French Culture Now

The rise and fall of Jean-Luc Godard
UKTelegraph. July 2, 2008
Richard Brody's new book “Everything is Cinema” is a detailed account of the inspirations and impulses behind Godard's multifarious output and, in many ways, it is a winner - as dense and disputatious as anything by its subject. For his first 10 years as a director, Godard turned out masterpiece after masterpiece - À Bout de Souffle, Le Mépris, Bande à Part, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend. The cinemas couldn't print tickets fast enough. Then, almost overnight, his audience vanished.
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French approve of Bruni’s music career
AFP. June 17, 2008
Over half of French people approve of Carla Bruni pursuing her music career while she is married to President Sarkozy: 57%, accoridng to an IFOP poll for the Journal du Dimanche. But 42% think her singing and recording is not compatible with her public role.
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Book review: 1789, The Threshold of the Modern Age
David Andress has sought a new angle in his book on the year 1789, the year of the French Revolution, by enlarging his perspective to embrace not just France but also Great Britain, Ireland and the Americas, indeed the whole world. His narative consists of series of potted biographies and vignettes. What is not supplied is coherence. Sudden thematic, geographical and chronological shifts lead to a narrative disjunction that bewilders and then irritates. Nor is there any compensating conceptual framework.
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Jolie-Pitts may settle in France
News24. June 17, 2008
Angelina Jolie has hinted she is planning to settle in France by enrolling her son Maddox in a local school. The actress and her partner Brad Pitt, who recently bought a property on the French Riviera, seem intent on staying in France and educating their six children there after Angelina gives birth to twins.
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Yves Saint Laurent Buried in Morocco
BBC. June 17, 2008
The ashes of French fashion designer YSL , who recently died at 71, were scattered in the gardens and grounds of his Moroccan home in Marrakech, where he preferred to live in the last years of his life.
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Obituary: Jean Desailly
CanadianPress. June 17, 2008
French actor Jean Desailly, 87, who worked in film and theatre, has died in Paris. Desailly appeared in films including "Maigret tend un piege" (Maigret Lays a Trap), "La Mort de Belle" (The End of Belle) and starred in Francois Truffaut's "La Peau Douce" (The Soft Skin).
President Nicolas Sarkozy saluted Desailly, whose career he said "spanned the theatrical life of the 20th century in its most prestigious symbols," including the renowned Comedie Francaise.
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Sarkozy plans for 'Grand Paris'
UKTelegraph. June 12, 2008
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has tasked a group of top architects, including Britain’s Richard Rogers, to dream up a Grand Paris to rival Greater London that could stretch as far as the Channel. The plan is considered the most ambitious since Baron Haussman changed the face of Paris with his grand, rectilinear avenues.
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French language is dying
DailyMail. June 12, 2008
French continues to lose ground as a global language. Linguist Herve Bourges, a French government adviser, says French is in deep crisis, besieged by the rise in English speakers worldwide. Unless action is taken, French will be steamrollered into oblivion, he warned. 'Despite having 200million French speakers on earth, the idea of a French-speaking world is becoming obsolete.' His report to the government added: 'We must ensure French is being spoken during international trade or diplomatic meetings,” he advised.
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In Praise of César Franck
Spectator. Une 12, 2008
Once so sure in the pantheon, esteemed by composers and critical taste, beloved by players and audiences, French omposer César Franck appears nowadays to be almost universally reviled. The present consensus is that Franck is merely thick, cloying, glutinous, too sequential, too chromatic, stiff in rhythm and phrasing, mechanised in form and process. Time for a second opinion?
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Best-selling author victim of French racism
UKGuardian. June 12, 2008
Faïza Guène's first novel Kiffe Kiffe Demain, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman in Paris's deprived suburbs, was a publishing hit and sold 300,000 copes. But despite her success she is still a victim of modern France's insidious racism. In theory, France follows the republican model of integration where everyone is equal. But as Guène went through school doors engraved with the words liberty, equality, fraternity, they realised that was a "lie". "In France when you're born poor, the whole system is set up for you to stay poor," she says. She thinks Sarkozy's appointment of women ministers of immigrant origin - Rachida Dati, Fadela Amera and Rama Yade - was cynical. He uses them as "alibis" while the daily struggle of the rest of the French population called Rachida or Fadela hasn't changed.
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Remembering YSL
IHT. June 12, 2008
Yves Saint Laurent, who exploded on the fashion scene in 1958 as the boy-wonder successor to Christian Dior and endured as one of the best-known and most influential couturiers of the second half of the 20th century, died of brain cancer on June 1, 2008 in Paris. He was 71. During a career that ran from 1957 to 2002, he was largely responsible for changing the way modern women dress, and pioneered the franchise licensing of fashion brand names on every sort of apparel and cosmetic. His personal life was riven with mental health issues, homosexuality, and drug addiction. He was an eccentric hermit in his later years. His fortune and that of his lover Pierre Berger, and their Foundation, is estimated at nearly a billion dollars.
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Louise Bourgeois Retrospective
Newsweek. June 12, 2008
The Louise Bourgeois's retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York includes more than 150 sculptures, installations, drawings and prints which are by turns pioneering, quirky, technically breathtaking, disturbing, confessional and sexual. Bourgeois was born in France but has lived an dworked in the USA since 1938.
