Youth Dispossession, Volcanoes and Diaspora: Recent Developments in Francophone Caribbean Film

Abstract

THE PAST DECADE HAS WITNESSED SEVERAL EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS in Francophone Caribbean cinematic production, and this article presents a survey of the current landscape of Caribbean cinema in French, focusing on work by Martiniquan and Guadeloupean filmmakers.1 The distinct history of the French islands has given rise to the development of strong literary and theoretical traditions, from Negritude and Antillanite to Creolite, which seek to explore the parameters of Francophone Caribbean identity, questioning how this identity relates to the wider Caribbean and problematising the ongoing relationship with France.This complicated history famously finds expression in the work of the late Martiniquan theorist, novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, particularly in the extended essay Caribbean Discourse, in which Glissant laments the fact that in the Caribbean, colonisation has divided into English, French, Dutch, Spanish territories a region where the majority of the population is African: making strangers out of people who are not.2 Despite this call for a greater racial and diasporic solidarity in the early 1980s, literary proclamations of Francophone Caribbean identity are inevitably shaped by references to metropolitan French poets, philosophers and novelists, and must first be translated and contextualised in order to reach non-French-speaking audiences. In contrast, film offers a more immediate manner of crafting cultural works which, through their use of setting and characterisation, can create bridges with a regional Caribbean audience. The visual and audible appeal of landscape, soundtrack and emotion can, then, combine to overcome the obstacle of language.Neg maronJean-Claude Flamand-Barnys Neg maron (2005) demonstrates a pronounced desire to connect with a local Caribbean audience. Just three years prior to its release, the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002) by Fernando Meirelles had achieved global success, marking a new boom in neo-naturalist fictional narratives and images that focus on marginal characters, urban violence, poverty and extreme experiences.? Neg maron deals with these same themes, initiating the public to a poor area of an unnamed Caribbean island by following the violent everyday lives of marginalised young men.Neg maroris director Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny, who now works under the name of Jean-Claude Barny,4 co-wrote the script with Alain Agat, a Martiniquan,? and the film was produced by Mathieu Kassovitz and Richard Maignan. Barny had gained experience of the film industry by working with the acclaimed French director Kassovitz, and he was a casting director for Kassovitz's 1995 global hit La Haine (Hate), a film which also explores the theme of youth dispossession, and which examines the violent and chaotic lives of young French men from highrise estates on the outskirts of Paris.Barny began work on Neg maron in 1999, and moved back to Guadeloupe, where he had spent his childhood, to complete the project. The film skilfully blends the present-day era with references to the slave past - the title alone forges this connection - by passing comment on the ways in which this past continues to inflect the present. In 1998, the figure of the negmaron (maroon) played a central role in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French DOMs, and in Guadeloupe a flame honouring the memory of the neg mawon passed from town to town during the entire year preceding the events.6 Barny's film must, then, be understood as part of an ongoing cultural reworking of the memory of the Neg maron in the French Caribbean consciousness.Moreover, Neg maron can be viewed as part of a Francophone tradition of using film as a means of examining the economic legacy of colonialism and its impact on contemporary economic structures: in a very different context, the African film Bamako (2006), set in the Malian capital and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, also addresses these themes. …