 The term Nouvelle Vague derived from

sociological journalism. La Nouvelle Vague

arrive! was the title of the first of several articles
based on surveys on French youth – 18 to 30
years old – published in L’Express by Françoise
Giroud between 3rd October and 12th December
1957. The articles made clear that WWII, the
reconstruction, the crisis were finally over. The
young looked at the future, not the past. It was
a time of transition, when the protagonist role
traditionally held by their fathers‟ generation
was and had to be passed on to them.
1) Autorship: the Nouvelle Vague theorists and film-
makers strove to lift cinema out of mass
entertainment and (re)place it in the domain of “Art”.
The new Wave practitioners thus theorised and
celebrated the director as “autor”.
2) Cinephilia: the New Wave filmmakers were steeped in
the love of cinema, especially, though not exclusively,
Hollywood.
3) Representation: New Wave films notoriously „broke
rules‟ with their location shooting, dislocated
narratives and idiosyncratic editing – while offering
seductive images of „modern‟ gender relationships
and lifestyles against the background of iconic
Parisian locations.
 Behind the ascent (or the explosion) of the Nouvelle Vague is a
sound critical approach, which questions, challenges and shatters
the turgid and somewhat blinkered pre-existing artistic
canon, which remained stubbornly and rigidly faithful to acquired
values. The Nouvelle Vague invents new points of reference and
creates new objectives.
 It is the style, not the content, that captivates the interest and
stimulates the debates of critics, experts, film-makers and cinema
goers.
 The politique des auteurs advocates cinema not as a “common” or
“set” syntactically frozen idiom, but as an individual artistic
expression.
 Cinema is not just an industry, the camera is not just the
“machine” any more, for it becomes Alexandre Astruc‟s “caméra-
stylo”: the camera can and must be used with the same artistic
freedom and ductility with which a writer uses his/her fountain
pen.
 Cinema, therefore, is not an idiomatic code (see above), but a fluid
language that allows to express “any kind of thoughts”.
 The Tradition of Quality emphasised craft over innovation, established
directors over new directors preferred the great works of the past to
experimentation.
 Literary adaptations to prove the cultural superiority of French film in the
face of the massive influx of Hollywood movies into the French market.
 Polished acting style, popular stars, elaborate sets and costumes: a
„classical‟ cinema
 Five general characteristics:
1. High production values
2. Theatrical and literary classics/prestigious cultural heritage
3. Studio-bound
4. Importance of scriptwriters
5. Star vehicles
 Most popular genres: comedies, thrillers,
 Flourishing Ciné-club movement, inaugurated by Louis Delluc in the
1920s
 A significant force in French culture and the development of French
cinema.
 The clubs had developed a highly literate audience for film, sophisticated
in their taste an informed about the historical issues governing the
development of film.
 Cinephilia a distinct culture on the French cultural scene
 A new type of film spectator, film critic, director.
 Intellectual climate a major force in film aesthetics, and later the film
industry
 Evolution of the social status of cinema
 Film culture: journals, cine-clubs all-time high
 Henri Langlois and the Paris Cinémathèque (1936)
 Debates about the status of film as art reanimated by a new generation of
critics.
 […] After having been successfully a fairground
attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard
theatre, or a means of preserving images of an
era, it is gradually becoming a language. By
language, I mean a form in which and by which an
artist can express his thoughts, however abstract
they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as
he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is
why I would like to call this new age of cinema the
age of the „caméra-stylo’ [camera-pen].
 From „The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The
Caméra-stylo‟ in L’Ecran Français, n.144, 30 March
1948.
 Cinema is breaking free of its limiting role as spectacle or
filmed theatre.
 Now cinema „is a language that can express any kind of
thoughts‟.
 Directing should not be considered simply a means of
presenting a scene but rather become „a true act of writing‟.
 The author „writes with a camera as the writer writes with a
pen‟.
 Like literature or philosophy, film could tackle any subject.
