Notice Board - French Cultural Studies

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French Cultural Studies
Notice Board
Edited by
DAVID LOOSELEY
French Cultural Studies will be pleased to announce in the Notice Board
forthcoming events, and a small number of recent books, involving all
aspects of modern French culture. Please contact Professor D. L. Looseley,
Department of French, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, West Yorkshire,
UK. Email: [email protected]
News from the Ministry of Culture
This section aims to provide information on recent events, statements and
publications connected with the Ministry and, where possible, to announce
forthcoming items of interest. It is necessarily selective, highlighting specific sectors of
the Ministry’s activities as and when they feature in the news. With grateful thanks for
their assistance to the Ministry’s Délégation au développement et aux affaires internationales (DDAI) and Département des études, de la prospective et des statistiques (DEPS).
Sources: Lettre d’information (LDI) produced by the DDAI, 182 rue Saint-Honoré, 75001
Paris (consultable online at: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/: click ‘Publications’); DocDDAI
(consultable at http://www.culture.gouv.fr/dep); Ministry of Culture website: http://
www.culture.gouv.fr/.
Audiovisual
Cinema: La Cinémathèque française, begun on a shoestring by Henri Langlois and
Georges Franju in 1936 and the subject of controversial wranglings with the Ministry of
Culture under Malraux, is moving from its current dual premises (Palais de Chaillot,
where it has been since 1963, and Grands Boulevards), which are now closed, to a new
site at 51 rue de Bercy, due to open this autumn. Its director since 2003, Serge Toubiana,
co-biographer of Truffaut and ex-editor of Cahiers du cinéma, sees the move as both
completing Langlois’s initial vision and offering a cinémathèque for the twenty-first
century, with much improved facilities including four screens, in place of the current
two, and 700 seats, instead of the present 500, as well as study and educational facilities,
French Cultural Studies, 16(3): 337–340 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com [200506] 10.1177/0957155805057300
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FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 16(3)
exhibition space and the presence of the Bibliothèque du Film. LDI, March 2005, has a
dossier containing further details.
Music on television: An eagerly awaited report by Véronique Cayla (director of the Cannes
Film Festival) has been submitted to the Minister of Culture and Communication,
addressing the need to make more room on TV for music programming. In particular, it
wants to see greater diversity in the types of music given exposure on TV; it also stresses the
need for public channels to become more involved in promoting new talents and for the
Ministry to match its commitment to music television with improved public support for
programme makers (LDI, February: 6).
Television: the official launch of France’s digital ‘TNT’ initiative (télévision numérique
terrestre) by the Prime Minister and Minister of Culture in March will shortly bring
fourteen free-to-view channels (public and private) to French viewers, on purchase of a
digital TV or on payment of around 100 euros for a set-top box. Another fifteen channels
are promised before the end of the year which will have to be paid for. Amongst the new
channels on offer will be France 4, which promises to give a special place to arts
programmes (LDI, April 2005: 2). More information is available on the Ministry website.
Éducation artistique et culturelle
On 3 January 2005, Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and Minister of
Education François Fillon presented yet another ‘plan de relance’ to Raffarin’s Council of
Ministers, intended once again to boost collaboration between the two government
departments after the relative watering down in 2004 of the ambitious five-year plan
launched in December 2000 by Jack Lang (as Minister of Education and Culture) and the
then Minister of Culture, Catherine Tasca (see Notice Board, 12(34): 116). In addition to the
largely familiar intention to improve and extend partnership between artists and arts
professionals, on the one hand, and teachers, on the other, the main idea this time is that
existing initiatives in schools – arts workshops, the well-established classes culturelles, arts
options in the bac, and so on – are to be complemented by initiatives aimed at wider
constituencies outside schools, such as quartiers and communes. Twinnings are also
promised between educational and arts establishments, as are artist residencies in schools
and similar forms of cooperation (LDI, February 2005: 2).
Indeed, the term ‘éducation artistique’ has for some time been used in a broader sense
than ‘enseignements artistiques’, though this is an area in which terminological
exactitude has often been absent. As Marie-Christine Bordeaux has recently pointed out,
the term ‘éducation’ here has to do with ‘la sensibilisation aux domaines artistiques en
temps et hors temps scolaire’ (see Saez (2005: 65–6) in New Books List below, where
Bordeaux usefully disentangles the prevailing lexis). But, using a jargon already familiar
to those teaching in UK higher education, the January 2005 text indicates that éducation
artistique is also deemed to embrace the acquisition not just of artistic competence but of
wider transferable skills – ‘compétences mobilisables dans d’autres domaines de la
connaissance comme la capacité d’analyse, d’expression, etc.’ (LDI, February 2005: 2);
and, again, both within and outside the education system. Necessarily so, if the Ministry
of Culture is to remain involved, since creative arts training in schools is the preserve of
the Education Ministry. Hence the perennial obstacles that have strewn the path of
previous cross-departmental collaborations, the history of which still only goes back
some twenty years.
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The Ministry
Following on from the item in the last Notice Board on the new Ministry building at 182
rue Saint-Honoré, LDI (February) contains a supplement introducing the new premises,
at which over 80 per cent of Ministry staff are now based. The most striking and
disconcerting aspect of the two renovated buildings which make up the site (one, on rue
Saint-Honoré, dating from 1919, the other, on rue Montesquieu, from 1960) is the
stainless-steel grid, or ‘net’, that clads both facades and is intended, the architects Francis
Soler and Frédéric Druot tell us, to unify the two structures and visually symbolise the new
unity of the once scattered Ministry departments. The effect is not dissimilar to the bold
juxtapositions of classical and modernist architectures which became the hallmark of
Mitterrand’s new Paris, like the nearby Pyramide du Louvre and the Colonnes Buren. The
new facilities include a ‘Point Culture’, open to the public on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 7
p.m., where information and documentation of various kinds provided by the Ministry
(including Internet resources) can be found. The existing Ministry premises on the rue de
Valois now house the ministerial cabinet, the DIC (see above) and the Délégation aux arts
plastiques, while the Direction de la musique, de la danse, du théâtre et des spectacles
remains where it was, at 52 rue Saint-Dominique (eighth arrondissement).
