A France 3 documentary on Marseille, a rebel city
France 3 paints a benevolent portrait of the most mixed city in France. Without hiding anything from the failings of the Marseille city but emphasizing its capacity for resilience. A column by Olivier Toscer
Once upon a time in Marseilles (110 min), a film by Hugues Nancy on France 3, Wednesday April 6, 2022
“I was born almost three thousand years ago, long before France became France. I am one of the most beautiful ports bordering the waters of the Mediterranean, a city-world where all the peoples of the earth come to take refuge. I am a rebellious city, proud of my uniqueness. Football is king here and my supporters always dream of glory. But, for a long time, because of the violence of men, I also have a bad reputation. To this darkness that sticks to my skin, I will respond by making France sing and dance. Here is my story that these Marseillais who love nothing as much as their city will tell. They called me Massalia the Greek, Marsiho the Provençal, and no one ever managed to put me in chains. I am the oldest city in France, I am… Marseille. »
Thus begins this self-portrait of Marseilles that Clara Luciani, the child of the country chosen to tell the old city of almost three thousand years, agreed to embody. She who spent her childhood on the edge of the northern districts of the city where she studied, Clara Luciani “is” Marseille in this story of 2,600 years of a turbulent and fascinating history.
“OM is my national team”
Here is the self-portrait of the oldest city in France. A city whose landscapes bear the marks of a contrasting destiny. Gateway to the Orient, crossroads of trade and immigration, Marseille is a mosaic of 111 districts and 200 nationalities.
“Marseille is not Francesmiles a linguist from Aix-Marseille University. Besides, Marseille’s identity is self-sufficient”. Later in the film, a supporter of Olympique de Marseille adds: “OM is my own national team”. The tone is set: the Marseillais are separatists before their time, not quite French, not quite foreign either and a bit of all of that at the same time. .
Alternately, some famous Marseillais (Robert Guédigian, Macha Makaieff, Akhenaton, the singer of the group I Am…) and others more anonymous, deliver their vision of a particular city where “we are from here, but we come from elsewhere”.
Marseille, a French kaleidoscope
Both a departure point for the colonies and an arrival point for all the people of the Mediterranean, Marseille is a kind of French kaleidoscope from which you never know where to take it. The film focuses above all on the mixing of the 20th century. : its Italian community, the successive waves of immigration post-World War I where Armenians, White Russians or Jews from Turkey will be added, at the end of the Second World War, to Algerian workers, to end up melting into a southern melting pot a little crazy but which, so far, has always held up, whatever the price
The film recalls that if the Moroccan tabors and the Algerian skirmishers were the first to deliver, sabers drawn and bayonets fixed, the Good Mother of the German occupation at the end of the war, their descendants sweating like dockers on the port or workers in the gigantic Saint Louis sugar factory had to make do with straw mattresses in the slums for a long time.
Constrained and forced by the arrival of 100,000 Pieds-noirs in 1962, the socialist mayor and close to Mitterrand, Gaston Defferre then decided to expand the city to the north. Who remembers that the large HLM bars of the northern districts were built on land at the time populated by beautiful bastides, bought at a high price from the notables of the city? It was the era of the Glorious Thirties, years of recklessness that benefited everyone, even immigrants, before the crises of the 1970s broke out, which were to destroy the industrial fabric of the city and plunge its inhabitants the most vulnerable in poverty.
The black legend of Marseille
Born during the interwar period with the Corso-Marseille mafia, the city of Marseille is back in the headlines. But this time under the aspect of city gangs, drug trafficking and settling of accounts. Racism too. The film takes a long look at the assassination of a young Comorian musician by National Front billposters in 1995. He explains it by the still stubborn resentment stemming from the Algerian war. In the Marseille melting pot where all communities have citizenship, for better or for worse, former harkis, ex-indigenous, former FLN but also retired OAS and far-right activists of all kinds rub shoulders. Inevitably, sometimes the cocktail explodes.
This is the extraordinary destiny of a city like Marseille. He deserved to have his rich story filmed. One regret remains: by excluding evoking all its feats of arms and all its disillusions with this extraordinary human community, sometimes getting lost in long developments on the architecture and the dense heritage of the city, the documentary twirls between thousand themes. Even if it means skimming over them more than making them understood.
The mystery of the planet “Mars” remains intact.
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