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The culture that is French, a continuing series
Are these consistent or contradictory points of view?
What those foreigners are missing is that French culture is surprisingly lively. Its movies are getting more imaginative and accessible. Just look at the Taxi films of Luc Besson and Gérard Krawczyk, a rollicking series of Hong Kong-style action comedies; or at such intelligent yet crowd-pleasing works as Cédric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole and Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, both hits on the foreign art-house circuit. French novelists are focusing increasingly on the here and now: one of the big books of this year's literary rentrée, Yasmina Reza's L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn Dusk or Night) is about Sarkozy's recent electoral campaign. Another standout, Olivier Adam's A l'Abri de Rien (In the Shelter of Nothing), concerns immigrants at the notorious Sangatte refugee camp. France's Japan-influenced bandes dessinées (comic-strip) artists have made their country a leader in one of literature's hottest genres: the graphic novel. Singers like Camille, Benjamin Biolay and Vincent Delerm have revived the chanson. Hip-hop artists like Senegal-born MC Solaar, Cyprus-born Diam's and Abd al Malik, a son of Congolese immigrants, have taken the verlan of the streets and turned it into a sharper, more poetic version of American rap.
Those would not have been my exact picks but there you go. (I was offended by L'Auberge Espagnole; could not one of them have had an internet start-up? I also found myself longing for organized religion.) Alternatively:
In a September poll of 1,310 Americans for Le Figaro magazine, only 20% considered culture to be a domain in which France excels, far behind cuisine.
Or:
Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English.
Most of all, the French specialize in having good taste in culture, which is a form of interior mental production. A world music buy on a French label is virtually a sure thing. The question is how good your culture can get, these days, without exporting much. Here is the full and interesting story.
Thanks to David Zetland for the pointer.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 14, 2007 at 06:33 AM in The Arts | Permalink
Comments
I love France and the French, but their music SUCKS. MC Solar has been around for years, and while good, the fact he still gets mentioned as the pinnacle of new French amazes me. How can a country that is so good at cinema be so lousy at music?
Posted by: tom at Dec 14, 2007 8:12:47 AM
Frankly Tyler, I thought you would have better taste than to post something written for TIME. That says all that needs saying about this
Posted by: tf at Dec 14, 2007 8:25:37 AM
MC Solar is so passé ... and Tyler, Auberge is about exchange students studying/partying abroad, why should they be working?
The Time article, just as Time itself, only uses the foreign mirror to cast a rosy picture of the US. Newsweek and Time (and their audiences) are in a slumbering decline.
Culture requires context. US unwillingness/inability to learn about anything beyond their borders imposes a huge non-tariff barrier on the world (US audiences do not even accept British movies or TV series.).
Posted by: jaywalker at Dec 14, 2007 8:29:19 AM
I've always found French culture and politics to be the best indicator for me in matters of art, morality, philosophy or international relations. Whatever the majority French opinion is in any of these subjects is bound to be the worst position to take. Whether it's backroom oil-for-food graft, collaboration, or Jerry Lewis the French are always provide South to my North.
Mr. Sarkozy seems to be a welcome slip of random chance in the last 100 years of French history.
Posted by: The other Eric at Dec 14, 2007 10:33:07 AM
Against liberté, égalité, fraternité? Sounds about right for most US Republicans.
Posted by: jaywalker at Dec 14, 2007 11:04:17 AM
A simple question : why this question of cultures arises only about France, and not about Italy, Germany, Japan or Australia ?
Posted by: Mathieu P. at Dec 14, 2007 11:07:10 AM
Apparently at least one aspect of French culture is only for Frenchmen who can pay list price.
-dk
Posted by: Dick King at Dec 14, 2007 12:52:28 PM
US audiences do not even accept British movies or TV series.
So, BBC America is just a figment of my imagination? I didn't really spend several weeks last summer watching Life on Mars? I've never actually seen the original versions of Coupling or The Office?
I'm not sure more timely fiction is a good thing. I find it much easier to read ficion written in the 1860s than fiction written in the 1960s, the period when U.S. authors were most in the "here and now."
Posted by: Ted Craig at Dec 14, 2007 1:28:37 PM
What I often find myself marveling over is the way Americans (me included) return over and over again to the "France" thing. Why do we do it? It's not like France these days is a terribly important country after all. It's like a thorn in the palm or a sore tooth we can't keep ourselves from fiddling with.
I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be that American women fretted over Frenchwomen all the time. Frenchwomen (of myth, anyway) were stylish, pulled-together, comfortable with food and sensuality and sex. And, always, chic. It made American women feel clunky and clueless and want to spend five years in France learning how to wear scarves and boots and conduct love affairs.
My own pet theory about this: The French have great, or at least hugely confident, taste; we're a bunch of self-pleasing slobs. But we feel vulnerable about it, and easily looked-down on. We're insecure populists, in other words, while they're swaggering snobs. It irks us; it bugs us; we can't let it go.
My hunch is that if we got a little more confident (and more easygoing and less touchy) in our own taste we'd pay less attention to France. The whole "what's culture?" question just wouldn't bug us as much as it does. But that's just speculation.
