The loss so young of Isabelle McNeill left her friends and colleagues grieving deeply. I was fortunate to work with Isabelle during our PhD years, when we coordinated the Cambridge University Film Seminar together. Isabelle was a creative, energetic, and ethical collaborator. She was already a uniquely generous intellect and her scholarship on cinema, cities, and memory went on to offer new pathways for research and thought. Isabelle’s video essay, Drones in the Banlieue, exemplifies her creative-critical intelligence and ethical conviction. It offers a surprising and moving perspective on drone vision in the context of the French banlieues, pushing against standard frameworks of surveillance and domination to discover instead intimacy, agency and shared belonging. I will try to situate the concerns and achievement of Drones in the Banlieue in relation to some of Isabelle’s other work while reflecting on her ethos as a scholar.
Drone photography has become pervasive in activities from filmmaking to urban planning to military surveillance. Drones enable a radically elevated, apparently unmoored gaze that seems simultaneously omnipotent and depersonalized. This aerial perspective has often been theorized with reference to the panopticon, and understood to exemplify mechanisms of surveillance, control, and spectacle. Drone vision, it is said, renders space as a mosaic of abstract shapes and monitored data, and is a vehicle of mastery, domination, and territorial power.
The banlieues have been an emblematic site of such top-down surveillance. The term “banlieue” typically refers to housing developments on the outskirts of major French cities whose residents often have their origin in migration from former French colonies. Imagined as spaces of otherness, social delinquency, and political unrest, these suburban peripheries have often been reduced to a two-dimensional, homogenized representation in media narratives. Scholars such as Mustafa Dikeç have conceptualized the banlieue as a site of “spatial injustice” shaped by political and historical forces that entrench segregation and inequality.1Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy (Blackwell, 2007).
Aerial photography has compounded the visual and political marginalization of these spaces, marking them as “dangerous” peripheries that require constant monitoring—a narrative that, in turn, justifies repressive policies and practices.
In Drones in the Banlieue, Isabelle gestures to these theoretical perspectives and discursive tropes, but surprises by refusing to present drone vision as an inherently oppressive or alienating technology. Instead, she reimagines it as a mode capable of tenderness, intimacy, and relationality. Isabelle’s audiovisual rhetoric is restrained and sophisticated. Drones in the Banlieue combines onscreen text (often phrased as questions) and footage from documentary, television news, and feature films. It deploys the affordances of digital video, including slow motion and repetition as well as juxtaposition, to invite the viewer to help compose the analysis. Notably, Isabelle avoids voiceover, but two thirds of the way through the video essay, onscreen text asks, “Could the flying, probing gaze be tender rather than controlling?” The question catches the tension explored by the video essay; it is a tension also at the core of much of Isabelle’s other work on visuality and space, some of which I discuss below. Technologies of separation, she insists, might yet hold the potential to reveal interconnectedness.
In its audiovisual discussion of the unconventional banlieue documentary Swagger (Olivier Babinet, 2016), Drones in the Banlieue critically repurposes the elevated gaze, reclaiming drone vision as a tool for making present shared and domestic spaces, and the agency of those living in the Aulnay-sous-Bois banlieue. The video essay follows Swagger in deconstructing stereotypes of the banlieue as a locus of exclusion, reframing it instead as a site of vitality, resilience, and conviviality. Both Swagger and Isabelle’s video essay acknowledge that drone images and aerial photography might aestheticize the banlieue’s spatial inequalities or reinforce systems of control. But the video immerses us in the affect of the documentary (and its evocative music by Jean-Benoît Dunckel of the French electronic duo Air) and shows how drone footage is imbued there with unexpected emotional warmth.
Isabelle situates Swagger in a specific tradition of aerial photography in cinema. Her video extracts the famous “proto-drone” shot from the banlieue film La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), and a helicopter shot representing angel flight from Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987), in order to show how the drone shots in Swagger can celebrate difference with a “loving gaze”. The power and precision with which this point is made is characteristic of Isabelle’s work as a whole. Drones in the Banlieue builds upon earlier attentive analyses, especially in Isabelle’s 2020 essay, “Music and Spatial Injustice in Banlieue Cinema”, which interprets Swagger, along with the feature Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016), through the lens of spatial politics.2Isabelle McNeill, “Music and Spatial Injustice in Banlieue Cinema”, French Screen Studies 20, nos. 3-4 (2020): 317–335. Here, Isabelle draws on Dikeç to argue that the French banlieue has long been characterized by a pattern of colonial-derived division that reproduces itself through repetitive representation and policy. But she again resists imagining the banlieue in terms of social pathologies, even to refute them.
In the article, Isabelle uses Phil Powrie’s concept of “third space music” to analyse the films’ soundtracks. For Powrie, third space music refers to a sonic space of negotiation “where different, alternative, subversive meanings emerge.”3Phil Powrie, Music in Contemporary French Cinema: The Crystal-Song (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Isabelle points to how Swagger rejects the default hip-hop soundscape of banlieue cinema in favour of the composed score by Dunckel, but also found music such as vintage, and notably non-French, pop songs. This substitution, she argues, disrupts entrenched expectations for cultural representation and expresses a “sampling aesthetics”, a sonic equivalent of the hybridity that infuses the onscreen portrayal. She shows how such incongruous musical choices celebrate the distinctiveness and agency of the banlieue inhabitants, in this case young people associated with the Collège Claude Debussy in Aulnay-sous-Bois.
