French Cultural Studies

La crise de l'Église catholique de France est devenue un lieu commun sociologique : 56 % des Français se disent encore catholiques mais seulement 4,5 % assistent à la messe chaque semaine. En Europe, la France est aujourd'hui l'un des pays de culture catholique où l'observance religieuse est la plus faible : déclin des baptêmes, des ordinations, du nombre de pratiquants… Bien des interprétations de ce déclin ont déjà été faites, mais quel est le point de vue des catholiques sur ce qui leur arrive ? Comment se représentent-ils et pensent-ils les évolutions de leur Église ? Pour le savoir, une enquête de grande ampleur a été réalisée à l'initiative de Confrontations. Le catholicisme français apparaît ainsi sous un jour nouveau : la « crise » de l'Église dépend moins des évolutions que les statistiques donnent à voir, que des diagnostics qui sont établis à partir d'elles. Elle se traduit donc avant tout par un conflit d'interprétation sur la qualification de ce qui est en crise et sur les remèdes à adopter. Cet ouvrage présente un panorama de la manière dont les catholiques vivent et analysent ce contexte de crise et les propositions qu'ils formulent pour en sortir. In fine, c'est à une véritable exploration des multiples sensibilités de l'archipel catholique que le lecteur est invité.

This a later and much extended discussion of the issues raised in ‘The quota of French language songs on radio’, Modern & Contemporary France, vol. 5, no. 1, (Feb. 1997), pp. 73-75.

The paper examines the origins, policy process, application and effects of French legislation enforcing quotas of French-language and foreign (essentially Anglo-American) language songs on French radio.  The legislation will be considered in the context of other aspects of the cultural Maginot line erected to defend French identity from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ invasions.  On 1st January 1996  the ‘amendement Pelchat’ came into force.  It imposed on all French radio stations a compulsory minimum of 40% of French language songs in its musical programming at times where there is a significant listening audience.  Within this 40% minimum of French songs, there is a further disposition requiring radios to give airtime, for half of the quota, to new talent or new productions.  The law required the broadcasting regulatory body, Le Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), to modify its licensing agreements with radios to take the new conditions into account within 6 months of the law being promulgated and to monitor continuing compliance.

Les musiques hip-hop, et notamment le rap, ont longtemps été étudiées sans que soit pris en compte leur caractère esthétique. Les approches formelles ont donc été le parent pauvre des recherches académiques francophones sur le sujet. Cet ouvrage collectif, dans la lignée du colloque international « Conçues pour durer. Perspectives francophones sur les musiques hip-hop » (Paris 2017), réunit un réseau international de chercheuses et chercheurs francophones, aux spécialités disciplinaires variées. Il noue également un dialogue avec les acteurs et actrices des musiques hip-hop et les savoirs qu’ils forgent sur ces formes esthétiques depuis leurs origines : l’introduction est écrite par deux universitaires et la conclusion est signée par un rappeur pionnier et pilier du rap français. Le volume aborde des thèmes aussi divers que la critique musicale en France, l’usage du plurilinguisme dans le groupe de rap sénégalais Keur gui, les liens entre Tupac et la pensée de Machiavel, ou l’usage de l’Auto-Tune chez PNL. Il offre un jalon essentiel dans la réflexion sur les méthodes et les problématiques de la recherche universitaire francophone pouvant déployer la richesse esthétique des musiques hip-hop.

L'oeuvre de Blaise Cendrars s'est constamment placée sous le signe d'un imaginaire du crime. Le crime a permis à l'écrivain de rendre compte de sa conception de la création littéraire, de ses enjeux -l'appropriation de l'autre- et de ses pouvoirs -de refaçonnement identitaire-, voire des impasses auxquelles elle a pu se trouver confrontée. A ce titre, l'imaginaire du crime nourrit la cohérence de la production de l'auteur de Panorama de la pègre.

