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EPILOGUE
and recently given Government financial encouragement. When the trade-body representing the whole French film industry, Unifrance, issues publicity, it includes and is proud of the work of its experimentalists and short film-makers. The British feature film industry couldn't care less about the short film-makers. It has no interest at all in experiment. It is this kind of attitude towards cinema as a whole that makes such a big difference between British and Continental films. In France, although there are frustrated film-makers like everywhere else, there is less antagonism to young talent in the creative field, especially recently. The national film school, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, now 16 years old, has produced students whose work and ideas have had influence. Britain and America have no such national school of cinematography.
It is true that television has not as yet made its impact to anything like the degree that it has in the USA or the UK, but even if and when it does, it is most unlikely to have the effect which it has had in English-speaking countries because of what can only be called French film-consciousness. And, as Louis Marcorelles has pointed out, the influence of the French cine-clubs has not been without some effect, although it must be remembered that Paris still traditionally sets the pace for the country as a whole.1 He also makes the point that French film criticism of an intelligent kind has a far wider outlet than similar criticism in Britain or America. Groups of theorists have grown up around the two French film journals, Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, who are not despised and jeered at by older professional film-makers as they would be in Britain.
To turn to films, it is often forgotten by critics today that the post-war Italian neo-realist movement had part of its roots in the French cinema of the thirties.2 Jean Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935), Toni (1935), La Bete Humaine (1938) and La Regie du Jeu (1939) represented an expression of social realism which was a forerunner of the later Italian work and was a true reflection of its period.
1 Sight & Sound, Vol. 27. Xo. 4. Spring, 1948. 2Cf. page 532 etseq.
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