A poster for the planned first Festival International du film de Cannes, September 1939. The event was postponed until after World War II and the first festival was in fact held in 1946. An illustration by Jean Gabriel Daumergue. - Channel 4

Adapted from Hal Alshelbé’s roman policier of the same name, Pépé le moko is both a fatalistic and sentimental tale of a doomed hero, Pépé, trapped in the Casbah in Algiers due to his criminal activity. Gabin plays Pépé as an antihero who cannot forget his Parisian proletarian roots. When he meets Gaby (Mireille Balin), another man’s mistress, Pépé believes he has found his true love—a belief that facilitates his demise. While Pépé pursues Gaby, he is being pursued by the local Algerian police, headed by Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux). Further complicating matters, Pépé is in an unhappy relationship with Inès (Line Noro), who eventually betrays him when he decides to follow Gaby out of the Casbah—his only haven from the law and Inspector Slimane. - Romi Stepovich

“Born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé on May 17, 1904, in Mériel, France, he was the son of professional cabaret performers, and raised by relatives in the country….

He worked with an impressive group of directors, including Jacques Tourneur (on Tout ca ne Vaut pas L’Amour) and Anatole Litvak (Coeur de Lilas), and quickly developed the image which became his trademark: his face a mask of boredom and cynicism, a cigarette dangling insolently from his lips….

…It was… Duvivier[’s] film, 1937’s Pepe Le Moko, which shot Gabin to international stardom; its follow-up, Renoir’s brilliant antiwar meditation La Grande Illusion, solidified his new fame. A certified classic of world cinema, the picture ran for an unprecedented six months in New York City, where the critics dubbed it the best foreign film of the year. In France, it was the box-office champ of 1937, and its success established Gabin as his homeland’s biggest star. His fame was reinforced by a series of hits, including the 1938 Marcel Carné drama Le Quai des Brumes, Renoir’s La Bete Humaine, and 1939’s Le Recif de Corail.” - Allmovie

Poetic realism, also labeled social fantastique (or cinéma du désenchantment), brought a new aesthetic to films. The aim was to show real life and represent a reality detached from the mundane trepidations and cliches of bourgeois drama… Poetic realism can also be described as “cinematographic expressionism” refined in textured facades, gradation of grays, and a graceful equilibrium between naturalism and stylization. The essence of the plot focused on the working-class individual whose existence corresponded to a series of lost illusions, love deceptions, and existential disenchantment.

A succinct summary of major themes in poetic realism could be presented as follows: the representation of the popular hero, the pessimistic atmosphere, the (doomed) quest for happiness, and finally the tragic destiny. The chiaroscuro lighting, background artifices, evocative visual imagery, and wittiness of dialogue resulted in a distinctive lyrical style. - French cinema: from its beginnings to the present

Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927)

Gance climaxed his work in the silent era with Napoléon, an epic historical recreation of Napoléon Bonaparte’s early career during the French Revolution. A superspectacle, the film advanced the technique of cinematic language far beyond any single production of the decade. The definitive version originally ran over six hours in length, and its amazing innovations accomplished Gance’s intent of making the spectator part of the action. To create this effect, Gance utilizes rapid montage and the hand-held camera extensively. An example of his technique is the double tempète sequence in which shots of Bonaparte—on a small boat tossing in a stormy sea as huge waves splash across the screen—are intercut with a stormy session of the revolutionary Convention, at which the camera, attached to a pendulum, swings back and forth across the seething crowd. For the climax depicting Napoléon’s 1796 Italian campaign, Gance devised a special wide-screen process employing three screens and three projectors. He called his invention Polyvision, using the greatly expanded screen for both vast panoramas and parallel triptych images. - Gilda’s Attic

La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923)

Gance was strongly aware of the importance of editing. He was thinking deeply about the capacity of the eye to absorb information and in appropriate scenes incorporated an approach he called “accelerated montage”.

It is interesting to note that Gance was applying this deliberate, theoretical and analytical approach to his editing in La Roue in 1923. This is two years before Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), which is regularly credited with being the pioneering example of film editing. It would be interesting to hear Gance’s comments on current films that use a very fast, fragmented editing style. But an important difference is that Gance did not apply a style of short, quick cuts for the entire film, only when he felt the story justified it. - Senses of Cinema

The great Surrealist succès de scandale and quite possibly the most famous short film ever made, Un Chien Andalou is the astonishing brain-child of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and remains one of the most intriguing collaborations in the history of cinema. In full provocateur mode, Buñuel called the film “a despairing, passionate call for murder” and the film’s notorious and oft-quoted eye-slashing scene (administered by Buñuel himself) retains its horror. Its assault upon the viewer, and on notions of beauty and normality, is as potent today as it was when it was first screened in Paris, where it instantly provided Surrealism with its most iconic image. - Roger Ebert

Max Linder, the French silent film comedian who Charlie Chaplin called “The Professor,” began his screen career in 1905 and became the first internationally recognized film comedian, influencing the work of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd among others, until his career was cut short by his death in 1925 at the age of 42. Typically playing a dapper dandy of the idle class, Linder was writing, directing and supervising his own films from 1911. He created and refined a subtle and complicated style of character comedy, while simultaneously reveling in the slapstick manner of the day. His dashing appearance and mischievous grin were put to good use in his films as he relentlessly pursued the female sex, boldly and humorously. - Oscars

Louis Feuillade (February 19, 1873 – February 25, 1925)

Born in 1873, Feuillade came to Paris from southern France in 1898 to pursue a career in journalism. His conservative educational background and association with the right-wing press gave little hint of the radically subversive aesthetic that would emerge in his films. He was hired by Gaumont as a scriptwriter in 1905 and in 1907 replaced Alice Guy as head of production. Before leaving Gaumont in 1924 Feuillade made more than 800 films covering almost every contemporary genre: historical drama, comedy, realist drama, melodrama, religious films, and so on. However, he was most famous, or infamous, for his crime serials: Fantômas (1913-14), Les Vampires, Judex (1916), La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1917), Tih-Minh (1918) and Barrabas (1919). - The Innovators 1910-1920: Detailing The Impossible

Generally speaking, December 28th, 1895, corresponds to the actual birth date of cinema. It was that evening that the Lumière brothers presented their Cinématographe to a crowd of curious photographers and inventors in the Salon Indien, located in the basement of the Grand Café, 14, boulevard des Capucines, in Paris, thus achieving the first public and paying projection in history (ten views of about fifty seconds each for thirty-three spectators in an informally assembled viewing room). Although not completely documented a century later, the program most certainly included such views as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (L’arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat), A Sprinkler Sprinkled (L’arroseur arrosé) probably the first fiction film known, Baby’s Meal (Le repas de bébé) and Card Game (Partie d’écarté). - French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present

“Auguste and Louis Lumiere produced a successful prototype of the Cinématographe, which was not only a camera but a printer and projector as well. It was patented in France on 13 February 1895… At the heart of the Cinématographe was the film transport mechanism, where two pins or ‘claws’ were inserted into sprocket holes at each side of the film, moved it down and were then retracted, leaving the film stationary for exposure. This intermittent movement was designed by Louis and based on the principle of the sewing machine mechanism. The handle at the rear of the Cinématographe operated the rotating shutter and the take-up magazine as well as the film transport mechanism.” - National Media Museum