Drazin also specializes in British cinema (he has written a book on “Britian’s only movie mogul,” Alexander Korda) and he finds several occasions to create analogues for French and British filmmakers. The work of Lindsay Anderson and the British New Wave of the 1960s are likened to the cinema of Jean Vigo, to the extent that they were “even more true to Vigo’s concept of the ‘social cinema’ than the French New Wave, which in the tendency to make a fetish of the cinema… risked losing sight of the actual world that Vigo believed the cinema should reflect” (p. 85). Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, which uses devices of memoir, epigrammatic wit, and paradoxical situations to darkly comedic effect, finds a perfect correlative in Sacha Guitry’s picaresque films. Graham Greene turns out to serve as a useful introduction to Julien Duvivier, a director the English writer highly admired, and whose own forays into screenwriting would reflect a Duvivier-style romantic fatalism. The director-screenwriter team of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert finds its parallel across the Channel in the equally legendary partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

In a sense, Drazin’s book is much less a theory of French cinema than it is an account of the estrangements and rapprochements on which its divisive history predicated itself: “Running through the French cinema lay a polarity between chaos and order; flair and convention; art and commerce” (p. 343). As a film historian, Drazin specializes in examining the commercial development of the cinema as an art form that was immediately compromised by its potential for rapid industrialization. In the case of French cinema, it was forced by the monopoly interests of Hollywood to acknowledge that a large part of its survival would depend as much on its international reach and appeal as it would on domestic resonance and success. Indeed, from its very beginning, cinema was the product of highly competitive capitalist interests that grew out of its technological origin.

…Drazin’s book is much less a theory of French cinema than it is an account of the estrangements and rapprochements on which its divisive history predicated itself: ‘Running through the French cinema lay a polarity between chaos and order; flair and convention; art and commerce.’

When Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope premiered in Europe in 1894, Auguste and Louis Lumière, the sons of Antoine Lumière and heirs of the family photography business, were instantly motivated to find a better and more efficient means of recording and projecting moving images. Whereas the images of the Kinetoscope could only be seen through a peephole, the Lumière brothers conceived a way of projecting images onto a screen, an improvement which would increase the size of the audience, boost ticket sales, and even augment the social experience of the spectator. Another amelioration the Lumière brothers enacted was to reduce the cost and weight of Edison’s fairly laborious mechanism: “Edison’s Kinetograph — the machine that recorded the images the Kinetoscope showed — was a heavy, immobile, battery-powered contraption that required a horse-drawn wagon to move it out of the ‘Black Maria,’ the crude studio in which Edison’s early films were shot. By contrast, the cinématographe was light enough to be carried about outdoors by a single operator. It did not require electricity to use and… was able to carry out all three operations of motion-picture making: ‘It was at once a camera, printer, and a projector’” (pp. 3-4).

Interestingly, the Lumière brothers chose not to capitalize on their machine; instead, they trained and sent a team of cameramen to travel around the world with the purpose of demonstrating the wonders of the cinématographe for public exhibition and filming the faraway places to where they traveled: “This enterprise amounted to the first coherent documentation of the world — the first opportunity for a film audience to see gondolas floating down the Grand Canal, omnibuses crossing Westminster Bridge, camels strolling past the pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt.” There is perhaps no better polarity in the relationship of French cinema to its American counterpart than in the fact that the Lumière brothers devoted the use of their Cinematographe to the documentation of real scenes, real people, and real locations, while Edison’s company necessarily restricted the use of their peephole camera, which could not move beyond the Black Maria theater without incurring great cost and labor, to the showcase of “dancers, acrobats, and contortionists,” a gimmick that would “struggle to escape the amusement arcades.” Almost at once, the French cinema would be distinguished by its valuation of the “real” in lieu of the fantastic or artificially strange, a polarity which may have diminished over the years, but which nonetheless reflects the distinctly French fascination for realism, whether in the guise of the social, the poetic or the psychological.