I.

Introduction

French Cinema, historical development of the cinema in France. One of the paradoxes of the French film industry is that, despite the fact that foreign companies and investment have, since the silent era, played a major role in the financing of French production, the resulting films have won praise worldwide for their specific qualities of Frenchness, particularly during those periods when they have been most successful internationally: the Golden Age of 1929-1939, and the era of the nouvelle vague (New Wave), 1958-1968, approximately.

II.

French Silent Cinema

After its initial dominance in world markets due to Georges Méliès and the Pathé company (see Cinema, Early Development of), the French film industry was losing out to American films in all countries by 1914. Then during World War I, young film-makers such as Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier, and Louis Delluc had the opportunity to direct, and, impressed by some elements of the new American style of film-making, they developed new theories about what film art should be like. Inspired by Intolerance (1916) by D. W. Griffith, with its rapid intercutting of disconnected shots from different parts of its multiple storylines, the films they made pushed the use of insert shots and close-ups away from the smooth continuity of American films in the search for new ways of expressing emotions and ideas. The most individual of these films, such as Delluc’s Fièvre (Fever), and Marcel L’Herbier’s Eldorado, both made in 1921, as well as others from Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac, were referred to as “avant-garde” at the time, but they all had a conventional story supporting the filmic effects, in a way that is not true of avant-garde films of more recent times. These films were made on very low budgets, compared to the mass of more ordinary films, and they were supported by the circuit of ciné-clubs that grew up in France during the 1920s.

It was not only the avant-garde films, but also the ordinary French films of the time, that were little seen in other countries, partly as a result of the latter’s poor production values, and partly as a result of their somewhat out-of-date style. This observation also applies to the films of Abel Gance, who pushed Griffith’s fast cutting much further into passages where the shots were only a few frames long, and arranged in metrical patterns. This approach was mixed with poetic inter-titles and old-fashioned melodrama in La Roue (1924), while Napoléon Vu par Abel Gance (1927) added extravagant camera movements and triptych screen sequences, as well as even greater length. There was an attempt at “Americanization” of style and subject-matter in late 1920s French cinema, and also increasing involvement of German and American money and co-productions. However, this did not put the French industry back on to the international scene, whereas the coming of sound eventually did.

III.

Sound Cinema

Promising attempts to develop soundtrack technology in France were held back by inadequate investment. This meant that French studios and cinemas were forced to make use of expensive equipment from the United States or Germany when they converted to sound production and exhibition. However, these countries played a major role in developing sound films in France. Paramount’s Joinville studio was designed to penetrate the non-English-speaking market by shooting each film in several different languages. By early 1932 this was no longer economical, and Joinville was converted into a centre where dubbing was used to translate film dialogue. Its tight schedules had militated against artistry, and the Alexander Korda adaptation of the successful stage production Marius (1931) by Marcel Pagnol was atypical of production there. The film’s emphasis on regional customs and speech, together with the energy and charm of the performances and poignancy of the story, led to immediate success in France. Pagnol wrote a sequel, Fanny (Marc Allégret, 1932), and then another, César (1936), which he directed himself. His trilogy was so successful at home and ultimately abroad that by 1934 Pagnol had been able to set up his own studio in Marseille, with three sound stages.

The German company Tobis-Klangfilm challenged American dominance throughout Europe, on the screens and (on the basis of rival patents relating to the sound camera) in the courts. At its Épinay studio it initiated a series of films directed by René Clair, whose writings articulated opposition to “canned theatre”: Sous les Toits de Paris (1930; Under the Roofs of Paris), and Le Million and À Nous la Liberté (both 1931). Though these did much to establish the reputation of French sound production abroad, the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany meant that the projects Clair proposed to follow Le Dernier Milliardaire (1934; The Last Millionaire) were unacceptable to Tobis, and he sought work outside France.

