While it's true that over fifty percent of films shown in its cinemas are imports, France's film industry is experiencing something of a boom. The international audience for French-language films stands at a record high, mainly thanks to the runaway success of Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amélie, 2001) and the two Astérix films (1999 & 2002). At home, too, audiences have been growing. There are cinemas in even quite small rural towns, censorship is very slight, students get discounts and foreign films are often shown in their original language with subtitles (look for version originale or v.o. in the listings). In addition there are any number of film festivals, though the most famous of these, in Cannes, is more a screening of what's new for those in the industry, rather than a public event. Filmfests where anyone can go along include those at La Rochelle (International Film Festival; June–July); Créteil, in the Paris suburbs (festival of women's films; March/April); Toulouse (Cinespaña; Oct); Paris (Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Dec); Clermont-Ferrand (short film festival; early Feb); Annecy (International Festival of Animated Films; June); and Angers (young European film-makers; January).While the French celebrate contemporary cinema they also treasure the old. The Paris Archives du Film possess the largest collection of silent and early talkie movies in the world, and in 1992 they embarked on a mammoth programme to transfer all the pre-1960 stock onto acetate to avoid disintegration; the work is expected to be completed by 2005. Cinema is, of course, a French invention, 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 leaving a factory sent the audience ducking for cover. The medium was eagerly seized by the artists of the post-World War I avant-garde who realized immediately its potential visual 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 expats Luis Buñuel's and Salvador 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 pioneered special effects with his adaptation of Jules Verne's Voyage to the Moon. However, French entertainment cinema didn't truly come into its own until the New Wave movement (Nouvelle Vague) of the 1960s. This raw and gritty style – pioneered by the young assistants of the postwar directors – owed its birth to 1959's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The Four Hundred Blows), by François Truffaut, and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour of the same time. In the years that followed, French cinema exploded with the morally provocative work of Erich Rohmer, who debuted with 1962's Signe du Lion, and the then-scandalous eroticism of Roger Vadim. Jean-Luc Godard gained a deserved reputation for well-crafted narratives, 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 screen bare-breasted in Vadim'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 suave and self-assured Alain Delon became something of a Sixties French Bogart. The post-New Wave era of the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties was dominated by the towering presence of Gérard Dépardieu, whose cinema career 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) – which made Christopher Lambert an international star – was followed by Nikita (1990), Léon (1994), sci-fi flick, The Fifth Element (1997) and historical epic Jeanne d'Arc (1999), the latter two both starring Besson's actress-wife Milla Jovovich. He and his contemporaries – Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, 1981; Betty Blue, 1986; Mortal Transfer, 2000), Bertrand Tavernier (Mississippi Blues, 1983; Round Midnight, 1986), Patrice Leconte (Ridicule, 1996; La Fille sur le Pont, 1999; La Veuve de St-Pierre, 2000) – still garner 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 Colours trilogy – base themselves 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 afield 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 L'Autre Monde (2001), while Russian-born Pavel Lounguine (Taxi Blues, 1990; Luna Park, 1992) recently released Tycoon (2002). Contemporary politics and cinematographic innovation made a dramatic comeback in French cinema with the 1996 winner of the French Césars award for best film, La Haine, by Mathieu Kassovitz. A brilliant and strikingly original portrayal of exclusion and racism in the Paris suburbs, La Haine is worlds away from the early Eighties movies that used Paris as a backdrop, such as Diva and Subway. This trend has broadened as young film-makers like Laurent Cantet confront the socio-economic challenges of their own generation, as in his acclaimed Ressources Humaines (2000), and its follow-up L'Emploi du Temps (2001). Another southern French director, Robert Guédiguian, uses hometown Marseille as the backdrop for his gritty proletarian-flavoured works, like Marius et Jeanette (1997), À la Place du Coeur (1998) and La Ville est Tranquille (2000). At the same time, there has been a return to period dramas in recent years, including veteran Roland Joffré's Vatel (2000), and Patricia Mazuy's Saint Cyr (2000), both set in the seventeenth century. Reasonable thrillers have also surfaced, such as Chantal Akerman's La Captive (2000), and controversial and censored Baisse-Moi (2000) by Virgine Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. Other directors to watch out for include Jacques Doillon, whose poignant Ponette (1996) recounts the tale of a four-year-old girl who refuses to accept the death of her mother, and Cédric Klapisch whose Chacun Cherche Son Chat (When the Cat's Away, 1996) about day-to-day life in the Bastille area of Paris was followed by Un Air de Famille (1998), a black comedy about a dysfunctional family set in a local bar, and the lighter L'Auberge Espagnole (2002), in which he has fun with European language students flat-sharing in Barcelona. Bertrand Tavernier ruffled a few feathers with Laissez-Passer (2002), about film-makers in German-occupied Paris, while Jean-Pierre Jeunet warmed hearts with his quirky romantic comedy, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001). François Ozon's 8 Women (2002) starred eight of France's top actresses (among them Catherine Deneuve), combined musical numbers with a somewhat clumsy lesbian sub-plot – and somehow managed to pull it off. All in all, although French cinema has not returned to the world domination of the New Wave period, it's now a healthy and diverse industry.
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