Documenting the Charlie Hebdo Tragedy

Abstract

This chapter focusses on the feature length documentary L’Humour à Mort, directed by Daniel Leconte and Emmanuel Leconte (released in France in December 2015). Made just months after the fatal attack on the staff at Charlie, it provides a day-by-day account of the events of January 2015, as well as contextualising the periodical’s earlier defence of its right to publish the Danish cartoons. In addition, the documentary provides a palimpsestic tribute to the publication, the victims of the terrorist attack on its staff, as well as police and French Jewish victims killed during the same bloody week at the beginning of 2015 (including the attack on the Jewish supermarket that occurred in suburban Paris on 9 January 2015). The hypothesis that I will develop in this chapter is that the work is a strong example of a contemporary twenty-first century national cinema for France. That much is evident. However, I will also spend much of this chapter also arguing that the work is greatly nuanced and a significant documentary film in its own right. My ground for this argument is twofold. Firstly, that the structuring of the work owes something to the fragmented and polyvalent narrative techniques of late-modern aesthetics of the remix (and as espoused in Blier’s Merci la vie). Secondly, that L’Humour à mort is a telling micro-history that ably shows its viewers the horror of the experience of a contemporary terrorist attack.