Of the French companies, Pathé-Natan (a new manifestation of a long-established French company) moved into sound production with a programme including La Petite Lise (Jean Grémillon, 1930), which can now be seen as anticipating the moody fatalism and concern with marginal characters typical of “poetic realism”, the dominant school of the Golden Age. To this Lise’s scenarist Charles Spaak made a contribution ranking second only to that of poet Jacques Prévert: they wrote most of the greatest 1930s roles for the star Jean Gabin. Prévert’s contribution, during a sustained collaboration with director Marcel Carné, comprised Quai des Brumes (1938; Port of Shadows) and Le Jour se Lève (1939; Daybreak); Spaak’s included La Belle Équipe (Julien Duvivier, 1936); and Les Bas Fonds (1936; The Lower Depths) and La Grande Illusion (1937). These last two, for Jean Renoir, were less fatalistic, a characteristic of the director’s work, presumably as a result both of his temperament and, in the mid-1930s, his political commitment.

The Gaumont film company collapsed in 1934, followed in 1936, in scandalous circumstances, by Pathé-Natan. It is, indeed, another paradox of the French film industry that its artistic strength is, historically, closely linked to the failure of its large companies to achieve the kind of dominance of production, distribution, and exhibition that would allow effective resistance to penetration by imports from abroad, particularly the United States. Thus, repeatedly, the bulk of production has been in the hands of small independent, and often undercapitalized, companies unable to achieve the continuity of production that characterized Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1960s, and was a major source of that industry’s commercial, technical, and even artistic, strength. Conversely, however, this has meant that French film-makers have usually had a chance of finding a one-off investor or group of investors willing to support an adventurous project.

The career of Renoir, arguably the world’s greatest director, and one of the greatest narrative artists of the 20th century, is exemplary in this respect. He received his first chance to direct sound films from his friend, the independent producer Pierre Braunberger, who had established a company through a merger with a regional distributor, Richebé. His second film for the company, La Chienne (1931, with Michel Simon), was so controversial dramatically and technically that Renoir was only able to save it from Richebé, who was demanding that it be re-edited, by appealing, at Braunberger’s suggestion, to the company’s principal investor, a shoe manufacturer, through the latter’s mistress.

An account of how La Grande Illusion was set up is equally instructive. Jean Gabin was enthusiastic about the role he was to play and the story, which grew out of the experiences of Renoir’s old World War I flying companion, General Pinsard, and his many escapes from prisoner-of-war camps. Nevertheless, it took three years to find finance for the film. Renoir asserts that it was only because the financier, Rollmer, and his assistant, Albert Pinkévitch, were not in the industry, and therefore lacked its prejudices about what might be successful, that they backed the film, which went on to be voted Best Foreign Film at the New York World’s Fair, had a special prize created for it at the Venice Festival (where German pressure ensured that it failed to win the Golden Lion, the festival’s main prize), and caused President Roosevelt, after a private screening at the White House, to declare that: “All the democracies of the world must see this film.”

The serious implication of these stories is that the personal creator has, historically, been as important as the structures and prejudices of the French industry and its leaders. Moreover, it is this personal cinema that has won success abroad, enabling France to be, since the end of World War II, second only to the United States in the number of films it exports.

Renoir was responsible for pioneering the use of direct sound, recorded on location to ensure that the individual drama was played out within a social context that was clearly articulated both aurally and visually. He often had sets built on location, so that the interiors of his protagonists’ homes could be linked visually with the exteriors surrounding them.

As democracy became threatened by the rise of fascism, Renoir’s concern with society and community acquired an explicitly political dimension. His only collaboration with Prévert, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, was released early in election year, 1936. A narrative polemic of extraordinary energy and artistry, it deflates fascist rhetoric by placing it in the mouth of a swindler, and proposes the cooperative ideals of the Popular Front as an alternative.

Only after the collapse of the Popular Front and on the eve of World War II did Renoir’s vision incorporate the fatalism of the poetic realists, in La Règle du Jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game). However, Renoir’s characters here were no group on the margins of society, but high society itself; his doomed protagonist no factory worker destroyed by sexual jealousy, no army deserter, but a national hero. The audience found this vision intolerable, and booed and catcalled in the middle of screenings. First the film was cut, then, after the outbreak of war, it was banned for being demoralizing, along with Le Jour se Lève. Consequently, Renoir’s masterpiece exists today only as a result of a restoration in the late 1950s, incorporating what were originally out-takes.

