Colouring the claim: visual code and national allegiance in 120 Battements par minute (Robin Campillo, 2017)

TY - JOUR

T1 - Colouring the claim

T2 - visual code and national allegiance in 120 Battements par minute (Robin Campillo, 2017)

AU - Hartford, Jason

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - The visual language of 120 Battements par minute imposes a disciplined approach to colour: specifically, the Tricolore. Blue, white, and red appear in a colour ‘chord’ that indexes the French flag. This chromatic iconography enables the film to assimilate minoritarian discourses into a French Republican narrative, staking a claim on the French nation on behalf of Act Up-Paris. By placing the national colours strategically within the mise-en-scène, Campillo’s film uses the Tricolore to help the audience integrate the characters and plot out of their organizational, medico-sexual, and ethnic specificities and back into the prevailing and exclusionary Republican ideology. Although 120 BPM aligns itself strongly and explicitly with various sexual minority and PWA communities, I argue that its cultural and commercial contexts require it to sidestep possible charges of communautarisme. Faced with the risk of telling the story of an exotic, possibly foreign-inspired movement, the film tells its story through a minoritarian plot and dialogue, while showing it to be patriotically French, through colour. Thus does 120 BPM command authority as a National film, while quietly balancing queer visibility with a claim to integration.

AB - The visual language of 120 Battements par minute imposes a disciplined approach to colour: specifically, the Tricolore. Blue, white, and red appear in a colour ‘chord’ that indexes the French flag. This chromatic iconography enables the film to assimilate minoritarian discourses into a French Republican narrative, staking a claim on the French nation on behalf of Act Up-Paris. By placing the national colours strategically within the mise-en-scène, Campillo’s film uses the Tricolore to help the audience integrate the characters and plot out of their organizational, medico-sexual, and ethnic specificities and back into the prevailing and exclusionary Republican ideology. Although 120 BPM aligns itself strongly and explicitly with various sexual minority and PWA communities, I argue that its cultural and commercial contexts require it to sidestep possible charges of communautarisme. Faced with the risk of telling the story of an exotic, possibly foreign-inspired movement, the film tells its story through a minoritarian plot and dialogue, while showing it to be patriotically French, through colour. Thus does 120 BPM command authority as a National film, while quietly balancing queer visibility with a claim to integration.

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85115846127

U2 - 10.1080/09639489.2021.1978415

DO - 10.1080/09639489.2021.1978415

M3 - Article

SN - 0963-9489

VL - 30

SP - 209

EP - 225

JO - Modern and Contemporary France

JF - Modern and Contemporary France

IS - 2

ER -