• 2 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, Hon (...)

4The first four points of this theory are based on the literal definition of movement, on the hidden and visible aspects of people, objects, but also texts and ideas, on contact zones, and, finally, on the tension between individual action and structural restrictions. The fifth argument maintains that mobility studies should also analyse its opposite, namely the sense of rootedness, limitations, and the static. There is a seemingly paradoxical complicity between roots and trajectories, a reciprocity that Elizabeth DeLoughrey has addressed in terms of identities and cultural dimensions: Roots and Routes can – but need not – be read as homophones.2 By speaking of im/mobility rather than of immobility and mobility, the perspective of this article is in line with DeLoughrey’s thinking. The slash is used not for reasons of linguistic economy or graphic preference. In fact, there are additional aspects, neither completely immobile nor completely mobile ones, and, even more importantly, productive and relational aspects whose mobility also creates immobilities and vice versa. Thus, the term im/mobilities refers to the excess inherent in both terms and to their dialectical relationship. In fact, the second part of my title, “Im/mobilites in Incendies”, is designed to emphasise the ambivalence inherent in this terminological construction, an ambivalence that is fundamental to the construction of the film’s history, narrative, and cinematographic staging.

• 3 Among them, prizes in Adélaïde, Sudbury, Portland, Rotterdam, Valladolid, Vancouver, and Warsaw (In (...)
• 4 Résistante “recounts the evolution of a political and military activist, an athletic young pacifist (...)
• 5 “For western readers, her unadorned narrative elucidates a committed pacifist’s choice of violence, (...)
• 6 Rogers, “Narratives”, p. 95.

6Incendies is a key film in Villeneuve’s career, having been nominated for a 2011 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, winning several international awards, and thus gaining the visibility necessary for Villeneuve to be entrusted with blockbuster productions.3 It should be noted, however, that Denis Villeneuve’s Quebec films – Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), and Incendies (2010) – are different from his more recent productions such as Dune (2021), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Arrival (2016), Sicario (2015), and Enemy (2013), which are situated in the Hollywood tradition. As far as the story and the narrative of Incendies are concerned, it is essential to point out that these are the results of two adaptations, namely an autobiography that was adapted for the theatre, which was then adapted for the big screen. Here, we see the mobility of the media form, the story, and the latter’s settings and protagonists. Originally, the autobiography recounted the life of the Lebanese activist Souha Bechara, who tried to assassinate Antoine Lahad, commander of the South Lebanese Army − an ally of the Israel Defense Forces − during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon between 1985 and 2000 following the 1982 invasion. Without having planned an escape route, Bechara was instantly imprisoned and then tortured during her ten years of incarceration in a dreaded prison of the Israeli occupation zone.4 Her autobiography, Résistante (written in French), explains the evolution of her political activism from a pacifist stance to one of active engagement, gun in hand, and her imprisonment.5 She writes her autobiography in an austere style that also characterises several contemporary memoirs from the Arab world and conceals a sophisticated effort to submit a personal story to collective memory while initiating a space for reconciliation based on human understanding.6

• 7 The Lebanese-born Franco-Quebec playwright studied in Quebec, where he acted, wrote, and directed n (...)
• 8 “[L]a quête de soi qui participe à la formation des écritures dramatique et scénique de cette produ (...)
• 9 Nawal, Wahab, Sawda, Abdessamad, Chamseddine, and surprisingly “JEANNE. Non ! Non ! Ce n’est pas ça (...)
• 10 Puis il y a eu l’invasion du pays par l’armée étrangère. Ils sont montés jusqu’au Nord.” Mouawad, I (...)

