Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Etre Et Parler: Being And Speaking French In Abdellatif Kechiches Lesquive And Laurent Cantets Entre Les Murs, Dana Strand

Faculty Work

French film-makers have long recognized the primordial importance to the nation’s ‘imagined community’ of the centralized public school system, which, since the early days of the Third Republic, has been viewed as a bulwark of Republican values. In this essay, I discuss the ways in which two recent films, Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive/The Dodge (2004) and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs/The Class (2008), interrogate the role French schools play in shaping national identity. Both films focus on language as a marker of difference as well as a point of tension, performance and potential subversion, by exploring the respective contrast between the …