The French, masters of life

THE impact of watching Marcel Carne’s “Children of Paradise” for the first time, alone in a dark theater in 1964, was so overwhelming in its passion, vitality and grandeur that it forced me to reevaluate all the other movies I considered masterpieces. With the elusiveness of love as its theme, the 1945 film creates a glittering world of backstage life, peopled with performers who discover themselves the heroes and villains in the tragicomedy of their lives.

In one of cinema’s most breathtaking opening sequences, the camera pulls back to reveal the vast, crowded Boulevard du Temple lined with sideshow attractions, sweeping the viewer into a carnival in the Paris of 1840 -- the circus acts, the barkers and the pickpockets. As the camera moves down the street it introduces the beautiful Garance, billed as the Naked Truth, and some of the men who will enter her life: the actor Frederick Lemaitre, the talented mime Baptiste and the thief Lacenaire. One is immediately ensnared.

The French are terrific at carrying off romantic gallantry but equally unsparing at laying bare the nastiness, the dankness and pure evil that can consume the human spirit. While French cinema is hardly free of mediocre movies, it has been sustained, like that of the Japanese, by a continual flow of gifted filmmakers grappling honestly with the human experience. At their best, French movies, past and present, remain essential viewing.

The French have made their share of epics and spectacles, but the best -- Sacha Guitry’s 1954 “Royal Affairs in Versailles” comes to mind -- have been marked by a sense of intimacy that may be the abiding hallmark of the fine French film. Beyond the narrative storytelling, the technology of the cinema to a large extent evolved in France, where its potential as an art form was explored more seriously than elsewhere, and the tradition of quality and innovation endures.

Arguably the milestone event in world film exhibition occurred in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895, when Louis and Auguste Lumiere presented a program of shorts, such as the literally titled “A Train Arrives at the Station.” Leon Gaumont and Charles Pathe were soon pioneering production companies, and in 1896 Gaumont’s secretary, Alice Guy, suggested the company start telling stories instead of turning out what were essentially newsreels. Guy quickly became the world’s first female director and maker of the second known narrative film. The industry developed rapidly, and by 1902 Georges Melies culminated six years of fanciful shorts with the whimsical “A Trip to the Moon.”

By 1908 Pathe was involved in the Film d’Art Company, formed to film the classics of the stage as performed by major stars. Sarah Bernhardt remarked that “This is my one chance at immortality” and in 1912 made “Queen Elizabeth,” a decidedly static business but sufficiently prestigious to enable Adolph Zukor to secure Paramount’s fortunes with his roster of “Famous Players in Famous Plays” productions. French cinema got a shot in the arm with the arrival of comedian Max Linder, to whom Chaplin acknowledged his indebtedness, and the World War I era serials of Louis Feuillade -- “Fantomas,” “Les Vampires” and “Judex” -- notable for the style, atmosphere and wit Feuillade brought to his mystery adventures featuring elusive master criminals.

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BOLD INNOVATIONS

IN the years after World War I, Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc and Germaine Dulac would pursue experimental cinema with enduringly impressive results while Abel Gance would bring bold innovative techniques to such epics as “La Roue” (1923) and “Napoleon” (1927), with its awesome triple-screen sequences expressing the headlong rush of warfare and history. Meanwhile, Jean Renoir and Rene Clair launched their careers, with Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” (1937), which looked back to World War I, and “The Rules of the Game” (1939), which evoked the coming of World War II.

A number of French filmmakers responded to the German Occupation heroically, with “Children of Paradise” and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s daring and controversial “Le Corbeau” (“The Raven”) (1943), about a small provincial town experiencing a rash of poison pen letters, representing dramatically different responses to dire wartime conditions.

Postwar years brought the emergence of the great comedian-filmmaker Jacques Tati and his bumbling alter ego Mr. Hulot, and masters such as Max Ophuls continued the grand tradition with such sublime period pieces as “La Ronde” (1950), “The Earrings of Madame de ... “ (1953) and “Lola Montes” (1955), but before long the “cinema of quality” would be under assault byyoung filmmakers who would constitute the New Wave -- Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette et al -- and “Breathless,” “The 400 Blows,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad” became staples at U.S. art houses. In the ‘60s Claude Sautet would become one of the most accomplished directors anywhere for the next quarter-century.

