Smell and the City: Miasma as a Code of Crisis in Postwar French Cinema

Abstract

This essay focuses on the role the sense of smell plays as a moral barometer in the urban imagination. Smell has long been a tool by which to determine proper hygiene in the city, whether locating the potential of physical disease by foul odor or, more metaphorically speaking, cultural pathology in the form of prostitution and poverty. The essay deploys the sense of smell within architectural contexts according to the latter definition, that is, with respect to allegory. The postwar French suburban housing type known as le grand ensemble, or large housing estate, is the setting of social malaise and corruption in two postwar French films. Jean-Luc Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966) is the story of a prostitute whiling away her time in La Courneuve, a suburban housing project outside Paris, and Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) follows the hapless and violent existence of three young men, an Arab, a black and a Jew, in one 24-hour period as they move between city and suburb, life and death.

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