Hundreds evacuated as flash floods hit southern France 

Rescuers backed by helicopters evacuated about 1,600 people, most of them campers, in southern France on Thursday as heavy rain caused flash flooding and transformed rivers and streams into torrents, the interior minister said.

Hardest hit was the Gard region, where 119 children, many of them from Germany, were evacuated from their campsite at Saint-Julien-de-Peyrolas, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said in a statement.

About 750 people in all were evacuated in Gard, mainly from campsites, a top district official, Thierry Dousset, told France’s BFM-TV news channel [. . . ]

Source: Hundreds evacuated as flash floods hit southern France – France 24

A year in Paris is as bad for your health as smoking 183 cigarettes 

A study by the European Transport & Environment association published on Friday confirmed that spending a few days in various popular European capitals is equivalent to smoking between one and four cigarettes.

Spending a long weekend in Paris could be as bad for your health as smoking two cigarettes. But this is at least a lot less polluted than in Prague, where your mini-break could be the equivalent of smoking four cigarettes, or even worse in Beijing, where it could be same as puffing up to 16 cigarettes.

You no longer need to sit next to a dedicated smoker to be a victim of passive smoking. Air pollution is such that you only have to walk around for a few days to breathe the toxic equivalent of several cigarettes. This study obviously has serious implications for tourists, who typically spend their days wandering the streets visiting sites, but it also will cause concern for native cyclists and joggers striving for a healthier lifestyle but instead exposing themselves to toxins.

The Transport & Environment study compared the contamination from fine particles of the ten largest European tourist cities by converting it into the number of cigarettes smoked. The NGO used a method of calculation created by Berkeley Earth, an international climate association [ . . . ]

Continue reading at FRANCE24: A year in Paris is as bad for your health as smoking 183 cigarettes – France 24

Audrey Tautou’s eight best films 

Pas de Merde loved Amelie of course, but The Da Vinci Code was horrible. What do you think of this list?

Audrey Tautou’s stardom is such that she easily crosses the barrier between the francophone and anglophone worlds. Her English-speaking roles – such as “The Da Vinci Code”, are as impactful an [ . . . ]

See full story at VOGUE: Audrey Tautou’s eight best films | Vogue Paris

Worst of heatwave yet to come as France braces for ‘terrible’ Tuesday

France’s heatwave is set to continue, with the hottest weather yet expected on Monday and Tuesday across the country.On Monday, temperatures could soar up to around 40C according to France’s national weather agency Météo France. France’s met office has issued heatwave weather warnings for 67 departments out of 101 in France – a record first reached in June last year – and has warned against storms in the country’s southeast in the afternoon, Le Parisien reported.

“The heatwave continues tomorrow Monday, with very high temperatures which will be difficult to bear. Be careful of storms on the southeast in the afternoon with a risk of hail,” the weather forecaster wrote on Twitter.

On Monday, the hottest parts of France will be in the southwestern regions, with temperatures in some cities reaching 36C in Toulouse and 37C in Bordeaux.

On Tuesday, Paris and the country’s northeast and centre will be the most affected by the heat, with Lyon and Paris sweltering under 36C.

Meteorologist Guillaume Séchet, creator of the site meteo-paris.com, is referring to Tuesday as a “terrible day with 38-39C in Ile-de-France and highs of 40C around Bourges and Auxerre”.

There will be a gradual decline in temperatures in the south-east of France on Tuesday but it will remain very hot.

Fortunately, the mercury is expected to drop considerably by Wednesday and Thursday.

“All of a sudden, we will lose 10C in 24 hours in the North and return to a more normal 23 to 24 C in the second half of the week,” Guillaume Séchet told Le Parisien.

France’s scorching weather is also causing air pollution levels to soar.

On Monday, traffic is being reduced in both Lyon and Paris to cut down on the smog with cars belonging to the most polluting category of vehicles being banned.

Similar measures were taken for three days in Paris in July.

Speed limits have also been lowered throughout the Ile de France region around Paris and in the east of the country.

Like much of Europe, France has been hit by a heatwave over the past week – which is already turning into the third hottest since temperatures have been recorded.

Last week, four nuclear reactors were forced to close in order to avoid raising the temperature of rivers whose water is used to cool reactors and then returned.

On Saturday, the southern town of Béziers in the Hérault department reached 41.3C. It was the hottest day in France since a deadly heatwave in 2003, that killed thousands of elderly people.

Source: Worst of heatwave yet to come as France braces for ‘terrible’ Tuesday – The Local

Behind Jean-Luc Godard’s Shades: Agnès Varda’s Ways Of Seeing

Elsa Court unpicks the cinematic relationship between Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard. With her new film, Faces, Places, in UK cinemas soon, and a retrospective currently on screen at the BFI Southbank, a reassessment of the often marginalised Varda feels more vital than ever

”L’art du cinema consiste à faire faire de jolies choses à de jolies femmes” – the art of cinema consists in having pretty women do pretty things. This quote, from Francois Truffaut, was how I chose to open my lecture – the last of four taught on the directors of the French New Wave at the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University last autumn – on Agnès Varda. I had decided to save Varda for last, and Truffaut’s quote, frequently remembered in the wealth of critical writing on the French New Wave, seemed to me a good entrée en matière to discussing the postfeminist narrative of Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962).

So far into the course, I had approached the movement according to its standard historical – and therefore predominantly male – perspective, placing the films of Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais within their cultural context in postwar France, stressing the way in which the young, anti-orthodox filmmakers simultaneously called for a reassessment of cinema as art and for a relaxing of the rules of filmmaking. By the end of the day, I had yet to discuss the New Wave’s inclusion of women and its representations of gender relations, which jarred with the movement’s professed radical attitudes towards both film and the changing landscape of France’s society and culture. My lecture on Varda deliberately approached her work through the perspective of her uniquely playful, even generous redressing of the codes of female representation within the movement and in French cinema in the broader sense. Continue reading “Behind Jean-Luc Godard’s Shades: Agnès Varda’s Ways Of Seeing” →