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French cinema has occupied an important place in national culture for more than a hundred years. August and Louis Lumière invented a motion-picture technology in the late 19th century, and Alice Guy-Blaché and others were industry pioneers. In the 1920s French film became famous for its poetic realist mode, exemplified by the grand historical epics of Abel Gance and the work in the 1930s and ’40s of Marcel Pagnol and others. A generation later the nouvelle vague, or New Wave, produced directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who “wrote” with the camera as if, in critic André Bazin’s words, it were a caméra-stylo (“camera-pen”).
