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3 The Transnational Aesthetic Volker Schlöndorff, Studio Babelsberg, and Vivendi Universal The Ideational Universe of the Global Media Conglomerate The French Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE) began operations in 1853 selling water, but even at that time it had a mondial vision, selling to sites including Paris and Constantinople. CGE merged in the 1980s with HAVAS Media Group, a French media and publishing corporation, thereby acquiring control of the French private television company CANAL+. During the 1990s it engaged in a series of further mergers. When in 1996 the dynamic Jean-Marie Messier took control of the company, he accelerated its expansion so much so that a 2003 biography of Messier bears the title The Man Who Tried to Buy the World. Absorbing various companies to become one of the world’s largest conglomerates, it would hold interests in such diverse sectors as transportation, communications, healthcare, construction, property management , entertainment, software, desalination plants, and media. In 1998, after further mergers, the company took on the new name Vivendi. With such far-flung holdings, Vivendi had difficulty establishing a clear profile, until toward the end of the decade the company moved most aggressively in the direction of media and entertainment. Back in 1992, at the beginning of its expansion into media markets, CGE purchased the DEFA Studios, with much controversy, from the German Treuhand , the authority in charge of the privatization of the GDR state property. The DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) had served as the center of film production in the GDR. Moreover, it occupied the site previously occupied by the historic UFA (Universal Film-Aktiengesellschaft) studios, the studios i-xii_1-244_Hall.indd 60 4/25/08 1:57:28 PM the transnational aesthetic · 61 of Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich, the heart of German national film production during the eras of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. For eighty years, this site had been at the heart of German film production. With the purchase, CGE established Studio Babelsberg GmbH. CGE also began a large development project with the real estate of the DEFA facility, creating the “Media City, Babelsberg” between Berlin and Potsdam. By 2000, however , Babelsberg would become only one relatively small object in Messier’s empire. Vivendi continued to grow, purchasing Canadian Seagrams, which had itself just recently purchased Universal Studios and Polygram music. The company again changed its name, this time to Vivendi Universal. Acquisitions and mergers continued through 2002, with the company taking on Houghton-Mifflin, Pathé, and the USA Network, among others. At the height of its expansion it had branches in eighty-four countries and over three hundred thousand employees. There is much that could be said about the sheer size of its holdings, but it is interesting to contemplate the actual world its material connections constructed. Within its media concerns Vivendi Universal brought into connection directors and films as diverse and divergent as Volker Schlöndorff’s Der Unhold (1996), Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de L’amour (2001), Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park III (2001), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), François Ozon’s 8 Femmes (2002), and Chuck Russell’s The Scorpion King (2002). These filmmakers and their particular aspirations might seem disparate, even at odds, yet on a purely material economic level processes of globalization bring forth a condition in which the funding for a Godard film derives from and is to a certain extent dependent on the success of American Pie 2 (Rogers, 2001). This list of films, all produced within the Vivendi Universal system, serves as a good example of how globalization affects the media. It also raises interesting questions in regard to transnational film production. We could easily trace the material connections between Éloge de L’Amour and American Pie 2, but what about precisely the appearance, the content, the ideas, the images themselves? Having been brought in contact with European art film, does globalization raise towards high culture the acting career of The Rock? The answer is probably no. Does globalization change the impulses behind the films of Schlöndorff, Godard, or Akerman, pushing them towards popular forms? When experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman receives funding support not only from Eurimages, but from Vivendi affiliate Polygram to film a light-hearted love story at Babelsberg, should we ask what relationship exists between the images of a film and the ensemble of productive forces out of which it emerges? Akerman stated explicitly that a connection does i-xii_1-244_Hall.indd 61 4/25...

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