FRAMING EXCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF SPACE IN LAURENT CANTET'S ENTRE LES MURS

摘要

This article examines the spatial representation of cultural mixité in the latest film by Laurent Cantet. It takes the form of a close reading of Entre les murs (2008), which, while illustrating well the failings of French education and specifically its republican ideals of assimilation, appears also to endorse the benign authoritarianism of the one teacher featured and to frame the pupils themselves as the source of the problem. Taking into account Bourdieu's argument that the French education system always serves to reproduce social inequality and hierarchization, I propose that Cantet's concrete staging of the educational process has, in fact, a precise political aim: to reconfigure republican space by constructing a new spatial dynamics capable of freeing both cinematic space from its ideological frame and individual movement from symbolic violence. Through analysis of Cantet's complex framing strategies in three key sequences, I argue that the film renders powerfully present those who are habitually cast to the margins or excluded. By reconceiving the cinematic frame as a mobile and receptive vehicle for embracing the language of mixité, Entre les murs reveals itself ultimately as a constructive work of social mourning that reformulates in clear ethical terms the current dilemma of intégration versus communautarisme.