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Monday, February 5th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | How French Cinema Works
Evan Puschak, the video essayist better known as the Nerdwriter, has seen a lot of movies. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his analyses of a range of pictures including Blade Runner, Reservoir Dogs, Parasite, La Dolce Vita, Nostalghia, and You’ve Got Mail. When he notices something special about the films coming out of one country in particular, we’d do well to listen to him address why. He once devoted a video essay to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which he frames as having set off the nouvelle vague, the first movement most of us think of when we think of French cinema — which many of us around the world regard as occupying une classe à part. Puschak finds one reason we do so in his new video essay above. That reason is the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image, or CNC, the governmental agency tasked with promoting not just French film but French audiovisual arts in general. “For decades, it sat at the center of cinema in France, affecting every layer of the industry there,” says Puschak. Funded by taxes on cinema admissions, television providers, and media both physical and streaming, it redistributes money to the production, distribution, and exhibition of films, television shows, video games, and other forms of art (as well as to the preservation of existing art). As far as movies in particular, the declared idea is to “support an independent cinema that is bold in terms of market standards and that cannot find its financial balance without public assistance.” “In the US film industry, there’s only one metric to judge movies: commercial success,” Puschak says. “Without participation by the state, there can be no other metric. The market determines everything,” and that holds as true for indie films as it does for broad Hollywood spectacles. The CNC also invests heavily in “the maintenance and renovation of theaters, especially those that show art-house films,” all across France, and even in cinema education for schoolchildren meant to encourage an appreciation for “all kinds of movies, not just those that giant corporations have millions of dollars to promote.” This in contrast to the many Americans “conditioned from an early age to see only certain kinds of movies in the theater.” Of course, how well a CNC-style agency would work in America, a world apart from the dirigiste culture of France, is a matter of debate. So, in fact, is the question of how well it works in France. It has “all the problems you’d expect from a large bureaucracy: sluggishness, red tape, waste, controversies over who gets to choose what films get money.” But the CNC has evolved in fits and starts with changes in technology and culture, and the US has lately directed no small amount of financial support to film production in the form of state-level tax credits. As anyone who visits the cinemas of Paris will notice, France has a “public of devoted filmgoers, people who want to go out to the movie theater and have a wide range of experiences there.” Cinephiles the world over would surely agree that any money spent to cultivate that is money well spent. Related content: How Anna Karina (RIP) Became the Mesmerizing Face of the French New Wave Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless: How World War II Changed Cinema & Helped Create the French New Wave An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays RIP Jean-Paul Belmondo: The Actor Who Went from the French New Wave to Action Superstardom Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
| 10:00a | The Disney Artist Who Developed Donald Duck & Remained Anonymous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Popular and Widely Read Artist-Writer in the World”
Donald Duck first appeared in Disney’s 1934 cartoon The Wise Little Hen (below). In his subsequent roles, he quickly developed into that still-familiar figure the New Yorker once described as “personified irritability.” But it would take him another decade or so to become more than an incompetent, quick-to-anger foil for Mickey Mouse. It would also take the mind and hand of Carl Barks, a former Disney artist who’d retreated to the edge of the California desert to raise chickens and draw a few comic books for extra money. That ostensible side gig lasted thirty years, during which Barks wrote and drew about 500 Donald Duck stories, building an entire world around him now regarded as one of the greatest works of American comic art. Even as Barks’ comics became enormously popular, he labored on them in total anonymity; fans called him “the Good Duck Artist” (which now seems more of a commentary on the artistic standards of Disney comics at the time) or “the Duck Man.” As comics Youtuber matttt puts it in the video above, “in the early nineteen-fifties, the Duck Man was selling three million comics every single month, and yet no one knew his name,” because “Disney was intent on keeping alive the myth that Walt Disney himself personally drew the comics.” Despite that, it was clear to many readers, young and old, that one particular Donald Duck artist was producing material of exceptional ambition and “astoundingly high quality.” It would take the especially dedicated among them years and years of repeated attempts before finding out his name. “The duck comics were, at their best, rip-roaring, edge-of-your-seat, globe-trotting comic adventures,” says matttt. “They feel less like Steamboat Willie and more like Indiana Jones or Star Wars — or, should I say, Indiana Jones and Star Wars feel like the duck comics, because both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg grew up reading, and are vocal fans of, the Duck Man.” Other avowed Barks enthusiasts include R. Crumb, Matt Groening, and even Osamu Tezuka, the “God of Manga” himself. “Even when I open manga from much later, like Dragon Ball or One Piece, by artists who, to my knowledge, have never read a Donald Duck comic, I see the Duck Man’s influence: in those half-page scene-setting splashes, the big eyes, expressive faces, the sense of motion and pacing.”
Barks only came into the public eye after his actual retirement, and in his later decades found himself fêted around the world. Generations of readers had grown up familiar with not just his sophisticated interpretation of Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, but also the city of Duckburg he created and the characters with whom he populated it: Gyro Gearloose, the Beagle Boys, Magica DeSpell, and most distinguished of all, Donald’s impossibly wealthy uncle Scrooge McDuck. Like most millennials, I first encountered them all through DuckTales, the Disney TV series with a Barksian penchant for exotic travels and ironic endings; this prepared me to appreciate Barks’ original stories as Gladstone Comics subsequently reprinted them in the nineties. And like all former young Barks fans, I’ve only come to appreciate them more in adulthood. Related Content: How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made: 1939 Documentary Gives an Inside Look Donald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Other Disney Propaganda Cartoons from World War II An Early Version of Mickey Mouse Enters the Public Domain on January 1, 2024 Watch 13 Experimental Short Films by Tezuka Osamu, the Walt Disney of Japan Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
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