The Paris Olympics: Parlez-Vous Cinéma?

The French have always been very good at blowing their own horns. The spectacular opening ceremony they staged for last Friday’s opening of the Paris Olympics wonderfully showcased many things at which the French nation excels, like building the Eiffel Tower, producing daring fashion ensembles, taking on romance in all its permutations, and offending the bourgeoisie. (I was fascinated to find that day-after Internet chatter accused the festivities of insulting Christianity via an impudent hint of the Last Supper in a moment featuring drag queens.) Yes, that Seine-centric opening ceremony was long (aren’t they all?) and sometimes weird, but it had an exuberance that, to my mind, lifted it high above the ordinary. And the French, bless ‘em, were confident enough in their own cultural riches to offer prime performance slots to two women who weren’t French at all. That’s why Lady Gaga did a number complete with feathered fans, chorus boys, and diminishing clothing. And Celine Dion, coming off of a truly horrible neurological disease, used her Canadian brand of French to put a stirring musical cap on the whole evening.

 The opening ceremonies, of course, were designed for the TV audience, not for those drenched multitudes who stood in the rain watching bits of diverse entertainment (a piano solo! The capering of a masked torchbearer over the rooftops of Paris!) while soggy athletes sailed down the Seine on barges. But as a movie person, I couldn’t help thinking about France’s many contributions to the wonderful world of cinema. These were not much highlighted in a ceremony that seemed to delight in pretty much EVERYHING French. The  sole movie nod I remember involved a goofy film clip featuring the Minions, those little yellow critters who (as it turns out) were created and directed—and even largely voiced--by an actual Frenchman, Pierre Coffin. Who knew?

 But there was no in-passing acknowledgment of such landmark French directors as Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, and even (despite lots of attention to pioneering French women) Agnès Varda. The French Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave) that had such a huge impact on Young Hollywood in the Sixties went unnoticed. Even more surprising, I heard absolutely no mention of the role played by French inventors in the development of the motion picture as an artistic medium. A trip to L.A.’s Academy Museum nicely reminds visitors where movies came from. (No, not the stork!) The wonderfully named Auguste and Louis Lumière were French inventors of photographic equipment, and the short films they produced between about 1895 and 1905 (documenting such commonplace events as workers leaving a factory) were among the first motion pictures ever made. Georges Méliès, another early filmmaker born in the late 19^th century, was not much interested in the Lumière brand of cinéma-verité realism. Méliès, who was a magician of some repute, became entranced with the trickery made possible by the motion picture medium. He helped create the longstanding vocabulary of special effects cinematography, pioneering such techniques as  multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, , dissolves, and hand-tinted color. Those of us who remember the Apollo 11 moon-landing in 1969 surely recall seeing the frequent clips from Méliès’ Le Voyage Dans La Lune (based on Frenchman Jules Vernes’ 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon), complete with astronauts, friendly moon maidens, and a landing that hits the Man in the Moon (splat!) in the eye.

 Of course the Olympics are a festival of sports. To honor its cinema heritage, France has the annual Cannes Film Festival in spring. But there’s no question that out of this current Olympiad will come a movie.

 An update: Mea culpa! A reporter writing in the L.A. Times mentions that the opening ceremony contained a subtle (and by me unseen) reference to Méliès and other French film pioneers. Where? I really can’t say.