Book Review: The Faber Book of French Cinema

Published on Tuesday 15 March 2011 11:38

THE FABER BOOK OF FRENCH CINEMA Charles Drazin Faber & Faber, £25

IT ALWAYS seemed eminently sensible to me that Martin Scorsese titled his epic documentary study of American cinema A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

Cinema having trundled on its way now for upwards of a century, and spidered off into uncountable specialisms and hybrid forms and arcane extremes, any attempt at a full and factual account of the form's entire genesis, development and progress is inevitably "personal" – even if it should seek to cover only one territory.

So vast is the landscape that a route must be plotted; and inevitably, along the way, one person's key figure is another person's footnote, and one person's classic text is another person's non-event. Charles Drazin's personal history of French cinema opts for a primarily industrial approach to its subject. Specifically, it analyses how the French film business has developed as compared with – and in competition with – its American counterpart. Immediately, some aficionados of le cinema franais will twitch.

Why should the cradle of unabashed art film, uncompromising auteurs and rivetingly charismatic stars be held to the standard of trashy old Tinseltown, where cash is king? Well, quite. It's not that it's an entirely unreasonable or illogical comparison, given that France established dominance in making and selling cinema early in the medium's development, only to cede it to the US amid much weeping and gnashing of teeth; and Drazin does acknowledge and examine the inherent differences in artistic and industrial practice that have historically separated the two nations in terms of their respective cinema cultures.

But as useful and detailed as it is in parts, his book does seem limited by its preoccupation with box office over art – and particularly with the shadow cast by the big Hollywood sign. I mean, a full plot synopsis of Casablanca with copious quotes from the script? All to accompany an argument that the super-hit might have been influenced quite a bit by contemporaneous but overlooked French films?

These are tangents that a 400-page history can ill afford – particularly given that later on the influential and prolific current auteurs Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis will find themselves dismissed with one mention apiece, within a dutiful list of "women filmmakers".

A study of markets has its points of interest, of course; and Drazin's account of the shifting commercial concerns of French cinema in relation to the ever-expanding Hollywood machine will have its value to students of the subject. He's good on political context; and particularly useful around the war, where his interest seems to come alive.

I just hope that those students also pay attention to some critics who aren't quite so besotted with hot box office, and suspicious of art for art's sake. This is French cinema. It's all about art for art's sake. It's hard to trust a tour guide who pats Jean Vigo on the head saying his films "lacked the narrative drive upon which the commercial industry depends", and who dismisses Robert Bresson for neglecting "glamour" and "star appeal".

It's not just those eminent artists who get short shrift, either. Drazin appears to lose interest in his whole project round about the New Wave; the entire last 50 years is squished into little more paper than Drazin has earlier given over to one chap, the lightweight and far from influential 1930s satirist Sacha Guitry. (A chunk of that recent-years page weight, moreover, is reserved for the Dardenne Brothers… who are Belgian.)

There is colour and detail and dedicated research here. That's all commendable. Drazin is a friendly and fluent writer, who knows a lot. But this presents itself as a definitive study, and it isn't that. It isn't up to date enough; and it's altogether too concerned with the bottom line.