French Film Culture and British Cinema

Abstract

By the end of the 1950s it was a truth as widely acknowledged in Britain as in France that British cinema was moribund, and it was from that time onwards that film culture in Britain began to take its lead from France. The French influence was felt on film criticism, film theory and, to a degree, on film exhibition and production. It was partial at first but, thanks to the activities of the journals Movie and Screen, it had become widespread by the middle of the 1970s and was no longer confined to the cinema but embraced the fields of politics, literary criticism and education. However, the French influence was always felt selectively and usually used polemically: as frequently seems to have been the case in Britain,³ groups of intellectuals exploited France and the French tradition to point up what they most disliked about their own culture and what changes they wished to bring about. This means that the impact of French film culture in Britain cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of the British cinema in the immediate post-war years.⁴

We knew we had an authentic British tradition; we hated it.

Ben Brewster

I taught myself French by reading Cahiers du cinéma.

V. F. Perkins

BAZIN. En quoi, d’après vous, la médiocrité du cinéma anglais est-elle exemplaire?

RIVETTE. Cinéma anglais, c’est-à-dire cinéma de genres sans que ces genres aient une nécessité profonde. D’une part il n’y a pas, comme à l’intérieur du cinéma américain, des genres ayant leur justification propre comme le western, le policier … d’autre part, ce n’est pas non plus un cinéma d’auteurs, puisque personne n’a rien à dire. C’est un cinéma boiteux, un cinéma entre deux chaises. Un cinéma purement fondé sur l’offre et la demande. …

(1957)¹

One is hard put to find, in the whole British cinema, any real ‘authors of films’, total creators capable of moulding a subject after their own personal vision and of looking at the world and its people with fresh eyes: like a Jean Renoir, a René Clair, a John Ford, an Orson Welles, an Eisenstein, a Dovjenko. The only true ‘revelations’ of the British cinema since 1945 have either been silenced, for all practical purposes, by the hostility of the British film industry or have departed to America.

Louis Marcorelles (1957)²