Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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occupation period Braque’s stripped canvas re-

jected lyricism in favour of unequivocal sever-

ity of line and colour—for instance, The Grey

Table (1942). His Studio Series (1949–56)

comprised eight canvases, the result of a long

process of thought over several years. Harmo-

nious relationships are sought as plain objects,

crowding the image, metamorphose and lose

their identity as they merge through the pleas-

ure of associations.

VALERIE SWALES

Further reading

Calvet, L.-J. (1993) Georges Brassens, Paris:

Payot (biographically oriented study).

Braudel, Fernand

b. 1902, France;

d. 1985, Paris

Intellectual

Perhaps France’s most influential postwar his-

torian, Braudel was from 1956 the editor of

the journal Annales, was instrumental in the

setting-up of the sixth section of the École Pra-

tique des Hautes Études (later the institutional

bastion of structuralism), and founded the

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, later to be

the power-base of Bourdieu. His institutional

importance is fully matched by that of his writ-

ing. La Méditerranée of 1947 (on the sixteenth

century) and 1979’s Civilisation matérielle,

économie et capitalisme (XVe–XVIIIe siècle)

are two of the century’s major works of his-

tory. Braudel was elected to the Academic

Française shortly before his death.

KEITH READER

Brel, Jacques

b. 1929, Brussels;

d. 1978, Paris

Singer-songwriter

Brel, together with Brassens, is regarded as one

of the great icons of postwar chanson. Fol-

lowing a middle-class Catholic education in

Brussels, Brel escaped his father’s cardboard-

box factory, to make his debut in 1953 at the

Théatre des Trois Baudets in Paris. He initially

adopted a lyrical voice in the songs of the

1950s, combining religious and moral zeal

with youthful romanticism, typified in ‘Quand

on n’a que l’amour’ (If We Only Have Love),

earning from Brassens the nickname l’Abbé

Brel (Abbot Brel).

Following a heightened sense of pessimism

and disillusionment towards the end of the

1950s, especially where women and love were

concerned, as in ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (If You Go

Away), Brel’s lyricism was eclipsed by the de-

velopment of two additional voices. The first

satirized middle-class society in songs such as

‘Les Bourgeois’ (The Bourgeois), and ‘Les

Flamandes’ (The Flemish Women) which made

him unpopular in Flanders. Brel’s attack was,

however, of more universal significance, ad-

dressing those who fall into immobility, deny

their intelligence and individuality, and refuse

to be existentially committed in life. The sec-

ond voice was developed in a series of invented

characters which served to renew his hope of

finding the perfect love (‘Madeleine’, ‘Titine’,

‘Les Bonbons’).

The optimism generated in these dramatic

songs faded by 1968 with the triumph of death

and time, as in ‘J’arrive’ (I’m Coming). Songs

such as ‘Les Bonbons 67’, the sequel to ‘Les

Bonbons’, degenerated into parody and the

burlesque, as characters could no longer hold

on to any serious goal in life. Resigned to a

more realistic notion of love, as in ‘La

Chanson des vieux amants’ (‘The Song of the

Old Lovers’), the lyrical narrator returned,

escaping nostalgically back towards an ideal-

ized childhood. Given the pessimism and es-

capism of his 1967–8 work, it is perhaps not

coincidental that Brel decided to stop his con-

cert tours.

During the 1970s, he went on to star as Don

Quixote in the musical Homme de la Mancha

(Man of La Mancha), produced and acted in

several films, and developed a passion for

Brel, Jacques

sailing and flying, all before settling in the

Marquesas Islands with his companion

Maddly Bamy. Following this long absence,

Brel returned in 1977, shortly before his early

death from cancer, with a sell-out comeback

album, Brel, which reflected both the themes

of his earlier songs and his subsequent evolu-

tion away from France. Not only was the nar-

rator dissatisfied with society, as in ‘Jaurès’ and

‘Les Flamingants’ (extreme Flemish national-

ists), but his faith in love was at an all-time

low and his view of women often corresponded

to an angel-whore dichotomy (‘Knokke-le-

Zoute Tango’). The cult of male friendship did,

however, offer some consolation (‘Jojo’). Much

of Brel’s originality lies in his theatrical stage

performances, where he developed his facial

and gestural expression to the full. English

versions of his songs formed the basis of an

American musical, Jacques Brel is Alive and

Well and Living in Paris, and have since been

recorded by many artists, including Scott

Walker and Marc Almond.

