The French Film Industry After World War I

 The French Film Industry After World War I

French film production declined during World War I,
1) as many resources were drained away to support the fighting.
2) Moreover, American films increasingly entered France.
3) In the years immediately following the war’s end,
    only 20 to 30 percent of films screened there were French,
4)with Hollywood supplying most of the rest.

Competition from Imports
1) What created the problems confronting French film production between 1918 and 1928?
2)  For one thing, imported films continued to pour into France in the 1920s.
3) American films were the most numerous, especially early in the decade.
4) Even though America’s share declined steadily throughout the mid-to-late 1920s,
5) other countries, primarily Germany and Great Britain, gained ground faster than did
     France.

The situation for exports was little better.
1)The domestic French market itself was relatively small,
2) and films seldom could recover their costs without going abroad.
3)Foreign films, however, were difficult to place in the lucrative American market,
4)and only a tiny number of French films had any success there during this period.
5)With American films dominating most other markets, the French depended largely
  on areas that already had cultural exchange with France, such as Belgium,
  Switzerland, and French colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia.
6)Companies were willing to experiment to find a distinctively French cinema able to
   compete at home and abroad.
7)Several directors central to the fledgling French Impressionist movement—
    Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein—
    made their early films for large firms.

Disunity within the Film Industry
1)French production was also hampered by disunity.
2)Before World War I, two big companies, Pathé and Gaumont,
   controlled the French film industry.
3)After the war, both cut back severely on production, the riskiest sector of the industry,
    and concentrated instead on surer profits from distribution and exhibition.
4)The largest French firms backed off from vertical integration just when
    vertically integrated firms were strengthening the Hollywood industry.

France’s production sector
1)consisted of a few large- and medium-sized firms and many smaller companies.
2)Often a director or star would raise money for a film, and if that film failed,
    the company went out of business or struggled along for another film or two.
3)This artisanal strategy offered little hope for competing with Hollywood.
4)In addition, most films had low budgets.
5)Even by the late 1920s, when the industry was doing somewhat well,
6)one expert estimated the average cost of a feature to be between $30,000 and $40,000—
   one-tenth the budget of an average American feature.

France - downturn
1)Just as bad, because of the lack of an oligopoly and vertical integration,
    the production sector’s interests clashed with those of the exhibitors and distributors.
2)Pathé, Gaumont, and the other established firms owned only 10 to 15 percent of
    French cinemas.
3)The independent theater owners wanted to screen what would bring the biggest audience—
   usually, American imports.
4)And often an American film was cheaper to rent than a French one.

Outdated Production Facilities
1)To make matters worse, technical facilities were outdated.
2)As in other European countries, French producers depended on the glass studios built
   before the war.
3)The lack of capital investment hampered companies in reequipping these studios to catch
   up with the technological innovations American firms had made during the 1910s,
   particularly in lighting.

Outdatedness continues in lighting
1)As a result, French filmmakers were unaccustomed to using artificial lighting
    extensively.
2) In the late teens, French visitors to Hollywood were awed by the vast lighting systems.
3)As director Henri Diamant-Berger observed in early 1918, “Lighting effects are sought
    and achieved in America by the addition of strong light sources, and not, as in France,
    by the suppression of other sources. In America, lighting effects are created; in
    France, shadow effects are created.”
4)That is, French filmmakers typically start with sunlight and block off parts of the light to
   create dark patches within the set.
5)American filmmakers had more flexibility, eliminating sunlight altogether and creating
   exactly the effects they wanted with artificial light.

Outdatedness in lighting continues
1)There were some attempts to bring this kind of control to French filmmaking.
2)In 1919, director Louis Mercanton rigged up portable lighting equipment to take
   on location for his realist filmmaking.
3)For the epic The Three Musketeers (1921–1922), Henri Diamant-Berger installed
   American-style overhead lighting in a studio at Vincennes.
4)Modern lighting technology became increasingly available during the 1920s, but it
    remained too expensive for widespread use.

The Three Musketeers (Henri Diamant-Berger, 1921–1922)