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World Policy Journal
Volume XV, No 2, Summer 1998
RECONSIDERATIONS: America the Menace: France's Feud with Hollywood
By Bill Grantham *
Hollywood and France are the feuding hill-billy dynasties of world culture, mired in a conflict so ancient and obscure that few can explain what, exactly, it’s about. Yet, it appears impossible for more than a few months to go past without some person—who should know better—declaiming about the God-given right of the people of France to view some forgettable special-effects extravaganza, or of the urgent need to protect the gossamer-fragile civilization of Racine, Flaubert, and Proust from the cultural depredations of Bruce Willis and Leonardo DiCaprio.
If all of this were just background noise, it might not matter. However, the war of words between French and American culture is also a policy issue. The existence of quotas on the importation of American television programs into Europe-n issue of minuscule importance in terms of the global economy—almost wrecked the Uruguay Round GATT talks in 1993. Within Europe, France is unflagging in the diplomatic efforts that it has maintained for more than a decade to persuade its neighbors of the need to hold the line against the flood of American cultural imports. And, in the United States, the lobbying power of the American cultural industries, notably Hollywood, can still distract administrations, Democratic or Republican, into believing that the policy ramifications of this cultural posturing actually affect vital interests.
Most of us have short memories, so we treat these issues as if they are newly minted. In fact, the cultural animosity between France and America long predates the cinema. And the use of the movies as a battleground for enacting this dispute has lasted almost as long as there has been a motion picture industry. Indeed, since 1908, there has been an explosion of Franco-American cinema animosity roughly every 20 years. (The one exception in this otherwise constant cycle is 1968, a year in which the French were otherwise occupied—although they did find time to indulge in a significant gesture against the international cinema establishment, by occupying and closing down the Cannes film festival.) The historical, cultural and-dare one say it—atavistic underpinnings of these disputes have been insufficiently recognized by French and American policymakers. One consequence of this is that, all too frequently, they have come up with the wrong policies.
Loathing—and Loving-America
It is not difficult to trace French animosity toward America back more than a century and a half. A standard dictionary dates the use of the word “Americanize” in the French language (s’ américaniser) to the year 1851. In a tactful note for wary users, it adds the observation, “often pejorative.” Barely half a century into its existence, the young American republic was already getting a bad rap in France. The poet Charles Baudelaire declaimed that the “poor man” who became “Americanized” would lose “the idea of the differences which characterize the phenomena of the physical world and of the moral world, of the natural and of the supernatural.” Baudelaire was accordingly stuck with the problem of what to do with Americans who palpably were not so lost. His solution: de-Americanize them. Thus, according to Baudelaire, the America of one of his heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, was “a vast cage, a great accounting establishment,” in which the great poète maudit “made feeble efforts to escape the influence of this antipathetic atmosphere.”
America’s problem for the Old World, even in the nineteenth century, was that it was the avatar of modernity. Baudelaire’s contemporary, Karl Marx, saw the burgeoning American capitalism of the mid-century as a promising early candidate for the inevitable upheaval of revolution.
The combined energy and rootlessness of American culture seemed for the French, as for many Europeans, to mark a decisive rupture— a threatening one for the partisans of the ancien regime. Of course, this rupture was not really between the physical Old and New Worlds but between the ideological ones, between the forces of those loaded concepts “progress” and “reaction.” Thus, American culture had huge appeal to those who embraced Victorian invention and entrepreneurism, who attended trade fairs and exhibitions and marveled at Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows, a form of mythopoeia that married the wonders of modernity to the elemental and essential lure of the frontier.
The crowds of nineteenth-century Europeans that flocked to this ineradicably American entertainment were also sampling the commercialization of entertainment and, with it, culture. Show business, wrote P. T. Barnum, was an “art” that was “merchantable.” Our world, he claimed, “is a trading world of men, women and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature.” Barnum would not be the last show business mogul to claim that the American style of entertainment was the inevitable product of the natural world, although, perhaps, he remains alone in suggesting that it owes its existence to God himself.
