Their Violence is Ours

A video version of this article is available in both high res and low res.

On the fortieth anniversary of the widespread protests that shook France in 1968, the electro-dance group Justice released a new music video called Stress.  Directed by Romain Gavras (Sheitan, Across the Universe), the video’s depiction of extreme violence generated widespread controversy around Europe. Evoking the slogans of ’68, blogger Louis Moulin called the video, “a cobblestone in the face.” Many critics found the clip deeply unsettling and difficult to assess; some condemned its portrayal of violence and race outright while others, like the filmmaker Chris Marker, thought it was “a poem.” Yet despite the hubbub and ruffled feathers, few recognized the film as the milestone in French cinema that it is.  Stress reappropriates cinematic violence from slasher and horror films for explicitly political ends, making an important argument about the connection between France’s festering racial problems and the consumption of mass media.

For six minutes a group of teenagers goes from a Parisian banlieue¹ (probably Clichy-sous-Bois or Montfermeil) to the city center with the intent of being as violent as possible, attacking the most helpless people they can find and destroying whatever they get their hands on. Having hijacked a car and destroyed it with a Molotov cocktail, the characters turn on the cameraman.² The music stops, the screen goes black and we hear, but don’t see, one of them shout, “filming this gets you off, you bastard?” - a distinctly violent end to a distinctly violent video.

This final phrase, “Ça te fait kiffer de filmer ça, fils de pute?” in the original French, could probably be rendered more harshly, but what’s important is the verb, kiffer, a word of North African origin that means ‘to like’. Here, though, it takes on a sexual connotation and its use suggests that the characters believe the cameraman has enjoyed filming their destruction, and has participated in their acts of violence in a very different manner than they themselves. It is the only instance in which we hear them speak, the only time they voice their anger by means other than physical assault. The real targets of their attack are the viewers who have been looking out from behind the camera. The music stops, the lights are out, the characters speak to us: we ourselves are attacked for enjoying their violence.

When Stress was released last May, it encountered a mixed, but passionate, reception. It was never shown on television broadcast because of fears that it would “incite violence.” Within a few weeks millions of people had viewed it online and of course no riots ensued. French bloggers and talking heads spent hours considering and reconsidering the “message” of the film. What, they asked, were its goals and its means of representation?

An oft-repeated criticism was that Stress “banalized violence” and sought to shock viewers for no reason.  Others denounced the video for its “proven racist tendencies.” Did it not show kids of Arab and North African descent performing the very acts of aggression and violence that they are stereotypically assigned? Weren’t the victims primarily white and didn’t it fail to depict any of the social problems that gave rise to their violence?

In spite of these serious charges, many commentators avoided the issue of race altogether. Better to talk about the cinematic elements, references and style. Such commentators thought it recalled the “ultraviolent” youth of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972) and the setting and issues of Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995). The leather jackets with Justice’s logo (a cross/coffin) are surely similar to the white shirts/pants of Kubrick’s film. But the comparisons miss the point – A Clockwork Orange makes on-screen violence an aesthetic and highly sexual phenomenon, encouraging viewers to enjoy the aggression onscreen and to take pleasure in uneasiness and in horror. It combines heinous brutality with comedy, style and sex, attempting to legitimize violence through association. This is a relatively common combination these days. Horror, slasher films and “torture porn” cultivate our fears by offering caricatured villains while helping us to enjoy that fear by mixing on-screen violence into aesthetic play. The result is almost always both sexualized and powerful. We simultaneously identify with the perpetrators and victims. We take pleasure as much in the thrill of acting out violent urges as in the horror of having them acted out on us.

Stress, however, uses violence in a different way. Though the throbbing dance soundtrack suggests some level of “unreality,” by filming in a cinema vérité style Gavras doesn’t “make beautiful” what happens on-screen; the obvious aesthetic glamour of, say, Tarantino’s Kill Bill isn’t there.³ The effects, the slow motion, the fantasy are all absent. Blood doesn’t spray in a geometrical arc across the screen; their makeshift weapons don’t glimmer and shine. There is no comedy to soothe and allay our misgivings.⁴ Even if we do come to identify with the perpetrators, our complicity is shoved back in our face with: “filming this gets you off, you bastard?” That final scream, which is really an accusation, unveils our viewer’s pleasure as both sexual and abusive. It forces us to acknowledge the exploitation of the characters on-screen: we use them to satisfy ourselves. In horror films the cruelty and terror on-screen are expressly intended for our amusement and are supposed to end when the credits roll. When the lights go down in Stress, the violence does not stop: it increases in scope to include us. The teenagers’ final attack rejects and condemns our imposed desires.

