Eloquent fragments: French fiction film and globalization

French (and Franco-Belgian) cinema has witnessed a return to the real since the middle of the 1990s and should thus successfully have pinned down the impact of the globalizing economy on the sociopolitical sphere. Yet neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the frame of conventional fictions. Condemned to be a cinema of fragments by the shattering of the old leftist imaginary, has French cinema merely tracked globalization's local consequences, always letting systemic causes escape its grasp? Or has it identified successful strategies with which to restore eloquence to social struggle and suffering that otherwise seemed condemned to silence? Engaging with important films by the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Bertrand Tavernier, Manuel Poirier, Matthieu Kassovitz and others, this paper argues the latter. French film, it suggests, has found ways to make the fragments speak to the totality, to short-circuit neoliberal triumphalism and to interpellate a nation that no longer plays its erstwhile integrational role. While none of these strategies can provide totalizing systemic critique, they do show that cinema is playing an active role in the rebuilding of a radical oppositional imaginary

The Parisian popular as reactionary modernisation

Noting the centrality of the Parisian popular in French cinema of the 1930s, this paper looks behind its apparent nostalgia to the disavowed work of modernization that it carried out. Drawing on recent work on the transnational, it shows how representations of popular rootedness and of the cosmopolitan modern were linked responses to the new. Helping to embed cultural consumption in collective memory and identity, cinematic populism engaged with and simultaneously rejected the experiences of displacement and mixity. In some ways it can be considered to have carried out a process of democratization, shifting the common people to centre stage and inviting them to look upon their own image. Broadly speaking, however, its disavowed modernization was deeply regressive. The reflexivity it granted was counterweighted by its idealization of rooted community and folkloric cultural forms in a way that could only view the cosmopolitan new as threat and loss and which immobilised and ethnicized the popular even as it partially undid its exclusion

Suffering in silence: bodily politics in post-1995 French cinema

Developing earlier research by the author that had sought to trace the specificity of the current wave of socio-politically engaged film, this article focuses in on the body, suggesting that it has become a core vector of ‘raw’ expressivity in recent French cinema due to the withdrawal of the discourse of the organised left as mediating instance. Brooks’ celebrated analysis of melodrama and the political philosophy of Rancière and Laclau and Mouffe are drawn upon to examine the political work done by Cabrera’s Retiens la nuit and Devers’ La Voleuse de St Lubin. Engaging with the objectified, embodied and isolated social suffering that runs through current cinema, the two films’ significance lies in their exploration of the possibilities of and obstacles to its articulation within an oppositional politics

The shifting identities of French popular cinema

_France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema_ Edited by Lucy Mazdon London: Wallflower Press, 2001 ISBN 1 903364-08-6 pbk 180 pp

Putting the dead to work: making sense of worker suicide in contemporary French and Francophone Belgian film

Contemporary French and Francophone Belgian cinema has produced a wave of worker suicides that outdoes even Jean Gabin's repeated cinematic deaths of the later 1930s. This article discusses its significance in the context of neo-liberalism and develops an analytical tool-kit for making sense of it, taking its main theoretical inspirations from Slavoj Žižek's theorisation of violence and Carl Cedeström and Peter Fleming's analysis of worker suicide, but also drawing on Michel Foucault's account of parrhesia as the scandalous living of another life in this life. The article suggests that most of the films considered use the apparently subjective violence of worker suicide to force the unseen violences of neo-liberal labour into view, while only a few move beyond this denunciatory position to probe both what a parrhesiastic exit from neo-liberal labour, a killing of the worker-in-the-self, might look like and all that prevents it

A more effective coordinate system for parameter estimation of precessing compact binaries from gravitational waves

Ground-based gravitational wave detectors are sensitive to a narrow range of frequencies, effectively taking a snapshot of merging compact-object binary dynamics just before merger. We demonstrate that by adopting analysis parameters that naturally characterize this 'picture', the physical parameters of the system can be extracted more efficiently from the gravitational wave data, and interpreted more easily. We assess the performance of MCMC parameter estimation in this physically intuitive coordinate system, defined by (a) a frame anchored on the binary's spins and orbital angular momentum and (b) a time at which the detectors are most sensitive to the binary's gravitational wave emission. Using anticipated noise curves for the advanced-generation LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors, we find that this careful choice of reference frame and reference time significantly improves parameter estimation efficiency for BNS, NS-BH, and BBH signals.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Reactions at Polymer Interfaces: Transitions from Chemical to Diffusion-Control and Mixed Order Kinetics

We study reactions between end-functionalized chains at a polymer-polymer interface. For small chemical reactivities (the typical case) the number of diblocks formed, $R_t$, obeys 2nd order chemically controlled kinetics, $R_t \sim t$, until interfacial saturation. For high reactivities (e.g. radicals) a transition occurs at short times to 2nd order diffusion-controlled kinetics, with $R_t \sim t/\ln t$ for unentangled chains while $t/\ln t$ and $t^{1/2}$ regimes occur for entangled chains. Long time kinetics are 1st order and controlled by diffusion of the more dilute species to the interface: $R_t \sim t^{1/4}$ for unentangled cases, while $R_t \sim t^{1/4}$ and $t^{1/8}$ regimes arise for entangled systems. The final 1st order regime is governed by center of gravity diffusion, $R_t \sim t^{1/2}$.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, uses poliface.sty, minor changes, to appear in Europhysics Letter

Kings Wharf and Superdudeywords

Exploring the shifting space between handwriting, calligraphy and Graffiti