Approaching terrorism on screen: contemporary film and television in France and Belgium

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As the European country with the highest number of terrorism-related fatalities since 2000, France and its approach to terrorism has significance well beyond its own borders. The reaction to the fateful Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks of 2015 illustrates the global reach of those terrorist events that unfold on French soil, and has positioned France as a symbol of urban western lifestyles that have come under threat. Analysing how visual culture approaches these events can shed light on broader political, ethical, and cultural responses to terrorism. As the largest exporter of films in Europe with a globally admired film industry, France's filmmakers have now begun to turn their attention to this phenomenon. As such, the time has come for scholarship to consider France's cinematic reaction to its new relationship with terrorism in a singular analysis, particularising the cinematic manifestations of terrorism in France, and updating the study of terrorism in film by moving beyond the dichotomous pre- and post-9/11 approaches that dominate the current literature. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the socio-political relationship between France and terrorism, as explored by Plenel (2016), Badiou (2016), and Kepel (2015), and also in the global history of terrorism on film, particularly by Butler (2006), Shaw (2015), and Comer and Vayo (2013). However, the former group of texts lacks close consideration of important cultural works such as films, and the latter remains heavily focused on the 9/11 attacks. Now that French film makers have begun to release a variety of films dealing with terrorism since the 2015 attacks, this is the opportune moment to explore these socio-political questions and their impact on French representations of terrorism, to answer the timely question of French attitudes towards this new phenomenon.From as early as the First World War, French directors have explored the ethical aspects of representing traumatic events. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) became known as an anti-war film as a result of Renoir's refusal to represent battle, drawing attention to the futility of war based onnational identity. Following the Second World War, documentaries like Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais,1956) and experimental films such as Hiroshima mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) challenged cinema's ability to represent the traumas of the Holocaust, the Nazi occupation of France, and the Hiroshima bombing, revealing the dilemma of the inaccessibility to these events, which are temporally fixed in the unreachable past, and, as Resnais explores in Hiroshima mon Amour, cannot be appropriated by those who were not present at the events. Such a sentiment is expressed by survivors from both the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the Bataclan attack in documentaries considered within this corpus. Both survivor witnesses remark that they prefer to keep what they experienced to themselves.