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Chapter 7 | Claude Martin (continued) After the Second World War, this development accelerated. In 1952, radio was succeeded by television. Information programs and radio soaps put on new clothes. The Famille Plouffe showed the changing society. With Point de mire, René Lévesque opened windows on the world, which was also changing. The famous strike of the Radio-Canada television producers revealed the abyss between Montréal and Ottawa. Popular book publishing placed on the market new economic approaches and Les insolences du frère Untel (Desbiens, 1961) is a landmark of that time. One can also find outstanding developments in the worlds of recording and cinema. On private television, Jeunesse d’aujourd’hui became the crucible for a series of new stars of popular songs. By the end of the sixties, Québec society was the beneficiary of a whole set of cultural industries... and social and political questions to deal with. Those same industries, at the same time, began supplying us with a plethora of imported productions. Westerns and detective stories filled the screens of our television sets. The radio station CJMS dismissed La bonne chanson in favour of a hit parade of new popular music. The yo-yo and rock’n’roll music asserted themselves. The French book publisher Robert Laffont sold American best sellers here, books that were first translated for distribution in France. But all this was not totally new. Between the two Wars, some people were scandalized by the depravity of American feature films. But, mostly, there were counterreactions to that. The Roman Catholic Church, at that time, tried to produce a national cinema, but its rural orientation resulted in limited success. During the same period, the creation of France Film is a more interesting example. This firm succeeded in importing several feature films from France. Several years later, it provided the financial basis for the first private French speaking television station: Télé-Métropole. This example is a good way of introducing another aspect of that second industrial revolution. In the transformation from France Film to Télé-Métropole, there is a major change in orientation. The market sets up its own rules for choosing and valorizing work. The dialectic of distinction is replaced by the one of distribution. The judgements of academics are succeeded by those, more democratic, of the public, who vote by choosing how to spend their leisure time. There is no question here of being naïve and adopting the slogan that pretends that the consumer is right. The public makes choices from among the supply offered by organizations that mostly seek profit. But these organizations have no interest in deceiving their public. As for authors, they produce works spurred by themes found in their society. However, we face other dialectics, those of the cultural industries and their publics, and of authors and their publics. But, as suggested by the title of this colloquium, Québec is a small society. This is a huge handicap in the field of cultural industries. Cultural productions, generally speaking, are characterized by production requirements that have high fixed costs, and variable costs which, depending on the size of the public, are rather low. A small society finds it difficult to make this domain profitable. A large society can do it more easily and can sell its productions abroad, without having to take into consideration production costs, which constitutes unfair competition with enterprises in smaller societies. Given that, one would think that smaller societies would be caught in a situation whereby they import almost all their cultural productions, notwithstanding language barriers. But this is far from the case in Québec. Except, notably, for cinema, Québec productions capture an enviable part of the cultural market. Its television is a case frequently discussed in academic circles. People wonder how such a small society, living in the shadow of the United States, has succeeded in supplying the essentials of a television menu, from information to drama, the latter being the flagship of Québec’s cultural industries, as my colleague Roger de la Garde put it (1992). How to explain this phenomenon? A number of conditions made this possible. The first was a collective will to assert Québec’s identity. This showed up first in periodicals and books, but moved rapidly to the mass media. It often dealt with the theme of survival. It also favoured the emergence of the social movement which addressed the political sovereignty of Québec. The second condition is based on the overall economic development of Québec and on the springing up of a class of Francophone entrepreneurs, who like others elsewhere sought to accumulate capital in the media. Economic development gave people a level of disposable income sufficient to buy cultural goods and services, to be consumed during leisure time. An average Québec family spends about $1,000 a year for cultural goods and services, in the first place to acquire television sets and cable, but also for reading material, records and evenings outside the home. This is a good starting point. This relative level of wealth opens the door to consumer goods. Out of this, advertising has been developed, as a means of mass communication for massaging mass consumption, but also as an essential support for financing large mass media. |
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