“It takes a village … ” : Transgressing Rural Geographies in Sinapi's Camping à la ferme

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 Sully reportedly claimed: “Labourage et paturage sont les mamelles de la France.” Pétain's June 25, 1940 radio address states: “La terre, elle, ne ment pas … Elle est la patrie elle-même. Un champ qui tombe en friche, c’est une portion de France qui meurt. Une jachère à nouveau emblavée, c’est une portion de France qui renaît.” See Barbas 66. 2 For a comparative study of citizenship and a history of jus soli, see Brubaker. 3 For the impact of Yves Robert's films on audience figures, see Powrie, French Cinema in the 1990s, 3. For an analysis of Claude Berri's films as “nostalgia for rural communities,” see Powrie, French Cinema in the 1980s, 50–61. 4 Even TF1's TV reality show “La Ferme des célébrités” presented rural France as a tough, wild place for city-dwellers to survive. 5 Other critically acclaimed documentaries addressing this malaise include: Depardon's Profils Paysans (2000, 2004), La vie moderne (2008), and Meunier's La vie comme elle va (2004), followed by Ici Najac, à vous la terre (2006). 6 Their portrayal of men and farmers, in particular, signals a crisis in the patriarchal order traditionally associated with the land in France. Philibert evokes a dying father and Meunier interviews an inconsolable widower. Depardon's aging farmers can’t find wives and die single and childless. Such documentaries present French audiences with a disappearing breed inhabiting increasingly deserted rural areas. 7 In his television address in November of 2005, President Chirac said : “C’est une crise de sens, une crise de repères, c’est une crise d’identité.” See Chirac. 8 Director Jean-Pierre Sinapi focused on various minorities in his previous films Vivre me tue (2003) and Nationale 7 (2000). 9 For his personal discussion of his experience within the Villepin government and acrimonious relationship with then Minister Sarkozy, see Begag's Un mouton dans la baignoire. The title itself alludes to Sarkozy's words about the killing of a sheep for the Muslim celebration of Aïd-el-Kebir. 10 The TIG (Travail d’Intérêt Général) was instituted in the mid 1980s and aimed at substituting community work for a jail sentence and at involving the community at large in the social rehabilitation of the delinquent. Only public organizations can offer TIG and the benefits are meant to be mutual (for the community and for the individual). Concrete examples of TIG include maintaining and keeping up public spaces (lawns, beaches) and fixing up “national” buildings (“patrimoine”). For a fuller description, see Ministère de la Justice. 11 The term was actually used by Begag in an interview with Marc Cheb Sun and Hélène Ganzman: “Et bien oui, il faut traverser le périphérique, aller chez les indigènes là-bas, les descendants de Vercingétorix … C’est risqué, parce qu’on s’en prend plein la gueule, surtout lorsqu’on est basané …” See Begag “La diversité, c’est mon pays !” 12 On RTL's “Chronique de Denis Girolami,” Girolami comments, “du fermier poivrot à la mairesse opportuniste en passant par l’agriculteur facho sans oublier la bouchère nymphomane.” 13 The Politique Agricole Commune was criticized for encouraging farmers not to plant for fear of losing subsidies. 14 To describe the same idea of a mobile frontier, but in a different context (Duvivier's Maria Chapdelaine about French settlers in Canada), Winifred Woodhull contrasts the pioneering défricheurs who “push back the frontiers of the wilderness” with the sedentary settlers. See Woodhull's “France in the Wilderness” in Stovall 61. 15 See “Dossier Presse Camping” 7.