Focalizing on the Fringe: Foucault and Contemporary French-Language Film (Panel Presentation)

In the last twenty-five years, a plethora of French and Francophone directors have made films that feature characters marginalized by their socio-economic status, race, religion and / or gender, thus taking these individuals’ stories out of the fringe and placing them center-stage on the big screen. In fact, a trend can be traced in these films whereby when marginalized characters’ narratives are privileged, so-called norms of both filmmaking and society are often examined and questioned. Through the optic of Foucault’s theories of the Panopticon (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the New Prison)—a structure that bestows upon those located in the center of a structure (real or figurative) power to control and punish those at the margins—we will examine to what extent marginalized characters in recent French cinema adhere to or reject notions of 'normalcy' and the subsequent consequences of their behavior. In particular, the applicability of the Panopticon’s 'center-centric' perspective to contemporary cinema will be put to test through a comparison of scenes from Rosetta (1999) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, and Colline Serreau’s Chaos (2003).