I do not completely agree…

“l’inégalité naturelle (…) est insupportable, dire que bon nombre de femmes blanches sont plus belles que bon nombre de femmes noires est un acte raciste ou ethnocentrique.” dénonce le Grand Charles.

Je dois avouer ne pas avoir été confronté á une idiotie de ce niveau depuis, hmm, que j’ai entendu l’inénarrable Noachovitch ici. Mais celle-ci officiant chez Courbet, on lui passera plus aisément son populisme éhonté qu’à quelqu’un qui se présente comme le redresseur éclairé des torts de notre société en déliquescence.

Car il faut tout de même avoir un certain aplomb pour prétendre qu’il existerait une inégalité naturelle entre femmes blanches et femmes noires, arabes ou métisses quant á la beauté - ou quoi que se soit d’autre. Au passage, notons que l’auteur emploie l’adjectif  pour le moins révélateur “typée”, comme si les blanches étaient moins typées que les autres. Mais il faut surtout faire preuve d’un ethnocentrisme crasse et d’une incapacité flagrante à remettre le beau dans son contexte historique et social qui fait que selon les cultures, les époques l’imaginaire universel de la beauté s’incarne dans des modèles différents. En un mot, que le moche et le beau se construisent, se négocient au quotidien, dans les médias, la mode, les discours qui nous pénètrent et nous font penser, agir, juger autant que nous agissons, jugeons et pensons. Bref, point d’”inégalité naturelle” mais plus certainement des inégalités acquises dont il faut faire la généalogie et dont il convient ensuite de questionner la légitimité.

Il faudra donc dire au Grand Charles qui, sous couvert de dénoncer la bienpensance, professe des inepties, que la reconnaissance du beau, qu’il soit physique comme artistique d’ailleurs, engage un peu plus que le jugement qu’il semble supposer  “naturel” porté par le regard d’une personne sur une autre. Ainsi et sans vouloir ni prétendre en faire l’analyse exhaustive, si les mannequins noires sont sous-représentées dans les défilés et les gravures de mode, cela ne tient certainement pas á une nature plus parcimonieuse dans sa distribution de la beauté ! (sic)

Ce qui est navrant avec ce genre de commentaire c’est qu’on est en droit de se demander si son auteur ne nous éclairera pas prochainement sur les critères physiques de cette inégalité entre les hommes (enfin les femmes, car c’est bien essentiellement d’elles dont il est question dans ce consumérisme croissant des corps). En attendant, on se demande bien ce que celui dont il semble se réclamer, Charles Baudelaire, trouverait á dire de ses commentaires nauséeux, lui qui ne trouvait pas la beauté des blanches si indubitablement supérieure.

Enfin l’analyse qui prétend débusquer derrière le refus d’accepter une soi-disant inégalité naturelle confère à un néo Mc Carthisme:  toute discussion des canons de la mode est rendue de facto impossible car elle serait inspirée par un socialisme rampant. Evidemment l’auteur ayant préalablement pris le soin d’associer égalité avec socialisme, on ne pourra pas lui opposer que nombreux des inspirateurs de l’idéal d’égalité de la révolution française, bourgeois libéraux á l’image d’un Voltaire, avaient bien peu á voir avec le socialisme caricatural qu’il décrit. Mais ce raccourci opportun permet, il est vrai, de refuser de poser les questions politiques en les diluant dans une vision “economiciste”.

To my surprise Politiken informs us that it is no longer possible to pay for drinks in Copenhagen’s strip bars with an American Express card !

Apparently Amex considers strip bars as part of the pornography business and therefore refuses to grant card owners the possibility to use them for such morally unsuitable behaviours. Pornography is illegal so are strip bars !

Hopefully, the owner of several strip bars in the city seems willing to lead the rebellion against such discriminating policy that threaten tourists’ enjoyable experience of the city. (sic)

If the argumentation is said to be based on legal restrictions, as the articles rightly points out, there is no doubt that this policy is primarily informed by moral considerations. As much as I support the initiative taken by financial institutions against child pornography (apparently a booming industry of 20-ish billion $ a year !!!), I can’t but laugh at again another example of moral quest that the management of certain companies pretends, consciously or not, to impose on consumers.

Funnily enough, Amex seemed to have much more prosaic issues in mind when they started refusing payment for adult webiste in 2000: here.

