The chronicle of film in its early years is often the story of French innovation. In the U.S., Thomas Edison patented his Kinetoscope, a peepshow mechanism for seeing motion pictures, in 1891. But in France the Lumiere brothers figured out how to project movies onto a screen. Their rival, Georges Melies, broke with the 50-second limit of early filmstrips to make a three-minute movie in 1896—one that actually told a story. Melies also constructed the first working film studio as opposed to a room set aside for shooting. And according to Charles Drazin's French Cinema (published by Faber & Faber), France was also home to the first purpose-built movie cinema (1916), although that claim doubtlessly has other contenders.
Drazin also reminds us that, circa 1900, France had the world's largest film companies, a distinction it lost even before World War I cut off foreign markets and allowed Hollywood to dominate world cinema. Already in the early decades of the 20th century, the American audience for movies was so enormous that a few companies catering to local tastes could make a fortune. Those local tastes would soon spread across continents as Hollywood gained dominance over film distribution in many lands.
French Cinema is a thoughtful and provocative book, mostly for what is says but occasionally for what it ignores. How could Drazin complain about the bleak landscape of the nation's cinema during World War I, a time when Fantomas and L'Vampires were being produced? Mostly, though, Drazin discerns the meaning of major trends. By photographing scenes of everyday life the Lumieres, manufacturers of photographic equipment, established a tradition of documentary naturalism, while Melies, a stage magician, discovered the new medium's potential for fantasy and illusion. The early French moguls simply divested themselves of their holdings in the face of Hollywood and allowed, as early as the 1920s, a culture of artisanal and small entrepreneurial films to flourish.
Drazin doesn't disdain the more commercial French films disdained in harsh tones by the Cahiers crowd that launched the new wave of Goddard and Truffaut. He meticulously shows that even the films made in Occupied France under the gaze of Nazi authorities were usually similar in content and form to contemporary Hollywood, forced to allegorize their content under the strict supervision of the Production Code Administration.
