Steve Dempsey

FEW COUNTRIES HAVE as sure a sense of themselves as France. 

The French have spent much of the past thousand years maintaining the proposition that France is not merely a country, but a grand idea that must be protected.

The Académie Française was established in the 17th century to standardise and protect the French language. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted with the revolution.

In 1905, they established a complete separation of church and state in public life. Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command, developed an independent nuclear deterrent and spent much of his presidency ensuring that France could never be mistaken for an American subsidiary with good cheese.

So it’s not surprising that in this time of dramatic cultural upheaval, where AI threatens creativity and global platforms dwarf national cultural outlets, France has decided to take a stand to protect itself and maybe, just maybe, save global culture.

The occasion for this stand was the Lumière Summit, which took place in Saint-Paul-de-Vence earlier this week. President Emmanuel Macron and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung announced that their countries would put €1 billion over five years into a partnership supporting film, television and other screen industries.

Macron described the objective in terms that would make a Silicon Valley venture capitalist choke on his Soylent: “cultural sovereignty”.

The event culminated in the signing of the Lumière Declaration, which outlined 15 core principles. Overall, it stated that, “Moving images are a common good: a vehicle for emotion, memory and knowledge, for individual emancipation and collective transformation, for shared culture… The future of our industries will be defined by the works we choose to create and support.”

The declaration also cast shade on the attention economy by stating, “We refuse to reduce images to the attention they capture.” 

Clooney magic dust

But the event wasn’t all lofty declarations. Around 200 senior executives from film, television and gaming, policymakers, cultural leaders and creatives from across the globe were on hand at the one-day event. And they weren’t just there to be lectured at: there was a bit of a bear hug too.

Discussions were focused on global co-production funding and enhanced financial incentives like film production tax rebates. George Clooney showed up. Netflix co-chief executive officer Ted Sarandos even received France’s Legion of Honour, its highest civil award. 

France has convened a meeting like this before.

In 1926, it held the International Film Congress in Paris, which assembled industry leaders of the day to address challenges such as Hollywood’s dominance in Europe.

France also introduced the exception culturelle in the 1990s. This was a policy concept that formed part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations that treated cultural goods and services differently from standard commercial products.

French television services still have to reserve at least 60% of film broadcasts for European works and 40% for works using the French language. France has even made Netflix and other streaming services contribute to the system that finances French production. The result? A robust, globally competitive domestic creative sector and the prevention of the total dominance of American commercial media.

A lesson for us?

This time around it’s the power of technology, not media, that the French are protecting themselves from. The power of platforms – particularly YouTube – came up at the Lumière Summit, as did everyone’s favourite bugbear: Artificial Intelligence.

“We would be making a tremendous mistake if this technology became a tool that replaces, or claims to replace, creators,” Macron said. Lee said that artificial intelligence should be developed in “a more responsible and human-centred way”.

So is this just protectionism with Gallic flair, or is there anything Ireland could learn from the French approach? 

After all, we too have a vibrant film sector, which could be easily undermined by strategic changes in direction from tech companies or capital allocators abroad. And we are entering an era in which the marginal cost of producing media is approaching zero.

Cinema, articles, songs, advertisements and images can now be generated by machines in quantities no human industry could match.

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France is arguing that culture is not just another commodity to be optimised. A film that’s made with emotion and craft is not equivalent with the AI video slop. A song is not merely three minutes of audio capable of keeping somebody engaged until the next ad. Culture carries language, memory, values and identity.

This is the thrust of the Lumière Declaration, which calls creative works a source of emotion, memory and knowledge and insists that human creation remain at the centre of the industry.

But what does this actually mean in a small market like ours where we have close ties with big tech companies? Lots, it turns out. 

We could enhance existing film, television, animation, VFX and games tax incentives. Productions that develop Irish talent or intellectual property could receive additional support.

We could establish an Irish Creative Technology and IP Fund to provide early-stage funding for games, animation, virtual production, immersive media, VFX, AI creative tools and other businesses combining technology and culture.

We could create stronger links between industry and Irish third-level education, enhancing indigenous commercial research around the creative technology sector. You could spitball a near endless list of policy interventions. 

But maybe the greatest possible response would be to copy the French attitude.

We don’t have the same scale economically, but we pack a cultural punch. Aside from tax rebates, the creation of novel skills and copyright protections, we should be sure enough in ourselves to value our creative culture, and protect the economic conditions required to produce it.

The French have a word for the scale on which they like to imagine themselves: grandeur. Typically, we don’t think of ourselves in those terms, but maybe it’s time we did.