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Audrey Evrard

Fordham University, Modern Languages, Faculty Member

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Audrey Evrard ([email protected] ) is Associate Professor of French at Fordham University. Her research focuses on French cinema, and more specifically on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in social documentary filmmaking. In recent years, she has contributed articles on the subject to Jump Cut, Working USA, Nottingham French Studies, and more recently Modern and Contemporary France. She also co-edited the special issue, “The Politics of Laziness,” for Nottingham French Studies in 2016. She is currently finishing a manuscript, Precarious Sociality: Ethics and Politics in 21st-century French Documentary (in contract with University of Wales Press).

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Papers by Audrey Evrard

Political Cinema and Anti-Imperialism

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2020

The imperialism/anti-imperialism dichotomy offers one way to categorise political films. These en... more The imperialism/anti-imperialism dichotomy offers one way to categorise political films. These encompass a wide range of contexts, practices, and genres; they cover cinematic traditions produced in Europe, Latin and Central America, Africa, and Asia, and include industrial, commercial, independent, and governmental films. In the early decades of the twentieth century, cinema was often called upon to propagate colonial propaganda, and this relationship between cinema and empire has remained central to Hollywood and British film industries up to the present day. This essay argues that the politics of antiimperialism in cinema have been plural, multidirectional, and have even at times presented conflicting ideologies, particularly insofar as Third Cinema failed to account for the direct

There, before you: caring for the uncared for

French Screen Studies, 2022

ABSTRACT Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras i... more ABSTRACT Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside institutions of care: hospitals, psychiatric wards, private doctors’ offices, nursing homes and even prisons. This article focuses on two films – Prendre soin/Caring (Bertrand Hagenmüller, 2018) and Être là/Being There (Régis Sauder, 2012) – that bring the viewer inside nursing homes and a psychiatric care unit located at the heart of a violent penitentiary – to contend that filmmakers have redefined (health)care as a political and ethical field so as to interrogate our collective (in)ability to care for all members of our society with compassion and attention. It proposes that Prendre soin and Être là actively engage with care as a set of practices, attitudes and interactions that continually need to be reaffirmed against misconceptions, managerial demands and institutional violence. As they do so, they position documentary cinema as a space where the value of care can be grasped more intimately. Furthermore, both films dislodge the viewer from the safe position documentary spectators expect to maintain by leading them to face alterity (social, psychological, physical) as a shared human condition.

There, before you: caring for the uncared for

French Screen Studies, 2022

Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside ins... more Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside institutions of care: hospitals, psychiatric wards, private doctors’ offices, nursing homes and even prisons. This article focuses on two films – Prendre soin/Caring (Bertrand Hagenmüller, 2018) and Être là/Being There (Régis Sauder, 2012) – that bring the viewer inside nursing homes and a psychiatric care unit located at the heart of a violent penitentiary – to contend that filmmakers have redefined (health)care as a political and ethical field so as to interrogate our collective (in)ability to care for all members of our society with compassion and attention. It proposes that Prendre soin and Être là actively engage with care as a set of practices, attitudes and interactions that continually need to be reaffirmed against misconceptions, managerial demands and institutional violence. As they do so, they position documentary cinema as a space where the value of care can be grasped more intimately. Furthermore, both films dislodge the viewer from the safe position documentary spectators expect to maintain by leading them to face alterity (social, psychological, physical) as a shared human condition.

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early 21st Century

University of Wales Press, 2022

Back cover blurb: A study of how French social documentary engages our precarious world. An ex... more Back cover blurb:

A study of how French social documentary engages our precarious world.

An exploration of turn-of-the-century French documentary cinema, Precarious Sociality explores how filmmakers engage and resist the ways finance capitalism has violently reshaped reality since the late 1990s. Audrey Evrard traces the dissolution of twentieth-century class narratives into a more complete recognition of difference empowering new solidarity grounded in economic, social, and ecological precariousness. Placing well-known auteurs side by side with less canonical filmmakers, Precarious Sociality reaffirms the enduring power of long-form documentaries in a political landscape reshaped by social media clips.

