Counter-Model, Cultural Exception, Resistances
Any cartography of resistances to Hollywood domination and to the influence of neoliberalism in the cinematic sphere would inevitably place France somewhere near its center. Countering the prevalent hostility to state ‘interference’ in market mechanisms, France has maintained a generous system of state support for filmmaking that has, in turn, sustained a vigorous national production system. France has also played a key role within Europe both by defending individual state’s rights to support their national cinemas within the European Union (EU) and by promoting pan-European support for film. At a more global level, France has been a leading proponent of cultural exceptionalism and diversity in opposition to free market understandings of cultural activity. France has also been one of the heartlands of political counter-globalization, despite the progressive and seemingly inexorable internationalization of its own economy in recent decades.1 Responding to this broader context, recent French cinema, both fiction and documentary, has seen a return of political involvement as manifested in a wave of films dealing with the oppressiveness of the contemporary order.2 This coexistence of film industrial, policy, political, and textual resistances might suggest an admirable consistency. Yet things are, of course, more complicated. Not all resistances are equivalent and the French system is riven by tensions and contradictions, as underscored in a recent report by the Club des 13, a group of film professionals, which describes an industry torn between commercial and cultural logics and small and large players.3 Any celebration of French cinematic resistances needs to be postponed until after a careful examination of policies, industrial structures, and texts.4
French Cinema as Global Counter-Model?
The origins of the current French system of state support and regulation of cinema go back to the period following the Second World War. Consolidating the wartime Vichy regime’s interventionist stance, the French Fourth Republic established the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) in 1946. Faced with the postwar influx of Hollywood films and the felt imperative to defend its national industry, the French government set up the CNC administered state aid system that, with important revisions, still continues today. The cornerstone of the system was a tax on all cinema tickets that was used to support French cinema, particularly producers and exhibitors, thus effectively forcing American films to subsidize their French rivals, partially offsetting their overwhelmingly dominant position.5 The system was revised in the 1950s, and particularly after the installation in 1958 of the French Fifth Republic, a regime that underlined the importance it accorded to the cultural sphere by the establishment of a Ministry of Culture under the charismatic tutelage of André Malraux. The year 1959 saw the inauguration of a selective aid mechanism that allotted funds to productions according to their perceived cultural worth. Automatic aid mechanisms continued to support all French productions, but the addition of selective support marked a shift of French policy from a purely industrial logic (support of the national industry) to a hybrid one where industrial and cultural logics worked in tandem. This shift took place in a broader French context in which cinema’s cultural status was nourished by the country’s flourishing network of cinema clubs, the emergence of the New Wave, the strength and assertiveness of the specialist press (notably Les Cahiers du Cinéma), and film’s broader intellectual prestige. Contemporary mobilizations in support of cinema are still substantially framed by the kind of understanding that emerged from this foundational moment but also remain marked by the inevitable tension between film’s industrial and cultural dimensions.
Automatic and selective support mechanisms were at the heart of the French system throughout the next two decades. They remain vital instruments today but ceased to be the chief source of film funding after a series of momentous changes in the 1980s, a decade that saw the liberalization of the audiovisual sphere as governments of both right and left opened up state-controlled television and radio to private ownership. TF1, the leading television channel, was privatized. Two new private channels were established and, most importantly, pay TV channel Canal Plus was set up, with its main fare being recently released films. Whereas U.S. cinema had been the main threat, the newly expanded television sector, with its great appetite for films and capacity to draw audiences away, seemed the new rival to a cinema industry whose ticket sales, after plummeting in the 1960s and stagnating in the 1970s, were again in sharp decline. The French government response to this context was to make television pay for increased state support for cinema. Whereas the main terrestrial channels were obliged to invest a relatively low percentage of their profits in the film industry, Canal Plus had to invest 20 percent of its earnings in film production.6
The role of Canal Plus reminds us to what extent the French system is a regulated rather than a ‘free’ market one. What drives the system is a commitment to maintain some kind of balance between big and smaller players and cultural and commercial understandings of film. Since at least the time of the Lang Plan of 1989, France has sought to encourage producers, distributors, and exhibitors who are large enough to compete at home and abroad. Lang’s core objective was to promote big-budget filmmaking as a way to fight declining attendances. Films would no longer get proportionally less automatic public funding as their budgets rose, a clear financial incentive to grow larger, and a commitment was made to maintaining a dense network of cinemas in order to sustain audience levels. At the same time, the country maintained its support for small productions by subsidizing new directors and artistically ambitious films and by obliging Canal Plus to fund a diverse range of works.7 It allowed the regulated growth of the multiplexes that brought attendances back up from the lows of the 1980s and early 1990s, but also subsidized the modernization of France’s art cinemas.8 Although this commitment to commercial and cultural logics and large and small operations might seem contradictory, it makes considerable sense. A cultural cinema without commercial success would quickly appear an expensive, elitist indulgence. Yet purely commercial measures of success would be unable to justify the complex system of state support.
