Dossiers

 

Cinema celebrated its centenary in 1995: on 28 December 1895, the Lumière Brothers held the first screening for a paying audience at the Grand Café in central Paris. The first moving images they had recorded on film were shown under the title Sortie des usines Lumière (Leaving the Lumière Factory). France was the birthplace of the Seventh Art and to this day remains a hub of the film world. It has given it some of its legendary figures: from the inspired trail-blazer Méliès and the generation of poetic realism in the thirties (Renoir, Carné, Prévert), to the New Wave cinema of the sixties (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Malle, Rohmer). This French tradition of cinéma d’auteur or art films stands alongside brilliant commercial successes (Pathé, Gaumont) and internationally recognized stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve.

In 2002, cinemas throughout France sold some 184.5 million tickets, with box-office takings standing at 893 million euros. 58.4% of the population go to the cinema at least once a year, and 34.6% at least once a month. The number of cinemagoers is currently experiencing a slight upturn and attaining the level at which it stood in the 1980s, even though it is declining in the long term, due to the competition from television and video cassettes.

The French film industry thus continues to play an international role. It has benefited from a comprehensive support system at the filming, production and distribution stages, organized under the aegis of the National Centre for Cinematography (CNC), which redistributes the funds obtained from a tax on box-office takings, sales of video cassettes and television broadcasts. The “advance against takings” system, which is at the heart of this scheme, is also a means of encouraging emerging talent and supplementing - in the case of ambitious projects - the funding provided by the usual production circuits. This policy has had a quantitative effect. With over 5,240 cinemas - 97 of which are multiplexes - France is among the countries with the densest network of cinemas.

The number of feature films produced every year exceeds 120, of which approximately a third are first films. Exceptionally for Europe, French films accounted for 28.5% of ticket sales in 2000. This shows that French productions hold their own in the face of American films, which enjoy a virtual monopoly on many foreign markets. The success of the DVD, which consolidated its growth in 2002 and continued progressing in 2003, has brought about deep-seated changes in methods of disseminating films. A new kind of “cinemagoer” is emerging.

The vitality of the French film industry is epitomized by several directors who have a personal touch, such as Bertrand Tavernier, Maurice Pialat, Bertrand Blier, André Téchiné, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Jacques Beineix. Quality films with a wider appeal likewise draw on a reservoir of talent, such as Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Claude Berri, Claude Lelouch and Patrice Leconte, whose films have been enthusiastically received by the public. Comedies starring actors such as Josiane Balasko, Michel Blanc, Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot, or Thierry Lhermitte have also done well. The genre came back into favour in 1993 with The Visitors, meeting with the kind of success it used to enjoy in the 1960s. In 2002, Alain Chabat’s Asterix & Obelix Meet Cleopatra pulled in over 14.2 million spectators. As for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie from Montmartre, it attracted an audience of 8 million in France and nearly 20 million abroad.

Some French film directors enjoy an international reputation, such as Jean-Jacques Annaud and Luc Besson. Finally, a new generation of film-makers like Olivier Assayas, Cédric Klapisch, Arnaud Desplechin, Manuel Poirier, François Ozon, Olivier Dahan, Mathieu Kassovitz and Agnès Jaoui is emerging, even as their successors at the European Foundation for Audiovisual Professions (FEMIS), a school located at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, are preparing to step into the fray.