For another mise-en-scène: polyphony and affectivity in the movie Welcome

Abstract

Traditionally known as a country of respect for human rights and political asylum in recent years France received notoriety by intolerance and expulsion of immigrants. Many of these situations are present in Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009) and provoked an intense social and political debate over immigration. The media visibility of different issues about the subject – which was possible because of the movie – ended with the expiration of the crime of solidarity, a law which punished french citizens who helped undocumented immigrants. To understand the presented situations by the movie, we use the studies of Zygmunt Bauman (1999, 2005, 2007 and 2009), contextualizing the movie and its production. Then, we discuss the imagetical construction process based on the concepts of Orientalism by Edward Said (2007), and Eurocentrism by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (2006), and France’s specificities about racism, using the work of Albert Memmi (1993) and Michel Wieviorka (1998). The presence of the immigrant in Welcome was identified with polyphonic qualities, according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective of polyphony. From the study of Luís Nogueira’s cinematographic specificities and the concepts of image, affection and visage by Gilles Deleuze (1985, 1995) we understand that the use of close ups aimed to produce an individualization of the immigrant and an affection for him. This way, we believe that Welcome cooperates in the sense of rising new possibilities of the immigrant’s fiction image, as well as about other minorities.