7Bechara’s autobiography was later adapted into a play by Lebanese-Québécois playwright, actor, and theatre director Wajdi Mouawad.7 The play was first performed in France and then Canada in 2003 under the title Incendies. On stage, “the quest for the self that helps shape the dramatic and scenic writing of this production is forcefully embodied in a staging that sparks the creativity of the audience.”8 Here, the military conflict remains completely decontextualised: it appears as a civil war between refugees and militias without a recognisable religious affiliation or location. Nevertheless, some clues point to twentieth-century Lebanon: the proper names are mostly Arabic-sounding9 and one of the military invasions from the South (to the North) is named.10

• 11 “[U]n minutieux travail d’épuration du texte original pour […] plonger le spectateur dans un univer (...)
• 12 In the spirit of Edward Said and his pioneering book Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.
• 13 For a summary of criticism of the film’s highly aestheticised visuality, which often elicits touris (...)
• 14 This change is troubling in that it repeats orientalist and sexist stereotypes that the autobiograp (...)

8In turn, the film adaptation by Québécois director Denis Villeneuve, in collaboration with writer and producer Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, is “a meticulous work of purification of the original text in order to immerse the spectator in a realist fictional universe and to show rather than evoke, as Mouawad does, the quest for origins undertaken by the protagonists.”11 In sharp contrast to the autobiography and the play, the film projects an orientalist12 image of religious conflict and eliminates its dimensions of international politics by starting the story earlier: during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).13 The film retains the figure of the murderer, but, unlike the original autobiographical persona, the fictional character does not become a celebrated national heroine who speaks for herself in a clear and comprehensible voice.14 Instead, the film shows her transformation into a static and silent figure while the enigma of her life remains to be unravelled. In contrast to its predecessors, it foregrounds forced movements and immobilities.

• 15 International Movie Data Base, “Incendies”. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1255953/, accessed 13 Apri (...)

9The film tells the story of a woman, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), who lives in Canada and, after her death, bequeaths three letters to her twins Jeanne (Melissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette): one for their father, whom they believe to have died in Lebanon, one for their brother, whose existence was unknown to them, and a third addressed to themselves but which they will only receive after having delivered the other two letters.15 Thus, the story of Incendies is based on a traditional quest narrative. More precisely, two different quests must be accomplished, while the protagonists of both follow their own reasons for becoming active seekers of their past. Set in motion by the reading of Nawal’s will, the first quest revolves around the twins’ search for their origins. As a result of their investigation, Jeanne – and then Simon and the lawyer Jean Lebel (Rémy Girard) – are compelled to become mobile themselves, to travel both physically and psychologically.

• 16 The theatrical version does not involve the murder of Wahab, the young lover of Nawal (a 14- or 15- (...)
• 17 In the play, the mother Jihan is the dominant force demanding submission. As a grandmother, Nazira (...)

10Similarly, a generation earlier, their mother repeatedly fought against various forms of coerced immobility. The protagonist’s first incentive to move occurs during her youth when she finds herself pregnant, unmarried, and wanting to flee with her lover Wahab (Hamed Najem). However, Wahab is killed by her brothers,16 but, being protected by her grandmother (Majida Hussein), the head of the family,17 Nawal narrowly escapes the honour killing herself. The matriarch sends her granddaughter to study in the city, far from her family, but also far from her newborn son (the result of Nawal’s illicit relationship with her lover), whom she entrusts to an orphanage from which he will emerge as a child soldier. In the midst of the civil war, Nawal sets out to find her son but, unfortunately, struggling against a stream of refugees, she arrives too late to rescue him: the orphanage has been burned down, the children abducted. This unsuccessful search will haunt her throughout her life, leaving her with unanswered questions and the burden of the unfulfilled promise she made to her baby to find him one day. Similarly and equally unsuccessful, the lost son will also search for his mother. In the early years of their fruitless search, and as a result of the war, both become increasingly radicalised but unwittingly find themselves on opposite sides of the war parties: she as the perpetrator of an attack on an important politician, and he as a torture and rape specialist in a notorious prison. Finally freed from physical and psychological coercion, Nawal and her twins, who were born in the prison, take refuge in Canada. During her exile in Canada, she works for the lawyer Lebel until she becomes almost permanently silent. The mother and her children’s transatlantic crossing is psychologically charged with and driven by an unspeakable taboo. The major difference between the three quests lies in their temporalities: the search of the heirs, as a result of their mother's long-term search for her son, succeeds fairly quickly, which also successfully completes the quest for the father and brother.

