The best contemporary popular music in France is distinctly un-French, combining sounds from West, Central and North Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, though the old chanson tradition is undergoing something of a revival, and rap has taken strides. Meanwhile jazz and classical music continues to thrive. The French have treated film as an art form, deserving of state subsidy, ever since its origination with the Lumière brothers in 1895, although today the greatest economic drive for French film comes from the pay television network Canal Plus. In theatre, the French have developed their own heavyweight brand of intellectual drama in which directors (not playwrights) dominate. Innovative dance can't compete with the US, but there are several excellent regional companies and festivals that bring in the best international talent

Music
Standard French rock largely deserves its miserable reputation. Sixties rocker Johnny Halliday is still France's biggest music star; Patrick Bruel, idol of love-lorn adolescents, appeals equally across the generations; and Seventies disco music, epitomized by Claude François, remains depressingly popular. This said, half of all albums bought in France are recorded by British and American bands, and the dominance of Anglo-Saxon music on the radio prompted a recent law insisting that radio stations' output must be at least forty percent French.

However, France is in the forefront of the World Music ( sono mondial ) scene. Algerian raï flourishes, with singers like Cheb Khaled and Zahouania enjoying megastar status. Daddy Yod from Guadeloupe sings ragga ; Angélique Kidjo, from Benin, is a brilliant vocalist as is the Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour; and the best " alternative " rock band, until their recent demise, was the Franco-Spanish Mano Negra , whose music, heavily influenced by Latin American tours, combined rap, reggae, rock and salsa sounds. The " ethnically French " have produced their own rewarding hybrids, best exemplified in the Pogue-like chaos of Les Négresses Vertes. Other names to look out for producing eclectic sounds are Louise Attaque, Mano Solo, Gabriel Yacoub and Thomas Ferson, and groups like Paris Combo, Pigalle and Castafiore Bazooka. French "country music", known as Astérix rock , with accordions as the main instruments, has a raucous energy going for it. The culture of the dispossessed suburbs has found musical expression in rap and hip-hop . France is the second biggest producer of rap music after the US, and names to look out for include the internationally known MC Solaar, NTM, IAM, Doc Gynéco and Alliance Ethnik.

Electronic music has long been a French obsession, with the world-famous Jean Michel Jarre at the fore. With such a tradition, it's not surprising that house and techno are popular in France. DJs to look out for are the well-known Laurent Garnier, plus Manu le Malin, Sex Toy, DJ Cam, Chris the French Kiss and the techno twosome Daft Punk. The best trance/jungle DJ is Gilb-R, while Etienne Daho , who found fame as a pop star in the 1980s, has gained another following with the trance/jungle feel of his 1998 album.

But the French are probably right not to abandon chansons , epitomized by Edith Piaf and developed by Georges Brassens and the Belgian Jacques Brel in the Fifties and Sixties, and reaching their sly, sexy best with the legendary Serge Gainsbourg, who died in 1991. Today, the elderly Charles Aznavour and younger singer-composers like Arlette Denis and Dominique A continue the tradition, while Juliette has added a postmodern flavour.

Jazz has long enjoyed an appreciative audience in France: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Miles Davis were being listened to in the Fifties, when elsewhere in Europe their names were known only to a tiny coterie of fans. Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his partner, violinist Stéphane Grappelli, whose work represents the distinctive and undisputed French contribution to the jazz canon, had much to do with the music's popularity. But it was also greatly enhanced by the presence of many front-rank black American musicians, for whom Paris was a haven of freedom and culture after the racial prejudice and philistinism of the States. Among them were the soprano sax player Sidney Bechet, who set up in legendary partnership with French clarinettist Claude Luter, and Bud Powell, whose turbulent exile partly inspired the tenor man played by Dexter Gordon (himself a veteran of the Montana club) in the film Round Midnight. In Paris you can listen to a different band every night for weeks, from trad, through bebop and free jazz, to highly contemporary experimental. And there are many excellent festivals, particularly in the south .

If your taste is for classical music and its development, you're also in for a treat. Paris has two opera houses and in the provinces there are no fewer than twelve companies, of which Strasbourg and Toulouse are said to be the best, and a further dozen orchestras. Monaco's opera house is renowned for drawing the top international stars. The places to check out for concerts are the Maisons de la Culture (in all the larger cities), churches (where chamber music is as much performed as sacred music, often without charge), and festivals - of which there are hundreds, the most famous being at Aix in July.

Contemporary and experimental computer-based work flourishes: leading exponents are Paul Mefano and Pierre Boulez, founder of the IRCAM centre in Paris and himself one of the first pupils of Olivier Messiaen, the grand old man of modern French music who died in 1992.