By the end of the ‘70s the French cinema began to lose its dominance, yet it has filmmakers who continue to astonish and beguile, such as Claire Denis and her venturesome “The Intruder” and Michael Haneke, with his “The Piano Teacher” and “Cache.” The recent “Cache” indeed represents French cinema at its most rigorous: posing tough questions about society and about one’s self in relation to it but refusing to offer the satisfaction of any clear answers. The ambiguity “Cache” evokes reverberates through French cinema all the way back to its beginning.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

When shopping

Unless otherwise indicated, the films listed here are available on DVD in the U.S. In some cases, titles not available here may be obtainable through foreign sources.

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THESE TALES OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE ARE NOW AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE.

Classics

Georges Melies’ “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). Timelessly amusing and inventive.

Louis Feuillade’s “Fantomas” (1913) (on DVD in U.K.), “Les Vampires” (1915) and “Judex” (1916). Witty serials featuring master criminals; high art in a modest genre.

Abel Gance’s “La Roue” (1923), one of the most exciting railroad movies, and “Napoleon” (1927), a monumental treatment of the life of the emperor, culminating in dazzling Cinerama-like triptych sequences.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928). Still the definitive evocation of the martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans.

Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou” (The Andalusian Dog) (1929), Bunuel’s “L’Age d’Or (1930) and Jean Cocteau’s “Blood of a Poet” (1930). Powerful surrealistic classics.

Marcel Pagnol’s “Fanny,” “Marius” and “Cesar” trilogy (1932). Alexander Korda directed the first and Marc Allegret the last, but Pagnol’s interconnected tales of life on the Marseilles docks are all of an irresistible piece.

Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct” (1933). Never was rebellion at a boy’s school so lyrical.

Marcel Carne’s “Port of Shadows” (1938) epitomizes pre-war melancholy fatalism, with army deserter Jean Gabin crossing paths with Michele Morgan.

Rene Clair’s “Under the Roofs of Paris” (1930), a tale of bohemian Paris of considerable charm, and “A Nous la Liberte (1931), a musical satire on the dehumanizing effects of the assembly line that inspired Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”

While all of Robert Bresson’s films are essential viewing, his greatest is arguably “Diary of a Country Priest” (1951), a portrait of a young priest in a struggle with his faith.

Rene Clement’s “Forbidden Games” (1952). The devastating impact of war upon children is unforgettable.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Le Corbeau” (1943) is among the most daring of films made under the German Occupation, while “Diabolique” (1955) lives up to its title as one of the scarier films of all time.

Jean Cocteau’s entire oeuvre is essential, with his exquisite “Beauty and the Beast” (1946) the most accessible and his surreal “Orpheus” (1950) the most audacious.

Max Ophuls’ “La Ronde” (1950), “The Earrings of Madame de ... “ (1953) (both VHS only) and “Lola Montes” (1955), constitute a trio of splendiferous period pieces -- the first a sly rendering of Schnitzler’s sexual merry-go-round, the second another romantic carousel set in motion by the sale of a pair of diamond earrings. In the third Ophuls imagines the courtesan and dancer reduced to a circus attraction.

Jean Renoir, one of France’s greatest, never made a film not worth seeing, but “Grand Illusion” (1937) and “The Rules of the Game” (1939) remain at the top of the list.

Jacques Tati introduced his tall, bumbling alter ego in “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” (1953) and in “Playtime” (1967) turned him loose in a dehumanized, mechanized metropolis.

Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face” (1959) is horror at its most poetic and poignant.

Luis Bunuel enjoyed a final splendid decade in France, launched by “Belle de Jour” (1967), in which Catherine Deneuve’s bourgeois housewife discovers liberation by working in a brothel.

Jean-Pierre Melville specialized in meditative reworkings of the American crime film, the best of which is likely “Le Samourai” (1967), starring Alain Delon as a killer for hire.