Few filmmakers have sought to make this critique and fewer have the sense of urgency as Romain Gavras, who is the co-founder of an art collective, called Kourtrajmé. The group has produced music and films in Parisian banlieues for years and has been a leading force in documenting life in some of the poorest parts of Greater Paris. Gavras’ work frequently confronts real and represented violence, often with multiple layers of irony that lead to difficult and uncomfortable assessments. One important reference is Michael Haneke, who also released a film last year: a remake of his own 1997 film Funny Games, which deals with similar issues of violence in film. In an interview following the release of the original version, Haneke says,

I turn the viewer into the killer’s accomplice, and in the end I chastise the viewer for playing that role. It’s rather sarcastic but I wanted to demonstrate how we always become the killer’s accomplice when watching this type of film.

Much of Funny Games tries to illicit both our consent and our resistance to violent acts, showing how easily we are manipulated by fairly conventional narrative twists. Later, in the same interview Haneke says, “If you’ve watched [Funny Games] to the end it was because you needed it. You needed to be tortured for that length of time to understand.” We watch the film to feel the conflict and resolution, the rise and fall. In a horror film this means: the pleasure in torturing and in being tortured.

Gavras has clearly understood Haneke’s aims. A viewer hoping to feel the pleasure of torturing and being tortured through conventional conflict and resolution will be unsettled by films like Funny Games and Stress, where the violence transgresses those comfortable boundaries. Stress furthers Haneke’s argument by forcing race into the equation. Whereas the villains in Funny Games somehow exist outside of psychological explanation (their acts seem to come ex nihilo), Stress depends on some deeply held French stereotypes. If we watch to the end it is not only because we enjoy watching violence but also because we enjoy or are at least captivated by watching the characters act out stereotypes for our pleasure. This is why charges of racism miss the point. At the close of the video, the characters call out to us for objectifying them for our own pleasure. Though we may enjoy playing the nicely delimited and easily identifiable roles of victim and perpetrator within the realm of the video, when it is over and the music has stopped we are revealed as just perpetrators – and nothing else. What happens in the video is, in the end, fictional; how we have related to the video is fact.

The argument the film makes is that to enjoy the rampage is to enjoy the stereotype the actors perform. The characters are not clichéd monsters or hideous villains, but French teenagers from metropolitan Paris, and, importantly, of Arab and North African descent. These boys have come to symbolize and exemplify much angst in French society: the guilt of colonial exploitation, the failures of Republican ideals and the quotidian racism of contemporary France are all bound up in what these characters are supposed to represent. Portraying these teenagers in film means connecting horror and slasher films’ methods of portraying of evil and violence to the ways in which France understands race.

This is why the scream at the very end of the video is so disturbing and it is the real reason why the video generated so much outrage in France. When we see how complicit we are in the violence, how we “get off on it,” we also see how this pleasure depends on the characters “playing” their race. Stress is a video of significant artistic and political achievement because it offers a brutal and unromantic portrayal of violence that reveals the enjoyment of that violence as exploitive and racist because it depends on viewers enjoying the characters playing a stereotypical role based on their race. This racism extends into reality insofar as the real inhabitants of banlieues are also expected to play out their stereotypes for the benefit of a white upper class.

This deeper message was clearly lost on French TV audiences and online viewers who refused to bridge the gap between real space and cinema space: the system of pleasure and exploitation embedded in Stress is the same system that determines the manipulation of the French-Maghrebian⁵ youth in the banlieus of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil. Their portrayal in the press is largely as the “hoodlums” they play in Stress, except without the ability to speak for themselves. The coverage of riots in 2005 and 2007 confirms this. Exposing this is surely a task worth pursuing but sadly few people in France seem ready to do so. Perhaps in the years to come viewers will be able to understand and recognize that final blacked-out scream, but for now the scene’s meaning appears to be lost in the darkness of their own understanding.

Nate Lavey lives in Portland, Maine, makes short films and manages crackleunion.com. View the video essay that accompanies the piece here.

¹Which in this case refers to a peripheral French slum, inhabited primarily by people of North African descent. But the term is applied in a variety of contexts, with a variety of meanings. Some banlieues are quite nice, inhabited by wealthy people of various extraction.

²Burning cars is an oddly common event in France. Approximately 1,200 cars were burned on New Year’s Eve this year, topping the recent record in 2007 of 973. [http://www.rue89.com/2009/01/03/voitures-brulees-un-record-2009-en-trompe-loeil]

³Aesthetic theory is often concerned with making beautiful life itself. In movie making, style and beauty are obviously disputed categories that function differently for different filmmakers. In Stress, the concern for beautiful violence (a la Kill Bill) is absent.

⁴Perhaps the only instance comes when one of the teenagers kicks in the car stereo when “D.A.N.C.E.,” another Justice song, begins to play.

⁵The Maghreb being the Western region of Northern Africa.