Abstract
Since the terrorist attacks that took place in Paris (13 November 2015) and Brussels (23 March 2016), the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek and the diasporic communities of Belgium—and in particular, Brussels—have been frequently analysed in European and Western media outlets. Two days before the tragic events in Paris, the (francophone) Belgian film Black (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, 2015) was released to Belgian audiences. The film achieved critical valorisation after winning the Discovery prize at the Toronto international film festival, prior to its screening at film festivals in Belgium, namely the Ghent film festival (in Flanders) and the Festival International de Film Francophone (FIFF) in Namur (Wallonia) (Feuillère 2015). The contextual backdrop of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism has led to a synchronic interpretation of Black as a potentially radical and subversive film. This chapter argues that Black represents the futile hope of a multicultural understanding of Belgian nationalism, as it reinforces the separation between excluded groups.
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Western media outlets in the UK, Australia, the USA and France have offered either sensationalist, specious or nuanced interpretations of the Brussels suburb, Molenbeek. In The New York Times, Cohen proposes that ‘[i]t is hard to resist the symbolism of the Islamic State establishing a base for its murderous designs in the so-called capital of Europe at a time when the European idea is weaker than at any time since the 1950s’ in addition to foregrounding that ‘41 percent of the population of Molenbeek is Muslim’ (Cohen 2016). After the two terror attacks, L’Express (2016) drew attention to the ‘jihadi threat in Belgium’, whilst Gendron (2015), in Libération, described Molenbeek as a site of an invisible presence of jihad, that is, that much of the radicalisation takes place online. Simon and Traynor nuance the generalised view of Molenbeek as a ‘jihadi central’, since the inhabitants of Molenbeek are attempting to change this specious interpretation (Simon 2016). Traynor’s (2015) interviewees note the ‘stigmatisation’ of the community against the backdrop of the terrorist attacks and the Syrian war.
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See Bosséno (1992) for an outline of ‘beur filmmaking’ in the context of French cinema in the early 1990s.
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Bart De Wever has increasingly used loaded discourse that exacerbates the climate of fear around the terror attacks in Europe. De Wever described the attacks in Paris as ‘Europe’s 9/11...It changes public opinion. And just like we have seen in the United States, you’ll now see new laws being voted across Europe’ (Cerulus 2015).
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There is also a distinct lack of consistency in newspaper reports concerning the filmmakers’ origins in Belgium, and their linguistic identity (e.g., see Denis 2015: 4, which does not follow the dominant narrative).
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Higbee (2001: 56) offers a nuanced and considered close reading of the mise-en-scène of the ‘miscegenated’ and ‘multi-ethnic’ Le Panier district in Marseilles. Tarr (2005: 85) cites Higbee’s analysis of space in the endnotes to her approach to Bye-Bye as a banlieue film, and further considers the ‘claustrophobic spaces’ of the apartments in the district (Tarr 2005: 81).
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Steele, J. (2018). Diasporic Belgian Cinema: Transnational and Transcultural Approaches to Molenbeek and Matonge in Black . In: Harvey, J. (eds) Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73667-9_6
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