Not dead yet: Three takes on auteurism in contemporary French and Francophone cinema

Introduction

This article offers a critical re-evaluation of the auteur paradigm in the setting of contemporary French and Francophone cinema. Three different case studies are developed to argue that while the paradigm can still claim a measure of meaningful vitality within the confines of the French film industry, its wider applicability as a model for Francophone filmmakers raises some pointed questions about the continuing influence of the metropolitan centre on the production and reception of minority identities within the French cinematographic landscape. Although government-subsidised auteur cinema has traditionally been associated with national cinemas, we argue that France’s state-based support systems, heavily invested in transnational and transcultural modes of production, challenge any stable division between national and transnational cinemas. We recognise instead a transnational auteur cinema emerging from France that extends the traditional concept of cultural diversity beyond French/European borders, incorporating transcultural narratives and promoting various forms of cinémas du monde. However, in the light of trends suggesting the poor marketability of this cinema in France and elsewhere, we find ourselves obliged to ask if this French-based politique des auteurs actually benefits those it embraces, or whether the French paradigm of diversity may in some instances – perhaps unintentionally – be serving to hamper the development of real cinematic heterogeneity, particularly on the level of audience reception.

Our investigation is situated at the confluence of two similarly powerful but very different discourses. On the one hand, there is the long-standing discourse, internal to the French cinema world, that considers auteurism in the framework elaborated by Bazin (1957), Truffaut (1954) and Les Cahiers du cinéma more generally. ¹ On the other, we engage with both postcolonial and cultural studies to evaluate the impact of French positions in a more global setting. Our title, ‘Not dead yet’, thus has two distinct dimensions. Clearly, it alludes to the debates that grew out of Barthes’ famous essay (1977), and asserts the continuing creative value of the auteur paradigm within France’s national cinematic production. It also refers to the persistence of what we might term the ‘colonialist reflex’ in France’s cultural politics in relation to other parts of the world, and in particular to its former Francophone colonies (Halle, 2010).

The study presents a comparative analysis of three directors-as-auteurs, all of whom released feature-length narratives in 2010, either as French or majority-French productions. Firstly, we consider Xavier Beauvois with a focus on Des hommes et des dieux (2010). Our study of Beauvois will be contextualised with the important document initiated by Le Club des 13 (2007), entitled Le Milieu n’est plus un pont mais une faille, ² which grew out of Pascale Ferran’s incendiary wake-up call at the César ceremony of 2007, pointing out how the French auteur tradition was in danger of collapse through institutional neglect and the aggressive hegemony of the television chains. ³ Le Club des 13 report claims that as well as eroding the ground available to cinema as an artistic enterprise, the processes of film production in France are damaging France’s cultural impact on the world stage (Le Club des 13, 2007: 165).

Secondly and thirdly, we consider the examples of Algerian-born Tony Gatlif and Chadian filmmaker Mahmat-Saleh Haroun as expressions of the French film industry’s transnationalism through which the apparatus of auteur filmmaking is applied to the ethnographic and didactic aspirations of ‘les cinémas du monde’ (Royer, 2010, 139). Although this paper draws on the auteur model as a descriptive term for a singular piece of work stamped by authorial voice, it also underscores a broader connection to institutional structures which necessarily affect its very definition. We shall argue, with Royer, that the auteur model today cannot be fully understood without reference to contemporary transnational Francophone geopolitics.

Our work draws on Rosanna Maule’s (2008) Beyond Auteurism to bridge our different approaches, and to acknowledge that since the mid 1980s a shift has occurred whereby the auteur has increasingly come to embody multiple, and sometimes paradoxical, strategies that transcend the paradigm’s original function. We focus on the auteur as a response to the changing cinematic landscape being developed by government, and/or government-funded agencies (including governmental ministries and the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC)) together with other cultural and institutional players (including the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, the Cannes Film Festival and the Association française des cinemas d’art et d’essai (AFCAE), France’s network of independent art et essai cinemas). Maule suggests that today the auteur functions in relation to ‘two, rather opposite agendas’ (2008: 14). She describes these as:

one supporting the film author as the emblem of Europe’s culturally oriented cinema, funded through public institutions and government subsidies conceived outside the economic imperatives of the film industry … the other promoting the film author as a marketing figure for niche theatrical distribution mediating between cultural and commercial interests. (2008: 14)

While Maule examines this second approach in detail, our study seeks to give greater emphasis to the continuing existence of and modifications to the primary category, the auteur figure as an emblem of a government-subsidised, ‘culturally oriented’ cinema in France – a category we feel has been understated within Maule’s own thesis. We are interested in how this approach impacts on the way in which filmmakers are able to negotiate their own careers, and the cultural limitations that may arise, particularly for Francophone filmmakers, who, working within this agenda, are encouraged to trade on the image of their seemingly perpetual ‘cultural diversity’.

