© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Unfamiliar places: ‘heterospection’ and recent French films on children
Professor of French Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published widely on French cinema studies, including French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 1997), Contemporary French Cinema: Continuity and Difference (Oxford University Press, 1999), Jean-Jacques Beineix (Manchester University Press, 2001), and 24 Frames: French Cinema (editor, Wallflower, 2005). He is the co-editor of several anthologies, including The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (Wallflower, 2004), Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film (Ashgate, forthcoming 2005) and Composing for the Screen in the USSR and Germany (Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2006). He is the general co-editor of the journal Studies in French Cinema
This essay shows how films with pre-adolescent children as their protagonists, but intended for adult audiences, ‘simultaneously represent, contest, and invert’ typical viewing positions. The terms are those of Foucault in his brief essay on heterotopic space. Using Foucault's notion of the heterotopia, and Lefebvre's ‘genital spaces’, the essay compares and contrasts two French films released in 2002, Être et avoir and Les Diables, showing how such films create ‘heterospection’, a combination of nostalgia and dislocation in time and space, a place of defamiliarization and deviation, experienced as loss and anxiety. The essay suggests that the increasing prevalence of films with pre-adolescent protagonists in current French cinema could lead to a revaluation of ‘screen theory’, as heterotopic space has a differential relationship to the binaries associated with such theories. It is both within the male–female binary, and displaced within it, as a space which contests that binary.