France and the Library of Congress Start a Media Project The Jacksons in 1977 on the French show "Numero Un." THE history of French-American relations is a tale of an old alliance that bends with shifting cultural and political winds but never breaks, and whose mutual fascination, shared interests and ideological divides have created a host of competing narratives about how one side views the other. In February the Library of Congress and the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel announced their plan to exchange some 500 hours of digitized film and television footage over the next three years. This swap, between the French archive and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, will focus on how each country portrays the other in TV news, documentaries, travelogues, educational and even home movies dating to the early days of film. The exchange - which was first broached over drinks between Mike Mashon, the curator of the Moving Image Section at the Library of Congress, and Daniel Teruggi, the director of the research and experimentation department at the French institution - is in its infancy, partly because of rights issues. "It makes no sense to say you can't see something because it's rights protected, when everybody can see everything today," Mr. Teruggi said by phone from Paris. But we are the keepers of that content, so we can't just put it online because the legal environment is so rigid. The French archive, financed by the government, holds production rights to its material, making the works less complicated to share, and some of the footage can be seen on its Web site. By contrast the Library of Congress does not hold copyright to the items it is exchanging; researchers seeking copies of restricted American content must secure permission from the rights holder. This means that in addition to digitizing public-domain content to share with the French, Mr. Mashon is alerting copyright owners whose programs are intended for exchange. Though the archivists hope to make as much of the material as possible accessible to the public one day, for the moment the swap is aimed at academics, so that an authorized French studies researcher in the United States would only have to travel to Washington to consult the French archives using a computer in the Library of Congress, and an American studies professor from the Sorbonne could visit a terminal at the Bibliothèque Nationale. But as they work out the details, Mr. Mashon said, he hoped the exchange would shed light on France's wavering status as friend or frenemy of the United States. "I'm approaching this mainly as an archivist who would like to make more international broadcasts available," he said. But I'm also of French descent and have a soft spot in my heart for my French compatriots and colleagues and family that is still in France. Mr. Mashon said that he was intrigued by Americans" paradoxical views of the French: "On the one hand they think of them as folks who surrender in any given war at the drop of a hat. But at the same time they envy them for their culture, their beauty, their wine, for the fact that they eat fatty foods and don't get obese. There's good and bad, and that's what drew me to the project. He said he was especially curious about the state of French-American relations in the aftermath of World War II. "France goes from being popularly portrayed as this besieged country overrun by Nazis: they're our friends and we've got to support them and liberate them," he said. Then at the end of the war a lot of Americans start thinking of them as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. We have a couple of newsreels in the collection from right after World War II, and it's all about rebuilding this strong country that's going to come back stronger than ever: God bless the French. So when did we start becoming more critical of France? Both organizations plan to assemble scholars to help answer those kinds of questions, selecting footage that will interest researchers and result in work that could have a trickle-down effect for the public. "More and more researchers have understood the growing importance of broadcast as a historical, sociological reference," Mr. Teruggi said. A TV image captures how people dress, how they speak, the environment, everyday life in a country and how it changes little by little over time. In the meantime an initial swap in February was a bit of a mishmash and somewhat hard to parse. French pieces included a portrait of New York from 1962; programs on Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller from the 1980s; American-theme episodes of the literary talk show "Apostrophes," with Bernard Pivot as host, that ran from 1975 to 1990; historic documents about American artists in 20th-century Montparnasse; and a documentary about Watergate, among other selections running up to 2003.