The author function as cultural capital

The first auteur model we would like to discuss is that of filmmakers most closely aligned with the traditional paradigm: those whose success is heavily reliant on an operation that privileges the auteur by ‘granting him or her a high degree of discretionary power based on accumulated cultural capital’ (Mathieu and Strandvad, 2008: 176). One most obviously successful in this accumulation of cultural capital is Xavier Beauvois, who seems to fit into the traditional paradigm quite seamlessly – although not, as we shall see, effortlessly. All his films, including Des hommes et des dieux, were made with ‘middle-ground’ budgets, the term used by the report for films costing between €3 million and €8 million, the ‘privileged space’ (espace de liberté) for auteur cinema (Le Club des 13, 2007: 5). Indeed, Beauvois meets all the auteur criteria defined by Le Club des 13 report. His imaginary world, as represented in his five films to date, ⁴ is cohesive and distinctive: if there are generic fluctuations – N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir (1995) is a road movie, for instance, and Le Petit Lieutenant (2005) a police thriller – they are subsumed within a web of artistic constants that make each film a recognisable example of Beauvois at work.

The thematic material is consistently centred on the precariousness of human life. Beauvois’s stories are about people – individuals and/or communities – living beyond the edges of comfort and safety, whether it be the Christian monks in civil-war Algeria, the Paris police group trying to fight violent street crime in a society disintegrating at its core, the provincial families in Selon Matthieu (2000) and Nord (1991), torn by social pressure or their own inner weaknesses, or the HIV-positive protagonist of N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir, lurching to self-destruction through drugs and sexual profligacy. This is a world in which the love necessary to bring relief or redemption never prevents tragedy. The failure of love is, in one sense, the heart of the tragedy, whether it happens at the level of the individual or of society, or indeed, as in the case of Des hommes et des dieux, on the scale of civilisations. Rarely is blame placed on human agency external to the protagonists; it is, rather, as if a dark destiny has fallen on humanity, sometimes causing people to make the bad choices that lead to their ruin, sometimes – as with the monks – linking even the most painstaking and noble choice to tragic consequences. At the same time, the non-judgmental integrity with which Beauvois presents his characters and their stories has a kind of luminosity that acts as a cathartic counterbalance to the grimness of the stories themselves.

It is surely the case that Beauvois’s body of work challenges both the gloom of Le Club des 13 and Maule’s absolutist insistence that auteurism has been superseded. However, it is hard to imagine any twenty-first-century auteur enjoying the carefree improvisational innocence of the Chabrols, Malles, Godards and Truffauts of the early New Wave. And indeed, from the very beginning, Beauvois’s approach to cinema, although undoubtedly driven by passion, has involved a deliberate process of inscribing himself into a particular lineage. It is a process nicely symbolised in the acting roles he gives himself in three of his films: in the first two, he plays with Bulle Ogier (most closely associated with the films of Jacques Rivette) and Jean Douchet (a key mentor, along with Serge Daney: both were closely involved with the original development of auteur politics at Les Cahiers du cinéma); in Le Petit Lieutenant, he works with Nathalie Baye, who has acted with a whole range of challenging directors from Truffaut, Godard and Tavernier through to Diane Kurys and Tonie Marshall. The tradition in which he seeks to imbed himself is one in which the demand for authorial liberty is conjoined with cinematographic rigour. In Selon Matthieu, he collaborated with the uncompromising Catherine Breillat and Philippe Garrel; more widely, his cinematography offers ready references to the work of Dreyer, Renoir and Bresson, as well as Godard and Truffaut. In short, in fashioning his own stories and style, he has prepared his way carefully, drawing on some impressive models.

