Decade
The best French films of the 1920s
The decade when French filmmakers treated cinema as an art in its own right, from Abel Gance to the surrealists.
By Eleanor Hale
After the war, French cinema lost its commercial lead to Hollywood but found something else: a generation of directors and critics who believed cinema was an art as serious as painting or music. Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac experimented with rhythm, superimposition and the moving camera, while film clubs and specialist cinemas built an audience for them. By the end of the decade the surrealists had arrived, and sound was about to change everything.
Silent historical epicLe Miracle des loupsRaymond Bernard · 1924
Silent dramaNanaJean Renoir · 1926
Silent historical epicNapoléonAbel Gance · 1927
Silent dramaL'ArgentMarcel L'Herbier · 1928La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923)
A railwayman's tragedy, edited in places with very short shots that influenced the Soviet montage directors. Long and melodramatic, but full of astonishing images of trains and mountains.
Cœur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923)
A love story in the port of Marseille, best known for a fairground sequence in which the camera spins with the merry-go-round. Epstein was one of the great theorists of the decade.
Le Miracle des loups (Raymond Bernard, 1924)
A historical epic about Louis XI and Charles the Bold, with battle scenes filmed on the ramparts of Carcassonne. France's answer to Griffith.
Entr'acte (René Clair, 1924)
A short made to be shown during the interval of a ballet, with a runaway hearse, a dancing ballerina filmed from below and cameos by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Dada on film.
Nana (Jean Renoir, 1926)
Renoir's lavish Zola adaptation, with his wife Catherine Hessling as a doll-like courtesan. A flop at the time, and a fascinating early Renoir today.
Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927)
The young Bonaparte, from the snowball fight at Brienne to the Italian campaign, filmed with a camera that flies and a triptych finale on three screens. The summit of the silent era in France.
Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (René Clair, 1928)
A wedding day turned upside down by a horse that eats a lady's straw hat. Clair's farce, adapted from Labiche, is a model of comic timing without words.
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
Made in France by the Danish director, this account of Joan of Arc's trial is told almost entirely in close-ups of faces. Renée Falconetti's performance is one of the most famous in film history.
La Chute de la maison Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928)
Edgar Allan Poe's story filmed with slow motion, superimpositions and a dreamlike rhythm. Luis Buñuel worked on it as an assistant.
L'Argent (Marcel L'Herbier, 1928)
Zola's novel of speculation moved to the Paris stock exchange of the 1920s, with Brigitte Helm and a camera that soars over the trading floor.
Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
The surrealist short Buñuel wrote with Salvador Dalí, which opens with a razor and an eye. Still shocking, still funny.
Where to go next
Sound arrived in French cinemas at the end of the decade. For what came next, see the best French films of the 1930s. For the war years that came before, see the 1910s.