CHRIS TINKER

See also: francophone popular music: Europe;

song/chanson

Major works

Brel, J. (1982) Tout Brel, Paris: Laffont (col-

lected song lyrics).

Further reading

Todd, O. (1984) Jacques Brel: une vie, Paris:

Laffont (biography).

Bresson, Robert

b. 1901, Bromont-Lamothe

Director

Bresson is a film-maker whose cinematic writ-

ing is unlike any other—elliptical, hermetic,

making extensive use of close-ups less for psy-

chological insight (a term foreign to him) than

as windows on the soul. A Catholic, he has

also been described as a Jansenist, and his later

films, such as Le Diable, probablement (1977)

and L’Argent (1983), bear the trace of a spir-

ituality, at once resigned and refined, that could

not inappropriately be described as Oriental.

His early films make comparatively conven-

tional use of actors and dialogue, and it was

not until Diary of a Country Priest (Le Jour-

nal d’un curé de campagne) in 1951 that the

distinctiveness of his style came to the fore.

This adaptation of the Bernanos novel

counterposes the young priest’s writing of his

diary to his voice on the soundtrack reading it

aloud. The result is an unprecedented stress

on the materiality of writing and of the priest’s

agony. Bresson has famously said that if a

sound can replace an image then the image

should be done away with. His work from this

film onwards can be understood as a sustained

development of that idea.

He was to return to the work of Bernanos

with Mouchette in 1967, but two other works

of that period, the Dostoevskian Pickpocket

of 1959 and Au hasard, Balthazar (1966), are

more remarkable. Pickpocket presents its cen-

tral character’s compulsive thieving as the

means by which he attains (a kind of) salva-

tion, in a narrative reversal of Un condamné à

mort s’est échappé of 1956. Michel the pick-

pocket finds grace through imprisonment as

grace finds Fontaine, the hero of the earlier

film, and enables him to escape from a Ger-

man wartime prison. Both films are extraor-

dinarily gripping on the level of narrative sus-

pense, whereas the narration of Balthazar is

such a tissue of ellipses and paradoxes that it

often baffles audiences. The eponymous cen-

tral character is a donkey, for whom the film

constructs a kind of spiritual odyssey, in the

extreme example of Bresson’s refusal of the

notion of the actor and espousal of the ‘model’

from whose pro-filmic behaviour any taint of

emotional manipulation is to be rigorously

expunged. The deadpan quality this gives his

films—which is doubtless why Tati said that

Bresson, Robert

he would like to work with him—achieves an

iconic effect similar to the flattening-out of the

image in early medieval art. Very few of his

‘models’ go on to prolonged screen careers, so

uniquely draining is the experience of work-

ing with him. Bresson is at once the most spir-

itual and the most material of film-makers, an

influence on Godard but also on Martin

Scorsese (Raging Bull). There is scarcely an-

other director whose work is so instantly and

consistently recognizable.

KEITH READER

See also: Catholicism and Protestantism; cin-

ema

Major works

Bresson, R. (1975/88), Notes sur le

cinématographe, Paris: Gallimard/Folio

(Bresson’s aphoristic distillations of his

views on the true essence of cinema).

Further reading

Arnaud, P. (1986), Robert Bresson, Paris:

Cahiers du cinéma (a well-illustrated

phenomenological study, articulating the

films’ formal properties with their theologi-

cal implications).

Schrader, P. (1972), Transcendental Style in

Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Berkeley, Los

Angeles and London: University of Califor-

nia Press (a monograph by Scorsese’s main

scriptwriter, situating Bresson’s work

within a wider context of spiritual art).

Sémolué, J. (1993), Bresson, Paris:

Flammarion/Cinémas (a careful and well-

documented overview).