Beauvois’s achievements as an auteur demonstrate ongoing historical continuity in the paradigm, at least at the level of the individual filmmaker. One can readily imagine the particular case study replicated in other instances. Nonetheless, as Le Club des 13 report points out, the dramatic increase in industrial and funding complexities is compounded by the expanded political parameters within which would-be auteurs must work, and today’s putative French auteurs are obliged to be shrewder than their New Wave predecessors. Le Club des 13 report notes a dramatic shrinkage of the auteur-dominated middle ground of film production, citing a fall from 49 such films in 2004 to 19 in 2006 (2007: 43 n. 26).

Beauvois projects an attention-worthy metaphor of his sense of the auteur role through that of his abbot, Christian, in Des hommes et des dieux. In an interview with Peter Labuza at the New York Film Festival, he stated:

In French, there is a play on words; the word for director where part of the word is also the word for the Last Supper. So I had this idea where Christian is Jesus with the disciples around him. It was a challenge but it just came so vividly to mind. (2010: n.p.)

In his pun (metteur en scène, en Cène), Beauvois draws on the Bressonian tradition for designating the director, but more importantly, the Jesus evoked here is not the incarnation of divine triumphalism, not the author as God, but the servant who sacrifices himself so that others may have life. This kind of auteur is one responsible for a project that is shared, and overtly dependent on others for its realisation. To extend this metaphorical reading, Beauvois, like his monks, would seem to consider the cinema world an ideal community: one that functions in communion, where individuals accept that they are part of a collectivity, but a collectivity in which their individuality is enhanced rather than diluted, and their weaknesses supported and compensated for by the strengths of others. It is a community whose reason for being is service to other communities, not hegemony or exploitation. This is filmmaking as a highly ethical activity, even a kind of priesthood, and its world as a kind of monastery: but it is not, for all that, a secure place, its only peace in a hostile surrounding environment coming from its attentive fostering of its fundamental beliefs and values. From the filmmaker’s own perspective, then, there is no universalist ambition, nothing that promotes the proto-colonialism of a mission civilisatrice. If anything, Des hommes et des dieux raises the most probing questions about such attitudes, in the most tension-filled and controversial site of France’s postcolonial geopolitical landscape, namely Algeria.

The critical and popular success of Des hommes et des dieux was notable, and testimony to the continuing strength of a non-commercial auteur cinema as a viable strategy for promoting cinematic diversity within an audiovisual landscape of large-scale ventures. Its numerous accolades on the festival circuit included the Grand Prize of the Jury and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, and three Césars, including Best Film. Distributed by Mars within France’s network of independent cinemas, it attained 3,204,170 entries. ⁵ Supported in large part by France’s government-funded CNC, through the avance sur recettes scheme, and benefiting from investment from Sociétés pour le financement du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel (SOFICA), Des hommes et des dieux is surely irrefutable evidence that the French system works, at least within France’s own dominant cultural milieu. But what happens when the system seeks to extend its influence beyond those parameters?

The auteur as cultural brand

The meaning of the auteur becomes more complex when applied to migrant filmmakers in France, whose varied backgrounds and artistic quality, bound within the packaging of the auteur, are marketed into a different form of culturally specific diversity that can be contrasted with French filmmakers such as Beauvois. With such diversity comes a degree of Eurocentric earnestness in the reverence paid to filmmakers identified as being of, or at least representing, a non-Western cultural background. Claims of cultural authenticity are frequently made along the lines that a particular cultural background affords a filmmaker the right to act, through his or her work, as a spokesperson for an entire culture or ethnicity. The function of the filmmaker’s ‘cultural difference’ becomes essential to the ways these films are funded and promoted, with the migrant filmmaker providing a sense of diversity and authenticity, as well as a sense of ‘perpetual discovery’ (McGregor, 2010). As Thomas Elsaesser has noted elsewhere, it is this element of discovery that becomes essential for generating the momentum and sustainability of these films, be it on the festival circuit or within the networks of the art et essai cinemas in which they are screened (Elsaesser, 2005: 92). The essentialist ease with which the French festival circuit perpetuates the myth of cultural ‘purity’ represented in works by ethnic filmmakers that have been embraced into the auteur fold further accentuates the privilege, indeed the artistic licence, granted to filmmakers perceived as auteurs in France. This often occurs to the exclusion of other voices that may have similar or greater claim to cultural legitimacy and representativeness, and yet remain largely unheard in the wave of media attention that washes over the latest ethnographic discovery at Cannes.