The French system seemingly provides a seductive European alternative to the Hollywood of global media conglomerates. After the sharp decline of the 1980s and early 1990s, when annual attendances were down to around 120 million, French audiences are robustly healthy. The 2008 audience figure of 189.7 million represents a 6.7 percent increase on 2007. French films took an impressive 45.4 percent of their home market, shading out the U.S.’s 44 percent, an exceptional result that owed a lot to the box-office triumph of popular comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis whose 20.5 million ticket sales were an all-time record for a French film.9 The home market share of French film is more typically 30 – 40 percent, which is nonetheless a much better figure than other European industries manage on their home market, even if it cannot rival the home performance of some Asian countries.10 In 2006, multiplexes provided just under a third of cinema screens, yet nearly half of French cinemas were categorized as art cinemas, an internationally unrivalled proportion.11 French film sells well internationally. UniFrance, the publicly funded export support agency, reports 84.5 million overseas seats sold for 2008. This represents a record for the period since they started to log figures in 1994 and easily outstrips figures in the midsixty millions for the previous two years. It takes overseas admissions for the year close to the figure for French film on its home market, confirming the importance of exports for the industry.12 The year 2008 also saw production reach a record high with 240 partially or wholly French classified films being made.13 The sum invested in French-led films went up by 230 percent between 1996 and 2006, which, even allowing for the increase in output, still represents a growth in average budgets.14 These impressive figures would seem to confirm the success of the French model. It can, however, be questioned in two ways. Firstly, it could be argued that, despite its apparent successes, it is increasingly dysfunctional, with a Byzantine set of regulations needed to maintain its impossible balances. Secondly, it might be suggested that, behind its apparently high-minded commitment to diversity and to noncommercial logics, it is a closed and protectionist system. These two arguments will be considered in turn.
Systemic Dysfunction
Some of the dysfunctions of the system are condensed in a rising sense that the French industry is splitting in two, with the emergence of a ‘two-speed’ cinema and an increasing gulf between the big players in production, distribution, and exhibition and the rest.15 This came to a head in 2008 when Le Club des 13 published their report lamenting the ‘bipolarization’ of the French industry and identifying crisis tendencies in all its different sectors. The increased average budget per film hides a situation in which the number and cost of big-budget films has climbed sharply, opening a widening gap between them and other productions.16 In contrast, producers of smaller films are forced to patch together a financial package drawing on the different funding sources (television, the public support system, regions, SOFICAs (tax-break vehicles), co-production money), needing to keep each funder happy to the detriment of the integrity of the project.17 Television may have become cinema’s cash cow but has no real commitment to small films and pushes larger ones to follow highly conventional lines in terms of style, narrative, and casting.18 The number of films being made has indeed increased but, rather than being an advance, this effectively means a bitter competition for screen space and an accelerated turnover. This situation is exacerbated by blockbuster-style release patterns of big films. Recent years have seen an inflation in the number of prints per film so that big releases can occupy a high percentage of the nation’s screens at a given moment. Promotional budgets have also been driven upwards, increasing by over 300 percent between 1998 and 2006.19 Lacking the means to compete, smaller films struggle for screen space and public attention.
The picture for distribution is no more reassuring. The French market is dominated by big, at least partially vertically integrated players; the distribution arms of American majors, of French TV channels (M6, TF1, Canal Plus), and of big exhibition chains. In 2006, the ten biggest distributors accounted for a market share of 83.3 percent.20 Because big distributors are able to spread their risks across a range of films and to make money at different points in the supply chain, they are relatively protected from the uncertainties of the business. Distributing fewer, smaller films and faced with increased promotional costs and the shorter shelf lives of films, the kind of independent distributors on which art and auteur cinema depend are increasingly vulnerable. Auteurs can be picked up by big distributors if they achieve a certain public profile but are then lost, by a cruel irony, to the small distributors who nourished their early career.
The situation in exhibition is not necessarily brighter. Multiplexes have helped revive cinemagoing, attracted new, popular audiences, and driven the upgrading of facilities across the range of theaters. The increased audience they deliver has helped sustain a popular French cinema that can compete with Hollywood at the national box office.21 What they have done for cinematic diversity is more debatable. Within Paris, where they cater for a large cinephilic public, they show a wide range of big budget and art-house films.22 What they show elsewhere, especially outside the big urban centers, is, in its standardized variety, much less so. Unlike many art cinemas, where business needs are balanced by a real commitment to individual films, multiplexes are essentially moneymaking machines. Because much of their profits come from confectionary and other ancillaries, films can easily become the lead product that sells the others. A long-standing convention had it that theaters did not charge for showing promotional trailers for films: breaking with this understanding, multiplexes charge for advertising upcoming features, increasing their own profits and further undermining the fragile economy of independent distributors. The loyalty cards that the big chains operate encourage customers to come to them repeatedly while discouraging attendance at other cinemas.23 With exhibition, as elsewhere within the industry, if you scratch the surface of France’s apparently balanced and diverse cinematic terrain, you find a bitter struggle for market domination and survival.
