When it comes to giving coherence to the discussion of a series of artistic works, one likes to begin with a general idea that will bring some order to the individual chaos, or one would like in any case to avoid making merely a simplistic list of the items in question. However, I must confess to a critical failure in this instance. After asking myself the question several times, I still haven't been able to formulate an intelligent answer that would enable me to open the two or three desk drawers where the majority of French film production over the last fifteen years could be classified in due form. I am thus compelled to make of my inability an objective critical truth and to declare that the main characteristic of French cinema since World War II has been its variety or diversity. The problem with this general idea, of course, is that it brings me right pack to the particular.

Yet this idea has some relative critical interest when one compares today's French cinema to what it had become right before the war. In those days, the cinema's unity of purpose or ambition was obvious. It was so obvious that critics justifiably refer to it as "the French pre-war school," just as they refer to, say, German expressionism between 1919 and 1933 or the Soviet school of the years 1925-1935. This critical ploy is made possible thanks to two convergent phenomena of the pre-war period: the aesthetic kinship of the works produced and the small number of truly important creative artists who were working at the time.

Indeed, four names, and only four names, indisputably dominate the French cinema after the departure in 1934 of René Clair for England, first, and then America. These are Jacques Feyder, Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, and Jean Renoir. We could also add to this list Marcel Pagnol, but his work is rather inconsistent and in the margins, if you will, of the "page" being composed by the four men named above. Naturally, it would be unfair completely to reduce the pre-war French cinema to the work of these filmmakers. I am not forgetting Jean Grémillon or even Sacha Guitry, but I am dealing here with the French cinema after 1934, a date that is doubly symbolic not only because of the departure of Clair at a time when the new technology of the talkies had more or less been mastered, but also on account of the death of Jean Vigo.

The year 1934, for example, was the one of Le grand Jeu [The Big Game, by Feyder], 1935 that of Pension des Mimosas [Mimosa Hotel, by Feyder], Toni [by Renoir], and La Bandera [Escape from Yesterday, by Duvivier]; 1936 was the year of Le Crime de M. Lange [The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Renoir], La belle Equipe [They Were Five, by Duvivier], and Jenny [by Carné]. In 1937, we had Une Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country, by Renoir] and La grande Illusion [Grand Illusion, by Renoir], Pépé le Moko [by Duvivier], Carnet de bal [ Dance Card, by Duvivier], and Drôle de drama [Bizarre Bizarre, by Carné]. In 1938, there were La Bête humaine [The Human Beast, by Renoir] and Quai des Brumes [Port of Shadows, by Carné]; finally, in 1939, came La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game, by Renoir] and Le Jour se lève [Daybreak, by Carné, below].

All of these films, despite a definite diversity (although my aim here is not to emphasize it), undoubtedly have something in common. The kinship between their written scripts and their visual styles is blatant: it is what has sometimes been dubbed the "dark realism" of French pre-war cinema. The origin of these pictures may possibly be found in the naturalistic French novel of the 1900s, where Feyder found so much inspiration and Renoir even some of his titles: i.e., Emile Zola's La Bête humaine and Guy de Maupassant's Une Partie de campagne. But from today's perspective, it has become quite clear that the invoking of the naturalistic tradition was more an alibi than a model. In fact, the "dark realism" of the French pre-war cinema was a fatalistic romanticism. Its "realism" fed on a social kind of fantasy and had more in common with Jacques Prévert or Mac Orlan than with Zola or Maupassant. Indeed, the screenwriter who left his mark on this period more than any other is precisely Prévert. But whether the scenarios were by Prévert, Charles Spaak, or Henri Jeanson, they were all built on the same dramatic structure: that of tragedy translated into contemporary — and popular — social reality. And the masterpiece of such proletarian tragedy remains Le Jour se lève. As if to make the dramatic kinship among the films of French pre-war cinema even more explicit, the same actor embodies the tragic destiny of the popular hero or common man from film to film: Jean Gabin, who can be seen in pictures from La Bandera and Pépé le Moko to La Bête humaine and Le Jour se lève.

