What’s so Funny About Rabbi Jacob: Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973) and French Cinematic Comedy
This essay reappraises the political function of France’s popular cinema franchouillard [translated as redneck cinema]; a comedic cinema characterized by bawdiness, mischievous characters, lighthearted treatment of subject matter, physical comedy, screwball plots and slightly risqué sexual humor that thrived during France’s Trente Glorieuses (1945-1974) and into the 1980s. Gérard Oury’s Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), a comedy about a bigoted Frenchman who disguises himself as an orthodox rabbi, serves as a case study of the genre. The essay concludes that the cinema franchouillard served as an important medium through which the average French citizen moderated stressful realities and traumatic memories. In a time marked by a new Anti-Semitism and violence against Maghrébin workers, Rabbi Jacob disseminated a comforting universalist discourse about multicultural reconciliation and harmonious advancement into the future while relying on existing stereotypes, avoiding social realities, and circumnavigating historical wrongs.
Subversive Heterphilia: Jules Vallès, Séverine, and the Politics of Friendship, 1879-1888
An examination of a male/female friendship in context: Séverine, an investigative journalist, Dreyfusard, and Nobel Prize nominee, and Vallès, a utopian Socialist and Communard leader, befriended in the 1880s. Without ignoring the misogynistic, sexist, and patriarchal composition of late nineteenth-century male/female social interaction, the paper asks what personal benefits their friendship provided and argues that theirs was a friendship of political transference whereby Séverine retained and reconfigured Vallès’ socio-anarchistic position towards parliamentarianism and political parties. Rejecting scientific socialism, Séverine kept alive Vallès’ conception of socialism as a felling, a visceral experience.