Brialy, Jean-Claude

b. 1933, Aumale, Algeria

Actor and producer

Brialy has acted in some ninety films since

1957, but is best known as a key actor of the

Nouvelle vague (New Wave), especially for

Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins

(both 1959), also acting in films by Godard,

Malle, Rivette, Truffaut and Varda. An im-

portant role is the ageing fetishist of

Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (Le Genou de Claire)

in 1970. Among his secondary roles, there is

the judge of Tavernier’s Le Juge et l’assassin

(1976), and the bourgeois of Buñuel’s The

Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la

Liberté) in 1974 and Chabrol’s L’Inspecteur

Lavardin (1986).

PHIL POWRIE

Further reading

Bradby, D. and Williams, D. (1988) Director’s

Theatre, London: Macmillan (Chapter 6

deals with Brook).

Williams, D. (1988) Peter Brook—A Theatri-

cal Casebook , revised edition 1991, Lon-

don: Methuen.

Bryen, Camille

b. 1902, Nantes;

d. 1977, Paris

Artist, poet and illustrator

Bryen took part in Dada and Surrealist activi-

ties in the 1930s and 1940s. His ‘objects of

symbolic function’ are assemblages of dispa-

rate elements brought together according to

an inner logic. He wrote poems (Opoponax)

and produced works in gestural automatism

(Hépéril). He collaborated in the avant-garde

review Réalités nouvelles and participated in

exhibitions of art informel including

HWPSMTB in 1948 and Signifiants de

l’Informel in 1958. In 1952 Bryen and

Audiberti published L’Ouvre-Boîte, colloque

abhumaniste (The Tin-Opener: An

Abhumanist Colloquium), where they defined

their philosophy of abhumanism as ‘the world

without man…the world as it is at the begin-

ning, before it has been compartmentalized,

classified, humanized’.

ELZA ADAMOWICZ

Seee also: painting

Buffet, Bernard

b. 1928, France

Artist

Buffet acquired a successful reputation in the

Bryen, Camille

1940s and 1950s. His figurative painting rep-

resented aspects of Sartre’s existentialist theory

in a literalist and highly schematic manner,

which was popular with a large section of the

French public. An example is Self Portrait

(1954).

VALERIE SWALES

Further reading

Lydon, M. (1980) Perpetuum Mobile: A Study

of the Novels and Aesthetics of Michel Butor,

Edmonton: University of Alberta Press

(analysis of Butor’s approach to writing).

Raillard, G. (ed.) (1974) Butor: colloque de

Cerisy, Paris: UGE (talks by and about

Butor).

Spencer, M.C. (1974) Michel Butor, New

York: Twayne (overview of Butor’s writing

career; also contains bibliography).

World Literature Today (1982) 56, 2 (journal

issue on Butor).

Butor, Michel

cable and satellite television

The importance of developing the new media

of cable and satellite as part of France’s hi-

tech communications revolution featured

prominently on the media policy agenda of

both Socialist and Gaullist governments

throughout the 1980s. However, the era of

multichannel cable television has been slow to

arrive. By the late 1990s only about 10 per

cent of French households were hooked up to

a cable network. Satellite television had fared

even less well, with only a handful of house-

holds equipped to receive the output of the

technologically oversophisticated French di-

rect-broadcasting satellites Télédiffusion 1 and

2. However, in the late 1990s the development

of digital television looked set to give a boost

to satellite television in France.

RAYMOND KUHN

Further reading

Lunven, R. and Vedel, T. (1993) La Télévision

de demain, Paris: Armand Colin (a detailed

analysis of the new media technologies of

cable and satellite).

Cabrel, Francis

b. 1953, Agen

Singer-songwriter

With his occitan (Southern French) accent,

nostalgic and sometimes melancholy songs,

Francis Cabrel has espoused good causes, for

example, leukaemia with Il faudra leur dire

(They Must be Told), and has defended his

atavistic roots with Les Chevaliers cathares

(The Cathar Knights). But the so-called ermite

d’Astaffort (hermit of Astaffort) is perhaps

most important as an outstanding lyricist,

charismatic stage performer and stout de-

fender of la chanson française (French song).

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

da Costa, B. (1978) Histoire du café-théâtre,

Paris: Buchet/Chastel (an anecdotal history

of the café theatre)

café-concert

The café-concert (caf’conc’)—a café where

singers and other artistes entertained custom-

ers—became popular in France in the 1860s.

