Since the primitive years of film, the nation of France has been at the forefront of the cinematic field. From the ingenuity of the Lumière’s to the pioneers of the Nouvelle Vague, a plethora of French artists have come and gone but without any doubt have collectively augmented the medium and influenced it’s design to unprecedented levels. To celebrate the July 8th release of veteran Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier, we have taken a look at some of the definitive French auteurs:

• Jean Renoir
Not only a director, but a screenwriter, actor, producer and author too – Jean Renoir in many ways is the godfather of French film. The son of renowned artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. He found most of his success in the 1930s, where he directed such films as Boudu Saved From Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux, 1932), a farcical send-up of the pretensions of a middle-class bookseller and his family and Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion, 1932), starring Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin - a film on the theme of brotherhood about a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I. In 1939, Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast. The film was met with derision by Parisian audiences upon its premiere, resulting in Renoir’s greatest commercial failure. However, in the 1950s the film had its resurgence and today The Rules of the Game appears frequently near the top of critics' polls of the best films ever made.

• François Truffaut
Before becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut was an influential film critic who wrote for French cinema journal, Cahiers du Cinema. Despondent with the state of French cinema at the time, he wrote his polemical essay “A Certain Trend of French Cinema”. The article resulted in a storm of controversy, and in the late fifties Truffaut was inspired to radicalise cinema and made his feature film debut Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959). The 400 Blows was released to much critical and commercial acclaim, with Truffaut later receiving a Best Director award from the Cannes Film Festival. It was a film that spearheaded what was to become known as the French New Wave and it paved the way for other directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette to experiment. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he still to this day remains an icon of the French film industry.

• Jean-Luc Godard
Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood cinema as well as the French "tradition of quality", and he is often considered the most extreme or radical of the New Wave filmmakers. His catalogue is vast and includes such greats as Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg which distinctly expressed the French New Wave's style – the film employed various innovative techniques such as jump cuts , and subverting the rules of continuity editing; Pierrot Le fou (1965) which involved a violent and complex storyline and Bande à part, a film which has a number of highly influential moments but in particular, incorporates a dance sequence which inspired the Jack Rabbit Slims segment of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). In the 2002 poll of the Sight and Sound publication, Godard ranked #3 in the critics' top ten directors of all time.

• Luc Besson
The creator of the EuropaCorp film company, Besson has been involved with over 50 films, spanning 26 years, as writer, director, and/or producer. Critics cite Besson as a pivotal figure in the “Cinema du look” movement, a specific, highly visual style produced from the 1980s into the early 1990s. Although he has worked on many features perhaps his most loved are his stylistic, uber-cool texts, Subway, Nikita and Leon.

• Bernard Tavernier
The experienced Bertrand Tavernier has been involved in film for nearly half a century and has worked on over 30 features. He claims that his cinematic influences include John Ford, William Wellman, Jean Renoir and the first film director with whom he worked with was the legendary Jean-Pierre Melville. His first film The Clockmaker (1974) won the Prix Louis Delluc and the Silver Bear award at the 24th Berlin International Film Festival and since then he has gone on to win a BAFTA for best film in a foreign language for Life and Nothing But (1990) and a total of four Cesar Awards throughout his prestigious career. His early work was dominated by mysteries, but his later work is characterized by a more overt social commentary. His latest feature, period romance drama The Princess of Montpensier, competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and has been widely praised by its indigenous as well as international press, who have noted it as an ambitious and poignant film. The film, inspired by the eponymous short story by Madame de La Fayette is released in the UK early next month (July 8th) and stars the talented Melanie Thierry, alongside Gaspard Ulliel, Gregoire Leprince-Rinquet and Lambert Wilson. Above all else, it’s a return to form for Tavernier and showcases the artistic talent of a widely respected and persevering auteur.