In Drones in the Banlieue, Isabelle’s analysis of drone imagery achieves a similar inflection of the familiar. Just as she highlighted music’s potential to evince and soundtrack agency and distinctiveness through a third space music, the video essay arguably proposes a kind of third space vision. While drone imagery is often an avatar of militarized surveillance (or directly and grotesquely an instrument of assassination), Isabelle’s reframing allows the medium to adopt qualities of intimacy and community.
As such, Drones in the Banlieue bears significant thematic connections to Isabelle’s research on Parisian rooftops, work which will unfortunately now not take monographic form in the planned book The Rooftops of Paris: Cinematic Perspectives. Isabelle was concerned in this project with the dual symbolism of the rooftop as both a site of mastery—a place for panoramic and controlling surveillance—and a more unsettled space of transit and impermanence, aligned with precarious urban life. Likewise, she probed how filmmakers have used rooftop imagery to refuse and problematize this “view from above”. The rooftop, in Isabelle’s analysis, was visualized as a liminal space where geographies of power could be rethought.
This line of thinking is extended in Drones in the Banlieue, as Isabelle explores how the surveillant gaze of the drone might similarly be reinterpreted as a participatory and human gaze. The intellectual courage of this analytic move shouldn’t be missed. Often, in scholarship, abjection must be emphasised to the detriment of achievement, reflecting a critical tradition that grants symbolic capital to the scholar in proportion to her focus on victimhood rather than agency. But Isabelle, with no compromise of rigour, makes a counter-habitual case for how even instruments freighted with histories of domination might offer avenues for solidarity and creativity. Such a claim reflects not only her scholarly originality but also her feminist ethos, as articulated in the jointly authored “Tactics and Praxis: A Manifesto”.
Co-written with Louise Haywood and Georgina Evans for the journal MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, the “Tactics and Praxis” manifesto called for a resistance to certain exploitative structures in academia. In their place, it advanced the use of creative practices and “tactics” as feminist modes of collaboration, favouring experiments in craft and generosity over hierarchizing models of institutional validation. This ethos of creativity, resistance, and collaboration tangibly informed Isabelle’s approach to her work. Indeed, her Drones video essay and the “Tactics and Praxis” manifesto resonate in their refusal to reduce the lives of individuals to narratives of marginalization, instead recognizing creativity and self-fashioning even within systems of inequity.
Isabelle’s video essay ultimately functions as an invitation. Its refusal to impose conclusions, its gentle yet insistent probing of visual and political norms, encourages viewers to engage with alternative ways of seeing and imagining. This sense of hospitality—an openness to the perspectives, struggles, and joys of others—seems profoundly linked to the principles that defined Isabelle herself.
Isabelle McNeill’s imaginative intellect was matched by a generosity of spirit. She was not merely a producer of knowledge, but a creative collaborator who fostered shared spaces for thinking and relating. The loss of Isabelle is a tragedy for her partner and children, for her friends, and for her colleagues, but her work endures, leaving us with “petites pierres”—an image introduced in one of her essays and reprised elsewhere—small stones to build pathways of connection, empathy, and shared memory.4Isabelle McNeill, “Watch This Space: Women’s Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art”, L’Esprit Créateur 51, no. 1 (2011): 12–25.
Drones in the Banlieue concludes with the statement that Swagger “subverts the ‘drone system’ to propose alternative assemblages, emerging through the agency of the banlieue inhabitants themselves”. May we honour Isabelle’s legacy by ourselves imagining alternative assemblages and new possibilities for scholarship, just as she did with such generosity and grace.
Tributes to Isabelle McNeill:
Videos:
Isabelle McNeill and Michael Hrebeniak, ‘What is wrong with academia?’
Notes
| ↑1 | Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy (Blackwell, 2007). |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Isabelle McNeill, “Music and Spatial Injustice in Banlieue Cinema”, French Screen Studies 20, nos. 3-4 (2020): 317–335. |
| ↑3 | Phil Powrie, Music in Contemporary French Cinema: The Crystal-Song (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). |
| ↑4 | Isabelle McNeill, “Watch This Space: Women’s Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art”, L’Esprit Créateur 51, no. 1 (2011): 12–25. |
Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Aarhus University. He has published video essays in venues including 16:9, ZFM, and [in]Transition, where he is co-editor. His Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes was awarded best video essay in the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Practice Research Awards 2024. Among his books is a study of the 1966 film classic The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis, 2019), and his ‘Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism’ appeared in NECSUS in 2021.
Dr Isabelle McNeill was Philomathia Fellow in French and Film at Trinity Hall College Cambridge, where she had taught film studies and French Literature and culture since 2005. She was the author of Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) as well as articles and essays on film in relation to memory, the city, home, tourism, Internet culture and girlhood. She was working on a book on the cinematic rooftops of Paris, alongside related work on the Parisian banlieue and drone cinematography. She collaborated with colleagues to establish the seminar Tactics and Praxis, a group exploring intersections between academic work and creative practice as part of a feminist, ethical response to the academic institution. She was co-founder and chair of the board of trustees of the Cambridge Film Trust, a charity which runs the Cambridge Film Festival.
Thank you for your tribute, Georgia x