Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage

Notes

177 Notes Introduction 1. Examples of the diverse range of activities associated with that year are the exhibition honoring the work of Claude Monet held at the Grand Palais from February to May of 1980; one honoring the architect Viollet-le-duc, also held at the Grand Palais; restoration projects and museum projects including the restoration of the nineteenth-century commercial sailing ship the Belem (which is now used for historical cruises celebrating France’s maritime history) and the establishment of a museum to commemorate rural life in the Villefagnan in the Charente, for which funds for both were dedicated in 1980. I give this brief sampling only to convey an idea of what is included under the rubric of heritage. For more on the activities associated with L’Année du patrimoine, see Lebovics (2004). 2. I am borrowing Stuart Hall’s distinction between heritage as the general tendency to frame identity through the past and The Heritage or sometimes just Heritage to refer to the officially sanctioned version of the national past and its relationship to the nation at any given moment (2005, 23–24). 3. There is no direct equivalent of the term “heritage” in French. I have used the term “patrimoine” here because it is the closest term available in French. The word “heritage” and the word “patrimoine” have both had similar trajectories of development. Both originally referred to a property inheritance left from one family member to another (Lebovics 2004, 84; Lowenthal 1998, 4). In the late twentieth century, both words became applied to the developing notion of a shared cultural heritage. The French word patrimoine, however, has developed a specifically national-cultural connotation that the English word does not quite have. This derives in part from the application of the term to national art and architectural treasures, a use common as early as the 1970s (Vadelorge 2003, 11). 4. French cinema has not been globally dominant since before the First World War, at which time it was the foremost cinema in the world both in terms of production and market share (Abel 1998). If French cinema has not dominated the marketplace for more than a century, it has nonetheless had periods of great cultural and artistic prestige, most notably during the 1930s, often considered French cinema’s golden age, and during the 1960s, when it was strongly associated with the avant garde. French cinema’s prestige and market share were both seen to decline following the end of the New Wave in the 1970s, and it was this that prompted Mitterrand to seek a “restoration” of sorts. 5. The system of avance sur recettes was created in 1960 and is administered through the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC). It provides various funding mechanisms , among them a system of loans that allows filmmakers to borrow up to 5 percent of a film’s total production costs against future box-office returns. Although this type of loan was theoretically intended to support independent-film production and to permit the creation of feature-length films by unknown writers and directors, it tends to favor 2VKHUZLW]1RWHVLQGG $0 178 / NOTES TO PAGES 3–8 high-budget, high-profile films by well-known directors, which might explain why the heritage film has disproportionately benefited from this type of funding. 6. These are only a partial list of films that could be classified as heritage films. 7. For more on the evolution of the term, see Lowenthal (1998), Lebovics (2004), and especially Desvallée (1998). 8. History’s role in constructing the national past is explored in greater detail in chapter 1. For more on the notion of French exceptionalism, see Godin and Chafer (2005). 9. Chapter 1 discusses the evolution of history and historiography. However, I point out at this juncture that the historical film, from the beginning, incarnated Ernest Renan’s vision of national identity in that it functioned as a concrete and transmissible memory of “the great things we have done” (1882). 10. The endurance of heritage can be partly explained by the creation of a number of governmental agencies charged with it. Among these are the Directions Régionales des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC), created in 1977 and charged with safeguarding and transmitting regional heritage, Le Conseil du patrimoine ethnologique, created in 1980 and charged with overseeing and funding ethnological research in France, Le Conseil supérieur de la recherche archeologique, created in 1985, and La Commission nationale de l’inventaire général...