If you can forgive a little self-promotion, a few more thoughts about the "France" thing here.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Dec 14, 2007 1:49:07 PM
Michael, on of the silliest concepts promulgated by the great unwashed is
the idea of French women being tres chic and l'amour nonpareil. My experience
was that once you removed the wrapper, French women were hairier than I was
and exuded a certain "air" that was rather, shall we say, reminiscent of an
extra-ripe Camembert.
Thet were also rather needy and non-reciprotive in the sack.
Posted by: Brutus at Dec 14, 2007 2:25:04 PM
Just to be fair Michael Blowhard... it is pretty much a sub-group of upper middle class Anglos who obsess over France.
Typically, they are the type of people who want to seem upper-class and sophisticated, but have just a little too many working class skeletons in their closet to feel completly confident in the social role they aspire to. They overcompensate with the whole Francophile thing, because "French" is the American pop-culture stereotype of continental sophistication and class.
If more Americans enjoyed French culture, or where even aware of French culture, then French culture would lose it's cache with class-conscious Americans. The more inaccessable French culture is to Americans, the more American Francophiles can prove how much better they are that those "self-pleasing slobs" as you like to call them.
Of course, the contrary is also true... superficialy disliking French culture is a way for an Americans of privledge to show how "down to earth" and "in touch with the common man" they are (hence things like "Freedom Fries").
Posted by: Rex Rhino at Dec 14, 2007 2:33:42 PM
A world music buy on a French label is virtually a sure thing.
Any recommendations in particular, Tyler?
Posted by: Ted Craig at Dec 14, 2007 3:06:06 PM
Brutus -- Ah, you're talking reality, not ideas ... That's interesting too. The whole country can seem to smell a little like an overripe Camembert sometimes, can't it? Ze French, zay can be funky.
Rex -- I take your point, but as you point out yourself a lot of NASCAR types love hating France. (The Will Ferrell movie "Talladega Nights" had a gay Frenchguy as the bad guy.) Negative feelings can be obsessive ones too. So it isn't just the upper-middle-class types who pay France (or someone's cliche image of France) a surprising amount of attention and energy.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Dec 14, 2007 3:34:52 PM
America's obsession with france, and vice versa, is becuase the two are so similar in key ways. france is the Super power that almost was, and like other nations that have strode accros the world stage as the pre-eminent power, they have an air to match. It seems the french are not defferential enough to accept their middleweight status, and for Americans for which European culure is the historical underpinning for their own culture, the french superiority complex grates especially hard since it too is built upon similar ideologically progressive footings.
Posted by: nyongesa at Dec 15, 2007 3:01:29 AM
I buy the wider thesis, but the only real visual-art example was a little weird. How did Robert Combas arrive as the top French anything?
I'm sure works by French artists Pierre Huyghe, Sophie Calle, Christian Boltanski and Daniel Buren can hold their own with Hirst, auction-price-wise or otherwise.
Posted by: Benjamin.L at Dec 15, 2007 3:29:47 AM
"The question is how good your culture can get, these days, without exporting much."
Failure to export would limit the quality of culture, presumably, by restricting the market for culture to the internal market. With a smaller market, the number of culture-producers would fall, right? The constraint, here, is the size of the internal market. Two things, one of them noted in the story, increase the size of the French cultural market. One is government subsidy, quite large in France (especially when you count the implicit subsidy of the "cultural reserve". The other is the percentage of private consumption devoted to culture. This, I would guess, is also relatively large in France. So I doubt that failure to export restricts the quality of French culture very much.
Failure to import, I think, is a much larger danger to the quality of culture. An intellectual culture can become ingrown and self-absorbed if it is isolated. But does France fail to import culture? Du tout! Despite the cultural reserve, France imports a lot of cultural products, especially American ones. So even though the world of Parisian intellectuals can seem a little bit incestuous at times, I don't think there's any danger as a whole that French culture will disappear up its own anus.
Compare U.S. culture. The U.S. exports a huge amount of culture, and consumes a huge amount, the vast majority of it domestic. For my money, that leaves the U.S. culture far more cut off from the rest of the world than France's, with a craptastic quotient that's hard to match.
Posted by: Michael McIntyre at Dec 15, 2007 9:42:54 AM
"So it isn't just the upper-middle-class types who pay France (or someone's cliche image of France) a surprising amount of attention and energy."
Case in point.
I guess by your provincial stereotyping you are a gun-toting cowboy-hat wearing bible-thumping Burger King engorged fatass.
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Posted by: bilard at Dec 15, 2007 8:41:32 PM
Michel Houellebecq Elementary particles
In one block of the Champ Elysses there are 2 macdonalds.One inside a a high class store.
Most american tv show of the last 5 or 6 years are imports , from idol to survivor and the Office.Sadly coupling , a british version of friends but for men or mature public, failed.
all around the world most vieved tv and cinema is made in the USA.
A big parts of it is not ameican.Titanic, canadian director.Independence day , german. Air force one , german.
what about Disney:Bambi, german.Pinocchio ; italian.Cinderella , frec¡nch,Peter Pan : british. Sleeping Beauty castlle based on Gaudi designed castlle near the town where the spanisn Disneys mother was born.
Perhaps it is the cosmopolitanism of America the basis of the succes
And is not new people like Stronheim, Shaw, Blasco Ibañez built Hollywod
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Was parkour too lowbrow to mention?
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