Expelling the French
The group of competing inventors striving to solve the technical problems of the moving picture at the end of the nineteenth century were not particularly concerned with the potential of the nascent cinema either for art or for entertainment. In France, the Lumière brothers, whose public demonstrations of films in 1895 are usually taken as the starting point of the modern cinema, initially shot banal, informational subjects: workers leaving the Lumière factory, or a train arriving at a railway station in Provence. But these early pioneers quickly grasped the narrative and diversionary qualities of the new medium. In 1898, at the time of the Spanish-American War, the Vitagraph director J. Stuart Blackton filmed Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, a short subject where, as its title suggests, the foreign flag was removed from its staff and replaced by the Stars and Stripes. According to Blackton, “the people went wild.” In France, George Meliès, arguably the first important film director, graduated from filming street scenes to filming stage illusions and conjuring tricks, drama-documentaries on subjects such as the Dreyfus affair, fairy and fantasy tales (including the celebrated Voyage to the Moon), and even what would today be called “adult” movies.
Thanks to people such as Meliès, France was the creative leader of the early cinema. But it was also the industrial leader that, effectively, invented the modern studio system, a vertically integrated, globally implanted web of production and distribution offices that achieved substantial economies of scale and market power. The leader of this French cinematic conquest was the Pathé Frères company. Pathé manufactured the cameras that were used to make and project films, sold film stock, produced movies, and distributed them through its international distribution network. By 1908, when the cinema “industry” was just 13 years old, French film releases, led by Pathé, had captured up to 70 per cent of the American market.
In the era of robber barons, this French hegemony was an affront to American industrialists. Indeed, as early as 1896, just one year after their original demonstrations in France, the Lumière brothers found themselves thwarted in their attempts to present their system in the United States. Confronted by boycotts, confiscations by customs, and the “inexplicable” cancellation of demonstrations—11 inspired, they believed, by owners of rival cinema systems—the Lumières gave up their efforts. Other French companies who stayed the course found themselves under similar attack, however.
The industrial attack centered on patents-the intellectual property protection afforded the camera and projection systems on which the competing industrialists depended. As in the early days of home video, when the mutually incompatible Betamax, VHS, and Philips 2000 fought each other for market leadership, the pioneering days of the cinema were marked by bitter battles between systems. In order to run a cinema, it was necessary to ally oneself with one or another competing industrialist. Once that decision was made, the cinema owner could only show films made using that industrialist’ s system: everybody else was effectively locked out. In order to drive the French out of the American market, a group of patent holders, led by Thomas Edison, pooled their various camera and project patents and formed the Motion Picture Patents Co. (MPPC), the main purpose of which was to exclude foreign competition.
The creation of the MPPC had an instant impact on the French movie businesses, driving most of them out of the American market. In just two months, the foreign share of short films in release fell by 25 percentage points. However, two leading French pro ducers, including Pathé, managed to obtain MPPC licenses and thereby become part of the cartel.
The cartel itself could not be sustained. First, one of its essential patents, dealing with the crucial system for threading film through a camera, was struck down by the courts. Then, the nascent federal antitrust laws were successful in busting the cartel. Unfortunately, this came too late for the French companies that had been excluded from the United States by Edison and his cronies. Pathé’s affiliation with the MPPC did it little good, either. By the outbreak of the First World War, foreign films were down to just over 15 percent of the American market.
Fatal Decisions
There is a paradox here. All French film companies declined in America, and not just those that were kept outside the MPPC cartel. Although it would be comforting for some to view the decline of the French film industry before the First World War as the unique product of American perfidy, this is only partly true. Equally important was the mismanagement of the world leader, Pathé Frères. Pathé took a fatal strategic decision to stick to making short films when everybody else was getting into full-length feature production. Moreover, in general, the company was not very well run. In consequence, and despite having an American subsidiary that should have shielded it from the lack of market access imposed by the conditions of the world war, Pathé’s American subsidiary failed in 1921, and was taken over by its stockholders and management.
There was another aspect to France’s cinematic decline: its moviemakers began to diverge stylistically from their American counterparts. American directors such as Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith developed a narrative style that critical admirers such as Sergei Eisenstein observed was rooted in the technique of the nineteenth-century novel and its linear storytelling methods. In France, the best early directors, such as Abel Gance, Marcel L’ Herbier, and Louis Delluc, eschewed this style (which would became known as “narrative continuity”) in favor of approaches that in the words of one British critic, Roy Armes, left them “marginalized in terms of world cinema.”
