| Abstrakt: |
Any plausible categorization of cinéma-monde would have to include a body of Francophone films in which locus, language, and the status of the protagonists are uncertain and/or hybridized. Thus conceived, it is possible to stage, as one aspect of cinéma-monde, an intertextual, place-specific conversation between Agnès Varda's recent peregrination to the port-city of Le Havre (Villages, Visages [2017]), Aki Kaurismäki's cinematic fairytale of child migration and community (Le Havre [2011]) and, by association, Marcel Carné's much earlier adventure of failed migration (Le Quai des brumes [1938]). The co-location and co-locution of these stylistically diverse films are achieved at the same time as they register the regionalization of France and French cinema, decentre the concept and role of the French protagonist, and destabilize the indexicality of place that the links between them seem, at first sight, to maintain. While not the only port-city in the work of Varda and Kaurismäki (Nantes and Helsinki feature in Jacquot de Nantes [1991] and The Man Without a Past [2002]) the status of Le Havre as a port-city is a point of confluence. It allows the constellation of films considered here to look both inward and outward, either from the dim liminality of containers, or atop their magnificent piles, or from the captain's cabin, bestowing authority on the precarious gaze of migrants and, simultaneously, invoking not only the magical power of the auteur, and of French cinema itself, but also what we might term the Levinasian intuition of Kaurismäki's dog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
