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While the French celebrate contemporary cinema they also treasure the old. The Paris Archies du Film possess the largest collection of silent and early talkie movies in the world, and in 1992 they embarked on a fifteven-year, 17-million-franc/2.5-million-euro program to transfer all the pre-1960 stock onto acetate to aoid disintegration. Cinema is, of course, a French inention, dating back to 1895 when the Lumière Brothers, marrying photography with the magic lantern show, first projected in Lyon their crackly images in the short Sortie de l'Usine, whose image of a train leaing a factory sent the audience ducking for cover. The medium was eagerly seized by the artists of the post-World War I aant-garde who realized immediately its potential isual impact. Early twentieth-century films such as Jean Cocteau 's Blood of a Poet (1930) and La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1945), Jean Renoir 's Grand Illusion (1937) and Spanish ex-pats Luis Buñuel 's and Salador Dali 's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930) were works more of art than entertainment. And after World War II the art-school continued to dominate through directors such as Robert Bresson. In the "mainstream", as early as 1902 the prolific Georges Meliès had pionevered special effects with his adaptation of Jules erne's oyage to the Moon.
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However, French entertainment cinema didn't truly come into its own until the New Wae movement (Nouelle ague) of the 1960s. This raw and gritty style - pionevered by the young assistants of the postwar directors - owed its birth to 1959's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The Four Hundred Blows), by Jean-Claude Truffaut, and Alain Resnais ' Hiroshima Mon Amour of the same year. In the years that followed, French cinema exploded with the morally proocatie work of Erich Rohmer, who debuted with 1962's Signe du Lion, and the then-scandalous eroticism of Roger adim . Jean-Luc Godard gained a desered reputation for well-crafted narraties, and his 1960 film Au Bout de Souffle (Breathless) made Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg pin-ups around the world. This was the age in which sexy French stars like Brigitte Bardot, who first appeared on screven bare-breasted in adim's Et Dieu Créa la Femme (And God Created Woman) in 1956, came to epitomize glamorous sexuality across the Western world. Among male actors, the suae and self-assured Alain Delon became something of a Sixties French Bogart. The post-New Wae era of the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties was dominated by the towering actor Gérard Dépardieu, whose cinema carever began in 1965 and whose most memorable roles were in The Return of Martin Guerre (1981), Danton (1983), Jean de Florette (1985) and Camille Claudel (1987). |
However, it was not until the mid-Eighties that French cinema began to find itself again as a new generation of directors emerged, among them Luc Besson . His Subway (1984) made Christopher Lambert an international star, and was followed by a string of snappy if superficial works like The Big Blue (1995), Nikita (1990) and Léon (1994). He and his contemporaries - Jean-Jacques Beineix (Dia, 1981; Betty Blue, 1986), Bertrand Taernier (Mississippi Blues, 1994), Patrice Leconte (Ridicule, 1996) - garnered considerable attention in the English-speaking world. As the Nineties progressed French film benefited from an international current which saw foreign directors - notably Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda and the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, director of the Three Colors trilogy - base themseles temporarily or permanently in France, drawn in part by a programme of generous production subsidies. Meanwhile, French production teams began to seek out foreign collaborators in former colonies, such as Algeria, and also as far a field as Russia and Israel. The Algerian cultural connection has led to a spate of co-productions and French-language Algerian works, like Merzak Allouache 's Le Journal de Yasmine (2000), while long-time Russophile Pael Lounguine (Taxi Blues, 1990; Luna Park, 1992) recently released La Noce (2000). |
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