Export performances confirm this tension-ridden situation. Successful French exports in 2008 are indeed varied, including English language ‘postnational’ action films (Taken, Transporter 3), auteur films (Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet, Cantet’s Entre les murs), medium-budget-quality films (La Môme), national comedies (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis), and big-budget European co-productions (Astérix aux jeux Olympiques). At first glance, this list suggests an admirable balance between national and ‘post-national,’ art-house and popular, and lower and higher budgets. On closer examination, things look less rosy. Of the export box office for French films in 2008, 55.6 percent belong to big-budget, English-language productions made for international, multiplex audiences. Popular French-language hits like Astérix aux jeux Olympiques or Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis prospered in Europe but made little impact in the U.S. French art-house films continue to travel well, helping to fill an international demand for more demanding works, despite rising competition from other world cinemas such as South Korea. Yet, most French films never make it to export, not least because of the high marketing costs involved, which constitute an effective barrier to circulation.24 The international festival circuit constitutes an alternative, less purely commercial distribution channel for a non-Hollywood cinema.25 Yet, the pressure on festival screens is intense and the marketing costs of festival films, like those of other films, have increased greatly.26
Should one conclude from these dysfunctions and tensions that, far from serving as an European counter-model to Hollywood, the French system is irredeemably flawed, one more proof of the inability of the state to regulate efficiently? This would be precipitate. The cinematic landscape is constantly shifting (the rise of television, the advent of the multiplex, the constant drive to monopoly of the bigger players). The only way to deal with this inherent instability is through a constant series of regulatory revisions, an “endless tweaking of the system,” as Buchsbaum puts it, with each revision producing unforeseen effects that require further adjustments. The way that television money, although a vital funding source, has also driven films in fundamentally conservative creative directions is a case in point. Yet, as Buchsbaum also notes, continuous tweaking is the only way to maintain the kind of diversity that allows the French system to balance commercial and cultural logics.27 Rather than discrediting state intervention, the French model ultimately underscores the difficulty and necessity of regulating markets.
National Protectionism?
Is the critique of national protectionism more justified than that of regulatory dysfunction? Anne Jäckel, a leading authority on the political economy of European cinema, thinks not. Taking strong exception to academic analyst Martine Danan’s description of the French model as “a closed national system,”28 she proceeds to lay out a persuasive case for its ‘inter/nationalism.’ She notes that whereas production support is only accorded to films categorized as all French or French co-productions, automatic support goes to all distributors and exhibitors in France regardless of nationality. She underscores the openness of French film culture to foreign films: France has more film festivals than any other country and its rich art cinema network sustains a truly internationalist cinephilia, particularly in Paris.29 She notes too France’s long tradition of participating in co-production deals with European and other countries. France signed the first intergovernmental co-production treaty with Italy in 1949 and, a desirable co-production partner not least because of its generous support mechanisms, now has agreements with forty-four countries.30 France has also provided support for reputed foreign directors who for political or financial reasons have struggled to make films in their own country. These include names such as Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ken Loach.31 The list could now be expanded to include Abbas Kiarostami, whose latest (French-funded) film is in postproduction at time of writing. In addition, two French support schemes, the Fonds Sud and the Fonds Eco, were set up in 1984 and 1989 respectively. During its first decade, the former helped finance over 130 films from thirtynine countries from the global South. The latter contributed to the making of sixty-five features in the old Eastern bloc between 1990 and 1997.32 The international commitment manifested by these schemes is complemented by France’s leading role in driving European support mechanisms, within both the EU and the Council of Europe, the Media program coming from the former, Eurimages from the latter. Recognizing that a highly fragmented distribution sector was a major obstacle to the circulation of European films within Europe, Media came to focus much of its attention on supporting distribution. Seeking to promote co-productions as a way of building cinematic bridges, Eurimages provides production support for projects involving at least two European partners. France also played a leading role in the development of the Europa Cinema network, a panEuropean support system for cinemas programming a significant number of films from across Europe. Whereas these support schemes are relatively modest in their financial impact, France’s commitment to them evidences a determination to take something of the French model of public support beyond national borders.
