Humanism at the limit and post-restante in the colony: The prison of the postcolonial nation in Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophète (2009) (original) (raw)
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If “every tracking shot is a moral act,” as Jean-Luc Godard has once remarked, then filmmaking in the aftermath of colonialism must have posed numerous challenges to a fresh offbeat Nouvelle Vague director like himself. How is filmmaking possible after colonialism? What needs to be changed, salvaged, ridiculed? How does technique work thematically and content stylistically to “track,” with candid morality, the state of art and politics in postcolonial France? This is what this papers about. Key words: A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Theodor Adorno, French Colonial Algeria, Colonialism, Bretolt Brecht , le cinéma de papa, Postcolonial Studies, Fin de cinema, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Luc Godard, La Nouvelle Vague/ French New Wave, Le Mepris (Contempt), Verfremdungseffekt (Defamiliarization, Estrangement Effect)
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The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments' oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians and filmmakers have skillfully used moving images to critique and expose colonial transgressions. In their efforts to reimagine the horrors of violent encounters between the French army and Algerian guerilla fighters, their narratives cover daring eye-witness accounts of war crimes, including acts of torture at times described by the perpetrators themselves while catering to the expectations of a global audience. Florent Emilio Siri's L'ennemi intime (2007) and David Oelhoffen's Far from Men (2014) are among these transnational productions that accomplish both tasks. In the stories told by the two films, the plots show evidence of a fundamental thematic transformation in filmic representations that collapses the differences between colonizer and colonized, situating both as victims of colonization. The article argues that even though both films consistently reproduce the conventional portrait of the colonized as weak, passive, and deeply reliant on French guidance, Far from Men introduces the myth of the vanishing native, a theme that helps legitimize and normalize the settler's "right" to occupy the colonized space.
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The dominant valence of contemporary interventions into the carceral space, exemplified by the “activisms” (textual and otherwise) of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Dylan Rodríguez as well as by the organization critical resistance, is abolition. Theirs is a historical project that maps pathways between the motions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ballooning of the “prison industrial complex” in the antebellum American South. It is a theoretical project that grounds (reapplies to the map) the tracings provided by anti-colonial and post-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, and the post-biopolitical necropolitics of Achille Mbembe, in order to frame the prison as, above all, a site of social exclusion, warehousing, and death. These productive linkages between the projects of decolonization, abolition, and thinking-the-prison, as new as their theoretical sexiness may make them seem, have, however, an extensive genealogy. Indeed, at the very moment when the prison was first articulated within its “modern” programme – that is, as something more than a holding space for debtors, as instead a space for reform and social-reintroduction (though perhaps it would be possible to suggest that all that changed in this process was our social understanding of debt: “debt to society”) – large, transnational cohorts of “reformers” directed themselves toward the perfection of this space. These reformers, who I want to suggest are better described as a necessary part of the modern prison’s articulation, were also, by and large, prominent proponents of the abolition of slavery. The links between these projects, both efforts toward carrying into the world the ethical and moral “revelations” of the Enlightenment – opportunity, freedom, reason, order (all deserving of the qualification of quotation marks) – are perhaps, on the surface, obvious. At the level of language, however, these intertwined 18th- and 19th-century projects mark the inauguration of a discourse that continues – of course with major variations – today. Davis, Gilmore, and Rodríguez all reject the project of reform, so central to the interventions of Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Rush, having learned from Michel Foucault that to reform a space such as the prison is only ever to rearticulate it, to re-entrench its authority and prolong its hold. Yet the language games of these post-Enlightenment reformers have much to reveal about the ways in which projects of resistance, networks of power, and institutional systems operate and perform in contemporary society. Indeed, we might view a longer history, a genealogy of prison interventions that would trace sinews between Beaumont-de Tocqueville-Rush and Davis-Gilmore-Rodriguez. This is, however, not the project that follows – but is instead, with luck, the direction of further work. What follows is the ground of such an investigation; we must first understand the logic of earlier prisons – efforts to know and reform them.
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