Eric Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s” (1968) established his reputation as a filmmaker with a gift for making lengthy conversations cinematic.

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New Wave

All the major talents, starting with the idiosyncratic Jean-Luc Godard, have made films not to be missed. Key among Godard’s are “Breathless” (1960), with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Bogart-worshipping layabout; “Contempt” (1963), in which a script writer’s (Michel Piccoli) disintegrating marriage (to Brigitte Bardot) plays out against his attempt to get Fritz Lang to direct “The Odyssey”; and Godard’s latest, “Notre Musique,” set in Sarajevo and a wry meditation on war and its legacy.

Claude Chabrol revels in laying bare bourgeois hypocrisy. Two of his best are “Le Boucher” (The Butcher) (1969), a thriller and a compassionate view of sexual aberration, and “The Story of Women” (1988), with Isabelle Huppert as an abortionist in Vichy France.

Jacques Demy’s romantic sensibility was at first unleashed in “Lola” (1961) and will be remembered for his Michel Legrand collaboration “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964).

Louis Malle’s most notable French films include “Le Feu Follet” (The Fire Within) (1963), in which Maurice Ronet’s alcoholic despairs of finding a reason for living; “Lacombe Lucien” (1974), about a rural youth ripe for recruitment by the Nazis; and “Au Revoir, les Enfants” (1987), in which a rural Catholic school becomes a refuge for Jewish children during World War II.

Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959) is a love story between a Frenchwoman and a Japanese architect while the tantalizing “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) finds a man trying to convince a woman they were lovers.

Jacques Rivette’s “Paris Belongs to Us” (1960) (VHS only) depicts students beset by sexual and political tensions; his harrowing “La Religieuse” (1966) (not on DVD or VHS) finds a young woman forced into convent life; and “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991) is the story of an aging artist inspired anew by a young model.

Francois Truffaut will be best remembered for his first two: “The 400 Blows” (1959), with Jean-Pierre Leaud’s appealing rebellious adolescent, and “Jules and Jim” (1962), an elegant, wistful take on the eternal triangle with Jeanne Moreau at the apex.

Agnes Varda’s finest moments occur in “Vagabond” (1985), with its compassionate but unsentimental look at a young drifter (Sandrine Bonnaire) and in “The Gleaners and I” (2000), a highly personal documentary in which she confronts her own aging.

Chris Marker has devoted himself almost entirely to documentaries, most famously the antiwar “Far From Vietnam” (1967) (not on DVD or VHS), as has Marcel Ophuls, who launched his documentary career with “The Sorrow and the Pity” (1971), an inescapably painful probe of France under the Occupation. Also unforgettable: Claude Lanzmann’s superb Holocaust documentary “Shoah” (1985).

Claude Sautet, a warm, perceptive storyteller, hit his stride in the ‘70s with “The Things of Life,” “Cesar and Rosalie” and “Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others.”

The emergence of Bertrand Tavernier with “The Clockmaker of St. Paul” in 1974 marked a break with the New Wave and a return to a classic style enlivened by passion and commitment: “The Judge and the Assassin” (not on DVD or VHS), “Let Joy Reign Supreme,” “Coup de Totrchon, “Life and Nothing But,” “Capitaine Conan” and the recent “Safe Conduct.”

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Contemporary

Standouts of recent decades have been Claude Berri’s two-part period saga of betrayal and redemption, “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring” (1986), and Andre Techine’s “Wild Reeds” (1994), a coming of age story affected by the Algerian War. In the ‘90s Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made his stunning trilogy “Three Colors: Red, White and Blue” exploring fraternity, equality and liberty in the modern world.

Increasingly impressive, Claire Denis made “The Intruder” (2004) (not on DVD or VHS), a boldly idiosyncratic telling of a man’s struggle for redemption. Michael Haneke brought unsettling insight to “The Piano Teacher” (2000), about a dangerously repressed woman, and to the recent “Cache,” which raised personal and political implications as a TV celebrity discovers he is under surveillance.