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Comment by WhereIsTheTruth | Hacker News Reader

"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement

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Wow that's insane. If China did that same thing today, we would be up in arms.

Up in arms against the French protectionism for their second-largest industry or the American "bribe" to relax it, in order to benefit their own industry and better spread their ideology?

If china opened up their theaters to normal american movies? Right now they only allow heavily censored and de-westernized movies. Things have to be heavily re-edited for the chinese audience, which isn't strictly bad, but the kind of things that get edited out are unfortunate

For China it is not surprising to censor "normal american movies", but it should not be forgotten that even some western countries like UK have heavily censored many "normal american movies" for several decades, before relaxing the censorship rules.

In IMDB, at the "Alternate versions" sections, many cases of censored versions are described, and the British censorship rules were especially ridiculous.

It's not so much "de-westernized" as it is "sanitized for The Party". The details really matter here, because when it comes to censorship it's much less about "East vs West" and more about "The Party" vs "all others".

Censorship is bad wheter is done by "the party" or by "democracies" or by companies.

Insane? Really? There is nothing wrong with defending your language and the artistic industry. They've got also some similar quotas for the song in French on the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law.

Its promoting making bad movies and song though. Let the world compete

Not everyone is so eager to dissolve their national identities and turn their countries into economic platforms for the world to compete on.

> Its promoting making bad movies and song though. Let the world compete

You should see Holywood movies. /s

We would be up in arms because the propaganda would tells us to be up in arms. It's remarkable how our feelings towards each other and to foreign countries are entirely shaped by propaganda.

Anyone here old enough to remember freedom fries?

Spain has quotas for regional languages too, this made Netflix had to produce on those languages.

Governments keep doing this, it's just bad if the one doing it is also the -global- leader of right now...

Random article talking about this https://www.catalannews.com/culture/item/spain-s-netflix-law...

Perhaps the Chinese government funded this very article?

French law defines a whole "media chronology" where a movie can only be shown in theaters the first x months, then it can only be leased for the next x months, then released in disc, etc...

Why is that? I assume that's in a no-later-than sense, with later tiers being added on and not replacing earlier ones.

If not, wouldn't that make second-run films or pulling under-performers from screens earlier illegal?

Oh yeah my bad I explained it poorly.

The next steps doesn't prevent the ones before.

But about under performers, it has an exception for movies that did under a specific amount of entries, for them the timeline is shorter but still there : you can pull it out of theaters the day right after the release, but you'll still need to wait a (shorter) time to release it on disc.

This law made Disney release (at least one) movie only on Disney+ in France, bypassing theaters.

> "* signed May 28, 1946, by the Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and representatives of the French government Léon Blum and, especially, Jean Monnet*"

I am not surprised. Jean Monnet worked as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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