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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Although it deals primarily with events that happened sixty years ago, Rachid Bouchareb's film Indigenes (2006) is in every sense a sign of the times. The movie could not have been funded without the meteoric rise of its most prominent star, Jamel Debbouze, whose popularity was also crucial in ensuring the film's box office success. In addition, Indigenes capitalized upon and helped to influence major public debates within France about the nation's colonial past and contemporary postcolonial immigrant minorities. In highlighting the role played by North African colonial troops in the liberation of France during World War II, the movie helped to persuade President Chirac to end a long-standing injustice whereby veterans in former colonies have been receiving lower pensions than their former comrades in arms in France. The promotion of Indigenes was also used to press the case for fairer treatment of African immigrant minorities in contemporary France.
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France has in recent years been the site of public debates of unprecedented intensity about the nation's colonial past. The resonance of these debates has been exemplified with unique force by the extraordinary impact of Rachid Bouchareb's film Indigenes. Winner of the Best Male Actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival, nominated for a 2007 Oscar in the best Foreign Film category, (1) and credited with triggering a long overdue change of French government policy, Indigenes brought for the first time to the attention of the general public in France the role played by colonial troops in the liberation of the country more than half a century earlier. The film also drew attention to a long-standing injustice whereby ex-servicemen in the former colonies had been receiving pensions worth only a fraction of those paid to veterans in France. The importance of the movie in helping to persuade President Chirac to end that injustice after seeing a private screening of the film was signaled by the fact that the official announcement of Chirac's decision was timed to coincide exactly with the French release of Indigenes on 27 September 2006. Amid the euphoria surrounding this announcement, a journalist in Morocco wondered "si les choses auraient ete differentes, dans le cas ou le film 'Indigimes' avait ete realise plus tot" 'if things would have been different if the film Indigenes had been made earlier' (Semlah). (2) On closer analysis, not only is it doubtful that the movie might have helped to change things sooner, it is practically certain that the film could not even have been made a few years earlier. As I will endeavor to show, although it deals primarily with events that happened sixty years ago, Indigenes is in every sense--in its production, scripting, casting, direction, promotion, and reception--a sign of the times.
While well written and skillfully photographed and edited with strong acting performances, Indigenes breaks no new ground artistically. The production crew and actors have readily acknowledged close and conscious similarities between the direction and editing of the battle scenes in Indigenes and those in Steven Spielberg's World War II blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998) (Merckx). Other commentators have noted structural affinities with war movies such as Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) and Tom Hanks's Band of Brothers (2001) (Huddleston, Thom). Where the ethnic dynamics of Indigenes are concerned, Bouchareb has frequently cited as a model Edward Twick's Glory (1987), which rescued from historical neglect the role of African American troops during the American Civil War (Hakem 30). There is a similar parallel with Robert Markowitz's The Tuskegee Airmen (1995), depicting African American pilots and the racism from which they suffered on the part of American whites during World War II (Mandel). Indigenes engaged in a similar process of bringing to public attention the neglected role of Africans with reference to French as distinct from American history but it was not, as the hullabaloo surrounding the movie led many to believe, the first feature film to depict colonial troops mobilized in the service of France. Almost twenty years earlier, in Le camp de Thiaroye (1987), Ousmane Sembene had highlighted grave injustices meted out to West African soldiers at the end of World World II. Pierre Javaux's Les enfants du pays, depicting a unit of tirailleurs senegalais (West African colonial soldiers) in the Ardennes during the fall of France in 1940, preceded by five months the French release of Indigenes in the fall of 2006 but attracted little publicity.
The most distinctive feature of Indigenes lay neither in its cinematic qualities (polished but unoriginal) nor in the fact that it depicted colonial troops, but in the fact that it focused for the first time on those of North (as distinct from West) African origin. (3) No less important, the film did this at a time when, after being stifled for decades, searching questions about the colonial period were coming to the fore in public debate in France. A key factor fueling debates about colonialism has been the settlement in France of immigrant minorities originating in former French colonies. While minority populations originating in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa have been significant players in recent controversies over French colonialism, those of North African origin are the largest and longest established postcolonial minorities in France and they have been commensurately prominent in public debates there. All the leading figures in Indigenes--director Rachid Bouchareb and a quartet of actors led by Jamel Debbouze, who also coproduced the movie with Bouchareb-came from the ranks of second-generation North Africans born and raised in France, who since the 1980s have been known in popular parlance as "Beurs." (4)
The fact that Bouchareb and Debbouze were able to raise a production budget of almost 15 million euros--a significant sum by French standards and five times greater than Bouchareb had had for his previous film--was itself symptomatic of a sea change in the status of minority ethnic artists. When Bouchareb and other young directors of North African descent first began making feature films in the mid-1980s, these were almost invariably low-budget productions with limited releases, widely regarded as a marginal genre that became known as "Beur" cinema (Tarr). Common themes in these early films, the best known of which was Mehdi Charef's Le the au harem d'Archimede (1985), were the disadvantaged social conditions and racial and ethnic discrimination suffered by young people of North African origin in the banlieues, run-down urban areas in which postcolonial minorities are...
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