Article
Through the lens of terror: re-imaging terrorist violence in Boukhrief’s Made in France
Studies in French Cinema
(2019)
Abstract
Nicolas Boukhrief’s film Made in France (2015) charts an unsettling
path into the world of terror, with the radical intent to shake
public perceptions and disrupt state discourses by redirecting
the gaze inward to investigate the very disturbing, and much
repressed, phenomenon of home-grown terror. The film marks a
major departure in Western films about terrorism, in that it frames
the story through the perspective of the terrorist, and maps a
different cartographic imagination, directing attention away from
conceptions of terrorism as dispersed, networked or de-territorialised
to establish a geography in which terror is located in the
inner domain and manifests itself as a state of rupture or ‘anomie’.
Made in France avoids the trap of perpetual binaries (‘us’ versus
‘them’ rhetoric) to deliver a trenchant message about the growing
threat couched in the social fabric, and in our contemporary times.
By shifting the gaze from the more generalised subject of ‘terrorism’
to focus on individual terrorists as well as processes of radicalisation
and group dynamics, the film aims to unpack the
concept of terrorist and undo the spectacle of terrorism in order
to articulate a more complex and reflective narrative that emphasises
causality, history and temporality.
Keywords
- France,
- Home-grown terrorism,
- jihad,
- violence,
- religion
Disciplines
Publication Date
2019
Citation Information
Jimia Boutouba. "Through the lens of terror: re-imaging terrorist violence in Boukhrief’s Made in France" Studies in French Cinema (2019) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jimia-boutouba/9/