A Tale of Two Cities: The Technical Estate

AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield

Much is known about how estates function as a kind of political technology. They settle, emplace, warehouse, discipline, extract, constrain, and experiment with the inhabitation of those whose incomes and social positions require particular arrangements of affordability.. Affordability that is not only financial, but forms of provisioning and residency that manage their visibility, circulation, expenditures, indebtedness, and domesticity. Much less is known about how the introduction of particular technical instruments and sensitivities alter the social and governance landscape. Many estates are subject to extensive nocturnal floodlighting, illuminating the exteriors so as to curtail crime and illicit economy, to provide an atmosphere of continuous security. Additionally, the functioning of elevators are critical to internal circulation and constitute zones of volatility within a constricted public space, as they are sometimes objects of defacement. But what happens when certain technical devices are deployed to alter the view of what is going on, and that employ the verticality of the estate to affect ground-level events? This is where two recent films of estates in the Parisian banlieue come into play — Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouihl’s Gagarine.

Ly’s film is set in  Les Bosquets estate of Montfermei, where Ly grew up. It is mostly centered on the sensibilities and practices of three cops in the Street Crimes Unit, whose job is to circulate by car through the district making their presence felt in largely hit and run interdictions of both normal and nefarious activities, rendering even the most innocent manifestations of child’s play or simply waiting for a bus indicative of potentially criminal behavior. For one of the three cops, Stéphane, this is his first day on the job, and new to Paris, basically plays things by the book, while at the other extreme, is a brutish sort, Chris, who talks nonstop and disparagingly about every resident and is only ever momentarily reigned in by the assuredness of the third, Gwada, a black cop, whose mother lives in the estate. Chris likes to pull up to young girls at bus stops and smell their fingers for weed in an act of sexual intimidation. And when the girls try to film it, he grabs the phone and throws it to the ground. Here, the key thing is that you can get away with most anything as long as it is not recorded.

This raises the question of what is available to be recorded. The film is at is best when it depicts all of the toing and froing of everyday life, the kids tobogganing on a concrete embankment, the interweaving of speculation and necessity in the local market, the sly, respectful and weary efforts of the real local authorities who try to find common ground among antagonists, and the constant repurposing of what is available for other uses. One gets the sense that things could get out of hand at any time, yet, for the most part they don’t, revealing a tacit resourcefulness on the part of a deeply fractured and multiple collective. Clearly the cops need Les Bosquets more then it needs them.

Perhaps this is why they get frantic when an event occurs that could fundamentally disrupt this dependency. Buzz, a somewhat nerdy looking teenager, likes to assemble and deploy drones from the rooftop of his building, mostly to spy on girls his own age across the complex.  One day, the drone accidentally captures a scene where the cops are pursuing a youth, Issa, who is wanted for questioning in a theft. Issa is unintentionally killed in this pursuit by a flashbang when the cops are confronted by an angry group of kids. Despite whatever ameliorative steps at restoring a moral balance to the situation are taken by Stéphane and Gwada, upon learning that the situation has been filmed by the drone, Chris is obsessed with recovering the memory card and obliterating the evidence. This leads to a final violent conflagration within the stairwells of the estate, an event which within minutes would seem to wipe out all of the hard work residents exert to both maintain an infuriated resistance to marginalization and the pragmatic pursuit of everyday deals and small resolutions necessary to give some space of maneuver to everyone. Here, the estate becomes apocalypse.

Gagarine takes place in the renowned Cité Gargarine in Ivry-sur-Seine, built by the Communist Party in 1961, named after the Russian cosmonaut, and then demolished in 2019. The trajectory of the estate basically mirrored the fortunes of the party, which in the end proved unable to sustain the estate and it model of socialist progress. In the film, a black youth, Yuri, lives alone, his mother and younger brother having decamped into a new domestic situation where he was not welcome. Yuri, his long-time friend, Houssam, and Diana, a Romani with whom he would eventually fall in love canvass nearby warehouses for disused equipment that could be retrofitted into the dilapidating spaces of the estate in order to ward off the prospective demolition. But despite their skilled efforts, they are not enough to prevent unforeseen accidents from emerging during official inspections. The complex is sealed, residents, who long have taken good care of each other, move away, and only Yuri and a hapless low-level drug dealer Dali, both with nowhere else to go, are left to forage their way through the interior obstacle courses to maintain some foothold within their apartments.  

Yuri is an autodidact who seems to know everything about astral matters, electricity, plumbing, and computing. As the demolition crews proceed with their work to ready the estate for its eventual collapse, Yuri mobilizes his skills to covert his apartment into some kind of self-sufficient space,  building a complete environmental support system in the International Space Station, as his guide. This serves as a platform for the unfolding love story with Diana, a relationship expressed through the wondrous sensualities opened up by the making of a new world in the immanent ruins of once was, and with a sense of expansiveness offered by the liminality of a building emptied of residents but yet holding all of their collective dreams and memories. Unlike Ly’s film that pointed to all of the practices of “real management” effected on a day to day level in face of residents rage, economic precarity, plural compositions, and excessive policing, Gagarine re-imagines the estate as a potential utopia. Like all utopias an inordinate sacrifice is demanded, and Yuri nearly perishes as the former residents assemble one last time to witness the demolition take place. Yuri has somehow managed to completely rewire the charges into a vast morse coder signaling one last time the aspirations once embodied by the estate as a platform for a new life.