Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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Writer and director

Mehdi Charef was the first beur to write a

successful semi-autobiographical novel about

the problems facing ‘second-generation’

Maghrebin immigrants in the shanty towns

and housing estates of metropolitan France.

Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983), cen-

tring on streetwise, unemployed Madjid,

‘paumé entre deux cultures’ (stranded between

two cultures), became a successful beur film,

enabling Charef to direct other features, in-

cluding Miss Mona (1987), charting the

doomed friendship between an illegal immi-

grant and a lonely French transvestite. His

second novel, Le Harki de Mériem (Mériem’s

Harki), published in 1989, addresses the pain-

ful effects of internal divisions between Alge-

rians and harkis.

CARRIE TARR

See also: Algerian war; beur cinema; beur writ-

ing; beurs; immigration

Charlie Hebdo

Magazine

A satirical weekly, created in 1970, in the

wake of a flurry of alternative publications

born of the climate of protest manifest in May

1968. Rebellious and anti-establishment,

Charlie Hebdo has regular skirmishes with the

authorities. Cartoon sketches are its central

weapon, especially those of Cabu, Gébé, Siné

and Wolinsky. Falling readership and accumu-

lating law suits caused the paper to cease pub-

lication in May 1981, but the original team of

contributors, with François Cavanna and

Georges Bernier (alias Professeur Choron) at

the helm, relaunched the paper in July 1992,

joined by a new generation of cartoonists:

Tignous, Luz and Charb. By the mid-1990s,

the paper boasted 200,000 readers.

PAM MOORES

See also: comic strips/cartoonists; national

press in France

Chartreux, Bernard

b. 1942, Nancy

Playwright

A dramaturg at the Théâtre des Nanterre-

Amandiers, Chartreux is known for his con-

temporary adaptations of foreign and ancient

works, and his social documentary plays such

as Violences à Vichy (Violence in Vichy) and

the adaptation Les Derniers sur la peste (The

Latest on the Plague).

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Hannagan, V. (1990) ‘Reading as a Daughter:

Chantal Chawaf Revisited’, in M.Atack

and P.Powrie (eds) Contemporary French

Fiction by Women, Manchester: MUP (an

account of Chawaf’s explorations of the

mother-daughter relation, and of its effect

upon her writing practice).

Chéreau, Patrice

b. 1944, Lézigné

Director and actor

One of the most influential theatre directors

in France today, as well as a well-respected

film director, Chéreau’s reputation for crea-

tion and innovation is influential enough to

attract large audiences. Known for his perfec-

tionist approach and his energy, in contempo-

rary terms he is noted especially for his col-

laboration with popular playwright Bernard-

Marie Koltès during the 1980s, whose work

he championed, promoted and directed. His

actor-director revival of Dans la solitude des

champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cot-

ton Fields), in November 1995, was a sell-out

success, partly due to the popularity of

Chéreau’s and Koltès’s work.

Before 19.69, his directorial career, begin-

ning at Sartrouville, saw him become noted

for his Brechtian approach to stage, text and

actors. A defender of the notion of the theatre

as art and a lover of Italian theatre, he also

worked for a short time at the Piccolò Theatre

in Milan, until, in 1970, he began co-director

with Planchon at the Théâtre National

Populaire in Villeurbanne, forming a creative

partnership with professionals such as Rich-

ard Peduzzi, with whom he still works today.

His most famous production of this period,

with Peduzzi, was his 1973 La Dispute by

Marivaux, which critic Bernard Dort de-

scribed as ‘wild-cat Marivaux’. Alongside his

theatre direction, Chéreau also directed a se-

ries of musical works, including Offenbach’s

The Tales of Hoffmann in 1974, a spectacular

Wagner’s Ring in 1976 and Alban Berg’s Lulu

in 1979.

By the late 1970s, he had also developed

an interest in author Jean-Paul Wenzel, whose

Loin d’Hagondange (Far from Hagondange)

he directed in 1977. At around the turn of the

decade, he also began making inroads into a

new film career, which was to inspire (but also

disappoint) him until his films L’Homme

Blessé (The Injured Man), co-written with

Hervé Guibert and released in 1983, and La

Reine Margot in 1994.

