Suffering in Silence: Bodily Politics in Post-1995 French Film

Abstract

Developing earlier research by the author that had sought to trace the specificity of the current wave of socio-politically engaged films, this article focuses on the body, suggesting that it has become a core vector of ‘raw’ expressivity in recent French cinema due to the withdrawal of the discourse of the organised left as mediating instance. Brooks’s celebrated analysis of melodrama and the political philosophy of Rancière and Laclau and Mouffe are drawn on to examine the political content of Cabrera’s Retiens la nuit and Devers’ La Voleuse de St. Lubin. Engaging with theobjectified, embodied and isolated social suffering that runs through current cinema, the two films’ particular significance lies in their exploration of the possibilities of and obstacles to its articulation within an oppositional politics.