These different initiatives support Jäckel’s conclusion that, far from having a closed system, France shows a consistent international commitment. She writes, “France’s film policy has made a vital contribution to the production of a transnational, world cinema,” and adds, “French and non-French films made with the support of France’s various funds, particularly selective aids, offer some of the best examples of a viable— and enduring—world cinema.”33 Whereas she is surely right to refute the perception of French policy and support mechanisms as narrowly national, she is perhaps too generous in the internationalist picture she paints. French policy is simultaneously nationalist and internationalist, essentially because France’s national cinematic interests in the face of the overwhelming strength of Hollywood are best served by the existence of a diverse international cinematic landscape and cooperation with suitable partners. Moreover, moving beyond the film-industrial, France has good political reasons to promote European rapprochement and its colonialist past at least partly explains its desire to maintain links and cooperation with the global South as a way to sustain its influence. More broadly, a country that was once a major power has long mobilized the cultural as a way to maintain a certain level of international prestige. Jäckel is fully aware of this complex nexus of determinants of the internationalism of French film policy but underplays it in her conclusions. She also underplays the extent to which the more narrowly commercial face of French cinema policy and the increasing industrial concentration it favors may actively militate against the kind of diversity she praises. If one side of French cinematic internationalism is expressed through support for foreign directors and films, another side translates into encouragement of big players who will be able to compete on world markets. English-language blockbusters are also part of French internationalism.34
Cultural Exceptionalism and Cultural Diversity
In the same way that France has driven European cinema policy, it has also played a leading role in cultural policy more broadly and particularly in defense of cultural exceptionalism and later of cultural diversity. French cultural exceptionalism, the refusal to consider culture as just another merchandise or service, came to the fore in 1992 at the GATT trade negotiations when the Americans predictably took a strong free-trade line and the French dug in their heels. Not simply an affair of governments and bureaucrats, the GATT talks mobilized substantial elements of the cultural industries with French professionals and industry organizations predictably playing a leading role in lobbying at national and European levels.35 We have seen that French cinema, far from being a homogeneous block, is riven by competing interests. What helped it unite in this case was the threat to the support system. The fact that leading exhibitors were also producers of films and major benefactors from the system helps explain the ease with which consensus was achieved.36 The GATT’s threat to European agricultural subsidies was then a bigger issue in France than culture, with small farmers putting considerable pressure on the government through highly visible public mobilizations. The coupling of agriculture and culture allowed the former to lay claim to a cultural dimension—agricultural production was not simply a business but part of a national identity and way of life—and the latter to connect to other struggles and to appear less sectoral in its thrust.37
The Franco-American standoff at the GATT was an unequal confrontation. France badly needed support from the EU and its individual member states. The EU could not be counted on. Its core purpose being the abolition to barriers to circulation within the union, it took a dim view of national mechanisms that might be seen to constitute a barrier to the free flow of audiovisual products. In 1979, having outlawed quotas and tariff barriers, it turned its attention to state support mechanisms, only to come up against vigorous opposition from most of the states concerned. The EU is far from monolithic. Some of its members—the UK being a prime example—favor liberalization of markets. Others, like France and Germany, are far more inclined to support state intervention. Important EU Directorates-General (the European Commission’s policy arms) have pushed the liberalization agenda whereas the less influential Directorate responsible for culture has backed support mechanisms.38 When the EU was finally persuaded to align itself with the cultural exception, it was the result of France’s ability to convince other nations and intense lobbying by cultural professionals at a national and European level. Due to their high media visibility, cinema professionals such as the actor Gérard Depardieu were able to take the campaign to a much wider public.39
The victory won by the French at the GATT in 1993 was not definitive for the U.S. would open other fronts, seeking, for example, to build clauses favorable to its audiovisual industries into bilateral trade agreements with individual countries, fully aware that those wishing to sell their goods to it find it hard to hold out on the cultural front. It would use the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) to mount a more general challenge to European aid systems. The core principle of the MAI, confusingly labeled ‘national treatment,’ was the requirement to accord the same treatment to foreign and national investments. Applied to cinema, this would have meant that American firms would have had equal access to European aid mechanisms, effectively negating any advantage that they conferred. A second principle was the ‘most favored nation’ clause, which required that governments treat every nation as well as those they treated best in investment terms. This would have undone any advantages accruing from bilateral cooperations and co-productions, a vital part of the French and European cinematic armory. The fact that these devastating consequences might not immediately strike those concerned underlines why it has been so important that cultural professionals develop an international counter-expertise. Tellingly, the chief event that brought the threat represented by the MAI to the notice of politicians was a colloquium organized at the French National Assembly by cultural professionals, with the world of film to the fore. The battle was to be waged at the level of knowledge with the private meetings and arcane discussions of elites opposed to the public debates of those who challenged them. The lobbying of French and EU politicians was (and remains) an essential part of the cultural professionals’ armory, but the importance of also taking the arguments to a wider public was underscored by the subsequent organization of conferences and colloquia and the dissemination of reports, as opposition to the MAI mounted.40 French mobilization against the agreement united film professionals with other groups (unions, counter-globalization activists, committed intellectuals) also opposed to neoliberal globalization.41 Like the earlier pairing with agriculture, this forging of a common front helped elevate the cinematic cause to a more general level. The MAI talks broke up at the end of 1998 with no agreement having been reached. The mobilization against them contributed in no small way to the birth of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC), the leading French counter-globalization organization.
About the same time as the MAI negotiations were failing, countermoves were afoot to promote the principle of cultural diversity at UNESCO, the UN’s cultural arm. France again played a leading role, in alliance with Canada, another country with excellent reasons to preserve cultural defense mechanisms, given the extent of the U.S. penetration of its media landscape. The drawing up of a universal declaration on cultural diversity in 2001 was followed by the adoption of the Convention on the Preservation and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression in 2005 and its ratification in 2007.42 In 2005, 148 countries voted for the convention. Two, the United States and Israel, voted against. The victory was partly symbolic because, although the Convention legitimizes state action in the cultural sphere, it does not take precedence over trade treaties. It underlined, however, how successful France had been in building support for its stance.43 Having risked isolation at the GATT in 1993, it had now achieved near-consensual support for the principles behind its positions. In the process, of course, it had universalized what might initially have seemed a narrowly national and indeed sectoral position. The international dimension of French film policy as described by Jäckel can profitably be located within this strategic universalizing drive.
