Occupation and Quality

From 1940 to 1944 France was defeated and occupied, and its cinema carried on under German and Vichy control, producing, strangely, some of the most admired films in its history. After the Liberation the industry was reorganised, the state took on a new role in film, the Cannes festival began, and a polished, literary style of film-making dominated the 1950s until a group of young critics attacked it. This chapter follows that story. It deals with a painful period, so it sticks to what is widely documented and says where the details should be checked.

Film Under the Occupation

After the defeat of 1940 the country was divided between a German-occupied zone and a zone run from Vichy by a collaborating French government, and the Germans took over the whole country in 1942 (check). Film was controlled in several ways.

• State control. The Vichy government created a body to organise the film industry and license its workers (check the name and date). Its work later passed to a postwar body, the CNC (see below).
• Exclusion. Jewish film professionals were banned from working, and some had to leave the country or go into hiding. Others were persecuted.
• German involvement. A German-owned company in Paris, Continental Films, produced a number of French films, and German officials oversaw the industry (check).
• Censorship. Scripts and films were checked, and British and American films were banned.

A Busy Cinema

Cinemas did well in these years: attendance rose, partly because American films were gone and partly because cinemas were among the few warm places to go (check the claim). French studios made a large number of films. Many were light entertainment, some were costume dramas that allowed directors to avoid contemporary subjects, and a few have been read since as hidden comments on the times. Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), a medieval fantasy by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, is the best-known case. Whether audiences understood it as a message at the time is a matter of debate.

Liberation and the Purge

After the Liberation in 1944 there was a purge of people accused of collaboration, including some in the film world. Some were banned from working for a period. The case of Henri-Georges Clouzot is often cited: his thriller Le Corbeau (1943), a story of poison-pen letters in a small town, was made by the German-owned company and was criticised after the war as an attack on French society; he was banned from working for some time and returned to directing (check the details). The case shows how hard it was to separate art, circumstance and politics.

The Blum-Byrnes Agreement and the CNC

Two decisions in 1946 shaped the industry for decades.

• The Blum-Byrnes agreement. A financial agreement between France and the United States, under which the United States cancelled part of France's war debt and gave new loans, and French cinemas agreed to show more American films. It provoked protests from French film workers, who feared that the industry would be swamped (check the terms).
• The CNC. A state body for cinema, the Centre national de la cinématographie, was set up in 1946 (check), taking over from the wartime organisation. It grew into the main channel for state support of film, a subject taken up again in Chapter 10.

Together these decisions began a long argument that runs through the whole course: how to keep a national cinema alive beside the American one.

The Cannes Festival

The Cannes film festival was planned for 1939, as an alternative to a festival in Italy that was thought to be too influenced by fascist politics, and was cancelled when war broke out. It was held for the first time in 1946 (check). The festival's top prize is now the Palme d'Or, introduced in the 1950s (check). Cannes helped to give French cinema a showcase and to make France the centre of an international film culture.

Auteurs of the 1940s and 1950s

The Cinema of Quality

The dominant style of the 1940s and 1950s was later given a label by its critics: the cinéma de qualité ("cinema of quality") or the "tradition of quality". It meant polished studio films, often literary adaptations, with well-constructed scripts, fine sets and established stars. Directors such as Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy and René Clément are usually associated with it, as are the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (check). Some of these films were distinguished, and the label is not simply an insult. It does show the thing that the next generation rebelled against.

The Critics Strike

In 1954 a young critic called François Truffaut published an article in the magazine Cahiers du cinéma, usually known by the title "A certain tendency of French cinema" (check). In it he attacked the cinema of quality as literary, stuffy and controlled by scriptwriters, and called for directors to be the real authors of their films. The article is one of the most famous in film criticism. It is the starting point for the New Wave and for the idea of the auteur, both discussed in Chapter 5.

Remembering the War Years

The war years were a source of argument long after. The early postwar films stressed resistance, for example La Bataille du rail (1946), a drama about railway workers, in a spirit that suited a nation wanting to remember itself as heroic. A much later documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), by Marcel Ophuls, questioned the picture, and it was kept off French television for years, until the early 1980s (check). The gap between the two shows how the memory of the Occupation changed, a subject to which Chapter 10 returns.

Exercises

Next chapter: The Nouvelle Vague, which follows the critics who turned film-makers.