Music and spatial injustice in banlieue cinema

ABSTRACT

This article examines the use of pre-existing music in French films set in impoverished banlieue neighbourhoods. It draws on Dikeç’s concept of ‘spatial injustice’, which arises in a convergence of media representation and government policy, entrenching inequality, in the context of the ‘fracture coloniale’ in French society. Pre-existing music, with its wider spheres of signification beyond the film, potentially disrupts reifying visions of the banlieue. The article considers ‘third space music’, applying Powrie’s concept to contemporary cinema in the banlieue. For context, Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Mehdi Charef, 1985) and La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) show pre-millennial banlieue films using music as a shared cultural resource. La Haine begins to evoke a third space by foregrounding analogue ‘sampling’, a hip-hop practice in which dominant codes are appropriated and reconfigured, an aesthetics which now pervades contemporary digital life. Looking at pre-existing music in more recent films Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016) and Swagger (Olivier Babinet, 2016), through the prism of ‘third space music’ and sampling, shows how these films use music in their search for alternative ways of representing the over-determined space of the banlieue, whilst also confronting its spatial injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Film music
• banlieue
• urban space
• French cinema
• spatial injustice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hargreaves (2013, 213) helpfully summarises the specific meaning of the word banlieue that I will be using throughout this article: ‘Although all of the urban spaces beyond the periphery of Paris intra-muros are banlieues (surburbs) in the generic sense of the term, in recent decades popular usage of the word has been reconfigured and narrowed to denote certain types of highly stigmatised working-class neighbourhoods, often referred to as cités’. For clarity, I will use ‘banlieue’ to refer to this stigmatised social space and ‘cité’ to refer to specific sites represented in the films.

2. The term HLM, for habitation à loyer modéré, refers to the low-rent social housing blocks constructed in the 1960s under de Gaulle’s presidency.

3. I use these depersonalising terms intentionally as indicative of the attitude of the colonial apparatus: see Yamina Benguigui’s film Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghrébin : Les Pères (1997), in which an official responsible for labour recruitment from the colonies refers to the men he brought over as ‘product’.

4. ‘In a truly systemic institutionalisation of racism and colonial relations.’

5. ‘The link between the contemporary banlieue and colonial cities does not only stem from the large population of inhabitants from former colonies. Many parallels exist in their administrative management and in the discourses around these spaces.’

6. ‘A fixed image, of an individual disengaged from society.’

7. ‘The need to democratise an artform with hermetically sealed codes and to widen the sources of the national imaginary.’

8. ‘The spokesperson for a community.’

9. ‘Horizon of towers’ and ‘bleak greyness.’

10. ‘It can’t be!’

11. ‘My hands were made for gold!’ In the original English dialogue Tony says ‘they oughta be picking gold from the street’.

12. I am grateful to Dr Deniz Turker for her expert analysis of the image.

13. ‘People of French stock’, ‘the French’, ‘well, we’re French too, but….’

14. ‘One mustn’t forget terrible things like that.’

15. Niang illustrates how sportswear and a cap worn backwards have become a constant reference point in the media and even for politicians (2019, 70).

16. I am grateful to Marta Rabreau for advice on the Polish lyrics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isabelle McNeill

Dr Isabelle McNeill is the Philomathia Fellow in French and Film at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, where she has taught film studies and French literature since 2005. She is the author of Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (2010) and is completing a book on the rooftops of Paris in cinema. She is also undertaking preliminary research for a project on contemporary girlhood and making video essays.