Cinema as Resistance
Mobilization around the MAI coincided with a broader French context within which globalization increasingly came to be questioned and to a degree unparalleled in other European countries. The year 1995 was a turning point. The end of the year saw a massive public sector strike wave in defense of workers’ acquired rights that explicitly opposed itself to neoliberal logics. The later 1990s saw the rise of the French counter-globalization movement and specifically the launch of ATTAC by Paris-based journal Le Monde Diplomatique, itself a leading international forum for opposition to neoliberalism. The year 2005 was another high point of French counterglobalization: the country’s ‘no’ vote in the European referendum of that year was not simply a rejection of neoliberal logics or of the liberalizing thrust of EU policies. Such a rejection was nevertheless a key factor in what happened. The year 2007 again saw the French invade the streets, this time as students and workers came together to block the rightist government’s planned introduction of the CPE, the Contrat Première Embauche, a piece of legislation designed to make young people more easy to hire by making them easier to fire. Opposition to the legislation again underscored the strength of French resistance to neoliberal logics and to the forced flexibilization of labor. At the same time, prominent French intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Rancière, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, and Alain Badiou were amongst the leading international voices challenging the neoliberal consensus. Of course, one cannot automatically equate French resistance to Hollywood hegemony and championing of cultural diversity with the politics of counter-globalization or anti-capitalism. A policy that can be sold to the EU and to most of the world’s nations is hardly intrinsically radical. Yet, given the right circumstances, such as the broader opposition to neoliberalism within France, a refusal of market logics can lend itself to articulation within a more genuinely oppositional politics. This is surely the lesson of the subsumption of cinema within broader based, social movement opposition to the MAI.
It is therefore no accident that there has been a return of some form of oppositional political commitment within French film since the mid-1990s.44 Those working in film find themselves part of a context in which neoliberalism is challenged both intellectually and on the streets and there is a hunger for oppositional representations and counterknowledge. They have repeatedly needed to mobilize to defend the French cinema system against external assaults, educating themselves about the functioning of globalization in the process. They encounter daily the brutality of market forces as they endeavor to make, distribute, and exhibit the films they want in a context where so many films struggle to survive and where the profit drive constantly threatens to hollow out other values. It is, of course, to a considerable degree, the generous support system that allows films with noncommercial drives to be made and the large state-supported network of art cinemas that enables them to reach a public. Yet, the same system, in its drive to profit and oligopoly, is also what threatens their existence and circulation. Film professionals are, one might say, traversed by the tensions within the system, the unstable and constantly threatened balance it maintains between cultural and commercial logics. Given the broader sociopolitical situation, it is unsurprising that some therefore feel driven to make fictions or documentaries that engage with the systemic violence that surround them, despite other contextual features (the need to please financiers, television channels, audiences, distributors) that typically push in the opposite direction.
There is a division of labor between fiction films and documentaries. French fictions have typically figured the impact of the systemic on individuals and small groups in restricted locales. Their characters move in a world whose spatiality is profoundly dislocated: the nation offers a diminishing symbolic home to them and the causes of what is happening to them have effectively moved out of story space and cannot be pinned down or named.45 They have to deal with pressing needs, have diminishing or restricted access to traditions of resistance, and no prospect of a better future. In the absence of broader solidarities or an elaborated discourse of politics, they typically encounter the unmediated impact of the violence of the current order at the level of the body. The films are effective to the extent that they work against their own recalcitrant raw materials to reconnect local, immediate conflicts to the systemic and to restore eloquence to bodies deprived of a language able to name and oppose what is happening to them.46 Unsurprisingly, a good number of them take us into the world of work as a place where oppression can be forced back into visibility. An increasing number figure the experience of migration: in a world where goods, services, and finance circulate freely, the constrained and painful mobilities of those at the edges of the neoliberal order can highlight the inequalities inherent to globalization.
Erick Zonca’s early fictions like La Vie rêvée des anges (1998) are among the best examples of films that figure the unmediated impact of socioeconomic violence on individuals evicted from collective and institutional protections. Bruno Dumont’s films, notably La Vie de Jésus (1997) and l’Humanité (1999), work on a similar terrain. Both directors figure a world with dislocated spatial contours within which the nation no longer offers a real or symbolic shelter. As La Vie rêvée begins, Isa, one of its two heroines, is seeking a friend in the north of France but finds he has crossed the Belgian border in search of work. She herself is given a job in a backstreet sweatshop by a Yugoslav whose daughter is working in the U.S. making army and police uniforms. Borders seem to have lost their meaning, as turning stereotypes on their head, the immigrant now employs the ‘native’ French person in an international, low-wage economy. The uniforms that his daughter makes point, perhaps clumsily, to a shift in the state’s role from protection to repression. In Dumont’s l’Humanité, there is no longer anything to bridge the space of the high-speed transnational, as embodied by the Eurostar train, and the slow, local mobilities of the characters. In his La Vie de Jésus, a group of young, unemployed men circulate aimlessly on mopeds on local lanes. Whereas the national once might have lifted their lives to a more general plane, it is now reduced to a particularist neo-tribalism as expressed in the brutal murder of a young man of North African descent. Dumont’s films are traversed by a raw physicality that is intrinsically associated with the inarticulacy of characters no longer able to rise above their situation through access to a universalizing language. Zonca’s characters retain access to isolated fragments of a language of class but their struggles nonetheless tend to take on a directly physical character.