The carefully constructed career of Xavier Beauvois can be read in relation to a historical lineage of national auteur cinema. In contrast, the application of the auteur paradigm to the freewheeling, exuberant and emotionally unbridled films of Tony Gatlif – including Latcho Drom (1993), Gadjo Dilo (1997), Exils/Exiles (2004) and Korkoro/Liberté (2009) – produces an ambiguous trajectory that might be said to reflect the positioning in France of the Roma/Gypsy culture more generally. His work is at once heralded at film festivals as a leftfield cultural revelation and yet marginalised in economic terms by a limited commercial release. This existence at the fringes of the auteur framework reflects the filmmaker’s personal story as much as his body of work, as well as his cultural difference in France.

Algerian-born and of Andalusian descent, Gatlif is committed to engaging with significant socio-political issues in his work that have both historical and contemporary social relevance in France. His cultural engagement is supported by French funding schemes, designed to promote awareness and diversity within the French film industry. As an example, following a series of festival screenings in 2009, Gatlif released his fifteenth feature film, Korkoro/Liberté, in 2010. The film is based on the persecution of the Roma in France during the Second World War. A large percentage of its €4.6 million budget came from state-subsidised incentives (placing his film within the aforementioned privileged space of the auteur middle ground). This included funds from the Fonds Images de la diversité, established in 2007, with the goal of financing projects which contribute to :

la connaissance des réalités et expressions des populations immigrées ou issues de l’immigration et de leur intégration, des populations des départements et régions d’outre-mer et des collectivités d’outre-mer ainsi qu’à la mise en valeur de leur mémoire, de leur histoire, de leur patrimoine culturel et de leurs liens avec la France. (CNC, 2013: n.p.)

Korkoro/Liberté can be understood as a narrative diversifying not only the cinematic production but also historical memory in France at a particular political moment when France was denying Roma the right to remain in the country. In this sense, the film both reclaims a history for marginal voices of those whose presence is often ignored, and also uses this history as a warning in the present, focusing on the politics of belonging.

Gatlif is clearly identified in France and elsewhere as being of Roma/Gypsy origin, a characteristic that he readily embraces in the marketing of his films, to the point where he is seen by many to embody Roma culture and to act on behalf of his ‘people’. Gatlif regularly portrays himself and his work as an outsider of both mainstream French cinema and French culture, appropriately exotic and yet tantalisingly accessible to a Western audience, with his call to cultural exoticism and his claim to authenticity evident in his press release declarations, such as: ‘Je m’exprime par le déplacement, le voyage. Je suis un metteur en scène itinérant. J’aime être nomade’ (Gatlif in Melinard, 2004: n.p.). The director appeals to an emotional response in his target audience, and further entrenches his self-marginalisation, via his own form of cultural anchoring: ‘Je dépends d’une culture, d’une ethnie – les Gitans – enfermée dans une image négative depuis toujours’ (Gatlif in Piazzo, 2004: n.p.).

Such claims to authenticity and representativeness, and such appeals to moral outrage, lend an air of authority and legitimacy to Gatlif and his films. Critical responses, in France and elsewhere, further cement this self-characterisation, with the director having been described by film reviewers and scholars alike as ‘the loving chronicler of his native culture’ (Smith, 1998: n.p.) and ‘a keeper of memory and images’ (Blum-Reid, 2005: 8). Indeed, when he won the Prize for Best Director for Exils/Exiles at Cannes in 2004, the then already accomplished director was described by Le Nouvel Observateur as a ‘Gitan d’Algérie’ having ‘ramé comme un forçat pour pouvoir mettre en images le destin de son peuple, sa grande source d’inspiration’ (Riou, 2004: n.p.). There is more than a trace of orientalist fervour in French critical responses to the director and his work. Les Cahiers du Cinéma revelled in the ‘énergie documentaire’ of Exils, which, although somewhat allegorical in terms of its reference to Gatlif’s own pilgrimage from France to Algeria, is a work of pure fiction (Malausa, 2004: 40).

