These days cinema audiences are becoming more sophisticated. Even general audiences are appreciating that there is a whole wide world of film production, and that foreign films can be enjoyed with subtitles – once an anathema to many. The Lives of Others, a German language film, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, has proved extremely popular with non‐German audiences. Of course, the Cinema did not begin in Hollywood – as some might like to believe – but in France in 1895. And the French did not just “invent” the cinema, but have a fine and honourable history of producing hundreds of films a year, many of the cinemas great directors, screenwriters, actors, and films are French.
The Historical Dictionary of French Cinema presents a broad overview of French cinema and its development all in a reasonably sized, 450‐page single volume. A fairly short list of acronyms and abbreviations is followed by a detailed chronology which begins in 1888 with Etienne Jules Marey's development of the chronophotographe, a precursor to the film camera, and then, of course, the historic date of 28 December 1895 when the Lumière brothers held a projection of 20 of their films, along with Léon Gaumont, Alice Guy, and Georges Méliès in attendance. The films screened included the famous L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de La Ciotat – this occasion being generally regarded as the birth of the cinema. The chronology ends with 2006 when Jacques Audiard's De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrêté won the César for Best Film and Laurent Achard's s Le Dernier Defous wins the Prix Jean‐Vigo.
Before the book launches into its hundreds of cross‐referenced dictionary entries there is an introduction covering: The Silent Cinema: 1895‐1930; Global Dominance and Declines; The Arrival of Sound and the “Golden Age”; Occupation, Liberation and the Tradition de Qualité; New Waves, New Revolutions, Militant Cinema; and, in conclusion, Heritage, Plurality, and The Look. The hundreds of cross‐referenced dictionary entries begin with À Bout de Souffle (1960), the first feature‐length film of New Wave director Jean‐Luc Godard, and end with Claude Zidi (1934‐) covering many of the major actors, directors, films, movements, producers, and studios associated with French Cinema. As well as biographical information, entries also discuss the significance and impact of each individual, film, movement or studio included.
The authors accept that the work cannot be totally comprehensive, and it is inevitable that any reader with some knowledge of French cinema is going to find a particular favourite has been omitted. I was surprised to find no reference to Louis Buñuel. I appreciate that he was a Spanish film maker, but he did work in France for a period and produce some classics, including Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid), Cet Obscur Objet du Désir (That Obscure Object of Desire), and Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), to name just a few.
The book has a substantial, and very useful bibliography which includes general reference works, film periods, major topics which have shaped critical debate and film scholarship, concluding with a list of major journals and useful web sites. The whole is well laid out and printed in a clear font. Nine black and white photographs are included in the centre section. The first photograph is from François Ozon's 8 Femmes (2002) and is so poorly reproduced and dark, that I could hardly see it. The rest are a little brighter but are rather grey, and they are not really the best illustrations of French cinema – more an afterthought! Frankly they mar an otherwise reasonable work on the cinema.
The major weakness of this work is that most film titles are in French, and there is no French‐English translation. The authors are aware of this as there is a Reader's Note which says that for “various considerations” they have used only the French titles of films in the work. As one with hardly fluent French I found this most unhelpful. For example, I wanted to find reference to Last Year at Marienbad. I had to look on the internet via Wikipedia to discover that the French title is L'Année Dernière à Marienbad. The film was not listed as an entry in the book. Back to Wikipedia to ascertain that the director was Alain Resnais. He has a quite a substantial entry in the book, and, listed with his films is L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961), on which there is a paragraph including its award at the Golden Lion at Venice, various other interesting information, as well as the fact that it was made in a climate of censorship. Quite difficult to extract this information from a book which is intended as a reference work!
Despite some shortcomings there is still much to be commended in Historical Dictionary of the French Cinema. It is a useful reference work and source book on the French cinema, which will be found of interest to students of the cinema, those on film studies courses, and those wishing to study the place and influence of French cinema in the world.
