Watched (not entirely, there's like 25mn to go yet)
My Journey Through French Cinema by Bertrand Tavernier which are obviously inspired by Scorsese two documentaries about US and Italian cinema.
Bertrand Tavernier is a film historian, critic & director (decent and eclectic moviemaker, BTW). Son of a French resistant (who housed Aragon during the war), Tavernier was a movie buff since his early years and among other things did work for Melville & Godard. That's probably the key difference with the Scorsese narration: Tavernier draws heavily from his own experiences and meetings with movie legends (Gabin, notably) to offer unique insights into the films he discuss.
The selection is highly subjective and dependant on his own history (he's "only" covering from the late thirties to the early seventies and it's not exhaustive at all) but that was probably the correct choice to have something working within 3 hours. Moreover, it certainly inject a lot of passion and avoid turning it into a dry & stifle lesson : Tavernier takes some time to praise some French composers (which are among the many jobs in the industry which are often occulted in discussions), for instance. He's also very astute and conveys very well the differences between French films and their American counterparts in direction, editing and music scoring plus most of the commentary is fairly concrete, modest and down-to-earth
Among some of the funny anecdotes, I'll quote one about his work as the PR for the production company of Godard, where he was instructed on several successive films to convince people that Godard was making a "real" movie this time, with a "real" script, up to presenting the literary sources for each project : it always was a lie
I don't know how enjoyable it would be for foreign audiences, because some of the understanding stems from the French historical context (or familiarity with the movie culture), but overall it's a good introduction. I'm seeing articles in US press so it's probably visible in festivals or such ?
