Patrice de Méritens — Looking at your left hand, one can see that you have a ring exactly like that of a high-flying bird!
Philippe Labro — Ah yes! It’s my ring from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, that I wear permanently like a charm, a souvenir of my two years as a student there between 1954 and 1956. Arriving there at the age of 18 thanks to a one-year Fulbright Scholarship, I was allowed, because of my grades, to stay an extra year thanks to the intercession of a rich former student with the agreement of the dean. During that time, I didn’t speak a word of French. My only contact with my family was by mail because the telephone was not simple then. I was therefore immersed in the American world to the point of acquiring a bilingualism and a dual culture that changed my life. My relationship with the United States, to be precise, is not one of passion or of fascination, but of constant interest. I was magnificently well received there, supported in my loneliness, with extraordinary journalism professors; from this comes my feeling of recognition, gratitude towards this university, towards Americans and their hospitality even if I always try to make my view of them otherwise objective.
P. de M. — Did this plunge into American life change you emotionally?
P. L. — Paul Morand said that anyone who spent his 20th year abroad was different. Living far from home induces a necessity to adapt. For example, at university, the rule of ‘hello-goodbye’: not greeting someone you crossed did not incur a punishment but a summons for a call to order. Another imperative: a suit and tie all day long. And, above all, there was honesty and honour: if you left your possessions on a table, you would find them there the next day. Not cheating, not copying, loyalty and openness were, quite obviously, values that my parents – who were honoured at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations – had already inculcated in me. It is said that, at 15, the die is cast – and yet, my American experience deepened in me the celebrated ‘become what you are’. My two years in Lexington formed my judgment and observation qualities. Everything is important when you are abroad: every word and every stance. You are not in danger, strictly speaking, but on the alert. That is how I gained the habit of knowing how to listen to others.
P. de M. — And culturally speaking?
P. L. — I had some strong lessons in journalism. In the columns of the campus newspaper, I published my first cinema reviews, which allowed me to see all the films of the end of the 1950s. I also used to speak on air on the local radio whose listeners used to laugh at my French accent. And, above all, we were sent into the field: to the local police station, the post office, the butcher’s, the bank and into the street with the primary aim of getting to know the lie of the land. Seeing and reporting back, becoming a reporter …
P. de M. — If some of these constants remain, it would seem that the atmosphere has greatly changed on American campuses …
P. L. — I went back to Washington and Lee the first time to receive an honorary doctorate. I was treated to speeches in an academic gown, a wonderful moment after the publication of The Foreign Student which recounted the customs and spirit of that institution, a sort of southern Harvard. I then went back for the funeral of one of my professors. It is certain that through the decades many things have changed inside American universities, firstly though sexual and racial diversity which, in itself, is highly positive; but, since then, the ‘cancel culture’ and the dictatorship of the politically correct have risen up and we are witnessing a hysterisation of campuses. The intellectual plague that is woke culture complicates everything, subjecting professors and university executives to the wild imaginings and delusions of minorities. There is no longer any question for a lecturer, if he does not want to be in danger, of receiving or seeing a student in his office without his door being left open. Woke is a gangrene which has been infecting France for some time, with the France Unbowed parliamentarians together with some political factions whose main aim is to deconstruct the system. To destroy the classic order, the dictatorship of parity is often the Trojan Horse to the point that feminism, perfectly legitimate in its essence, has transformed into aggressivity and excess.
P. de M. — These are the unexpected aspects of cultural interpenetration. With a few years’ delay, the worst as well as the best comes to us from across the Atlantic …
P. L. — With woke, attacks on the liberty of thought have multiplied among us in a scandalous way. Sylviane Agacinski was prevented from expressing herself at a university in Bordeaux; Élisabeth Badinter has been taken to task on social media; with sexist discrimination as the pretext, Valérie Plazenet, a dance teacher at Sciences Po, was excluded from her courses for refusing to adopt the ‘leader/follower’ wording designed to replace the notion of gender. Being a man or a woman and recognising oneself as such has become reactionary. The paradox is that we owe this movement which comes from the United States to our deconstruction philosophers: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and other inventors of the ‘French theory’ who gave lectures and taught in the United States – especially in California – and became stars. Some might say that their thinking, adopted by the Americans, has been perverted. That is the negative side. But we can also bear in mind the reciprocal cultural exchanges that are admirable …