Naturally, this critical simplification of mine calls for numerous emendations. Still, I don't think I am wrong when I say that our cinema at this time looked as characteristic abroad as did Italian neorealist cinema of the postwar period. In order to grasp the contrast between that unified spirit and today's diversity, we must understand what the absolutely exceptional state of French cinema during the war really was. Indeed, a priori, it would seem totally normal if the German Occupation of France and the country's subsequent material impoverishment had condemned French cinema to silence or at least extreme mediocrity. Yet, paradoxically, even though one cannot aver that the year 1941 was one of revival to compare with the admirable quality of film production during 1938-1939, it remains indisputable that the break with the pre-war situation, far from causing artistic decline, actually allowed for some renewal of inspiration among filmmakers. The temporary isolation of French cinema, then — off in a closed circuit, as it were — was not altogether detrimental.

Let me now mention just two of the factors behind this paradox: the temporary disappearance of foreign competition, whose absence in the long term could have weakened French artistic productivity, but which in the short run permitted the blossoming of a series of original film experiments; and the gradual disappearance of what I have called a "dark" or "pessimistic realism" — a realism by now so out of tune with the times that Henri-Georges Clouzot's "dark" Le Corbeau [The Raven, 1943] was even wrongly accused by some of a kind of treason. This inflammatory accusation was truly excessive, and Le Corbeau, of course, went on to become a classic among film buffs. Yet such a charge is significant given the period's atmosphere. If French cinema was no longer down in the dumps, so the reasoning went, its palette should duly adorn itself with all the colors of the intellectual rainbow. And this is exactly what happened.

Naturally, the variegation of color had to be matched by a variegation of talent. But by 1939, Feyder had already stopped making films; in 1940, Renoir and Duvivier were in the United States; and of the four "greats," only Carné was left. These vacant places, as well as those created by the widening of the domestic market, had to be filled. The years 1941 to 1945 thus saw not only the emergence of such new names as Jacques Becker, Louis Daquin, and Robert Bresson, but also the promotion of filmmakers who until then had remained in the shadow of the four "greats": Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Grémillon, Jean Delannoy, Henri Decoin, and Christian-Jacque.

At the Liberation, or shortly thereafter, the above list of names was expanded by those, among others, of Jean Cocteau, René Clément, Yves Allégret, André Michel, and Georges Rouquier; then later by André Cayatte and Jacques Tati; and finally by the return of the departed: Julien Duvivier, René Clair, Jean Renoir, and Max Ophüls. I am mentioning all of these directors just as they come to mind, without trying for the moment to distinguish among their virtues, in order to underline the abundance and vitality of French film production after World War II. But it is high time to put some order into this list of names and to establish a few hierarchies.

It should already be clear, in any event, that the true sea-change, or transformation in the history of French sound cinema, occurred not in 1945 but in 1941. And it is interesting to note that, despite the differences in context and cause, this date is also the one that more or less marks some kind of renewal in the American cinema as well: after all, Citizen Kane was made in 1941. Must we then conclude that, beyond the immediate historical influences and regardless even of economic or political forces, an aesthetic ripening was occurring of which filmic events were only the tangible manifestation? In Hollywood as in Paris, the war may only have been the earthly rumble that made the ripe fruit fall from the tree.

Whatever the case, let's see what we can do with such a premise. I spoke earlier of France's "pessimistic" or "poetic realism" and what happened to it under the German Occupation. This dark substance upon which the French cinema had fed for so long could nevertheless not stop nourishing it — at least in part. During the war itself, Le Corbeau bore witness to the curious vitality of such a pessimistic stew. Carné, who himself had served it up so brilliantly in Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se lève, was to return to the same dish after his incursion into the fairy-tale genre with Les Visiteurs du soir [The Devil's Envoys, 1942]. He then made Les Enfants du Paradis [Children of Paradise, 1945, above] and Les Portes de la nuit [Gates of the Night, 1946]. Of these two admirable films, one could say that they moved "dark realism" from its classical period to its baroque age. Moreover, the latter picture reveals to an even greater extent how this "realism" was not so realistic after all. Unlike Prévert, however, Carné seems to have hesitated between the shadowed poetry of Juliette ou la clé des songes [Juliet, or the Key to Dreams, 1951] and the prosaic naturalism of Thérèse Raquin [1953]. Unfortunately, and without of course denying the beauty of his style, the relative failure of Marcel Carné well reveals that such "dark realism" has become by now an incongruous aesthetic.

This is also what the career of Julien Duvivier exemplifies, even though his oeuvre does not have the peaks of Carné's. In fact, this excellent craftsman was never a real artist, and if he succeeded before the war with films like Pépé le Moko and La Bandera, that is because he was carried by a powerful wave whose crest he managed to surf so well. The movies he makes today keep up the illusion of his artistry, especially abroad, in that they are made with undeniable skill and continue to embody the scraps of mythology with which some people persist in identifying the French cinema.

