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Film Screening : Touche pas à la femme blanche

29 July, 2010

Touche pas à la femme blanche (Don’t touch the white woman) directed by Marco Ferreri, 1974 (100’).

A post-'68 two fingers to bourgeois rationality, starring Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroiani. The film relocates the Battle of Little Big Horn ('Custer's Last Stand') to Paris, nearly a century later - but still in period costume.

It’s not an attempt simply to tell that story, nor is it just an indictment of the Indian Wars. The film is an ambitious attack on the inequalities bred by capitalist 'development' - whether the manifest destiny of American westward expansion or the schemes and plots of speculators in the contemporary city.

The bizarre location used is the 'trou des Halles', the massive hole excavated on the site of Les Halles, the ancient markets that closed in 1971. Is this site a symbol for what 'history' leaves out, or just a big ugly scar in the centre of a city, a cheap stand-in for an American canyon?

In the last shot of the film, it's hard to avoid a psychoanalytical reading: the hole as an unspeakable, repressed sexuality. Both 'history' and 'sex' are subjects too traumatic to confront, which we strive, in different ways, to repress; there's a lot going on in that hole in the ground!

Date: Thursday 29th July
Time: 6pm

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