via The New York Times:

An exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, “Forty Years of Ads on TV,” celebrates commercials made in France since the late 1960s. At left is a film still, the first in a sequence of five, from a 1968 campaign for Boursin cheese directed by the actor Jacques Duby.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1968

The second of five stills in the Boursin cheese commercial. The Times’s Michael Kimmelman writes: French commercials speak to French culture no less than French literature or music does. Long on sensuality, style and poetry, they are notably lean on facts and nearly allergic to the rough-and-tumble of commerce.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1968

The third of five stills in the Boursin cheese commercial. Hard-sell tactics, standard in America, just don’t wash in France.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1968

The fourth of five stills in the Boursin cheese commercial. “To us money implies corruption, and moreover, because we consider ourselves the inventors of freedom, never mind if that’s not true, we still consider advertising as a kind of manipulation,” explained Jacques Séguéla of Havas, the country’s second-biggest advertising agency.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1968

The fifth of five stills in the Boursin cheese commercial. “This explains why television commercials started so late here — essentially because leftist opposition saw ads as corrupting the soul,” Mr. Séguéla said.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1968

The first of four consecutive film stills from an ad for Dim lingerie directed by William Klein in 1971. The Lalo Schiffrin theme music that accompanies Dim’s ads has become embedded in the French psyche, an equivalent of America’s “plop, plop, fizz, fizz.”

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1971

The second of four stills in the Dim lingerie commercial. France did take a long time before it broadcast commercials on television, prohibiting private advertising years after.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1971

The third of four stills in the Dim lingerie commercial. Years after the United States, Britain, Italy and other countries were making a new art form out of 30-second promotions for detergents and toothpastes, France still prohibited private advertising.

Photo: Agence Publicis, 1971