Plant - Upward Mobility (Review) (Sight and Sound 1996)

Back to previous page document 1 of 1 Upward mobility Plant, Sadie. Sight and Sound 6.2 (Feb 1996): 30­31,3. Find a copy http://primoa.library.unsw.edu.au/openurl/61UNSW_INST/UNSW_SERVICES_PAGE?url_ver=Z39.88­ 2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&genre=unknown&sid=ProQ:ProQ%3Apqrl&atitle=Upward+mobility&title=Sight+and+Sound&issn=00374806&date=1996­ 02­01&volume=6&issue=2&spage=30&au=Plant%2C+Sadie&isbn=&jtitle=Sight+and+Sound&btitle=&rft_id=info:eric/&rft_id=info:doi/ Abstract Plant reviews Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture by Kristine Ross. Full Text Sadie Plant on France's postwar obsession with fast cars and clean bodies Upward mobility Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture by Kristin Ross, October/MIT Press, 261pp, £19.95 (hb), ISBN 0 262 181 614 Gridlock in Paris. Troops on the streets. Gangs in the suburbs. Hate on the screens. As it struggles with a difficult combination of economic reform, industrial unrest and Algerian terrorism, the France of the mid­90s is deeply troubled both at home and abroad. Chirac's election has brought a new wave of jingoistic protectionism, demands for a halt to immigration and adventures with nuclear weapons out in the colonies across the seas. There is paranoia about the status and fate of the French language and ­ in the wake of a series of suicides including situationist leader Guy Debord and, most recently, radical philosopher Gilles Deleuze ­ a sense of unease about the future of French culture and intellectual life. So these are traumatic times for France. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, however, looks back to an earlier period of rapid social change, and a 50s France which, in its desperation to become a modern and efficient capitalist state, refused to deal with the more ignominious aspects of its recent past and so set itself up for the troubles to come. Ross sees French modernisation as an event in itself. On the one hand it came with the aftermath of the wartime occupation: on the other it constituted a prelude to the more dramatic événements of 1968. Sandwiched between these two great upheavals, the nation she portrays was also caught between colonial relationships from the past and relationships more recently acquired, such as that with the United States. Having dominated Algeria for so long, France now saw itself falling under the influence of a foreign power across another, much larger body of water. America seemed to be flooding in, not least in the shape of its consumer goods, its movies and, of course, its cars. As Ross points out, the automobile is "the central vehicle of all twentieth century modernisation", and it certainly played this role in France. Car culture shaped the production lines and economic order: it invaded the boulevards of a Paris designed to take much earlier cavalcades, the driveways of the new suburbs, and the poplar­lined roads of the interior. This obsession with the car is captured in the French cinema of the 50s and 60s, where traffic converges and collides with the speeds and movements of film. This was pursued in Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1957) and Godard's A bout de souffle (1959), in Jacques Demy's Lola and Robert Dhery's La Belle Américaine (both 1961), and indeed right up until the great crash scene in Weekend, a film which despite its Anglophone name marked the ending of France's romance with Americana. But it is Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, affable, confused and conservative, who best personifies the struggle to reconcile French culture with the new vehicles of the postwar years. Playtime is haunted by passing reflections of an old Paris, shimmering on the new surfaces of an endlessly plastic and see­through world. Mon oncle is left behind by a world of communicating vessels, automatic doors and the unyielding orders of a working life to which Hulot is completely unable to adapt. The 50s future is too orderly for him; too shiny, clean and symmetrical. The fears of American influence were seeded then, even if it took another 40 years, Eurodisney and McDonald's to blossom fully. But in the 50s America was an easy scapegoat for shifts in power much closer to home. Indeed, Ross suggests that France was only so sensitive to the impact of American Culture because of the extent of its own expertise in matters of foreign and colonial influence. She argues that France itself was involved in to many postwar exercises of power. As the French withdrew from Algeria in 1962, many colonial personnel found themselves in charge of institutions at home. And even if there were different administrators in control, France modernised by turning the mechanisms of colonialism on itself. The nation became increasingly ordered, bureaucratic, and conformist. Even everyday life was colonised, not least by the unprecedented philosophical and political status it acquired in the works of Barthes, Henri Lefebvre and Debord. If the fast cars and white goods of the 50s were taking over the everyday, they were also symbols of abundance. It was time to forget the days in which Paris had starved during the war. It was also time to mop up some other embarrassing leftovers from this period: France needed to purge itself of the stains left by Vichy and the occupation. There was a feeling that France was somehow sullied and unclean, tarnished and stained by its apparent complicity with the German war machine. It had to be purified and tidied up; it had to be as clean as America. Brothels were closed, streets washed down and French women told that they didn't wash enough to compete with their American counterparts. Even French methods of torture in Algeria were now described as clean. Ross is at her best when she focuses on the cleanliness with which postwar France became obsessed. She describes the extent to which order and hygiene were obsessive themes not only in film, fiction and the popular press, but also how this obsession contributed to the proliferation of new consumer durables and the reconstruction of urban areas. Robbe­Grillet invested in "the cleansing power of the look" and purged the novel of lyrical romance. A 1955 issue of Hie is devoted to the theme of whiteness: bleach, pasteurised milk, linen, nappies and the white goods which were to make it all possible. Vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines: with the new abundance of cleaning devices, there was no excuse for corruption and dirt. What couldn't be swept under the carpet could instead be hoovered away. As M Hulot struggled to hang on to his authenticity, he found himself surrounded by alien appliances; objects with a life of their own; and all of them committed to his cleanliness and health. This collision with the new urban order was mirrored in academic argument. In her final chapter, Ross describes the fate of France's postwar existential dreams and finds the ubiquity of the automobile and the clean lines of the washing machine repeated in the gestures of the structuralism in which

