I’ve been watching the coverage of Cannes with a lot of interest—and my mouth is positively watering for The Artist, the popular new silent film by Michel Hazanavicius.  I haven’t seen it yet, and this blog isn’t even really about it—but rather about the curious double-standards that the film critical community has when it comes to French films.

Every single mention of The Artist has described it as a French film.  But… it was filmed in Hollywood, starring John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Missi Pyle, Penelope Ann Miller, and James Cromwell. Y’know. . . they ain’t French.

Of course, maybe what they mean is that Hazanavicius is French, but by that logic the Hellboy movies are Spanish, because Guillermo del Toro is.  If the point is that The Artist was financed with French money and a French studio, then I guess the many Resident Evil movies must be German, right?

Actually, I think the emphasis on the Frenchiness of The Artist is largely a marketing hook, to lend the film a prestige and veneer of artistic respectability that would be absent if people perceived it as a Hollywood film.  Bear in mind I’m not claiming it is a Hollywood film, just that if it were released to mall theaters without any acknowledgment of being a foreign import (and being a silent film this would be easy to do), it would flop.  The target audience is one that frequents arthouse theaters, and they do that with a certain prejudice.

Let me take you back in time, to 2001, for a case study that I hope will make my point more clear.

They called it a “delicious pastry,” a “delectable French confection,” and a “candy-colored hit.”  And so, with sentiments like that, the American film critics anointed Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulin (Amélie) a blockbuster success in the fall of 2001.

It quickly became the highest grossing French film ever shown in the United States.  Normally, film critics don’t have that kind of power—if the opinions of reviewers carried that kind of weight, Adam Sandler would be living in poverty.  But a terror-weary American public not yet two months out from the traumatic events of September 11, 2001 needed diversion badly, and a “delicious pastry” sounded just the ticket.

Hollywood’s regular fare at that time—which included such unfortunate productions as Collateral Damage in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a firefighter pitted against terrorists—was geared to the edgy, violent tastes that had dominated just prior to the attacks.  Overnight, it was suddenly unclear when, if ever again, Americans would want to see that kind of stuff.  Enter Amélie, and with it the enthusiastic endorsement of critics, convinced millions to go see what all the fuss was about.  Those people liked what they saw and they told their friends, who in turn told their friends, and soon Amélie snowballed its way to a fabulous destiny of $33.2 million in US receipts alone.

The week of November 9, 2001, when Amélie opened across key markets in the United States, reviewers for the Washington Post, USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, and the New York Times all published rave reviews.  These are major publications, their reviewers are in some cases celebrities in their own right; the articles would then be syndicated to smaller papers which did not have film reviewers on staff.

In short, for those Americans who stood in line to help contribute to Amélie’s amazing opening week grosses, these eight reviews were arguably the most important and influential in the most important and influential film market in the world.

And these reviews, while describing the romantic comedy in terms of dessert, all took pains to identify Jean-Pierre Jeunet as a wacky French artist whose previous films were darkly comic cult hits.  While this is true, it is incomplete, and what was left unsaid was no simple oversight.

Jeunet’s most recent work prior to Amélie was the 20^th Century Fox blockbuster Alien Resurrection, the third sequel in the profitable sci-fi franschise.  Alien Resurrection took in almost twice as much money in American theaters as Amélie, was written by Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, and had models of its stars marketed as action figures in toy shops and WalMarts.

Of the eight reviews that opening week, almost every one cited Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des Enfants Perdus (City of Lost Children), despite the fact that very few readers would even have heard of these films.

J. Hoberman of the Village Voice went so far as to draw connections between Amélie and such French films as François Truffaut’s Tirez sur la Pianiste  (Shoot the Piano Player) and Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro, but appeared willfully blind to the most high-profile title in Jeunet’s CV.

At that same time, it was easy to walk into a video store and find copies of Peter Jackson’s tasteless Meet the Feebles (1989) cheerily advertised as “from the director of Lord of the Rings,” as if the audience for one overlapped with the audience for the other.

No one bats an eye when Sam Raimi goes from making The Evil Dead to Spider-Man, or James Cameron switches from Piranha 2 to Titanic.  As long as it sells, everyone is happy.  Not so with French cinema.

American audiences and critics alike expect, even demand, that French films play by a different set of rules.  French films are supposed to have a rarified air to them, to aim higher, even to be elitist, alienating, off-putting.  And in many ways, this same attitude is shared by French audiences and critics.

Even though the French have been pioneers in entertaining, populist genre movies since the very birth of motion pictures, much of the French contribution to film history has been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed when it fails to accord with this narrowly defined myth of French art films.  France can lay claim to a venerable tradition of fantasy filmmaking so rich and far-reaching that its effects can be felt throughout the world.

But it isn’t just American critics sweeping this history of populist and genre filmmaking under the carpet–the French film industry itself has seemed determined to enforce a perpetual cycle of forgetting upon itself.

Forgive me for making a generalization, but I say this as a Francophile who’s been to France repeatedly and as an American tourist never accepted the clishe stereotype of the “rude Frenchman.”  Even still, I have to concede that the French are an authoritarian, autocratic, elitist people and have been pretty much as long as there has been a France.

In their superb study of French culture Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, Benoit and Nadeau describe the French mindset as “jusque à boutisme”—“to the bitter end-ness.”  Compromise is unheard of: never give up, never give in, fight on into pointless defeat without considering the merits of the other side.  Added to that mentality is the intractable power of insular elites, by which there are rigidly defined routes to power, excluding many from ever hoping to be part of the ruling class.

As a consequence, France has undergone two hundred years’ worth of revolutions, one after another, with every political, economic, or social crisis resolved only through wrenching transformation.  Outsider groups have no recourse to be heard other than to overthrow the current regime.

This cycle is the key defining feature of French film history.

With generational regularity since the birth of the movies, new groups of filmmakers and scholars force their way to the top by loudly proclaiming their unquestionable superiority and decry the obvious inferiority of the group that came before them.  By issuing angry manifestoes and asserting some purported revolution in cinema every time a new trend comes along, each generation of artists and reviewers tries to downplay the more nuanced and evolutionary aspects of the development of French cinema.  Throughout the history of French films there has been a sort of petit-Stalinist tendency to try to erase the memories of those films and filmmakers who do not fit the current ideology.  It is a war—there are winners and there are losers, and as in any war it is the winners who get to write the history.

Being the iconoclast I am, I would like to invite the losers back into the conversation and rewrite that history.

Hazanavicius speaks for me.  His delightfully silly OSS 117 films recently reached deep into an obscure part of French mid-century cult filmmaking and made them cool and relevant all over again—in ways that encourage newbies and youngsters to rediscover those forgotten gems of pulp fiction.

Jeunet is another—a mainstream filmmaker unafraid of genre and deeply aware of French pulp cinema, yet capable of working on a level that deserves artistic accolades.

Hazanavicius and Jeunet are also superb examples of a new, post-tribal kind of filmmaker.  Their work is only incompletely describable as “French.”