There is a tension that arises in Gatlif’s position as both auteur and spokesperson for an otherwise little known, often misrepresented, and even persecuted culture, whereby he invariably, and even necessarily, contradicts himself about his role in the creative process, as he attempts to straddle two contradictory positions. On the one hand, he imbues his films with his personal vision and indeed his personal politics, not to mention his much-lauded contributions as composer and performer of the musical soundtracks of his films: ‘Est-ce que dans un film on doit ressentir le réalisateur ou pas? Moi, je pense que oui. C’est même très important. J’ai envie de savoir qui me parle’ (Gatlif in Piazzo, 2004: n.p.). On the other hand, he frequently, and perhaps necessarily, declares himself absent from the filmmaking process. An example can be found in the case of his 1998 film Gadjo Dilo, which he describes, once again despite being a work of fiction, as a film of ‘absolute honesty and truth’ (Rutherford, 1999: n.p.), in which, he claims: ‘J’avais besoin de vérité, de tout dire, sans filtre … Si l’image est belle, c’est qu’elle s’est imposée, qu’elle s’est faite malgré moi. Si c’est beau, c’est par accident’ (Gatlif, 1998: 4).

Gatlif’s films have been hailed by critics and at film festivals far and wide as breathtaking in their raw emotion in a style that meanders in and out of the documentary format and into narrative fiction, thereby enhancing Gatlif’s reputation for being able to capture an apparent ‘reality’ of a cultural identity, particularly given the lack of other well-known cultural reference points that might otherwise make for a more informed and reasoned judgement as to the representative status of his films. Certain French critics were effusive in their exaltation of the perceived cultural authenticity of Exils/Exiles, using familiar stereotypes to describe both the film and its apparent cultural anchoring, such as in Le Figaro: ‘Exils est un vrai film gitan où le désir de voyage l’emporte souvent sur la destination’ (Borde, 2004: n.p.), and in Télérama, with the observation that: ‘Exils avance à l’instinct’ (Morice, 2004: np). The essentialism comes to a head when Gatlif, whose ‘caméra et ses personnages se frottent au réel pour mieux l’enchanter’ (Mury, 2004: n.p.), is unreservedly declared ‘le “passeur” de la mémoire gitane’ (Morice, 2004: n.p.).

To this extent, it can be argued that Gatlif straddles both of Rosanna Maule’s previously cited criteria for auteur status, whereby the director acts as both an emblem of Europe’s culturally oriented cinema and as a marketing figure for niche theatrical distribution mediating between cultural and commercial interests. The extent to which Gatlif has come to embody the gypsy ‘cultural brand’ in France is testimony to the enduring legacy of auteur cinema, and the continuing reverence with which its practitioners are received. It is also indicative of how the particularly French phenomenon of cinémas du monde plays itself out in the peculiar case of Tony Gatlif: deliberately (self-)marginalised for his part-Roma cultural origin, and therefore able to pursue his flamboyant and emotionally exuberant filmmaking free from the moral and social constraints of his predominantly Western festival-going audience, yet he is a filmmaker technically born in France, albeit during the occupation of Algeria (in 1948). Gatlif effectively mirrors a number of somewhat contradictory cultural and cinematic mores that remain at the heart of the auteur paradigm in France, even as it stretches beyond the Franco-centric preoccupations that characterised the films made at the beginning of the movement and into a culturally diverse yet reassuring worldview that, while international in its appeal, remains characteristically French.

Towards a migrant auteur ‘cinéma du monde’

If Beauvois seems to validate the French auteur paradigm, the case of Gatlif, even though he works within the French national industry, draws attention, as we have seen, to some awkward ambiguities in relation to cultural difference. Our third example, the Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, raises further complexities. Over recent decades, there has been a committed engagement by France to invest heavily in international co-productions, which made up 46 per cent of the country’s annual production in 2012. In addition to what Martine Danan (2002) has termed France’s ‘post-national’ cinema (big-budget English-language productions such as The Fifth Element (Besson, 1997) and Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, 2004)), France has been investing in small-budget co-productions with migrant filmmakers with ties to the global South. These films aim to provide cinematic diversity aligned with the country’s broader goals of producing a culturally oriented cinéma d’auteur. In this sense, we agree with Royer that:

[although] French cinema is often considered to be the embodiment of national cinema … the history of the French film industry with its government subsidies, national institutions and its ‘auteur’ films has paradoxically fostered transnationalism and transculturalism. (Royer, 2010: 139)