Cinema
While it's true that over sixty percent of films shown in French cinemas are from the US, investment in film production in France is nearly twice the level of that in the UK, and the number of films made annually is three times as great - though, of course, nowhere near the output of the US. There are ciné-clubs in almost every city, censorship is very slight, students get discounts and foreign films are usually shown in their original language with subtitles (look for version originale or v.o. in the listings). In addition there are a number of film festivals, though the most famous of these, the Cannes Film Festival , where the prized Palme d'Or is handed out, is not, in any public sense, a festival; it's more a screening of what's new for those in the industry. Filmfests where anyone can go along include those at La Rochelle (Rencontres Internationales d'Art Contemporain; June-July); Créteil , in the Paris suburbs (festival of women's films; March/April); La Ciotat (silent films; July); Reims (thrillers; Oct-Nov); Strasbourg (general films; March); and Toulouse (Cinespaña; Oct).

While the French celebrate contemporary cinema they also treasure the old. The Paris Archives du Film possess the largest collection of silent and early talkie movies in the world, and in 1992 they embarked on a fifteen-year, 17-million-franc/2.5-million-euro programme to transfer all the pre-1960 stock onto acetate to avoid disintegration.

Cinema is, of course, a French invention, dating back to 1895 when the Lumière Brothers , marrying photography with the magic lantern show, first projected in Lyon their crackly images in the short Sortie de l'Usine, whose image of a train leaving a factory sent the audience ducking for cover. The medium was eagerly seized by the artists of the post-World War I avant-garde who realized immediately its potential visual impact. Early twentieth-century films such as Jean Cocteau 's Blood of a Poet (1930) and La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1945), Jean Renoir 's Grand Illusion (1937) and Spanish ex-pats Luis Buñuel 's and Salvador Dali 's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930) were works more of art than entertainment. And after World War II the art-school continued to dominate through directors such as Robert Bresson .

In the "mainstream", as early as 1902 the prolific Georges Meliès had pioneered special effects with his adaptation of Jules Verne's Voyage to the Moon. However, French entertainment cinema didn't truly come into its own until the New Wave movement (Nouvelle Vague) of the 1960s. This raw and gritty style - pioneered by the young assistants of the postwar directors - owed its birth to 1959's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The Four Hundred Blows), by Jean-Claude Truffaut , and Alain Resnais ' Hiroshima Mon Amour of the same year. In the years that followed, French cinema exploded with the morally provocative work of Erich Rohmer , who debuted with 1962's Signe du Lion, and the then-scandalous eroticism of Roger Vadim . Jean-Luc Godard gained a deserved reputation for well-crafted narratives, and his 1960 film Au Bout de Souffle (Breathless) made Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg pin-ups around the world. This was the age in which sexy French stars like Brigitte Bardot , who first appeared on screen bare-breasted in Vadim's Et Dieu Créa la Femme (And God Created Woman) in 1956, came to epitomize glamorous sexuality across the Western world. Among male actors, the suave and self-assured Alain Delon became something of a Sixties French Bogart.

The post-New Wave era of the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties was dominated by the towering actor Gérard Dépardieu , whose cinema career began in 1965 and whose most memorable roles were in The Return of Martin Guerre (1981), Danton (1983), Jean de Florette (1985) and Camille Claudel (1987). However, it was not until the mid-Eighties that French cinema began to find itself again as a new generation of directors emerged, among them Luc Besson . His Subway (1984) made Christopher Lambert an international star, and was followed by a string of snappy if superficial works like The Big Blue (1995), Nikita (1990) and Léon (1994). He and his contemporaries - Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, 1981; Betty Blue, 1986), Bertrand Tavernier (Mississippi Blues, 1994), Patrice Leconte (Ridicule, 1996) - garnered considerable attention in the English-speaking world.

As the Nineties progressed French film benefited from an international current which saw foreign directors - notably Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda and the late Krzysztof Kieslowski , director of the Three Colours trilogy - base themselves temporarily or permanently in France, drawn in part by a programme of generous production subsidies. Meanwhile, French production teams began to seek out foreign collaborators in former colonies, such as Algeria, and also as far afield as Russia and Israel. The Algerian cultural connection has led to a spate of co-productions and French-language Algerian works, like Merzak Allouache 's Le Journal de Yasmine (2000), while long-time Russophile Pavel Lounguine (Taxi Blues, 1990; Luna Park, 1992) recently released La Noce (2000).

Contemporary politics and cinematographic innovation made a dramatic comeback in French cinema with the 1996 winner of the French Césars award for best film, La Haine, by Mathieu Kassovitz . A brilliant and strikingly original portrayal of exclusion and racism in the Paris suburbs, La Haine is worlds away from the early Eighties movies that used Paris as a backdrop, such as Diva and Subway. This trend has broadened as young film-makers like Laurent Cantet confront the socio-economic challenges of their own generation, as in his acclaimed Ressources Humaines (2000), and its follow-up L'Emploi du Temps (2001). Another southern French director, Robert Guédiguian , uses hometown Marseille as the backdrop for his gritty proletarian-flavoured works, like Marius et Jeanette (1997) and À la place du coeur (1998).