But the true reason why this anachronistic trend of "dark realism" manages to survive — sometimes quite successfully — is that it is enriched or nuanced by a psychological subtlety foreign to its mythological underpinning. This is characteristic of Yves Allégret's work, for example: Manèges [The Cheat, 1950] and Les Miracles n'ont lieu qu'une fois [Miracles Happen Only Once, 1951]; or, more recently, of Henri Verneuil's films: Des Gens sans importance [People of No Importance, 1956], for one. And it is also true of some pictures by Jean Delannoy, most notably Le Garçon sauvage [Savage Triangle, 1951].

Only Clouzot, however, succeeded in establishing himself as a resolutely dark filmmaker (even darker than the old Carné) at the same time that he nevertheless was a thoroughly modern one. His Le Corbeau (right) exemplified the only original and viable mutation in the vein of social pessimism during the years from 1936 to 1940. But Clouzot also specialized, if not in police movies (such as Quai des Orfèvres [Jenny Lamour, 1947] and Les Diaboliques [Diabolique, 1955]), at least in a certain dramatic "suspense" or "tension" of which violence is the ultimate expression (Le Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear, 1953], for instance).

If the phrase "dark" or "poetic realism" fairly well characterizes the French pre-war school, then, one could put under the label of "psychological realism" a whole series of works that are representative of the output of the last ten years. Pessimism is still frequent in these films, but it is more moral than social, it no longer appears to be systematic or thoroughgoing, and the mise-en-scène does not try to create through lighting or scenery a kind of metaphysics of disaster that transcends and even precedes the screenplay. The word "realism," which is an extremely dubious epithet as applied to the "dark" Le Jour se lève, is for this reason a more judicious term when it is used to describe the psychology behind Clément's Jeux interdits [Forbidden Games, 1952].

But one cannot speak of "psychological realism" with regard to the French cinema without mentioning, before any directors' names, the two screenwriters whose bylines appear in the credits of the films that are most representative of this artistic trend. I am speaking of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (right), who, as a team, occupy a place in French film production of the last twelve years that is almost as important as that of Prévert before the war. This duo authored practically all the screenplays of films by René Clément, Claude Autant-Lara, and Jean Delannoy. And the difference in quality of the films that finally came out of these screenplays is, all things considered, a consequence of the degree of talent of their directors, whom, on the basis of their originality, I have listed in descending order. Jean Delannoy, for his part, is to "psychological realism" what Julien Duvivier is to "dark realism": when the tide ebbs, that is to say, it is Delannoy who will remain stranded on the beach. The best of his pictures — La Symphonie pastorale [The Pastoral Symphony, 1946] and Dieu a besoin des hommes [God Needs Men, 1950] — are in the end only honorable efforts, and the lesser ones, like Les Jeux sont faits [The Die Is Cast, 1947] and Notre Dame de Paris [The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1956], are utter disasters.

Claude Autant-Lara, whose talent was revealed during the war by Douce [Love Story, 1943] and Le Mariage de Chiffon [The Marriage of Chiffon, 1942], is an uneven filmmaker whose critical or analytical faculty is uncertain (witness Le Bon Dieu sans confession [God without Confession, 1953] and Marguerite de la nuit [Marguerite of the Night, 1956]), but whose dour and biting personality affirms itself brilliantly when his subject is well chosen (as in La Traversée de Paris [Four Bags Full, 1956]). We also owe to Autant-Lara the first and most exemplary psychologically realistic film, Le Diable au corps [Devil in the Flesh, 1947], which was adapted from the famous novel by Raymond Radiguet.

In the case of René Clément, who débuted right after the Liberation with La Bataille du rail [Battle of the Rails, 1946, right], we are dealing this time with one of the strongest and most original talents of the postwar era. Furthermore, it is his frequent collaboration with Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost that justifies the partial grouping of Clément under the label "psychological realism." In fact, Clément distinguishes himself above all through his very personal synthesis of documentary realism and rigorous style. In the otherwise stylish Monsieur Ripois [Knave of Hearts, 1954], for instance, he was able to film almost unnoticed in the streets of London, with his actors playing the scenes as he wanted them to do, unimpeded by onlookers, who became his unwitting extras, as it were. In this respect, Clément is probably the most representative filmmaker of the postwar generation, one who reacted against the romantic idealism of the French school of the 1930s and who had learned his lesson from newsreels and war documentaries, where the blinding reality of events takes precedence over any attempt to aestheticize them.

