French Politics, Culture & Society

It is now twelve years since French brinkmanship pushed American negotiators and the prospects of a world trade deal to the wire, securing the exclusion of cultural products and services from the 1993 GATT agreement and the maintenance of European systems of national quotas, public subsidies, and intellectual property rights in the audiovisual sector. The intervening period has not been quiet. Although the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was sunk when Lionel Jospin pulled the plug on negotiations in October 1998, the applications of new central European entrants to join the European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been accompanied by a continuing guerrilla battle fought by successive American administrations against the terms and scope of the exclusion.

Since the mid-1980s, the growth of multiplex cinemas has transformed the social, industrial, and spatial logics of film exhibition across western Europe. Pioneered in the United States, where they were developed in the mid-1970s as “destination anchors” in suburban retail centers, multiplexes first appeared in Europe in Belgium (as early as 1975), Sweden (1980), and the United Kingdom (1985). In France, multiplex development started comparatively late; a first wave of comprehensive theater modernization and rationalization, launched in the 1960s, had already created a distinctive national model of multiscreen complexes (such that one observer was moved to argue that, by the late 1980s, “without false modesty, France’s film theaters are the most attractive in Europe and among the best in the world”).

When the parties of the entire French political spectrum lined up to fight the US position on GATT in 1993, French cinema’s future appeared threatened. The audience had shrunk, theaters were closing, production had plummeted, and most direly, French market share had dipped to 30 percent for the first time in its history, as the US film share was at a postwar high of 58 percent. Ten years later, all of those indicators had turned around dramatically. The audience had returned to theaters, new theater construction and renovation were booming, production topped 200 films, up from just over 100, and market share had risen as high as 41 percent. Yet

For those of us accustomed to thinking of French cinema as a low-budget, philosophical alternative to Hollywood, the past few years might have been a bit disorienting. Established auteurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Agnès Varda) and challenging newcomers (Gaspard Noé, Catherine Breillat, Erick Zonca) continue to impress, but their idiosyncratic views are now complemented by an increasing number of what look a lot like, well, French “blockbusters.” These are popular genre films that feature special effects and glossy production values.

I will begin this piece with two contradictory observations that I will later try to reconcile.1 The first is that neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the framework of conventional fiction. The second is that, following its much trumpeted return to the real in the 1990s, French cinema could not avoid figuring the consequences of that same capitalist globalization. Reconciliation of this paradox will lead to the suggestion that French (or rather Franco-Belgian) cinema has above all focused on the fragments left behind once globalization has passed through the social terrain. But, far from producing a satisfactory solution, this reconciliation only opens onto a dilemma.

In 2004, fifty-one documentaries obtained a theatrical release in France. This new record represents a measure of the success enjoyed by the wave of documentaries that has reached France’s silver screens since the turn of the century. Tackling a variety of issues, these documentaries have been remarkably successful at home; in terms of domestic admissions, fifteen of the top seventeen performing French documentaries have been released in the last ten years.

The events that became known as the affaires de foulard began on 3 October 1989, when three Muslim girls who refused to remove their head scarves were expelled from their middle school in the town of Creil, about thirty miles outside of Paris. The headmaster, Eugène Chenière, claimed he was acting to enforce laïcité––the French version of secularism. According to Chenière, laïcité–– a concept whose meaning would be furiously debated in the months and years that followed––was an inviolable and transparent principle, one of the pillars of republican universalism. The school was the cradle of laïcité, the place where the values of the French republic were nurtured and inculcated. It was, therefore, in the public schools that France had to hold the line against what he later termed “the insidious jihad.”

Le référendum français de ratification du Traité constitutionnel européen constitue un des événements politiques principaux survenus en France depuis le début de la Cinquième République. Le « non » français marque un moment important à la fois dans l’histoire de la construction politique européenne, dans l’évolution des rapports que la France et les Français entretiennent avec l’Europe, et, enfin, dans le cours de la vie politique française. Nous nous attacherons surtout dans le cadre de cette courte contribution à ces deux derniers aspects.

Eric Dior, Un Couple infernal: 200 ans de francophobie et d’antiaméricanisme (Paris: Perrin, 2003).

Pierre Rigoulot, L’Antiaméricanisme: Critique d’un prêt-à-penser rétrograde et chauvin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004).

Alain Hertoghe, La Guerre à outrances: Comment la presse nous a désinformés sur l’Irak (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003).

Leora Auslander Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France by Lisa Tiersten

Rebecca Rogers Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France by Mary Louise Roberts

Jeffrey H. Jackson Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend by Michael Dregni

Jean-Philippe Mathy Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It by Ronald Aronson

Joel Revill The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin

Scott Gunther Liberté, égalité, sexualités: Actualité politique des questions sexuelles by Clarisse Fabre and Eric Fassin

Alec G. Hargreaves Muslims and the State in Britain, France and Germany by Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper

Notes on contributors