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Documentary calls for Polanski amnesty
NYSun. June 12, 2008
Marina Zenovich's excellent new HBO documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” details the trial and conviction of Polish director Polanski for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977, and his subsequent asylum in France where he is a citizen and cannot be extradicted. Strangely, France does not claim Polanski as a French film-maker, the way it does everyother artist who lives there. Wonder why?
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France's Laurent Cantet Wins Palme d'Or at Cannes (Update2)
Bloomberg. May 31, 2008
“Entre les Murs,'' a classroom drama directed by Frenchman Laurent Cantet, won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or award for best picture at a red-carpet gala today, giving France its first Cannes victory in 21 years. ``All of the performances: magic. All of the writing: magic,'' said jury president Sean Penn.
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LVMH forces Stone to recant on China
Followthemedia. June 1, 2008
Last week actress Sharon Stone, who practises Buddhism, said China’s earthquake tragedy was kharmic retribution for its human rights violations in Tibet and elsewhere. Oops. Stone is fashion brand Dior’s cover girl. Dior has 68 outlets in China. China threatened to boycott Dior to punish Stone. Rench fashion giant LVMH which owns the Dior brand forced Stone to recant or lose her lucrative contract. She grovelled, saying she was “deeply sorry for my inappropriate words and acts which have hurt the Chinese people’s feeling.” So once again China flexes its financial might at the expense of human rights, justice, decency and freedom of expression. And a French company enables totalitarian censorship.
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New books slam Sarkozy
Bloomberg. June 1, 2008
Nicolas Sarkozy's fall from grace has been bloody and swift. A fresh batch of books marking his first anniversary in power continues the drumbeat of bad publicity. In “Le Roi Est Nu'' (“The Emperor has No Clothes”), Lionel Joffrin accuses Sarkozy of turning the republic into an “elective monarchy.” Francois Leotard winces over Sarkozy's faux pasin “Ca Va Mal Finir'' (“It Will End Badly''). Philippe Ridet in”Le President et Moi'' asserts that Sarkozy is egocentric, exhibitionist, brutal.
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French cinema thrives on state subsidies
FollowtheMedia. June 1, 2008
Individual national governments and the EC are pouring a righteous amount of tax money into the audiovisual sector, most visibly for film production and distribution support. With this aid, the French film industry would seem to be thriving. French producers made 227 films in 2007, half Hollywood’s output but three time that of the UK. Unique in continental Europe with a large international distribution French producers, nonetheless, receive generous State aid, €270 million in 2007, made possible by a tax on cinema tickets and broadcasters’ turnover. And every French production is ‘officially’ a cultural creation.
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Breton's "anti-capitalist" manuscripts sell for big money
Guardian. May 28, 2008
The only known manuscript draft of the first Surrealist manifesto is being put up for auction; the estimated price of the document has been set at somewhere between €300,000 and €500,00. Sneaky old capitalism, once again, has ingeniously taken a movement aimed at its violent destruction and turned it into luxury goods.
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Cannes feels the big chill
HollywoodReporter. May 27, 2008
As the Cannes Film Festival winds down, no U.S. distributor has made a major acquisition. The tepid Cannes market continued what's been a dismal cycle for the finished-film market that began last year in Toronto. Theatrical grosses have dropped, there's been a glut of product, and then came the closing of Warners' specialty divisions.
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Breton manuscripts sell for millions
Guardian. May 28, 2008
A selection of French Surrealist Andre Breton’ personal effects including a copy of his 21-page Surrealist Manifesto have been sold at auction in Paris for a total of €3.6m. The nine manuscripts were eventually acquired by Gérard Lhéritier, a noted collector and the founder of the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris, assuaging fears the collection would be split up and sold separately.
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Spielberg honors France by accepting Legion of Honor
UKPress. May 22, 2008
Zillionaire film director Steven Spielberg has honored France by accepting induction into the Legion of Honour. Spielberg is the world's most popular film director and has won innumerable international awards, but none of his projects have had anything to do with France. President Sarkozy ( always glad to piggyback on the success of international celebrities) said Spielberg's work documenting the Holocaust and his efforts to help the war-wracked Darfur region of Sudan prompted the award.
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Mina Agossi, French jazz rebel
Reuters. May 22, 2008
One of the rising stars of French jazz, French-Beninese Mina Agossi has toured extensively in Europe and the United States, won a string of prizes and was the subject of a documentary on French-German arts TV channel Arte. To Agossi, there's nothing sacred about jazz standards. She beatboxes on "Ain't Misbehaving", breaks into French in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and boils down Thelonious Monk's classic "Well, You Needn't " to the point of reciting it.
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Breton manuscript at auction
Independent. May 22, 2008
The only known complete manuscript of Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 – one of the most influential documents in modern art – will be sold by Sotheby's in Paris tomorrow. Art historians argue that the manifesto, which justified or influenced the work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamps, should be sold as a single lot with other Breton writings of 1924. The 21-page docment is estimated to sell for €500,000 (£400,000).
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Museum Kingpin Philippe de Montebello moves to NYU
NewYorkTimes. May 22, 2008
French-born Philippe de Montebello, 72, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 31 years, will become the first professor to teach the history and culture of museums at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He will also advise the university on its plan for a new overseas campus at Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
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TODAY'S FRENCH ARTS, CULTURE, AND FASHION NEWS ...