Whereas in Zonca’s and Dumont’s works a tradition of struggle is simply unavailable, Robert Guédiguian’s films figure characters who live in the remains of the past: emptied-out epic spaces like the cement works of Marius et Jeannette (1997) serve as a mute backdrop to small, foreground dramas, reminding us that the stories only make sense in a broader context. Characters retain a leftist vision but are no longer part of the organized working class that made that tradition meaningful. Marking a transition, Guédiguian’s La Ville est tranquille (2001) confirms the passage from the epic to the fragmentary: we see one of its leads participate in a group of dockers’ last stand against redundancy before he uses his payoff to buy a taxi, collective action giving way to a personal struggle for economic survival before our eyes. Later, the same character mockingly sings the “Internationale” in different languages as he drives his taxi past the docks and warehouses. The internationalist hymn can now only be sung ironically by an individual: even as Marseilles is transformed by a globalizing economy, a universalizing oppositional language is falling silent. The film’s heroine is a fish-packer. She struggles to look after her granddaughter while working to feed her drug addict daughter. Eventually, she kills the latter to ensure the future of the former. Where once there had been a struggle for a better world, there is now only struggle for life.
Cantet’s Ressources humaines (2000) is the classic but far from only example of films that go into the world of work to force exploitation, alienation, and struggle back into visibility, thus refuting the fiction of the consensual acceptance of the neoliberal order. In an early sequence, one worker raises his middle finger behind his boss’s back, and another uses the pretext of his oily gloves to refuse to shake the boss’s hands. At this stage, resistance must pass through the individual body, whose mute expressivity bears witness to yet resists the silencing of opposition. However, going further than other films where struggle has been silenced and individualized, Cantet’s film reaffirms the necessity and possibility of a collective struggle mediated by an elaborated political language. The film’s hero breaks into the factory at night, prints out the management’s secret redundancy plans, and tapes them to the factory door. With oppression thus forced back into public visibility, the workers are driven to take strike action and rediscover their voice in the process. The 1995 public sector strikes in France reinstated the possibility of resistance to apparently unstoppable neoliberal logics while reaffirming a vision of the sociopolitical terrain with struggle at its heart. In its own small way, Cantet’s film does something similar.
Migration has been an important issue for film professionals. A sizable group of them took a leading role in a high-profile mobilization in support of the paperless migrants or ‘sans-papiers’ in 1997. A further mobilization in 2007 saw the launch of a petition defending the right of the children of migrants to be educated in France. It bore the names of more than three hundred film professionals as well as a good number of professional associations and production companies and was supported by a short film made with migrant children and called Laissez-les grandir ici (Let Them Grow Up Here). A number of fictions have been constructed around migration of which Philippe Llioret’s 2009 release Welcome is the latest. Welcome became the object of a bitter public exchange between Eric Besson, the Minister of the Interior, and Llioret when the filmmaker compared French legislation criminalizing those helping migrants with the practices of the anti-Semitic, wartime Vichy regime. Migrants are complex figures in contemporary cinema. Typically coming from the European East or the global South, they paradoxically embody both the brutal inequalities of contemporary globalization and the failed promises of state socialism, decolonization, and development. Uprooted, deprived of state protections, available for hyper-exploitation, they foreshadow the vulnerability that threatens established populations as protections weaken. Yet they can also be made to compensate for the same vulnerability: the building of the real and symbolic barriers that exclude them seems to reconstitute the very national boundaries that globalization undermines. Rich with this potential resonance, migration should allow films to develop a multifaceted critique of systemic violence and inequities. However, films like François Dupeyron’s Inguelezi (2004), or Welcome, within which a French figure must choose whether or not to help a migrant, tend to address the issue in ethical terms that neglect the systemic. Mehdi Charef’s Marie-Line (2000) frames migration in more politically productive ways by showing the interaction of a handful of French and migrant workers in a workplace context, thereby exploring, at the micropolitical level, nascent internationalist solidarities and the forces that militate against them.
