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French New Wave

by Craig Phillips
Craig Phillips is a San Francisco-based writer and screenwriter and sometime
cartoonist. He also writes and edits for GreenCine.com.

An artistic movement whose influence on film has been as profound and enduring
as that of surrealism or cubism on painting, the French New Wave (or Le Nouvelle
Vague) made its first splashes as a movement shot through with youthful exuberance and
a brisk reinvigoration of the filmmaking process. Most agree that the French New Wave
was at its peak between 1958 and 1964, but it continued to ripple on afterwards, with
many of the tendencies and styles introduced by the movement still in practice today.

Le background
Immediately after World War II, France, like most of the rest of Europe, was in a
major state of flux and upheaval; in film, it was a period of great transition. During the
German Occupation (1940-45), many of France's greatest directors (Ren Clair, Jean
Renoir, Jacques Feyder among them) had gone into exile. After the traumatic experience
of war, a generation gap of sorts emerged between the more "old school" French classic
filmmakers and a younger generation who set out to do things differently.
In the 50s, a collective of intellectual French film critics, led by Andr Bazin and Jacques
Donial-Valcroze, formed the groundbreaking journal of film criticism Cahiers du
Cinema. They, in turn, had been influenced by the writings of French film critic
Alexandre Astruc, who had argued for breaking away from the "tyranny of narrative" in
favor of a new form of film (and sound) language. The Cahiers critics gathered by Bazin
and Doniol-Valcroze were all young cinephiles who had grown up in the post-war years
watching mostly great American films that had not been available in France during the
Occupation.

Cahiers had two guiding principles:

1) A rejection of classical montage-style filmmaking (favored by studios up to that time)
in favor of: mise-en-scene, or, literally, "placing in the scene" (favoring the reality of
what is filmed over manipulation via editing), the long take, and deep composition; and
2) A conviction that the best films are a personal artistic expression and should bear a
stamp of personal authorship, much as great works of literature bear the stamp of the
writer. This latter tenet would be dubbed by American film critic Andrew Sarris the
"auteur (author) theory."

This philosophy, not surprisingly, led to the rejection of more traditional French
commercial cinema, and instead embraced directors - both French and American - whose
personal signature could be read in their films. The French directors the Cahiers critics
endorsed included Jean Vigo, Renoir, Robert Bresson and Marcel Ophls; while the
Americans on their list of favorites included John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred
Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles, indisputed masters, all. There
were also a few surprising, even head-scratching favorites, including Jerry Lewis (thus
beginning the stereotype about France's Lewis obsession) and Roger Corman.
Many of the French New Wave's favorite conventions actually sprang not only from
artistic tenets but from necessity and circumstance. These critics-turned-filmmakers knew
a great deal about film history and theory but a lot less about film production. In addition,
they were, especially at the start, working on low budgets. Thus, they often improvised
with what schedules and materials they could afford. Out of all this came a group of
conventions that were consistently used in the majority of French New Wave films:

Jump cuts: a non-naturalistic edit, usually a section of a continuous shot that is

removed unexpectedly, illogically
Shooting on location
Natural lighting
Improvised dialogue and plotting
Direct sound recording
Long takes

Many of these conventions are commonplace today, but back in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, this was all very groundbreaking. Jump cuts were used as much to cover
mistakes as they were an artistic convention. Jean-Luc Godard certainly appreciated the
dislocating feel a jump cut conveyed, but let's remember - here was a film critic-turned-
first-time director who was also using inexperienced actors and crew, and shooting, at
least at first, on a shoestring budget. Therefore, as Nixon once said, mistakes were made.
Today when jump cuts are used they even feel more like a pretentious artifice.
Many will argue (and rather pointlessly when it comes down to it) which film was the
first of the French New Wave; officially, the first work out of this group wasn't a feature
at all, but rather, short films produced in 1956 and 57, including Jacques Rivette's Le
coup du berger (Fool's Mate) and Franois Truffaut's Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers).
Some point to Claude Chabrol's Le beau Serge (1958) as the first feature success of the
New Wave. He shot the low budget film on location and used the money raised from its
release to make Les cousins; with its depiction of two student cousins, one good, one bad,
it's the first Chabrol film to contain his uniquely sardonic view of the world. Les cousins
is particularly interesting when looking at the typical qualities of early French New Wave
works, because of its long, memorable party sequence which climaxes in a very cruel
joke.

