Parisians have treated cinema as an art form ever since the first projection by the Lumière brothers "Cinematograph" at the Parisian Grand Café du Boulevard des Capucines in 1895. The 1930s were the golden age of French cinema, as stars of musicals and theatres invaded the cinemas, many of them on liberally censored film vehicles that helped create the French reputation for naughtiness. Meanwhile, more artistically minded auteurs were scripting, directing and producing moody, often melodramatic films. The key figure was Jean Renoir, son of the Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. For Parisian scenes, check out his left-wing Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), set in a printshop in the then-crumbling Marais. The movement known as Poetic Realism grew up around Renoir and the director Marcel Carné, who made the Canal St-Martin area of Paris famous in Hôtel du Nord (1938), a film that starred Arletty, the great populist actress of the 30s and 40s. Arletty and Poetic Realism reached their apogee in Carné's wonderful Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), set in the theatrical world of nineteenth-century Paris, with a script by the poet Jacques Prévert.After the war, the state stepped in to boost French cinema, levying taxes on box-office sales, and subsidizing art cinema (as it still does today). Renoir continued to make great films: his French CanCan (1955) is the film about the Moulin Rouge and the heyday of Montmartre, though it was all shot in the studio. In 1959, the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") set about changing all that. Among the seminal works of the movement, Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), by François Truffaut, and A Bout de Souffle (1959), by Jean-Luc Godard, both have contemporary Paris as the real star, their directors daring to take their new, lightweight cameras out onto the streets. Perhaps the best collaboration between the city and the directors of the Nouvelle Vague is Paris Vu Par (Six in Paris; 1965), a collection of six shorts by the key figures of the genre, including the prolific Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer. Other directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague have turned out to be less wedded to its values: the career of the director Louis Malle encompasses an underwater film with Jacques Cousteau, the quirky Zazie dans le Métro (1961) – a real Paris spectacular – and the moving international hit, Aux Revoir Les Enfants (1987). For Parisian settings, few films do better than Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), which depicts two hours in the life of a singer as she moves through the city. Since Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1986), which launched the international career of Gérard Depardieu, the French film industry has increasingly concentrated on glossier, more exportable "heritage" movies, which do the city few favours. Balancing the historical spectaculars, but equally exportable, has been the movement known as the Cinéma du Look, producing cool, image-conscious films such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's outright cranky Delicatessen (1991), Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981) and Betty Blue (1986), and Luc Besson's Nikita (1990) and Subway (1985), set in the RER stations at La Défense and Les Halles. Much edgier was Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1996), an original portrayal of exclusion and racism in the Paris banlieue. More recently, Kassovitz had a massive international hit as an actor with the Jeunet-directed Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001), better known in Anglophone markets as Amélie. For more information on cinema in France, the website www.filmsdefrance.com has excellent Listings of French films, searchable by year or by name, as well as directors' and actors' biographies. The best Parisian source of information on films is the Les Halles videothèque.
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