Highlights of 2005

Radio - Michel Onfray

Over the summer, for a month Michel Onfray holding forth for an hour each evening on France Culture. This is the kind of programme unimaginable on the BBC. A philosopher talking for an hour - anytime at all, but each weekday night for over a month would cause an influx to R4's Feedback of viagra-spam proportions. Over the same summer period on the same channel, we had the Lévinas week a total of six hours a day on Lévinas for a whole week. I actually do remember hearing Simon Critchley talking about Lévinas for 15 minutes once on R3 about a decade ago.

In the UK we do of course get some philosophy in the media but always in the BBC/PSB tradition filtered through an anchorman as with In Our Time which has philosophy via Melvyn Bragg - Yes it is sometimes good but in spite of the presence of MB rather than because of it. Never philosophy straight.

The things I like about Onfray are his obvious dedication to the questioning nature of philosophy, his defence of hedonism, his areligiosity (I like his references to Paul de Tarse, never using the S. word) and his sheer in depth knowledge of the subject - two or three interesting hours on Pierre Gassendi, hitherto only known obscurely as a questioner of Descartes, now reframed for me as a hedonist materialist.

Television - Clara Sheller (merci Nathalie)

France has never been big on homegrown soap operas or sitcoms preferring the short serial of episodes of an hour to a couple of hours in length. - the feuilleton. (Although F3 has Plus Belle La Vie running at the moment - a half hour daily soap set in Marseilles).
The problem with the feuilleton is that they are more or less strictly for grandmas but this one was different. It had a new star Melanie Doutey who played the eponymous Clara - a figure so easy to identify with, ordinary like us - but also someone who offers a kind of transcendence - a beauty that remains constant despite the travails of everyday life. The secret of a star is not to show too much emotion - by their stillness they offer a glimpse of a kind of stoical future where we can cope, can perhaps glide through life's challenges, just take life's cruel vicissitudes. Therein lies an innate conservatism of the star phenomenon - this (star) other offers a pleasure that means we don't demand the radical otherness of the event - of a radical change.

Clara had a life. This was life as we know it from soaps. And just as we know it - full of emotional over-reachings and blind alleys and straightforwardly abrupt face slaps. A life where men sleep with men and then women sleep with them and women sleep with men and women. People get drunk and say too much which is also never quite enough. The excess and lack of the lover's discourse.

Music - Camille

Without a new album by Brigitte Fontaine or Les Rita Mitsouko then what? Camille's album filled in. She launched her career out of that Nouvelle Vague album where she sang the versions of Too Drunk to Fuck and Guns of Brixton - the latter where she somehow really sounded angry without raising her voice in any standard way. Therefore so much more dangerous than the forced ultra macho and therefore faux leftism of The Clash's original. Veering between Meredith Monk style vocal experiment (Sensa, Jeanine 1,2,3) and standard singer songwriter (Baby Carni Bird) she manages most of the time to produce something quite extraordinary - the heartbroke and heartbreaking opening to Pale Septembre to the surreal hilarity of the various Jeanines.

Film - L'Intrus

I saw it in Paris just round the corner from the Sorbonne and now on DVD. I get an incredible sense of openness from Clair Denis' films - if art is supposed to allow us to reawaken a sense of wonder, then this is art. After the experience of L'Intrus then you, can look differently. The sensual nature of the terre-material is what the films seem to be about - including the human form itself. Look at Michel Subor's face, look at Beatrice Dalle's smile. Perhaps the films are also about the limits of the image itself and the value of the touch of the unknown that is the real world. The moment in L'Intrus where the Michel Subor character goes to touch the breast of (who else) Beatrice Dalle and is ordered off and then the fact that the film ends with the Dalle character laughing uncontrollably as she husky-sleighs over the land where he once lived. There are moments when we have pure experimental cinema - shots held far longer than is usual . . . you look differently. A disquieting yet alluring presence - the Denis image, the world.

And now Cahiers du Cinéma have put out two of Denis' earlier films Nenette and Boni and S'en Fout la Mort - incidentally the latter will never be shown in full in Britain because of the cockfighting scenes.

Novel - Houellebecq

More or less simultaneously released in French and in English. What strikes me is how French it is. The whole novel is based on a parodic take on the Raelians who were all over French media a couple of years ago with their cloning claims - but hardly reported in Britain. Then there are the constant references to French public figures such as Michel Onfray (see above) and Jamel Debbouze.

The sex is explicit, but if pornography is lies (Dworkin) then this is pretty truthful, most of it is about the decline of virility of the main character. If the sex is explicit it is tellingly explicit when MH describes the impotence and droop of the main charcacter Daniel. How he is just too old, others are going to live a more exciting life than he. So . . .

Then there are the moments of existential poetry. Nothing more exposes the cultural differences between France and Ukania more then the way Houellebecq is responded too. In France the poetic-philosophic genius, in Ukania the pretentious porn merchant.