This kind of art is nevertheless very different from what is called neorealism, even though René Clément did make a brilliant foray into this arena with Au-delà des grilles [The Walls of Malapaga, 1949]. Neorealism, it's true, itself presupposes the priority of reality over its expression, of the recording of events over their manipulation through style. But this does not hold true for Clément, who always starts from an imaginative screenplay, which he then fleshes out with all the components of the real world. As much as he can be called a realist, then, Clément can also be dubbed a formalist; and if preference must be given to one of these designations, I would vacillate by calling him a realistic formalist, as one can see this auteur on display in films like Le Château de verre [The Glass Castle, 1950], Monsieur Ripois, and the recent Gervaise [1956].

Actually, neorealism, as defined by the Italian cinema, has not had much influence in France, with the exception perhaps of the particular and extremely heartwarming case of Alex Joffé in such pictures as Trois Telegrammes [Three Telegrams, 1950] and Les Assassins du dimanche [Every Second Counts, 1956]. And, where neorealism is concerned, we must also consider the short-lived (and for this reason unfortunate) exception of Georges Rouquier in his remarkable film Farrebique [1946]. In general, however, one can say that if the war has brought the French cinema back to a certain level of reality, to a certain taste for objectivity toward the outside world, such objective reality has not become the focus of films here. It has simply been integrated into the traditional predilection of French art for, let us say, "enriched analysis" — that is, into French art's talent for a certain novelistic, by which I mean transformative, intelligence.

In this respect, Jacques Becker, for one, appears to be the modern heir to the evolution of our cinema since the end of the war. This filmmaker, a former assistant to Jean Renoir, is noteworthy for the extreme accuracy of his take on things, for the heightened sensitivity with which he directs his actors, and for the rigorous application of his style. With or without the screenwriter Annette Wademant, Becker has painted an astonishing picture of French bourgeois youth — more tender than satirical — in Rendez-vous de juillet [July Rendezvous, 1949, above], Edouard et Caroline [Edward and Caroline, 1951], and Rue de l'Estrapade [Strappado Street, 1953]. His masterpiece, however, is undoubtedly the admirable Casque d'or [Golden Helmet, 1952], which did not garner the success it deserved here in France.

Apart from the limited survival of "dark realism" and the important place occupied by what I have called "psychological realism" — itself often inspired by literary (sometimes dramatic but more often novelistic) sources — any analysis of French film production of the last few years will enable us to discern another trend: that of the film with a thesis. It must be understood that, in a limited sense, such films are truly exemplified only by André Cayatte, whose every film since Justice est faite [Justice Is Done, 1950] is a social plea directly or indirectly linked to the general issue of justice: Nous sommes tous des Assassins [We Are All Murderers, 1952] is against the death penalty; Avant le Déluge [Before the Deluge, 1954] is about petty crime among upper-middle-class youth; and Le Dossier noir [The Black File, 1955] is about the difficulties of being a sentencing judge. But if one broadens somewhat the definition of the film-with-a-thesis to include every work in which the investigation of a social issue takes precedence over the novelistic exploration of autonomous characters, then Cayatte remains only the chief representative of a "Cartesian" group among whose members I would also place Yves Ciampi, with Le Guérisseur [The Healer, 1954] and Les Héros sont fatigues [Heroes and Sinners, 1955], and Jean-Paul Le Chanois, who made L'Ecole buissonnière [Passion for Life, 1949] and Les Evadés [The Escaped, 1955].

With this last effort at classification, I think I have exhausted every possibility of putting some order to the recent output of the French cinema, but in the process I failed to mention more than two or three names of great importance. As a consequence, I must now present individually the major filmmakers yet to be discussed. I will begin with two particular cases that partly belong to the past. The first is Jean Cocteau, who, due to bad health, has probably put a stop to his film career. His work, however, will continue to shine like a jewel, one naturally made of material different from the kind usually associated with the cinema. As far as I'm concerned, perhaps his most successful pictures — even more so than his overtly poetic screen productions — are the two adapted from his theater plays, L'Aigle à deux têtes [The Eagle with Two Heads, 1948] and, above all, Les Parents terribles [The Storm Within, 1948], both admirable examples of the transmutation of drama into film.