LDI, April 2005, includes an eight-page bilan of Donnedieu de Vabres’s first year in
office. Notable amongst the summaries and statistics is a plaudit from former Culture
Minister Jack Lang, albeit regarding only one specific measure (p. 8).
Popular Culture
Arts de la rue: In February, the Minister launched the Temps des arts de la rue initiative
in Marseille, a long-term promotion and development project. Street arts, which involve
some 900 companies, are warmly encouraged these days by the Culture department, to
the tune of 6.5 million euros in 2004, with a promise of 2 million extra this year. They
are lauded for having ‘inventé des démarches singulières d’écriture artistique,
impliquant le public dans une dynamique originale’; and also for representing a cultural
form in which France is considered to be ‘un pays de référence’. The idea of developing
new relations with the public is arguably of particular significance, since it points to the
wider tendency over the last twenty-five years to view the street and public festivity as
spaces in which new forms of democratisation can be achieved, though there are those
who have critiqued this conception as a simplistic answer to a complex question.
Marseille was the chosen venue because it is where the new Cité des arts de la rue is to
be sited, a project going back to 1995, though building is only due to start this autumn.
The estimated cost is 9.5 million euros, to be paid by the Ministry together with the city,
the department and the region. Other measures among Donnedieu de Vabres’s ten-point
plan include employment benefits, encouraging further international exchange, and
emphasising that street arts represent a specific form of ‘writing’ for a public space (LDI,
March 2005: 4–5).
Electronic dance music: In a not dissimilar gesture of openness, the Minister’s invitation
to representatives of the ‘techno’ world to meet him at the Ministry last September (see
last Notice Board, Culture in the digital age) was followed up this February by his
honouring with the Ordre des arts et lettres the members of the chart-topping electronic
group Air (Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin), alongside Dimitri from Paris and
Philippe Zdar (LDI, March 2005: 15).
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FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 16(3)
New Books List
This section lists a small selection of new books on aspects of contemporary French culture
as defined under the heading ‘Editorial Policy’ on the inside front cover of the journal.
Details of such publications should be sent to David Looseley at the address above.
Baque, S., Pour un nouvel art politique: de l’art contemporain au documentaire, Paris:
Flammarion, 2004, ISBN 2-08-210284-X, 317 pp.
Cander Gucht, D., Art et politique: pour une redéfinition de l’art engagé, Brussels:
Éditions Labor, 2004, ISBN 2-8040-1891-1, 93 pp.
Djian, J.-M., Politique culturelle: la fin d’un mythe, Paris: Gallimard, 2005, ISBN 2-17030098-6, 196 pp.
Dupré, M., Regards sur la photographie, Ailly-sur-Somme: E.C. Éditions, 2004, ISBN 2911105-54-0, 97 pp.
Farchy, J., L’Industrie du cinéma, collection Que sais-je? no. 2555, Paris: PUF, 2004, ISBN
2-13-054299-9, 127 pp.
Grésillon, G. and Kerdellant, C., Les Enfants-puce: comment Internet et les jeux vidéo
fabriquent les adultes de demain, Paris: Denoël, 2003, ISBN 2-2-7-25347-3, 352 pp.
Risler, C., La Politique culturelle de la France en Algérie: les objectifs et les limites
(1830–1962), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004, ISBN 2-7475-6092-9, 248 pp.
Saez, G. (ed.), Institutions et vie culturelles, 2e édition revue et augmentée, collection Les
Notices, Paris: La Documentation Française, 2004, ISBN 2-11-005573-1, 172 pp. The new
edition of this already invaluable compendium provides a welcome and even widerranging update on the cultural realities of twenty-first-century France. As well as
bringing Augustin Girard’s existing history of cultural policy up to 2004 (P. Poirrier) and
summarising the main areas of the Ministry of Culture’s remit (namely éducation
artistique et culturelle, le patrimoine, archives, museums, libraries, theatre, music and
dance, cinema and visual arts), the volume also offers transverse thematic analysis, in
chapters ranging from ‘Le modèle culturel français face à la mondialisation’ to
‘Sociologie de la culture, publics et pratiques culturelles’ (O. Donnat) and ‘De l’économie
au management de la culture’ (X. Dupuis).
Forthcoming Book Announcement
L’Oeuvre de Victor Hugo à l’écran: des rayons et des ombres
Un groupe de spécialistes français, sous la direction de Delphine Gleizes (de l’Université de
Lyon 3), ont rédigé un ouvrage collectif portant sur les films adaptés des livres de Victor
Hugo (1802–85). Il y sera question des adaptations et de la réception des longs métrages
inspirés de L’Homme qui rit, Ruy Blas, Les Misérables, Notre-Dame de Paris et de plusieurs
autres classiques d’une dizaine de pays, de l’époque du muet à nos jours. Ce livre permet de
comprendre comment les films adaptés de l’œuvre de Victor Hugo ont été compris, adaptés,
ré-appropriés, parfois au prix de la trahison du message du grand écrivain français.
L’ouvrage L’Oeuvre de Victor Hugo à l’écran: des rayons et des ombres paraîtra en
novembre 2005 dans la collection ‘Cinéma et société’, conjointement aux Presses de
l’Université Laval et à Paris chez Harmattan.