P. de M. — And whose first essential quality is an unfailing friendship?
P. L. — Exactly. Let’s talk first about literature. One has to know, and this is fascinating, that American writers partly became famous thanks to France. In America, they are isolated, existing in their country with its continental dimension with a certain difficulty. In New York, Washington, Boston or Chicago, maybe. But elsewhere, in Kansas, Colorado or any other backwater State in rural America, being a writer is a solitary affair. In France, on the contrary, where writing and literature have always been very important, they were recognised. So, under the influence of the Nouvelle Revue Française, of André Gide and some others, especially Michel Mohrt who kept up a correspondence with Jack Kerouac, they entered our culture. It was the great translator Maurice-Edgar Coindreau who made Gaston Gallimard discover the work of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Capote, Caldwell or Styron. Later, French critics who accorded this literature a sort of veneration gave the same reception to Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. Paul Auster, for example, is definitely not as respected in his own country as he can be in the sixth and seventh arrondissements of Paris. I remember a literary cocktail in the Gallimard gardens where William Faulkner was to be seen lying on the lawn … In our most prestigious publishing houses, led by Gallimard and Grasset, there was even a snobbery for the first American novel, which had an almost better welcome than a first French novel.
P. de M. — What were the reciprocal influences?
P. L. — Joseph Kessel, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre were inspired by American writers. Camus claimed to adhere to the thriller, especially of Horace McCoy. André Gide swooned before Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and he was right. We talk of the roman noir but it is simply a novel because there is no difference between a detective story and a classical novel once the approach is literary, interpreting and depicting the world. Take Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom): Jean-Paul Sartre had not copied, but had read, with great attention, John Dos Passos. The construction, the abundance of characters and the intricacy are typically inspired by the Americans. Today, Pierre Lemaître, a writer and screenwriter, has taken on board this narrative art perfectly, especially with The Great Swindle (Au revoir là-haut), which won him the Prix Goncourt. And Philippe Lançon’s Shreds (Le Lambeau) is, in its way, an American masterpiece, recounting a precise event – the 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine – just as William Styron wrote about his depression. I myself have been influenced by the American construction whose first imperative is never to let go of the reader. The principle of the ‘page-turner’, describing a book that is particularly gripping, comes from there. The young Swiss-French writer Joël Dicker has carved out an international reputation by taking inspiration from the structure and methodology of American story-telling. There are in the United States schools of writing that produce stories as we make food mix! It doesn’t always work. That said, and to come back to the great names, if there is a penetration of American know-how, of the ‘tell it like it was’ proper to Hemingway, we should remember that he claimed to be influenced by Flaubert and Balzac. Tom Wolfe, whom I had the good fortune to have as a good friend, talked in his case of Balzac and Zola. When we wrote to each other, I nicknamed him Balzola! He was always in conflict with John Updike, Norman Mailer and all the team of the New Yorker by deciding, based on real facts, to put himself in the heads of his protagonists. The new Tom Wolfe journalism allows thinking in the place of people the writer is describing. It is the invention of a new language and the destruction of journalism’s usual structures. Tom Wolfe influenced us all.
P. de M. — Can one talk of love between the two countries?
P. L. — You have to read Adam Gopnik, author of about 15 books, who was the New Yorker correspondent in Paris from 1995 to 2000. His Paris to the Moon is a real love song to France. A number of American writers came over here in the years 1920-1930, not just because France seemed to them to be the country of the Enlightenment, of Montaigne, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, etc., but also for our art de vivre. Sitting on the terraces of bistrots in Montparnasse for four hours just to chat is not very American. After half an hour they give you the bill and goodbye … If intellectuals such as Henry Miller or Anaïs Nin fed on French culture, the opposite was also true, such as Simone de Beauvoir who in her own words lived through a ‘trans- Atlantic love’ with Nelson Algren, the author of The Man with the Golden Arm, published in French with the title L’Homme au bras d’or and translated by Boris Vian. From 1947 to 1964, she wrote him hundreds of passionate letters. He was one of her main lovers.
P. de M. — We also find love in the way the heart of France beats to the rhythm of American music …
P. L. — All styles, jazz, rock, folk, soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, rap and Afro-American are part of our daily life. It’s the same for the classics, George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein, minimalists such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich or Philip Glass, who had a great success over here … like Maurice Ravel during his triumphant tour of America, or of Maurice Jarre who had a glittering career there as a film-music composer.
In painting too, hearts beat in unison. I shall not go over the Impressionist period and the history of Montparnasse or modern art events. It is enough, in this respect, to cite the magnificent Claude Monet-Joan Mitchell exhibition at the Fondation Vuitton. It is, as you know, a posthumous dialogue between a master who disappeared in 1926 and an American who was to become famous from the 1950s from the New York school – Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, etc. – and whose work at the beginning was inspired by Monet and also by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse and Kandinsky.
P. de M. — There is not just literature, music and art. There is also cinema that you experienced from the inside …
P. L. — In fact, I directed seven films with, for master and mentor, Jean-Pierre Melville, himself intensely influenced by American cinema. He was capable of reciting the names of 63 directors from 1930 to 1960 who had inspired him. Starting with this infusion, he built up his own portfolio. He became Melville, with his own vision as an artist and his genius, to the point that when his films were shown in cinematheques and universities, the Americans considered him a master, which explains his influence on the generation of Michael Manns and Quentin Tarantinos. And this went further still, to Hong Kong and China.
In this virtuous circle which is that of reciprocal exchange within an art form, we should not forget the Nouvelle Vague. When this unfurled with Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, they brought a breath of fresh air and American filmmakers were all the more interested since, in Les cahiers du cinéma, these young directors had previously been essayists. Godard, Truffaut and the others had started by writing. They got involved in film creation because they considered that it was the supreme art and also because one day Rossellini had told them: ‘if you want to get girls, make films!’ And they did. It was quite obviously a different time. Words like those are no longer allowed.
They were fascinated by American directors in whom they saw real auteurs whereas those concerned considered themselves simple craftsmen making thrillers, dramas or comedies. And it was French intellectuals who taught them that their status was quite different: suddenly, the Robert Aldriches, Howard Hawks, John Fords or Hitchcocks took on the status of auteurs, which helped them in their creation. In parallel with this revolution in mentalities, the Nouvelle Vague films exported to the United States did not really have a commercial success but were to exercise an influence on the generation of Scorsese, Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola or Arthur Penn. The screenplay of Bonnie and Clyde of Arthur Penn, for example, was offered to Truffaut. It is fascinating to see just how much everything goes round. It’s a sort of circle, or ronde, to borrow the title of Max Ophüls’ masterpiece.
P. de M. — Would you say that this circle still exists?
P. L. — Given that the current American output is for a large part concentrated on the Marvel Universe, those blockbusters on the edges of magic destined for children that last two hours and which, in my view, are of very little interest, the French influence there is not as strong. The Godards, Chabrols, Malles and others are all dead, but we have some young film-makers who are very talented, in particular Cédric Jimenez, the director of BAC Nord and Novembre to whom I wrote to tell him: ‘You are an American movie-maker.’ A new generation is arriving, fed on our national culture, but also with a taste for storytelling, construction, casting and the light typical of the Americans. Jean-Pierre Melville noted that there was an American blue light that we did not know how to make. He looked into the question and succeeded in re-creating it. It was a laboratory issue: French developing baths did not have the same texture or the same ingredients as American baths. Today, in digital times, all that is globalised, obviously.
Everything is interconnected and, if Hollywood was one of the great universities of world cinema, we, the French, still play a certain role with our Cannes Festival and with a great fellow, Thierry Frémaux, who is doing remarkable work at the head of the Institut Lumière in Lyon. Despite the arrival of streaming and the series that constantly worry film distributors and cinema owners, we have the luck to have a very active cinematographic pool with about 100 feature films at least made every year. We also have the best pool of cinemas in Europe. For the Americans, importing their work into France is important. Today, we no longer even translate the film titles …
P. de M. — Is that not a form of cultural imperialism?
P. L. — The term, which is a political one, is a bit strong. I would say rather that it is the result of an acute sense of commerce, marketing, advertising and the imposition of themes, personalities and stars. We are up against huge machines, like Warner, Fox, Paramount and so on. We don’t have here the equivalent of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts; and that, despite some very good actors that the Americans come over for: Marion Cotillard, Jean Dujardin, Gérard Depardieu, Vincent Cassel, Omar Sy, Roschdy Zem, Eva Green, Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, Reda Kate or Jean Reno … What is marvellous is the interpenetration. The cinema, music, plastic arts and literature are human activities that overcome and cross all frontiers. You will tell me that in politics and business the Americans never leave themselves out and that it is ‘America First’, as we saw recently with the crisis over the submarines sold to Australia. Without doubt, this is the ransom we have to pay when you are just a postage stamp on the world map up against a continent. As always in love stories, there are comings and goings, breakups and reconciliations. In their time, Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin had the courage to oppose with the greatest clarity the war in Iraq wanted by George W. Bush and then relations normalised. As usual …
P. de M. — So we have a common destiny?
P. L. — Obviously we do. We must not forget that America is the only big Western country with which France has never known conflict. Besides that, twice in one century, America came to fight at our side, firstly against German imperialism, then to save us from the Nazi nightmare.
Such solidarity plainly forges a real unity of destiny. And then we share the same values, particularly our identical passion for democracy – a form of government that Churchill was right to say was the worst … with the exception of all the others.