Stepping into the Void? Examining the Political Trajectories of Cinema and Bande Dessinée in France

In a wonderfully-titled article published in Paragraph in 1992 – ‘How to avoid becoming a middle-aged fogey, with reference to three recent popular French films’ – Keith Reader discusses the literary-inspired, ‘determinedly non-realistic’ (97) direction of late ‘80s film-making in France, considering his chosen films as ‘symptomatic of the ideological and political watering-down of French society’ during the Mitterrand era (108). Despite later reflections from film scholars such as O’Shaughnessy (2010) noting the re-emergence of politically-engaged French cinema from 1995 onwards, by 2015 the then-editor of Cahiers du Cinema, Stéphane Delorme, would lament in a cover story for the journal the ‘vide politique’ of contemporary French cinema, resolutely restricted, as he saw it, to ‘des imageries coupées du réel’. A visual medium more traditionally associated with such a description, the bande dessinée, appears to have followed an opposing thematic trajectory to that of cinema in recent decades. Once largely restricted to juvenile subject matter – although frequently harnessed as a propaganda tool aimed at maintaining already-dominant ideologies amongst its young readerships – the Francophone bande dessinée has, since its 1990s transformation, increasingly engaged with political questions via a growing number of approaches. This article considers how this art form, contrary to the recent thematic evolution of French cinema, has developed since the Mitterrand era to become, arguably, the visual medium of choice for political activism in current-day France. It studies the progression of thematic trends from the emergence of BD reportage in the mid-1990s, to the visual chronicling of French presidential elections from the turn of the millennium onwards, before finally examining the mobilisation of the form in the last ten years as a form of artistic challenge to political decision-making in France and its adoption to this end by journalists and film-makers previously unfamiliar with bande dessinée creation.