Movies and Film: It's Art, Stupid!

It's Art, Stupid!

Perhaps the most important piece of information you'll need to remember about French as opposed to other film traditions is this: From the early silent years, many of France's filmmakers have been quite self-conscious of themselves as artistes and of the status of their work as "high art." Seems simple enough, but this one fact has enormous implications for the history of twentieth-century film.

The history of American cinema is first and foremost a history of entertainment. Sure, directors like John Ford and Orson Welles should be considered artists (auteurs, to recall the term you'll read more about shortly); conversely, there are long stretches of French film history in which nothing artistically interesting was going on, and the studios were set on squeezing just as much money out of the nation's cinema-goers as even the most cynical American moguls.

But the fact remains that in France, more than in any other country, the culture of the high arts and the culture of film have marched hand in hand since the turn of the last century. No other nation has produced such a massive library of theoretical writings on the aesthetics and philosophy of film, from the earliest treatises of the silent era avant-garde (Artaud, Canudo, and others) to the Cahiers du cinma writers to contemporary theory of film by intellectuals like Gilles Deleuze.

Moreover, from the first decade of the twentieth century, numerous artists from other mediums—painting, drama, sculpture, music—have been involved in the art and culture of French film, establishing the country's motion picture industry as a leader in its wider artistic scene. And there has surely been more self-consciousness in France of film as artistic expression than in any other nation's cinematic tradition: more "mainstreaming of experimentalism," if you will.

After World War II, for example, while the tiny American avant-garde was largely living and filming abroad or "underground" and attracting small art-house audiences, Jean-Luc Godard helped finance Jacques Rivette's Quadrille (1950), an experimental 40-minute picture in which four people sit around a table just staring at each other silently. (Can you imagine an American audience paying to watch something like that at your local multiplex? Didn't think so.)

In short, to acquire a sophisticated appreciation of French film, you must learn to view a Godard the same way you'd take in a Manet at a museum. Look carefully, absorb, contemplate, and appreciate, bearing in mind that what you're viewing is often as carefully crafted a work of art as anything hanging on the walls of the Louvre.