Via Mad Musings Of Me, here’s an interesting article from The Times (subscription may be required for some) discussing on the differing ratings films get across Europe and how what can be seen as controversial in one country can be completely ignored just over the border.

The report stems from Robin Duval, the outgoing director of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), dismissing proposals for European-wide film classification. The article points out several examples of where standards differ:

Britons take a stronger stance than most countries against sex, violence, swearing and drug use. Use of Anglo-Saxon oaths is especially frowned on in Englishspeaking countries, causing anomalies with films such as Billy Elliot, which contained no sex, drugs or violence but an estimated 50 swearwords.

In Britain it was rated 15, but in France and Spain it received the equivalent of a universal certificate. America demanded cuts to allow it to be rated PG-13, in which parents are cautioned not to let younger children watch. Germany and Sweden allowed children of seven into screenings.

France has the most relaxed attitude to film censorship, especially over sex. The most extreme example is American Beauty, rated 18 in Britain but given a universal certificate in France. The Exorcist, Gangs of New York, Hannibal, Pulp Fiction and Secretary were all given an 18 certificate in Britain but a 12 in France.

Of course, there are some stereotypes that no journalist can resist:

Scandinavian countries are very liberal on sex and drug use, but take a hard line on violence. The first The Lord of the Rings film, which was passed at PG in Britain because violence was inflicted on fantasy beasts rather than human beings, was restricted to 11 and over in Sweden and Norway. Despite Britain?s relatively high tolerance for violence, it can occasionally be outstripped by Italy. The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson?s film in which James Caviezel is whipped for 25 minutes, was rated 18 in Britain but awarded a universal certificate in Italy.

I’d have to agree with Duval that European-wide classification isn’t going to possible in most cases, but it’s interesting to note that in Britain, while the BBFC has the general power to classify films, local authorities also have powers in this area. Michael Brooke has discussed this issue in the past.

As a final point, I’ve noticed that DVDs released onto the British market are often now (presumably to save costs) labelled with the Irish certification as well as the British (interestingly, Ireland still has a Film Censor’s office, whereas Britain’s, of course, is just a classifier – no censorship here folks, oh no) – in most cases they’re the same rating, though I have noticed a couple of DVDs (the names escape me now) where they have a lower certificate in Ireland than in Britain.

I just mentioned Living With Caucasians in the post on Adjara in the sidebar, but I thought this quote was of wider relevance and worth quoting in full here:

Here?s the thing: this country is small. Tiny, even. Russia?s military involvement in Adjara is no joke, and the money that comes through the Adjaran port and the border with Turkey isn?t either. When the bridges get blown up, they?re blown up a few hours? drive away, and the economy of all of Georgia is affected, as are your tax dollars, particularly if you?re American, as are your gas and oil supply, as are the people I hang out with every day. These are real people, and a lot of them are better read than you. Nobody here needs a teacher to tell them how to write, read, do journalism, paint, run a revolution. They need an open interchange of dialogue about all of those issues, but not a deus ex machina.

This is why I think deriding everything that goes on in post-Soviet space as “absurd” ? including the whole cult of thinking the Turkmenbashi is funny, so don?t even go there ? is a colossal mistake. Those are real refugees starting to come over the border from your banal “tinpot dictator” joke. This coldness and ability to distance from what?s going on is one of the reasons US visitors quickly lose sympathy and friendship here, and I?d bet a lot of other places as well, and it’s one of the things in my own relationships here that I people anticipate from me as a westerner, and which I constantly struggle to counteract. It?s not really all that funny; it?s a goddamn dictatorship, under which people struggle pretty damn hard to do whatever they can – even if, yes, it means that it’s ten lari to cross a river on a pony.

And another thing: history shows that people sometimes choose dictators because dictators work in concrete, viable, short-term goals: win the war, get the gas on, let us live our lives and hold our heads up. I think our responsibility is to make democracy a viable, justifiable, immediate alternative that fulfils or at least explains all those things, something I don?t see happening with any sort of clarity in places emerging into contact with the United States. Irony is not a useful weapon of international change.

