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.
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?
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.).
Against liberté, égalité, fraternité? Sounds about right for most US Republicans.
Apparently at least one aspect of French culture is only for Frenchmen who can pay list price.
-dk
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.
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”).
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.
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.
“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.
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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