[written with Itzana Dobbelaere] Until now, there wasn't any research on the Montmartre cabarets in Brussels during the Second World War, when they have had an important success at that time. Firstly, the clearing of this new field of research implies to describe the main characteristics of these cabarets : history of each cabaret, toponymy, relations with other entertainment venues in Brussels (especially the cabarets focused on variety acts and shows called cabaret-dancings), important personalities, répertoire and typical programs of a show, advertising, censorship, etc. Then we try to explain the reasons of this success. We make the hypothesis that it was less due to the war time conditions than to the creative strategies through which directors and artists managed to 'rewrite' the répertoire and aesthetics of the fin-de-siècle Montmartre in their Brussels shows of the 1940's. Among theses strategies, one of the most efficient had been the deliberate blurring between two styles : the fin-de-siècle Montmartre and the Parisian music-hall of the Belle Époque, the latter being far closer to the répertoire of the cabaret-dancings. The appendix contains a localization of the Montmartre cabarets on chronological maps and a list as exhaustive as possible of the cabaret-dancings. [Revue belge de musicologie, vol.69, 2015, p.239-255, with Itzana Dobbelaere]

The last few years have seen an increased visibility of non-binary persons who are publicly claiming their identities and pronouns beyond the gender binary in both English and French. While the singular “they” has gained favor among many in Anglophone spaces due in part to the precedent for such a usage in English, Francophone non-binary persons have had to face further challenges regarding language and syntax given the binary nature of French grammar itself. This special issue considers recent attempts to make available gender‑equitable, ‑neutral, and ‑expansive language and identities to French speakers within linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical spaces. In offering to the readers of H-France our reflections on these developments, the contributors to this special issue expand on the fruitful exchange initiated at a symposium at Vassar College in April 2018—when earlier versions of this material were first presented—and invite dialogue with a broader public. In so doing, we hope that the questions we raise will be taken in the spirit of ongoing inquiry rather than as prescriptive positions (as indicated by the titular question mark), and that our chapters will be read as open-ended engagements with the rapidly-developing public conversations on non-binary issues beyond the academy. We also hope that the embedded hyperlinks and the appended glossary will allow our readers to engage directly, if they so wish, with the many multimedial resources cited in this issue.

http://www.theses.fr/2015REN20024

French singing in the time of Gilbert Duprez : history, aesthetics and skills

Aus französische Gesangskunst in der Zeit Gilbert Duprez : .Geschichte, Ästhetik und Methode

Looking at opera, opéra-comique and salon music through the eyes of the first performers stresses the histrionic and vocal dimension of their art. Thus, this dissertation drives from the mutual appraisals of artists, which can be found in treaties, memoirs, archives of the Paris Conservatoire, letters, etc. The vocabulary used to describe singing in the 19th-century has been linked to 78rpm records and cylinder recordings. The relative focus on high-pitched male voices is only relevant because changes in the general taste for opera voices were mainly triggered by leading tenors during the romantic era. The impact of various locations and repertory on the audience's expectations was studied in order to define the aesthetic and social frame of vocal performance. Reinventing the practical know-how from the sources actually meets the growing expectations of both schedulers and singers who want to renew the approach of the so-called "romantic" French repertory - which currently goes widely unknown and unsung. A better understanding of tradition allows for more consistent historically informed performances.

Michael Haneke's Caché/Hidden (2005) has generated a level of critical discussion that has quickly established the film as a defining work of early twenty-first century French cinema. Noticeably absent from this wealth of analysis is an examination of how Caché's formal experimentation with surveillance technology directly informs its treatment of the political and ethical issues of postcolonialism. Drawing from the practices of 1960s ‘surveillance art’, as well as the CCTV aesthetic of reality television, this article addresses this critical gap by focusing on how Caché's filmic apparatus captures the alienation of emotion from phenomenological experience. Caché presents an alternative to Foucault's visual economy of self-regulation (panopticisme) in that its protagonist Georges internalizes the disinterested and subject-less gaze of the ever-present camera rather than the interested gaze of the prison guard. This process results in a state of emotional indifference: Georges is an unmoved witness to traumatic events as well as his own history. In Caché, Haneke shows how this indifference helps produce the stratification and paranoia of a postcolonial society.

Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle.

The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first.

Unica Zürn's works are the mirror of his condition of life,
tragically marked by schizophrenia. Introduced
in the environment of French surrealism by Hans Bellmer, she
could not fail to convey, in his art, the anxiety
and the suffering experienced for the terrible illness.
An art where the sign is the voice
of her anguish and the shelter of her soul.

