A staple of French cinema may be banned from film soon.
A pushback against smoking is nothing new even in France, but Socialist senator Nadine Grelet-Certenais considers the biggest selling point for cigarettes their presence in movies. Her newest proposition to parliament may change the future of French cinema and erase a rich history of classic film.
Cigarettes are under great scrutiny from Health Minister of France Agnès Buzyn as she plans to “denormalize” smoking in France. She has focused her efforts towards the film industry. This comes after Grelet-Certenais lectured the upper house of parliament on cinema’s influence on the smoking industry. She told senators, “Seventy percent of new French films have at least one scene of someone smoking. This more or less helps to make its use banal, even promote it, to children and adolescents.”
If she convinced only one person with her speech, it was the right one. Buzyn plans to talk to the culture minister Françoise Nyssen, who deals with regulations in the film industry, about enforcing a ban on cigarette smoking in French films.
“I don’t understand why the cigarette is so important in French cinema,” Buzyn said on the issue.
This ban would prevent new films from including scenes where characters smoke, but what about the hundreds of cherished classic French films that already include characters with a cigarette in their mouth?
French New Wave spanned from the 1950-1960s, using real life as inspiration for movies more than ever. These films are regarded for their candid nature of storytelling and changed the course of cinema forever. However, most of them contain scenes where characters are smoking. This isn’t surprising, considering the popularity of cigarettes was accepted during that time. Naturally, filmmakers concerned with portraying a new generation of French people authentically would include their habits and vices as well.
In the famous Breathless scene below, Jean-Paul Belmondo speaks with a cigarette in his mouth for most of the scene.
The article Possible Smoking Ban Will Change French Cinema appeared first on Film School Rejects.
0 comments:
Post a Comment