Lucy Mazdon

Transnational ‘French’ Cinema: The Cannes Film Festival

This article reassesses the significance of the Cannes Film Festival and the European film festival more generally. Via an analysis of the local/national/global dynamic of Cannes, it considers the role of the festival in both promoting and representing French cinema, going on to suggest that this enables a re- or de-construction of the centrality of the ‘nation’ in articulations of contemporary French cinema.

The television talk-show in France: constructing audiences, constructing identities

numerous cable, satellite and terrestrial broadcasters and to new combinations of public and private ownership. These transformations are mobilized through industrial structures, material practices and political discourse as well as through programming itself. Certain genres seem particularly revealing of the shifts taking places in their contexts of production: one such genre is the television debate or the talk-show which, as this article will go on to discuss, seems to articulate many of the central discourses of French broadcasting of the period. As newly privatized channels are established, so the talk-show can be seen to reconstruct public and private spaces and identities; as the ’national’ address of state-owned television gives way to the consumerism of privatization, so the talk-show appears to renegotiate relationships with audiences through new conceptualizations of citizenship. The debate and subsequently the talk-show have long been a staple feature of the televisual landscape, both in France and elsewhere. In his analysis of the history of the genre in France, Noel Nel suggests that the debat télévisé emerged in 1960 with the programme Faire Face. Earlier programmes had flirted with the genre within the context of the magazine, but Nel claims that it was not until this series that monologue fully gave way to dialogue and that ’le lancement officiel du d6bat ait eu lieu, dans un contexte de libert6 6troitement surveillée.11 Nel describes the genre as

Review: French National Cinema, Susan Hayward, London and New York, Routledge (2nd Edition), 2005, xii+378 pp., illus., bibliography, index, £16.99 (pbk)

The received gospel of documentary usually starts with ‘In the beginning, there was Nanook of the North,’ despite Nanook (1922) having been baptized retroactively, after John Grierson found the first of the realist canonic gospels in Flaherty’s Moana (1926). Having announced that Moana had a ‘certain documentary quality,’ it was not difficult to find a similar quality in Nanook. There was a Promethean quality to Flaherty. Like that Titanic god, he was impressively daring and inventive, but he had his Dionysian side as well. In her later years, his widow Frances Hubbard Flaherty would interpret his life in spiritual terms that were at odds with the memories of his collaborators, and explain his working method in Zen-like phrases like ‘non-preconception.’ According to Jay Ruby, Frances Flaherty and Robert Flaherty’s brother David made a conscious decision to suppress the pre-Nanook history. The publication of the Flaherty diaries in annotated form tells us much about Robert and Frances Flaherty, their initial motivations, and the emergence of Flaherty the film-maker. Robert Christopher’s biography is all about the pre-Nanook lives of the Flahertys, told in their respective diaries. It is rather like reading a Dead Sea Scroll and realizing that some of the key concepts associated with Christianity were anticipated many years earlier by the Essenes. Much of what Grierson discovered in Moana was clearly prefigured in Flaherty’s life, long before Moana. The film-maker made four expeditions to Canada’s far north, from 1910 to 1916, ostensibly to search for iron ore that he believed to be in an undiscovered extension of the Mesabi iron range. Nanook was photographed on the fifth expedition, from August 1920 to August 1921. While he was hardly an eloquent diarist, his accounts of these expeditions are fascinating. Frances Hubbard Flaherty is represented by a single diary, written between December, 1914 and February, 1916, and her entries portray her transition from a rather willful and ambitious proto-feminist, who wished to use her husband as an instrument of her own ambition. Robert Flaherty insisted on following his own path. Robert Flaherty’s relationship with Frances Hubbard was not simple. They met for the first time in 1903, when he was hired to do odd jobs around the Painsdale

French televised debate and the public service ethos

As the French televisual landscape has been altered through privatisation and the advent of new channels, many commentators have posited a shift from paleo?television to neo?television, from viewer as citizen to viewer as consumer. This article argues that such a dichotomy is overly simplistic, suggesting instead that contemporary French public service broadcasting combines elements of both types of television. It goes on to examine two television discussion shows. Whilst acknowledging that no one programme can alone represent the remit of a particular channel, the article suggests that the longevity and popularity of these programmes makes them key products of their respective moments of production and consumption. Finally, the ways in which each programme constructs and represents the transformations and the ambivalence at the heart of French public service television in examined.