By the late-1950s, Thelonious Monk had become a figure of veneration in French modern jazz circles. But in the first years of the following decade, the pianist’s French critics – like those in other parts of the world – began to censure Monk for having ceased to “evolve”; this trend reached something of an apotheosis in a 1964 Jazz magazine article, in which Michel-Claude Jalard condemned Monk for having presented the mere “simulacra” of former improvisations in his then-recent Paris performances. Focussing on Jalard’s argument, the article puts this French critical trend in context, showing how issues widely occurring in Monk’s 1960s reception were re-voiced by French writers in the language, and to the ends, of a specific and local debate between jazz writers – one which centered on oppositions of modernity and tradition, art and entertainment, and the political left and right. The piece goes on to further explore some of these “French” arguments by way of a musical analysis of several live performances of the standard Lulu’s Back in Town, as given by Monk’s quartet during its European tour of 1966. In taking a somewhat unfamiliar theoretical literature as its interpretive starting point, this analysis aims to give new and newly precise answers to questions the French writers – and many commentators after them – would ask of the pianist, and which recent scholarly work concerned above all else with dialogue and interaction has only partly equipped us to answer: where in Monk’s music is the line between improvisation and composition, between improviser’s art and entertainer’s act, and why have critics thought it mattered?

"Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946) is a very peculiar and yet typically French cultural icon. Her peculiarity has sprung, to a certain extent, from her marked preference for the canonic blue colour of many her couture  “objects” as well as her memorably elegant designs of which many were on display in the important exhibition at Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris better known as Galleria"

В данной статье, на основе комплексного анализа нарративных, нормативных и эпистолярных средневековых источников, созданных на латинском и старофранцузском языках, автор рассматривает, как формировался образ монгольских завоевателей в трудах французских политических и религиозных деятелей XIII-XIV вв. В работе исследуются труды очевидцев, современников и потомков. Определяются источники информации, выделяются стереотипы о монголах, прослеживается эволюция образа кочевников в рамках эсхатологической и прагматической французской средневековой литературной традиции.

in H Dauncey and S. Cannon, Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno. Culture, Identity and Society, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp.57-75. ISBN 0-7546-0849-2.

Abstract:
The relationship between on the one side the music industry and the musical audience and on the other the broadcasting media in France is in a sense similar to other countries: music is used especially by the young initially as a defining feature of a sub-culture that gives them identity. Radio in particular meshes into this in so far as recorded music is a relatively cheap staple diet of radio programming aimed at the adolescent audience and young adults. Equally, but serving a different psycho-social function, music is a staple part of programming on radio stations serving an older audience, whether these stations be monothematic, bi-thematic or multi-thematic. Thus radio also provides free advertising for the music recording industry, which takes a keen interest in any regulation affecting this relationship. As regards television, the deregulation of broadcasting (that came later in France than in comparable western countries) allied with the growth of cable TV networks and satellite channels and their subsequent digitalisation (which came earlier than in other European countries), have encouraged the creation of many new thematic channels, including music channels. As in Holland, for example, the indigenous French music channels compete with the global channel MTV for the youth audience. What is different about France is the complicating factor of linguistic protectionism that is the public policy manifestation of the link between the French language and national cultural identity. Whereas young people have since the 1960s been fascinated by American culture and especially American music, French elites, both conservative and radical, have been suspicious of it. Direct condemnation of 'Anglo-Saxon' cultural imperialism may have given way more recently to a more veiled anti-Americanism in the form of attacks on globalisation in the name of protecting French and other particularisms. Such has been the backdrop to French government introduction of protectionist measures affecting, in particular, radio. Fears in the 1990s that French song (and consequently the French music industry) was in danger of being swamped in a tidal wave of Anglo-American products dominating radio play-lists led directly to the imposition of linguistic broadcasting quotas limiting radio and television stations' musical programming freedom - measures that have proved controversial, difficult to enforce and of unpredictable effect.

Introduction: Music, both popular and ‘serious’, has of course been present on French radio and television since the very earliest days of both media. Entertainment, musical or otherwise, alongside news and information, and the educational functions of the transmission of culture, has been an important mission associated with both broadcasting media in France as in other western countries. And a major element of the western entertainment tradition is of course popular music. While the technology associated with broadcasting has been commonly available in the developed economies of Western Europe and North America at more or less the same time, French society and politics have developed differently from their neighbours. A major distinction between France and Britain for instance has been, firstly, the role of the State within society, in this context in controlling, restricting and regulating broadcasting systems, and, secondly, governmental attitudes to an independent commercial sector providing competition to the public service tradition. Recently, as globalisation has tended to erode national autonomy in broadcasting systems and to threaten national cultural identity, and since global culture has been purveyed mainly by English-speaking cultural phenomena and multinational businesses whose ideological home is often perceived as being in the United States of America, a further French ‘exception’ has been a concern to protect the position of the French language within France and the world. This concern that has taken political form in the shape of a protectionist policy towards French cultural productions and the national media that transmit them. Hence, the French film and cinema industry, and French popular music industry and the broadcasting of French popular song, for instance, have, in the one case, been the subject of international trade negotiations to prevent the import of cultural productions being treated like cars or bars of soap, and in the other, subject to legally enforced quotas to limit competition from American or British popular music. While some of these themes are relevant to both media and the ways in which popular music is treated by them, this chapter will deal separately with radio and then television, looking first at the chronologically earlier medium, that of radio.

