The connections between cinematic and literary culture have always been particularly close in France, from the Surrealists' fascination with the silent director Louis Feuillade, via the involvement of Cocteau or Pagnol, to the more recent directorial ventures of novelists such as Duras, Robbe-Grillet, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. If there is a world capital of film culture, it has to be Paris, where the first public film screening took place in 1895 and where the concentration of cinemas remains unrivalled in the Western world.

The films shown at that first screening were short ‘home-movie’ documentaries, directed by Louis Lumière, who ran a photographic factory near Lyon and saw moving pictures as a piquant adjunct to his main business. The other name associated with the ‘prehistory’ of cinema in France is that of Georges Méliès, a professional magician whose films (such as Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) rely upon illusion and special effects. From the outset, the dichotomy—in many respects a false one, but none the less firmly entrenched—between film as documentary record of the ‘real’ and film as dream-factory was established.

Serials (such as Feuillade's Les Vampires, 1915-16) and literary adaptations formed, along with the comedies of such as Max Linder, the bulk of the early silent output. Visual experimentation flourished as resources increased in the 1920s; Surrealist-influenced short films (Germaine Dulac's La Souriante Madame Beudet, 1923; Buñuel and Dali's Un chien andalou, 1928) and the epic extravagance of Abel Gance indicate the range the silent film could cover.

The arrival of sound (1929) had an initially disastrous effect upon the French industry, outstripped as it was by its American and German competitors. ‘Safe’ adaptations of Boulevard plays and literary classics were the norm, though the names of Guitry and Pagnol show that such cinema was not necessarily so hidebound as has often been thought. A still more important literary contributor was Jacques Prévert, whose mordant scripts for Carné, Grémillon, and Renoir are arguably his finest work. Studio filming was the rule until about the mid-1930s, reflecting not only industrial conservatism but the superb quality of set design (often by Lazare Meerson or Alexandre Trauner) and the number of actresses and actors (e.g. Jules Berry, Louis Jouvet, Madeleine Renaud) who had come from the theatre.

Renoir's work more than that of any other director promoted location shooting and suggested that the sound cinema could produce artistic masterpieces [see also Carné; Duvivier; Vigo]. The war obviously had a disruptive effect; the major French directors who went to Hollywood, René Clair and Renoir, were far less successful there than their German counterparts such as Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk, and, while the Occupation yielded a masterpiece such as Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (1945), it also badly affected the careers of actresses and actors who collaborated (Arletty, Pierre Fresnay, Robert le Vigan). Post-war reconstruction was hindered by these divisions within the industry and by the flood of American films onto the French market. The 15 years after the Liberation were to be stigmatized by the Nouvelle Vague critics as those of the ‘cinéma de qualité’ (also known as the ‘cinéma de papa’), though recent revaluations of its leading directors (Claude Autant-Lara, René Clément, Henri-Georges Clouzot) have been rather kinder to their work. Gangster movies, made by such directors as Yves Allégret, Jacques Becker, and Jean-Pierre Melville, were an important counterweight to the more overt production values of the ‘cinéma de papa’, and also fed into the Nouvelle Vague's output.

The Nouvelle Vague, the most important movement in post-war French cinema, is the subject of a separate entry. Although the term was originally a journalistic invention and never covered a coherent body of theory and practice, the films, together with the polemic declarations of faith, of directors such as Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut, had a powerful collective impact, whether negative or positive, both in France and abroad. It is partly as a result of the ‘politique des auteurs’ championed by the principal organ of the Nouvelle Vague, Cahiers ducinéma, that Godard came to be an auteur as much studied as Butor in French courses in the English-speaking countries.

The Nouvelle Vague remained dominant in serious French cinema probably until 1968-9, beginning a period which unsurprisingly inaugurated a major return to the historical via critical documentaries (Marcel Ophuls's Le Chagrin et la pitié, 1971) and reconstructions (Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien, 1974). These remained, however, less popular with the general public than big-screen films starring such names as Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, or Simone Signoret. Major new directors to appear in the 1970s included Bertrand Blier, Maurice Pialat, and Bertrand Tavernier; woman directors, in France as elsewhere, have generally been few and far between (Agnès Varda is by far the best-known).

The dominant trends in French cinema by 1990 were at the opposite pole to the values of the Nouvelle Vague. Gaudy studio filming eschewing any suspicion of realism, with minimal or inconsequential narrative, characterizes the ‘video-clip’ world of such directors as Jean-Jacques Beineix and Luc Besson, while big-screen costume drama—‘cinéma de qualité’ with a vengeance—reestablished itself with Claude Berri's Pagnol adaptations Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (both 1986), the most successful foreign-language films ever in Britain, and Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1989), starring Isabelle Adjani. Yet many younger directors, such as Léos Carax and Eric Rochant, were making films clearly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague, and French cinema culture remained remarkable in its openness and diversity.

[KAR]

Bibliography

• J.-P. Jeancolas, Le Cinéma des Français (1979) and Quinze ans d'années trente (1983)
• J.-L. Passek (ed.), Dictionnaire du cinéma français (1987)
• S. Hayward G. Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and Contexts (1990)