—

In Denmark too Sarkozy’s unexpected but well-publicized performance during his press meeting at the last G8 became a hit: the article featuring the episode ranks top of the week on politiken (bottom right). Refreshing or sad if you consider that latest up-date on extravagant Paris Hilton  is “only” 5th ?

—

To finish here with the news from Denmark, Le Monde runs an article on the current paradox of the Danish economy: the situation is so satisfying (historic low unemployement at 3.7%, low inflation, sound public finances, etc) that is start posing a problem: tapping into the growth potential for 2007 and 2008 will prove difficult as companies cannot find qualified workers to address the demand they are facing.

Denmark has one of the highest activity rate of the OECD countries so postponing the pre-retirement age and lowering the income tax level so to attract foreign workers are among the few likely solutions. Something the article does not tackle is that a priority should be to put an halt to the populist and simplistic rhetoric of the appalling Dansk Folkeparti and its pathetic leader Pia Kiersgaard. Both, despite being per se an insult to human intelligence have enjoyed increasing power of nuisance in national politics during the last couple of years and have managed to frame the political agenda way beyond their actual size (and understanding of the issues at stake). This has been made possible mainly by the lack of a stable majority from the moderate & conservative parties.

I  hope that the emergence of a new center party, Ny Alliance, as well as the penalizing shortcomings of labour will allow to open up further the debate on Denmark radical anti-immigration policy during the last couple of years. (Just as a sad example, Danish people sometimes had to move to Sweden with their foreign lover so to be able together as Denmark refused to grant them residence permit!) Aside from political or ethical considerations, this might be the price for sustaining the flourishing economy.

Et voilà donc Versac pris la main dans le sac, ou plutôt le nez scotché devant Sans Aucun Doute ! Beurk.

J’adore la petite justification glissée immédiatement, consciemment ou pas, (”parfois”, “petite faiblesse”, “cinq minutes”, etc) et qui trahi la mauvaise conscience de celui qui goûte subrepticement au fruit défendu (l’avachissement intellectuel, la paresse neuronale qui permet á TF1 de préparer nos cerveaux aux prochains spots d’une grande marque de soda) le temps que son surmoi reprenne le dessus et le ramène à une activité plus en phase avec son socio-style. ;)

Bon évidemment Sans Aucun Doute ça vaut franchement pas The West Wing niveau politique étrangère ou exégèse d’arcanes institutionnelles mais apparemment c’est par là qu’il faut passer pour émerger politiquement en France ces jours-ci. Belle campagne électorale qui fait honneur au sens civique soit-disant retrouvé le 21 mai dernier donc…

Quant á moi, il faut bien avouer que vivre á l’étranger offre cet avantage que le Satan cathodique m’épargne cette tentation-là. Mais peut-être un jour TV5 revêtira-t-elle les atours du messianisme de seconde partie de soirée made in TF1 et alors me vautrerai-je allégrement dans le foutre télévisuel tel le Robinson de Tournier dans la fange de son îlot-prison. Baudelaire avait bien raison dans son “Au Lecteur”:

“…Aux objets répugnans nous trouvons des appas…”
En attendant, je dois combattre (mollement) d’autres périls comme mon désir irrépressible de profiter des plages de la capitale danoise. On s’en doute, un combat assez inique pour ma volonté faiblarde ;)

Au risque de choquer la bienpensance (bienséance?) je déclare ardemment souhaiter l’élection de Mme Noachovitch. Ceci afin que son strapontin sur TF1 échoue ensuite à Maître Eolas : avouons ça aurait de la gueule tout de même! Et puis, autant placer les personnes compétentes aux postes clés de notre société. Or autant dire que de sous le règne de Nicolas 1er, l’anonymat tristounet du Palais Bourbon ne saurait rivaliser avec les spotlights des plateaux de la première chaîne.

I am off for a few days between 2 continents to a place I have dreamed about for quite some time now: Istanbul alias Byzantium alias Constantinople alias the New Rome alias Tsargrad. I won’t even take the laptop so no internet, no blogging. However, I’ll be back next week to share how it was. In the meantime, try to enjoy the fantastic weather across most of Europe !

