By Jan Baetens

Wendy Michallat

French Cartoon Art in the 1960s and 1970s

Pilote hebdomadaire and the Teenager Bande Dessinée

http://upers.kuleuven.be/en/books/authors/wendy-michallat

Launched in 1959 by René Goscinny and Jean-Michel Charlier, partially in reaction to the unfair labor conditions offered by the then leading comics magazines, Pilote is considered today the publication that made the bridge between traditional children and adolescent comics magazines such as Tintin or Spirou and adult comic journals such as Fluide Glacial and Métal Hurlant (which will even develop a US sister publication[1]). As the publication that translated and creatively appropriated some material of Kurtzman’s MAD magazine, Pilote also played a vital role in the transatlantic dialogue between US nonmainstream, if not underground production, and the new European comic artists.

Although there exist quite some studies on the journal, the study by Wendy Michallat is the very first one to rethink its history in a broader perspective, not just that of comics culture, but that of culture at large. And the result is absolutely breath-taking. First of all because Michallat gives a very detailed yet nuanced and well written overview of the various periods of the magazine, whose history is one of nearly permanent crisis and eternal attempts to relaunch new formats and formulas in a publication niche that was much less profitable than it was often thought. Second, and most importantly, because the author succeeds in doing what other studies fail to do, namely explaining the systematic changes in the magazine’s policy.

This explanation is not an a posteriori enumeration of hits and misses, but a scrupulous examination of the various contextual aspects that influence the zigzag transformations of the journal. As such, Michallat’s study is a model for all those who would like to write the history of a mass media form. More particularly, it takes into account issues such as:

• The need to come up with a concept that is ‘in sync’ with social and political expectations (in this case the obsession with “education” in postwar France, which helped turn away from the pure entertainment of comics and introduce a more text-oriented magazine).
• The competition with similar titles, which cannot be reduced to a matter of style and content, but has a lot to do with distribution networks and good or bad relationships with backing groups in society.
• The legal constraints that burden the necessity to always change even a winning formula, in this case, the (in-)famous law of 16 July 1949 on Publications for Youth, censoring all publications depicting crime, violence and moral debauchery (initially a measure of protectionism, for the law helped ban all American import, it rapidly became a dangerous arm in the hands of all those eager to police this type of publications).
• The necessity to find a place in the existing mediascape, for instance via new forms of collaborations with newspapers and radio stations (at that moment, just after the invention of the transistor, the dominating medium in youth culture).
• The obligation to adapt to a rapidly changing cultural environment, for instance by taking into account that the comics medium during the sixties gradually became an important vector of the counterculture.
• The challenges raised by the internal changes of the magazine format itself, torn between different and always unstable logics, as revealed for instance by the emergence of the comics album as the new hegemonic format.[2]
• The labor conditions within a collective enterprise such as a comics magazine, which has to find a balance between the creative freedom offered to its collaborators and the basic obligation to make money (we shouldn’t forget that May 68 did not start in May 68, but had been prepared by a decade of growing unease with a mainstream culture that was no longer capable of keeping its great promises of the postwar period).

The great achievement of Michallat is that she shows the complex interaction between these (and many other) dimensions, which prove often mutually incompatible. She does so in a way that retells the whole story as if we were in the driver’s seat, facing problems as well as opportunities and having to take decisions whose consequences remain unsure. This approach gives the reader the impression that she is making history herself, including when it comes down to find an answer to failures and dead ends (even if the magazine will last till 1989, its life as a weekly ends in the early seventies, which is also the moment in which its influence in the field is reduced to almost nothing).

[1] Nicolas Labarre, Heavy Metal, l’autre Métal Hurlant. Bordeaux: Bordeaux UP, 2017, see : https://www.noosfere.org/icarus/livres/niourf.asp?numlivre=2146594729).

[2] On this dramatic change, see the exhibition curated by the GREBD research group of the University of Lausanne: https://wp.unil.ch/grebd/evenements/expositions-du-grebd/

A reading suggestion for the summer: Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing by Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar and with foreword by Joseph Tabbi, described as “An exercise in reclaiming electronic literary works on inaccessible platforms, examining four works as both artifacts and operations.”

Many pioneering works of electronic literature are now largely inaccessible because of changes in hardware, software, and platforms. The virtual disappearance of these works—created on floppy disks, in Apple’s defunct HyperCard, and on other early systems and platforms—not only puts important electronic literary work out of reach but also signals the fragility of most works of culture in the digital age. In response, Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop have been working to document and preserve electronic literature, work that has culminated in the Pathfinders project and its series of “Traversals”—video and audio recordings of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works.

If you are still unconvinced, you should first read Jan Baetens’ review of the book. Quoting directly from the review:

The very classical, perhaps eternal, topic of the author speculating on, day-dreaming or boasting of the afterlife of her or his works, is something that the successive new media revolutions of the last decades are forcing us, as readers as well as writers, to reconsider in radical ways […] True, the loss of literary and other works is far from a new phenomenon (most works are almost immediately forgotten; many works are destroyed, by accident or on purpose; still others get simply lost), but the issue of their technical accessibility is becoming one of the major problems of our contemporary, electronic culture. […] If one decides that just moving ahead in order not to miss the next new thing and that just forgetting about the past is what matters, then technical obsolescence is not a problem. But if one believes instead that “we must struggle never to forget” (p. 237, last words of the text), then the situation becomes quite different (it should be reminded here that in cultural semiotics, as illustrated by the School of Tartu of Yuri Lotman, culture is defined as “non-hereditary memory”). The keyword of this book’s subtitle is therefore twofold: it is about preservation, but even more about the use of preservation, a way of saying that it should be read as a double warning: first, against the illusion of the very possibility of such an enterprise (nothing can be “really” preserved –– what is being preserved is always only a certain form or version of it); second, against the confusion between material conservation (which is a necessary step in the larger process but nothing more) and preservation in the broader sense of the word (which refers to the need of making meaning of the object of preservation, here and now but also in the future).