• 18 With André Gardiés one could distinguish between four kinds of cinematic spaces: the “cinematograph (...)

11In the diegetic and narrative space of Incendies, mobility appears as the consequence of restrictive physical, political, and social immobilities.18 The parochial community rules of the small village, an ancestral place marked by stasis, regulate the individual through strict behavioral, political, and social rules. This coercive environment drives the attempt of two young lovers who had pre-marital sexual relations to escape the rigid norms and violent punishment stipulated by the village’s social and moral laws. The result of this attempt to flee is a permanent immobilisation of the lover’s body (and, perhaps, a mobilisation of his spirit) when he is coldly executed by Nawal’s brothers. The young woman would have suffered the same fate had it not been for the intervention of her grandmother, who confined her to bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy, entrusted the baby to the midwife, and sent Nawal away. From then on, the majority of Nawal’s physical movements are similar: despite the terrible events experienced by the protagonists, their movements are always privileged compared to those left behind. Nawal can study in the city, walk against the flow of refugees, and look for her son. She even finds a way to infiltrate a politician's family and assassinate him. Once released from prison, she and her twins take refuge in Canada. Nevertheless, it is after many years of exile that Nawal is im/mobilised, almost paralysed, and falls permanently silent, which contrasts with the combativeness and mobility that characterised her during her youth.

• 19 This thinly veiled intertextual allusion to Aimé Césaire’s famous work (Cahier d’un retour au pays (...)

12Initially led by the mathematician Jeanne, the twins’ quest for their origins takes them across the Atlantic to the Middle East in search of clues, if not answers, to the history of their biological mother and father. This also entails a return to the parental homeland.19 In this sense, the immobility that began with the mother’s death − the end of the body's autonomous mobility − is also a return to the beginning of the mother’s mobility. Similarly, the mother’s death also occasions the visit of the prison and, thus, a return to Jeanne’s place of birth. It should be emphasised that, in Incendies, the female position is repeatedly one that, despite patriarchal obstacles, manages to be mobile and ignore male failures and abandonments.

• 20 Sophocles, The Theban Plays: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, Trans. George Young, Ed. (...)

14Psychological immobility is also often reflected at moments when the protagonist is stupefied. Indeed, the revelation of the truth provokes a terrible shock for most characters as they are confronted with the unspeakable. This discovery of the truth is reminiscent of the process of understanding incest in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex.20 For, as soon as the mother and the twins become aware of the older son and brother, this knowledge gives rise to a feeling of horror, which, in this case, does not cause amazement but physical and linguistic inertia, dumbfoundedness, silence, and the manic stammering of word fragments, numbers, and unfinished thoughts. Learning about the truth fosters neither enlightenment nor happiness. On the contrary, it immobilises all movement. The psychological immobility or shock caused by traumatic realisations manifests itself physically, but above all it manifests itself as a crisis of language, a breakdown of speech, even aphasia and thus silence.

• 21 “HERMILE LEBEL. Il n’a toujours pas dit un mot. Il est resté avec Chamseddine et quand il est sorti (...)
• 22 For example, the title in German is Die Frau die singt – Incendies, in Italian La donna che canta, (...)