Several film-makers, including Renoir, were also active in the campaigns organized by Ciné-Liberté, founded by the Maison de la Culture of the French Communist Party, for legislation to reform the film industry. These intensified after the Popular Front government took power in 1936. Policies proposed included ending the quota on imported films and taxing them instead, then using this revenue to support French production. There was also a call for an immediate end to film censorship, which had been responsible for denying licences authorizing public screenings of certain films. Works that had felt the force of such censorship included Zéro de Conduite (1933; Zero for Conduct) by Jean Vigo, an anarchist account of his schooldays, La Vie est à Nous (1936), produced by a collective under Renoir’s supervision for the Communist Party’s campaign in the elections, and the Soviet classics. The Luis Buñuel Surrealist masterpiece L’Age d’Or (1930), whose production had been privately financed by wealthy aristocratic patrons, had been banned by the Paris police under a different law, following riots in a cinema where it was being screened.

Ironically, though the Popular Front never enacted any legislation for the support of French film production, ideas developed then were adopted by the Vichy regime of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, which came to power during the fall of France and collapse of the Third Republic in 1940, and subsequently ruled those areas of France not occupied by the Germans or incorporated into the Reich. The most important initiative was the setting up of the Comité d’Organisation de l’Industrie Cinématographique. This was superseded in 1946, two years after the Liberation, by the Centre National de la Cinématographie, which is still responsible for channelling financial support to the industry. Money comes from levies on box-office receipts, general government funds, and taxes on television. Currently, two types of support are available. One distributes money to all films in proportion to their box-office takings, the idea being that this will help finance a new production. The other offers loans, as an advance against subsequent receipts. This fund was set up in 1960, and thus was in place to give financial assistance at an important stage in the development of the New Wave. It still gives invaluable support to independent film-makers today.

Though several directors and actors fled Nazi rule after the fall of France in 1940, enough remained to establish continuity with the preceding decade. Carné and Prévert made their greatest film, Les Enfants du Paradis (released in 1945, after the Liberation; The Children of Paradise), while Lumière d’Été (1943) and Le Ciel est à Vous (1944) show Grémillon at his best.

IV.

French Cinema after World War II

In the 1940s the most important newcomers were Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. The former’s stories of redemption, from Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) through Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (1951; Diary of a Country Priest), Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé (1956; A Man Escaped), and Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966; Balthazar) to L’Argent (1983; Money), had a stylistic austerity and rigour which, for more than three decades, would distinguish his work from that of other film-makers. Jour de Fête (1949) was Tati’s debut feature, followed by Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953; Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday), which introduced the gangling, pipe-sucking character, played by Tati himself, who was to appear regularly in subsequent films. Gesture, movement, and the use of sound (not dialogue) were the cornerstones of Tati’s art, and led, in Playtime (1967), to an unusually innovative use of 70-mm film.

Renoir and Max Ophuls returned from Hollywood in the early 1950s, having left to escape the Nazis. The former, initially in The Golden Coach (France/Italy, 1952) with his cameraman nephew, Claude Renoir Junior, was a pioneer of the use of Technicolor in major French productions. The latter, a German Jew, had originally come to France as a refugee from Nazism. His last four films, La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de... (1953; The Earrings of Madame de...), and Lola Montès (1955), a CinemaScope masterpiece, sadly cut before its release, are perhaps his greatest. With him came his son Marcel, now a major figure in documentary. The latter’s Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1971; The Sorrow and the Pity), made for French television (which refused to show it), and Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), produced without any French finance, offer a trenchant analysis of France under German occupation. More recently, in The Troubles We’ve Seen: A History of Journalism in Time of War (1994), he has taken the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, and media coverage of the siege, as the context for an exploration of a question posed early in the film by actor Philippe Noiret: “Would it have changed anything if people had been able to see Auschwitz on television?”.

The success of the films of Roger Vadim starring Brigitte Bardot, of which Et Dieu Créa la Femme (1956; And God Created Woman) was the first, showed that there was a market for films aimed at the new, more affluent, youth audience, and some French producers began to back other young film-makers who were willing to work quickly, or with minimal resources. The most prominent of these were Chabrol, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, and Truffaut , a group of young critics. While learning their trade at the screenings of the Cinémathèque Française they had, together with André Bazin, their critical father figure, made Cahiers du Cinéma the most important film magazine in the world.

