Gypsies/Rom in Films Personal Conflicts,

Gypsies/Rom in Films

Personal Conflicts, but on the Big Screen

Gypsies have often played characters at the heart of conflicts in films. But a lot of the time those conflicts have had nothing to do with the history or dynamics of their community at all as ROM actors have been recruited to play a series of different "ethnic" characters in American films, especially Native Americans. After all, for many Hollywood directors (especially in past decades), casting choices were simple: An actor who was not obviously black or white could be cast to play pretty much any other race.

When Gypsy characters have appeared on film, ironically, they have usually been depicted by non-Rom actors. At least as perniciously (and indeed probably more so), the stories told about Rom culture have been highly stereotyped and usually derogatory, centered on dominant culture motifs of Gypsies as, at best, lovable thieves, and more often as the same kind of threatening figure often represented by black men in popular American culture.

However, there is a slim work of film that examines Rom culture from a more sympathetic and more accurate perspective. Included in this opus of work is the work of Tony Gatlif, a French filmmaker who was born to a Rom mother and whose early life as a child spending time on the streets of Paris mirror many of those stereotypes of Gypsies. Attracted to the idea of a career in film from a very young age, Gatlif has made a number of films that evoke the life of the Rom in Europe. This paper examines his work, focusing on two films in particular: the 1983 film Les Princes and Gadjo Dilo (1997). Both of these films present the lives of individual Rom men and women as full of low-level but continual conflict, the kind of daily stress that arises when the individuals in question are put under question pressure by the larger society.

Gatlif plays around with the stereotypes of Gypsies as many of his characters are engaged in the kind of low-level property crimes that many people tend to think of when they think about the "typical" Gypsy. His characters tend to be rootless, not as an intentional choice about a nomadic life but as the consequence of not having a place to call home. In some of this movies, such as Les Princes, he frames this low-level personal conflict against larger political conflicts. In this case, it is the Algerian War of Independence, the same international conflict that sent Gatlif himself as a young man from Algeria onto the streets of Paris.