Merry Christmas in No Man's Land: European Borders, Language Barriers and Front Lines in Christian Carion's Joyeux Noel

Abstract

A geographic and symbolic space characterised by borders and barriers, Europe is the site of plural cultural identities and complex multilingual interactions. What constitutes the European continent, who belongs within it and who should possess the mobility to travel across it, are questions which have been most intensely scrutinised during wartime and are frequently broached in cinema. This chapter explores Christian Carion's quadrilingual 2005 film Joyeux No.l , based on the 1914 Christmas truce, in which European borders and territories are radically redefined. In this film, no man's land becomes a common ground for translingual communication. This chapter examines the film's representation of border-crossing and transgression as central to a constructive European experience, and investigates "the play of external borders and internal boundaries" (Marshall 2012: 50) central to cinema-monde through its transnational production and multilingual narrative.