Although Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) would make only two films in the decade - Orphee and Le Testament d'Orphee (1959) the spidery watermark of his signature could be traced through the whole 1950s decade and even more visibly in the one that followed. In Orphee, myth is all too happily and firmly rooted in everyday life such that Cocteau's poetic exploration of the creative imagination also functions both seamlessly and simultaneously as a flawless film noir thriller.
And like Jacques Tati, these great artists always considerably more than regents waiting for the young princes of the nouvelle vague to come to age, would keep French cinema alive until Francois Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour became the succes de scandale at 1959's Cannes Film Festival.
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Indeed the rigid structure of the industry had already been dented by the work of a few rookie directors, notably Roger Vadim; whose Bardot vehicles have often been misconstrued for nouvelle vague cinema themselves, but were merely the frothy foam on its crest and Jean-Pierre Melville. But it was in the field of short films that the actual tangible signs of aesthetic renewal emerged. Shorts were generously subsidized by the state and exceptionally fruitful training ground for apprentice directors and journeymen alike.