The work of these directors broke the conventions of standard film style in various ways: by not respecting standard script structure and smooth transitions of mood; by making easily noticeable camera movements; by using jump-cuts; and by not using the full polish of studio lighting. Godard, Truffaut, and their cameraman Raoul Coutard spearheaded a return to location shooting, even of interior scenes. This matched the spontaneity of new performers such as Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, as well as Brigitte Bardot, a star from the old system. They were aided in this by their extensive use of the small, light 35-mm Cameflex camera, which had been made by the Éclair company since 1948. Experiments by Chris Marker and ethnologist Jean Rouch with the noiseless, lightweight 16-mm cameras introduced by Éclair in 1960 similarly revitalized documentary (see Cinéma Vérité). Pierre Braunberger supported many of these developments. In addition, he had previously produced several important short films by Alain Resnais, who made the move to fiction in 1959, as did another older film-maker, Georges Franju, co-founder with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque and its archive collection in 1936. Franju had established himself with major documentaries, including Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) and Hôtel des Invalides (1952). Other important figures of the New Wave were Agnès Varda, who came to directing from photojournalism, and her husband Jacques Demy.

The 1960s also brought the final film by Jean Cocteau (Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960) and major works by Jean-Pierre Melville, originally a precursor of the New Wave. Particularly noteworthy is L’Armée des Ombres (1969; Shadow Army), about the French Resistance, in which Melville had been active.

Nevertheless, it was Godard’s output that attracted most critical attention, remains the most memorable, and was historically and aesthetically the most important. From À Bout de Souffle (1960; Breathless) to Weekend (1968)—15 features and several shorts—this resembled a voyage of discovery, charting new potentials for narrative cinema. At first it seemed that the conventions of filmic construction had been overturned, but as mainstream production came to terms with the New Wave in the mid-1960s, it became difficult to detect any generic difference between the best work of, say, Truffaut and Louis Malle, a talented but more conventional director who had arrived on the scene at about the same time. Consequently, for over a decade, some of the most exciting French films were directed by the veteran Spanish exile Luis Buñuel, though Bresson continued to produce major films.

From the mid-1960s, most of the projects realized by major directors in France and other European countries have, in strict financial terms, been international co-productions. After 1968, only Godard and Rivette persisted with experiment, followed in the 1970s by Marguerite Duras, who, in films such as Nathalie Granger (1972), India Song (1975), Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert (1976), and Le Camion (1977), continued to explore the relationships between sound and image, narrative and memory, the past and the imagination, that had characterized both the early New Wave and the nouveau roman (New Novel).

The richness and diversity of French production over this whole period, which lasted approximately a quarter of a century, cannot be over-emphasized, even in the context of what was a remarkable era for European film-making in general. Cinema has traditionally been held in high esteem in French artistic and intellectual life. This has meant that the barriers between commercial, art, and avant-garde cinema have, in the past, tended to be less rigid than in other cultures. Nevertheless, the structure of the French industry and the methods by which production has been financed have provided the economic foundation for artistic achievements which, in this era as in the 1930s, clearly merited the worldwide acclaim they received.

V.

Recent Developments

In recent years, films from Hollywood, which in France are traditionally exhibited in both dubbed and subtitled versions (the latter in specialist or upmarket cinemas), have become increasingly dominant at the box office. France has tended to counter this with bigger-budget, more commercial packages, and has succeeded up to a point, with films like those of Luc Besson, such as Le Grand Bleu (1988) and The Fifth Element (1997). Although these are often successful at the international box office, the passion, excitement, and experimentation that distinguished the masterpieces of the Golden Age and the period including and following the New Wave are rare. Even many of Godard’s more recent experiments, or a highly personal project such as the Bertrand Tavernier film Daddy Nostalgie (1990; These Foolish Things), seem emotionally bland by comparison.

