123-562: Profs (sometimes stylized P.R.O.F.S ) is a French comedy film directed by Patrick Schulmann and released on 18 September 1985. A young literature teacher, Frédéric Game, has very "cool" methods that separate from the high school where he has just arrived. With his friends Michel, Gérard and Francis, he decides to modify the traditions and renovate the high school. These teachers use anti-conformist educative methods : The four acolytes will use of several stratagems to get rid of some teachers they judge harmful. They will also use of
246-823: A billion admissions in the US alone), Hindi (?: no accurate data but estimated at 3 billion for the whole India/Indian languages) and Chinese (275 million in China plus a few million abroad), but above films shot in Korean (115 million admissions in South Korea plus a few millions abroad) and Japanese (102 million admissions in Japan plus a few million abroad, a record since 1973 et its 104 million admissions). French-language movies ranked 2nd in export (outside of French-speaking countries) after films in English. 2012
369-534: A broadcast license requiring it to support the production of movies. Some taxes are levied on movies and TV channels for use as subsidies for movie production. The French national and regional governments also involve themselves in film production. For example, the award-winning documentary In the Land of the Deaf ( Le Pays des sourds ), created by Nicolas Philibert in 1992, was co-produced by multinational partners, reducing
492-516: A concept used by most still photography studios from the 1860s onward; it was built with the same dimensions as Méliès's own Théâtre Robert-Houdin (13.5 × 6.6 m ). Throughout his film career, Méliès worked on a strict schedule of planning films in the morning, filming scenes during the brightest hours of the day, tending to the film laboratory and the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in the late afternoon, and attending performances at Parisian theatres in
615-475: A daily basis with Méliès as salaried employees for the Star Film Company . In addition to their work as cameramen, Méliès's operators also did odd jobs for the company such as developing film and helping to set up scenery, and another salaried operator, François Lallement, appeared onscreen as the marine officer. By contrast, Méliès hired his actors on a film-by-film basis, drawing from talented individuals in
738-506: A direct influence on the future New Hollywood directors, slowly faded by the end of the 1960s. During this period, French commercial film also made a name for itself. Immensely popular French comedies with Louis de Funès topped the French box office. The war comedy La Grande Vadrouille (1966), from Gérard Oury with Bourvil , de Funès and Terry-Thomas , was the most successful film in French theaters for more than 30 years. Another example
861-420: A familiar device to screen audiences. Because Méliès does not use a modern cinematic vocabulary, some film scholars have created other frameworks of thought with which to assess his films. For example, some recent academicians, while not necessarily denying Méliès's influence on film, have argued that his works are better understood as spectacular theatrical creations rooted in the 19th-century stage tradition of
984-461: A hand-colored print struck from a second-generation negative, was colored by Elisabeth Thuillier's lab, but the perforations used imply that the copy was made before 1906. The flag waved during the launching scene in this copy is colored to resemble the flag of Spain , indicating that the hand-colored copy was made for a Spanish exhibitor. In 1999, Anton Gimenez of the Filmoteca de Catalunya mentioned
1107-624: A leading destination for filmmakers and actors from around the world. Many film festivals are held in France, including the internationally famous Cannes Film Festival . Les frères Lumière released the first projection with the Cinematograph , in Paris on 28 December 1895, with first public showing in the Eden Theatre, La Ciotat . The French film industry in the late 19th century and early 20th century
1230-716: A masterpiece. Mathieu Kassovitz 's 1995 film Hate ( La Haine ) received critical praise and made Vincent Cassel a star, and in 1997, Juliette Binoche won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The English Patient . The success of Michel Ocelot 's Kirikou and the Sorceress in 1998 rejuvenated the production of original feature-length animated films by such filmmakers as Jean-François Laguionie and Sylvain Chomet . In 2000, Philippe Binant realized
1353-575: A print sale price of US$ 0.15 per foot was standardised across the American market, which proved useful to Méliès. Later price standardisations by the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 hastened his financial ruin, as his films were impractically expensive under the new standards. After 1908, his films waned from the fashions of time as fanciful magic fell out of vogue. According to Méliès's memoirs, his initial attempts to sell A Trip to
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#17328692234341476-487: A record-breaking 300 feature-length films (since broken multiple times by the UK and France itself ). France is one of the few countries where non-American productions have the biggest share, largely due to the commercial strength of domestic productions. The most influential film directors in the history of French cinema are Jean Renoir , Marcel Carné , François Truffaut , Jean-Luc Godard , and Agnès Varda . France has also been
1599-453: A rope to tip the capsule over a ledge on the Moon and into space. A Selenite tries to seize the capsule at the last minute. Astronomer, capsule, and Selenite fall through space and land in an ocean on Earth, where they are rescued by a ship and towed ashore. The final sequence (missing from some prints of the film) depicts a celebratory parade in honour of the travellers' return, including a display of
1722-429: A series of distorted areas, obscure visions, metamorphoses and synthetic objects. Indeed, in the film, the human may be viewed as a fetish object (for example, the doll hanging by a thread), with reference to Kafkaesque and Freudian theories on automata and the fear of man faced with something as complex as him. The ascent of the stairs would be the liberation of the ideas of death, culture, and sex that makes us reach
1845-602: A small percent of Méliès's films and advertised alongside the black-and-white versions at a higher price. From approximately 1897 to 1912, these prints (for films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies , The Impossible Voyage , The Barber of Seville , and A Trip to the Moon ) were hand-colored by Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier 's coloring lab in Paris. The Thuilliers led a studio of two hundred women, painting directly on film stock with brushes in carefully chosen colors. Each worker
1968-557: A snowfall that awakens the astronomers, and they seek shelter in a cavern where they discover giant mushrooms. One astronomer opens his umbrella; it promptly takes root and turns into a giant mushroom itself. At this point, a Selenite (an insectoid alien inhabitant of the Moon, named after one of the Greek moon goddesses, Selene ) appears, but it is killed easily by an astronomer, as the creatures explode if they are hit with force. More Selenites appear, and it becomes increasingly difficult for
2091-528: A stand in the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. A Trip to the Moon was largely forgotten to history and went unseen for years. Thanks to the efforts of film history devotées, especially René Clair , Jean George Auriol , and Paul Gilson , Méliès and his work were rediscovered in the late 1920s. A "Gala Méliès" was held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 16 December 1929 in celebration of the filmmaker, and he
2214-415: A stratagem to stick Josiane, the librarian and Bonnet, the censor, making them pass for lovers at the sight of the director and numerous witnesses. Finally, Caroline Derieux, a biology teacher and in love with Frédéric, will have a suicide attempt during one of her classes when she will understand that he does not share her feelings. Frédéric is globally appreciated by his students, at the point that Guillaume,
2337-447: A strong anti-imperialist vein in the film's satire. The film scholar Matthew Solomon notes that the last part of the film (the parade and commemoration sequence missing in some prints) is especially forceful in this regard. He argues that Méliès, who had previously worked as an anti- Boulangist political cartoonist, mocks imperialistic domination in the film by presenting his colonial conquerors as bumbling pedants who mercilessly attack
2460-473: A student, becomes jealous of him, thinking that he covets Lætitia, a student of his class with whom he is himself in love with. French cinema The cinema of France comprises the film industry and its film productions, whether made within the nation of France or by French film production companies abroad. It is the oldest and largest precursor of national cinemas in Europe, with primary influence also on
2583-422: A young Natalie Portman ), and in 1997 The Fifth Element , which became a cult favorite and launched the career of Milla Jovovich . Jean-Pierre Jeunet made Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children ( La Cité des enfants perdus ), both of which featured a distinctly fantastical style. In 1992, Claude Sautet co-wrote (with Jacques Fieschi) and directed Un Coeur en Hiver , considered by many to be
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#17328692234342706-575: Is Gérard Oury and Édouard Molinaro . The 1979 film La Cage aux Folles ran for well over a year at the Paris Theatre , an arthouse cinema in New York City, and was a commercial success at theaters throughout the country, in both urban and rural areas. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film , and for years it remained the most successful foreign film to be released in
2829-490: Is deliberately theatrical. The stage set is highly stylised, recalling the traditions of the 19th-century stage, and is filmed by a stationary camera, placed to evoke the perspective of an audience member sitting in a theatre. This stylistic choice was one of Méliès's first and biggest innovations. Although he had initially followed the popular trend of the time by making mainly actuality films (short " slice of life " documentary films capturing actual scenes and events for
2952-632: Is largely due to the commercial strength of domestic productions. In 2013, France was the second largest exporter of films in the world after the United States, and a 2014 study showed that French cinema was the most appreciated by global audiences after that of the US. France has had a very strong film industry, due in part to protections afforded by the French Government . The French government has implemented various measures aimed at supporting local film production and movie theaters. Canal+ has
3075-453: The A Trip to the Moon attraction at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York . The French film historian Thierry Lefebvre hypothesises that Méliès drew upon both of these works, but in different ways: he appears to have taken the structure of the film—"a trip to the Moon, a Moon landing, an encounter with extraterrestrials with a deformity, an underground trek, an interview with
3198-487: The féerie genre, as does Frank Kessler. It can also be described simply as a trick film , a catch-all term for the popular early film genre of innovative, special effects-filled shorts—a genre Méliès himself had codified and popularised in his earlier works. A Trip to the Moon is highly satirical in tone, poking fun at nineteenth-century science by exaggerating it in the format of an adventure story. The film makes no pretense whatsoever to be scientifically plausible;
3321-481: The Cité du cinéma , a major studio north of the city, and Disney Studio, a theme park devoted to the cinema. Notable French film distribution and/or production companies include: A Trip to the Moon A Trip to the Moon ( French : Le voyage dans la lune ) is a 1902 French science-fiction adventure trick film written, directed and produced by Georges Méliès . Inspired by Jules Verne 's 1865 novel From
3444-471: The féerie . Similarly, Tom Gunning has argued that to fault Méliès for not inventing a more intimate and cinematic storytelling style is to misunderstand the purpose of his films; in Gunning's view, the first decade of film history may be considered a "cinema of attractions," in which filmmakers experimented with a presentational style based on spectacle and direct address rather than on intricate editing. Though
3567-528: The parodic tone of the film, from the Offenbach opera-féerie. As the science writer Ron Miller notes, A Trip to the Moon was one of the most complex films that Méliès had made, and employed "every trick he had learned or invented". It was his longest film yet; both the budget and filming duration were unusually lavish, costing ₣ 10,000 to make and taking three months to complete. The camera operators were Théophile Michault and Lucien Tainguy, who worked on
3690-699: The 1930s included René Clair 's Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934), Jacques Feyder's Carnival in Flanders (1935), and Julien Duvivier 's La belle equipe (1936). In 1935, renowned playwright and actor Sacha Guitry directed his first film and went on to make more than 30 films that were precursors to the New Wave era. In 1937, Jean Renoir , the son of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir , directed La Grande Illusion ( The Grand Illusion ). In 1939, Renoir directed La Règle du Jeu ( The Rules of
3813-566: The 1944 novella of the same name by Colette . Many contemporaries of Godard and Truffaut followed suit, or achieved international critical acclaim with styles of their own, such as the minimalist films of Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville , the Hitchcockian-like thrillers of Henri-Georges Clouzot , and other New Wave films by Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais . The movement, while an inspiration to other national cinemas and unmistakably
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3936-542: The Cannes Festival, for direction ( Tony Gatlif , Exils , 2004), screenplay ( Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri , Look at Me , 2004), female acting ( Isabelle Huppert , The Piano Teacher , 2001; Charlotte Gainsbourg , Antichrist , 2009) and male acting ( Jamel Debbouze , Samy Naceri , Roschdy Zem , Sami Bouajila and Bernard Blancan , Days of Glory , 2006). The 2008 rural comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis drew an audience of more than 20 million,
4059-585: The Century in a poll of 600 French critics and professionals in the late 1990s. In the magazine Cahiers du cinéma , founded by André Bazin and two other writers in 1951, film critics raised the level of discussion of the cinema, providing a platform for the birth of modern film theory . Several of the Cahiers critics, including Jean-Luc Godard , François Truffaut , Claude Chabrol , Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohmer , went on to make films themselves, creating what
4182-471: The Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon , the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. Méliès leads an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers as the main character Professor Barbenfouillis. Although
4305-611: The Eightees they are added by a new generation including Sophie Marceau , Emmanuelle Béart , Jean-Hugues Anglade , Sabine Azema , Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil . In 1968, the May riots shook France. François Truffaut had already organised demonstrations in February against Henri Langlois 's removal as head of the Cinémathèque française and dedicated his film Stolen Kisses , which
4428-788: The English-language edition of the Star Film Company catalogue announced: "In opening a factory and office in New York we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice, we will act!" Various trade arrangements were made with other film companies, including American Mutoscope and Biograph , the Warwick Trading Company , the Charles Urban Trading Co., Robert W. Paul 's studio, and Gaumont . In these negotiations,
4551-496: The European cinema market, because American films could be sold more cheaply than European productions, since the studios already had recouped their costs in the home market. When film studios in Europe began to fail, many European countries began to set import barriers. France installed an import quota of 1:7, meaning for every seven foreign films imported to France, one French film was to be produced and shown in French cinemas. During
4674-506: The French military, who melted down many of Méliès's films to gather the traces of silver from the film stock and make boot heels from the celluloid. When the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was demolished in 1923, the prints kept there were sold by weight to a vendor of second-hand film. Finally, in that same year, Méliès had a sudden fit of rage and burned all his remaining negatives in his garden in Montreuil. In 1925, he began selling toys and candy from
4797-521: The Game ). Several critics have cited this film as one of the greatest of all-time , particularly for its innovative camerawork, cinematography and sound editing. Marcel Carné 's Les Enfants du Paradis ( Children of Paradise ) was filmed during World War II and released in 1945. The three-hour film was extremely difficult to make due to the Nazi occupation . Set in Paris in 1828, it was voted Best French Film of
4920-557: The Man in the Moon was accomplished using an effect Méliès had invented the previous year for the film The Man with the Rubber Head . Rather than attempting to move his weighty camera toward an actor, he set a pulley-operated chair upon a rail-fitted ramp, placed the actor (covered up to the neck in black velvet) on the chair, and pulled him toward the camera. In addition to its technical practicality, this technique also allowed Méliès to control
5043-443: The Man in the Moon, and a brutal return to reality back on Earth"—directly from the 1901 attraction, but also incorporated many plot elements (including the presence of six astronomers with pseudo-scientific names, telescopes that transform into stools, a moonshot cannon mounted above ground, a scene in which the Moon appears to approach the viewer, a lunar snowstorm, an earthrise scene, and umbrella-wielding travellers), not to mention
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5166-577: The Moon through the extensive tribute to Méliès and the film in the Brian Selznick 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and its 2011 Martin Scorsese film adaptation Hugo . Film scholar Andrew J. Rausch includes A Trip to the Moon among the "32 most pivotal moments in the history of [film]," saying it "changed the way movies were produced." Chiara Ferrari's essay on the film in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die , which places A Trip to
5289-562: The Moon include Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel of Air (for the 2011 restoration; see the Hand-colored version section below), Frederick Hodges, Robert Israel, Eric Le Guen, Lawrence Lehérissey (a great-great-grandson of Méliès), Jeff Mills , Donald Sosin, and Victor Young (for an abridged print featured as a prologue to the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days ). The film's style, like that of most of Méliès's other films,
5412-493: The Moon to French fairground exhibitors met with failure because of the film's unusually high price. Finally, Méliès offered to let one such exhibitor borrow a print of the film to screen for free. The applause from the very first showing was so enthusiastic that fairgoers kept the theatre packed until midnight. The exhibitor bought the film immediately, and when he was reminded of his initial reluctance he even offered to add ₣200 to compensate "for [Méliès's] inconvenience." The film
5535-486: The Moon was "surely not one of my best," but acknowledged that it was widely considered his masterpiece and that "it left an indelible trace because it was the first of its kind." The film which Méliès was proudest of was Humanity Through the Ages (1908), a serious historical drama now presumed lost . After Méliès's financial difficulties and decline, most copies of his prints were lost. In 1917, his offices were occupied by
5658-422: The Moon , Méliès credited Jules Verne 's novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870). Cinema historians, the mid-20th-century French writer Georges Sadoul first among them, have frequently suggested H. G. Wells 's The First Men in the Moon (1901), a French translation of which was published a few months before Méliès made the film, as another likely influence. Sadoul argued that
5781-471: The Moon , under the direction of MoMA's film curator Iris Barry , opened the film up once again to a wide audience of Americans and Canadians and established it definitively as a landmark in the history of cinema. LeRoy's incomplete print became the most commonly seen version of the film and the source print for most other copies, including the Cinémathèque Française 's print. A complete version of
5904-507: The Nouvelle Vague except for a few essays, Truffaut and Chabrol remain the leading directors whose artistic aspects remain commercially successful. Other directors of the 1970s in this effect are Bertrand Tavernier , Claude Sautet , Eric Rohmer , Claude Lelouch , Georges Lautner , Jean-Paul Rappeneau , Michel Deville Yves Boisset , Maurice Pialat , Bertrand Blier , Coline Serreau and André Téchiné in purely entertainment films, it
6027-518: The Parisian theatrical world, with which he had many connections. They were paid one Louis d'or per day, a considerably higher salary than that offered by competitors, and had a full free meal at noon with Méliès. Méliès's film studio, which he had built in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis in 1897, was a greenhouse -like building with glass walls and a glass ceiling to let in as much sunlight as possible,
6150-456: The United States. Jean-Jacques Beineix 's Diva (1981) sparked the beginning of the 1980s wave of French cinema. Movies which followed in its wake included Betty Blue ( 37°2 le matin , 1986) by Beineix, The Big Blue ( Le Grand bleu , 1988) by Luc Besson , and The Lovers on the Bridge ( Les Amants du Pont-Neuf , 1991) by Léos Carax . Made with a slick commercial style and emphasizing
6273-618: The Wolf became the sixth-highest-grossing French-language film of all time in the United States and went on to gross more than $ 70 million worldwide. In 2008, Marion Cotillard won the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of legendary French singer Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose , the first French-language performance to be so honored. The film won two Oscars and four BAFTAs and became
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#17328692234346396-504: The alien lifeforms they meet and return with a mistreated captive amid fanfares of self-congratulation. The statue of Barbenfouillis shown in the film's final shot even resembles the pompous, bullying colonialists in Méliès's political cartoons. The film scholar Elizabeth Ezra agrees that "Méliès mocks the pretensions of colonialist accounts of the conquest of one culture by another," and adds that "his film also thematizes social differentiation on
6519-466: The alienation of their main characters, these films are representative of the style known as Cinema du look . Camille Claudel , directed by newcomer Bruno Nuytten and starring Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu , was a major commercial success in 1988, earning Adjani, who was also the film's co-producer, a César Award for best actress. The historical drama film Jean de Florette (1986) and its sequel Manon des Sources (1986) were among
6642-463: The astronomers to destroy them as they are surrounded. The Selenites capture the astronomers and take them to the palace of their king. An astronomer lifts the Selenite King off his throne and throws him to the ground, causing him to explode. The astronomers run back to their capsule while continuing to hit the pursuing Selenites, and five get inside. The sixth astronomer, Barbenfouillis himself, uses
6765-463: The attraction style of filmmaking declined in popularity in favour of a more integrated "story film" approach, it remains an important component of certain types of cinema, including science fiction films , musicals , and avant-garde films . With its pioneering use of themes of scientific ambition and discovery, A Trip to the Moon is sometimes described as the first science fiction film . A Short History of Film argues that it codified "many of
6888-402: The basic generic situations that are still used in science fiction films today". Other genre designations are possible; Méliès advertised the film as a pièce à grand spectacle , a term referring to a type of spectacular Parisian stage extravaganza popularised by Jules Verne and Adolphe d'Ennery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Richard Abel describes the film as belonging to
7011-540: The biggest movie studio in the world, and along with the boom in construction of "luxury cinemas" like the Gaumont-Palace and the Pathé-Palace (both 1911), cinema became an economic challenger to theater by 1914. After World War I, the French film industry suffered because of a lack of capital, and film production decreased as it did in most other European countries. This allowed the United States film industry to enter
7134-533: The camera), in his first few years of filming Méliès gradually moved into the far less common genre of fictional narrative films, which he called his scènes composées or "artificially arranged scenes". The new genre was extensively influenced by Méliès's experience in theatre and magic, especially his familiarity with the popular French féerie stage tradition, known for their fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. In an advertisement he proudly described
7257-478: The capsule (without the need of space suits or breathing apparatus) and watch the Earth rise in the distance. Exhausted by their journey, they unroll their blankets and sleep. As they sleep, a comet passes, the Big Dipper appears with human faces peering out of each star, old Saturn leans out of a window in his ringed planet, and Phoebe , goddess of the Moon, appears seated in a crescent-moon swing. Phoebe causes
7380-446: The capsule falling in front of a black background superimposed upon the footage of the ocean. The shot is followed by an underwater glimpse of the capsule floating back to the surface, created by combining a moving cardboard cutout of the capsule with an aquarium containing tadpoles and air jets. The descent of the capsule from the Moon was covered in four shots, taking up about twenty seconds of film time. Color prints were produced for
7503-425: The captive Selenite and the unveiling of a commemorative statue bearing the motto " Labor omnia vincit ". When A Trip to the Moon was made, film actors performed anonymously and no credits were given; the practice of supplying opening and closing credits in films was a later innovation. The following cast details can be reconstructed from available evidence: When asked in 1930 what inspired him for A Trip to
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#17328692234347626-411: The characters. Patrick Bokanowski would thus have total control over the "matter" of the image and its optical composition. This is especially noticeable throughout the film, with images taken through distorted objectives or a plastic work on the sets and costumes, for example in the scene of the designer. Patrick Bokanowski creates his own universe and obeys his own aesthetic logic. It takes us through
7749-407: The cinematic vocabulary to which American and European audiences later became accustomed, a vocabulary built on the purposeful use of techniques such as varied camera angles, intercutting, juxtapositions of shots, and other filmic ideas. Rather, each camera setup in Méliès's film is designed as a distinct dramatic scene uninterrupted by visible editing, an approach fitting the theatrical style in which
7872-429: The country. The highest-grossing film was Taken 3 (€261.7 million) and the largest territory in admissions was China (14.7 million). In that year, France produced more films than any other European country, producing a record-breaking 300 feature-length films. France is one of the few countries where non-American productions have the biggest share; American films only represented 44.9% of total admissions in 2014. This
7995-450: The creation of national cinemas in Asia. France has had a very strong film industry due in part to protections afforded by the French Government . In 2013, France was the second largest exporter of films in the world after the United States, and a 2014 study showed that French cinema was the most appreciated by global audiences after that of the US. According to industry tracker The Numbers ,
8118-439: The difference between his innovative films and the actualities still being made by his contemporaries: "these fantastic and artistic films reproduce stage scenes and create a new genre entirely different from the ordinary cinematographic views of real people and real streets." Because A Trip to the Moon preceded the development of narrative film editing by filmmakers such as Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith , it does not use
8241-595: The dominance of four firms: Pathé Frères , the Gaumont Film Company , the Georges Méliès company, and the Lumières . Méliès invented many of the techniques of cinematic grammar, and among his fantastic, surreal short subjects is the first science fiction film A Trip to the Moon ( Le Voyage dans la Lune ) in 1902. In 1902, the Lumières abandoned everything but the production of film stock, leaving Méliès as
8364-494: The emblematic figure of the angel. Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac was a major box-office success in 1990, earning several César Awards , including best actor for Gérard Depardieu , as well as an Academy Award nomination for best foreign picture. Luc Besson made La Femme Nikita in 1990, a movie that inspired remakes in both United States and in Hong Kong. In 1994, he also made Léon (starring Jean Reno and
8487-547: The entire range of French filmmaking today, Tim Palmer calls contemporary cinema in France a kind of eco-system, in which commercial cinema co-exists with artistic radicalism, first-time directors (who make up about 40% of all France's directors each year) mingle with veterans, and there even occasionally emerges a fascinating pop-art hybridity, in which the features of intellectual and mass cinemas are interrelated (as in filmmakers like Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Olivier Assayas, Maïwenn, Sophie Fillières, Serge Bozon, and others). One of
8610-474: The evening. According to Méliès's recollections, much of the unusual cost of A Trip to the Moon was due to the mechanically operated scenery and the Selenite costumes in particular, which were made for the film using cardboard and canvas. Méliès himself sculpted prototypes for the heads, feet, and kneecap pieces in terracotta , and then created plaster moulds for them. A mask-making specialist, probably from
8733-408: The existence of this print, which he believed to be in a state of total decomposition, to Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange of the French film company Lobster Films. Bromberg and Lange offered to trade a recently rediscovered film by Segundo de Chomón for the hand-colored print, and Gimenez accepted. Bromberg and Lange consulted various specialist laboratories in an attempt to restore the film, but because
8856-416: The film also including The Extraordinary Voyage , a feature-length documentary by Bromberg and Lange about the film's restoration, in 2012. In The New York Times , A. O. Scott called the restoration "surely a cinematic highlight of the year, maybe the century." As A Short History of Film notes, A Trip to the Moon combined "spectacle, sensation, and technical wizardry to create a cosmic fantasy that
8979-451: The film disappeared into obscurity after Méliès's retirement from the film industry, it was rediscovered around 1930, when Méliès's importance to the history of cinema was beginning to be recognised by film devotees. An original hand-colored print was discovered in 1993 and restored in 2011. A Trip to the Moon was ranked 84th among the 100 greatest films of the 20th century by The Village Voice . The film remains Méliès' best known, and
9102-457: The film indirectly through Charles Urban 's Warwick Trading Company in London. Many circumstances surrounding the film—including its unusual budget, length, and production time, as well as its similarities to the 1901 New York attraction—indicate that Méliès was especially keen to release the film in the United States. Because of rampant film piracy , Méliès never received most of the profits of
9225-400: The film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque". Similarly, the literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht described the film as a work "satirizing the pretensions of professors and scientific societies while simultaneously appealing to man's sense of wonder in the face of an unexplored universe." There is also
9348-493: The film was Thomas Lincoln Tally , who chose the film as the inaugural presentation of his Electric Theater. In order to combat the problem of film piracy that became clear during the release of A Trip to the Moon , Méliès opened an American branch of the Star Film Company , directed by his brother Gaston Méliès , in New York in 1903. The office was designed to sell Méliès's films directly and to protect them by registering them under United States copyright. The introduction to
9471-580: The film was designed. Similarly, film scholars have noted that the most famous moment in A Trip to the Moon plays with temporal continuity by showing an event twice: first the capsule is shown suddenly appearing in the eye of an anthropomorphic moon; then, in a much closer shot, the landing occurs very differently, and much more realistically, with the capsule actually plummeting into believable lunar terrain. This kind of nonlinear storytelling —in which time and space are treated as repeatable and flexible rather than linear and causal—is highly unconventional by
9594-629: The film was screened at the Olympia music hall in Paris in 1902, an original film score was reportedly written for it. In 1903, the English composer Ezra Read published a piano piece called A Trip to the Moon: Comic Descriptive Fantasia , which follows Méliès's film scene by scene and may have been used as a score for the film; it may have been commissioned by Méliès himself, who had likely met Read on one of his trips to England. More recent composers who have recorded scores for A Trip to
9717-501: The film's great success in their theatres. The film also did well in other countries, including Germany, Canada, and Italy, where it was featured as a headline attraction through 1904. A Trip to the Moon was one of the most popular films of the first few years of the twentieth century, rivalled only by a small handful of others (similarly spectacular Méliès films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies and The Impossible Voyage among them). Late in life, Méliès remarked that A Trip to
9840-538: The film, including the entire celebration sequence, was finally reconstructed in 1997 from various sources by the Cinémathèque Méliès , a foundation set up by the Méliès family. No hand-colored prints of A Trip to the Moon were known to survive until 1993, when one was given to the Filmoteca de Catalunya by an anonymous donor as part of a collection of two hundred silent films. It is unknown whether this version,
9963-684: The financial risks inherent in the project and ensuring enhanced distribution opportunities. On 2 February 2000 in Paris , Philippe Binant realized the first digital cinema projection in Europe , with the DLP Cinema technology developed by Texas Instruments . In 2011 Paris had the highest density of cinemas in the world, measured by the number of movie theaters per inhabitant, In most downtown Paris movie theaters, foreign or arthouse films movies are shown alongside mainstream movies. Paris also boasts
10086-525: The first digital cinema projection in Europe , with the DLP CINEMA technology developed by Texas Instruments , in Paris. In 2001, after a brief stint in Hollywood, Jean-Pierre Jeunet returned to France with Amélie ( Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain ) starring Audrey Tautou . It became the highest-grossing French-language film ever released in the United States. The following year, Brotherhood of
10209-737: The first French film to do so. Its $ 193 million gross in France puts it just behind Titanic as the most successful film of all time in French theaters. In the 2000s, several French directors made international productions, often in the action genre. These include Gérard Pirès ( Riders , 2002), Pitof ( Catwoman , 2004), Jean-François Richet ( Assault on Precinct 13 , 2005), Florent Emilio Siri ( Hostage , 2005), Christophe Gans ( Silent Hill , 2006), Mathieu Kassovitz ( Babylon A.D. , 2008), Louis Leterrier ( The Transporter , 2002; Transporter 2 , 2005; Olivier Megaton directed Transporter 3 , 2008), Alexandre Aja ( Mirrors , 2008), and Pierre Morel ( Taken , 2009). Surveying
10332-433: The first half of the film (up to the shooting of the projectile) is derived from Verne and that the second half, the travellers' adventures on and in the Moon, is derived from Wells. In addition to these literary sources, various film scholars have suggested that Méliès was heavily influenced by other works, especially Jacques Offenbach 's opera-féerie Le voyage dans la lune (an unauthorised parody of Verne's novels) and
10455-577: The first scene, and LeRoy's was missing the entire final sequence featuring the parade and commemorative statue. These prints were occasionally screened at retrospectives (including the Gala Méliès), avant-garde cinema showings, and other special occasions, sometimes in presentations by Méliès himself. Following LeRoy's death in 1932, his film collection was bought by the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. The museum's acquisition and subsequent screenings of A Trip to
10578-402: The foreign films). After ten weeks nearly 17.5 million people had seen the film in France, Intouchables was the second most-seen French movie of all time in France, and the third including foreign movies. In 2012, with 226 million admissions (US$ 1,900 million) in the world for French films (582 films released in 84 countries), including 82 million admissions in France (US$ 700 million), 2012 was
10701-435: The fortunes of French film exports have since declined: in 2019, France had fallen to the position of 7th largest exporter by total box office revenue with a 2.01% share of the global market, and in 2023, 15th by the same metric with a 0.44% share. Overall, France sits fourth on the tracker's all-time box office chart behind the US, UK, and China. In 2015, France produced more films than any other European country, producing
10824-510: The fourth best year since 1985. With 144 million admissions outside France (US$ 1,200 million), 2012 was the best year since at least 1994 (since Unifrance collects data), and the French cinema reached a market share of 2.95% of worldwide admissions and of 4.86% of worldwide sales. Three films particularly contributed to this record year: Taken 2 , The Intouchables and The Artist . In 2012, films shot in French ranked 4th in admissions (145 million) behind films shot in English (more than
10947-475: The hero of his screen debut, Antoine Doinel , for twenty years, the last post-New-Wave-film is Love on the Run in which his heroes Antoine (Léaud) and Christine (Jade) get divorced. After World War II, the French actress Leslie Caron and the French actor Louis Jourdan enjoyed success in the United States with several musical romantic comedies , notably An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), based on
11070-557: The highest grossing French films in history and brought Daniel Auteuil international recognition. According to Raphaël Bassan , in his article « The Angel : Un météore dans le ciel de l'animation,» La Revue du cinéma , n° 393, avril 1984. (in French) , Patrick Bokanowski 's The Angel , shown in 1982 at the Cannes Film Festival , can be considered the beginnings of contemporary animation. The masks erase all human personality in
11193-482: The home front, as the hierarchical patterns on the moon are shown to bear a curious resemblance to those on earth." Méliès, who had begun A Trip to the Moon in May 1902, finished the film in August of that year and began selling prints to French distributors in the same month. From September through December 1902, a hand-colored print of A Trip to the Moon was screened at Méliès's Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. The film
11316-449: The inside of the glass-roofed workshop in which the space capsule is built, was painted to look like the actual glass-roofed studio in which the film was made. Many of the special effects in A Trip to the Moon , as in numerous other Méliès films, were created using the substitution splice technique, in which the camera operator stopped filming long enough for something onscreen to be altered, added, or taken away. Méliès carefully spliced
11439-550: The literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht once summed up Méliès's importance to film history by commenting that Méliès "profoundly influenced both Porter and Griffith and through them the whole course of American film-making." It remains Méliès's most famous film, as well as a classic example of early cinema, with the image of the capsule stuck in the Man in the Moon's eye particularly well known. The film has been evoked in other creative works many times, ranging from Segundo de Chomón 's 1908 unauthorised remake Excursion to
11562-455: The major Parisian mask- and box-making firm of the Maison Hallé, used these moulds to produce cardboard versions for the actors to wear. Though other details about the film's making are scarce, the film historian Georges Sadoul argued that Méliès most likely collaborated with the painter Claudel on the scenery, and with Jehanne d'Alcy on the costumes. One of the backdrops for the film, showing
11685-529: The moment when the capsule lands in the moon's eye remains one of the most iconic and frequently referenced images in the history of cinema. At a meeting of the Astronomy Club, its president, Professor Barbenfouillis, proposes an expedition to the Moon . After addressing some dissent, five other brave astronomers—Nostradamus, Alcofrisbas, Omega, Micromegas, and Parafaragaramus—agree to the plan. A space capsule in
11808-481: The most noticed and best reviewed films of 2010 was the drama Of Gods and Men ( Des hommes et des dieux ), about the assassination of seven monks in Tibhirine, Algeria . 2011 saw the release of The Artist , a silent film shot in black and white by Michel Hazanavicius that reflected on the end of Hollywood's silent era . French cinema continued its upward trend of earning awards at the Cannes Festival, including
11931-447: The period between World War I and World War II, Jacques Feyder and Jean Vigo became two of the founders of poetic realism in French cinema. They also dominated French impressionist cinema , along with Abel Gance , Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein . In 1931, Marcel Pagnol filmed the first of his great trilogy Marius , Fanny , and César . He followed this with other films including The Baker's Wife . Other notable films of
12054-683: The period included Brigitte Bardot , Alain Delon , Romy Schneider , Catherine Deneuve , Jeanne Moreau , Simone Signoret , Yves Montand , Jean-Paul Belmondo and still Jean Gabin . Since the Sixties and the early Seventies they are completed and followed by Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret as character actors, Annie Girardot , Jean-Louis Trintignant , Jean-Pierre Léaud , Claude Jade , Isabelle Huppert , Anny Duperey , Gérard Depardieu , Patrick Dewaere , Jean-Pierre Cassel , Miou-Miou , Brigitte Fossey , Stéphane Audran and Isabelle Adjani . During
12177-406: The placement of the face within the frame to a much greater degree of specificity than moving his camera allowed. A substitution splice allowed a model capsule to suddenly appear in the eye of the actor playing the Moon, completing the shot. Another notable sequence in the film, the plunge of the capsule into real ocean waves filmed on location, was created through multiple exposure , with a shot of
12300-561: The popular film. One account reports that Méliès sold a print of the film to the Paris photographer Charles Gerschel for use in an Algiers theatre, under strict stipulation that the print only be shown in Algeria. Gerschel sold the print, and various other Méliès films, to the Edison Manufacturing Company employee Alfred C. Abadie , who sent them directly to Edison's laboratories to be duplicated and sold by Vitagraph . Copies of
12423-631: The prestigious Grand Prix for Of Gods and Men (2010) and the Jury Prize for Poliss (2011); the Best Director Award for Mathieu Amalric ( On Tour , 2010); the Best Actress Award for Juliette Binoche ( Certified Copy , 2010); and the Best Actor Award for Jean Dujardin ( The Artist , 2011). In 2011, the film Intouchables became the most watched film in France (including
12546-483: The print spread to other firms, and by 1904 Siegmund Lubin , the Selig Polyscope Company , and Edison were all redistributing it. Edison's print of the film was even offered in a hand-colored version available at a higher price, just as Méliès had done. Méliès was often uncredited altogether; for the first six months of the film's distribution, the only American exhibitor to credit Méliès in advertisements for
12669-627: The print to be saved. In 2010, a complete restoration of the hand-colored print was launched by Lobster Films, the Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema, and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. The digitised fragments of the hand-colored print were reassembled and restored, with missing frames recreated with the help of a black-and-white print in the possession of the Méliès family, and time-converted to run at an authentic silent-film speed, 16 frames per second. The restoration
12792-433: The real waves in the splashdown scene are the only concession to realism. The film scholar Alison McMahan calls A Trip to the Moon one of the earliest examples of pataphysical film, saying it "aims to show the illogicality of logical thinking" with its satirically portrayed inept scientists, anthropomorphic moon face, and impossible transgressions of laws of physics. The film historian Richard Abel believes Méliès aimed in
12915-437: The reel of film had apparently decomposed into a rigid mass, none believed restoration to be possible. Consequently, Bromberg and Lange themselves set to work separating the film frames, discovering that only the edges of the film stock had decomposed and congealed together, and thus that many of the frames themselves were still salvageable. Between 2002 and 2005, various digitisation efforts allowed 13,375 fragments of images from
13038-419: The resulting shots together to create apparently magical effects, such as the transformation of the astronomers' telescopes into stools or the disappearance of the exploding Selenites in puffs of smoke. Other effects were created using theatrical means, such as stage machinery and pyrotechnics . The film also features transitional dissolves . The pseudo- tracking shot in which the camera appears to approach
13161-494: The screen and that reality could be transformed by the camera. In a 1940 interview, Edwin S. Porter said that it was by seeing A Trip to the Moon and other Méliès films that he "came to the conclusion that a picture telling a story might draw the customers back to the theatres, and set to work in this direction." Similarly, D. W. Griffith said simply of Méliès: "I owe him everything." Since these American directors are widely credited with developing modern film narrative technique,
13284-409: The screen, accompanied by sound effects and live music. Méliès himself took considerable interest in musical accompaniment for his films, and prepared special film scores for several of them, including The Kingdom of the Fairies and The Barber of Seville . He did not require specific music for any film, allowing exhibitors freedom to choose whatever accompaniment they felt most suitable. When
13407-400: The shape of a bullet is built, along with a huge cannon to shoot it into space. The astronomers embark and their capsule is fired from the cannon with the help of "marines", most of whom are played by young women in sailors' outfits. The Man in the Moon watches the capsule as it approaches, and, in an iconic shot, it hits him in the eye. Landing safely on the Moon, the astronomers get out of
13530-408: The standards of Griffith and his followers, before the development of continuity editing. Other filmmakers performed similar experiments with time. (Porter, for instance, used temporal discontinuity and repetition extensively in his 1903 film Life of an American Fireman .) Later in the twentieth century, with sports television 's development of the instant replay , temporal repetition again became
13653-485: The third-highest-grossing French-language film in the United States since 1980. Cotillard was the first female and second person to win both an Academy Award and César Award for the same performance. At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival , Entre les murs ( The Class ) won the Palme d'Or , the 6th French victory at the festival. The 2000s also saw an increase in the number of individual competitive awards won by French artists at
13776-569: The weakest player of the remaining three. (He would retire in 1914.) From 1904 to 1911, the Pathé Frères company led the world in film production and distribution. At Gaumont, pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché (M. Gaumont's former secretary) was made head of production and oversaw about 400 films, from her first, La Fée aux Choux , in 1896, through 1906. She then continued her career in the United States, as did Maurice Tourneur and Léonce Perret after World War I . In 1907, Gaumont owned and operated
13899-541: Was La Folie des grandeurs with Yves Montand . French cinema also was the birthplace for many subgenres of the crime film , most notably the modern caper film , starting with 1955's Rififi by American-born director Jules Dassin and followed by a large number of serious, noirish heist dramas as well as playful caper comedies throughout the sixties, and the "polar," a typical French blend of film noir and detective fiction . In addition, French movie stars began to claim fame abroad as well as at home. Popular actors of
14022-477: Was a pronounced success in France, running uninterrupted at the Olympia music hall in Paris for several months. A Trip to the Moon was met with especially large enthusiasm in the United States, where (to Méliès's chagrin) its piracy by Lubin, Selig, Edison and others gave it wide distribution. Exhibitors in New York City , Washington, D.C. , Cleveland , Detroit , New Orleans , and Kansas City reported on
14145-480: Was also the year French animation studio Mac Guff was acquired by an American studio, Universal Pictures , through its Illumination Entertainment subsidiary. Illumination Mac Guff became the animation studio for some of the top English-language animated movies of the 2010s, including The Lorax and the Despicable Me franchise. In 2015 French cinema sold 106 million tickets and grossed €600 million outside of
14268-477: Was an international sensation." It was profoundly influential on later filmmakers, bringing creativity to the cinematic medium and offering fantasy for pure entertainment, a rare goal in film at the time. In addition, Méliès's innovative editing and special effects techniques were widely imitated and became important elements of the medium. The film also spurred on the development of cinematic science fiction and fantasy by demonstrating that scientific themes worked on
14391-456: Was assigned a specific color to apply to a frame of film in assembly line style, with more than twenty colors sometimes used for a single film. On average, the Thuilliers' lab produced about sixty hand-colored copies of a film. Though Méliès's films were silent, they were not intended to be seen silently; exhibitors often used a bonimenteur , or narrator, to explain the story as it unfolded on
14514-500: Was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1931. During this renaissance of interest in Méliès, the cinema manager Jean Mauclaire and the early film experimenter Jean Acme LeRoy both set out independently to locate a surviving print of A Trip to the Moon . Mauclaire obtained a copy from Paris in October 1929, and LeRoy found one from London in 1930, though both prints were incomplete; Mauclaire's lacked
14637-474: Was being made, to Langlois. The Cannes Film Festival is cancelled – on the initiative of Truffaut, Godard and Louis Malle. Jean-Luc Godard no longer works in the commercial film business for years. Political films such as Costa-Gavras ' Z celebrate success. Chabrol continues his vivisection of the bourgeoisie ( The Unfaithful Wife ) and Truffaut explores the possibility of bourgeois marital happiness ( Bed and Board ). While Godard disappears from cinema after
14760-518: Was completed in 2011 at Technicolor 's laboratories in Los Angeles. Restoration costs were $ 1 million. The restored version premiered on 11 May 2011, eighteen years after its discovery and 109 years after its original release, at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival , with a new soundtrack by the French band Air . The restoration was released by Flicker Alley in a 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD edition featuring both color and black & white versions of
14883-521: Was shown after Saturday and Thursday matinee performances by Méliès's colleague and fellow magician, Jules-Eugène Legris, who appeared as the leader of the parade in the two final scenes. Méliès sold black-and-white and color prints of the film through his Star Film Company , where the film was assigned the catalogue number 399–411 and given the descriptive subtitle Pièce à grand spectacle en 30 tableaux . In France, black-and-white prints sold for ₣560, and hand-colored prints for ₣1,000. Méliès also sold
15006-412: Was the world's most important. Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe and their L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat in Paris in 1895 is considered by many historians as the official birth of cinematography. French films during this period catered to a growing middle class and were mostly shown in cafés and traveling fairs. The early days of the industry, from 1896 to 1902, saw
15129-626: Was to become known as the French New Wave . Some of the first films of this new movement were Godard's Breathless ( À bout de souffle , 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo , Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us ( Paris nous appartient , 1958 – distributed in 1961), starring Jean-Claude Brialy and Truffaut's The 400 Blows ( Les Quatre Cent Coups , 1959) starring Jean-Pierre Léaud . Later works are Contempt (1963) by Godard starring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli and Stolen Kisses starring Léaud and Claude Jade . Because Truffaut followed
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