The fictions are collectively haunted by ambiguity. They help restore the grounds for critique by pointing to neoliberalism’s aggravation of inequalities, domination, and exclusions. They reassert the possibility and necessity of struggle, showing characters who are defined not by their circumstances, as in an immobilizing social realism, but by their refusal of them. Yet, operating in the ruins of a politics, showing the remnants of the working class, they also inevitably point to a defeat and to a closing down of political horizons. It is this combination of characteristics that largely differentiates them form earlier understandings of political cinema.47
In contrast to the fictions, French documentaries are more likely to deal with collective struggles. A series of them have dealt with the impact of factory closures on workers, the most well known being Hervé le Roux’s Reprise (1997), Luc Decaster’s Rêve d’usine (2002), and Ariane Doublet’s Les Sucriers de Colleville (2002). Unlike the fictions, they figure groups that still have access to a language of resistance and can thus reflect on their situation even as their future is closed off. Documentaries typically accord themselves a greater mobility than the fictions and a more explicit access to a totalizing explanatory frame. Thus, a film like Marie-France Collard’s Ouvrières du monde (2000) moves between Levi’s workers in France, Belgium, Turkey, and the Far East as it tracks the workings of a multinational moving its operation towards zones with subsistence-level wages and nonexistent protection of worker’s rights. The film stages an exchange between European and Asian workers by inviting the former to comment on a video recording of the latter’s discussion of working conditions. By opening this dialogue between two groups destined not to meet, the film starts to reopen a virtual space within which an internationalism from below may be articulated. Something similar occurs in Sabrina Malek and Arnaud Soulier’s Un Monde Moderne (2005), a film showing how teams of foreign workers are brought together in the French shipbuilding port of Saint-Nazaire to construct the luxury ocean liner Queen Mary. The film’s initial impact seems dispiriting. Shipbuilding was one of the industries where the strength of the organized working class was most tangible. Now we see a workforce so fragmented by subcontracting that one group of workers may steal tools from another to meet deadlines. Long-standing gains are swept away but there is no longer a single, identifiable employer that can be confronted. Instead, spread around Europe and the wider world, the different subcontractors and agents seem to defy location or even identification. Yet, the film finds grounds for hope in the efforts made by the CGT, the French trade union federation, to defend the rights of the different foreign workers as, through translation and linguistic improvisation, an international solidarity from below is patched together.
Partly moving us away from work, two high-profile French coproduced documentaries, Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino (2003) and Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2005), make commodity production and consumption their main target. With a mobility similar to Ouvrières du monde, Mondovino explores the globalization of the wine trade, the homogenization of taste regimes that accompanies it, and the resistances of those who seek to hold on to more socioculturally embedded forms of production. Choosing, like Un Monde Moderne, to observe global flows as they pass through a single nodal space, Darwin’s Nightmare focuses on the Tanzanian town of Mwanza. The town’s seedy airport is the point of departure of the heavy Russian transporter planes that ship out the flesh of the much sought after Nile carp fished in the African Great Lakes region for European and Asian consumers, even as people in Tanzania go hungry or feed off the remnants of the fish carcasses. The film is meant to be understood allegorically as much as literally. The way in which the carp, an imported species, has decimated native fish species before turning on its own kind is meant to be read as an allegory of the spread of globalizing capitalism and the predatory dynamics that accompany it. If Sauper’s film seems harder hitting than Nossiter’s because of its visceral aesthetic (rotting carcasses, deformed bodies, maggots, and mire) and its relentless focus on exploitation and misery, the strength of Nossiter’s is to keep resistance and a sense of agency at its core.
Despite their differences, the documentaries share a strong pedagogic dimension: they seek to educate us about the impact of global capitalism upon lives and cultures. This drive is epitomized by Vincent Glenn’s Davos, Porto Alegre et autres batailles (2003), which intercuts between the discussions of global and political leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos and those of counter-globalization activists in Porto Alegre at the World Social Forum. Staging, like Ouvrières du monde, a virtual exchange between two groups that never actually meet, the film highlights and contributes to the emergence of a counter-expertise able to challenge the voice of neoliberal elites. This counter-expertise provides an on-screen echo of the expert knowledge that cinema professionals have been forced to develop to engage with arcane world-trade discussions on an equal footing.
Although, as we have seen, the fictions and documentaries tend to occupy very different symbolic universes, they share a focus on resistances and a refusal of consensual constructions of the socioeconomic terrain. What also unites them is the way they have provided resources for trade unions and counter-globalizers who have repeatedly used them as a way to structure and inform their debates. For example, Images Mouvementées, an annual film festival organized by ATTAC in Paris, is now in its seventh year. The festival in 2009 used about forty fiction and documentary films and nine interlocking debates to explore the theme of utopia.48 In a more general way, France’s art cinemas routinely use post-film discussions to differentiate their offering from the multiplexes more narrowly commercial approach, thus providing a space wherein the kind of film described here can be used to stimulate reflection and exchange of views. In short, film has helped to make the consequences of globalization a matter of public concern and debate.
Conclusion
To the extent that opposition to unbridled free market logics constitutes resistance, it is reasonable to see French cinema as a resistant cinema, a leading global exemplar. However, we should hesitate before drawing hasty parallels between French cinematic resistances and the politics of counterglobalization. To begin with, the former come out of a different, longer history that, despite France’s long-standing resistance to Hollywood, only converges with counter-globalization proper in more recent years. Secondly, as we saw, French cinematic resistances are driven by a range of motives, only some of which could be directly connected to a broadly progressive politics. Thirdly, whereas French cultural exceptionalism has played a leading role in challenging free market logics in the cultural sphere, its roots lie more in a state-centered understanding of the cultural than in a radical politics. Fourthly, whereas it might be suggested that any film that challenged Hollywood either at the box office or at the level of style, form, or theme was resistant, we would do well to remember that the kind of resistance mounted by a Cantet film has little to do with that of a Besson action-fest. On the other hand, it is undeniable that, occurring in the broader context of widespread French opposition to neoliberal logics, French cinematic and cultural resistances have lent themselves well to articulation within a progressive politics, notably since the mid-1990s. It could indeed be argued that, having had to face up to EU and U.S. free market drives at an earlier stage, French cinema and cultural professionals helped lead the way, notably through the generation of a counter-expertise and through the mounting of high-profile public campaigns. French film can also be seen to have helped rebuild the grounds for critique and opened spaces for public deliberation. Whereas what drives French film policy is clearly not the desire to create a politicized cinema, such a cinema could not have taken the dimensions and found the audiences it did without France’s generous state-support system and the unrivaled network of art cinemas and alternative exhibition venues it helps defend. Ultimately, whereas French cinematic resistance is a complex, uneven phenomenon, it is also a real and important one.