I don't know whether my second instance here, Marcel Pagnol, will make more films in the future, but, whatever the case, I doubt that his future work will change in any way what we already know about him — about his genius as well as the limitations of that genius. It is common in French criticism to regard Pagnol as "anti-cinema," because he once proclaimed that the ideal film was "canned" theater and then went on to effectively embody his own proclamation. In fact, however, the case of Marcel Pagnol is not so simple. At the same time as he provided his theater audience with a cinema venue, Pagnol also introduced into French cinema a regional inspiration, an ethnographic realism (that of the south of France), which one can consider the forerunner of Italian neorealism, on whose birth I believe he had a definite influence. Pagnol's last few films have continued in his earlier vein in that they are simultaneously typical of the Provence region and literary, if not dramatic or theatrical, works. Manon des sources [Manon of the Springs, 1952] is a kind of peasant epic on the glory of water, without which Provence would only be a desert full of rocks. This very long, uneven, sometimes boring film is nevertheless a worthy example of the resurgence in the cinema of a Mediterranean tradition. Unfortunately, Pagnol has neglected technique here to an unacceptable degree; and, as he is incapable of controlling his artistic inspiration, he mixes the best and the worst of it without distinguishing between the two.

With René Clair, we are dealing with a filmmaker who continues to participate in, indeed make, cinema history, even though he has been part of it for a long time already. Therefore I need not dwell too long on the obvious qualities of this fine director, whose reputation abroad is as great as it is at home in France. The reason is that Clair's work is easily accessible to a foreign audience, and the reason for that can be found in this auteur's very aesthetic. For, in a way, René Clair has remained a maker of silent movies. Whatever the importance and quality of the dialogue may be in his recent films, the visual expressiveness inherent in these pictures still prevails over the verbal expressiveness of their dialogue, and one almost never loses what is essential if one misses part of what the actors are saying (with the possible exception here of the overtly philosophical La Beauté du Diable [Beauty and the Devil, 1950, above]). Jean Renoir's talent, by contrast, has blossomed only in the talkies, where the interrelationship between what the characters do and what they say can be as intimate as in a novel. It follows that the subtler charm of his films must be less perceptible to those who do not understand French very well — which, if you accept my thesis, is the reason for Renoir's own relative lack of recognition, or prestige, outside his native country.

The explanation for René Clair's greater popularity, by contrast, must be sought in the nature of his message. The auteur of Sous les Toits de Paris [Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930] is, in my view, no more universally representative of French art than the auteur of La grande Illusion, but the aspect of French tradition that René Clair exemplifies is perhaps the most universal. It is the one, I mean, that goes back to Montaigne, Molière, and Voltaire, then all the way up to Anatole France and beyond; and it is a tradition where intelligence prevails over sensibility and, above all, sensuality. This is a tradition intent on clarity, lucidity, irony, and analysis. Besides the fact that what pertains to intelligence is a priori easier to convey on screen than what pertains to the senses, I also believe that the work of Clair pretty much corresponds to the opinion that foreigners generally hold of French sensibility. In a word, he is our ideal film ambassador.

Yet, I do not believe that Renoir is in fact less representative of the genius of French cinema. He is, so to speak, at the opposite pole, but it's a pole that is no less necessary to stabilize the axle of the sphere. The tradition embodied by Renoir itself passes through Rabelais, Rousseau, Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola. It is a tradition that excludes neither intelligence nor satire, but which envisages the world through the lens of pleasure and sensuality rather than the filter of abstract beauty. If you want reference points other than literary ones, René Clair would be the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean Renoir would be . . . the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, naturally. The eroticism of Ingres's odalisques is abstract, for it emerges from the design, from the balancing of the curves — i.e., from what we can call the intelligence of form. The eroticism of Auguste Renoir, by contrast, stems from the caress of light on women's skins; indeed, that caress is there already in the very look of his subjects.

In any case, while René Clair was absent from France during the decisive years of the pre-war sound cinema, it is the work of Jean Renoir — through the originality and richness of its inspiration — that indisputably dominated the French school of the years 1934 to 1939. Though Renoir participated in the movement toward "dark realism," his work was in the vanguard of cinema in other ways, as well, and it prefigured to a great extent the future evolution of cinematic form and content. As early as 1932 with Boudu sauvé des eaux [Boudu Saved from Drowning], for example, Renoir was systematically looking for that depth-of-field which would renew the whole of cinematographic art. It is only with Citizen Kane in 1941 that the American cinema would in its turn break away from the classical style of editing to go over to the side of deep focus and long takes. In this regard, La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game, 1939], apart from being a film whose technical applications have yet to be fully explored, is the place where this type of realist mise-en-scène reached its zenith.