In 1982, he directed an acclaimed produc-

tion of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and became direc-

tor of the Théâtre de Nanterre-Amandiers,

where he set up a film and theatre school and

promoted new writing, particularly the plays

of Koltès. Between 1982 and 1988, Chéreau

mounted four of his works, as well as ac-

claimed productions of Genet’s The Screens

(Les Paravents), German author Heiner

Müller’s Quartett, and a particularly praised

Chekhov’s Platonov in 1987. Following the

death of Koltès, whom Chéreau had come to

regard at the greatest playwright of his era, he

left Nanterre to work independently, pursu-

ing a career in cinema and theatre.

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

‘Patrice Chéreau’ (1986), Les Voies de la

création théâtrale 14, Paris: CNRS (essen-

tial reading).

Chevalier, Maurice

b. 1888, Paris;

d. 1972, Paris

Singer and actor

Chevalier, Maurice

100

Maurice Chevalier’s career spanned three-quar-

ters of a century. Having started in partner-

ship with Mistinguett, who launched his ca-

reer, he became one of France’s best-loved sing-

ers and crooners of this century, with such

songs as Valentine. He also had success in Eng-

land and America as a singer and in films. Al-

though suspected of collaborationist sympa-

thies after World War II—partly because of La

Chanson du maçon (The Mason’s Song)—his

career continued to blossom well into old age.

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Giesbert, F.-O. (1987) Jacques Chirac, Paris:

Éditions du Seuil (the standard political bi-

ography).

choreographers

French choreographers could until recently be

divided into two easily distinguished categories:

those working in ballet and those working in

contemporary dance. However, these genres are

now less polarized and separate, in keeping with

developments on the wider international dance

scene. As French contemporary dance has also

been influenced by a wide variety of dance and

choreographers

102

other sources, rather than following specific

schools, a multiplicity of styles co-exist within

it. Any overview of French choreography must

delineate its major unifying concerns, indicate

the contributions of established leading chore-

ographers and highlight members of the rising

choreographic generation.

French choreographers draw on a wide va-

riety of dance styles and techniques from abroad

that were developed prior to the dance boom

of the 1980s. A number also came to dance late,

having studied another artistic or physical

displine, and increasingly they bring various cul-

tural heritages to bear on their work. Choreog-

raphers are also generally well-informed, ab-

sorbing ideas from literature, cinema and popu-

lar music. From this multiplicity of sources arises

a multiplicity of choreographic visions. New

French dance is increasingly claiming the term

danse d’auteur (author’s dance) to encompass

this desire to avoid imitative trends. Two other

widespread choreographic preoccupations are

le langage du corps (the desire to reintegrate

the humanity of the dancer and the communi-

cative power of the dance) as a reaction against

earlier abstract postmodern dance styles, and a

general enthusiasm for theatricality and visual

spectacle.

Such attention to the spectacle was also evi-

dent directly after World War II, when the only

French choreographers of international stand-

ing were Serge Lifar, director of the Paris

Opéra Ballet until 1959, and Roland Petit,

director of the Ballet des Champs-Elysées and

then founder of the Ballet de Paris in 1948.

When Serge Lifar first took over the Paris

Opéra in the 1930s, he inherited a company

which had lost much of its former glory. Lifar

managed to return audiences to the Opéra

through various reforms of the company, and

by staging a wide variety of ballets that appealed

to public taste and displayed his own, and his

principal dancers’ talents. His desire to demon-

strate the independence of dance from music is

shown in work such as the classical Giselle and

his own original ballets: the mythic Icaré (Icarus)

and Phèdre (Phaedra), and the fairy-tale Snow

White (Blanche-Neige).

Roland Petit, a pupil of Lifar’s, had an even

greater sense of the theatre. After leaving the

Paris Opéra in 1944, he created a succession

of works, collaborating with fashionable de-

signers and painters. The most noted of his

works are Le Jeune Homme et la mort (Death

and the Young Man) and Carmen. Petit re-

hearsed the former ballet (which had a mod-

ern scenario devised by Cocteau) to jazz mu-

sic, but in performance substituted Bach, cre-

ating a striking contrast between old and new.

In Carmen, he created a stunning vehicle for

his ballerina wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, which ex-

ploited her unusual physique and included a

seduction scene that was controversially long.

The blurring of boundaries between ballet

and modern dance that began to occur mid-

century is seen in the work of France’s most

prominent choreographer, Maurice Béjart. Al-

though ironically Béjart has spent most of his

career based in Belgium and Switzerland, he

reached the status of a pop star during the

1970s, capable of filling the enormous Palais

des Sports. His first successful work was a ver-

sion of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacré du

printemps), which elicited an invitation to

move to Brussels. Since then he has created a

large number of ballets employing an eclectic

range of ideas, including strong religious and

moral themes. These cover homosexuality and

other provocative subjects, as well as creating

large-scale realizations of orchestral scores

(such as Beethoven’s for the 9th Symphony) in

which his male dancers are often featured most

prominently. In 1970 Béjart founded the

MUDRA school in Brussels, which has become

a training ground for many young French art-

ists; but in 1987, after conflicts with the man-

agement, his company moved to Lausanne.

Another choreographer, who trained and

performed with Béjart and whose work occu-

pies the middle ground, is Maguy Marin, di-

rector of the Lyon Opéra Ballet. Marin first

achieved success with her Beckett-inspired

work May B, in which she shows her formida-

ble gift for creating unforgettable images of

humanity. These images are often tinged with

naivety and humour, as in Cinderella

(Cendrillon) and Groosland in which costumes

enlarge dancers to enormous proportions.

choreographers

103

Over the last twenty-five years, government

policy on dance has actively sought to encour-

age primarily the creator’s role, dramatically

increasing the number of working choreogra-

phers. It is therefore becoming more common

for leading contemporary choreographers to

be asked to work with ballet companies, ei-

ther to create new work or to remount impor-

tant pieces so they are not lost. Recent exam-

ples at the Paris Opéra include Jean-Claude

Gallotta’s reworking of his sporadically in-

comprehensible, yet simultaneously seductive

fable Ulysse (Ulysses), and Philippe Decouflé’s

restaging of another surreally costumed world,

Decodex. Leading contemporary choreogra-

phers as these, and Daniel Larrieu, Karine

Saporta and Dominique Bagouet (before his

premature death from AIDS), are also recog-

nized by higher government subsidy.

Among the many less-established choreog-

raphers who are gaining critical acclaim, a few

deserve particular mention. These include

Régis Obadia and Joelle Bouvier, whose duet

Welcome to Paradise and video work have

drawn much praise for their exploration of a

physical language which delves into the depths

of an emotional interior world; Josef Nadj,

whose signature work remains the quirky and

humorous Canard pékinois (Peking Duck);

and Claude Brumachon, who took three prizes

in the 1988 Bagnolet competition and contin-

ues to make a succession of works which ap-

peal through their effective gestural language,

such as Texane and L’Avalanche.

Despite doubts that such growth can be

maintained, it is clear from this brief outline

that French choreographers are currently cre-

ating a wealth of new work that reflects a visual

bias and spans a broad range of styles and

sources.

FIONA WARNE

Further reading

Billard, P. (1995) L’Age classique du cinéma

français, Paris : Flammarion (a very long,

thoroughly documented history, with indis-

pensable chronological and statistical ap-

pendices).

Forbes, J. (1992) The Cinema in France: After

the New Wave, Basingstoke and London:

Macmillan/British Film Institute (a compre-

hensive and socially aware history, with much

valuable information on important films una-

vailable in English-speaking countries).

Frodon, J.-M. (1995) L’Age moderne du

cinéma français, Paris: Flammarion (a long

and well-documented history; features in-

valuable chronological and statistical ap-

pendices).

Hayward, S. (1993) French National Cinema,

London and New York: Routledge (a well-

documented chronological overview, with

valuable information on the industry).

Passek, J.-L. (ed.) (1987) Dictionnaire du

cinéma français, Paris: Larousse (a useful

one-volume reference to leading actors and

film-makers).

Williams, A. (1992) Republic of Images, Cam-

bridge, MA and London: Harvard Univer-

sity Press (stresses formal and stylistic ele-

ments and is good up to the Nouvelle

Vague, but much sketchier thereafter ).

cinéma de banlieue

The label given to a number of films that at-

tracted attention in mid-1990s France through

their depiction of the class and ethnic tensions,

often issuing in rioting, that were common in

the French suburbs. The bestknown example,

a major international success clearly influenced

by black American cinema, is Matthieu

Kassowitz’s La Haine (1995), but works by

beur directors and independent French film-

makers also form an important part of the cat-

egory.

KEITH READER