Today, France’s recently established Aides aux cinémas du monde (formally known as Fonds Sud Cinéma) supports 73 ‘pays aux cinématographies les plus fragiles’, spanning Africa, the Middle East, South and South-East Asia as well as the Caribbean. In addition to its own programmes, it has spearheaded and been a major contributor to some the EU’s most generous schemes, including the Programme UE-ACP d’appui au cinéma et à l’audiovisuel, as well as to the Organisation internationale de la francophonie’s own funds, which are made available to Francophone cinematic productions emerging from the global South. This transnationalism within the French film industry exceeds national or European ideas of cultural orientation to provide alternative forms of diversity, not only in opposition to Hollywood, but also removed from Maule’s post-auteur cinema, working to provide new narratives which, as Royer explains, ‘turn their focus on the hybridity, the differences within the French nation, thus disturbing the image of French national cinema as Parisian, middle class, and mono-racial’ (Royer, 2010: 145). Programmes such as the Aides aux cinémas du monde encourage co-productions with filmmakers of the global South to create a ‘world cinema’ which is then promoted through state-subsidised distribution and exhibition channels such as the Cannes Film Festival and then with the AFCAE. Such forms of co-production are marketed on their narratives of difference, their ‘Frenchness’ only detectable by reviewing the budgets or reading the origin of the film in the festival programme, and, in some cases, the use of the French language.

A compelling case study to consider in relation to this type of transnational auteur cinema is that of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Born in Chad, he has been living in France for 30 years. He has made four feature films, all of which continue to be set in Chad, and address issues concerning the country, namely civil war, with recurrent themes of retribution, forgiveness and masculinity an authorial stamp. ⁶ In 2010, he released Un homme qui crie (2010), a film that deals with both the physical and social decline of a man in a country shattered by war and transformed by globalisation. The film is an extension of his previous films Daratt (2006) and Abouna (2002), which both deal with the damaging effects of a war handed down from one generation to another. However, while his two earlier films (as well as Grigris, 2013) use the younger generation of Chadian males as a vessel for reconciliation, Un homme qui crie takes a close critical look at an older generation’s culture of war.

Adam, a retired swimmer, is an ageing pool attendant for a hotel in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad. When the hotel is bought out by Chinese owners, Adam is forced to hand over his job to his younger assistant, who happens to be his son Abdel. Filled with resentment at such humiliation, Adam secretly recruits Abdel to fight in the army against the rebel fighters, and, with his son taken away, resumes his job at the pool. The conflict between government and rebels increases, and then Adam is faced with a new dilemma: the appearance of Abdel’s pregnant girlfriend who, following Abdel’s recruitment, now has nowhere else to go. Deeply remorseful, and afraid for his son’s safety, Adam is then dealt a final blow. The escalating conflict has damaged the already fragile tourist industry. The hotel must close. All the while, people are fleeing the city to escape the escalating conflict. Adam realises he must try to right his wrong and save his son, but his penitence comes too late.

According to Haroun, the story emerged from his own experiences making Daratt, when rebel forces entered the Chadian capital and left him and his crew trapped in the desert. As in Beauvois’s and Gatlif’s films, fact and fiction are blurred, the film becoming an almost ethnographic vehicle for recording culture, as well as a pedagogic tool for ‘educating’ (as opposed to entertaining) the viewer. Although the film was made on a smaller budget than Des hommes et des dieux and Kokoro/Liberté, its €2 million is at the higher financial end of Franco-African co-productions. The film, a French/Belgian/Chadian co-production, received money from Fonds Francophone, as well as the ACPFilms programme, which aims ‘permettre une promotion accrue de la diversité culturelle, mettre en valeur les identités culturelles ACP et contribuer au dialogue interculturel’ (EU/ACPFilms, 2008: n.p.). Both these programmes, whilst multilateral, have France as the majority financial contributor. In addition, the French-language screenplay meant that the film qualified for the generous avance sur recettes scheme provided by the CNC. Haroun’s film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, and went on to receive a limited theatrical release across the country through the AFCAE. Although state subsidies for film production play a part in the distribution of capital that is both economic and cultural, it is important to recognise the essential role of the Cannes Film Festival in the auteur’s ultimate consecration – what B. Ruby Rich (2003) has disparagingly described as the ‘worship of taste’ – and its connection to the policies of promoting diversity that underscore the auteur as an emblem of culture. The CNC is committed to supporting both the French film festival circuit and the art et essai exhibition network – necessary if these subsidised films are to reach a significant audience. Ultimately, we can consider Cannes as the definitive site of consecration, where films ‘can gather the cultural capital and critical prowess necessary to subsequently enter the national or local exhibition markets on the strength of their accumulated festival successes’ (Elsaesser, 2005: 92). Former CNC director general Véronique Cayla describes Cannes as ‘l’emblème le plus prestigieux et le plus authentique de la politique mise en place, dans notre pays, pour favoriser la diversité du cinéma et faciliter la circulation des œuvres aux quatre coins du monde’ (Cayla, 2006). As Elsaesser explains, the auteur in this setting becomes ‘the nominal currency of the film festival economy’, but he recognises too how the festival feeds into the very creation of the auteur, claiming that ‘No poster of an independent film can do without the logo of one of the world’s prime festivals, as prominently displayed as Hollywood productions carry their studio logo’ (2005: 87, 92).

