US President Joe Biden is flying back this evening. End of his state visit to France after the commemorations of the Allied landings. And we take advantage of this visit and the honors paid to the Americans, to evoke the influence of American culture in our country.
franceinfo: In this area, cinema played an important role Jean Viard?
Jean Viard: Of course, the best proof with your question is as if it was only the Americans who had landed in Normandy, because we all saw The longest day, and for us, that’s the event, that’s the film. Because in reality, we weren’t there, but there were a lot of English people for example. The English, moreover, often grumble a little because they find that they are not given their rightful place. What tells us the story? look Ben-Huryou have the impression that basically, the time, the history of Jerusalem, Christ, etc., we have seen it more in the cinema, and we could take many other examples.
And the strategic intelligence of the Americans is to have made cinema a culture of power. THE. It’s thanks to great films that the United States not only reflects on itself – look at the films they made about the Vietnam War, almost immediately after the Vietnam War. What great films about the Algerian War? There are a few, but they are not necessarily at the same power level. And so they made cinema a weapon of power on the planet, to develop their culture, to sell their way of life, their idea of women, housing and cars, of course. and they made it a weapon of power.
We find this at the moment in India, in Egypt or in India, we have a bit of the same types of phenomenon. In India, we see very very clearly that cinema has become nationalist, it has become Hinduist, and the Americans invented that. Other cultural centers, whether in Egypt or India, do exactly the same thing.
This is the famous ‘soft power’ that we talk about from time to time. Is it also through cinema that we have seen the image of women evolve, that we Europeans have also changed our consumption methods?
But of course, in terms of the image of women, it’s a huge role because it’s clear that the whole image of the star, the whole hypersexualized image of the woman’s body in many films, honestly, watch any western you always have a few girls who are usually prostitutes. And then you have courageous, combative men, well it’s John Wayne. It’s the myth of the combative American and soldier, and the myth of the beautiful, available woman; these are still absolutely crushing standards, and which we’re moving away from at the moment.
Moreover, it is no coincidence that cases like the Weinstein affair, the MeToo affair in cinema, this kind of instrumentalization of women which was linked to cinema, in most films of the 60s: 70, at one point we saw a naked woman, not a naked man, that was part of the background of the film. So we are in all these processes, we are in the process of getting out of them.
And today, we also make a lot of criticism of this Americanization of society. Because some believe that we are exporting societal debates on gender, on racism. But have there always been these criticisms? ?
Yes, but first, there always has been. But what do we read in the United States? We read great French thinkers like Derrida, who we don’t read much in France. We read Lévi-Strauss, so it’s not just one way. In fact, we have exported our intellectuals, particularly on the left, so they could send the argument back to us, so to speak, in the other direction.
So it’s true that American universities in particular, which are driven by the reflection that there has been on the relationship between whites and former black slaves, all the debate of the last 20 years, all the construction that they made the African American community, they negotiated among themselves: what are we going to call black people? How will everyone recognize themselves in their identity? But the community took an African American name.
Yes, it really stirred up American society and therefore, the question of slavery actually became central again. And it is clear that at the moment, we are seeing the rise of these debates on colonization which are somewhat imported to us from the United States. But excuse me, when we see New Caledonia, we see clearly that in France the colonial question is far from being resolved. It comes to us at the same time, it makes us think. But if we have a fundamental reflection on what the colonial era was, yes, it comes to us from the United States, but it also poses a real question.