Topographies fantastiques dans la fiction télévisée francophone : Les Revenants (Canal +, 2012 ; 2015) et Zone blanche (France 2, 2017-2019)

TV/Series, 2020

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 décembre 2020. TV/Series est mis à disposition selo... more

On Impossible Cinema: Camille de Toledo’s Intermedial Archaeology of the Fictions of Our Times

Camille de Toledo is now recognized as a key figure on the contemporary French and European liter... more Camille de Toledo is now recognized as a key figure on the contemporary French and European literary scenes. He is also the author of a lesser known mixed-media body of work – drawing from literary, cinematic, photographic, digital and musical forms, genres and supports – that engages directly late 20 th - and early 21 st -century epistemes and provides essential insights into the author’s unraveling of the aesthetic, historical and political horizon of the early 21 st century. In interviews as well as in his writings, Camille de Toledo contrasts the project of a European po-ethical – an ethics grounded in poetics and language – that needs to be formulated and implemented in the 21 st century with the American cinematismes that dominated our collective experiences of the world throughout the 20 th century and that he strives to overcome and debunk in his work. This article focuses more specifically on Toledo’s excavation of these cinematismes. Drawing primarily from two short video...

Introduction: Time for Idleness…

Nottingham French Studies, 2016

Framing the World Economics in a Tuna Can: Luc Moullet Tracks the Origins of a Meal in Genèse d'un reaps (1978)

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

Nottingham French Studies

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the…

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

Nottingham French Studies

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the…

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

Nottingham French Studies

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the…

Topographies fantastiques dans la fiction télévisée francophone : Les Revenants (Canal +, 2012 ; 2015) et Zone blanche (France 2, 2017-2019)

TV Series, 2020

Rêve d'usine (Luc Decaster, 2003): presenting the vanishing workplace

In Luc Decaster's 2002 documentary film, Rêve d'usine, we see the factory, a workplace in crisis,... more In Luc Decaster's 2002 documentary film, Rêve d'usine, we see the factory, a workplace in crisis, gradually evaporate in front of our eyes in the last few minutes of the film. In this article, the foregrounding of the vanishing factory as a visual trope signifies a shift in documentary practice. By the mid-2000s, the closing factory had become a commonplace in French social documentary films. Engaging what is now a lieu commun in the collective social imaginary of contemporary France, I argue that Rêve d'usine renders manifest a subjective crisis: not only are these workers dispossessed of their economic and social functions, but they face an existential disjunction. What this article highlights more specifically is that the disjunction experienced by the small group of workers can become the site of their regained agency, notwithstanding the fact that this is a deeply precarious agency. This purposeful re-presentation of the workers' existential struggle is achieved here through the cinematic mise en abyme of their present spectrality. Adopting Jacques Derrida's conception of the spectre, I thus propose in this article that Decaster rejects a more traditional empathetic mode of identification between spectators and the filmed subjects. It is, however, by disjoining the workers' and the spectators' subjective experiences that Luc Decaster opens up a space where these workers can receive justice.

Political Cinema and Anti-Imperialism

Shifting Documentary Militancy from Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Following late nineteenth-century pamphleteer Paul Lafargue’s advocacy for “the right to be lazy” and the enjoyment of the flourishing society of leisure, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the filmmakers’ project a celebration of idleness. Rather, as they strive to restore the productive value of individuals unable and unwilling to enter the labor market, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) reject what the filmmakers see as leftist politics’ complacency with capitalism’s promotion of work as an ethics of self-realization. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on the proletariat’s self-identification and incidental political inscription in late 19th century society, this analysis argues that the two films discussed here operate therefore a political and aesthetic shift away from twentieth-century militant cinema by replacing the figure of political consciousness commonly associated with the industrial, capitalist society, namely the worker, with the unemployed post-industrial subjects of late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, these two films disrupt dominant narratives; by giving authority to the refusal of work as a legitimate experience, they allow the sharing and debating of these experiences to produce ‘disturbances’ in such public discourse. Entertainment and didacticism are thus intricately interwoven in these films.

Genèse d'un repas ou l'économie mondiale dans une boîte de thon

En 1978, Luc Moullet réalisait un film qui tend à représenter les rapports de production à l’éche... more En 1978, Luc Moullet réalisait un film qui tend à représenter les rapports de production à l’échelle mondialisée. Aujourd’hui, à l’heure où la théorie sociale est animée par l’enjeu de la totalité et sa représentation, l’article d’Audrey Evrard décrypte ce film, Genèse d’un repas, pour en détailler l’apport essentiel : sa mise en scène novatrice des rapports néocoloniaux dans les chaînes globales de marchandises, la stratification raciale entre travailleurs du Nord et du Sud. Entre critique du consumérisme occidental et du racisme en milieu ouvrier, Genèse d’un repas est au plus proche d’une pratique de « cartographie cognitive » appelée de ses vœux par Fredric Jameson.