Photos are from Flickrleech

Not much activity here the last 10 days as I have been busy with work, thesis writings but also tried to enjoy the wonderful weather once in a while.
So deep apologies to the (very few) regulars. However the dawn brought me an excellent reason to extirpate from my silence !

It has just been unveiled and it is already all around, triggering passionated comments on the blogosphere, most of those I have read very positive, especially from informed people like Peter Gabor. You have guessed, I talk about the London 2012 Olympic Games logo.

As Gabor notes, extensive conceptual research have certainly taken place to reach this outcome so let us try to quickly excavate the strategies beneath the signs, as JM Floch would say.

First of all, because of its unsymmetrical colorful shapes, it connotes movement; the choice to position the text and OG rings into the upper corner evoke a certain “de-centeredness” which definitely contrasts with more classical conventions often used for Olympics logos. While the symmetry usually favored alludes to a modern principle of order, progress and universalism, we have here something far more complex suggesting pluralism, contrasts and frictions (see the sharp shapes)

The marginalization of the text and OG rings in the whole, their different localization in different “islands” created by the numbers 2 and 0 also participates in the dislocation of structure and refusal of the ideology of the USP according to which a unique and unambiguous message should stand out.

But the boldest move in terms of conceptual consequences is what amount, in my eyes, to the “spatialization of time” : the 2012 figures, which should have indicated time (original, isn’t it?!) because of the extended, extremely visible space they end occupying and because they provide the space where the name of the hosting city as well as the OG rings appear, take a spatial meaning.

Thus, the logo presented abolishes time and hallows space. A transposition of priorities and reference which significance Foucault had already foreseen a while ago:

“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are in a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space.” (Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diatrics, 1986 :22)

Then far away ideologically from the Olympic Games usual rhetoric, its modern time-driven symbolism, it reflects an orientation toward a more spatial identity, one of disorganized flux and pluralistic energies that we also find in the accompanying video.

Arguably, this logo is ambitious, original and therefore controversial. But is it still an Olympic Game logo ? Hardly. Because it is before anything else a London logo:

In advocating such aesthetic choices, Wolff Olins proves that it was not merely designing an identity for the 2012 Olympic Gamaes but wanted to integrate (dilute?) the Olympic Games brand into a wider brand platforms for the city of London. Rather than merely appropriating the values of the Olympic Games in order to associate them with London, this logo manages to impose the priorities of the city of London own brand by phagocytosing the legacy of the OG : through a very sophisticated approach, one does no longer passively focuses on the meaning of sport values as such but takes sport as the playground where to discursively state one’s own values. So maybe more than he thought, Versac has it right when he says that London rules.

In other words, London is leveraging the OG to further craft itself as a vibrant, diverse, hectic and even playful place.
So even though it is obviously to early to measure the reception, strategically, I take it as a masterpiece.

In the next note, I’ll come back to Wally Olins’ vision of consumption and brands as, aside from being visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School he is the co-founder of the agency behind this logo and many place branding strategies. For the impatient ones, he exposes some of his thoughts here

Useful references :

- Heilbrunn B. (2002), Le Logo, (Que sais-je, PUF)

Je me souviens vaguement de cette BD lue au temps de ma pré-adolescence où un vieil et débonnaire inspecteur de police marseillais au verbe imagé et á l’amour immodéré pour le pastis se plaignait que la SNCF nous faisait perdre avec son nouveau (á l’époque!) système de réservation informatique baptisé Socrate, le temps préalablement gagné par le TGV.

Je crois qu’aujourd’hui, avec les Twitter (qui vient de trouver 2 nouveaux adeptes de renom: le Cap’tain et Versac) et autre Facebook (auquel j’ai finalement succombé, non sans une longue et héroïque résistance face aux sollicitations incessantes de nombreux amis), nous perdons largement le temps que les ordinateurs nous ont permis de gagner.

De quoi donner une nouvelle actualité au “productivity paradox” observé par Robert Solow dans les années 90 :”you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics“

Au moins, ca change du solitaire…

While the eyes of Europe have turned to Athens for the evening in order to follow the final of the UEFA Champion’s League opposing Liverpool FC to AC Milan, a button away on my remote control is CNN broadcasting images of yet another terrorist bomb attack in Lebanon. This time in East Beirut. Hundred of demonstrators, curious and passer-bys are gathered there, making calls on their mobile phones, taking pictures with their digital cameras or yelling in front of the cameras. In a few days, more than 60 people have died in northern Lebanon, a mark never reached there since the end of the civil war in 1990.

image: Steve Bell for The Guardian

A week ago, a close half lebanese half danish friend of mine left Copenhagen to visit her family there for a few weeks. She left the notoriously insouciance of safe and quiet Denmark for a place which makes the media highlights for its recent upsurge of violence. Ever since, I have kept an eye on the news preoccupied by the growing instability and the possible consequences for her, her family and friends.

After all, and as we all witnessed last year, civilians are always the first victims of such fightings between regular army and extremist groups. Unfortunately, listening to a refugee from the Nahr Al-Bared camp, quoted in the NYT it won’t be different this time: “The army and Fatah al Islam would fire on each other, but the bombs and bullets landed on us. We were waiting for death.”

Yesterday, because an explosion occurred in Beirut, I sent her an SMS asking how things were. Beyond the relief of getting an instant reassuring reply, the end of her message got me pondering for a while: “I wish I could see an end to all this mess“.

But could that be more than a wish ?

Pessimistic, I wonder how it could when for a year at least we have let the precarious but real political equilibrium found by this country and its diverse ethnic and religious groups fall into a rather bleak future. This country which could have been a reason for hoping, an example for the entire region, has come to symbolize many of its dead-ends.

However inextricable the situation may seem, I hope that this time western governments won’t merely wave press releases stating how much they/we “regret” the way events unfold.

During all his campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s new president has loudly voiced his ambition to base his policy international affairs primarily on moral principles. The recruitment of M. Kouchner, founder of Doctors without Borders and long-standing advocate of humanitarian intervention - a man less than accustomed to diplomatic faltering - for the job of Foreign Affairs minister has confirmed Sarkozy’s willingness to move away from too often accepted cynicism like Chirac’s unbalanced approach toward Putin’s Russia ; Putin whom Sarkozy openly and forcefully criticized for his orchestration of military repression in Chechnya. So today, let us hope that the intentions claimed will also lead to a clear involvement, along with the US, the EU and the international community at large, in Lebanon.

Yes, let us hope that unlike last year, when Isreal-lead war seriously shook-up the Lebanese social fabric, this time a quick and unequivocal commitment of the international community prevents the collapse which some already tragically foresee, like these 2 journalists who blog from Beirut: “We are heading straight to a civil war”, they write.

Now the game is over, Milan has won, cameras are on Berlusconi who stands by Platini and hundred of millions are religiously watching the show. Let us not prevent Berlusconi from covering up civilians’ voices in Lebanese begging us for help.

“One does not think nor act, rather one makes signs”

Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes, Quadrige, PUF p.13

I am pleased to discover that one of my recent commentators on this blog is a respected academic whose books and articles I am (moderately) familiar with : Jonathan E. Schroeder. As a matter of fact, I actually have a short comment on amazon.fr about Brand Culture, which he co-edited and where a couple of essential readings appear, among which 3 are especially notable to me:

- Ambi-Brand culture : on wing and a swear with Ryanair by the always devastatingly insolent but accurate Stephen Brown.

- Brand as Ideoscape, by Søren Askegaard.

- Rethinking Identity in Brand Management, by F. Csaba & A. Bengtsson.

If the 2 first articles are from highly respected scholars - though they seriously threaten the foundations of most of their colleagues’ ideas, epistemologies and methods , I believe the 3rd one to be much needed in marketing & branding literature. (disclaimer : F. Csaba was my professor at CBS) This because it convincingly questions THE Holy Grail of branding theory and practice: identity. The authors unveil what one has to call a conceptual desert around the notion of identity as it is used by mainstream marketing academia (e.g Aaker; Kapferer… and, trust me, many others !) and contrast the taken for granted attitude of this tradition toward such a complex concept stemming from various disciplinary fields (e.g philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology) with the profound interrogation it posits in contemporary societies as shown by informed social sciences. (e.g Castells, Giddens).

As invited by Jonathan Schroeder here, I had a look at his projects’ web page and went through the chapter he wrote, “Images in Brand Culture,” for the upcoming (fall 2007) Go Figure: New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric, Barbara J. Phillips and Edward McQuarrie, eds. Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe.