15On stage, this phenomenon temporarily affects Jeanne and Simon.21 In contrast, in the film the revelation of the truth spontaneously leads to psychological ruptures that result in a convulsive verbal repetition of words and numbers, in a repetitive formulation of an impossible equation. Nevertheless, this repetition of sounds does not begin at this moment. In fact, it is a theme that runs through the film, beginning with Nawal’s confinement until the birth of her first child and culminating in her imprisonment. Indeed, Nawal’s nickname, “The Woman Who Sings,” serves as the title of the film in a number of other languages.22 She got this nickname in the Kfar Rayat prison, where she used to sing a monotonous and unmelodious song, the repetitive lullaby “Nami” by Marcel Khalife, in order not to succumb to the recurring torture she suffered and heard. The lullaby diverts Nawal’s thoughts and carries them beyond the sounds and screams of the tortured. Moreover, the song gives her agency, saves her from madness, and imaginatively takes her into a different world. However, this method simultaneously puts her in even greater peril, because the guards interpret her singing, her audible presence, as an act of open defiance against the regime. Although the repetitive, monotonous song appears to signify the prisoner’s incarceration, it keeps her body and mind active and mobile despite the confinement. Moreover, this extraordinary strategy later serves to communicate crucial information to her daughter.

• 23 In the play, the twin affirms that “En mathématiques, 1 + 1 ne font pas 1,9 ou 2,2. Ils font 2. Que (...)
• 24 Khordoc, “Visibility”, p. 314.

17Indeed, the calculation one plus one equals one is significant for various reasons. For one thing, it refers to a mathematical procedure known as the Collatz conjecture, which is not, however, explicitly named in the play when it is presented by Jeanne to her brother in a crucial scene of recognition.23 For another, it symbolises the tragic ignorance of a torturer who, without knowing it, repeatedly rapes and abuses his own mother and thereby becomes at once brother and father to the children he fathers with his mother while remaining her son. The possibility of one plus one being one is an impossibility yet becomes tragically possible in the film. A mathematical poetics,24 this calculation generates an addition without any increase, an addition that does not exceed the initial number, an addition without movement. In the film, which reduces the numbers game, the twins seek to escape the horror of the truth of their biological father/brother as they plunge into the hotel pool and perform a desperate crawl stroke. As they realise the fact of their incestuous origins, the twins begin to understand their mother’s sudden silence, and it is the audience’s role to differentiate between Nawal’s final state of apathy and the militant anger that animates her as a young woman. Outwardly silent and immobile, she is shaken to her core by these revelations.

• 25 Mouawad, Incendies, p. 42.

18Both as play and film, Incendies represents war. By showing soldiers and refugees without situating them in particular histories, by showing anger without tracing its origins, the film invites the audience to make up their own stories and contexts. Consequently, it is not a political film in the militant sense of the term: it does not take sides. Rather, the position taken is one of forgiveness, redemption, and peace. For instance, in the play, several people talk about the need to “break the thread” of anger.25 In the film, however, the possibility of forgiveness and peace is mediated only through images that reflect the protagonists’ state of immobilised shock caused by the horror and violence of war and the traumas that result from it. Nevertheless, a strategy of movement and stillness is equally important to understanding the film’s political, social, and cultural representations of im/mobilities.

• 26 The film does not exhibit any decolonial topology: the South is still the place of violence, of a s (...)
• 27 In the sense of crossing a border between two divided semantic spaces. (cf. Jurij Michajlovič Lotma (...)

19Nawal’s movement from her native village to the city and the university is not only a geographical movement from the South to the North; it is also a movement in the topology of the film,26 an event27 that leads to social, cultural, and intellectual change. That this movement also implies a political change is made visible through Nawal’s return in search of her son: because of her fashionable Western clothes, she clearly stands out from other women. In a crucial scene, when she takes a bus after finding the orphanage destroyed, she shows the kind of flexibility her social (intellectual and religious) position offers her: hiding her cross and veiling herself, she transforms herself into a Muslim and enters a bus full of refugees. Soon thereafter, she escapes death by showing this same cross to the Christian militia that coldly kill the passengers of the bus, including children. Similarly, in Canada, her role as a secretary in a lawyer’s firm affords her a better position than many other immigrants have. Nevertheless, despite her survival skills, she remains threatened by an ever-present violent carceral system and human rights violations and therefore occupies a dangerous and precarious social position.