French Documentary Perspectives on the Collective Politics of the Atlantic Shipyards, a Global Workplace

Focusing on three French documentaries filmed at French shipyards—Le dernier navire (Jean-Marc Mo... more Focusing on three French documentaries filmed at French shipyards—Le dernier navire (Jean-Marc Moutout, 2000), Les prolos (Marcel Trillat, 2002) and Un monde moderne (Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier, 2005)—this article addresses the impact of subcontracting, particularly the growing presence of temporary migrant workers, on labor collective organization and on the aesthetic of socially and politically committed documentary. Drawing from recent research conducted by French sociologists of labor and film analysis, it approaches these three films as a coherent corpus that manifests the erosion of twentieth-century working-class struggles, discourses, bodies, and sites but, most importantly, as a corpus that empowers early twenty-first-century migrant subcontracted labor, a category of workers typically lacking political representation and legal protections. Michel De Certeau's concepts of strategy and tactics provide a useful model to assess the changing nature of collective politics in the globalized workplace, from the power struggles of clearly identified classes during the twentieth century to the tactical reassemblage of contiguous but dispersed labor trajectories in the context of intensified economic globalization.

On Impossible Cinema: Camille de Toledo's Intermedial Archeology of the Fictions of Our Times

Framing the world economics in a tuna can: Luc Moullet tracks the Origins of a Meal/ Genèse d’un repas (1978)

Doctoral thesis: Ghost Workers: Contemporary French Filmmaking in the Global Age

Political Cinema and Anti-Imperialism

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2020

The imperialism/anti-imperialism dichotomy offers one way to categorise political films. These en... more The imperialism/anti-imperialism dichotomy offers one way to categorise political films. These encompass a wide range of contexts, practices, and genres; they cover cinematic traditions produced in Europe, Latin and Central America, Africa, and Asia, and include industrial, commercial, independent, and governmental films. In the early decades of the twentieth century, cinema was often called upon to propagate colonial propaganda, and this relationship between cinema and empire has remained central to Hollywood and British film industries up to the present day. This essay argues that the politics of antiimperialism in cinema have been plural, multidirectional, and have even at times presented conflicting ideologies, particularly insofar as Third Cinema failed to account for the direct

There, before you: caring for the uncared for

French Screen Studies, 2022

ABSTRACT Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras i... more ABSTRACT Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside institutions of care: hospitals, psychiatric wards, private doctors’ offices, nursing homes and even prisons. This article focuses on two films – Prendre soin/Caring (Bertrand Hagenmüller, 2018) and Être là/Being There (Régis Sauder, 2012) – that bring the viewer inside nursing homes and a psychiatric care unit located at the heart of a violent penitentiary – to contend that filmmakers have redefined (health)care as a political and ethical field so as to interrogate our collective (in)ability to care for all members of our society with compassion and attention. It proposes that Prendre soin and Être là actively engage with care as a set of practices, attitudes and interactions that continually need to be reaffirmed against misconceptions, managerial demands and institutional violence. As they do so, they position documentary cinema as a space where the value of care can be grasped more intimately. Furthermore, both films dislodge the viewer from the safe position documentary spectators expect to maintain by leading them to face alterity (social, psychological, physical) as a shared human condition.

There, before you: caring for the uncared for

French Screen Studies, 2022

Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside ins... more Since 2005, a growing number of French documentary filmmakers have taken their cameras inside institutions of care: hospitals, psychiatric wards, private doctors’ offices, nursing homes and even prisons. This article focuses on two films – Prendre soin/Caring (Bertrand Hagenmüller, 2018) and Être là/Being There (Régis Sauder, 2012) – that bring the viewer inside nursing homes and a psychiatric care unit located at the heart of a violent penitentiary – to contend that filmmakers have redefined (health)care as a political and ethical field so as to interrogate our collective (in)ability to care for all members of our society with compassion and attention. It proposes that Prendre soin and Être là actively engage with care as a set of practices, attitudes and interactions that continually need to be reaffirmed against misconceptions, managerial demands and institutional violence. As they do so, they position documentary cinema as a space where the value of care can be grasped more intimately. Furthermore, both films dislodge the viewer from the safe position documentary spectators expect to maintain by leading them to face alterity (social, psychological, physical) as a shared human condition.

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early 21st Century

University of Wales Press, 2022

Back cover blurb: A study of how French social documentary engages our precarious world. An ex... more Back cover blurb:

A study of how French social documentary engages our precarious world.

An exploration of turn-of-the-century French documentary cinema, Precarious Sociality explores how filmmakers engage and resist the ways finance capitalism has violently reshaped reality since the late 1990s. Audrey Evrard traces the dissolution of twentieth-century class narratives into a more complete recognition of difference empowering new solidarity grounded in economic, social, and ecological precariousness. Placing well-known auteurs side by side with less canonical filmmakers, Precarious Sociality reaffirms the enduring power of long-form documentaries in a political landscape reshaped by social media clips.