Well, first of all the paper deals with advertising so I should say that I have rather limited experience with advertising as such, academically or professionally speaking, as I believe with Benoit Heilbrunn (disclaimer: another former prof. of mine), that advertising has become a marginal element in the consumption and brand societies we live in. Basically, Heilbrunn argues that brands have progressively abandoned the strictly mediated relationship with consumers allowed by advertising in order to engage more directly with them, through PR, design, DM and any below the line alternative. Therefore the fundamentally external relation brand used to entertain with their consumers has become internalized. He explains that (source: Le Monde, 04/23/04):

By multiplying the apparatuses for interactions with consumers, brands have become unavoidable partners of their dailylives and a powerful cement of social bound. Brands have increasingly invaded the psychological, emotional and social spaces of people, thereby becoming true ideological devices able to advocate a genuine political program which relies on sacralizing commodity by enlarging the realm of consumption far beyond market exchange. Thus, consumption takes the form of a set of experiences through which people trade (symbolic) value and meaning and, consequently, negotiate their identities.

This being said, let us go back to our “Images in Brand Culture”. In the context of the extensively visual mode of relation of brands with consumers, where visual websites, print ad, TV (or logos as Heilbrunn would point) have replaced the traditional text, argument-based discursive strategies of communication, Schroeder’s aim is to point to the cultural foundation of the visual rhetoric used by brands in modernity. To do so he focuses on 3 areas : snapshots aesthetic (unposed, loosely framed photographs evoking authenticity & casuality), the tranformational mirror of consumption, and the visual language of architecture.

In describing the mechanics a play when ad campaigns leverage those 3 techniques, Schroeder highlights the need to include an informed investigation of the representational conventions upon which they draw in order to be efficient. So just like “an hour is not an hour, it is a vase filled with flavors, sounds, projects and climates” (Proust, Remembrance of the Past Things), an image in an ad is filled with deeper meaning, socially framed, which provide the basis of the connivance marketers try to establish with consumers.

Well, as much as I agree with that, it does not sound revolutionary to my ears.

A major issue I have is that Schroeder seems willing to draw general laws as for the impact of his 3 conceptual tools on branding activities. With such general questioning one assumes a certain permanence in the aesthetic of the snapshots, transformational mirror or architecture style. Personally, I would defend a more emerging or relational vision (see, Appadurai : “this is a relational argument”) where the snapshot, for example, can only be understood in the peculiar context - or network of associations, in a Latourian fashion - within which it emerges. Thereby obliging to reassess its role each time and in conjunction with all the proximate relevant sources of symbolic value with which the so-called aesthetic of the snapshot interacts . This means investigating the meaning it may convey given, for example, the product category, the history of the brand, the national culture or the competitive environment it appears in. From that perspective the snapshot aesthetics (or role of classical architecture) is fundamentally plural and can hardly be pointed at a category as such. Rather, its value is contextual. Consequently if the context of the snapshot is to be understood, it has to be preliminary delimited. This is why the notion of “net-work”is probably more enlightening. For example, Schroeder explains that classical architecture convey notions of “stability, longevity, permanence” that corresponds to the expectations of clients who entrust their savings to banks’ care but, it seems to me, if these values resonate in today’s consumer when they look-up at the classical HQ of their bank, at the time when these were erected the buildings may have conveyed very different values such as modernity, dynamism, progress. Furthermore, in the contemporary economy of desire, gamble and easy money (Rifkin, 2004) “stability, longevity and permanence” may easily become associated with “conservatism, establishment, overcautiousness”. My point is to say that if, as Schroeder advocates, we are to take broad cultural representation seriously in understanding how advertising works, we should never take culture as a frozen land (btw, run to see the eponymous Finnish movie) but always something versatile.

Of course, this certainly doesn’t impede the emergence of common themes across category limits such as countries, product categories or epochs. As a side comment, I wonder to which extend the renewed snapshot aesthetic is not marketers’ reply to the marketing-savvy consumers’ who have become aware of branding discourse and strategies (Brown, op cit). From that perspective the straightforward, no-bullshit communication tone is actually the most advanced and sophisticated level of the dialectical relation between marketing discourse and consumers’ response to it…
That’s why I doubt one can subscribe to the claim that the use of a given technique or rhetorical system such as snapshot aesthetic or architectural classicism and the possibilities it offers promote certain values per se. (p.9)
Moreover, if they are meant to do so, a culturally astute understanding of advertising still has to figure out how and why certain values (e.g. authenticity, casualness) are favored in certain times in certain places. For example, in their fascinating article (JCR, 2005) “The Fire of desire“, Belk, Ger & Askegaard notice that the longing for authenticity expressed in the form of Norwegian natural landscape voiced by consumers in urban developed societies such as Denmark was not expressed in less advanced countries such as Turkey.

