January 2010

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Jean-François Zygel is a French composer and musical academic. He appears regularly on French TV explaining, analysing, and performing French classical music. Not a 'populariser' - Zygel makes no concessions to the wretched world of 'crossover'. He's just very good at what he does.

Here is a very curious thing. Meurtre à l'Empire State Building is a French-made film which reveals the fascination that American history, culture and language have for the French. It tells the story of the murder of a 'gangster's moll' entirely in clips taken from American films of that period. One oddity - listen to the voice of 'Penny Baxter' at the beginning. The accent is London rather than American, isn't it ?

Here is quite a challenging piece from TF1's evening news. All the different new ways of approaching cooking in France, and plenty of different voices to test the ear

A little treasure here from NRJ12, one of the TNT (Télévision Numérique Terrestre) channels. Our BBC did a series on the antecedents of the Sherlock Holmes stories, where we meet the young Conan Doyle meeting the redoubtable Dr Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon whose powers observation were the basis for those of the great detective. It works wonderfully in French

France Télévision screened a very tepid docu-fiction on Louis XV followed by a rather good documentary on the making-of. Interesting in itself, but it is for the voices that I quote it

Here is another of Catherine Deneuve's pieces on French workmanship - the great silk making companies of Lyon.

In the series 'Un jour un destin...', France 2 gave us a piece on Brigitte Bardot, describing the various forms of nonsense that she and her films provoked. The Catholic church depicting her a the Seven Deadly Sins, indeed. But, happily, they didn't driver her to suicide. She has survived as a nice old French lady who lives with her animals and doesn't talk to the press.

TF1 news did an excellent, but slightly tongue in cheek inquiry into Internet piracy of films and DVDs. The French believe in the free availability of works of art, and although the practice of making whole films available on the Internet is a real problem for the industry, the popular feeling is a little ambiguous. If you find any of the film extracts quoted here interesting, I encourage you to buy from Amazon.fr or any of the other - legal - French retail sites

When I remember I record Les grands du rire, the Saturday collection of comedy clips. They also do a section on a popular singer - and this one blew me away completely. I had never even heard of Pierre Bachelet, born in Paris, but who spent his boyhood in the North, Calais, his father's town. This clip of 4 song extracts starts with Les corons (the back to back terraced houses found in mining villages). I've never heard a better football song ! I was born in the North-East of England, and I'm amazed at the similarity between the two societies which are not at all geographically close. The mining tradition, of course.

We all owe a debt to our teachers, and I am for ever grateful to the lady who did a literature course on Daniel Pennac. The book was La fée carabine. I loved the combination of a precise literary style, a street vocabulary not to be found in standard dictionaries, and the wild fantasy of life in an immigrant quarter of Paris. Empreintes did a piece on him, and I quote here Pennac talking to an audience of young people.

On the sonsenfrancais site I recently did an extract of Douze hommes en colère, the famous American play Twelve Angry Men, on the intimacy of the jury room. So here is a TF1 News piece on the French version. At first, we anglosaxons find the idea of the intime conviction hard to swallow, because we are persuaded that justice rests on 'the evidence'. No, Twelve Angry Men gives the lie to that. In this extract, someone says that it is the addition of convictions. Or perhaps, the process of resolving a group of sincerely felt opinions into one.

We have abandoned David Pujadas and the evening news on France 2 for a few weeks. Here is an excellent piece on the 1910 flood which put Paris under 8 metres of water. And of course - what would happen today, if, or when, it happens again...

Toute l'histoire is a strange channel which doesn't figure in my programme guide, but occasionally comes up with some interesting stuff. As for instance this piece on Radio Londres : Les Français parlent aux Français. You get the voices of both Pétain and De Gaulle in this extract, and some interesting snippets of history

It's a good film, Forrest Gump, and I'm always happy to include a clip to show how well the French dubbing actors do American voices. And, of course, how useful they are for us, bridging the gap between documentaries/discussions and original French films and series.

Here's a thoughtful piece from TF1's evening news on the secondary effects of medicines released for sale after inadequate testing, or after testing by experts paid by the industry

We've had Laurence Piquet and Un soir au musée before, and it's not a bad idea to visit the highlands of Culture from time to time, because it's what the French do best. So, before you visit Toulouse, here's a piece on La Musée des Augustins

I've noticed before how well Chinese films of this type (historical martial arms) dub into French. The English original is a parody of what we suppose to be a formal Chinese style, and the resulting French is rather charming.

I used to watch France 3's 'magazine of the sea', Thalassa regularly, but now I find that it deals almost exclusively in items about the environment and the problems of the third world. Both of which are important, but sometimes one wants to watch a programme about the beauty of the sea and its inhabitants. So I enjoyed this piece about the loss of the 18th century voyage of exploration lead by the redoubtable Monsieur de La Pérouse.

Another TF1 evening news piece to get Laurence Ferrari through to 8.30, when she can pack up and go home. This was on the work of professional genealogists - généalogistes successorals - who arrive on your doorstep to announce that an uncle you never met has left you a million euros, but unfortunately he was so crippled with debt that you're only going to get a cheque for 20

Des Racines et des Ailes, the flagship documentary of France Télévisions, is at its best talking about the great cities of France. Here, it was Lyon, and we get at once an extract with three different voices at different levels of difficulty, and a nice little tourist guide.

When I started this site I thought that news items would be its bread and butter . Easy to follow, interesting, of the right length. In fact we think that because the announcer's voice is clear, and the voice-over in the articles also. But, my goodness, the people being interviewed... This is about employees who defraud their businesses.

We don't often have comedy sketches on this site, but this is a super example from Rolande Magdane. His subject is the eccentricity of gender in the French language.

We've had some difficult extracts recently. Here is a peaceful little extract from the channel M6 on how to keep your potatoes from sprouting. Well, you knew that already, didn't you.

M6 broadcast Star Wars Episode 1 and I thought ho, ho, got to put this on the site. A difficult exercise, to put it mildly. Not only the names of the characters (what do I know about Star Wars ?), technical terms like destruction droids, and just the filthy accents of the bad guys. A bit of a giggle, though

France 4 brought us Gerald Dahan from the Casino de Paris on Christmas Eve. Here he does Bernard Kouchner.

I like the series How it's made for entirely selfish reasons - each little piece is five minutes long, and that simplifies the editing I have to do. However, the pieces are always interesting - as long as you like watching how things get made. Which reminds me that I should really record some cooking programmes. There are enough of them on French TV ...

La ligne verte  is a long film on a book by Stephen King. In the world of American state prisons, against a story about a simple-minded giant of a negro wrongly accused of a paedophile murder, with a good whiff of the paranormal thrown in,  King paints his characters, who suffer as his readers suffer and therefore make it all terribly credible...

After an excellent American film, a really, really terrible American series Mentalist. Inane story, dreadful dialogue, beautifully shot, background music signalling the slightest change of pace, made to measure for the couch-potato brigade. Even if you agree with this outburst of intellectual snobbery you will ask 'Why include it ?' Because it makes a magnificent listening exercise for this site. The dialogue is quite rapid, but mostly clear. There is a good range of vocabulary and grammatical structures. The sad fact is that good films, good songs, good documentaries aren't always the best learning material. If you're at the Level-2 of this site, try this one.

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