'L'amour se dit dans un regard'? Immigration, visibility and representation in Marguerite Duras's Les Mains négatives and Alice Diop's Nous.

Marguerite Duras's Les Mains négatives (1979) is a short film which interrogates the exclusion and marginalisation of immigrants in postcolonial French society by highlighting the hidden labour of Black sanitation workers in Paris. Alice Diop has described Les Mains négatives as 'the entire subtext'...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Modern & Contemporary France Vol. 32; no. 3; pp. 375 - 394
Main Author: Pleming, Katie
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd Aug2024
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=178943588&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: ssf
    uiTerm: 178943588
    longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        09639489
        55N
      jtl: Modern & Contemporary France
      issn: 09639489
      maglogo: N
    pubinfo:
      dt: Aug2024
      vid: 32
      iid: 3
      pid: 377
      pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd
    artinfo:
      ui:
        178943588
        10.1080/09639489.2023.2251410
      ppf: 375
      ppct: 19
      formats:
        fmt:
          – @attributes:
              type: T
              db: hlh
              ui: 178943588
          – @attributes:
              type: P
              db: hlh
              ui: 178943588
      tig:
        atl: 'L'amour se dit dans un regard'? Immigration, visibility and representation in Marguerite Duras's Les Mains négatives and Alice Diop's Nous.
      aug:
        au: Pleming, Katie
        affil: Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
      su:
        Les mains negatives (Film)
        Diop, Alice
        Nous (Film)
        Immigrants
        Sanitation workers
        Filmmaking
      sug:
        subj:
          Immigrants
          Motion Picture and Video Production
          Janitorial Services
          Janitorial services (except window cleaning)
          Waste collection
          Solid Waste Collection
          Sanitation workers
          Filmmaking
          Les mains negatives (Film)
          Nous (Film)
          Diop, Alice
      ab: Marguerite Duras's Les Mains négatives (1979) is a short film which interrogates the exclusion and marginalisation of immigrants in postcolonial French society by highlighting the hidden labour of Black sanitation workers in Paris. Alice Diop has described Les Mains négatives as 'the entire subtext' for her film Nous (2020), a documentary about people living in the suburbs of Paris. At once documents of social reality and experimental meditations on representation and filmmaking, both films examine the entanglements of viewing relations and social exclusion, and interrogate the moving image's capacity to remedy the 'invisibility' of certain lives. This article brings the two films together in order to probe the ethical and political stakes of their strategies of representation, drawing on recent criticism at the intersections of postcolonial theory, and film and visual culture scholarship. This critical lens highlights the political force of the films' experimental form. Yet bringing the two films into dialogue also allows productive frictions to emerge, exposing in particular the challenging aspects of the representation of Black subjects in Les Mains négatives, which stand uneasily alongside the film's message of inclusion and recognition.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
    refInfo:
    copyright:
      @attributes:
        flag: N
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N