Vive Le France! Happy Bastille Day to all those who celebrate — or just want an excuse to eat a croissant today.
Perhaps no other nation outside the U.S. has such a long, vast, and varied cinematic history as France. Historians still quibble about who really invented cinema — the French Lumière brothers’ innovations in motion picture exhibition developed largely in tandem with Thomas Edison out in New Jersey. The histories and legacies of our national industries are intertwined in ways that are too manifold to mention in just an intro.
But a phenomenon I’ve certainly noticed from my dalliances with the Cannes Film Festival many years ago is that the French often think they “understand” American cinema better than actual Americans do. Often times, they’re right on the money. (See: Gray, James.) But today, I thought I’d flip the script and try to understand the last century of French history through their cinematic output. What follows is a list of ten films, one per decade, that tries to locate the national character through art.
1930s
It’s tough to pinpoint what exactly the French poetic realist style in cinema is — because it’s become so diffused into just about everything else that follows, describing it is akin to detailing the flavor of water. In essence, most movies that try to do some slightly heightened version of verité-style reality for cinema so a dramatic story can take place within that world have taken some inspiration from this style. It’s not stagey, but it’s also something distinct from the world we inhabit.
A great progenitor of this style is Zero for Conduct (available on the Criterion Channel) by Jean Vigo, who unfortunately left far too brief a footprint since he didn’t make it to 30 years old. This 45-minute work is a rabble-rousing tale of children’s rebellion at a boarding school. It’s a lot of anarchic fun that speaks to France’s unique history of resistance to institutional authority.
1940s
The outbreak of World War II casts a long shadow over filmmaking in continental Europe, much of which faced Fascist occupation and the decimation of their national industries. But cinema did not grind to a complete halt in Nazi-occupied France, as shown by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (available on the Criterion Channel).
This grim, shadowy thriller presages the development of the film noir, a style of filmmaking that emerged thanks to the many European emigres into the American studio system. These directors brought with them a grim outlook on individuals’ ability to withstand the pressures of conformity and authority. Clouzot’s film resembles The Crucible as a French town tears itself apart over accusations and rumors stemming from an anonymous individual known as “The Raven” who sends letters to pillars of the community that threaten to divulge their secrets. It’s not hard to extrapolate what this film is actually about when you consider its historical context and how many people in France were willing to collaborate, or at least remain complicit, with their German invaders.
1950s
There’s no way to discuss what cinema is today without bringing up the contributions of the French New Wave. This was the first reflexive generation of filmmakers for whom a vision of the world was largely shaped by their engagement with movies growing up. As such, they treated it as something worthy of serious study and practice as an art form — not just as disposable entertainment.
More on the hallmarks of what people more commonly associate with the French New Wave in the next entry, but I do want to make sure that the so-called “Left Bank” gets some credit for their innovative work as well. This loose collective of filmmakers engaged with cinema as an art comparable to other more established disciplines, and they brought with it a more political and philosophical engagement. I am drawn like a moth to a flame with Alain Resnais’ quasi-experimental Hiroshima Mon Amour (available on the Criterion Channel), a work that combines a rigorous interrogation of how outsiders gaze upon ravaged nations with a probing experimental form. The prologue of this film changed my life.
1960s
The more free-wheeling, self-referential style that you’d recognize for how it impacted American cinema’s New Hollywood and Sundance generations really starts to take bloom in the 1960s. The Cahiers du cinéma directors began first as film critics for the publications that gave them their label, and they broke down films within their genres and looking for the stamps of true “auteurs” whose fingerprints were identifiable even when executing an uninspiring script. They made films about people like themselves who viewed themselves as characters in a movie, and they weren’t afraid to explode reality with bursts of obvious and irreverent cinematic technique.
The guiding light of this movement is Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (available on Max and Criterion Channel). This form-shattering work follows a small-time thief in Paris who’s convinced he’s a gangster in an old Hollywood film. It’s a post-modern demonstration of the feedback loop between images and reality, functioning both as an essay on the grammar of cinema and an explosion of its conventions altogether. An added bonus: it’s genuinely quite funny! Don’t feel that just because this is a canonized classic that it can’t be full of vitality.
1970s
Just as in America, the ‘60s were a time of liberation in France. But that wave of possibility also crested there by the end of the decade as the May 1968 revolts showed how freedom could tip over into anarchy and disorder. Revolutions spark change, just as they can also spur backlash and counter-revolutions.
The confinement of freedom forms the subject of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (now touring theaters across the country with a new restoration). The film’s extended conversations demonstrate the depths of discontent among a young Parisian man grappling with the failed promises of sexual liberation. His attempts to calibrate a love triangle to his advantage show how youthful energy begins to fizzle and flame out.
1980s
France was no stranger to the forces of commercialization that make the 1980s one of the least dynamic decades for cinema. (However, their infrastructure supporting public funding of the arts does leave them less vulnerable to corporate influence.) I must admit, this was the toughest decade to identify a standout French film from someone whose prime wasn’t more heavily associated with a different era.
