La Maison de la radio

Office of Radio France

Everyone knows that radio is transcendent and that of the other electronic media television and movies aren’t even a close second. And one of the great radio institutions of all time is Radio France. Nicolas Philibert’s La Maison de la radio, currently playing at Film Forum, is an inside look at what goes on inside the auspicious circular structure (designed by  the architect Henri Bernard) where Radio France--roughly the counterpart of our NPR and England’s BBC--is produced. The documentary wisely employs Fred Wiseman’s documentary style which to say that it lets the institution speak for itself. There are no voice overs or commentary to cloud the terrain since the movie is a walking voice over in which the charm of French language and syntax is a key part of the script. “Quand meme,” “ecoute,” “ca me rappelle quelqu’un,” “d’accord,” "ca ne vous derange pas” are just a few of the common Frenchisms that are the lingua franca of the broadcasts. When you see them used in the context of the programming they’re virtually untranslatable since they're like breathing. There are all kinds of eccentricities that make French Radio so French. In the movie an interview subject is a storm chaser by avocation. He earns his money as a doctor but won’t reveal his specialty due to the narrowness of the field. Pierre Bastien, a composer who makes mechanized instruments, performs one of his pieces while another studio features a room filled with xylophones and in yet another a hand held mallet hitting a chime marks the time on a quiz show. A sardonic woman editor wants to know if the fourth body found in the Deule was discovered in bits and pieces or as a whole. Another Radio France executive teaches an announcer how to read his script while the director of a play is trying to show one of her actors how to speak French with an American accent. Umberto Eco makes an appearance, along with a motorcycle team who follow the Tour de France. There is only one thing missing and that’s “le mystere.” Seeing La Maison de la radio is a little like going to the Fitzergerald Theater in Saint Paul to watch Garrison Keillor perform. The images and the poetry of radio come from the imaginative space it provides. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Radio France where "le mot juste" is treated with almost the same care that the French give to their cuisine. In this regard, the director's behind the scenes look can be a little like Toto pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. 

On Ugliness

Keith Miller deals with the notion that beauty is in the eyes, and not below the waist, in his TLS essay, “Beholders’s Eyes” (TLS, 3/12/11). Miller offers a vignette at the end of the essay that, as one might think, concerns a subject near and dear to the heart of every aesthetician from Plato onward: nudity. “Some sharp-eyed editor at the Sun had noticed that the inception of that newspaper’s Page Three feature, a smiling young girl photographed naked from the waist up, with a breezy potted biography (‘Kate from Kent, 21, likes hot-air ballooning’) attached, coincided roughly with the publication of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer,” writes Miller. Greer was subsequently asked to put in her two cents, and Miller summarizes her response thusly: “she (Greer) seemed to be saying…that these pictures were not unwholesome, because while they were effective at generating cheerfulness, they were not capable of generating desire.” While “Greer’s ‘handyman’ was quoted in support of the thesis, Kant [mentioned earlier in Miller’s essay] was not.” Would that the Sun were the sole problem confronting contemporary aestheticians as they grapple with what beauty is! Miller rues the fact that “beauty and desire are being sundered in ways that no western aesthetician could have predicted” by a culture where children “learn about the opposite sex from hard-core pornography.” Earlier in his essay, Miller offers up a brief survey of beauty, from the disinterested notion that “beauty should somehow be its own reward” to “the functionalist or utilitarian view, which holds that beauty has something to do with fitness for purpose” (argued by Robert Morris) to the idea of “perverse beauty...celebrated by, among others, Baudelaire in the nineteenth century and Bataille in the twentieth.” Though Umberto’s Eco’s latest volume, History of Beauty, was a subject of the essay, Miller points to his previous book, On Ugliness, as being more to the point in discussing the concept of beauty proposed by Baudelaire, and one “which has the field at the moment.” Elaborating on this line of thinking, Miller goes on to say,  “It’s ugliness that fascinates us and does all the deep symbolic work (sin, death, desire) in Western culture.”