• 28 The most striking shock occurs in the village where their mother was born: she is not welcomed by t (...)
• 29 “SIMON. Je ne serai pas capable de le chercher, de le trouver ! [/] HERMILE LEBEL. Mais si, vous al (...)

20For the twins who grew up in Canada, the great moment of im/mobility is surely the return to their native country. Without speaking the local language and knowing the social codes, Jeanne bears the burden of her inherited cultural differences and her mother’s past although neither of the twins is accepted in their mother’s former community.28 For both, the return reveals what they do not know and thus an experience of profound disconnection. Socially, the twins do not seem mobile enough; their position is not one of radical social mobility, but her mother’s last will unsettles their lives and questions their sedentary and safely uneventful life in Canada. Jeanne risks falling down the social ladder when she abandons her doctoral studies in mathematics to go to Lebanon. This issue of social change related to a personal quest is addressed more explicitly in the play, in which Simon is a more complex character, an amateur boxer training (unsuccessfully) to become a professional. Indeed, Simon is worried about Jeanne, whom he advises against accepting the will and going in search of their origins. At the same time, the lawyer advises Simon to go on a quest with him to work through his traumas that prevent him from moving forward and creating the right conditions for a boxing career.29

• 30 “[U]ne nouvelle conscience cosmopolite et même un tournant transnational dans le cinéma québécois” (...)

21Considering the ways in which the film represents political im/mobilities, it is possible to argue that Incendies demonstrates “a new cosmopolitan consciousness and a transnational turn in Quebec cinema.”30 However, a distinction must be made between host country and country of origin. In the former, the apparently successful integration of the three asylum seekers reveals an international and cosmopolitan community. In the latter, the civil war disrupts both the stasis and calcification of rural rigour and the mobility of politicised protest, academic intellectual life, and creativity in urban spaces. In a way, the difference between rural and urban Lebanese spaces, as well as the two lifestyles related to these spaces, are destroyed. The violence that is unleashed generates, as we have seen, many physical and psychological displacements. However, at the level of politics, the violence of civil war has not brought about any great changes, only an endless war of reciprocal violence and its share of political assassinations, imprisonments, tortures, summary executions, reprisals, rapes, and child recruitments. It is the population that suffers the violent dislocations, the forced mobility caused by the war and its ultimate lack of direction; it leads to immobility, political stasis, and the coercive regulations of human movement. In the end, everything changes because of the war, but nothing changes because of the war.

• 31 “Like the original play, the film’s mythic framework stretches the limits of standard chronology, a (...)

22Until the digitisation of film, cinematography necessarily operated through the duality of immobility (i.e., the still photograph or frame) and mobility (i.e., the filmed photograph) in the material production of film itself: 24 photographs/frames on a film strip yield one second of animated images for a projection. Indeed, film is mobilised immobility. In the case of Incendies, the director’s bias, in collaboration with cinematographer André Turpin, seems to be projected onto the movement of the narrative and the cinematic shot, a complicated movement with radical temporal changes accomplished by ellipses, analepses, and prolepses, by quests and paralyses.31 Within this aesthetic field, the progress of the quest leads to a contrary movement, from the present to the hidden information of the past, to the mystery of the twins’ birth. Indeed, a form of cinematic im/mobility resurfaces repeatedly in Incendies in the form of long-lasting, even generational, prolepses and analepses, particularly between the mother and daughter during their time in southern Lebanon. Cuts and counter-cuts, and scenes in which the clothing, technology, amenities, and decorations are the only elements giving clues to the era in question (before the clear appearance of one of the protagonists), lose the viewer in the chronotope and encourage reflection on the links between scenes. These difficulties in identifying the situation as well as the continuation in time play with cinematic time and im/mobility. This ambiguity, which leaves room for misunderstandings, is accentuated by the repetition of identical shots linking different temporalities.

