The terrorist as ennemi intime in French and Francophone cinema

Abstract

Characterisations of the post 9–11 world we inhabit have by now become worn-out clichés evocative of pre-modern wars of religion: the ‘religious century’ (allegedly predicted by Malraux in 1972) of a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) has turned into the epoch of a ‘global war on terror’ (Bush 2001) that has displaced populations and created a ‘flood of refugees’ (themselves suspected of terrorism) in Europe. The terrorism craze, imaged and relayed seemingly ad infinitum in the media worldwide, has reached horrific proportions. Artists and filmmakers have imaged it in distinct creative ways, carefully decanting facts from fiction, and dissecting the emotional impacts on the public from the spectacle of terrorist attacks. This issue deals with the French and Francophone representations on film, rendered all the more urgent by the attacks in Morocco (in Casablanca on 16 May 2003), Tunisia (in Tunis on 18 March 2015), France (in Paris on 13 November 2015), and the immediate political knee-jerk reactions that fed into the terrorism phobia. Indeed, although European citizens perpetrated the attacks, migrant ‘flooding’ was blamed for them, thus shoring up a pre-existing ‘us vs. them’ discourse against migrants. For terrorism has become an obsession from the late twentieth century on in political discourse. In 1987, postcolonial and cultural theorist Edward Said argued against the hyperbolic mania and inflated rhetoric of what he called the recent ‘terrorism craze’: terrorism, particularly terrorism committed by nominally ‘Muslim’ agents, has supplanted Communism as ‘public enemy number one’ (1987, 195), and assumed an oversized role as cultural bogeyman in the Western public consciousness. This aggrandisement of the terrorist threat, prescient Said argued, serves a number of functions (that are well known today): it mobilises public opinion for foreign wars, legitimating ‘various sorts of murderous action’; it institutionalises ‘the denial and avoidance of history’ (195); and it serves to redirect ‘careful scrutiny of the government’s domestic and foreign policies’ (195). The semantic field of terrorism studies then becomes saturated by magnified, Manichean rhetoric, seeking to construct an opposition between the terrorised West and the terrorist Other: ‘“We” are never terrorists; it’s the Moslems, Arabs and Communists who are’ (198). Benjamin Barber would later characterise this ‘us versus them’ dichotomy as the conflict between the regressive, traditionalist movements of ‘jihad’ and the allconsuming force of capitalism – or ‘McWorld’ (1992). Samuel Huntingdon more polemically theorised the ‘West versus the Other’ binary as a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) between the Muslim and the non-Muslim worlds. The terrorist threat elevated to the level of a civilisational menace by a force of radical evil makes it easier to ignore the role played by the West in histories of colonialism and postcolonial domination, as well as the on-going occupation and war in places like Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq (Nail 2016). As Said provocatively suggests, isolating ‘your enemy from time, from causality, STUDIES IN FRENCH CINEMA 2019, VOL. 19, NO. 3, 171–178 https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2018.1531338