Another factor leading to France’s cinematic decline was geopolitical. For all the European combatants, waging the First World War was immensely costly, sucking in national economic resources at unsustainable rates. At the same time, the imperial nations, such as France, neglected their empires and the markets upon which they depended. The United States, on the other hand, did not enter the war for nearly three years during which its government, as a matter of policy, determined to enter the international markets—including the cinema—evacuated by the warring European powers. By the time of the Armistice, the American film industry, already identified with Hollywood, was booming. After the war, the United States, undiminished economically by the costs of the conflict, was poised to expand internationally: between 1918 and 1921, film exports grew by 300 percent.
These four factors—the MPPC cartel, Pathé’s managerial weakness, the divergence of French cinema from the stylistic mainstream, and the catastrophe of the First World War—all had combined by the early twentieth century to topple France from the industrial and creative pinnacle it had occupied in 1908. By 1927, Hollywood films represented more than 60 percent of all films submitted to the French censor for pre-exhibition approval, while the domestic market revenue share of French producers had fallen below 40 percent.
Industrial Protectionism and Cultural Animosity
France was not the first country to respond to Hollywood’s cinematic hegemony by introducing quotas on American films. Germany, citing both cultural and industrial reasons, limited the importation of foreign films in 192 1, followed over the next few years by Britain, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. In February 1928, the French education minister, Edouard Herriot, set up a national quota system of Byzantine complexity, introduced, he said, in “the interests of good order, and of public morality,” “internal and external state security,” and “safeguarding {French} customs and national traditions.” While the quotas were aimed at all foreign films, including those from the increasingly successful film industry in Germany, the main target was Hollywood.
For the French in 1928, as now, the American movie business represented a combination of economic muscle and cultural aggression that had to be withstood. As always, there was some truth in the claims. No less a person than Herbert Hoover, while serving as secretary of commerce, had spoken of “the significance of motion picture exporting both as a straight commodity trade and as a powerful influence in behalf of American goods and habits of living.” The movies, in other words, were not just a source of income; they induced audiences to buy other American goods and promoted the American way of life. Anecdotes supported this claim: Hollywood was said to have been responsible for the introduction of the bungalow to Brazil, while businesses generally reported that demands for American styles and brands in products as diverse as shoes, clothes, cars, and furniture was due to the exposure of foreign audiences to American films.
In France, nationalists such as Charles Pomaret, a parliamentarian who ultimately served as a minister in the Vichy government, railed against Hollywood’s alleged predatory practices-raids on European acting and directing talent, monopolization of movie theaters, boycotts of independent exhibitors, and even alleged stifling of European films (by buying them up and then giving them only limited releases).
citing bothThe economic critique of Hollywood went hand in glove with a cultural attack on the values of its output. However, this critique was married to a fundamental antipathy to American industrial society and the “zoocratic” tendencies deplored, 80 years earlier, by Baudelaire. In 1930, Georges Duhamel published a dystopian novel titled Scènes de la vie future, (published in the United States, lest the lesson be lost, as America the Menace). Among the targets of Duhamel’s anti-American rage were the luxury picture palaces that had sprung up in the previous decade. For him, they had “the luxury of some big bourgeois brothel-n industrialized luxury made by soulless machines for a crowd whose own soul seems to be disappearing.” The American cinema, he railed, was “a diversion for Helots, a pastime for the illiterate, for miserable creatures, stupefied by their drudgery and their cares.”
The narcotic effect of the mass media was not a theme unique to Duhamel: one thinks of the “feelies” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or the tireless mind control exerted by movies, television programs, dime novels, and cheap music in George Orwell’ s Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, only in Duhamel is the theme so explicitly linked to an attack on America’s cultural and industrial impact.
This combination of economic fear and cultural loathing informed the French quota policy in 1928 (as it does today). Then, as now, the issue for policymakers should have been: did the quotas work? The answer is unclear, but the evidence suggests that they did not. In 1929, the number of French-made films submitted for censorship actually fell by nearly one-half. The arrival of talking pictures stimulated demand for new films, and raised French production levels by the early 1930s. But this rise was not sufficient to meet the demand for new movies. Instead of booming, French studios went out of business in the 1930s. As a result, the number of cinemas in France, which had roughly tripled in the decade after 1918, fell by one-sixth between 1929 and 1937.
The impact of the Depression and the high cost of wiring theaters for talking pictures undoubtedly exacerbated the movie industry’ s problems. However, in the United States, it overcame these hurdles. In France, despite being forced to loosen its quota regime twice in the 193Os, the protected film industry underwent serious decline.
