Seeing Paris in total darkness: the aesthetics of opacity in Nicolas Klotz's and Élisabeth Perceval‘s La Blessure

ABSTRACT

Nicolas Klotz's and Élisabeth Perceval‘s film La Blessure (2004) problematizes the political visibility and artistic representation of undocumented African immigrants in Paris by deliberately parsing sound and sight and imixing fiction with reality. Opening with a scene at the detention center at Orly airport, La Blessure tracks the sites and spaces accessible to undocumented immigrants. According to Élisabeth Perceval, screenwriter of La Blessure, the film is not about contemporary demands for asylum, with its ‘lot of statistics and proofs’ but about following alongside the experiences or sensations of refugees, combining the real and the fictional into a particular ‘carnal’ relationship. Similarly filmmaker Nicolas Klotz remarked that La Blessure was filmed ‘next to [à coté de] those who have lost everything. In the space where they dare to still exist'. This language of proximity, of touching on the subject and spaces of asylum seekers, resists the logic of rendering visible, in order to remediate, the painful experiences of West Africans in Paris in many recent films. Films, such as Djib (Jean Odoutan 2000), according to film historian Carrie Tarr, forge ‘rewarding, if transient, cross-cultural relationships and … collective political action’ through an aesthetics of humanitarian individualizing joined with identity politics. La Blessure, on the other hand, takes a different approach – a complete spectorial disidentification with the main character, Blandine. Through a noncontiguous use of sound and image as well as fragmented narration, La Blessure fragments the spectator's sensorium to problematize the relation of individual bodies to the social whole, and the relation of the spectator to the nonsites inhabited by refugees in Paris – the detention center and slums of the periphery.

KEYWORDS:

• Klotz
• La Blessure
• undocumented
• political invisibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Within such endogamous politics, Badiou finds appreciation of difference impossible.

Un démocrate n'aime qu'un démocrate. Pour les autres, venues des zones affamées ou meurtières, on parle d'abord papiers, frontières, camps de retention, surveillance policière, refus du rassemblement familial … Il faut être ‘integré’ … C'est un examen redoubtable qui vous attend! Du faux monde au ‘vrai’ monde, la passe est une impasse. (Badiou 2009, 16)

2. Documentary photography emerged alongside the development of flash photography technology, which allowed photographers such as Jacob Riis to document the dark interiors of tenement housing in New York City. The illumination of the flash allowed people to see into the tenements to discover, as the title of his 1890 book reads, ‘How the Other Half Lives.' Counter to this equation of illuminating light with the force of reason over non-reason, charity over degradation, La Blessure barely illuminates the squat in which much of the movie takes place. This aesthetics of darkness merges with a desire for subjective opacity especially in the main character of Blandine who barely utters any words throughout the film's duration.

3. See also Thomas (2009a). The climate of increasing racism in France was registered by a SOFRE study in 2003 in which 89 percent of French declared some mistrust (“méfiance”) of Maghrebins, 37 percent declared mistrust of blacks, and 10 percent revealed having mistrust of jews, see Edmiston and Duménil (2005). On the repressive politics of immigration as a ‘ticket office’, see Spire (2008).

4. Filmmaker Nicolas Klotz lists the spaces where he has interviewed asylum seekers as well as shot and produced his films:

Les files d'attente devant les foyers, les centres d'accueil, les points de rendez-vous des camionnettes du Samu social et des bus de ramassage de la RATP, les files d'attente au Centre d'hébergement et d'accueil des personnes sans abri (Chapsa) de Nanterre, les vestiaires …  (Perceval 2005)

5. Brice Hortefeux, Minister of the Interior (2009–2011)2011, has claimed that the number of people deported from France has increased from just over 10,000 in 2002 to 24,000 by the end of 26,000. Preface to Les Orientations de la politique de l'immigration (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2011): 7.

6. For Lewis Hine, this power of the image to connect the spectator with the truth of reality made it a key weapon for liberal reform. Hine found the “real fruition” of his documentary practices to be the adoption of photography by social workers. This power of the image placed in the productive hands of social workers would finally allow corruption and economic self-interest to give way to social goals and collective ideals. Lewis Hine quoted in Alan Tractenberg (1989): 227–230.

7. Sarkozy's now famous speech in Dakar in 2007 has been critiqued for its perpetuation of what I am calling here, the image-function of the periphery. While citing French culpability in the crimes of colonialism, Sarkozy claimed that it was Africa's own internal problems, including the rootedness of the “African peasant” in the past, that have prompted its ‘inability to enter history’. See Gary Wilder's (2012). On the national identity debate, see Fred Constant, ‘Black France' and the National Identity Debate: How Best to be Black and French?” in the same volume, pages 123–144.

8. Slavoj Žižek has a different take on the contemporary hatred of multiculturalism and fear of illegal immigration. In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (35), he argues that the non-transparent financial abstractions at work behind the recent economic crisis have left many clinging to the reassuring ‘shield' of ethnic identity. “The true ‘foreign body’ that cannot be assimilated, he argues, ‘is ultimately the infernal self-propelling machine of Capital itself' (Slavoj 2012).

9. Klotz and Perceval (2009). This disruption of sensation offers a moment of what Jean-Luc Nancy has called spacing, in which bodies establish a relationship across distance rather than enact a reunion. As he wrote in Being Singular Plural, ‘there is no other meaning than the meaning of circulation' (Nancy 2000): 3.

10. In Moktar's monologue, he comments,

I did not know where to go, I knew nobody. It was cold. I entered a cabin, I spent the night squatted there. It was the first time I saw the snow. Early in the morning, I saw a group of blacks walking past, I asked them if they could help me. They said they could do nothing, as they themselves are also in the shit like me … When I returned to the cabin, I couldn't find my things. I had lost everything. (La Blessure 2004).