Renoir, like Pagnol, also had a fundamental influence on Italian cinema: Toni [1935], for instance, prefigured several neorealistic tendencies. But, more than anything else, films of his like Le Crime de M. Lange [The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936] and La Règle du jeu evidence the maturity of their screenplays, the complexity of their artistic intentions, and the subtlety of their feeling and characterization. All of this, taken together, enables us to say that, with Jean Renoir, the cinema has become an adult art form on an equal footing with the novel, to which it is no longer inferior when it comes to breadth of subject and richness of visual, as well as aural, expression. At the same time, Renoir's oeuvre is one of the most accurate testaments to the nature of pre-war French society; and, in this regard, Georges Sadoul has aptly compared the significance of La Règle du jeu on the eve of the Second World War with the prescience of Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro [The Marriage of Figaro, 1778] in its adumbration of the French Revolution.

To be sure, such statements on my part apply, above all, to the Renoir of the period before the war. "Exiled" for ten years to Hollywood, to which he could not adapt as well as René Clair but where he nevertheless made some admirable pictures, Renoir did not simply switch back to the form and content of La Règle du jeu upon his return to Europe, as if nothing had ever happened. Open to influence and inclined toward innovation, Renoir today, at age sixty-three, appears to be concerned less with social realism than with moral reflection in films like French Cancan [1955, above] and Eléna et les hommes [Paris Does Strange Things, 1956]. Although he remains an inimitable painter, he is now less a novelistic one than an easel painter. Steeped, through his birth and upbringing, in the greatest pictorial culture one could imagine, heir to impressionism, Renoir managed to translate onto the screen the soul of French painting at the end of the nineteenth century, not by imitating or retracing it, but above all by integrating it into the life and tempo of his own day.

Except for its use of color, Renoir's recent work, which has reverted to the classical style of cutting, may appear artistically less revolutionary than his pre-war French production. Perhaps these later films are less overtly revolutionary, but this is probably because Renoir has reached such a degree of maturity that technique has become secondary, and style now corresponds so perfectly to substance that the two fuse seamlessly into one artistic whole. These days, Renoir's subject, like Chaplin's, is transparent: it is simply humanity.

Let me finish now with an "émigré" filmmaker who, in the last few years, has returned to France to make his films. I speak of Max Ophüls, whose strange career might be a source of misunderstanding. Abroad, Ophüls's name is synonymous with La Ronde [Roundabout, 1950], which has enjoyed great international success. It is doubtless a spectacular and brilliant film, extremely nimble in its writing as well as in its filming — above all the movement of the camera; and it is also full of a rather Germanic eroticism. But Max Ophüls is much more than the reputation garnered by La Ronde (right). With regard to style, Ophüls's passion for the circumlocutions of the camera, as well as for the intricacies of scenic design, makes him the perfect exemplar of the cinematic baroque. The French themselves do not have a baroque sensibility, but Ophüls, after all, is from the Saarland and his culture is Viennese. With Lola Montès [1955, below], the imaginary and extravagant biography of the famous real-life courtesan, Ophüls has even moved the baroque to the edge of surrealism, and the eroticism that reveals its hellish and accursed face in this film paradoxically transforms itself into a kind of tragic puritanism.

I have kept for the last the two most original, and therefore unclassifiable, talents of postwar French cinema: Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson. Nonetheless, both filmmakers have a few negative features in common. First, neither produces many films. Bresson made his first feature-length film, Les Anges du péché [Angels of the Streets], in 1943. Since then, he has made only three films: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne [Ladies of the Park, 1945], Le Journal d'un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest, 1951], and Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé [A Man Escaped, 1956].

