics of recognition in society (Fraser 2001).

A Woman of Paris: Geraldine Chaplin across French cinema

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on his work. Early in her career, Geraldine Chaplin inherited her father’s Parisian legacy, in both discourse on her public life in France (where she lived and worked early in her career) and also across a number of French films in which she played a central role. This chapter examines Geraldine’s work in France for filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Michel Deville in the context of French film culture’s fascination with her father, showing how Geraldine herself intervened in and redirected this critical legacy through her own performances.

Le(s) Visage(s) de Garbo: Negotiating Discourses of Authorship and Stardom in Jacques Feyder's The Kiss (1929)

This article examines The Kiss, émigré director Jacques Feyder's first Hollywood film, with two goals in mind. First, it considers the production and reception of the film, drawing on contemporary periodicals to illustrate Feyder's contribution to the film; second, drawing on Gilles Deleuze's conceptualisation of mirror images in cinema, it argues that The Kiss constitutes an important turning-point within Feyder's output as well as a key illustration of his authorial signature, looking towards the complex portrayals of women which feature in his most famous French films of the 1930s. Key to this analysis is how Feyder mobilizes mirrors to confront spectators with their own collusion in the construction of Greta Garbo's star persona in her films and portraits, and to open broader debates regarding the intersection between authorship and star personae.

Traduire dans des conditions difficiles

Translating in Difficult Conditions. The Text–Picture Relations in Audiovisual Translation: The Case of Subtitling As an audio-visual translator, I often encounter situations where the image visible on the screen (stage, prop, actor’s face, etc.) forces me to make a specific translation decision. There are also cases where the combination of image, sound and dialogue makes the text almost untranslatable, as its relation (which in addition can be culture-bound and include humour, idioms, metaphors, or wordplay) with other elements of the piece is so close that one faces a difficult choice – either to generalise (remove the problematic elements) or exotise the text so much that will become incomprehensible to the viewer. This article presents selected problems faced by audiovisual translators and which are associated with complex text-image relations; it shall also discuss strategies that translators can use to solve these problems. Examples illustrating these strategies have been drawn from American and French films and series.