There's a nice piece by Simon Kuper in the FT about France's "exception culturelle" and why it "makes more sense than ever," basically arguing that it is only fair for France to seek to give its domestic artists and filmmakers a helping financial hand in a world where the English language rules the roost and where technology has made the global media market a lot more crowded.
You can read it here, if you can afford to break the paywall.
My only issue with the piece, aside from the fact that it equates U.S. tax breaks on donations to the art world with French levies on movie-theater tickets purchased in France (the parallel would surely only work if art galleries or museums based in U.S. were forced to give away exhibition proceeds to the state), is that it doesn't touch on criticism from even within France of some of the ways cultural subsidies work here.
Take the movie industry. In France, there is a blunt-force approach to promoting home-grown talent that involves simply siphoning off cash from a variety of sources in the media industry and then reinvesting the cash pot into domestic entertainment. Ticket sales at cinemas are taxed at 11%; revenues from TV advertising and licence-fee revenues, as well as telecom operators' subscription revenues are taxed at anywhere up to around 5%; video/DVD and video-on-demand sales are taxed at 2%.
All this made for a total cash pot of 841 million euros ($1.1 billion) in 2011 for the CNC, the Centre National du Cinema, which takes in the money and decides how to allocate it for the good of French cinema. That's a 59% increase from 2007's intake, only a slightly less impressive rate of growth than registered by the money put into various financial products by the CNC over the same period (growth rate of 63%). You can find all these figures in a typically dry report from France's state auditors, the Cour des Comptes.
Aside from the seeming incongruity of relying on ticket sales from, say, Iron Man 3 or The Great Gatsby to fund the development of French movies, via a tasty advance to budding film projects, the big problem with all this money sloshing around is that it artificially bloats - rather than supports - unpopular cultural output, critics say.
A fun piece by Capital.fr ran the numbers in April to determine who were the biggest black holes of cinema subsidies in France. In pole position, director Jacques Doillon, whose last three movies had an average budget of over 2 million euros, an average subsidy of 880,000 euros and attracted an average total audience of just under 25,000 people. That's a subsidy of 35.90 euros per ticket. The article also hones in on pouty actress Emmanuelle Beart, whose movies are regularly given subsidies despite having a batting average of under 30,000 viewers.
Some French filmmakers have become increasingly vocal about the perceived injustice of the way these subsidies are doled out. The producer of Oscar-winning silent smash The Artist - cited by Kuper in his column as an example of a French movie that could actually compete on the world stage because it wasn't in French - said in 2012 that the CNC was a "buddies' network" that only gave money to movies that would never get made otherwise. (He says The Artist didn't get the CNC's subsidy.)
French director Matthieu Kassovitz also blamed the subsidy system for failing to breathe new life into French cinema. A case of sour grapes, some might say, given that his last three movies got 1.4 million euros in subsidies on average, according to Capital.fr. On the other hand, the CNC denied funding for his 1995 classic La Haine, which was huge.
A lot of the distress concerns the opacity of the CNC's decision-making process. Sure, we know who sits on the committees that award advance funding - namely screenwriters and filmmakers who are actively working in the industry, which already seems kind of ethically fraught to me but whatever - but it's not clear exactly what tips one script into the good pile over any other if we accept that financial viability is not a criteria.
So yes, by all means, say that it makes sense that France would want to preserve its domestic entertainment industry from being forced to give up crucial subsidies. But there has to be a point at which, when even the patient doesn't want to take the medicine, you look at changing the treatment.
You can read it here, if you can afford to break the paywall.
My only issue with the piece, aside from the fact that it equates U.S. tax breaks on donations to the art world with French levies on movie-theater tickets purchased in France (the parallel would surely only work if art galleries or museums based in U.S. were forced to give away exhibition proceeds to the state), is that it doesn't touch on criticism from even within France of some of the ways cultural subsidies work here.
Take the movie industry. In France, there is a blunt-force approach to promoting home-grown talent that involves simply siphoning off cash from a variety of sources in the media industry and then reinvesting the cash pot into domestic entertainment. Ticket sales at cinemas are taxed at 11%; revenues from TV advertising and licence-fee revenues, as well as telecom operators' subscription revenues are taxed at anywhere up to around 5%; video/DVD and video-on-demand sales are taxed at 2%.
All this made for a total cash pot of 841 million euros ($1.1 billion) in 2011 for the CNC, the Centre National du Cinema, which takes in the money and decides how to allocate it for the good of French cinema. That's a 59% increase from 2007's intake, only a slightly less impressive rate of growth than registered by the money put into various financial products by the CNC over the same period (growth rate of 63%). You can find all these figures in a typically dry report from France's state auditors, the Cour des Comptes.
Aside from the seeming incongruity of relying on ticket sales from, say, Iron Man 3 or The Great Gatsby to fund the development of French movies, via a tasty advance to budding film projects, the big problem with all this money sloshing around is that it artificially bloats - rather than supports - unpopular cultural output, critics say.
A fun piece by Capital.fr ran the numbers in April to determine who were the biggest black holes of cinema subsidies in France. In pole position, director Jacques Doillon, whose last three movies had an average budget of over 2 million euros, an average subsidy of 880,000 euros and attracted an average total audience of just under 25,000 people. That's a subsidy of 35.90 euros per ticket. The article also hones in on pouty actress Emmanuelle Beart, whose movies are regularly given subsidies despite having a batting average of under 30,000 viewers.
Some French filmmakers have become increasingly vocal about the perceived injustice of the way these subsidies are doled out. The producer of Oscar-winning silent smash The Artist - cited by Kuper in his column as an example of a French movie that could actually compete on the world stage because it wasn't in French - said in 2012 that the CNC was a "buddies' network" that only gave money to movies that would never get made otherwise. (He says The Artist didn't get the CNC's subsidy.)
French director Matthieu Kassovitz also blamed the subsidy system for failing to breathe new life into French cinema. A case of sour grapes, some might say, given that his last three movies got 1.4 million euros in subsidies on average, according to Capital.fr. On the other hand, the CNC denied funding for his 1995 classic La Haine, which was huge.
A lot of the distress concerns the opacity of the CNC's decision-making process. Sure, we know who sits on the committees that award advance funding - namely screenwriters and filmmakers who are actively working in the industry, which already seems kind of ethically fraught to me but whatever - but it's not clear exactly what tips one script into the good pile over any other if we accept that financial viability is not a criteria.
So yes, by all means, say that it makes sense that France would want to preserve its domestic entertainment industry from being forced to give up crucial subsidies. But there has to be a point at which, when even the patient doesn't want to take the medicine, you look at changing the treatment.
No comments:
Post a Comment