Notes
1 Philip Gordon and Sophie Meunier, 2001, pp. 13– 40.
2 Martin O’Shaughnessy, 2007.
3 Le Club des 13, 2008.
4 My thanks go to Jonathan Buchsbaum and Graeme Hayes for their helpful and informed comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
5 Colin Crisp, 1997, pp. 73–79.
6 Jonathan Buchsbaum, 2006, pp. 5–7.
7 Ibid., p. 13.
8 Graeme Hayes, 2005.
9 European Audiovisual Observatory, 2009, pp. 22–23. The home market share of French film is more typically 30 – 40 percent, which is nonetheless a much better figure than other European industries manage on their home market.
10 To give a snapshot comparison, home box-office shares for some European and non-European countries for 2008 are as follows: Germany 26.6 percent, Italy 29.3 percent, Spain 13.3 percent, UK 31 percent, Poland 25.4 percent, People’s Republic of China 61 percent, Japan 59.5 percent, India 90.5 percent, South Korea 42.1 percent (European Audiovisual Observatory 2009).
11 Le Club des 13, 2008, pp. 209–212.
12 UniFrance, 2009, pp. 7–8.
13 European Audiovisual Observatory, 2009, pp. 22–23.
14 Le Club des 13 (2008, p. 138) gives the following figures: 385 million Euros were invested in 134 French films in 1996 and 900 million Euros in 203 films in 2006. The average invested per film thus increased from 2.87 to 4.43 million Euros over the period.
15 Buchsbaum, 2006.
16 Le Club des 13, 2008, pp. 138–139.
17 Ibid., pp. 86–91.
18 Ibid., pp. 78, 93–102.
19 Ibid., p. 156.
20 Ibid., p. 152.
21 Hayes, 2007, pp. 16–22.
22 The downside of this is that they enter into direct competition for prints with art-house theaters and have the whip hand over independent distributors who cannot afford to upset them, given that success in Paris substantially determines the national career of French films; see Le Club des 13, 2008, pp. 178–186.
23 Hayes, 2007, p. 17.
24 Le Club des 13, 2008, p. 274.
25 Thomas Elsaesser, 2005, pp. 82–107.
26 Le Club des 13, 2008, p. 273.
27 Buchsbaum, 2006, p. 12.
28 Danan cited in Anne Jäckel, 2007, p. 24.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., pp. 24 –26.
31 Ibid., p. 30.
32 Ibid., pp. 30 –32.
33 Ibid., p. 33.
34 Luc Besson’s Europa Corp is the leading purveyor of French ‘post-national’ films. Apart from the Taxi and Transporter franchises, Europa Corp also specializes in Westernized martial arts (Kiss of the Dragon [2001], Danny the Dog [2005]), remakes of Japanese thrillers (The Secret [2007]), and linguistically mutable animations (the part computer-generated and part liveaction Arthur and the Invisibles [2006]). The company’s name pays eloquent testimony to its ambition to become a European mini-major with fingers in both production and distribution; see Rosanna Maule, 2008, pp. 163–188.
35 Frédéric Depétris, 2008, pp. 198–210.
36 Ibid., p. 203.
37 Ibid., pp. 207–208.
38 The Directorates-General III and IV, responsible for the audiovisual sphere and for competition respectively, both consistently opposed state support mechanisms (ibid., pp. 155–162).
39 Ibid., pp. 216–217.
40 Daniel Mouchard, 2003.
41 Depétris, 2008, pp. 249–250.
42 Buchsbaum explains the shift from cultural exceptionalism to cultural diversity by suggesting that the former was too associated with “the stigma of French defiance” to rally wider support (2006, p. 13). Whereas exceptionalism is essentially defensive in its implications, the latter lends itself to a more assertive framing.
43 France persuaded the EU to align with its positions and mobilized its influence amongst the Francophone countries. Canada laid the ground for the convention by establishing the International Network on Cultural Policy, which brought countries’ cultural ministers together annually for informal discussions. Seeking to mobilize civil society actors in a parallel manner, French and Canadian cultural groups set up the International Liaison Committee for Coalitions for Cultural Diversity, which attracted representation from more than thirty countries (Musitelli 2006).
44 Graeme Hayes and Martin O’Shaughnessy, 2005; O’Shaughnessy, 2007.
45 O’Shaughnessy, 2005.
46 O’Shaughnessy, 2007.
47 Ibid., pp. 36–55.
48 See http://www.local.attac.org/images-mouvementees/.
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