Cinema of France  

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"They can keep their Bressons and their Cocteaus. The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema." --Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953) by Adonis A. Kyrou


Related: Cinéma vérité - Cahiers du Cinéma - Cinémathèque - French exploitation films - film noir - Midi Minuit Fantastique - Nouvelle Vague

Titles: A Trip to the Moon (1902) - Fantômas (1913 - 1914) - Under the Sky of Paris (1951) - Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) - And God Created Woman (1956) - Eyes Without a Face (1959) - Jules and Jim (1962) - La Prisonnière (1968) - Le Chat (1971) - Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971) - Themroc (1973) - Going Places (1974) - Pussy Talk (1975) - Je t'aime moi non plus (1976) - Buffet froid (1979) - Coup de Torchon (1981) - Sans Soleil (1983) - Marquis (1989) - Monsieur Hire (1989) - Le Parfum d'Yvonne (1994) - Ridicule (1996) - Sitcom (1998) - Seul contre tous (1998) - Whatever (1999) Amélie (2001) - Irréversible (2002)

Producers: Anatole Dauman

Critics and curators: André Bazin - Jean-Pierre Bouyxou - Ado Kyrou - Henri Langlois

Actors: Stéphane Audran - Brigitte Bardot - Michel Blanc - Patrick Dewaere - Isabelle Huppert - Gerard Depardieu - Jeanne Moreau - Janine Reynaud - Delphine Seyrig

Director A-list: Bertrand Blier - Catherine Breillat - Louis Feuillade - Georges Franju - Alain Robbe-Grillet - Patrice Leconte - Georges Méliès - Gaspar Noé - François Ozon - Jacques Tati

Directors: José Bénazéraf - Bertrand Blier - Robert Bresson - Catherine Breillat - Claude Chabrol - Jean Cocteau - Guy Debord - Louis Delluc - Bruno Dumont - Marcel Duchamp - Germaine Dulac - Jean Epstein - Louis Feuillade - Georges Franju - Abel Gance - Serge Gainsbourg - Jean-Luc Godard - Michel Gondry - Alain Robbe-Grillet - René Laloux - Patrice Leconte - Michel Lemoine - Louis Malle - Georges Méliès - Claude Mulot - Gaspar Noé - François Ozon - Max Pécas - Jean Renoir - Alain Resnais - Jacques Rivette - Jean Rollin - Barbet Schroeder - Jacques Tati - François Truffaut - Roger Vadim

Screenwriters: Jean-Claude Carrière

 L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière. It was first screened on December 28 1895 in Paris, France, and was shown to a paying audience January 6 1896.
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L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière. It was first screened on December 28 1895 in Paris, France, and was shown to a paying audience January 6 1896.

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The art of filmmaking within the nation of France or by French filmmakers abroad is collectively known as French cinema. One of the best-known French films today is Amélie.

Contents

Context

France, especially Paris, has long been a gathering spot for artists from across Europe and the world. For this reason French cinema is sometimes intertwined with the cinema of foreign nations. Directors from nations such as Poland (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrzej Żuławski), Argentina (Gaspar Noe, Edgardo Cozarinsky), and the Soviet Union (Alexandre Alexeieff, Anatole Litvak, Gela Babluani) are equally prominent in the ranks of French cinema as the native Frenchmen.

History

Late 19th century to early 20th century

In the late 19th century, during the early years of cinema, France produced several important pioneers. Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe and their screening of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat in Paris in 1895 is marked by many historians as the official birth of cinema. During the next few years, filmmakers all over the world started experimenting with this new medium, and France's Georges Méliès was influential. He invented many of the techniques now common in the cinematic language, and made the first ever science fiction film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902).

In 1937 Jean Renoir, the son of famous painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, directed what many see as his first masterpiece, La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion). In 1939 Renoir directed La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game). Several movie critic's have cited this film as one of the greatest of all-time.

Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) was filmed during World War II and released in 1945. The three hour film was extremely difficult to make due to the conditions during the Nazi occupation. Set in Paris in 1828, the film was voted "Best French Film of the Century" in a poll of 600 French critics and professionals in the late 1990s.

Post-World War II: 1940s-1970s

In the critical magazine Cahiers du cinéma founded by André Bazin, critics and lovers of film would discuss film and why it worked. Modern film theory was born there. Additionally, Cahiers critics such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, etc. went on to make films themselves, creating what was to become known as the French New Wave. Some of the first movies of this new genre was Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cent Coups, 1959) starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

See also

French contemporary cinema, history of French cinema, Nouvelle Vague, list of French films




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Cinema of France" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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