Looking at history, from the 1792 revolution, to the 1961 massacre of Algerians and more recent racial attacks and the Charlie Hebdo shooting, these events may seem unconnected, but their roots stem from a culture of repression and violence within France. Amazon has declared liberté.īut these marks of respect ignore the real issues.īecause Paris is a city of 1,700,000 Muslims (ADRI 2000, cited in Laurene and Vaisse 2006). 89 of the 1500 attendees were killed.įacebook profiles turned red, white and blue. Three weeks ago, three extremists opened fire on an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan Theatre. Addressing this today, I would focus more on deconstructive film theory aided by scenes and analysis. At the same time, there’s a broader context surrounding depictions of Muslim identity within film itself. At the same time, a broader exploration could address other films centred on life in the banlieues and the surrounding political context towards zoning and the spatial conception of the city in itself: Girlhood (Sciamma 2014) and Divines (Benyamina 2016), other French cinema about “youth in revolt” dating back to 1968, the colonial unravelling of The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo 1966), the terrorists without a cause in Nocturama (Bonello 2016) today, and the monochrome violent excesses of the Belgian film Man Bites Dog (Poeelvorde, Belvaux and Bonzel 1992). In the intervening time since I wrote this essay, new analyses and recollections of these events have been formed both through critical texts and documentaries. Other resources exist out there such as Ginette Vincendeau’s 2005 critical text on the film, and recent non-fiction sources on the War of Terror and Islamophobia such as Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary The Looming Tower (Wright 2006) and Arun Kundnani’s wonderful The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Kundnani 2014).
However, there are a number of elements that could be addressed within a revised version, to avoid sweeping statements and a generalisation of the “media narrative”. Given the nature of the essay firmly reflecting events in November 2015, this essay has only been edited for publication on this blog for formatting. NOTE: This essay was submitted as university coursework toward Coventry University’s BA (Hons) programme of Media and Communications on December 1st 2015, to which I was recently awarded a 2:1.