For his part, Tati, whose name was known before the war only on the basis of a few pantomimic sketches for the music-hall stage, has suddenly revealed himself to be a comic filmmaker and actor of genius with Jour de fête [Day of Celebration, 1949]. After this unexpected success (all the distributors had initially refused the film), Tati could easily have made lots of money with sequels featuring his comic character of the little rural mailman. He chose instead to wait for four years, and, after much reflection, he revised his formula completely. The result this time was an extraordinary masterpiece about which one can say, I think, that it is the most radical innovation in comic cinema since the Marx Brothers: I am referring, of course, to Les Vacances de M. Hulot [Mr. Hulot's Holiday, 1953, above]. These days, Tati is finally putting the finishing touches on his third film, Mon Oncle [My Uncle, 1958], which will also be his first one in color.

Although we cannot compare their respective products, we can nevertheless observe in Tati, as in Bresson, the same scrupulous attention to his art. To make a film is, for each of these men, an operation of the mind that's as private and meditative as writing a novel or a poem is for an author when he fine-tunes his voice and polishes his style. This is so much the case for Bresson that his way of working has become legendary and is probably even unique in the history of cinema since Chaplin. I think that moviegoers outside France will soon be able to judge the result in his latest picture, Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé.

They will see in this film a kind of police story on its surface, with a dramatic development worthy of Hitchcock or Clouzot. Yet the movie's true concern is wholly moral and wholly interior. Bresson always defuses the "criminal" nature of the action in order to bring us back to what is essential: the story of an act of faith and tenacity. Beyond the facts, beyond even the personalities of the characters and even their respective consciousnesses, it is their souls and destinies that Bresson manages to reveal to us. But he reaches this end only after applying an aesthetic asceticism that aims to rid film — particularly one of this kind — of all its usual spectacular devices, especially in the acting. This is why, to make certain he would be successful, Bresson (right) used only non-professional actors in Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé. If only one honest man were needed to rescue the cinema from its own deadening course, Bresson alone, in all his saintliness, would suffice to get the job done.

At the conclusion of this rather incomplete survey, I am well aware of the artistic injustices I have had to commit. But this is the price one must pay if one doesn't want to go on for too long. In a more complete overview, I would have had to treat figures like Christian-Jacque, André Michel, Jacqueline Audry, Jean Dréville, Henri Calef, Guy Lefranc, Claude Vermorel, and more filmmakers whose names I'm sure I am forgetting. I wouldn't want to conclude, either, without mentioning the names of a few younger filmmakers whose talent has revealed itself more recently, and who should make their way into the limelight in the coming years. I'm thinking, among others, of Michel Boisrond, Roger Vadim, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and above all of Alexandre Astruc, who is the most demanding and original of the directors in this group. And, of course, I should also have talked about Abel Gance, whose epic genius dominated French silent film but who, when sound arrived, never received the technical resources and financial support he deserved. As early as 1927, he had invented for his film Napoléon the triple screen, which is the ancestor of Cinerama and indirectly of CinemaScope. Today, Gance is trying to give this technical invention new meaning in the form of "Polyvision," which, if you will, would be to classical cinema what counterpoint is to melody.

In closing, I must now set forward a few general ideas. Again, one is the evidence of a split in the French pre-war school into a series of individual talents, among whom very few — indeed, only a handful — can be classified by tendency or affinity. And yet, I think that all of our film production in France has something in common, something that has nothing to do with subject matter or even with style itself, but which is rather a way (possessed by the French cinema alone) of tackling the problems of narrative development and cinematic expression. One could perhaps say that the French cinema distinguishes itself today through a certain intellectualism — the tradition to which I referred earlier in my discussion of René Clair — which calls upon the values of intelligence more readily than it does upon those of feeling. That is, in French cinema, the accuracy and elegance of the analysis matter more than (broadly speaking) the human relevance or social significance of the subject. This intellectualism is frequently confirmed by the literary origins of the screenplays themselves and the relative faithfulness of these adaptations, the apex of which unquestionably remains Bresson's Le Journal d'un curé de campagne. French cinema, you see, more and more emulates literature, specifically the novel.

Such features as I describe above might be considered a limitation, and they probably are to some extent. Whatever the case, I do see in them an obstacle to the distribution abroad of the best French films, in that the subtlety of their novelistic dialogue is precisely what makes them so difficult for a popular international audience. Yet this subtlety is also what gives a touch of nobility to the language spoken in these pictures. Everyone knows that I admire the American, Italian, and Japanese cinemas too much to put the French cinema above them and all other cinemas, and a French critic would not be a good judge if he did that. But although other countries' films are sometimes superior to French ones because of qualities our pictures don't have, I think I can at least posit that French film is the one that bears the most complete testimony to the aesthetic dignity of cinema as a whole.