The Wave Breaks: Truffaut

But it was in 1959 that the wave really broke: that year featured three seminal
films, and with them, three major filmmakers would emerge. In 1959, a Cahiers critic so
acerbic he'd been banned the year before from the Cannes Film Festival, returned as a
director, bringing with him a film that would stun the world. That film, Franois
Truffaut's first feature, was Les quatre cents coups, or The 400 Blows.
It would be the first of many semi-autobiographical films Truffaut would make
with actor Jean-Pierre Laud (who bore a fairly close resemblance to the director) playing
Antoine Doinel. The 400 Blows was a stunningly unsentimental (especially compared to
Truffaut's last few films) but poetic account of a teenage delinquent who runs away from
home rather than deal with his uncaring parents and teacher, only to find life on the
streets a rough challenge. The film masterfully tells the story from Doinel's point of view,
but doesn't flinch away from the raw emotions of the situations, and has surely been an
influence on films as distinct as Raising Victor Vargas and Trans. The final shot is one of
the most unforgettable in all of modern cinema. Truffaut's next two films in the Doinel
saga would be the short featurette Antoine et Collette and the charming Stolen Kisses,
which is a fairly episodic but beautifuly observed romantic comedy; in that film, Truffaut
depicts Paris in the way that Woody Allen does New York, as a beautiful and whimsical
place. Interesting, too, how Stolen Kisses was released in 1968, the same year that the
student protest movements were rocking France and the world, while the film remains
deceptively serene. The anxiety seems to lie just beneath the surface.
Truffaut's follow-up film, Shoot the Piano Player, was a box-office dud upon
initial release but was given a critical reappraisal soon after. An offbeat crime film that
was quiet, romantic, personal and audacious, people weren't sure what to make of it at the
time, but its cinematic literacy and cheekiness would inspire future filmmakers (the pulp
fiction origins of the story and the inept crooks surely must have inspired Tarantino,
among others). The Ray Bradbury adaptation Fahrenheit 451 was another underrated
film, likely because at the time many people were treating it more like straight science
fiction than as a parable, a world not too different than our own. It's a surprisingly
moving, rich film that deserves a fresh look. Much of Truffaut's later work seemed to fall
into more sentimental or maudlin territory, but there are the occasional gems - Day for
Night, his playful ode to filmmaking, chief among them.

Godard
Far more politically engaged than Truffaut was Jean-Luc Godard; in fact, the two
were known to have been mutually disaffected with each other. Arguably, Godard, for
whatever his inconsistencies, is the one who might ultimately have been the most
influential and remembered. His Breathless (A bout de souffle), which was remade
weakly in America in 1983, is still probably the most often cited film when the topic
shifts to the French New Wave, and for good reason: it's a kinetic joy, full of jump cuts,
lavish Paris location shooting, with cool jazz on the soundtrack, a noirish mood, and a
lovely, literate romance, all adding up to one for the ages. Interestingly, the film is based
on a story by Truffaut, the only time the two would come close to collaborating on
anything.
Godard was the most prolific of all the major figures of this movement; he
produced roughly two films a year in the 1960s, and amazingly, many of them still hold
up today. In Le Petit Soldat and Pierrot le Fou in particular, Godard gave us his
protoypical male characters, men who were full of self-doubt; the politics in the former
seem a little more naive than what you'd find in Godard's later, more overtly politicized
work, while the latter is essentially a mishmosh of every genre the New Wave seemed to
have an interest in deconstructing (gangster, romance, musical) while ultimately ending
up in tragedy-land. My favorite Godard film is A Band of Outsiders (A band aparte)
which has an innate sense of playfulness at work as Godard very loosely adapts a book
noir and (his wife at the time) Anna Karina at her most lovely (and naive). It features a
memorable pantomime dance with Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey (who played,
in Godard's own words, "the little suburban cousins of [Jean-Paul] Belmondo" in
Breathless), and an overall sense of joie de vivre not seen in some of Godard's other
films.
Alphaville, Godard's homage to both science-fiction and American detective
stories, is a fascinating, if slightly alienating, production; Godard's frequent collaborator,
cameraman Raoul Coutard, shot modern-day Paris as a "dehumanized city of the future."
It's one of Godard's more even-keeled and sustained films and an interesting parable
about the alienating role technology plays in our lives.
In fitting with the upheavals of the era, Godard became more overtly politicized in
the late 60s and formed a film collective called the Dziga Vertov Group (named after the
great Russian filmmaker). His films then started to become increasingly inaccessible (not
that he was ever striving for mainstream success, mind you). In that period, he produced a
number of shorts outlining his politics, traveled extensively and shot a number of films,
most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. One notable exception is
the fascinating, but disturbing Weekend, which contains one of the chillingly great set-
pieces in all of cinema, a ten-minute tracking shot of the world's largest traffic jam as
well as a cutting portrayal of the bourgeoisie. As Amy Taubin recently wrote in the
Village Voice, Weekend is "kinetic and cruel... the film in which Godard really sticks it to
narrative. Not only is it devoid of a single character anyone could care about, the fact that
I've given away the ending doesn't matter a jot."
Godard the experimenting Marxist will still occasionally turn out interesting
works, but they give the appearance of someone who seems to have gone off the deep end
or lost touch with reality as most of us know it in his attempts to show his own. But this
is Godard - simultaneously exasperating and brilliant, self-important and important. "I've
always chosen to do what others aren't doing," he said in a 2001 interview with the BBC.
"No one does that, so it remains to be done, let's try it. If it's already being done, there's
no point in me doing it as well." And so it goes. And on goes his legacy, too.

Le recap
The filmmakers of the French New Wave are unique and distinctive enough to stand out
on their own but they collectively comprised one of the most influential movements in
cinema history. Some of the films have aged better than others but many remain firmly
entrenched in our memory banks. Even though they weren't aiming at mainstream
success, many of these films became popular and critically acclaimed worldwide, the
subject of much debate, and, ultimately, the inspiration to filmmakers everywhere. The
five filmmakers who came from the Cahiers du cinema (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol,
Rivette and Rohmer) were incredibly prolific: in the years between 1959 and 1966, the
peak of the New Wave, they made 32 films. When you throw in the other talented auteurs
intertwined with this group, you have a broad coalition of artists who made some of the
most groundbreaking films of the second half of the 20th century. Their contribution to
the film art cannot be underestimated.