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Scene from »Athena«: an emotionally and aesthetically intoxicating experience
Photograph:
Kourtrjameuf Kourtrajme / Netflix
Pictures are weapons, that's what France is experiencing these days. The short video, which shows the last seconds in the life of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk before he was allegedly shot dead by police officers during a traffic stop, is one such weapon.
Just like the many films produced by rioting kids themselves, which show on TikTok and elsewhere how cars burn, shop windows are broken, black-clad teenagers let out their anger on the streets. The riots in France were triggered by images. Since then, she has been accompanied by a flood of images.
One film plays a role again and again: the 2022 drama »Athena«, produced by Netflix, which tells the story of a riot in a suburban settlement after police officers apparently murdered a boy living there.
There are masses of videos circulating on TikTok that cut together film scenes and images of the riots and have titles such as "Athena 2", "Athena Nanterre" or "Film Athena vs. La Réalité". Most of the time, the rap song »Onizuka« from the soundtrack of the film is played.
So was Emmanuel Macron just a little off the mark when he urged parents to take better care of their children? They looked, the president said, as if they were living out on the streets, which they had absorbed in video games.
Was it really not a brutalizing video game, but a seditious feature film that leads young people to destroy kindergartens and empty supermarkets?
The parallels between fiction and reality are at least striking. In Reims, young people rioted in front of a police station, put on stolen uniforms and filmed themselves with them – this is exactly the scene with which »Athena« begins.
In many videos, they handle fireworks, just like in the movie. Many wear black pants and hoodies, as do the protagonists of the feature film. However, things are rarely as simple as they seem. This is also the case here.
First of all, of course, it is neither video games nor feature films that are fueling the unrest. But frustration, lack of perspectives, exclusion, racism. The situation in the socially disadvantaged suburbs has not changed for years, the current victim is another in a long list of documented police violence.
The situation has been heated for a long time, and the government seems to have been aware of the power of images. In 2020, it wanted to pass a law that would have prohibited filming the police during an operation and disseminating the footage on social networks. It was only after fierce protests that she abandoned the project.
And then the relationship of the feature film itself to the riots is more complicated than it first appears. »Athena« stands in a tradition of left-liberal films that artistically condenses the hopeless situation of young people from the banlieues to a bourgeois audience.
One of the best-known, »Hate« by Mathieu Kassovitz, dates from 1995 and painted in stylized black and white a bleak everyday life that leads to catastrophe. In 2019, director Ladj Ly won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival with his film »Les Misérables«.
Ly, who himself grew up as the child of a Malian family in the prefabricated buildings of Montfermeil near Paris, was also involved in the screenplay of »Athena«. This film also took part in a prestigious festival, the Venice Film Festival. The film was directed by Romain Gavras, the son of legendary filmmaker Costa-Gavras, who made classics of political cinema such as »Z« and »The Invisible Uprising«.
All these films come from the cinematic high culture so revered in France and are anything but works of art that serve base instincts. On the contrary, one could critically note that their addressees are not those they talk about, but that they are spoken over their heads. Especially since »Athena« in particular plays it down in the end: it wasn't police officers who committed the murder after all. But right-wing radicals in police uniforms.
Obviously, however, »Athena« has reached those he talks about. And not for the first time and not only in France. The film was already cited as an inspiration during riots on Halloween in Linz. Also at the New Year's Eve riots in Berlin-Neukölln and Bonn-Medinghoven. This is partly due to its easy availability: »Athena« can be seen on Netflix, you don't even have to go to the cinema for it.
Above all, however, the film condenses the experience of the uprising into an emotionally and aesthetically intoxicating experience. Rebelling against the state and its representatives in uniform is given the consecration of a Greek drama here.
In the end, there are only losers, but at least they fought against what seems as inevitable as a fate dictated by gods. And the long, technically extremely complex sequences, in which the camera seems to dance lightly through the staged chaos, through smoke and barricades and crowds of people, invite self-empowerment by means of the film's drawing machine.
A maelstrom of images that pushes out of the space of art into the reality of France in the summer of 2023.