Seeing Paris in total darkness: the aesthetics of opacity in Nicolas Klotz's and Élisabeth Perceval‘s La Blessure.

Nicolas Klotz's and Élisabeth Perceval‘s filmLa Blessure(2004) problematizes the political visibility and artistic representation of undocumented African immigrants in Paris by deliberately parsing sound and sight and imixing fiction with reality. Opening with a scene at the detention center at Orly airport,La Blessuretracks the sites and spaces accessible to undocumented immigrants. According to Élisabeth Perceval, screenwriter ofLa Blessure, the film is not about contemporary demands for asylum, with its ‘lot of statistics and proofs’ but about following alongside the experiences or sensations of refugees, combining the real and the fictional into a particular ‘carnal’ relationship. Similarly filmmaker Nicolas Klotz remarked thatLa Blessurewas filmed ‘next to [à coté de] those who have lost everything. In the space where they dare to still exist'. This language of proximity, of touching on the subject and spaces of asylum seekers, resists the logic of rendering visible, in order to remediate, the painful experiences of West Africans in Paris in many recent films. Films, such as Djib (Jean Odoutan 2000), according to film historian Carrie Tarr, forge ‘rewarding, if transient, cross-cultural relationships and … collective political action’ through an aesthetics of humanitarian individualizing joined with identity politics.La Blessure, on the other hand, takes a different approach – a complete spectorial disidentification with the main character, Blandine. Through a noncontiguous use of sound and image as well as fragmented narration,La Blessurefragments the spectator's sensorium to problematize the relation of individual bodies to the social whole, and the relation of the spectator to the nonsites inhabited by refugees in Paris – the detention center and slums of the periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]