I want to conclude by reflecting on Schroeder interesting remark that, the role of promoting the symbolic values of the bank institutions, once manifested in the proud architecture of their buildings and subsidiaries has been transfered to mere images, to pictures of such architectural achievements. One can see the classical columns and other physical attributes but only on billboards, TV ad, annual reports’ pictures. Under electronics, netbanking, offshoring and TIC, this reality has been diluted and then resurrected in “artificial system of signs” ; the signs of the real have replaced the real itself (Baudrillard, 1981)
As Schroeder aptly points, “banks today are in the business of building brands as much as physical structures”. But paradoxically this does not make them less “permanent” or less “safe” in the eyes of their clients. Probably because, at the end, the symbolic value, as evaluated by consumers, has been preserved, though it takes the form of mere images.

Lastly, and if the issue at stake, as Schroeder states himself, is to understand how pictures and images communicate value (p. 2), I cannot but recommend J. M. Floch’s masterpiece’s works in the field of communication, semiotics and marketing. By prolonging the work of Barthes and Greimas, Floch focuses not on a special type of communication (e.g advertising) which would restrain our understanding of communication. Instead he addresses “signs” whatever the form they may take in a given product category. This agnosticism allows him to deploy the powerful conceptual tools of structural semiotics (semiotic square, generative trajectory of meaning) to analyze product design, ad campaigns as well as users trajectories in the metro or patient- doctors relationships. I think that in order to properly grasp the significance of (post)modern consumption practices we are in desperate need for such transversal look at them.

Probably, his “Semiotics, Marketing & Communication: Beneath the signs, the strategies”, is the most luminous way to navigate back and forth between the versatile and superficial images to the permanent and more significant values. Today, one of the major limitations of Floch’s ideas, it occurs to me, is that his very structural approach restrains the possibility to account for contextual cultural changes and the way it modifies brands/products perceptions in a world deeply characterized by fragmentation, emerging and contradictory social dynamics. This is where Andrea Semprini’s continuation of his research enters the picture…

Avec le documentaire La Campagne du Net, diffusé mardi dernièr sur Arte et disponible sur le site internet de la chaine, on retrouve l’inénarrable M. Francois de la Brosse, conseil en communication de la campagne de Nicolas Sarkozy et journaliste brejnevien á ses heures perdues.

Cette fois, entre deux cageots de fruits et légumes á Rungis, il nous explique fièrement que Nicolas Sarkozy est… “simple and stupid”. Si, si !

Ca se passe environ á la fin du 1er quart du film, juste après une courte séance de questions-réponses avec un électeur d’une honnêteté intellectuelle remarquable puisque la question est formulée de telle manière que ce dernier ne peut qu’abonder dans le sens du monsieur.

Voilá la transcription du passage en question :

“Il y avait beaucoup de gens qui voulaient faire le site internet de Nicolas Sarkozy. Moi je l’ai emporté parce que j’avais une vision simple ; comme les américains disent : “K.I.S.S, Keep It Simple and Stupid”. Voilá ! Alors ma vision, ca a été un média, de l’audiovisuel et de la réactivité. Elle est très sarko compatible cette proposition parce que Nicolas, il est comme ca !“

L’intéressé appréciera certainement.

Source :

La campagne du net
Documentaire de Frédéric Biamonti et Alexandre Hallier
(France, 2007, 52mn)
Coproduction : ARTE France, La Générale de Production

Thanks to my fellow Denamrk-based French blogger, Kiddik for sending me this Bill Maher’s blasting pro-France case. I won’t pretend to be objective (how could I ?!) but I have to admit that I find this 10 times funnier than the lobotomized French-bashing rhetorics from O’Reilly that SuperFrenchie regularly deconstructs. By the way, I just see that he has already posted the video too but with the transcript… probably for evangelization purposes ! ;)