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in other countries, partly as a result of the latter’s poor production values, and partly as a result of their somewhat out-of-date style.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.