The French New Wave
The international impact of the French ‘nouvelle vague’ or
New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s can be compared in importance to
that of Italian Neorealism or German Expressionism of earlier decades. In fact,
however, the New Wave was not a unified movement and the term came to be used
as a kind of shorthand to describe films from this era that were often as
different from each other as they were from the mainstream Hollywood and French
films against which they were measured. The term New Wave has been applied to
films as diverse as Alain Resnais’ ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (‘Last Year
at Marienbad’) and Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim’, both made in 1961. It is
possible, therefore, to describe the ‘New Wave’ as a ‘moment’ rather than a
movement as Susan Hayward (1996) does or, to distinguish the term more
precisely and categorise the work of particular directors as strictly speaking
belonging outside this ‘New Wave’.
The origins of the ‘nouvelle vague’ lay in the theoretical writings of Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. In 1948 Astruc writing in ‘L’Ecran français’ formulated the concept of ‘caméra-stylo’ (“camera pen”) in which the language of film was considered to be ‘as supple and subtle as that of written language’ and the filmmaker as a kind of writer in light. This suggestion was developed and elaborated in André Bazin’s influential ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’, a journal which became the platform for a younger generation of cinéphiles (film lovers) and critics that included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer. The Cahiers critics praised films in which the ‘signature’ or distinct style and thematic concerns of the director was apparent. They also rejected both the radical montage aesthetics of Eisenstein and the ‘invisible’ continuity style editing of Hollywood as manipulative and didactic. Instead they championed the ‘long take’ and mise-en-scène tradition of such ‘auteurs’ (authors) as Renoir, Cocteau, Murnau, Ophüls, Lang, Ford, Hitchcock and Welles. Even ‘B’ movie directors such as Roger Corman were hailed as original artists and their work was favourably compared to the more interchangeable style of other ‘hired hands’ of the Hollywood studio system or France’s own ‘Tradition of Quality’. This cinema of literary adaptations and costume dramas which was prevalent in France in the 1950s was ferociously rejected by Truffaut, amongst others, as ‘cinéma de papa’, (‘daddy’s cinema’) being regarded as formulaic, studio-bound, irrelevant to contemporary France and (worst crime of all) uncinematic. (see chapters Mise-en-Scène and Film Theory).
What distinguished the young film enthusiasts and critics writing for Cahiers du Cinéma was that so many of them went on to put their ideas into practice as film directors. Claude Chabrol was the first of the Cahiers critics to commit his ideas to the test of a feature film release. ‘Le Beau Serge’ (‘Bitter Reunion/Handsome Serge’) (1958) about a village drunkard was filmed on location using money left to the director in an inheritance. This film, which is considered by many critics to be the first authentic expression of the New Wave, was a commercial success and allowed Chabrol to engage in further productions through his company AYJM and also finance the first film of his Cahiers colleagues Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. Truffaut claimed that the New Wave began ‘thanks to Rivette’ and Cahiers described his debut feature ‘Paris Belongs to Us’ (1960) as ‘the most significant and resolutely modern work of the new cinema.’ (Parkinson 1995). The New Wave was also made possible by changes in the French government’s attitude towards film subsidies. Previously government subsidies had been allocated by the Centre National de la Cinématographie only to established directors. The Gaullist regime, alarmed at what it regarded as the growing menace of Hollywood created an ‘advance on receipts’ system which financed first directors on the basis of a script.
In fact it was three films made in 1959 that brought the French New Wave to the world’s attention. These were Truffaut’s ‘Les Quatre cents coups’(The 400 Blows), Godard’s ‘À bout de souffle’ (Breathless’) and Alain Resnais’ ‘ Hiroshima , mon amour’. Each presented, in unique ways, a refreshing challenge to the internationally dominant classical Hollywood style and an artistic rebuff to the ‘cinéma du papa’. All three films self-consciously broke or upset conventions of mainstream cinema. Truffaut’s and Godard’s films displayed several of the features that became characteristic of the New Wave. They relied on real locations (in and around Paris), natural or very simple lighting, unknown (at the time) actors, a ‘casual’ look including handheld camera work (thanks to new lightweight equipment), sudden pans, zooms or tracking shots, an interest in long takes, rambling narratives and ‘natural’ dialogue that seemed, at times, to be improvised. Each of these features was a conscious rejection of the studio bound, highly crafted and literary style of France ’s ‘tradition of quality’.
These features were also suited to the New Wave’s need to make its films quickly and cheaply. They can be seen clearly in ‘Les Quatre Cents Coups’ (The 400 Blows 1959) Truffaut’s first full length film, an autobiographical portrait of a character named Antoine Doinel which would be continued in four more films. ‘The 400 Blows’, which Truffaut dedicated to André Bazin, concerned a young boy trapped by family, school and society who is eventually placed in a reformatory. The final scene, in which Doinel escapes his confinement and (after a long tracking shot running along a beach) is suddenly freeze-framed, was a highly original ending in 1959 although the technique has been employed to conclude countless films since then. ‘The 400 Blows’ won the Grand Prix de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 (ironically Truffaut had been refused entry in 1958 due to his aggressive criticism of French cinema) and the film went on to gain widespread international recognition.
Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘À bout de souffle’ (Breathless) is even more indifferent to the heritage of craftsmanship, technical control and polished photography that characterised the classical French ‘tradition of quality’. Indeed, Godard’s cinema would become the most radically challenging work of the New Wave (see Case Study), while the less politically-motivated Truffaut would show himself capable of working within the mainstream, at times surprisingly close to the carefully crafted and literary ‘cinéma de papa’ that he despised.
Resnais film ‘Hiroshima, mon amour’, from a script by Marguerite Duras, also employs techniques that ran counter to dominant cinematic practices of the 1950s. The film is about an actress making an anti-war film in Japan who has a brief affair with a Japanese architect. Through the use of male and female voice-overs, documentary footage of Hiroshima and flashbacks to the woman’s past in occupied France , we slowly discover she had had a disastrous affair with a German soldier and was punished by the town and her family. Through use of the silent flashbacks their past experiences are drawn together and an intense atmosphere is sustained through the revelations. Memory and fantasy are difficult to distinguish in the film and shifts in time and space are not clearly signalled. Resnais’ film has been described as ‘the prototypical Left Bank film’ (Bordwell 1994). The Left Bank or ‘rive gauche’ was composed of slightly older, more experienced directors such as Resnais, Agnès Varda and Georges Franju whose work was championed by ‘Positif’, a film periodical which was more Marxist in its leanings than its rather Catholic rival ‘Cahiers du Cinema’. ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ like Agnès Varda’s 1954 film ‘La Pointe courte’, an early example of ‘Left Bank’ filmmaking, employed a deliberately disorientating editing style in which chronological sense was disrupted and the narrative counterpointed two stories, one personal and the other social (or historical).
The style and subject matter of films by ‘ Left Bank ’ directors, such as Resnais, differs enormously from that of New Wave directors such as Truffaut or Godard. Resnais’ ‘Last Year in Marienbad’, for example, a tale of three people meeting in a luxury hotel, is so formally stylised that it is difficult to know if we are watching a dream or ‘reality’. The black and white photography is lush, the framing artfully studied and the wealthy guests at the hotel seem to have as much reality and mobility as the ‘Vogue’ models they resemble. The film is composed of achingly slow tracking shots of ornate ceilings, grand symmetrical corridors and baroque interiors, figures frozen against geometrically perfect gardens and voice-overs that drift across the images like thoughts at the edge of consciousness. The final effect of Resnais’ alienating devices is to expose the distance between the film’s characters and the failure of their relationships, and, further, to undermine our notions of time, memory and meaning. The contrast to the sprightly ‘documentary look’ of a Truffaut film such as ‘The 400 Blows’ or ‘Jules et Jim’ or almost any of Godard’s films could not be more pronounced. Where Resnais’ work is heavily scripted and meticulously crafted, the work of the former Cahiers critics appears, at least, much looser and more improvised. By contrast, feature such as hand-held camerawork and a seemingly casual attitude to framing, camera movement and editing are characteristic of the work of Godard, early Truffaut and other New Wave directors.
What the New Wave and Left Bank directors shared however, was an impulse to break with the past, to experiment with film form and challenge their audiences. Innovative storylines, elliptical editing, jump cuts, freeze frames, anamorphic distortion, changes in film speeds, unconventional use of sound, fragmented or non-linear narratives were techniques of a wider modernist project to unstitch the ‘seamless’ realism that dominated cinema. ‘This is cinema !’ these films screamed. ‘Do not confuse it with reality’. To bring the point home we often see the process of filmmaking itself as the subject of the ‘narrative’ as in many of Godard’s films including ‘Le Mépris’ (‘Contempt’ 1963) (see Case Study) or François Truffaut’s ‘La Nuit Américaine’ (‘Day for Night’ 1973).
Many New Wave films also foreground quite explicitly their cinematic influences. These include Hollywood genre movies, especially the film noir output of the 1940s and 50s; the work of Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and other favoured ‘auteurs’; and various film movements such as French ‘Poetic Realism’ or Italian Neorealism (see 1940s). Jean-Pierre Melville’s gangster films are extreme examples of this tendency to pay open tribute to a particular tradition: ‘Le Doulos’ (’The Fingerman’ 1962), ‘Le Deuxième Souffle’ (’Second Breath’ 1966) and ‘Le Samuraï’ (‘The Samurai’ 1967) are virtual studies in the conventions of Hollywood crime thrillers and film noir. The impassive antiheroes wear trenchcoats and fedora hats and even drive American cars. In fact, Melville who is regarded as an important influence on the younger generation of New Wave was probably the first to dedicate his films to earlier screen heroes and styles so obviously.
Hollywood’s influence is certainly to be found in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘À Bout de Souffle’ (’Breathless’ 1959) (in which Melville actually appears) where Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a small-time Parisian hood who imagines himself to be a Bogart or Cagney. He falls in love with an American blonde, played by Jean Seberg, who transforms into a heartless ‘femme fatale’ (see chapter Film Noir). But if audiences were lulled for a moment by allusions to American cinema, they were easily jerked awake by a different kind of allusion to ‘the process of filmmaking’. Godard’s use of ‘jump cuts’ in ‘Breathless’ - which broke a cardinal rule of continuity editing - was typical of the way New Wave’s directors insistently drew attention to the medium they worked in.