• 32 Kotte, “Zero”, p. 293; p. 296.
• 33 Kotte, “Zero”, p. 294.

23A striking example of temporal leaps, that is, of structural and visual parallels that together generate cinematic im/mobility, is the repetition of the same framing (high-angle establishing shot of a road crossing the opposite hill, sun, dry earth) in which a white bus moves twice in the same direction; the repetition creates an echo and superimposes the daughter’s journey onto that of the mother. We can see that for a young woman visibly adapted to living in Beirut in the 1970s, the journey to the south of Lebanon is − precisely because of this cinematic repetition − just as alienating as a foreign woman’s journey without local cultural and linguistic skills in the 2000s. This scene is typical of the framing in the Lebanese part of the film: rural and urban landscapes are captured in panoramic shots evoking Orientalist visions of tranquillity and timelessness.32 In contrast, the Canadian scenes can be interpreted as deterritorialised, generic, and anonymous third spaces of suburbanity.33 The reduced extradiegetic sound, too, presents parallels and paralyses; a single song is the primary support of the auditory universe of the diegesis: “You and Whose Army?” by Radiohead comes from another linguistic, cultural, and musical space. However, like the Lebanese lullaby “Nami,” repetitions of sound, in addition to those embedded in the diegesis, form an acoustic and musical im/mobility that complements the visual and narrative im/mobility of the story.

• 34 André Habib, “Mortes tous les après-midis - retour sur Polytechnique”. https://horschamp.qc.ca/arti (...)
• 35 “[L]’esthétique du cinéaste entre en conflit avec la pudeur éthique qu’un tel sujet demande.” Bruno (...)

24The cinematic elements that construct im/mobility always contain a metafictional aspect as they expose their own constructedness. This is particularly visible and complex in a scene where photographs apparently hold a historiographical value in the narration before being exposed as contemporaneous and political photographs in an editorial office at the time of their creation. This shift establishes an intermedial negotiation between photography − an immobilised moment − and filmography − the recreation of visual fluidity through the rapid succession of images. In this scene, and throughout the film, aesthetics opens towards an ethical question. Reading André Habib’s harsh criticism of a previous Villeneuve film, Polytechnique,34 which Bruno Dequen takes up again in his critique of Incendies, we may legitimately ask ourselves whether horror can be narrated adequately, in cinematically convincing ways, or whether, in this case, “the aesthetics of the filmmaker are in conflict with the ethical modesty that such a subject demands.”35 However, the desire to represent brutality only in an ugly light is reductive. A well-orchestrated aesthetic and narrative strategy is essential, especially in a film in which fatal blindness and character immobility, repetitive actions, and intertextual tradition − from tragedy to war film − must coexist. This strategy is particularly evident in a scene in which the main character understands everything but her daughter and the audience remain ignorant.

• 36 This idea of the tattoo differs entirely from the play in which a clown nose, a gift from the fathe (...)

25In Canada, Nawal interrupts her swimming in a public pool when she sees the heel of a man’s foot, tattooed with three vertically arranged black dots. The camera’s perspective here adopts the instabilities, restricted perspectives, and low angles of the swimmers. The viewer, who has already witnessed the moment when the grandmother tattooed the newborn through a close-up, understands immediately that he is her long-lost son.36 Nawal emerges from the pool with calm but feverish movements, passes a group of men at the edge of the pool without talking to the man with the tattoo, and sits motionless, with a blank stare, on a deck chair. It takes the whole film for the audience to discover the unspeakable reason why this woman suddenly becomes petrified in this very moment that leads to the resolution of various existential questions. In the water, she recognises the heel of the newborn baby her grandmother had tattooed with this distinctive sign. It is her son’s heel. At the same time, and this is where the problem lies, she recognises him, out of the water, as her torturer and rapist. The scene is thus used to generate a double awareness: from behind, this man is the son she has found, whose foot is marked; from the front, the same man has the face of her former torturer.