Topographies fantastiques dans la fiction télévisée francophone : Les Revenants (Canal +, 2012 ; 2015) et Zone blanche (France 2, 2017-2019)

TV/Series, 2020

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 décembre 2020. TV/Series est mis à disposition selo... more

On Impossible Cinema: Camille de Toledo’s Intermedial Archaeology of the Fictions of Our Times

Camille de Toledo is now recognized as a key figure on the contemporary French and European liter... more Camille de Toledo is now recognized as a key figure on the contemporary French and European literary scenes. He is also the author of a lesser known mixed-media body of work – drawing from literary, cinematic, photographic, digital and musical forms, genres and supports – that engages directly late 20 th - and early 21 st -century epistemes and provides essential insights into the author’s unraveling of the aesthetic, historical and political horizon of the early 21 st century. In interviews as well as in his writings, Camille de Toledo contrasts the project of a European po-ethical – an ethics grounded in poetics and language – that needs to be formulated and implemented in the 21 st century with the American cinematismes that dominated our collective experiences of the world throughout the 20 th century and that he strives to overcome and debunk in his work. This article focuses more specifically on Toledo’s excavation of these cinematismes. Drawing primarily from two short video...

Introduction: Time for Idleness…

Nottingham French Studies, 2016

Framing the World Economics in a Tuna Can: Luc Moullet Tracks the Origins of a Meal in Genèse d'un reaps (1978)

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

Nottingham French Studies

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the…

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

Nottingham French Studies

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the…

Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

Nottingham French Studies

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the…

Topographies fantastiques dans la fiction télévisée francophone : Les Revenants (Canal +, 2012 ; 2015) et Zone blanche (France 2, 2017-2019)

TV Series, 2020

Rêve d'usine (Luc Decaster, 2003): presenting the vanishing workplace

In Luc Decaster's 2002 documentary film, Rêve d'usine, we see the factory, a workplace in crisis,... more In Luc Decaster's 2002 documentary film, Rêve d'usine, we see the factory, a workplace in crisis, gradually evaporate in front of our eyes in the last few minutes of the film. In this article, the foregrounding of the vanishing factory as a visual trope signifies a shift in documentary practice. By the mid-2000s, the closing factory had become a commonplace in French social documentary films. Engaging what is now a lieu commun in the collective social imaginary of contemporary France, I argue that Rêve d'usine renders manifest a subjective crisis: not only are these workers dispossessed of their economic and social functions, but they face an existential disjunction. What this article highlights more specifically is that the disjunction experienced by the small group of workers can become the site of their regained agency, notwithstanding the fact that this is a deeply precarious agency. This purposeful re-presentation of the workers' existential struggle is achieved here through the cinematic mise en abyme of their present spectrality. Adopting Jacques Derrida's conception of the spectre, I thus propose in this article that Decaster rejects a more traditional empathetic mode of identification between spectators and the filmed subjects. It is, however, by disjoining the workers' and the spectators' subjective experiences that Luc Decaster opens up a space where these workers can receive justice.

Political Cinema and Anti-Imperialism

Shifting Documentary Militancy from Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in... more If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Following late nineteenth-century pamphleteer Paul Lafargue’s advocacy for “the right to be lazy” and the enjoyment of the flourishing society of leisure, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the filmmakers’ project a celebration of idleness. Rather, as they strive to restore the productive value of individuals unable and unwilling to enter the labor market, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) reject what the filmmakers see as leftist politics’ complacency with capitalism’s promotion of work as an ethics of self-realization. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on the proletariat’s self-identification and incidental political inscription in late 19th century society, this analysis argues that the two films discussed here operate therefore a political and aesthetic shift away from twentieth-century militant cinema by replacing the figure of political consciousness commonly associated with the industrial, capitalist society, namely the worker, with the unemployed post-industrial subjects of late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, these two films disrupt dominant narratives; by giving authority to the refusal of work as a legitimate experience, they allow the sharing and debating of these experiences to produce ‘disturbances’ in such public discourse. Entertainment and didacticism are thus intricately interwoven in these films.

Genèse d'un repas ou l'économie mondiale dans une boîte de thon

En 1978, Luc Moullet réalisait un film qui tend à représenter les rapports de production à l’éche... more En 1978, Luc Moullet réalisait un film qui tend à représenter les rapports de production à l’échelle mondialisée. Aujourd’hui, à l’heure où la théorie sociale est animée par l’enjeu de la totalité et sa représentation, l’article d’Audrey Evrard décrypte ce film, Genèse d’un repas, pour en détailler l’apport essentiel : sa mise en scène novatrice des rapports néocoloniaux dans les chaînes globales de marchandises, la stratification raciale entre travailleurs du Nord et du Sud. Entre critique du consumérisme occidental et du racisme en milieu ouvrier, Genèse d’un repas est au plus proche d’une pratique de « cartographie cognitive » appelée de ses vœux par Fredric Jameson.

