Through the lens of terror: re-imaging terrorist violence in Boukhrief’s Made in France

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nicolas Boukhrief’s film Made in France (2015) charts an unsettling path into the world of terror, with the radical intent to shake public perceptions and disrupt state discourses by redirecting the gaze inward to investigate the very disturbing, and much repressed, phenomenon of home-grown terror. The film marks a major departure in Western films about terrorism, in that it frames the story through the perspective of the terrorist, and maps a different cartographic imagination, directing attention away from conceptions of terrorism as dispersed, networked or de-territorialised to establish a geography in which terror is located in the inner domain and manifests itself as a state of rupture or ‘anomie’. Made in France avoids the trap of perpetual binaries (‘us’ versus ‘them’ rhetoric) to deliver a trenchant message about the growing threat couched in the social fabric, and in our contemporary times. By shifting the gaze from the more generalised subject of ‘terrorism’ to focus on individual terrorists as well as processes of radicalisation and group dynamics, the film aims to unpack the concept of terrorist and undo the spectacle of terrorism in order to articulate a more complex and reflective narrative that emphasises causality, history and temporality.