You can access the full review here.

Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing

By Jan Baetens

For many decades, scholars of adaptation studies have been quarreling on the flaws and merits of the so-called fidelity issue, that is the (biased) idea that the novel is always better than the film and that the value of a movie thus depends on its more or less faithful recreation of the original, whatever all these terms (recreation, faithful, original) may mean.

Current research has a more relaxed take on these problems, what does not mean of course that fidelity is no longer an interesting field of research. Simone Murray has done excellent work in the economic reframing of fidelity: the decision to select a work for adaptation and to rework it in a way that acknowledges the form and content of the adapted work is less determined by aesthetic than by financial issues (cf. The Adaptation Industry, 2012). Jean-Louis Jeannelle has foregrounded the necessity of making a genetic analysis of the adaptation process, making room for trial and error, if not for failures, censorship, and other types of obstacles (cf. Cinémalraux, 2014). Jean Cléder and Laurent Jullier, whose book Analyser une adaptation (2017) was reviewed here a couple of weeks ago, strongly advocate for the creative practice of adaptation as interpretation.

In this broader context, L’Adaptation. Des films aux scenarios (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2018), a collection of essays edited by Alain Boillat and Gilles Philippe, respectively professor of cinema studies and linguistics at the University of Lausanne, can be seen as both an admirable synthesis of the abovementioned tendencies and a groundbreaking study that helps rethink the very process of adaptation.

On the one hand, one finds here many elements that were highlighted by Murray, Jeannelle, and Cléder and Jullier: a strong focus on the industrial aspects of cinema, a sharp awareness of the inevitable difficulties and dead ends of the adaptive process, and the healthy reminder that adaptations do not have to save the original but give it a new life –on screen and elsewhere. On the other hand, their work on the archive of a famous, although today not always much appreciated director, Claude Autant-Lara, a typical representative of the “French Quality” school of the 1940s and 50s, allows them to correct a certain number of historical errors and misunderstandings as well as to propose a different methodological and theoretical framework for the study of filmic adaptations. As an example of the former, I am thinking of their new reading of François Truffaut’s debunking of Autant-Lara and “French Quality” in his 1954 article “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema”. Their historical reconstruction clearly demonstrates how critically and ethically unfair Truffaut’s attack actually was, and how urgent it is to abandon the caricature of “French Quality” that the young Turks of the New Wave have managed to establish as an eternal truth. As an example of the latter, it is key to emphasize the work that this book is doing on the redefinition of the very process of adaptation. Instead of being a single process of changing words into images, adaptation is a multilayered and temporally very complex procedure that involves a great number of intermediary agents such as, for instance, the person that transforms the book into a filmable idea, the person that further transforms this idea into a shooting script, the person that writes and edits the dialogues –not to mention the many feedback and interaction processes between them that determine the making of a movie.

All the essays in this book, written by some of the best film scholars in French today, share these same convictions. Hence the exemplary cohesion of the book, whose use-value is increased by the exceptional stylistic and conceptual fluency of all the articles and the elegant layout. Currently the best that is being said and written on cinema in French, this book should be translated in English with no further delay.

By Jan Baetens

John Updike

Always Looking. Essays on Art

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012

This is not a new book and many readers may find it pathetically old-fashioned. Yet this collection of writings on art with a capital A by an author often discarded as typically WASP is doing what so much modern art criticism seems no longer “capable and willing” of doing, as we are asked by the air hostess when boarding the plane and being offered an exit seat: to make critical judgments, taking into account one’s personal, subjective, individual point of view, but always in a kind and gentle way, written in an elegant and jargon free language, and addressing the reader as a partner in a polite and cheerful conversation.

Updike is never on the lookout for the new or the surprising. The selection of the art shows he discusses may even seem horribly conformist and conservative, unpleasantly biased toward the Western canon, and dramatically reluctant to revise canonical values and classifications. With some slight American exceptions, Updike’s taste –even in the hypothesis that he is doing nothing else than accepting well-paid commissions– almost naturally brings him to the masterpieces of Western painting (things become suddenly American when sculpture is involved, and this sculpture is always bigger than life as in the case of Oldenburg and Serra). And his writing is that of the mild and smiling guide, who hints at what is to be seen and discusses what others –mostly the authors of the catalogue, which is as important a part of a big budget exhibit as the works themselves– have to say on it. It reads marvelously, a real feel good experience for those who do not want to read romance novels.

Yet Updike is also a very sharp and ruthless judge, who is not afraid of saying things nobody else would say. As an outsider –after all, he did not have to make his living as an art critic– he is not only repeating what the artistic community so noisily repeats, he also dares to show the emperor’s new clothes. His remarks on Serra are exemplary in this regard. While underscoring the strength of some of his sculptures but quoting some sophisticated babble of the specialists, Updike concludes “All this steel devoted to scrambling our habitual perceptions? Wouldn’t the funhouse or Ferris wheel at the country fair do just as well?” (p. 192).

This remark ties in with the preface of the book, in which Updike, who first wanted to become a cartoonist, shows the modest, if not “silly” books that made him an artist: the Mickey Mouse “Big Little Books” of the 1940s serious readers would no longer allow their children to read. That a high-brow and apparently conservative writer such as Updike opens a book like this with praise of what is anything but “the best of the best” is a kind of manifesto –no fists raised of course, since this is Updike, but a lesson on the lasting effects of a real artistic experience (to quote John Dewey, that forgotten founding father of cultural studies).