It was in France, on December 28th, 1895, that the first programme of projected films was shown to a paying audience, when the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere screened a selection of short films in the basement of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.
Outside of Hollywood, French cinema inarguably became the most important in the world over the course of the 20th century, producing such great masters of the art as Marcel Carne, Rene Clair, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jean Cocteau, Julien Duvivier, Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville. The late 1950s saw the emergence of the New Wave of younger directors, many of them former film critics, among them Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. Apart from the late Truffaut, all are still working today, although only Rohmer, at 80 the oldest of them, has come close to the peak of his form in recent years.
Today's older generation of French film-makers also notably includes Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Sautet, Maurice Pialat, Patrice Leconte, and Claude Berri, whose companion films based on Pagnol novels, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, have been among the most successful non-English language films around the world in the past two decades.
However, with Hollywood and its slick, high-powered marketing campaigns exerting greater domination than ever on world cinema, the non-English language film has become an endangered species at the international box-office.
The multiplexes have taken over and they have no interest whatsoever in showing sub-titled films because they believe such movies belong in arthouses. They have a point. JeanPaul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac, featuring Gerard Depardieu, was one of the biggest successes shown at the late, lamented Light House cinema in Dublin during the 1990s, but it attracted minimal audience figures when it played in one of the city's suburban multiplex screens at the same time.
Television channels in Britain and Ireland have cut back dramatically on the number of foreign-language movies they transmit and those they do show have been sidelined to graveyard post-midnight slots. As a result, film distributors - who rely heavily on television sales in addition to cinema returns - are acquiring fewer foreign films, making it harder for those movies to secure any significant release outside their own countries.
One way in which French cinema has responded to this crisis is by funding some expensive, large-scale productions and filming them in English. However, the results have been less than impressive - for example, the big-budget, midatlantic equivalent of a Europudding in the case of Luc Besson's style-oversubstance extravanganzas, The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc, which, despite all the compromises to lure multiplex audiences, made a strong commercial impact only in France.
Directed by an Englishman, Roland Joffe, Vatel, which opened this year's Cannes Film Festival, was another example of a production paying more attention to the ingredients than to the contents. Although it is set in a Chantilly chateau visited by King Louis XIV and his entourage in 1671, only the title role is played by a French actor - Gerard Depardieu as the anagramatically named valet, Vatel.
IRONICALLY, the casting of token American actors such as Uma Thurman and the grating use of attempted French-accented English line deliveries are likely to alienate the type of audience which might be attracted to this lavish costume drama in the first place. It's very likely that far more people would see Vatel if it were in French.
The French audience for indigenous productions is still strong enough to ensure that a number of them can break even or turn a profit every year, even without a release in other countries. The phenomenon of the past few years has been the enormous success of the simplistic, US-influenced and car-chase-driven Taxi and Taxi 2, but local hits on that scale are extremely rare nowadays.
What makes the declining international profile of French cinema so regrettable is that France continues to produce such an abundance of talent on both sides of the camera. We may not be in the middle of another New Wave, but many French film-makers of distinction have emerged in the past two decades, among them Patrice Chereau, Olivier Assayas, Cedric Klapisch, Francois Ozon, Arnaud Desplechin and Dominik Moll.
And the number of world-class French actors working in French and international cinema today is remarkably impressive - among them are Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort, Michel Blanc, Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jean Reno, Sandrine Bonnaire and, of course, the ubiquitous Depardieu.
