18 February 2005
Bruce Jackson
Buffalo Report was in Paris this week
My apologies for the week-long break in Buffalo Report emails. I was in Paris for the 50th anniversary of Terre Humaine, the great humanistic social science book series edited by French ethnographer and geomorphologist Jean Malaurie.Monday night there was a reception at Bibliothèque nationale de France celebrating the opening of their exhibit honoring the 82 books already published in the collection. The title of the BnF exhibit is "Terre Humaine: 'Louons maintenant les grands hommes.'" Malaurie decided that the recent Terre Humaine edition of the American classic by James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would be the theme book for the series' 50th anniversary. (Click here for my post-face to that edition.) In the course of the evening they showed an excellent new documentary about the Agee and Evans book by Michel Viotte. It is one of five documentaries, each by a different director, all about different aspects of Terre Humaine, that will air on French TV during March.
Tuesday evening President Jacques Chirac hosted a reception in honor of Malaurie and the Terre Humaine writers at Elysée Palace.He read to the 75 writers, filmmakers, editors, publishers and heads of French media organizations and cultural agencies a 15-minute prepared statement about the series, Malaurie, the importance of good writing and the necessity for art. Then he greeted each guest individually, after which he spent about 90 minutes in conversations with several of us about books, social issues and the difficulties involved in and importance of understanding and documenting other cultures, whether they are elsewhere in one's own city or the other side of the world. I thought (and so did everyone I heard discussing his remarks and conversations afterwards) he had read and thought about the books he named and really cared about what he was saying. Little surprise George W. Bush hates him.
The next day a highly respected older French writer told me at length how awful a president he thought George Bush was. "The only good thing about Bush," he said, "is he has less than four years left. But what worries us is, what if the religious fanatics in America really do have voting power and next time they are able to elect someone who is worse than Bush—more hostile to other countries, more close-minded, more anti-scientific? What must our attitude toward and relationship with America then be? Europe is in the process of redefining itself. The borders of Europe are changing and we're working on a new constitution. India and China are inevitable powers. America may be isolating itself in a way that cannot be repaired, and that saddens me."
That night I had a conversation in a neighborhood cafe in the 11th arrondissement with a filmmaker, who has visited America many times, and his best friend, an insurance salesman, who has never been to the US at all. The insurance salesman said, "I was born in 1962, so in a real way I'm part American."The filmmaker, who had been born the same year, said, "We all are."
"But," the insurance salesman said, "the America I knew isn't there any more. Maybe it was never there. Maybe we just thought it was. Maybe none of it was real. Maybe it was just movies."
"It was movies," the filmmaker said, "but it was real too. It's still there."
"No," the insurance salesman said, "it's not."
"It is," the filmmaker said, "but you don't see it now. It'll come back. There have been bad times there before, and it has always come back."
"I hope so," the insurance salesman said.
"I hope so too," I said.
Two articles (in French) on Malaurie, Terre Humaine and the BnH exhibit:
Le sacre de Jean Malaurie et de "Terre Humaine," Le Monde, 17 February 2004
Des récits à la prèmière personne Le Monde, 18 February 2005
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.