Filmmakers such as Haroun are ‘discovered’ (despite their films being majority French co-productions) and welcomed into the next year’s jury as the final consecration of their cultural capital and Cannes’s (and France’s) commitment to la diversité. What is foregrounded at Cannes is summed up by Royer: ‘the assistance given to migrant filmmakers, to films from developing countries and to the distribution of small-budget films allows spectators to view a great variety of films and to become aware of many different lives’ (Royer, 2010: 146). These films play an important role in the continued promotion of a ‘culturally oriented’ auteur cinema within the French film industry, which has seen the once Eurocentric definition of culture transformed into a broader postcolonial focus on culture, highlighting issues pertaining to the repercussions of French colonial history, and the contemporary political and social issues emerging from both within and beyond the French nation-state.

An unequal distribution of cultural capital

Regardless of the critical success of Gatlif’s and Haroun’s films, the goals of French funding schemes for diversity, and the subsequent cultural capital these filmmakers acquire, we would like to suggest that certain migrant auteurs may not be able to attain the same level of status as their French counterparts, since their tradeable ‘cultural difference’ appears to limit their access to a larger audience within and beyond French borders. One of the easiest ways to measure this is through the actual success of the film-as-product beyond the relatively constrained festival circuit. In 2010, when Beauvois smashed the French box-office in an unprecedented manner, neither Gatlif nor Haroun managed to attain any form of success outside the festival circuit. Gatlif’s Korkoro/Liberté struggled at the box-office, with only 271,512 entries. Haroun’s Un homme qui crie was the most disappointing result of them all – despite a promotional blitz and winning prestigious festival prizes all over the world, it attracted only 60,537 entries in France. Such figures demonstrate that this type of auteur cinema, while fulfilling certain requirements of cultural diversity within cinematic production, has less satisfactory outcomes in relation to reception.

Our research thus points to a continuing ‘colonial reflex’ within both French production and reception patterns. By focusing on the promotion of ‘authenticity’ in relation to cultural difference, the auteur model appears to ascribe to certain filmmakers a degree of cultural essentialism that actually guarantees their own marginality, problematising the very goals that culturally oriented auteur cinema aims to promote. In opposition to the Beauvois case study, and although filmmakers such as Haroun continue to accrue a certain amount of cultural capital, we recognise a form of what Bourdieu (1993) might term symbolic violence, which sees the migrant filmmaker working in France struggle to attain the same level of power/status as his French counterpart within the auteur model. Although their difference becomes a tradeable commodity, the reality in many cases seems to be the limited accessibility of these films to a larger audience within and beyond French borders.

Conclusion

Our case studies suggest the need to pursue further questions concerning the extent to which Francophone filmmakers remain peripheral in a film industry in which cultural difference remains relatively unmarketable, even as they attain cultural capital through their consecration as auteur. Auteurs who are promoted in relation to their (non-French) cultural difference may be limited in their potential to garner broader audiences, even within the niche market of art et essai distribution networks. ⁷

However, the broader concern here is not the success of the films themselves, but rather the effect of this ‘invisibility’ of films committed to another form of diversity, and the politics of the agenda as professed by the industry itself. It appears that although funding bodies are supporting certain forms of cultural diversity that raise complex issues around belonging and national (French) identity within an increasingly transnational Francophone sphere, these films tend to be unsuccessful in challenging pre-existing hierarchies within the film industry’s traditionally Franco-centric authorial pantheon, reinforcing the dominance of traditional ‘inward-looking’ national narratives in the French audiovisual sector. Although many of the French policies for promoting diversity explicitly encourage cinematic productions to challenge stereotypical representations of French history and culture, and to give space to alternative stories that provide diversity, our research obliges us to ask whether the culturally oriented auteur approach is a – perhaps unwitting – smokescreen for increasing French production numbers, while limiting the visibility of minorities on French screens.