Splendid Isolation
As so often happens, this did not prevent people from drawing the wrong conclusions. This fact was exacerbated by the experience of the French cinema during the Second World War, when Hollywood films disappeared and the local industry prospered. At Liberation, the artistic and popular success of such films as Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis and Les visiteurs du soir, and Robert Bresson’s debut features, Les anges du peché and Les dames du Bois de Boulogne, suggested to many that a film industry isolated from the insidious influences of Hollywood could be a great statement of national culture. This was a position attractive to both right and left. On the right, nationalists could use the Vichy experience to advance the cultural agenda which, as we have seen, dated back a century. On the left, the cultural argument was taken up at the dawn of the Cold War to create a broader context for antiAmericanism.
At the same time, there was a huge backlog of American movies waiting to be shown in France. Young cinébiles such as Andre Bazin, the father of postwar film criticism, eagerly awaited the arrival of unseen films from the Hollywood directors they admired (while deploring the industrial system within which these masters worked). The French public longed to see the American spectaculars that they had not been allowed to see during the war, notably Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the system of support that enabled the French industry to thrive during the war years collapsed at the Liberation. Apocalyptic voices—of which there have always been many-proclaimed the death of French cinema, swept away by a wave of inferior Hollywood films.
While left and right united to attack Hollywood, the French government went about the business of rebuilding the French economy. An agreement with the United States for $1 billion worth of credits was struck in 1946 by the acting French prime minister Léon Blum and James F. Byrnes, the Truman administration’s secretary of state. Tied to the deal was an agreement to reopen the French market to Hollywood films. Although the deal basically revived the prewar quota system with modifications made at the request of the French, the so-called Blum-Byrnes Accords, while modified in 1948 and largely forgotten elsewhere, lingered in the collective memory of the French cinema as the moment when Hollywood destroyed the Vichy renaissance.
Of course, this was not true. While Hollywood had undoubtedly lobbied for the reopening of the French market, as it did with respect to all European markets after the war, it did not seek to dismantle the prewar quota system. Moreover, the threatened avalanche of unreleased American films was short-lived and effectively over by 1948.
However, the French experience of the Edison cartels, the Herriot quota decrees, and the Blum-Byrnes quotas coalesced to create a powerful national myth: The Americans used dirty tricks to defeat a world leader that was French. Quotas were the only means to stem the tide of American films that represented both a menace to the domestic industry and an alien cultural onslaught. And, when threatened, the American film industry would deploy all its economic and political muscle to defeat the French.
Forgetting the Lesson
All these issues resurfaced in the 1980s and 199Os, when the member-states of the European Community (now the European Union) attempted to limit the volume of American films and programs shown on European television screens. The spur for this was the spectacular redrawing of the European televisual landscape that occurred in the mid-1980s when the arrival of frontier-breaching satellite television combined with an ideological shift in favor of consumer markets to create an avalanche of new, mainly private, television channels in countries previously accustomed to a nearly exclusive diet of public service broadcasting.
The first factor3cross-border transmission— created legal and supervisory voids that called for regulatory action on a pan-European level. The second factor—new channels—created another problem. The startup television services, still building their audiences to the levels at which they could achieve significant earnings from advertising or subscriptions, looked for sources of plentiful, cheap, and watchable television, and found them, to nobody’s great surprise, in the United States.
In France, it seemed like Blum-Byrnes all over again. Just at the moment when it appeared that the television sector was on the verge of significant expansion, the Americans were ready to sweep in and take the spoils. France led the diplomatic charge in Europe for quota barriers to be erected against the importation of non-European (that is, American) television programs, backed by a sustained rhetoric bordering on paranoia. French leaders, including the culture minister Jack Lang, railed against American hegemony and the “social dumping” of cheapjack foreign culture. The director Bertrand Tavernier—one of the most sophisticated French historians of the American cinema—proclaimed that American intentions toward the French cinema were equivalent to its treatment of the Indians: “If we’ re very good, they will give us a reservation.”
At the same time, critics denounced the EuroDisney theme park near Paris as another symptom of the Hollywoodization of France, a “cultural Chernobyl,” a “construction of hardened chewing gum and idiotic folklore taken straight out of comic books written for obese Americans” and a “world that will have all the appearance of civilization and all the savage reality of barbarism.”
