ABSTRACT
While extras often appear on screen as representation of the people, they stand-in for a community that is missing—a lack of precisely what would constitute them as a community. In terms of a politics of aesthetics, this lack is intricately tied to the conditions of extra labour: lack of social care, unionisation, legal representation, adequate payment, and recognition through the granting of credits, to name but a few—conditions that, as a whole, institutionally exclude their participation in collaborative film production. Statistics provided a set of practices related to the description and management of the state, as well as society—among them, practices of numbering, calculating, and measuring that regulate the social, juridical, fiscal, and economic spheres. The film’s cast is made up of over 220 people from Paris and the banlieues, more than half of them amateurs, including sans papiers—illegal immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.