Part of the problem is that exhibition patterns changed in the 1980s, with the adoption in France as in other countries of Hollywood marketing policies: a large publicity budget and simultaneous release in up to 50 cinemas. Thus, throughout the world there is now less space for the more risky and personal film to build up its audience gradually, during a long run and as a result of good reviews and word of mouth. Gérard Depardieu is a star, and has achieved international success in a diversity of roles, from his early work for Duras, Resnais, and then Truffaut to more recent successes, such as Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), based on the play by Edmond Rostand. However, stars contribute to great films, they do not create them. Although throughout his career Depardieu has been prepared to take risks by accepting roles in projects that are other than safely commercial, even these receive less exposure in France and abroad than they would have had in, for example, the 1960s and 1970s. Only occasionally do triumphs such as Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991; Beautiful Troublemaker) break through to reach the audience they deserve.

Mathieu Kasovitz’s La Haine (1995; Hatred) proved, however, to be the first international success of a series of increasingly controversial French films. Its action commences the morning after a night’s rioting. In the week of its release similar riots occurred in three areas of urban France: a Paris suburb, Le Havre, and Rouen. Its account of disaffected youth from a racially mixed suburb, who respond to police violence with violence of their own, is shot in the style of popular American television series such as NYPD Blue, but following the antagonists rather than the police. It offers an image of impending crisis, which has touched sensitive nerves in British and American, as well as French, viewers.

La Haine was followed by a series of controversial low-budget international successes whose provocation derived more from explicit violence and sex than from an obvious engagement with social concerns. These included Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Tri’s Baise-Moi (1999; Fuck Me), Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Choses Secrètes (2003), and Gustav Noé’s pair Seul Contre Tous (1998; I Stand Alone) and Irréversible (2002). Many admirers of Seul Contre Tous found Irréversible unacceptable for the violence of the revenge killing with which it opens (this is, in fact, the climax of the story, which is told in reverse), and for the treatment of the nine-minute rape scene that motivates this revenge.

In the new millennium, French film-makers have been in the forefront of experiments with high definition digital technology. New Wave veteran Eric Rohmer used it to shoot exteriors in his story of revolutionary Paris, L'Anglaise et le Duc (2001; The Lady and the Duke) while Vidocq (2001), starring Gérard Depardieu, was the first 100 per cent digitalized mainstream feature.

VI.

The Future for French Films: The End of an Era?

For the first two years of the 21st century, French cinema seemed to be going from strength to strength. However, its economic infrastructure had developed in ways that suddenly put the whole project at risk.

During the 1990s, French diplomats, prompted by the active campaigning of their country's actors and film-makers, with Depardieu in the vanguard, had been able to ensure that cultural productions, including films and television programmes, were not made subject to the free trade provisions underpinning the World Trade Organization. This agreement, the 'cultural exception', ensured that the systems of support for film production operating in France and many other European Union countries remained intact.

The first shock came when Jean-Marie Messier, chairman and chief executive of Vivendi, publicly stated in December 2001 that the 'cultural exception' was 'dead'. In 2000, at the same time as it bought the Seagram Universal conglomerate, Vivendi had effectively become the owner of the pay television channel Canal Plus, taking a 49 per cent holding. At the time of Messier's bombshell, the Canal was investing, through its production wing Le Studio Canal, in 80 per cent of all French films, making it a major pillar of the 'cultural exception'. Moreover, it had also established itself as a major player in international co-production. Worse was to come when, in April 2002, Messier fired Pierre Lescure, the Canal’s founding chief executive, provoking immediate protests from staff, in the middle of a programme while on air, and from many leading actors, film-makers, and footballers. At the same time, Vivendi Universal's stock suffered a major fall in value and, shortly after, Messier himself was dismissed from his post. Several divisions of Vivendi Universal were then put up for sale and Canal Plus's future seemed far from certain.

Though President Chirac has often voiced his support of the 'cultural exception', some believe that, had Lionel Jospin won the presidency in the 2002 election, he would have been more active in promoting the survival of Canal Plus in something similar to its present form, and in support of the existing agreements with the World Trade Organization.

As of February 2003, the words of a film-maker from the other side of the Atlantic, David Lynch, spoken a few weeks before he headed the Jury at the 2002 Cannes Festival, summed up the unresolved situation: 'France has an incredibly strong tradition of film-making, helped by a regulatory system that has permitted it to retain a local industry... If I were French I would be scandalized to see that system come under threat.'