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  • Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood’s New World Order by Jonathan Buchsbaum
  • Alison Smith
Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood’s New World Order. By Jonathan Buchsbaum. (Film and Culture.) New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. xxvii + 393 pp., ill.

In the early to mid-1990s, French cinema found itself at the heart of the international debate about neo-liberalism and globalization. The 1993 sessions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, the forerunner of the WTO) centred, for the first time, on the audio-visual market, with the US in particular eager to bring film and even more importantly television under the auspices of free-trade agreements. The fierce resistance put up by French politicians and filmmakers to any attempt to limit the support offered to the national film industry made headlines internationally and brought the phrase and the concept of the ‘cultural exception’ into common use; its eventual success cemented the position of cinema at the forefront of French cultural policy and marked a turnaround in the (then declining) fortunes of the industry in France and possibly elsewhere in Europe. In his Preface, Jonathan Buchsbaum even attributes a triggering role to it in the wider anti- and alter-globalization movements that have developed in the new millennium. Buchsbaum’s book, however, is not so much a call to arms against neo-liberalism as a detailed and carefully documented recent history of the financial and political structures of the French film industry, starting from the essential assumption that French cinema, post GATT, should be seen as both a political and an economic success story; albeit not without its misjudgements and (obvious) crises, it has continued to balance relative economic health with clear cultural values. The 1993 GATT-fight is certainly given due prominence, but Buchsbaum is at pains to indicate how the negotiations developed debates already live within European institutions, and he follows the fortunes of the concept of ‘cultural exception’ as it gained traction on the world stage and developed into the ‘cultural diversity’ promoted by UNESCO in the first decade of the new millennium. The book also deals in detail with several other significant formative crises in French cinema’s late-twentieth-century development, such as the rise and fall of Canal+, and the re-organization of exhibition practices with the rapid development of multiplexes and the enthusiastic adoption of loyalty cards by the big exhibition chains. The book’s carefully researched accounts of the history it covers are most welcome, and it should be essential reading for anyone concerned with the development of the French film industry. Unfortunately, however, the latest developments it discusses date from 2008. In the wake of the financial crash, not to mention sectoral developments such as the seemingly unstoppable spread of digitalization in cinematic distribution and exhibition, we can certainly no longer assume that French cinema is still in the place at which Buchsbaum leaves it. It is the common fate of books on the film industry to become works of history very quickly; this one, unfortunately, must already be read in that key, and the reader in [End Page 153] sympathy with its direction and conclusions cannot but be frustrated at the absence of any account of how the hard-won ‘exception’ may have adapted to post-crash realities.

Alison Smith
University of Liverpool
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