The 2000 Cannes festival was marked by a return to period dramas, including two seventeenth-century dramas: veteran Roland Joffré 's Vatel, and Patricia Mazuy 's Saint Cyr, both an improvement on the glossy star-vehicle "heritage" movies of the late Nineties, like Beaumarchais L'Insolent (a French equivalent of The Madness of King George) and Le Hussard sur le Toit, which broke budget records and flopped, lapping up funds. Reasonable thrillers have also surfaced in recent years, such as Chantal Akerman 's La Captive (2000), and controversial and censored Baisse-Moi (2000) by Virgine Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi .Although French cinema has not returned to the world domination of the New Wave period, it is now a healthy and diverse industry. In addition to the film-makers named above, directors to watch out for include Cédric Klapisch whose Chacun Cherche Son Chat (When the Cat's Away) (1996) about day-to-day life in the Bastille area of Paris was followed by Un Air de Famille (1998), a black comedy about a dysfunctional family set in a local bar; and Jacques Dillon , whose poignant Ponette (1996) recounts the tale of a four-year-old girl who refuses to accept the death of her mother.

Theatre
The earlier theatre generation of Genet , Anouilh and Camus , joined by Beckett and Ionesco , hasn't really had successors. In the 1950s, Roger Planchon set up a company in a suburb of Lyon, determined to play to working-class audiences. It became the Théâtre Nationale Populaire, the number-two state theatre after the Comédie Française, and now does the classics with all due decorum. Bourgeois farces, postwar classics, Shakespeare, Racine and Cyrano de Bergerac make up the staple fare in most theatres. But certain directors in France do extraordinary things with the medium. Classic texts are shuffled to produce theatrical moments where spectacular and dazzling sensation takes precedence over speech. Their shows are overwhelming: huge casts, vast sets - sometimes in real buildings never before used for theatre - exotic lighting effects, original music scores. They are a unique experience, even if you haven't understood a word. Directors' names to look out for are Peter Brook (the English director who has been in Paris for decades; he is based at the Centre Internationale de Création), Ariane Mnouchkine , Patrice Chereau and Jérôme Savary .

Café-théâtre , literally a revue, monologue or mini-play performed in a place where you can drink and sometimes eat, is probably less accessible than a Racine tragedy at the Comédie Française. The humour or puerile dirty jokes, wordplay, and allusions to current fads, phobias and politicians can leave even a fluent French speaker in the dark.

In cities other than Paris, the theatres are often part of the Maisons de la Culture or Centres d'Animation Culturelle; local tourist offices usually have schedules and tickets are not expensive. The two major theatre festivals are the Festival Mondial du Théâtre in Nancy (June) and the Festival d'Avignon (July).

Buying tickets
The FNAC shops in all big towns and Virgin Megastores in the main cities have copious listings of what's on and are the best booking agencies for gigs, ballet or theatre.

Dance and mime
The French regional contemporary dance companies - including Régine Chopinot's troupe from La Rochelle, Jean-Claude Gallotta's from Grenoble, Mathilde Monnier's from Montpellier, Karine Saporta's from Caen, and Joêlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia's from Angers - easily rival the Paris-based troupes, though the exciting choreographers Jean-François Duroure and the Californian Carolyn Carlson are both based in or around the capital. Other names to watch for are Maguy Marin in Créteil and François Verret in Aubervilliers.

Humour, everyday actions and obsessions, social problems and the darker shades of life find expression in the myriad current dance forms. A multidimensional performing art is created by combinations of movement, mime, ballet, music from the medieval to contemporary jazz-rock, speech, noise and theatrical effects. Philippe Genty's company in Paris combines dance, drama and marionettes to astonishing effect while the Gallotta-choreographed film Rei-Dom opened up a whole new range of possibilities. Many of the traits of the modern epic theatre are shared with dance, including crossing international frontiers.

Though the famous Lecoq School of Mime and Improvisation in Paris still turns out excellent artists, pure mime - as practised by the incomparable Marcel Marceau - hardly exists, except on the streets and at Périgueux's international festival of mime.

For classical ballet (again well represented in festivals), the two most renowned companies are the Ballet de l'Opéra National de Paris at the Opéra-Garnier and the Opéra-Bastille, whose dance director is Brigitte Lefèvre, and the Ballet National de Marseille, whose artistic director is Roland Petit. Other classical ballet companies are based in Avignon, Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse and St-Etienne.