ABSTRACT
Bande de Filles offers a representation of girlhood as a collective endeavour and a celebration of solidarity. At the same time, though, the film conveys the limits to that solidarity in the form of violence. This chapter observes the connections between the girls’ violence and solidarity, observing the bodily vulnerability that unites the two states. While the street violence that erupts in dramatic set pieces offers the most spectacularised form of violence and aggression, and provoked moral panic discourses regarding the contemporary state of young women, the film also demonstrates the many ways in which the girls are subject to violence from men, and from the French state, in the form of symbolic violence. Walking through their neighbourhood at night, the girls are catcalled at and jeered, and even at home Marième must reckon with her menacing brother, Djibril. Sciamma’s film also draws parallels between the ritualised violence that is celebrated as part of the American football game, with which the film begins, and the French education system’s rejection and vilification of the characters that the girls encounter in the high school and elsewhere. Bande de Filles questions the moral panic discourses that underpin girls’ expression of aggression and physical violence.
