Jacques Villeglé was a French mixed-media artist best known for his work in décollage, the process of tearing (lacerating) posters from city walls revealing other posters underneath, thus arriving at new compositions.
His work Ach Alma Manetro (1949) is in the Centre Pompidou.
Catherine Spaak was a French actress and singer, known for her work in Italian sex comedies such as The Libertine (1968).
Thierry Mugler was a French fashion designer known for his avant-garde, architectural, hyperfeminine and theatrical approach to haute couture.
My personal connection to Mugler is me seeing his photos (or was it one photo?) taken at the Tafraout site with the rocks painted by Jean Vérame. This was at the Animism exhibion at the MuKHA in 2010.
That photo can be seen in Thierry Mugler, Photographer (1988) by Thierry Mugler.
Christian Boltanski was a French artist working in sculpture, photography, painting, and filmmaking, known for such works as Personnes (2010).
François Leterrier was a French film director and actor. He entered the film industry when he was cast in Robert Bresson’s film A Man Escaped (1956).
Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977) features a reggae-inspired soundtrack by Serge Gainsbourg.
His sketch film Slices of Life (1985) is a bit silly but features the prescient and good-hearted “Paris sera toujours Paris” which is an illustration of the Great Replacement theory.
Edmond Kiraz was a French-Armenian cartoonist and illustrator.
He is best known for his Parisiennes, his post-war Parisian wafer-thin model girls which first appeared in print in 1966.
Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher known for his reflections on technology.
Outside the field of philosophy, he is of interest for his delightful retelling of the Epimetheus creation myth from Protagoras told in the film The Ister (2004).
The transcript of that story (above):
‘One day Zeus said to Prometheus, “the time has come for you, for us gods, to bring into the day the non-immortals.” The non-immortals being animals and men. Prometheus, who is put in charge of this task, has a twin brother named Epimetheus. Epimetheus resembles Prometheus; he is his double. But in fact Epimetheus is his brother’s opposite. Epimetheus is the god of the fault of forgetting. Prometheus is a figure of knowledge, of absolute mastery, total memory. Prometheus forgets nothing, Epimetheus forgets everything. Epimetheus says to his brother: “Zeus has given you this task – I want to do it! Me me me! I’ll take care of it.” Epimetheus is a rather simple-minded brother, and Prometheus is fond of him. He dares not refuse and says, “OK, you take care of it.” So Epimetheus distributes the qualities. He will give the gazelle its speed, for example. […] He distributes the qualities in equilibrium. Epimetheus’ distribution of the qualities describes the ecological balance of nature. […] Now, as Epimetheus is distributing the qualities, he suddenly notices something… […] “There are no qualities left! I forgot to save a quality for man!” […] “I still have to bring mankind, mortals, into the day.” […] but there are no qualities left to give him a form. So Prometheus goes to the workshop of the god Hephaestus, to steal fire. Fire, which is obviously the symbol of technics, but which is also the symbol of the power of god. Zeus.’–Bernard Stiegler retelling the creation myth of Protagoras in The Ister (2004)
And in France, Jean-Loup Dabadie died.
Dabadie wrote the lyrics to the song “But Now I know” (1973), which was released as “Maintenant je sais” (1974) in French.
Pierre Guyotat was a French writer. He is one of the last writers in the history of Western literature to have his book banned. The book was Eden, Eden, Eden and is a actually an enumeration of obscenities and atrocities in the tradition of Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785, 1904).
The backdrop is the Algerian war, which was not really an Algerian war but a French war. Or at least a French-Algerian war. Pierre Guyotat fought in that war as a teenager and was arrested on charges of inciting to desert and put in a hole in the ground for three months.
Today, it is exactly four years ago that Charlie Hebdo was massacred.
My father, who died in 2000, used to bring copies of Hara-Kiri home when I was a boy.
Charlie Hebdo was the new incarnation of Hara-Kiri, after it had been permanently banned by the French government.
I recently looked at ALL covers of Hara-Kiri, which you can find here.
The funniest cover is perhaps Hara-kiri n°162 (March 1975) which depicts a frontal view of male genitals wearing a shirt along with the following accompanying text:
“Chômeurs ! c’est pas avec cette tête la que vous trouverez du boulot rasez-vous !”
English:”Unemployed! You won’t find a job with your face looking like this. Shave yourselves!”
I am, you might say, an unabashed fan of Charlie Hebdo. I am also a fan of the right to offend and insult, especially of fictional beings.
The words of Marquis de Sade from “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” are particularly apt here:
“I should like there to be perfect freedom to deride them all [all religions]; I should like men, gathered in no matter what temple to invoke the eternal who wears their image, to be seen as so many comics in a theater, at whose antics everyone may go to laugh.”
For those of you who think that Charlie Hebdo was obsessed with Islam. You are mistaken. It is simply not true and it has been proven.
Art critic Yve-Alain Bois in “Taken Liberties: Yve-Alain Bois on Charlie Hebdo”[1] has stated:
“A statistical analysis of Charlie Hebdo‘s content over the past ten years, particularly that of its front page, was published in Le Monde on February 25. It reveals not only that the publication was actually less obsessed with religion than is generally supposed, with only 7 percent of its front pages devoted to the subject, but also that the topic of Islam makes up less than a fifth of even these covers. When Charlie attacks religion–its contributors are particularly exercised by fundamentalism (of all stripes) and the hypocrisy of the clergy–Catholicism is most often the butt of its satire.”
So only seven percent is devoted to religion, and of that seven percent, only twenty percent to Islam. Which makes for 100*.07*.2 equals 1.4 percent. Yve-Alain Bois bases himself on research by Jean-François Mignot and Céline Goffette titled “Non, ‘Charlie Hebdo’ n’est pas obsédé par l’islam” [“No, ‘Charlie Hebdo’ is not obsessed with Islam”], published in Le Monde, February 24, 2015.
As we go forward, I’m rather pessimistic about freedom of speech , especially with regards to the global growth of religion. The question E. Kaufmann asks in 2010, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? is extremely relevant today.