Oracles of Suburbia: French Cinema and Portrayals of Paris Banlieues, 1958–1968

Abstract

The great film director Jean-Luc Godard once claimed that cinema was a kind of ‘oracle’ that anticipated grand currents of social and cultural change. This article examines films depicting the Parisian banlieues during the period 1958–68, a phase that coincided with the construction of mass housing developments in these areas. Beginning with Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle (1958), this article will chart the parallel evolutions of urban thinking and onscreen representations of the banlieues through Denys de La Patellière's Rue des Prairies (1959), Maurice Pialat's L'Amour existe (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967), and Tati's Playtime (1967). These films, it will be argued, were demonstrative of the predictive powers that Godard saw cinema as possessing, as they anticipated many of the critiques of mass housing that later emerged centring on the loss of ‘traditional’ communities, social alienation and consumerism. Yet, while banlieue cinema has often been seen as merely reflecting degradation and social ills, this article will argue that films also included ‘positive’ narratives centring on notions of nostalgia.