French Cinema

We have to have present that the seventh art was born in France because the first cinema projection was in France, concretely in the Gran Café de Paris in 1895.

We can differentiate several important periods. In the beginning with the cinema dumb shined the Lumiere brothers until 1910, year where they decided not to continue because the cinema wasn't commercial but Melies take over of the cinema industry and started to produce films with arguments getting become the cinema is spectacle like the famous "travel to the moon"in 1902, the Julio Verne's book adaptation. Then appeared Pathe and Gaumont, who in different ways improved the Melie's system introducing aesthetic films.During the I World War started the impressionism films, which were looking for new ways of express the things with a more modern perspective and maked with very low costs. Until 1927 the director stars of the dumb cinema in France were among others Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier ,Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac.This type of vanguard's movement in cinema emphasized the national glory and biographies of the most important French people like Napoleon.

In the thirties we have to remember the most important director, Jeans Cocteau, author for example of the famous film "les enfants terribles", in 1934. Cocteau offered new ways to the French cinema. And other important director was of course, Jean Renoir, who was the pioneer with the direct sound in the films. Because of the II World War a lot of cinema director left France, like for example Renoir, but the France cinema continued thanks to Crané, Rene Clair and Prevert, although the cinema production was reduced to the half.

After the War the most relevant French directors were Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. But was in the fifties when the French cinema lived their most important renovation that was called the Nouvelle Vague, promoted by director like Renoir, Max Ophuls,Rene Clair and Roger Vadim. This new movement was based on an author cinema of low budget, just aesthetic with a lot of improvisation and naturalness and trend to the psychological analyse of the characters. A group of five young critical cineaste; Claude Chabrol, Jean Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut founded "Cahiers du cinema", the most relevant magazine of cinema rewires and that then started to make films experimenting with new resourches of the narrative cinema. In this period appeared another important cineaste that we can't forget, Alan Resnais.

Nowadays, although still been good French films, the quality now is incomparable to before. We have to emphasize the artistic trajectory of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Ana Vidal