The Gaul of Them

Film essay for the Stranger, 1/10/94

I’d always figured the French Ministry of Culture to be an institution of bureaucratic nepotism, taking the taxes from laid-off Citroen assembly workers to subsidize incomprehensible books by irrelevant semioticians (“How many angels can dance on the head of a text?”) and “art” films chock full of social criticism and softcore sex (admittedly, two of my favorite genres). You know, Eurosocialism at its finest — bleeding the workers to support the bourgeois.

But I’ve got more respect for the Ministry of Culture now that it’s stared down the Hollywood monster and held to its demand to keep “free trade” from gutting the European film industry.

Before I proceed, some background. You know how all those movie people clamored to contribute to Clinton’s presidential campaign? It was more than just your everyday liberal-celebrity primping. The entertainment industry is an economic force, and saw a chance to make friends and peddle influence. In return, the new administration has supported or accepted every move toward big-media consolidation and domination. Broadcasters can buy more and more stations; networks can again control the syndication rights to their shows; cable operators and phone companies and movie studios can plan huge megamergers without a peep of antitrust interference.

And Hollywood got the White House to push its cause at the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Teriff) negotiations. At one point the US delegation threatened to let the deadline for the 1993 round of GATT talks expire, killing agreements on dozens of other trade issues, if France wouldn’t agree to stop using movie-ticket taxes to subsidize its domestic filmmakers.

This was just the sort of thing that leftists like Noam Chomsky warned against during the NAFTA debate: Big corporations using “free trade” as a justification for interfering in domestic policies, short-circuiting democracy.

The French officials had screwed over their farmers in other trade talks, but held their ground on the culture issue. The issue of French film support was set aside for discussion at a later date.

It was a great triumph over Hollywood’s pathetic longtime flack Jack Valenti, whose incessant whining about the poor helpless media conglomerates got lamer every time he spoke (“We’ve got 60 percent of your country’s box office; we demand the rest”). After he lost the fight, Valenti apparently realized the bad PR he’d gotten as a Goliath figure trying to push around the Eurofilm Davids. Valenti wrote to the NY Times that his industry group hadn’t really wanted the breaks it’d lobbied for. He now claimed Hollywood only really wanted a piece of any European taxes on blank videocassettes, revenues earmarked for the Euro film industry as a compensation against home taping. The studios (and the major record labels) have lobbied for similar taxes in the US. I think blank-tape taxes are unfair to begin with; they feed cash from indie video producers and home-movie makers toward the bigger boys. They’d be more unfair if they made overseas governments funnel cash toward US media empires.

Vice President Gore was in LA on the 11th. He spoke to a convention of media and telecommunications giants, with guest appearances by Lily Tomlin and Nancy Sinatra. He assured the throng that the administration would keep hounding the pesky Europeans to provide US “information providors” with “full access” to these “major world markets.” He added that as an ol’ Nashville guy he was proud that “you can turn on a radio almost anywhere in the world and it won’t be long before you hear American music.” To Gore, and to most of the people at the convention, music and film and video are Product, and those who resist the Hollywood (or the Nashville) cartel are mere nuisances meddling in the natural flow of commerce.

Some of us think differently. We think music, film and video are, or should be, vehicles for communicating ideas and emotions. We want to break the stranglehold of The American Entertainment Business on the world’s (including America’s) expressions and dreams. The stand-up comics are wrong: today’s big cultural rivalry isn’t NY vs. LA, it’s NY and LA (and Tokyo) vs. the rest of the world. We need more Chantal Akermans and Almadovars, and could live with fewer John Hugheses and even fewer George Lucases. Even a bad Euro movie (and I’ve seen plenty) is a better viewing experience than your average A-budgeted B-movie from the Hollywood stimulus-response factories.

There will be many similar battles in the years to come, as the entertainment conglomerates maneuver to subdue the economic and technological trends that threaten to make them obsolete.

So raise a Brie and a glass of fine wine in saluting the Ministry of Culture, preferably in front of a (now French-owned) RCA VCR running Camille Claudel.