Page 12 - Livre French Touch

From the earliest days of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph up to the present, France has always been a breeding ground for cinema. With its heritage, its know-how, and its artistic ambitions France ful lls a unique role in the world, combining creativity and technology. Since 1895, French cinema has continuously been a major factor in the country’s status as a beacon of culture and an intrinsic part of its identity. Unique, daring, innovative, humanistic, fantastical, vibrant, personal, magni cent – these are the words most commonly used by foreign lmmakers to describe French cinema. Whether you speak to foreign audience members, to Hollywood stars, or to the international press, it’s clear that France is synonymous with positive values: the imagination of Méliès, the Nouvelle Vague, a country of liberty and of the good life.
Today, the French lm industry plays a nurturing role for world cinema. A great many talents and a string of French innovations are making their mark around the world, in Hollywood, in Europe, or in Asia, where they have become ambassadors for our expertise and our identity. We are lucky that our ranks include technicians, directors, producers, distributors, companies, and public and private institutions that make France a strong and unique presence in world cinema. Cinéma – La FRENCH TOUCH pays them tribute by way of fty original portraits of businesses, events, people, and institutions that together form the crème de la crème of the contemporary French lm industry. Their expertise has impelled France and its cinema to new heights of excellence, where its talents are exported to the four corners of the globe and lm productions from all over gravitate to its territory.
This book is the rst of its kind to provide a lateral view across some forty professions. Its mission is to bring across the full scope of French talents’ international success stories. Its ambition is to offer international visibility to the French lm industry and the models that have led to this success. This is why we aimed to make this book bilingual, to testify to the presence of the French Touch in lms made around the world and to spotlight the qualities of cinema made by France. Made up of interviews with these men and women who exercise their professions with passion and a constant search for innovation and adaptation, this richly illustrated book is a clear signal to the world of cinema. It forms a showcase of French panache and how this confronts technological, artistic, and nancial issues, and makes clear that the French Touch is a greater presence than ever, anywhere in the world.
This journey through the rich and vibrant landscape of today’s French cinema was made possible by our partners, the CNC (this book’s associate publisher), Orange Studio, Film France, UniFrance, FICAM, and Co loisirs, as well as the collaboration of PARIS IMAGES CINEMA - L’INDUSTRIE DU RÊVE and all the people presented in these pages. The portraits are divided across seven chapters and run from founding gures to tireless ambassadors, all working in the service of that universal language of which Jean-Luc Godard once said: “I only want to talk about cinema. Why bother with anything else? With cinema we talk about everything, we touch on everything.”
Anne Bourgeois et Damien Paccellieri
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