In the 20th century, jazz music spread throughout global culture like few other musical forms. Over the 40-year period in which jazz was assimilated into French culture, myths about the origin of jazz played an important role in the discourse surrounding the music. By examining both how these myths functioned in the discourse and examining how they changed over time depending on cultural circumstances, this article shows how writers increasingly used jazz etiologies and writing on the importance of New Orleans to the history of jazz to bridge the cultural gap and to make a French connection with jazz music, so that the enjoyment of it could be experienced as authentically French. From early abstract expressivist origins, to the latter strategic deployment of these myths as a feature of New Orleans revivalism, this discourse played an important role in the integration of jazz into French cultural identity.

In “Assignée garçon,” Vinay Swamy brings the perspective of a U.S.-based instructor of French to explore how France and French-speaking North Americans have responded to the call for inclusivity. He makes a case for comprehending the invention of non-binary neo-pronouns (such as “iel”) as part—if not an extension—of the l’écriture inclusive movement. Such reframing is evident (and necessary), Swamy argues, when one takes into consideration the creative work of the Quebecois trans activist and Webcomic artist, Sophie Labelle. By analyzing such works alongside the French state responses to l’écriture inclusive, Swamy reflects on the responses of both institutional and non-state actors, and lays out the potential stakes at play in this linguistic and cultural debate.

English:
During the 18th century, the north Indian province of Awadh witnessed a new style of painting that displayed hybrid or intercultural elements, both Indian and European. This was possible largely due to the patronisation of Indian artists who had been displaced by the fall of the Mughal Empire, by Europeans (a sizeable number of them French) who were present there in large numbers. The Indian artist had to mould the style and content of his works to suit the demands of an emerging market and European taste. The paintings of this period, mostly held by European repositories today, bear witness to the process of what can be called cultural transfers between India and France. Historians have talked about the composite or hybrid nature of these works, but rarely have they considered the question of their reception in Europe. This article tries to look at this process through a study of the Gentil Collection at the National Library in France.


Français:
Au 18e siècle, la principauté d'Awadh dans l'Inde du nord voit une floraison de peintures attestant un vrai métissage culturel indo-européen. Nombreux Européens (dont un grand nombre de Français) qui fréquentaient cet endroit, avaient non seulement commencé à faire des collections personnelles de peintures indiennes mais certains d'entre eux avaient déjà établis des ateliers de peintures. Les artistes, tombés au chômage et dispersés après la chute de l'Empire moghole, trouvaient ainsi un nouvel emploi auprès de leurs nouveaux patrons européens. Mais ils étaient contraints d'adapter le style et le contenu de leurs oeuvres afin de répondre au goût européen. Ces peintures indiennes, pour la plupart dans des fonds européens aujourd'hui, constituent des témoignages visuels de transferts culturels entre l'Inde et la France de l'époque. Les historiens ont évoqué la notion de métissage culturel pour décrire le style et la qualité de ces oeuvres mais on a rarement exploré le contexte de leur réception en France. Centré principalement sur la collection du colonel Gentil à la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, cet article se propose d'étudier ces transferts culturels dans leur contexte d'accueil.

In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used—or stole, plagiarized, and expropriated—elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources of common discourse (the ironically named "beautiful language" of this book's title, itself an appropriation from Guy Debord's collaged Mémoires). Redeployed, often in startling or pointed juxtapositions, these elements took on newly oppositional meanings. A famous photograph taken inside the occupied Sorbonne in May 1968, for example, shows a massive academic painting altered by a clever cartoonish speech bubble that transforms the painting into a parody of itself and memorializes an event very different from the one captured by the original artist."The Beautiful Language of My Century" describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today.

A study of Abdellatif Kechiche's polarizing and quintessential  French film, Blue is the Warmest Color (2013).  The paper approaches Kechiche's production from multiple perspectives: as a syptomatic corporeal-focused production, part of a vanguard cinema du corps; as a controversial yet highly representative work of the contemporary French film ecosystem; as an adapation of a groundbreaking graphic novel; and as a penetrating examination of same-sex desire through bravura film style.