No wonder watching paint dry can be so much fun

CINEMA: The Faber Book of French Cinema By Charles Drazin Faber & Faber, 448pp. £25

IN ARTHUR PENN'S 1975 film Night Movesthe lead character, Harry Moseby, played by Gene Hackman, says: "I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Charles Drazin quotes this remark at the end of his history of French cinema to support his characterisation of French film as an "acquired taste" among anglophone viewers. Much of his book is devoted to investigating why French films remain a minority interest outside their native country, for in addition to surveying the development of French cinema from its origins to the present Drazin traces its complex relationships with other national cinemas, particularly Hollywood.

Drazin’s main theme is the inadequacy of auteur theory for an understanding of French film history. Developed in the 1950s by young critics such as François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer, who would later become new-wave film makers themselves, auteur theory installed the director as the exclusive creative force in cinema, the author of a coherent body of work identifiable through recurring themes and a stylistic signature.

To secure the recognition of cinema as a means of artistic expression, the auteur theorists campaigned virulently against the 1950s French film establishment and its preference for literary adaptations (the "tradition of quality"). This explains why, before Les 400 Coups, and his subsequent rehabilitation as a humanist film maker, Truffaut was widely reviled as a ruthless critic. While auteur theory succeeded in establishing cinema as an art form and cleared the way for a new generation of film makers, its exclusive canon of visionary directors distorted the medium's history by downgrading commercial cinema and privileging art-house production. Within France the result was a split between auteur and popular cinema that persists to this day.

Drazin effectively rehabilitates the popular cinema sidelined by auteur theory. Key to this argument is the career of Julien Duvivier, whom Drazin presents as a consummate professional director working comfortably within the studio system in both France and Hollywood to produce films with broad commercial appeal. Duvivier's best-known work is Pépé le moko(1936), a gangster film that was rapidly remade in Hollywood under the title Algiersand whose north African setting and atmosphere of expatriate entrapment were an indirect influence on Michael Curtiz's Casablanca.

As this suggests, Drazin's strongest insights concern the relations between French and anglophone cinema. Particularly interesting passages focus on peripatetic figures such as the Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti, who produced important work in both France and Britain, and Robert Hamer, whose Ealing classic Kind Hearts and Coronetsowes something to Sacha Guitry's Roman d'un tricheur. More generally, the contrastive interpretations of the French new wave, British free cinema and the new Hollywood are trenchant and well drawn. The contradictions of the long-standing cultural and economic rivalry between French and US cinema are carefully explored, particularly the ways the new Hollywood recaptured its domestic arthouse audience from the French new wave. If bohemian New Yorkers of the early 1960s styled themselves on Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim, chic young Parisians of 1968 dressed like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, a project turned down by both Truffaut and Godard.

Drazin retells the story of French cinema fluently and engagingly, wearing his learning lightly. Much of the history of the industry is inevitably familiar but rests on thorough research, drawing on recent scholarship and first-hand attention to original sources. The industrial history is complemented by a broader social and political background and punctuated by detailed readings of individual films. Highlights here include the discussions of Vigo's L'Atalante, Renoir's La Règle du jeu,Melville's Le Silence de la merand Godard's Le Mépris, where auteur status is qualified through recontextualization in terms of commercial and international developments. If the material on the popular and transnational dimensions of French cinema is persuasive, however, the book is less convincing in its coverage of postcolonial and women's film.

Ultimately, Drazin's view of French cinema is critical and ambivalent. Domestically, he supports popular French cinema against its auteur counterpart but recognises art-house film as a salutary corrective to purely commercial imperatives. Internationally, he presents French cinema as an essential alternative to a monocultural Hollywood, while admitting its inability since the early silent era to command a worldwide audience. Such nuances make for a more balanced analysis than is usually available in French surveys of this kind, but ultimately attribute the global box-office weakness of French cinema to two contradictory causes: the elitism of auteur cinema and the popular exploitation of cultural specificity, particularly in comedies whose jokes do not translate easily. This intertwining of the popular and the elitist seems caught in the multiple ironies of Harry Moseby's remark in Night Moves: Moseby's populist joke, a jibe at Rohmer, is intelligible only to an elite, an art-house audience familiar with Rohmer, while the real joke – the fact that his own self-deceptions are typically Rohmerian – is actually on himself. No wonder that jokes do not translate easily, and no wonder, as Charles Drazin ably demonstrates, that watching paint dry can be so much fun.

Douglas Smith is head of French and francophone studies at University College Dublin. His most recent publication is a special number of the Irish Journal of French Studieson the work of the anthropologist Marc Augé