This emphasis on the constructed nature of the films - New Wave’s ‘reflexivity’ - was expressed in all manner of ways, and with varying degrees of intensity. In Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim’ (1962) the tale of an unconventional love affair between two men and a woman reunited after World War 1 : the funny, romantic, irrepressible story is suddenly stopped a frame, transforming the ‘moving images’ into a photograph, to show that for all the vitality and dash, we are seeing memories transposed to the screen.
According to Parkinson (1995), such was the initial impact of the ‘New Wave’ that more than a hundred directors managed to raise funds for the debut features between 1959 and 1962. Most of these disappeared from view but a small group continued to exert an influence over French cinema. Other important New Wave directors included Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Louis Malle. Chabrol who had helped kickstart the New Wave in 1958 with ‘Le Beau Serge’ revived his career after a somewhat fallow period producing B movie thrillers with his late 1960s trilogy ‘Les Biches’ (The Does), ‘La Femme infidele’ (The Unfaithful Wife) - both 1968 - and ‘Que le bête meure’ (The Beast Must Die 1969). Chabrol’s whole career can be seen as an extended homage to Hitchcock, about whom he wrote a book (with Eric Rohmer). Chabrol shared Hitchcock’s preoccupation with sex and murder, but his thrillers are also marked by sharp observation and, frequently, vicious satire of the French middle class. Jacques Rivette, a more influential figure in the 1970s found difficulty in reaching large audiences with his sometimes long and phenomenally complex films. Only a few of his features have been distributed outside France despite his critical reputation, much of it based on the admiration for his serious and committed approach amongst fellow Cahiers critics.
Eric Rohmer’s cinema includes an early film ‘Le Signe du lion’ (1959) which, like ‘The Bicycle Thieves’ to which it is indebted, follows an unemployed and penniless man through the city streets. His later films, including three cycles of films: ‘Six Moral Tales’ (1962-72), ‘Comedies and Proverbs’ (1980-87) and ‘Tales of Four Seasons’ (1992), are talkative, philisophical investigations of human behaviour. Some of these films, such as ‘Pauline at the Beach’ (1982) and ‘Full Moon over Paris’ (1984) were successful internationally for their witty dialogue and sharply observed portraits of upper-middle class morality and his critical standing has grown in recent years. His films are characterised by Bordwell (1994) as ‘having the flavour of the novel of manners, or of Renoir films’. Louis Malle, whose career was already established before the emergence of the New Wave with ‘L’Ascenseur pour l’echafaud’ (Lift to the Scaffold 1957) has made films very much within the ‘nouvelle vague’ tradition of experimentation. ‘Zazie dans le métro’ (1960) about a spirited eight year old girl who causes chaos while visiting her uncle in Paris employed jump cuts, variable camera speeds, superimpositions and a variety of trick shots to create a sense of excitement and freedom. ‘Le Feu follet’ (The Fire Within 1963), which depicts the last hours of an alcoholic, disgusted with the life he sees around him, is regarded as Malle’s finest work in the 1960s.
Many critics argue that the energies of the New Wave had been largely absorbed or dissipated by 1964 at which point the key characteristics of the ‘movement’ were being imitated abroad. Susan Hayward, however, suggests that there were, in fact, two French ‘New Waves’: one from 1958-62 and the second from 1966-68. The international popularity of the ‘first’ may owe at least as much to the breaking of sexual taboos as to a real interest in cinematic modernism in the art house theatres of America and the United Kingdom. In 1961, for example, the Catholic ‘Legion of Decency’ in America condemned less than one percent of American productions, but an astonishing twenty percent of foreign releases. The New Wave interest in contemporary life, which included the newly emerging ‘free-love’ phenomenon - a result of the wider availability of the pill - was an obvious attraction to audiences bored by the stifling restrictions around mainstream Hollywood, or British films. When American films in the late 1960s were free to deal with the same subjects distributors of European films found their audience melting away. The second New Wave from 1966-68 was more politicised and open attacks on capitalism, the
family, consumerism and imperialism became commonplace, with Godard's films leading the
way. As Hayward (1996) notes:
`The second period of popularity, 1968, coincided with the progressive disenchantment with
De Gaulle's authoritarian presidential style, unrest on social and educational levels owing to lack
of resources to accommodate the expanding urban society and student university numbers,
worker's concern at their conditions, and concern with unemployment - all of which culminated in
the events of May 1968.'
While many of the New Wave directors became firmly established within the French film industry
and the sense of daring experimentation subsided, the legacy of the French New Wave is
difficult to overestimate. As Cook suggests, the movement revitalised the stagnant British and
American cinemas during the sixties, and produced similar chain reactions in Italy , West
Germany, Eastern Europe and indeed around the world:
`By calling into question the very form and process of narrative cinema, the filmmakers of the New Wave insured that the cinema could never again rely upon the easy narrative assumptions of its first fifty years.' (Cook 1996)