Sa nou ye: Filmmaking practices as formulations of identity in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique from 1976 to 2011
Item
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Title
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Sa nou ye: Filmmaking practices as formulations of identity in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique from 1976 to 2011
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b4138804ba66:11700
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identifier
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12298
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Creator
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Saint-Just, Sophie F.,
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Contributor
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Jerry W. Carlson
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Caribbean studies | Film studies | Caribbean | Film | Guadeloupe | Haiti | Identity | Martinique
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Abstract
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This dissertation considers the emergence of filmmaking practices in Haiti and in the French Caribbean (Martinique and Guadeloupe). I interpret the ways in which Haitian and French Caribbean collective and individual identities are reframed by the film medium in a series of films made between 1976 and 2011. I argue that these films do more than provide social commentary: they play an affirmative and contestatory role. Filmmakers renegotiate these identities by calling into question prevailing but limiting dichotomies: Martinique and Guadeloupe as assimilated French and now European Caribbean islands and Haiti as the first Black republic and the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.;Chapter 1, 2, and 3 concern Euzhan Palcy's landmark film Rue Cases-Negres. In Chapter 2, I argue that Palcy transformed Joseph Zobel's novel into a bildungsroman, migration, and a plantation narrative shot in the Hollywood Classical style. French critics who reviewed the film were unfamiliar with the cultural legacy of the (French) Caribbean. As a result they failed to understand the scope and meaning of the film (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 retraces the genealogy of filmmaking practices in Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe through the career of Darling Legitimus, a veteran actress who played the female lead in La rue Cases-Negres. .;Chapter 5 focuses on several Haitian and French Caribbean historical films where the past is rewritten as a grand narrative or through storytelling techniques that use oral tradition, Caribbean tropes, and theories. Diaspora, displacement, and alienation are the organizing principles of Chapter 6. This chapter examines recent Haitian and French Caribbean films that cast a critical look at the Haitian, Guadeloupean, and Martinican immigration experiences by proposing dystopian viewpoints. The ways in which Haitian and French Caribbean filmmakers have embraced marginality as a form of dissent is the focus of Chapter 7. Finally, Chapter 8 reviews the material conditions of production, exhibition, and reception of francophone Caribbean films.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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French