In my post celebrating the EU’s enlargement I reminded that the road ahead is going to be bumpy. Well, the rough ride starts today. On Tuesday morning, the European Parliament will have to vote again on the issue of whether to endorse or reject an agreement between the EU and the US on the controversial transfer of Airline passenger name records (PNR) (.pdf). The EP has already voted twice on this issue and as opposed to the Council and the Commission ? which has negotiated the agreement with the US – insisted on a Court of Justice verdict establishing the agreement?s compliance with EU data protection regulations or rejecting it. According to Statewatch and EUpolitix.com, the Council of Ministers ? fearing an ECJ ruling against the agreement – has now invoked an ?urgency procedure? to hold a third vote on the issue, hoping to overturn the slim majority of 16 votes with the help of the new – inexperienced and unelected, government dependent – MEPs from the new member states.

Freedom, these days, is not what it used to be. There was a time when most people were afraid of governments? efforts to collect data about them. For a long time, there was a general uneasiness with respect to the privacy related consequences of data processing technologies. But terrorist attacks, and the success of the technology I am using to publish this article have, over the last decade, slowly eroded most people?s resistance. A frog being boiled slowly will not jump out of the kettle. And now, secretly and diligently prepared, the widespread introduction of biometric data in identification documents and passports, as well as the creation of centralised databases to store them along with as much of electronic communication traces as possible ? as Maria Farrell reported last week – has almost become politically inevitable.

Caricature by Sebastian Linke

Continue reading →

Via Desbladet and Libé, I see that the PUF will be releasing, for the first time, a Que sais-je? in English.

The Que sais-je? series is an essential reference title, something missing in the English language market. French reference books on the whole are better than English ones, and there are a number of gaps in the anglophone reference publishing business. But anglo firms have been catching up in recent years, particularly British publishers motivated largely by an enormous demand from English-second language users. In my particular field – lexicography – the British Collins Cobuild dictionary and its copycats at other British firms are well ahead of their French equivalents.

Still, French publishers have two big products with no adequate equivalents in the English-speaking world: the encyclopedic dictionary and the Que sais-je? Although this new English Que sais-je? is written for a francophone market, I do wonder if this doesn’t augur a change in reference publishing. Will French firms now start moving into English reference book publishing? Will Que sais-je? become as indispensable in English as it is in French?

The story needed some time to cross the Channel, but on Saturday, International and German newspapers (taz) will grant Richard Desmond, owner of the publishing group Northern & Shell, whose papers include the Daily Express, the attention he already received in the British media. Shortly after announcing that his papers’ political allegiance would from now on be with the Tory party instead of Labour, on Thursday Mr Desmond managed to turn a regular meeting between executives of his papers and the Daily Telegraph at a jointly owned printing plant into a comedy show by apparently greeting people with a fake German accent, imitating Hitler, and finally ordering his senior management to intonate “Deutschland ?ber alles”.

Continue reading →

This morning’s Independent had a map of the EU on its cover this morning (concerning which states may hold a referendum on the constitution), but looking at it, another thought struck me. When the ten new member states join the EU next month, for the first time in its history republics will heavily outnumber monarchies within the EU. Of course, all monarchies within the EU are constitutional and limited monarchies, but the two forms have always been in close balance throughout the EU’s history.

The original six members who signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 were balanced: Three republics (France, Germany, Italy), two kingdoms (Belgium and the Netherlands) and one Grand Duchy (Luxembourg), giving a 3-3 split. The first enlargement in 1973 placed the monarchies in the lead for the first and only time with the UK and Denmark making them five-strong to only 4 republics (now including Ireland). Balance was restored with the accession of Greece eight years later and maintained with the addition of Spain and Portugal in 1986.

The republics took the lead for the first time in 1995, adding Finland and Austria to their ranks, with only Sweden joining the monarchies. Exact balance, of course, is impossible with an odd number of members, yet had Norway decided to join then, balance would have been maintained.

However, that balance will be lost, probably forever with the next ten members, all of whom are republics, none of whom seem to be likely to be restoring or introducing a monarchy in the near future. The closest any of the new members come to a monarchy are Malta and Cyprus, both members of the Commonwealth which has the UK’s Queen Elizabeth at its head. Indeed, balance seems likely to never be restored with Norway and Liechtenstein (and perhaps Morocco in the long term) the only monarchies left to not be members.

Of course, this has very little effect on the politics and operation of the EU, but I thought it was a interesting point of trivia worth noting.

Ok, get ready, this is going to be an extremely weird, not to say ‘whacky’, post (well, what else would you expect from the so-called president of the association of ‘whacky economists’: at least nothing dismal I hope).

The idea started to form in my mind as I was writing a mail earlier this morning to a fellow blogger. As the ‘correspondent’ (this term is, please note, also used to describe one of the parties in adultery-based divorce proceedings ) was young and female I felt the unusual need to hedge what I was saying with all kinds of qualifiers to avoid the wrong kind of interpretation. Since the ‘undressing’ thing is a metaphor which I would like to continue to use I thought it might be better to come out of the closet now and declare my secret ‘peeping tom like’ proclivity for this bizarre practice.

Full disclosure: I enjoy watching other people ‘undress their brains’, I have even what may be described as an ‘un-natural’ interest in the topic.

Now if you are over 18, and willing to risk your luck, please press continue reading.
Continue reading →

Quand Jimmy dit what’d I say?

I love you baby!

C’est comme qui dirait

Toute la province qui chante en anglais

Brussels’ newspaper of record, the centre-right Le Soir, is running a series of articles in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of rock. Among other things, they’ve published lists of their choices for the best rock albums ever, divided into two time periods: 1954-1979 and 1980-2004.

I have a lot of sympathy for those music critics inclined to think that rock died with the break-up of the Beatles and it would be better if we forgot about the “Rock revivial” of the 80s and called the rest of the stuff labelled as “rock” something else. But, that doesn’t seem to be the common usage. Rock seems to mean pop music that isn’t folk, isn’t country, isn’t rap or hip-hop, and isn’t disco, dance, techno or electronica. It seems to include punk and grunge according to Le Soir.

Okay, it’s fuzzy definition. I can live with that. But what struck me is that on the entire list – over 150 albums – all of three are not in English: Serge Gainsbourg’s L’histoire de Melody Nelson, Noir Désir’s Tostaky and The Buena Vista Social Club. The last one I wouldn’t even have thought was rock.

Good ol’fashioned Rock’n'Roll was very much an Anglo phenomenon, but if they’re going to include some of the stuff on that list as rock then we’re not really talking about classic rock, we’re talking about a broad swath of pop. And, if that is the case, there ought to be some more music from outside of Anglo-American pop. I mean really – Noir Désir’s worst album is still better than Terence Trent D’Arby, who still makes the list.

Since we’re something of a Euroblog here, I think we ought to try to promote European culture. So, I’m putting out a call to our readers: We at AFOE are looking for the best in post-war non-Anglo music. Go look at the lists at Le Soir name a few albums that at least are primarily in a European language other than English that were reasonably popular and well known at least in one country in Europe and deserve to be on a best albums list.

Since rock is so hard to define, I’m willing to loosen the criteria to anything that is genuinely well known. Readers should be able to come here and make a shopping list if they want exposure to the best outside of “international” anglo pop.

Let me start with some nominations off the top of my head:

L’Autre and Ainsi soit je.. – Mylène Farmer
The No Comprendo – Les Rita Mitsouko
Mademoiselle Chante… and Scène de Vie – Patricia Kaas

I mostly know French music from my distant and misspent youth and don’t actualy have very much of it. What I want to see is a list of the very best albums that you’ll have a hell of a time getting at a record store outside of continental Europe, so that I and any other interested readers out there, can buy them if they’re interested. Think of it as the opposite of the Eurosong contest – a search for Euro-non-schlock.
 

I have not had a lot of blogging time lately, as a check of the archives will reveal. Since taking the King’s coin to do translation research, I’ve been waist-deep in the ugly, practical, code-in-the-compiler end of algorithmic information theory. What I had taken to be a very clean and simple application of a very elementary mathematical proposition, on which I hung some bells and whistles to make it look impressive, has some actual programming consequences which are quite challenging.

It’ll all work. My math is sound and my preliminary returns are excellent. This is, after all, a reseach project. Doing this is how we find out what we didn’t think of when we started.

But, in conjunction with my class load, this means I have not been able to blog much, or even follow the news closely. I apologise for this to all my comrades in blogging here at AFOE. However, my long commute has given me a good deal of time to read. I am currently reading a fascinating but long out of print book which I have tried for quite a long time to find and recently acquired through Ebay: The New Class by Milovan Djilas.
Continue reading →