By 1890 there were some 200 in Paris alone.

The forerunners of twentieth-century cabarets

(e.g. of the Left and Right Bank in Paris in the

1960s), the café-concerts provided popular

entertainment and are important, historically,

as establishments where the public listened to

music rather than joining in the singing of

popular songs.

IAN PICKUP

See also: cultural topography (Paris); song/

chanson

Cahiers du cinéma

Journal

Launched by Gallimard on 1 April 1951 as

café-concert

the successor to La Revue du cinéma (1946–

9), Cahiers du cinéma contributed, with jour-

nals such as Positif and Image et son, to the

rise of film culture in France in the immediate

postwar period. Edited by Jacques Doniol-

Valcroze, J.M.Lo Duca and André Bazin and,

from 1955, by Éric Rohmer, it became cel-

ebrated, retrospectively, as the breeding ground

for the Nouvelle Vague film-makers Truffaut,

Godard, Chabrol and Rivette, as well as

Rohmer himself, all of whom wrote for Cahiers

before making their first films. The journal

became the focus of the politique des auteurs,

adumbrated by Truffaut in the article ‘Une

Certaine Tendance du cinéma français’ (see

February 1954 issue), which defended the role

of the director as ‘author’ of a film and at-

tacked the ‘tradition de qualité’ then dominant

in French cinema. It also enabled the Holly-

wood output of the 1940s and 1950s to be

classified and taken seriously, and established

the reputation of Hollywood directors such as

Hitchcock and Hawks, despised or neglected

up to that time. In this way it defined a new

attitude to both making and viewing films. The

second important, though less well-known as-

pect of Cahiers du cinéma’s influence in the

1950s was the promotion of prewar and post-

war European directors such as Renoir, Gance,

Ophuls, Murnau and Dreyer, and its support

for independent film-makers like Tati and

Melville. Cahiers thus defended cinema as an

important cultural form when it was increas-

ingly threatened by the rise of television, and

bequeathed to British critics in Movie, and

American critics such as Andrew Sarris, the

outlines of the ‘auteur theory’ which was to

dominate film criticism for a generation.

Cahiers du cinéma made a second major

contribution to film theory and practice dur-

ing and after May 1968. It supported Henri

Langlois in his resistance to a Gaullist govern-

ment takeover of the Cinémathèque in 1968,

and it published the proceedings of the États

généraux du cinéma (States General of the

Cinema) held at the time of the May Events.

Under the editorship of Jean-Louis Comolli

and Jean Narboni it became strongly politi-

cized, publishing an important series of arti-

cles on the relationship between fiction and

documentary, and between technology and

ideology, as well as extensive translations of

the writings of Eisenstein. Its Maoist editorial

line caused the withdrawal of financial back-

ing from Daniel Filipacchi and, ultimately, a

sharp decline in circulation, which was

brought to an end, in 1974, by a retour au

cinéma under the joint editorship of Serge

Daney and Narboni. At this point, Cahiers

was redesigned and relaunched for an

upmarket, knowledgeable, but more general,

readership. Today, with a circulation of some

60,000, Cahiers du cinéma remains the most

influential film journal published in France.

JILL FORBES

See also: cinema; documentaries; Gaulle,

Charles de

Further reading

de Baecque, A. (1991) Cahiers du cinéma:

histoire d’une revue, 2 vols, Paris: Cahiers

du Cinéma (essential reading on the life and

times of Cahiers).

Camus, Albert

b. 1913, Mondovi, Algeria;

d. 1960, Villeblevin

Writer, playwright and essayist

Camus’s death in an automobile accident fore-

shortened a career characterized by a remark-

able range of literary and journalistic output.

Not only was Camus the author of important

and widely read novels, the creator and direc-

tor of numerous plays, and a philosophical

essayist/polemicist, but he was deeply engaged

in the events of his time, first as an investiga-

tive journalist in Algeria, then as the editor of

the Resistance journal Combat, and finally as

a regular writer for the first incarnation of the

widely diffused L’Express. Along with

Camus, Albert