À l'attaque! Robert Guédiguian's Meta-Referential Cinema of Mediterranean Friendship and Solidarity

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Abstract: Robert Guédiguian's cinema comes across, on several levels, as a practice of solidarity. His works have been built on a close and unusually stable cinematographic community over decades. This social practice of filming is connected with a content-related political orientation that can be understood as having a Marxist foundation. If one defines friendship as the practice of living in solidarity, which connects familial bonds to their living environment and the world, then the two tendencies of a local and collective-historical exploration of friendship observed here can undoubtedly be noted in Guédiguian's work, which spans five decades. Looking at Guédiguian's oeuvre, it is striking that friendship is not only closely linked to a political understanding of the world but also to the Mediterranean region. As the son of an Armenian father and a German mother, themes of historical exile and contemporary migration from the Mediterranean play an important role in many of his Marseille films. Against this background, I contend that Guédiguian's cinema not only negotiates social practices of friendship and solidarity, it also brokers notions of belonging to the Mediterranean region. In this article I will elucidate Guédiguian's understanding of Mediterranean friendship. To this end so, I will focus on the unusually optimistic and playful film, À l'attaque! (2000), which has been often overlooked internationally. This film negotiates Mediterranean friendship as a solidary, sensual principle of life—not through a spatial opening of l'Estaque but in the form of a conte, in other words, through numerous transmedial references.