La vache qui rit
La vache qui rit (French: "The cow that laughs") is the brand name of a French processed cheese made by Fromageries Bel . The cheese, which has been produced since 1921, is best known for its round packaging, which depicts a laughing cow wearing earrings that look like the same round packaging.
history
The motif goes back to the French illustrator Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939) who decorated military trucks with a picture of a laughing cow during World War I. This picture was called Wachkyrie , an allusion to the German Valkyrie . Rabier met the cheese factory owner Léon Bel, with whom he teamed up.
La vache qui rit was an industrial product at a time when agricultural products were still mainly manufactured and sold by hand. The concept, packaging and marketing were uncharted territory in some respects. The cheese was primarily intended for children who should be specially addressed.
The image is a mise en abyme , a recurring image of the image in the image. This should go back to a suggestion by Ms. Léon Bels. The laughing cow wears earrings, which in turn show a cheese box with a laughing cow, who wears earrings which in turn show a cheese box with a laughing cow. This has contributed to the long-term awareness of the figurative mark .
In other countries, the cheese is also sold with the translated name or subtitles in the respective national language, such as The Laughing Cow (Great Britain and USA) or The Laughing Cow (Germany). On the processed cheese cubes Cheese & Fun, PartyCubes, Belcube, Apéricube “The laughing cow” is depicted. Other Bel brands are Babybel , Leerdammer , Bonbel and Kiri .
La vache qui rit is one of the most famous brands in France today ; almost 95 percent of the French know them.
Effect on art and culture
A parody called La vache sérieuse ( The Serious Cow ) was published as early as 1925, but had to be discontinued in 1956 after the Bel company complained about plagiarism .
The name of the cheese has also found its way into art: for example, it appears in Wim Wenders ' film Paris, Texas from 1984. Hunter, who grew up with Anne of French descent, teaches his father Travis, who has resurfaced for a long time, the word. In this film, the mise en abyme also plays a role in other places, to that extent La vache qui rit is part of a larger reference context there.
In his first editions of the Spirou and Fantasio series, the Belgian comic artist Franquin used the laughing cow as a recurring street motif, for example on billboards or truck tarpaulins.
The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers used the packaging for one of his editions for his gallery Wide White Space in Antwerp in 1968 . "La Vache qui rit" consists of eight boxes in which Broodthaers put the text "Je vous aime", "un peu", "beaucoup", "passionémant", "à la folie", "pas de tout" and his signature " MB 68 “distributed. He also added individual, photographically reproduced letters.
In Marc-Uwe Kling's collection of texts, The Kangaroo Manifesto (2011), the kangaroo uses the phrase “La vache qui rit” to subtly insult the moderator Julia Müller. This scene is also briefly taken up in the film The Kangaroo Chronicles (2020).
The anarcho-satirical magazine Hara-Kiri expanded the range of language games to include the “ Ara who laughs” or the “belly (Japanese Hara) who laughs”, since “Kiri” is spoken like “qui rit”. Hara-Kiri was Charlie Hebdo's predecessor magazine, banned for ridiculing Charles de Gaulle .
Web links
literature
- Julien Pontoise, Loic de Bergerac: La vache qui rit et La Rochefoucauld. Une psychanalysis poursuivante. Flammarion, Paris 1967.
- Thomas Knubben (ed.): La vache qui rit: Europe, the bull and the cow in sculpture and photography of the 20th century. Catalog for the exhibition "La Vache qui Rit" in Fellbach Town Hall from May 8 to June 5, 1994. Kulturamt Stadt Fellbach, Fellbach 1994, ISBN 3-9802150-3-2 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Plagiarism ( Memento of February 3, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ process