What a Choquer--the face of modern France

Who are the French today? What is their character, their identity, their reality; what are their aspirations?

Luc Choquer went about to answer these questions in a manner that recalls August Sander. The result is a sort of typography of contemporary French people, and by extension, of French life. Choquer has taken hundreds of photographs over the years, entered homes, asked people of all walks of life to pose for him. He often uses flash, slightly underexposing a picture's background, increasing its saturation, and using flash on the foreground and the subject(s), creating a slightly surreal effect, lifting the subjects off the background.

After seeing it, what can be said? In a  conversation with my friend Marc who saw it with me , we argued about whether Choquer's images showed something specifically French. He felt that the pictures could mostly have been taken somewhere else, that the people and their environments lacked a specifically French quality.

So, indeed, the people in the pictures look like any other, pretty much. Dancers during a break, kids by the swimming pool, middle class couples in the gardens of their representative houses with pools, another couple in their beige living room on a pompous fauteuil and a fake window, teenagers on the street--one can almost hear their "urban" music (or whatever that overproduced, sampled hiphoprappop shite is called in France... sorry, my age shows, I know)--and rich people at a horse race that look like any rich people at any horse race. With minor variations, they could be German or English or American or Dutch or in any industrialised Western country. I would not have recognised them as particularly French, either. France to me means also buildings, an infuriatingly difficult language to penetrate, an incredible sense of beauty, elegance and presentation (and vanity), a visible pride in public spaces and public institutions, and stunning wild landscapes, food and wine, and much more. Little of this shows in the pictures.

Choquer's images are representations of the aspirations of French society. It is a distinctly middle class vision, this idea of risig above one's station in life, of deciding to be "someone". And it so happens that those aspirations are pretty much the same as in any other Western country.

What surprises me is how readily I identify clues about social class, educational level, or certain attitudes. I respond by finding certain people or features--clothing, living environment, for example--attractive, but others not. Indicators of masculinity, assertiveness, independence, intelligence, health make it likely that I regard the people in the image with positive feelings because they correspond to my own aspirations, to how I would like to see myself or to be seen. And again, small things can turn me off--trying too hard, artifice, obvious vanity. These are the things that I was taught to detest from a young age, and, not surprisingly, most people that I associate with. Cue "The White Ribbon" by Michael Haneke for more on my northern German Protestant background.

Corresponding to Choquer's typography, there are advertisements that target these groups of people and feed their aspirations. Looking at the pictures, the ads and the products that these French people consume are easy to imagine. I may not be familiar with the brands, but I know how they are placed and what social prestige they may carry. I am aware how well I speak and comprehend that language of consumerism because it is absolutely international, the Esperanto of globalisation. Mass consumption requires mass taste. Yet, this language to Marc or me--and I suspect to many others--is not a language adding to the complex canon of meanings, traditions, images, and cultural signifiers familiar to us; quite the opposite, it subtracts. We lose a part of our cultural identity and thus a part of our bond with our patrimony and heritage and those that used to share this with us.

The face of modern France is a face like any other?

Avatar!

This evening I did something unexpected; I watched Avatar, James Cameron's CGI avalanche. I had not specifically meant to; my list of current films to watch runs to about a dozen and Avatar wasn't on it. But my mate so wanted to see it--Sigourney Weaver would make him swoon even if she advertised incontinence pads--and he paid, so what the hell...

It was pretty much what I had expected. Overwhelming, really. Scenes of extraordinary beauty, finely rendered to the last pore, hair, and leafy vein. Breathtaking action in 3D had me jumping in my seat. Even an old (in terms of practice) cynic like me was impressed.

Of course, my cynicism is no match for that of Avatar's producers. Avatar is a technological marvel rendered to perfection by countless processors, using the most advanced digital imaging technology ever, but what does it do? It spools off a story of aggressive cartoon cut-out technology junkies vs peace loving indigenous people (beautiful, naturally, because in Disney-nature beauty equals goodness) living in harmony with Mother Nature, an actual divine being encompassing all living things--people, trees, animals, flowers etc. Through their righteous determination, the goodness of their spirits, the purity of their intentions, and with the help of Mother Nature herself, the evil technology junkies--easily identified as Uncle Sam's finest--are defeated and Mother Nature, uncorrupted by the forces of technology and profit, continues to prevail in peace and, erm, harmony.

This most enchanted vision of Nature is entirely a high tech pixel storm, using the very same technology that the military uses for flight and battle simulations. An army of tens of thousands of software programmers in Utah and elsewhere in the US are working their fingers to the bone to ensure that, should Uncle Sam ever decide to invade and exploit another planet and annihilate its people, Mother Nature can go fuck itself. The film denounces the blind pursuit of profit, yet is the result of an unprecedented marketing process; its concept includes video games, computer applications, books, and a host of product spin-offs from the start like no other film before it. And, of course, it has become the highest grossing film within weeks.

Cameron & Co could have stolen Alien or Fifth Element or any number of other themes, and I would have bowed my head in reverence. But they chose this, the most outrageous lie possible. Not only do form and content not overlap, they live in different galaxies. It is propaganda of the very highest production "value", a lie so out there, told with such verve that one is simply overwhelmed by it.

Like oil companies drilling to save the planet, like George W Bush and Tony his poodle announcing "a final push for peace" while they are amassing the largest invading army in decades off the borders of Iraq, like junk food companies sponsoring the Olympics, Avatar is pure propaganda, a patently untrue story that we are desperate to believe. Not believing it is rather more painful.

It is indicative that this is the first major film of its kind. Ultra-expensive, technically without peer, it was never going to bite the hand it serves. 

 

She is alive!

Good night.