existentialism was subsumed. In spite of the speed with which she deals with these ideas, it is certainly true, as she points out, that the structuralists erased the very humanity which an earlier generation of French intellectuals had urged the colonised peoples to attain. While Frantz Fanon's free Algerians asserted themselves after the fashion of Sartre's man and de Beauvoir's woman, Lévi­Strauss revealed man to be a bourgeois construction best abandoned to the past. As Ross portrays it, this clash between existential humanism and structuralist rigour was really a battle between the messy archaisms of French philosophy and the shining new social sciences. The latter too were decried as a noxious American import, while their connections to the homegrown structures of administrative life continued to be quietly overlooked. It is no small irony that France shared its penchant for order and hygiene with the fascist Germany it wanted to escape. But Ross is in no doubt that the desire for cleanliness is indicative of a fundamental desire to forget the war and deny both the past and the present of French racism and colonial power. Her closing chapter makes it clear that France still wants to believe "its colonial past to be an 'exterior' experience, added on but not essc­n liai to French historical identity ­ an episode that ended, cleanly, in 1962," after which the nation smoothly "moved on to bigger autoroutes, all­electric kitchens, and the European Economic Community." Ross' route through the period is deliberately selective, and this is both a strength and a weakness of the book. She writes, in part, to disrupt the myth ­ still prevalent today ­ that French colonialism ended in 1962. She makes it clear that the bureaucratic cleanliness still discernible in the clinics and pharmacies of late twentieth­ century France was simply another colonialist face, albeit a less authoritarian one. But while she succeeds in showing the extent to which France was caught between its domination of Algeria and its domination of itself, Ross fails to take note of the wider geopolitical stage on which these 50s events were played out. Cold War paranoias and nuclear shelters fail to show even in the index; Indochina and Ho Chi Minh appear only in passing; and the French intellectual affair with Maoism is hardly mentioned. Although she chides Foucault for his failure to use his genealogical enquiries to shed light on the contemporary world, Ross also makes few comments on today's France. But it is her overriding interest in French colonialism in general, and Algeria in particular, that gives the book its pertinence to the France of the 90s. It remains a colonialist power, still keeping tight reins on activities not only in North Africa, but West Africa too. It has also enjoyed some of the highest taxes, the most generous state subsidy and welfare provision and the most bureaucratic procedures in the Western world. As an exploration of the tensions with which French modernisation was achieved. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies is published just as this period seems to be rushing to an end. France is on the brink of another transition, of vital importance to the rest of the world as well as the nation itself. Ross ends her book with the hope that France will seize the moment to return to a time when "it believed wholeheartedly in the possibility of limitless and even development." But there is little optimism, in her words or on the streets. Desires for European integration, which seemed like such a good idea to France when Europe appeared so uncannily French, are no longer as ardent, nor as economically feasible, as they seemed only two or three years ago. Not surprisingly, Chirac and Juppé are meeting great opposition in their attempts to unravel the bureaucratic nightmare France became in the postwar years, and there is chaos on the streets of a Paris already in the grip of terrorist fears. Once again, events are being recorded on film. La Haine's Algerians are organised, violent and Americanised; products of the very era which was supposed to put such ghosts to rest. As white bourgeois France is discovering, no amount of 50s soap was enough to remove the stains of a colonial past which may yet have its day. Sidebar Driving on the right: Jacques Tati, opposite, in 'Mon Oncle'; Jean­Paul Belmondo, left, from 'A bout de souffle' confront in different ways the reordering of French culture AuthorAffiliation Sadie Plant teaches philosophy at the University of Warwick and is the author of The Most Radical Gesture, a book about The Situationists Copyright British Film Institute Feb 1996 Details Subject Book reviews; Nonfiction; Culture; Social sciences; Social change Location France People Ross, Kristin Title Upward mobility Author Plant, Sadie Publication title Sight and Sound Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 30­31,3 Number of pages 3 Publication year 1996 Publication date Feb 1996 Year 1996 Section books

Publisher British Film Institute Place of publication London Publication subject Motion Pictures ISSN 00374806 Source type Magazines Language of publication English Document type Book Review­Favorable Document feature Photographs ProQuest document ID 237090233 Document URL http://search.proquest.com/docview/237090233?accountid=12763 Copyright Copyright British Film Institute Feb 1996 Last updated 2013­08­22 Database ProQuest Central Copyright © 2016 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions