French cinema invented the movie house—and later the New Wave
On 28 December 1895 the Lumière brothers projected moving pictures in Paris; their train arriving at La Ciotat still marks cinema's birth for many historians. Pathé and Gaumont soon led the world. Decades later, Cahiers critics grabbed cameras and remade film grammar again.
From 1896 to 1902 Pathé Frères, Gaumont, Georges Méliès, and the Lumières dominated. Méliès forged cinematic tricks and the 1902 science-fiction voyage A Trip to the Moon; Alice Guy-Blaché oversaw roughly four hundred Gaumont titles before continuing in the United States. Pathé led global production and distribution from 1904 to 1911, and by 1914 luxury houses such as the Gaumont-Palace challenged live theatre. After World War I cheap Hollywood imports forced a French quota of one domestic film for every seven foreign ones.
Between the wars poetic realism flowered under Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jacques Feyder, and Marcel Carné. Renoir's 1939 Rules of the Game and Carné's wartime Children of Paradise—later voted best French film of the century by hundreds of critics—remain touchstones. Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951, trained Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, and Rohmer, whose Breathless (1960) and The 400 Blows (1959) detonated the New Wave while commercial hits such as La Grande Vadrouille (1966) ruled domestic charts for decades.
Pathé and StudioCanal remain Europe's two largest production groups. France was the world's second-largest film exporter in 2013 and, in a 2014 study, the most appreciated national cinema after Hollywood—yet tracker The Numbers later ranked French export share seventh in 2019 and fifteenth in 2023. The arc from café projections to global soft power, then relative decline, mirrors how a pioneer industry keeps reinventing itself under American pressure.
Source: Cinema of France
