Popular Culture Review 32.1
Finally , taking into account Sciamma ’ s stated goals for the film ’ s message and form , along with the provocative language of its critical response in the press , the eventual aim here is to build upon Claire Mouflard ’ s insightful analysis of Sciamma ’ s “ artistic anticolonial practice of feminism ” ( 115 ), expanding upon an examination of the film ’ s characters and narrative to better appreciate its simultaneous critique of suburban non-places and deployment of any-spaces-whatever in order to both describe Marieme ’ s journey of self-discovery in a specific milieu and also to empower every young woman like her in every place and space .
NON-PLACES
Indeed , studying symbolization and its role in the construction of individual and collective identities is an important objective of Marc Augé ’ s work ( Colleyn & Dozon 28 ). In his 1992 Non-Places : An Introduction to Supermodernity , Augé champions an “ anthropology of the near ” ( 7 ), shifting the object of his analyses from France ’ s former colonies to the urban spaces of Paris : its metro stations , airport terminals , and peripheral highways . 2 Augé ’ s “ near ” is marked by “ supermodernity ,”— a globalized world in which technology , economics , and politics merge to transform history into current events , spaces into images , and the individual into a mere gaze ( Augé , Sense 103 ). This contemporary condition may lead to a strange kind of collective imaginary , for as the old myths of modernity have crumbled and faded , nothing has come to take their place except a growing indistinction between reality and fiction characterized by an overabundance of disconnected images and ideas , a symbolic landscape ill-suited to create a stable universe of shared signification ( Colleyn & Dozon 28 ). Instead , Augé assigns to supermodernity three excesses : that of events ( the 24-hour news cycle ), that of
42