In order to understand the evolution of the French cinema it is necessary to start off of one of his essential paradoxes: the one of which, although the foreign capital has played a fundamental role in the financing of its productions, the resulting films have had generally marchamo specifically French. This phenomenon is characteristic of the periods of greater international success: the golden age of the French cinema (1929-1939) and nouvelle vague (new wave, approximately 1958-1968). Let us see which have been the main landmarks in this historical development:

During the I World war, young people film directors like Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier or Louis Delluc, had the opportunity to direct e, impressed by some elements of the American cinematographic style, to develop new theories on how she had to be the art of the cinematography. Inspired by Intolerancia (1916), of D.W. Griffith, with their brief assembly and of disconnected planes taken from different parts from the multiple intercrossed actions of the story, made a series of films using inserted and first planes, in a moved away technique of the smooth continuity of the American films. In this search of new ways to express emotions and ideas through cinema, personal works like Fever arose, of Louis Delluc and the gilded one, of Marcel L'Herbier, both made in 1921, next to some of Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac. Films of vanguard in their day were considered, but they were based on conventional histories on which a series of filmic effects was developed, exposition that from one more a more modern perspective would make them doubtfully vanguardistas. They were made with the lowest budgets, in comparison with most of the commercial films, and thanks to the circuits of cineclubes were maintained that proliferated in France during the decade of 1920.

Not only these films of vanguard, but even more commercial the French films of that time, as soon as they were seen in other countries, partly due to the poverty of his production and partly to the old fashioned thing of his final results. This last characteristic also would reach to the films of Abel Gance. Influenced by D.W works. Griffith, more far took the fast assembly, until composing scenes in which the planes lasted a few photograms hardly and they arranged themselves in metric schemes. This approach was combined with very poetic titles and a style of melodrama already fashionable past in the wheel (1923), whereas its monumental Napoleón (1925) added to outlandish movements of camera and scenes rolled in triple screen, with a total duration of 195 minutes.