French Documentary Perspectives on the Collective Politics of the Atlantic Shipyards, a Global Workplace

Focusing on three French documentaries filmed at French shipyards—Le dernier navire (Jean-Marc Mo... more Focusing on three French documentaries filmed at French shipyards—Le dernier navire (Jean-Marc Moutout, 2000), Les prolos (Marcel Trillat, 2002) and Un monde moderne (Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier, 2005)—this article addresses the impact of subcontracting, particularly the growing presence of temporary migrant workers, on labor collective organization and on the aesthetic of socially and politically committed documentary. Drawing from recent research conducted by French sociologists of labor and film analysis, it approaches these three films as a coherent corpus that manifests the erosion of twentieth-century working-class struggles, discourses, bodies, and sites but, most importantly, as a corpus that empowers early twenty-first-century migrant subcontracted labor, a category of workers typically lacking political representation and legal protections. Michel De Certeau's concepts of strategy and tactics provide a useful model to assess the changing nature of collective politics in the globalized workplace, from the power struggles of clearly identified classes during the twentieth century to the tactical reassemblage of contiguous but dispersed labor trajectories in the context of intensified economic globalization.

On Impossible Cinema: Camille de Toledo's Intermedial Archeology of the Fictions of Our Times

Framing the world economics in a tuna can: Luc Moullet tracks the Origins of a Meal/ Genèse d’un repas (1978)

Doctoral thesis: Ghost Workers: Contemporary French Filmmaking in the Global Age

Review essay of Stefanos Geroulanos's Transparency in Modern France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford University Press, 2017)

La ligne d'écume: Encountering the French beach

Book review

Laurent Cantet.pdf

This is a review of Martin O'Shaughnessy's most recent monograph study of the French filmmaker La... more

Déplacements dialectiques : paroles de cinéastes

Le roman urbain contemporain en France : entre modernité et surmodernité

The Politics of Idleness, Special issue Nottingham French Studies

by Audrey Evrard and Robert St. Clair (Dartmouth College)

Nottingham French Studies, 2016

"The aim of the present issue of Nottingham French Studies is thus twofold. First, we seek to int... more "The aim of the present issue of Nottingham French Studies is thus twofold. First, we seek to interrogate, from across a pluridisciplinary field of critical perspectives (philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, cinema), the discourses, practices, politics, horizons and amphibologies of un-working, inoperativity, non-employment (the negation of idleness indeed etymologically gives us the word for é-négoces, business: nec-otium), laziness, leisure: in a word, idleness. Are we to think of idleness as a mere interruption - that is, as a necessary element - of the structures, apparatuses, and teleologies of 'work' under Neo-liberal capitalism, tending ever more towards an intensification of labour both material and immaterial, and the colonization of spheres of leisure by the logics of biopolitical capital? Or is it possible that 'idleness' opens up a space in which we can 'work our way out' of labour?
Contributors: Ross Chambers, Patrick M. Bray; Marina van Zuylen, Claire White, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jeremy F. Lane, Audrey Evrard and Robert St.Clair

Work, but At Your Own Risk … We Warned You | Edinburgh University Press Blog

Despite the loud chorus of political and business leaders extolling the virtues of hard work, a c... more Despite the loud chorus of political and business leaders extolling the virtues of hard work, a counter-narrative calling into question the centrality of work has gained momentum in France since the early 2000s. My recent article 'Shifting French Documentary Militancy: From Workers' Rights to an Ethics of Unemployment', available in Nottingham French Studies (55: 1) focuses on two documentaries, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007), that tilt towards the most radical side of this critique. For the people introduced across the two films co-directed by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello, working is simply not an option they happily accept. For them, being unemployed is far from being tragic and gives them instead opportunities to pursue fulfilling cultural, social and political activities (reading, volunteering, activism) and content themselves more easily with less. Relying on contrastive editing, alternating archival footage (TV ads, newscasts, film clips, political speeches), live sequences and interviews with a wide range of individuals who have refused work, the filmmakers attack the ideological correctness of mainstream media. As the films engage the practicality and sustainability of an individual and collective refusal of work, they denounce the actual violence of the workfare/welfare system, grounded in arbitrary measures of employability and productivity. ADT and VRF, I argue, partake in a politics of laziness more so than in the glorious celebration of complete idleness.