Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Maghrebi Migrant Women in France and French Cinema
- 1 The Voices of Maghrebi Women in Documentary Films: Framing Construction and Transparency
- 2 First-Generation Women in Short Films: Crossing Barriers and Communicating Experiences through Objects
- 3 The Voices of Maghrebi Migrant Women in French Téléfilms: Portraying Agency
- 4 Transmitting the Voices of Maghrebi Women through Feature Films: From Verbal to Non-Verbal Forms of Communication
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Film Corpus and Access
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Voices of Maghrebi Women in Documentary Films: Framing Construction and Transparency
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Maghrebi Migrant Women in France and French Cinema
- 1 The Voices of Maghrebi Women in Documentary Films: Framing Construction and Transparency
- 2 First-Generation Women in Short Films: Crossing Barriers and Communicating Experiences through Objects
- 3 The Voices of Maghrebi Migrant Women in French Téléfilms: Portraying Agency
- 4 Transmitting the Voices of Maghrebi Women through Feature Films: From Verbal to Non-Verbal Forms of Communication
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Film Corpus and Access
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
These are images that won't be seen again, and voices that will no longer be heard […]. With the first generation gone, an entire history goes with it.
– Yasmina KherfiAt first glance, it might seem that documentary films, by their very nature, could provide a closer, more accurate, or less-manipulated glimpse of Muslim women from the Maghreb in France than other artistic forms, given that ‘real’ women are actually seen and heard in them. One might also assume that the voices of the women reach spectators without being framed or filtered in a manner comparable to that in feature films, where for example, the women's voices are fictional, part of screenplays, and relayed by actresses. As Patricia Aufderheide reminds us, however, documentaries ‘are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose’ (2007, 2). Thus while documentaries do capture moments in the lives of ‘real’ people, as opposed to the performances of actors, this does not diminish the fact that they are constructed, at least to a certain extent, through processes of production, mise-en-scène, and montage (editing), among others, which are seldom controlled by the people who are featured in the documentaries. Indeed, the very definition of the word montage in French foregrounds the intention behind the action: ‘The act of putting together, using specific techniques, elements of diverse origins (texts, sounds, images, photos, etc.) in order to achieve a particular effect, the end result’ (‘Montage’, def. 3 in the Larousse dictionary; my emphasis). This ‘particular effect’ is akin to what film scholar Bill Nichols has termed the ‘voice’ in documentary film, which is produced though the interaction of different codes:
By ‘voice’ I mean something narrower than style: that which conveys to us a sense of a text's social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us. In this sense ‘voice’ is not restricted to any one code or feature such as dialogue or spoken commentary. Voice is perhaps akin to that intangible, moiré-like pattern formed by the unique interaction of all a film's codes, and it applies to all modes of documentary. (1983, 18)
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- Muslim Women in French CinemaVoices of Maghrebi Migrants in France, pp. 34 - 69Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015