Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis

220 Pages·2022·18.443 MB·English

by  Martin O'Shaughnessy

Looking Beyond Neoliberalism

Looking Beyond
Neoliberalism
French and Francophone
Belgian Cinema and the Crisis
Martin O’Shaughnessy
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We pub-
lish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and
social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production
values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our
website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Martin O’Shaughnessy, 2022
Cover images: Le Grand Soir (dir. Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, France /
Belgium / Germany, 2012). Reproduced with kind permission from Benoît Delépine
and Gustave Kervern.
Cover design: Jordan Shaw
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in Arno and Myriad
by Manila Typesetting Company, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 4862 8 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 4864 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 47444865 9 (epub)
The right of Martin O’Shaughnessy to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
List of figures viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Looking sideways at the Crisis 3
Chapter outline 6
Chapter 1: Audiard’s triumphant neoliberal subjects 11
Between conservatism and radical destabilisation: Audiard
and his critics 12
Heroes and prophets: Audiard’s prototypical neoliberal
subjects 15
Neoliberal subjectivity 22
Escaping precarity: Audiard’s happy endings 26
Gendering the neoliberal subject: Audiard’s violently
vulnerable men 29
Audiard’s flexible families 34
Conclusion 37
Chapter 2: Subjects in the chains of debt 40
Le Silence de Lorna and indebted citizenship 41
L’Emploi du temps and debt’s disciplinary reach 45
Le Père de mes enfants and the indebted image 49
Debt, governance and subjectivity 54
Cruel optimism and impasse 57
Film and theory in dialogue 59
vi Looking Beyond Neoliberalism
Indebted variations: the narrative of impasse or the impasse of
narrative? 63
Conclusion 68
Chapter 3: The desperate search for the exit 70
The death of the worker: Brizé’s hidden and spectacular suicides 71
Subjective, symbolic and systemic violence 77
Working men dead and dead men working 80
The death of the trader 83
The murderous violence of the corporation 86
The Dardennes’ ethical exits 89
Finally, the exit? Kervern and Delépine’s anarchic departures 92
Conclusion 96
Chapter 4: The deconstructive materialism of Sciamma
and Kechiche 98
The materialism of the encounter 99
Kechiche’s vitalist materialism: La Graine et le mulet 102
The mobile body of the Black Venus 108
La Vie d’Adèle and its troubling encounters 111
Sciamma’s embodied becoming 115
Tomboy, or what a body can do 116
Women on fire and under water: what cinema can do 120
Bande de filles: mutability and material limits 125
Bande de filles and the limits we do not see 129
Conclusion 130
Chapter 5: The Dardennes’ unwitting gifts 132
La Promesse: Finding a way to live in a new world 133
Theorising the gift 139
Finite gifts, infinite debts and mutable objects 144
Poisonous and ethical gifts 147
Generous gifts 150
The reconnective power of the gift 153
Conclusion 158
Chapter 6: Machinic enslavement and cinema’s machinic powers 160
Centred subjects, machinic margins and ex-centric looks 161
Lazzarato and machinic subjection 167
Contents vii
Cinema’s semiotic pluralism 171
Besson’s Lucy: a cog with superpowers 174
Sylvain George and the power of montage 178
George’s Benjaminian machinery 182
Filming the occupation and its plural semiosis 186
Conclusion 190
Conclusion 192
Bibliography 195
Filmography 201
Index 204
Figures
1.1 Disrupting the narrative: young Albert expresses his older
self’s elation (Un héros très discret, Jacques Audiard, 1996) 16
1.2 Malik arrives in prison as a blank slate (Un prophète,
Jacques Audiard, 2009) 18
1.3 Albert learning new skills (Un héros très discret,
Jacques Audiard, 1996) 18
1.4 The networked Malik looks upon the isolated and
diminished César (Un prophète, Jacques Audiard, 2009) 20
1.5 Fred as unlikely debt collector (Regarde les hommes tomber,
Jacques Audiard, 1994) 31
1.6 Forging a family (Dheepan, Jacques Audiard, 2015) 37
2.1 Lorna as indebted citizen and reliable payer (Le Silence de
Lorna, Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008) 41
2.2 Claudy as a demanding bodily presence (Le Silence de
Lorna, Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008) 43
2.3 The UN building as a space of mutual surveillance
(L’Emploi du temps, Laurent Cantet, 2001) 48
2.4 Grégoire’s first appearance, as if born of the urban
circulation (Le Père de mes enfants, Mia Hansen- Løve, 2009) 50
2.5 The pensive stillness of Clémence (Le Père de mes enfants,
Mia Hansen- Løve, 2009) 54
2.6 Visiting his mother in prison, the child’s role in keeping
optimism alive (Une vie meilleure, Cédric Kahn, 2011) 68
3.1 Walking away from an oppressive workplace (La Loi du
marché, Stéphane Brizé, 2015) 73
List of figures ix
3.2 Apparent mobile phone footage of the hero’s self-
immolation (En guerre, Stéphane Brizé, 2018) 76
3.3 The trader subsumed by his job (L’Outsider, Christophe
Barratier, 2016) 84
3.4 An inert body soon to become an object of symbolic
struggle (Corporate, Nicolas Silhol, 2017) 87
3.5 The worker’s over- identification with her disposability
(Deux jours, une nuit, Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014) 91
3.6 Not Dead: living in negation (Le Grand Soir, Gustave
Kervern and Benoît Delépine, 2012) 94
4.1 The crisis of the older worker and the failure of desire
(La Graine et le mulet, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007) 104
4.2 Rym’s closely scrutinised body (La Graine et le mulet,
Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007) 107
4.3 Adèle’s head is turned by the encounter with Emma
(La Vie d’Adèle, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) 112
4.4 Laure / Mickaël discovering what their body can do
(Tomboy, Céline Sciamma, 2011) 118
4.5 Resisting social destiny: Héloïse signals her attachment to
Marianne (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, Céline Sciamma,
2019) 122
4.6 Bande de filles’ utopian opening (Céline Sciamma, 2014) 125
5.1 The garage owner passing on skills to Igor in La Promesse
(Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996) 134
5.2 The identical jackets that seem to seal Bruno’s forgiveness
in L’Enfant (Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005) 147
5.3 Sandra’s insistent bodily presence (Deux jours, une nuit,
Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014) 149
5.4 Strength and vulnerability; collaboration: two dynamics
in the same frame (Le Fils, Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne,
2002) 152
5.5 The bike’s connective powers in Le Gamin au vélo
(Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011) 155
5.6 The connective gift of the waffles (La Fille inconnue,
Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2016) 157
6.1 Behind the human drama: the graphs and charts
(La Loi du marché, Stéphane Brizé, 2015) 162
6.2 Human hands harnessed to the barcode scanner
(La Loi du marché, Stéphane Brizé, 2015) 163
x Looking Beyond Neoliberalism
6.3 The containers becoming abstract (Ma part du gâteau,
Cédric Klapisch, 2011) 166
6.4 Lucy’s semiotic superpowers (Lucy, Luc Besson, 2014) 175
6.5 The spontaneous montage of political tradition and
present struggle (Paris est une fête, Sylvain George, 2017) 185
6.6 Capturing the occupation’s rich semiosis (Vers Madrid:
the Burning Bright, Sylvain George, 2012) 187