Not long after France beat Croatia in the final match of the 2018 World Cup, on Sunday, the French sociologist Edgar Morin, who is ninety-seven, tweeted that the victory of the team—which is predominantly nonwhite—is an occasion to celebrate the “one and multicultural” France. “Let’s enjoy these intoxicating moments of fraternity which won’t last long,” he wrote. Morin’s not just a sociologist; he’s also the co-director, with Jean Rouch, of one of the crucial films in the history of cinema, “Chronicle of a Summer,” from 1960, the project for which Morin coined a term that proved even more influential than the movie itself: cinéma vérité. That movie, a documentary made in Paris during the Algerian War, is centered on the psychological effect of colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and the legacy of the Nazi Occupation of France. But Morin’s tweet about France’s soccer-stoked fraternity reminded me of a more recent film that addresses the country’s struggle toward acknowledging its multiculturalism through a vision of sorority: Amandine Gay’s documentary “Ouvrir la Voix.” (The title, which means “opening the voice,” is also a homonym for ouvrir la voie, “opening the path.”) It came out in France last October but hasn’t yet been released here, and it deserves to be seen.
“Ouvrir la Voix” is as radically frank in style as in substance: nearly all of its two-hour running time is filled with interviews, done in extreme closeup, with twenty-four black French women whose remarks Gay organizes thematically into sixteen chapters. Some were born in France, some migrated to France; some are Muslim, some are Christian, one is Jewish; they are of diverse sexual orientation as well. Though the movie is mainly closeups, it provides, in its brief span, the sense of a distant journey that ranges far through an unseen France and deeply into the lives of people who live there, albeit in the margins of official culture. The film is not an encyclopedic history or a thumbnail overview of France’s current-day social conflicts; it’s a film of experience and of reflection, and its first-person narratives and anecdotes are matched by vigorous and incisive discussions of ideas, observations of a diagnostic and analytical bent.
In “Ouvrir la Voix,” some women discuss the casual racism that inflected their lives since childhood, both personal and official—schoolyard taunts, school administrators’ indifference and even contempt, demeaning advertisements, the intrusive attention of police—and alsos the plethora of stereotypes and clichés about black people that black people in France have themselves internalized. Many of the participants speak of their struggles against political and practical inequities as a movement of “Afrofeminism,” because their experience of feminism as black women proved different from—and was resisted by—the white women who dominate mainstream French feminist movements.
Above all, the movie confronts a political and historical paradox that exerts its distorting force in French laws and mores: the illusion of color blindness that’s central to the French national self-image. For instance, France keeps no official statistics on the subject of race or religion, in order not to enshrine the concepts in law. One speaker says that she used to agree with the idea, but then realized that the lack of statistics made large-scale discrimination very difficult to prove—France can rely on statistical analyses regarding gender but not about race. Just this month, France’s National Assembly voted unanimously to eliminate the word “race” from the Constitution, in order to invalidate the legal affirmation of race as a biological concept (there is only one “human race”).
But the problem, as several women in “Ouvrir la Voix” say, is that, even if the term is scientifically invalid, it’s experientially and socially accurate. As one woman says, “The word ‘race’ has to be spoken, because it exists, it’s materialized in our lives, in our bodies, in our perceptions of our bodies, in our relations with people, so I think it’s hypocrisy to ban it from the Constitution . . . Race is truly a reality.” Another adds, “The word ‘race’ describes a social reality”; yet another says, “We don’t name things because that way we don’t have to struggle with them . . . Saying that race doesn’t exist in France means not wanting to tackle racial problems.” The word “race,” one participant adds, is a crucial tool “to discuss our oppression clearly and concretely.”
Another word that looms large in the film is communautarisme, a bugbear of French politics across the political spectrum. There’s no exact English translation; it refers to a group or community’s self-identified distinction from French society at large, and, depending on context, can mean “clannishness,” “self-segregation,” or “separatist.” The avoidance of communautarisme is why France doesn’t keep statistics on race or religion; it’s why the presumption of color-blind integration in a perfectly meritocratic French society is upheld as an ideal and embodied in law. It’s the term used to decry the very notion of political organization by minority groups in French society.
The term communautarisme is connected with the French notion of laïcité, “secularity,” and it’s also why France passed, in the early two-thousands, stringent laws banning conspicuous religious symbols from government facilities—a law that, without saying so, targeted the headscarves of Muslim women and kept them out of schools. (One woman in “Ouvrir la Voix” discusses the discrimination that she faced, as a Muslim, from white French feminists; one of the film’s few ventures into on-location reporting involves a public meeting organized by a group resisting discrimination against Muslim women in the school system.) Yet what many women emphasize in the film is that communautarisme, far from being a self-discriminating trait of ethnic minorities, is the prevailing and unchallenged mode of life for France’s white people, whose efforts at widespread self-segregation are what passes for French life at large. As one woman says, “They don’t see themselves as white”—and therefore can’t be bothered to see black people as black.
The underlying connection between these women’s observations is the very idea of visibility. The fear of French authority causes French immigrants to keep a low public profile, to avoid speaking out or organizing politically, and these inhibitions have been passed down to the younger generations, as many of the film’s participants say. It’s significant that several of the film’s participants are performing artists, and most of the film’s forays beyond the closeup interviews involve stage performances and rehearsals. Black French men were on the world stage during the World Cup, as they have been every four years for several decades; black French women aren’t on that stage—and, for that matter, they haven’t been conspicuous on the French cinematic scene, either. One actress interviewed acknowledges that the range of roles for black women is narrow and stereotypical; “I feel like I can’t refuse roles that I’m offered, because I either change jobs or direct my own films,” she says. That is exactly what Gay has done with “Ouvrir la Voix.” It is both a vital film in itself and a virtual kit for the inspiration of other filmmakers; it’s an opening of voices and of paths.
Sourse: newyorker.com
