ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea that the positioning and representation of the migrant in French cinema has the potential to queer prevailing paradigms of French republican identity, masculinity, and nationhood. One might hope to find this taking place in recent celebrated French queer films such as Jaurès (2012, Dieutre) and Eastern Boys (2013, Campillo), yet these works ultimately frame and abjectify the migrant ideologically as an oppositional, alien other within French society, and, in the case of the latter, submit refugees to the universalising and sanitising French narrative of assimilation. The possibility for forging new French cinematic spaces that foreground the migrant’s embodied presence and point of view – spaces that also harness the potential of the migrant body powerfully to resist normalising agencies and the protocols of identity – may instead be found unexpectedly in Bruno Dumont’s four-part comedy series for ARTE, Coincoin et les z’inhumains/Coincoin and the Extra-humans (2018), which features the random, floating presence of migrants who are never formally identified or named as such, and where there is no authorial voice-over to impose a Western viewpoint. The migrants enjoy agency in that they determine their own path and turn up in the frame as and when and how they choose, and are attuned to the open beauty of human gesture while engaging in spontaneous acts of kindness in a spirit of mutual curiosity and mystery. Even more crucially, the migrants are aligned with another form of other equally unheralded in Dumont’s cinema: the out-queer, here in the shape of two young lesbian lovers. Their transverse skirting on the roadside – a brief, silent, accidental, mutual (non-)encounter – nevertheless sows the seeds of a possible new intersectional con-vergence, and a silent, undeclared, yet palpable bond of understanding and affinity based on a shared experience of being othered and discriminated against by the policemen in the film (oppressive, patrolling, white male agents of republican authority) who view both communities as deviant.
The chapter provides close analysis of key scenes in the second episode that redeploy and denaturalise key spatial motifs and topoi of migration cinema and initiate the viewer into aesthetic and sensorial processes of relational difference whereby the migrant figure becomes an aesthetic relational subject. This resonates strongly with Patrick Chamoiseau’s 2017 essay, Frères migrants, a poetic intervention in French public discourse on the migrant crisis which makes a powerful plea for open borders by invoking the transformative nature of a relational imaginary. It is argued that the intermittent presentation and open framing of the continually proximate migrant instantiates a ‘migrancy’ of vision, that is, a continuous dispersal and desublimation of the universalising, straight, white, male, patriarchal gaze. Fixed notions and preconceptions, not just of migrancy and non-normative sexuality but also of nationhood and Frenchness, are thrown into the air here, splattered and temporarily evaporated in the alienated territory of the Pas-de-Calais, revealed now in the summer light as a transcultural, carnivalesque queer space beyond identity. The result is a kind of pre-narrative and post-conceptual erotic drift that both deframes and deflates fixed notions of the migrant figure as objectified and abjectified sexual other of the Republic, so creating propitious new queer aesthetic and erotic migrant spaces that help to reconceive and reimagine the very nature of sociality and kinship beyond the fixed republican values and absolutes of legitimacy and universality advanced in works like Jaurès and Eastern Boys.
