THE FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY AFTER WORLD WAR I

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

French producers faced an uphill struggle in trying to regain their prewar strength. Throughout the late silent era, industry experts believed that French production was in a crisis. In 1929, for instance, France made 68 features, while Germany produced 220 and the United States 562. Even in 1926, the worst pre-Depression year for European production, Germany had managed 202 films to France's 55, while Hollywood outstripped both with about 725. In 1928, one of the best years for the Europeans, France made 94 films, compared to 221 for Germany and 641 for the United States. As such figures suggest, France's “crisis” fluctuated in its severity, but the struggle to boost production gained little ground in the postwar decade.

Competition from Imports

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

TOTAL NUMBER  PERCENT RELEASED IN FRANCE

YEAR OF FEATURES FRENCH AMERICAN GERMAN OTHER

The situation for exports was little better. The domestic French market itself was relatively small, and films seldom could recover their costs without going abroad. Foreign films, however, were difficult to place in the lucrative American market, and only a tiny number of French films had any success there during this period. With American films dominating most other markets, the French could count on only limited export—primarily to areas that already had cultural exchange with France, such as Belgium, Switzerland, and French colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia. Thus there was a continuous call for a distinctively French cinema that might help counter foreign competition, both at home and abroad. Companies were apparently willing to experiment, and several directors central to the fledgling French Impressionist movement—Abel Gance, Marcel UHerbier, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein—made their early films for large firms.

Disunity within the Film Industry

French production was also hampered by disunity. Before World War I two big companies, Pathe and Gau-mont, controlled the French film industry. 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. Thus the largest French firms backed off from vertical integration just as vertically integrated firms were strengthening the Hollywood industry. France’s production sector consisted of a few large and medium-size firms and of many small companies. The latter often made only one or a few films each and then disappeared. This artisanal production strategy offered little hope for successful competition with America.

Why were there so many small companies in France? The answer lies partly in domestic business traditions. In the 1920s, French business was still dominated by small companies; the move toward mergers and big corporations in other industrialized countries had not yet caught hold. During this decade, between 80 and 90 percent of French cinemas were owned by individuals. Because it was easier to make money in distribution and exhibition, people investing in the film industry usually put their money into one of these areas, avoiding the risks of production.

As a result, the French tendency toward small production companies persisted. Someone, often a director or star, would raise money for a film. If it failed, the company went out of business or struggled along for another film or two. Many films of this era also had low budgets. Even by the late twenties, when the film industry was slightly better off, one expert estimated the average cost of a French feature at $30,000 (in 1927) to $40,000 (in 1928). (During the late 1920s, budgets for Hollywood features averaged more than $400,000.)

Thus, the interests of the three sectors of the industry—production, distribution, and exhibition— often conflicted. Most important, small exhibitors had no stake in French production. They wanted to show whatever would bring them the most money—usually American imports. Responding to the demands of theater owners, distributors provided Hollywood films. Moreover, it was often cheaper to purchase a foreign film than to produce a French film.

Producers repeatedly called for the government to limit imported films. Inevitably, however, the more powerful distributors and exhibitors, who made most of their money on imports, opposed any quota, and they typically won out. Despite some minor measures to limit importation in the late 1920s, a strong quota was not passed until the 1930s.

Not only did the government fail to protect producers from foreign competition, it also assailed the industry with high taxes on movie tickets. During the 1920s, these taxes ran anywhere from 6 to 40 percent, depending on a theater’s size and income. Such taxes hurt every level of the industry, since exhibitors could not risk losing patrons by raising admission prices and hence they could not pay as much to the distributors and producers of the films.

Outdated Production Facilities

To make matters worse, technical facilities were outdated. As in other European countries, French producers depended on the glass studios built before the war. 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 (see pp. 70-72).

As a result, French filmmakers were unaccustomed to using artificial lighting extensively. In the late teens, French visitors to Hollywood were awed by the vast lighting systems. 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.”1 That is, French filmmakers would typically start with sunlight and block off parts of the light to create dark patches within the set. American filmmakers had more flexibility, eliminating sunlight altogether and creating exactly the effects they wanted with artificial light.

There were some attempts to bring this kind of control to French filmmaking. In 1919 director Louis Mer-canton rigged up portable lighting equipment to take on location for his realist filmmaking. For the epic The Three Musketeers (1921-1922), Diamant-Berger installed American-style overhead lighting in a studio at Vincennes, which thus became one of the earliest studios in France to be so equipped. Modern lighting technology became increasingly available during the 1920s, but it remained too expensive for widespread use.

Although some new studios were built, few had extensive backlots of the sort owned by the larger American and German producers. Most studios were in the Parisian suburbs, surrounded by houses rather than by open space. Large sets often had to be constructed in rented studios. Partly as a result of this and partly through a desire for realism, French filmmakers went on location more often than did their counterparts in Germany or the United States. Chateaux, palaces, and other historic landmarks appear as the backdrops of many French silent films; filmmakers also made a virtue of necessity by using natural landscapes and scenes shot in French villages.