Girlhood Luminosities and Topographical Politics

France has recently produced a series of films by female auteurs that offer a close and sympathetic engagement with girls. This chapter concentrates on two films whose titles draw attention to their interest in the feelings and experiences of girlhood: 17 Filles (Delphine and Muriel Coulin, 2011) and Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014). The directors, through location shooting, their local geographical knowledge, and non-professional actors drawn from the area where the films are set, place their explorations of girlhood into highly specific locations. Such geographical specificity produces and evaluates a distinctive approach towards girls and girl culture, which is usually understood in a more homogenous way. Furthermore, this close attention to geography produces a topographical account of girlhood in which verticality and horizontality, and light and shade, shape varied and distinctive experiences of power and agency for girls.

French Edgeland Poetics

As the natural spaces of the European countryside are increasingly micro-managed and diminished, they lose their timeless pastoral feel and come to serve, rather, as amorphous liminal spaces where one urban site ends and another begins: ‘edgelands,’ as British poets Roberts and Farley call them. And yet, as philosopher Edward Casey points out, there can be no oikos—no ‘ecology,’ no ‘dwelling’—without edges. And therefore, although we typically pay little attention to them, such edges, in their silent, unnoticed way, crucially subtend, give shape to, and have much to reveal about the urban environments we inhabit. In Jean Rolin’s Les Événements (2015), the focus of this chapter, we follow a narrator whose attempt to escape a near-future France in the throes of civil war takes him across the back roads of just such a countryside. Avoiding the senseless war, the narrator navigates an edgeland network of fields, ditches, and rivers. There, where long-abandoned industrial sites neighbour shopping centre parking lots, and where, in Rolin’s fiction, highways serve as battle fronts, Rolin sketches the unique and melancholic topography of an unnoticed, undervalued, and fragile ecosystem just as threatened by industry and urban sprawl as by the ravages of war.

Les Revenants, Tignes, and the Return of Post-war Modernisation

This chapter reads the French television hit Les Revenants (The Returned, Canal+, 2012-2015) as a parable of the uneasy legacy of France’s “Trente glorieuses,” the period of rapid economic growth that followed World War II. Situating the show’s fictional city and its story of failing dams in the history of the real dam that inspired it—the dam that displaced the village of Tignes in 1952—the chapter argues that Les Revenants encourages us to re-think the Trente glorieuses and its long-term effects and to ask both what became of the projects that defined these years and what has re-emerged from the shadows of their glories—from failing infrastructure and a police surveillance state to the environmental consequences now associated with the Anthropocene.

Introduction

This chapter serves as a general introduction to the essays to follow.

Picturing a Nation of Local Places in the Observatoire photographique du paysage and France(s) territoire liquide

The history of French photography has been marked by the preponderance of photographic ‘missions’, whereby a collective of artists charged with documenting the nation’s shared common spaces traverse the territory with cameras in tow. From the Mission héliographique (1851) to the Mission photographique de la DATAR (1983-89), these projects have much to tell us about the place that landscape occupies in the national imaginary. This chapter surveys two of the most recent and most compelling photographic missions that set out to render the contours of the nation intelligible. While the Observatoire photographique du paysage, inaugurated in 1991, mobilizes a rigorously implemented procedure of rephotography to sensitize the public to the evolution of the French landscape, the group of photographers united since 2011 under the moniker France(s) territoire liquide has produced a decidedly more personal and subjective view of a territory in flux. Though they differ greatly in the way they envision space, this chapter suggests that both groups privilege the lesser seen, the interstitial, and the vernacular to provide a nuanced vision of France that challenges the most dominant conceptions and clichés—in the rhetorical and graphic sense of the word—of the nation as a whole.

Disease and Affect

Decades of plant closures in metropolitan France have created a heightened awareness of the disused quality of the country’s industrial landscape. Even as a burgeoning working-class heritage industry has attempted to rehabilitate some physical sites to educational or touristic ends, documentary filmmakers have turned to human communities that in the age of ‘délocalisation’ have been forcibly evicted from sites of productive labour. Drawing on the travelogue Et la vie (Denis Gheerbrant, 1991), the plant closure exposé Silence dans la vallée (Marcel Trillat, 2007) and the testimonial poetic meditation Le Chemin noir (Abdallah Badis, 2012), this chapter highlights a recurring documentary figure, namely the image of individual workers who explicate their present and past situation against the backdrop of blast furnaces, mine pits, slag heaps, or other disused industrial structures across the blighted regions of northern and north-eastern France. Filmed on the site of its expropriation, the labourer’s body becomes strongly performative, affirming the imperatives of collective working-class memory and lending layered meaning to otherwise mute landscapes. By re-presenting affect-laden speech and gesture, filmmakers negotiate oppositions between visibility and invisibility, technology and nature, nostalgia and futurity, so as to reassert documentary’s micropolitical purchase upon the real.

Angels of History

This chapter explores the relationship between modernisation, space and photography in contemporary France, and the privileged role acquired by photography as a means of portraying a sense of national identity through spatial forms. It focuses in particular on Paysages Photographies (1989), the substantial photo-book which emerged out of the work of the Mission photographique de la DATAR between 1983 and 1988. The Mission photographique was commissioned in the early 1980s by the government’s spatial planning agency, the DATAR (Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale), which had been founded in 1963 to drive forward the modernisation of French territory. Its aim was to record the consequences of two decades of spatial transformation and production in France, and by implication marking the end of a triumphant phase of activity. The chapter considers how Paysages Photographies frames and presents the spatial transformations brought about by modernisation; how it captures the impact of spatial planning on the French landscape; and the visual forms taken by planned and modernised space. It explores how different photographers responded to the environments they encountered and, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, create an ambivalent sense of spatial transformation as both historical wreckage and half-realised dream.

Sylvain George’s Minor Mode, or Cinema at the Margins of its Fragile Community

This chapter explores the ‘minor’ subjectivity of Sylvain George’s film-work, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature and Henri Michaux’s ‘left-handed’ poetics. It claims that George’s unstable camera work, combined with the oscillation between the objectives of documentary observation and the sequences of lyrical expressionism, disrupt the traditional topographer’s position, resulting in a dynamic relation of inclusion. It closes by suggesting that this ‘minor’ mode, marked by its recurrent estrangement from the ‘real,’ is a crucial vehicle for capturing the complexity of the contemporary landscape of informal refugee camps in and around the cities of northern France.

Depth of Field

This chapter investigates the field of contemporary French documentary as a source for cultural representations of farmland and farm life, a segment of the national territory that has undergone profound change in the past half-century. Farmland, which represents over half of the surface area of metropolitan France, provides employment to an ever-smaller percentage of the population. The amount of land needed to make a living continues to grow, and farms are increasingly run by corporations rather than by people who live and work on the same property. Since 2000, a significant number of French documentaries have explored to the changes wrought to the landscape and to farm life by the agricultural industrialisation of the previous half-century. By reading across a broad collection of recent documentaries on farming, this chapter reveals the contours of a broader conversation about the emergence of, and need for, new forms of reconnection between the inhabitants of rural and urban France. The contours of this conversation emerge both in the documentary forms and practices in the films as well as new forms of interaction between films and their audiences.