October 2011
One of the very best programmes on FranceTélévisions at the moment is Un jour un destin presented by Laurent Delahousse. It presents the biographies of stars but without the mawkish sentimentality of a lot of these programmes. This one was on Simone Signoret, a very great lady of French cinema. This clip describes the success she and Yves Montand had in New York, when they finally woke up to the idea that communism wasn't a good idea and went to the States. Signoret was the first French actress ever to win an Oscar .
You will note that she got the award for her role in what is described as 'a little English film' which she had happened to make. Three times we hear about this 'little English film'. Well, it was Room at the Top, with Laurence Harvey, my friends and it wasn't so little...
Here's an old favourite. Our English novelist, Agatha Christies writing about a Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, played on television by and English actor, David Suchet, and then dubbed into French. That's Europe for you.
Documentaries made by FranceTélévisions make perfect listening exercises at a fairly modest level. They are beautifully photographed and researched - like the British BBC of thirty years ago. This one is on Claude Monet from the series Secrets d'Histoire introduced by Stéphane Bern.
It was one of my French friends who recommended this wonderful film Bouvard et Pécuchet. It is an adaptation of one of Flaubert's major works, and stars Jean-Pierre Marielle and Jean Carmet, two of France's greatest actors. It is a reflective, very beautiful film, and one of the very few that we will find that are not difficult to follow
Arte Télévision has the excellent habit of screening very early episodes of cult television series. So here is The Saint, with Roger Moore, in black and white. As always, this dubbed material makes excellent level-1 exercises
From imaginary crime to a very real crime - Jack the Ripper, in 1888. So much has been written about this, so many theories put forward that when France 2 put on a programme called l'Eventreur démasqué, I settled down to watch with a sigh of resignation. But it was very well done. The suspect 'démasqué' turns out to be Melville Macnaghten, Commissionaire of Police of Scotland Yard. What is at the least surprising is that he doesn't seem to have been suspected before now. Everybody else was in London, after all. On the linguistic level, one notes that the speech of the lady who has uncovered all of this is quite hard to follow - a good level-2. Please note that some of the pictures are fairly gory.
The Garde des sceaux is the Minister of Justice, the head of the justice system in France. LCP did a good documentary in which five past holders of this position were interviewed. Two became famous - Robert Badinter who succeeded in having the death penalty abolished, and Rachida Dati, a young and attractive woman whose parents were North African immigrants.
M6's weekend popular science programme E=M6 did a piece on compulsive behaviour. French is more logical than English and we learn that when a pulsion(= urge) is unhealthy, it becomes a compulsion. Naturally I hoped we were going to hear all about Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a text book example.. but they weren't that brave
Merlin is a British TV series that you can read about here. Merlin is a young magician at the court of Uther Pendragon (father of Arthur). It's a society that is rather down on witchcraft, and after a woman sees a horse emerging from a cloud of smoke (conjured by the winsome, but careless young Merlin), the witchfinder-general is called in. It's the sort of series that attracts our best British actors. Whether they do it for the money or the opportunity to go over the top and overact, is debatable. However, here is Charles Dance as Aredian the witchfinder. Overacting, one would say.
Linguistically interesting because of the parody of medieval language
We do not neglect culture on this site, and here is the reason why France is the cultural centre of all the arts, including that of music, where French composers have never equalled those of Germany or Italy. But one can speak beautifully about music in French
Laurence Piquet introduced Un soir ... Franz Liszt, and we hear the voice of the French musicologist Alain Duault, who demonstrates what I just said about talking about music, and then a drop-dead gorgeous lady pianist who plays the Sonata in B-flat minor while talking about it ... no easy feat.
Linguistically, her voice is fascinating. Very modern, very trendy. Not at all easy to follow, given the competition of the Steinway grand. It's a level-3.
The affair of the Mediator unites two subjects which are dear to the French - health and the villainy of large companies. This is the story of the pharmaceutical company Servier which sold this product, first as a medicine for the treatment of diabetes, then to help with weight loss. We are told that as a side effect it tended to harden the valves of the heart, and patients died. Servier is accused of knowing that, and suppressing the information. So here's a clip from an excellent documentary about some people who led the combat against this pernicious substance.
A rather good American film, Une vraie histoire, (A straight story) made by David Lynch. A road movie in which an old man travels 350 miles on hos sole means of transport, a motorised lawn-mower, to visit an old friend. Super
FranceTélévisions screened a very beautiful documentary on Line Renaud, one of my great heroines. Impossible to choose a representative 5 minutes from one and a half hours because she has reinvented herself with the decades, from the Las Vegas years to France, actress in her 50s... So here is a clip from the beginning in a grim Northern town of back-to-back houses
France 5 did a documentary on the commercial war between the world's luxury hotels. There was, of course, an undercurrent of surprise and disapproval that at a time of recession and financial crisis, the number of rich people in the world is increasing (if you're anglo-saxon, you might think that's a good thing, especially if you happen to be one of them) and a lot of people are happily forking out 7 000 euros a night without breakfast. It makes for a nice little video, though
