If you want to know how the French think America represents modernity, you need to go to the movies, and in particular to the cinema of Jacques Tati. Jacques Tati made six feature films during his career from the 1940s to the 1970s. A master of physical gesture and the gag, he satirized the quickly changing, post-war society he lived in. All of Tati's films are fundamentally preoccupied with modernity. As early as the mid 19th century, French observers were already conceiving of the United States as a technological civilization, and as a driver of modernization. Thanks in part to the Worlds Fairs that spread this image of America to foreigners and even to Americans themselves. This chapter will look at French views of American modernity in the 20th century. Especially, after the second World War, when America had resoundingly embraced its role in the New World Order, as the modern technological, industrialized, and urbanized nation. Jacques Tati starred in his own films, which typically had little dialog and rely instead on pantomimed farce. His first Jour de F�te or the Big Day or the Village Faire is the story of a small rural village in central France during the post war period in which the film was made, which is 1949. Fran�ois, the main character played by Tati, is the local postman who delivers the daily mail on his bicycle to the townsfolk, who he knows personally. His route takes a long time to complete each day, as Fran�ois interrupts his trajectory regularly to participate in town life. For example, stopping to chat with the elderly ladies, stopping to have a drink of pastis with his buddies, and stopping to help mount the flagpole to inaugurate the upcoming Bastille Day national holiday celebration. Fran�ois is the postman who knows everyone and who serves as the glue that adheres his village together with news and gossip, mutual aid and neighbourliness. When a traveling fair comes to town for Bastille Day, however, this bucolic, rural life is upset. Fran�oise views a documentary film about the American postal system farcically depicted as ridiculously technically advanced, a delivery system whose endless motion is kept at a furious pace by trains, planes, and automobiles. Dazzled by the film he witnesses in the fair tent and egged on by two mocking chaps, Fran�ois decides to imitate the American postal delivery practices in his town. Implementing the tools at his disposal, Fran�ois turns his bicycle into a machine of speed and efficiency. No longer does he meander the hillside roads with leisurely pleasure. But instead, races through his route without a nod to any passerby, and provoking collisions left and right. No longer does he hand the mail to his neighbors with a handshake and a chat. But instead throws the packages in a general direction of residences and shops, where they land in the mud or break objects in their path. No longer does Fran�ois interact with the townsfolk and maintain social bonds, but instead he embodies a single-minded mechanized delivery system. His attempts to emulate American efficiency and technological advancement go on for some time during the film. Resulting in slapstick gags and hilarious mishaps. In the end, Fran�ois realizes he can not compete with American technological prowess. He renounces his American style ambitions and he joins in the traditional conviviality of the harvest with his fellow townsfolk. His postal duties are taken over by a local child, signifying progress and futurity, French style. Part of a genre of postwar rural French cinema, for example, the successful film versions of the novels and plays of Marcel Pagnol Tati documented his changing world and acknowledged its disappearance with a strong dose of nostalgia. His films, in particular Jour de F�te, highlighted three major tensions between modernity and tradition, between rural life and urbanization. And between stability and mobility. The rural urban balance had tipped in France after World War II. Less than 50% of the French population lived in the countryside by the 1950s. Depicting the tension between stability and mobility is the scene in Jour de F�te. Where Fran�ois on his bicycle screeches to a stop, face to face with a bulky, noisy, smelly black car, symbolizing not only simple locomotion confronting mechanized speed, but the past confronting the future. As Andre Bazin, a well known French film critic, said the film satirizes the tension between the human incompetence of Fran�ois and the inhuman competence of the society that surrounds him. One could draw an analogy between the mailman who tries to rival the American postal system and General Charles de Gaulle who tries in the post World War II years to preserve the grandeur of France, vis a vis the new American super power. Other film makers besides Tati have taken American style modernity as a central theme of their narratives. Watch Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times for another satire of the modern world of mechanization and gadgetry. And Sylvain Chomet's Triplets of Belleville is a marvelous contemporary version of the epic conflict between bicycle and automobile. Many other films about the hazards of modern technology are listed in the recommended reading for this chapter. To the rest of the world, not just France, America has long represented the very incarnation of modernity. American modernity is a concept that began in the 19th century, but solidified in the 20th. Particularly as a result of the technical mechanization of industrial capitalism, as we will see in the next chapter. The modernity of America in the eyes of many French and Europeans was embodied not only by its technological prowess, and mass production, mass consumption, and mass entertainment but also by many positive, exciting features. Such as the physical and social mobility and freedom of American citizens. And, the grand Republican experiment, which as we saw in the previous chapter, Tocqueville studied in depth. Other optimistic impressions of American modernity include, America as an empty canvas, as immensity, symbolized by the skyscraper. As a place for renewal and transformation, America as a fountain of youth and as dynamism incarnate. The contrast is either a negative vision of France, or more largely, of Europe, whose heyday is over, and who remains mired in the past. Or, a positive vision of so-called old world values, that still respect the traditions and social conventions that define individuals. I quote Jacques Tati in a 1958 interview. “Today, an American, because of his neighbors and because of advertisements, can not possibly think of keeping his car more than one year. In 1958, it is impossible for him to drive a 1957 car because the newer automobile has an engine with increased horsepower! I believe it's important that children once used to shine the hubcaps, that their mother made the seat covers herself, that the whole family participated together in something. Now people don't participate in anything anymore; there is nothing to do, nothing left to work at. Everything changes constantly. I have children and all these matters worry me a lot.” Jacques Tati was not the only French person more frightened than thrilled by the prospects of American modernization traversing the Atlantic. As one observer, Georges Duhamel, whom we will meet in more depth in the following chapter warned, “America seems bound to lead the rest of humanity along the path of the worst experiments.” As another commentator, Simone de Beauvoir, whom we will encounter in more depth in chapter nine, observed, “…people in America consume conditioned air, frozen meat and fish, homogenized milk, canned fruits and vegetables. They even put artificial chocolate flavor into real chocolate. Americans are nature lovers, but they accept only a nature inspected and corrected by man.” And there is also Jean Beaudrillard, whom we will encounter in our final chapter ten. Who was more awed than alarmed about the progression of American modernity. Baudrillard made this cinematic metaphor, comparing America and France. “America is the original version of modernity.”, he said. “We are the dubbed or subtitled version.” To summarize, for some French observers, the idea of American modernity was thrilling. For others it was frightening. One of the predominant features of American modernity is embodied in the mass production, mass consumption, and the inequality of the American capitalist system. The next chapter will examine this in more detail.