At least the ‘80s gave us Leos Carax, an experimental radical unafraid of alienating his audience with films like Mauvais Sang (available to rent on Amazon). Literally translating to Bad Blood, this twisted romance refracts the time’s AIDS anxieties into a grittier look at the modern city. It’s a natural maturation and evolution of the nouvelle vague style into something a little bit more inscrutable and less easily embraceable.
1990s
Judging from a number of the films above, you could be forgiven for thinking that France is an ethnically homogenous country. It took the multiculturalistic emphasis of the post-Cold War ‘90s to break open the country’s filmmaking to encompass colors beyond the whiteness of the tricolore.
No film better bottled up the fury of those traditionally ignored by France’s cinematic gaze than La Haine (available on the Criterion Channel). Mathieu Kassovitz’s combustible drama, whose title literally translates to “Hate,” follows three angry young men stewing in their resentments following civil unrest in the banlieues of Paris. Unlike the classical cinematic imagery of Paris which romanticized the city in black-and-white, this film uses the darkness to find the seediness and menace lurking just outside the frame of tourist-friendly imagety.
2000s
If you need a clear demonstration of how the French film industry differs from America’s, consider how their early pioneers used the form. The Lumières filmed laborers leaving their workplaces, while Edison filmed carnivalesque attractions. So there can’t be a full reckoning with the French contributions to the art form without somehow pulling in some documentary work! There’s perhaps no greater tribute to the enduring vibrancy of France’s mid-century innovations than Agnès Varda’s constantly adapting humanistic look at her country. Up until her passing in 2019, she kept pushing the boundaries of the form — finding ways to open it up to the common people rather than clustering it among the intelligentsia.
Making the best of advances in digital video technology, she set out into the countryside to make non-fictional The Gleaners and I (available on the Criterion Channel). This self-reflexive work finds parallels between filmmaking and gleaning, the art of making something out of what society discards because it sees as nothing. Consider this the benevolent flipside to La Haine — expanding the frame can result in locating previously invisible subjects willing to fill the space with their heart and humanity.
2010s
As far as recent history goes, you can find just about any kind of work produced by the vast French film industry. But the standout for me is something that can adequately grapple with how labor plays into a changing technological landscape. It’s about locating the man inside the machinery of filmmaking as it becomes an increasingly industrialized product.
Paying subscribers can read a full piece on why I think Stéphane Brizé is such a skilled observer of modern economic dynamics. Here’s a little excerpt about why I think his 2016 film The Measure of a Man (available to rent from various digital platforms) is a cut above your traditional drama about work:
“With a naturalistic camera that borrows from conventions of the neorealist drama — handheld camera, unadorned frames, quietly intuitive zooms — Brizé situates this drama fully in the realm of the everyday. But just because we are meant to take the aesthetic as reality does not mean there are no fascinating choices shaping the viewing experience. The camera has a tendency to linger on [French leading man Vincent Lindon, who plays down-on-his-luck former factory worker Thierry], especially when he’s not actively engaged in conversation. In a perverse way, it echoes the spirit of rugged individualism that has left him fighting a losing battle for his own professional integrity. He’s isolated in the frame just as he’s isolated in society.”
2020s
I’m going to resist the urge to indulge recency bias and say that Romain Gavras’ Athena is the defining French film of the current decade, even as a clip from the civilians vs. cops thriller went viral recently because people mistook it for something out of the country’s recent riots.
Instead, I’ll use this as yet another opportunity to implore you to watch Alice Diop’s staggering Saint Omer (available on Hulu). This inversion of the courtroom drama poses a powerful challenge to whose struggles and sacrifices art is willing to put at the center of the frame. With radical empathy and quiet confidence, Diop inserts images rich with the complexities of Black womanhood into the classical canon where so few exist. It’s a wonderful ellipsis on a century of French cinema, a worthy endpoint for a country that has done so much to expand the form while also suggesting there are still frontiers to blaze and wrongs to make right…
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
Extra, extra, hear all about it!
As hinted in last week’s newsletter on Raging Bull, the great
is back on with new posts! This is making me want to revisit Lynne Ramsay’s film Morvern Callar — don’t think I fully appreciated it on the first go-round.I also enjoyed this appreciation of Game Night by
on — it’s a movie that I’ve grown much more fond of over the five years since its release (and featured prominently in my recent appreciation of its strI had a wonderful time interviewing Cheryl Dunye for Slant Magazine as her pioneering debut feature The Watermelon Woman entered the Criterion Collection. Maybe don’t read it all if you want to keep some element of surprise for your first viewing, but Dunye’s insight at the top about the long road for this landmark of Black queer cinema to receive canonization is valuable for anyone to know.
You saw a preliminary version of it here first, but if you want full descriptions for every A24 movie, I ranked them all for Decider. I’ll be updating this list every month, too, with their new releases!
I reviewed Bird Box Barcelona (now streaming on Netflix) for /Film. If this is what awaits us as Netflix tries to sequelize their “hits,” we are in for some rough days ahead.
For Decider, I said skip it to Seasons and The Tutor (both on Netflix).
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Talk to you this weekend, paid subscribers!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall