August 2011
Here's a rather good fantasy series Nick Cutter et les portes du temps. British-made, and high budget. It's a time travel story - all good clean fun
I enjoyed this piece from Des racines et des ailes on Périgord and the château owned by Jesephine Baker. The camera work is always very fine, and of course the measured voice-over is a perfect level-1 exercise
I nearly didn't pursue this episode of Roswell, an American series which I take to be about ordinary American adolescents being extraordinary extra-terrestrials. But I was struck by the odd effect of informal American translated into French. The bit with the teacher works fine - that's formal English and formal French. But when the girl says in compact American English "He said it could be in the future he wouldn't be there", it ends up in French as "Il disait qu'il se pourrait très bien qu'à l'avenir il ne soit plus là". It made me laugh...
A nice little documentary from Arte television, beautifully filmed, and interesting in its own right. The voice-over makes it a level-1, but perhaps not quite as easy as Des Racines et Des Ailes, for example. It's more informal.
August, and we have riots all over the UK. I am not going to comment, except to say that the reporting from France Télévisions is, as always, excellent. Here is an extract from the evening news of 10/08/2011
TF1 gave us Les 30 histoires les plus extraordinaires. I have to say I was disappointed, most of the stories being American, not French. And given that France recently gave us the unbelievable story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I would have thought that that would have been the easy winner... However, here's a nice obsessed Frenchman who devoted his life to searching for his American GI dad.
Here's a charming little piece on Charles Trenet. We normally hear the sentimental ballades such as Douce France, but here is the entertainer, the singer of patter songs. You'll need the subtitles for much of this. And I can't tell you how long it took me to catch the words "L'élève revête un harnachement spécial" Sometimes it just doesn't come....
I try to keep the standard here at a reasonable level, but if a video extract interests me I tend to throw caution to the winds...
This was a programme in the Empreintes series, interviewing the actor Fabrice Luchini. I like him as an actor, and he is a great admirer of Louis Ferdinand Céline, as I am. But he is eccentric and enthusiastic, and he talks fast. Very fast. Add to that a contribution from the widow of Céline, a lady who is now in her 90s, and you have something to test the ear. It took about a week to make this transcription, against the usual hour or so.
French TV, like ours offers an enormous selection of minor channels, most of which run American series. However, there is Encyclopédie, which is only spoiled by far too many English-language documentaries with French voice-overs. However, here is a nicely pessimistic view of the future from French experts who enjoy pointing out how likely it is that we are all going to come to grief one day...
Here is Comment c'est fait on making the 3D prototypes which are the models for all the thousands of different parts which make up our hoovers, dishwashers, etc. I liked the reflection at the very end "les machines qui ont permis de fabriquer ces pièces sont elles-mêmes faites de différentes pièces réalisées de la même manière. C'est un cercle sans fin" We're made the same way, of course. Man is a machine for creating the parts to make another man.
I very much enjoyed this docufiction from Arte Télévision Le grand Charles. The part of Charles de Gaulle is played by Bernard Farcy, who captures the voice to perfection
Envoyé spécial is a current affairs programme which tries to get people all het up about the little corruptions that have always lain behind the world of politics and of business. Here is an enquiry about the Légion d'honneur which affects to be surprised that Jacques Chirac gave the distinction to his pals from his constituency of Corrèze, or that Nicolas Sarkozy gave it to people like Barbara Streisand and Dany Boon ... or his tailor
And I loved this honest remark from the President
Et puis moi, je suis pas obligé de décorer que des gens que je
ne connais pas
que des gens que j'apprécie pas
ou que des gens qui ont dit du mal de moi !
I can't pretend that I understood what Gossip Girl was all about when I watched an episode: it seemed to be a group of American adolescents who were mysteriously rich and famous despite being well... adolescent. So here is the Wiki article.
But artistic quality is not what this site is about, and the bright, excited dialogue makes for a good listening exercise
France 5 did a documentary called Bye bye cobaye, which asked the question, Can we dispense with the use of animals for laboratory experiments on commercial products. The answer will, sadly, not surprise you..
