- Merovingian and Carolingian age
- The emergence of France
- France, 1180 to c. 1490
- The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
- France, 1815–1940
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French cinema has occupied an important place in national culture for more than a hundred years. August and Louis Lumière invented a motion-picture technology in the late 19th century, and Alice Guy-Blaché and others were industry pioneers. In the 1920s French film became famous for its poetic realist mode, exemplified by the grand historical epics of Abel Gance and the work in the 1930s and ’40s of Marcel Pagnol and others. A generation later the nouvelle vague, or New Wave, produced directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who “wrote” with the camera as if, in critic André Bazin’s words, it were a caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”). This shift was accompanied by an “intellectualization” of the cinema reflected in the influential review Cahiers du cinéma, in the establishment of several schools in Paris and the provinces where film could be studied, and in the founding of film museums such as the Cinémathèque (“Film Library”) in Paris.
Other directors of international stature include Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Robert Bresson, and Louis Malle. They exemplified the auteur theory that a director could so control a film that his or her direction approximated authorship. Filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Bertrand Tavernier, and Claude Bérri, as well as Polish-born Krzystof Kieslowski, extended these traditions to the end of the century, while directors such as Luc Besson, Patrice Leconte, Laurent Cantet, and Claire Denis carried on with them in the 21st century.
The leading film stars of the 20th century ranged from Fernandel, Maurice Chevalier, and Arletty to Brigitte Bardot, Gérard Depardieu, and Catherine Deneuve. Among those French actors winning accolades in the 21st century were Audrey Tautou, Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard, and Vincent Cassel. One of the world’s premier film festivals is held annually at Cannes, where the Palme d’Or is awarded to the best motion picture—most, in recent years, have come from outside France, a source of consternation to French film devotees. As in television, the French film industry faces competition from the United States and the United Kingdom. This led the government in the early 1990s to elicit the support of the European Commission to protect its native film industry. (For further discussion, see history of the motion picture.)