The reality was more nuanced. The campaign to curb television program imports ignored an axiom of television scheduling, namely that national audiences overwhelmingly prefer national programming. Imported programs have the advantage of being cheap, because television accounting practices mean that the costs of their production have been substantially recouped by the sale of the programs to television networks in their home country prior to export. Importing networks accordingly use (inexpensive) foreign programs to free up money to produce their own (expensive) domestic shows, which command bigger audiences (and therefore income).
This rule applied with equal vigor in Europe: indeed, once the new wave of private television networks became established, national programming became paramount once more. By 1998, the Hollywood studios were noting that in the rich, highly competitive German market, their programs were close to being squeezed out altogether by local fare.
Back in the 198Os, this rule was known but largely ignored. As a result of sustained French pressure, in 1989 Europe adopted quotas under a policy called, with a completely straight face, Television Without Frontiers. However, the quotas were set at or around the level that foreign programs would probably have achieved in a free market had the quotas not existed at all. In other words, the policy, founded in the rhetoric of the past and ignorant of the realities of the present, was ultimately cosmetic rather than effective.
Do Quotas Matter?
However, this reality—that the quotas did not really matter—was lost on the target of the quota policy, Hollywood. For years, since the U.S. government became interested in motion picture exports during the First World War, Hollywood has been an effective lobbyist on its own behalf in Washington. Under its colorful chief lobbyist, Jack Valenti, Hollywood launched its onslaught against the European quotas and, in time, found a sympathetic ear in the Clinton administration. The forum for the anti-quota struggle became the efforts to extend the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to cover services, including entertainment services such as movies and television programs. To the United States, it seemed clear that free trade in services could not tolerate the existence of quotas. To France, this was just another piece of barbarism from the “giant accounting establishment,” an unacceptable attempt to reify culture into P. T. Barnum’s “merchantable art.”
This is not the place to discuss in detail what happened in the GA-M negotiations, except to make two observations. First, ultimately, France won: the issue of quotas was not addressed in the 1993 agreement. Second, it didn’ t matter: Europe’s television landscape developed with the quotas much as it would have done without them, and Hollywood’s sales of programs to Europe were scarcely affected by the Television Without Frontiers policy.
This zero-sum policy game had little to do with the empirical merits of the issues, but everything to do with the baggage the two sides carried to the table. What is important about these vignettes of cultural and industrial history is the way in which the French attack on Hollywood appears to have drawn its strength as much from a continuum of aesthetic and even psychological themes rather than from a measured appraisal of genuine industrial, economic and, yes, cultural questions. If the reality is that Pathé would have declined anyway; that the Herriot quotas harmed French cinema; that Blum-Byrnes didn’ t matter; and that the Television Without Frontiers quotas were irrelevant-then policy conclusions drawn from the reverse of these truths must, self-evidently, be suspect.
We are accustomed to the atavistic and irrational as factors in the making of policy. But we do not usually think of them as significant to the dull matters of trade negotiations and market barriers. At times, French politicians and intellectuals speak of Hollywood the way Greece talks about Turkey or Gerry Adams refers to the British government, with the rhetoric of war. That, to say the least, is an odd way to talk about Baywatch.
It’s plausible to see in the gulf that separates the two sides the same features that informed cultural anti-Americanism in the nineteenth century—a fundamental lack of comfort with the constantly changing apparatus of the modern world. It’s the same impulse that led the French president, Jacques Chirac, to dismiss the Internet recently as “an Anglo-Saxon network.” How convenient to have someone to blame for unwelcome or uncontrollable change, and Hollywood fits the bill quite well.
Nonetheless, the issue of quotas on Hollywood’ s output is still on the cultural agenda in Europe, although, despite France’s continuing efforts, it is a waning one. American movies take the lion’s share of the box office in France, and will doubtless continue to do so. Yet, at the same time, France is by far Europe’s biggest producer of movies, each year making more than 100 films, including vernacular hits that do as well in the home market as the most successful Hollywood fare. American television programs on French networks take second place to well-made, locally produced police dramas, soaps, children’s programs, and game shows.
Yet the strange psychohistory of Franco-Hollywood animosity remains powerful, providing an available, useable rhetoric in stressful times. Here, as with any feud, fighting words are great for getting people riled up-but not much good for anything else.
*: Bill Grantham practices entertainment and intellectual property law in Los Angeles. He is the author of the forthcoming Some Big Bourgeois Brothel: Contexts for France’ s Culture Wars with Hollywood.. Back.