It was during the Liberation that the French cinema was at a complete and utter standstill. German preparations for the Allied advances had paralyzed the life of Paris, shutting down all of the city's cinemas and halting film production. Nevertheless, despite the storage of equipment and energy, production did recover by the year 1946. Though the amount of films produced were not far short of pre-war level of production the post-war budgets were decidedly smaller.
In the subsequent year, however, an agreement with the Americans to release pre-war quota control on the importation of Hollywood films caused French film production to plummet sharply. Imported films, dubbed into the French language would dominate the industry thus handicapping home-made products for a year until the quota was reestablished. The recovery of the cinema industry was assisted by the introduction of two government measures, the Loi d'Aide a l'Industrie Cinematographique (1949) and the Loi de Developpement de L'Industrie Cinematographique in 1953.
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| The controversial The Devil's Envoys filmed during the Occupation, a parable medieval with blatant references to Hitler. |
If the French cinema's economic situation was shaky, its prestige still rated highly. A series of notable films of the Occupation period which consisted of Marcel Carne's La Visiteurs du Soir ( The Devil's Envoys, 1942) and 1945's Children of Paradise, and Robert Bresson's Les Anges du Peche (Angels of Sin,1943) were all revealed after the Liberation to worldwide acclaim.