 First affirmation of the notion of the film auteur
 Refuting the constraints put in place by popular
cinema, mass audiences demands for entertainment and
distraction.
 May 1959 – two new works cause sensation and
attract both national and international interest: Les
400 Coups [Truffaut] and Hiroshima Mon Amour
[Alain Resnais]. The former receives the Best
Director Award and, shortly after, the Critics
Award from the New York Critics‟ Circle. The
winner of the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, however
is Marcel Camus‟ Black Orpheus, a film that remains
aesthetically faithful to those traditional, well-
affirmed film making formulae and modes
Truffaut had attacked in Les Cahiers du Cinéma
since 1954, the year he published his polemical
attack on French cinema A Certain Tendency of the
French Cinema.
Against the Tradition of Quality. Truffaut accuses French
Cinema of being “formulaic”, of being dominated by
scriptwriters, of being backward looking and of being
“bourgeois “
Distinguishes between two types of director:
a)Metteur en scène: technically competent
b)Auteur : true film artist: uses the medium creatively, has
a recognisable formal approach, identifiable style and
world-view, consistent themes across his body of
work, „man of the cinema‟ with personal vision.
Truffaut argues for a new kind of cinema, “a cinema of
authors" and claims that a film should be the
expression of a director‟s personal preoccupation. He
states that “Tomorrow‟s film will resemble its author”.
 Truffaut‟s life left profound traces and echoes, whether overtly or
covertly, in his oeuvre.
 The son of Janine Monferrand, he is adopted by Roland Truffaut who
marries his mother when he is one year old. His relationship with the
parents, and with the mother, more significantly, is often strained.
 His childhood is also problematic. He leaves school early and, after a few
diverse jobs, he creates a cineclub in 1948. It is through the cineclub that he
meets critic André Bazin, who will become his mentor and guide.
 In 1948 his parents send him to the Youth Observation Center, from
which he manages to escape. Thanks to Bazin, he finds a job and is
granted, by a judge, the right to live on his own. He joins the cineclub
Objectif 49 and the Cinémathèque. In 1950, he decides, rather abruptly to
join the army and requests to be sent to Indochina. During a leave he
meets Jean Genet and realizes he has made a mistake joining the army.
Thanks to Bazin, he is “reformed” and in March 1953 he starts writing for
the Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1954, his article A certain tendency of French
Cinema made him known outside the small circle of friends and
collaborators: he attacks well-established post-war directors and
scriptwriters, accusing them of producing works of “ready made”
quality, which rely on tested ingredients.
 Advocated “objective reality” as expounded in his Ontology
of the Photographic Image - in What is Cinema? (1958-1962).
 Relationship of cinema to reality: respects and reveals reality
because it is a mechanical art.
 Cinema as a moral vocation to embrace the „real‟.
 Aesthetic choices imply a relationship with reality/ a
particular way of perceiving and representing the world.
 4) Montage fragments reality. Deep focus (Orson
Welles), wide shots (Jean Renoir) and shot-in-depth allow us
to experience the ambiguity of reality. Advocates “true
continuity” vs. experimenting with editing.
 Every aesthetic or stylistic decision betrays a worldview
 Dedicated to André Bazin (1918-1958), Truffaut‟s mentor, who died of leukaemia on 2nd day of
shooting
 „Faire les 400 coups’: French idiomatic expression: to make mischief, to run riot
 The film is the first of five in the Antoine Doinel series with Jean-Pierre Léaud (from age 13 to 33)
depicting the adolescent‟s transition into a young man: Antoine et Colette (1962), Baisés volés/Stolen
Kisses (1968), Domicile conjugal/Bed & Board (1970), L’Amour en fuite/Love on the Run (1979)
 Semi-autobiographical story by Truffaut
 Shot entirely on interior and exterior locations in Paris and Honfleur (costal town)
 Shot entirely silent, post-dubbed, except for direct address scene at the Detention Centre (improvised)
 Style:
 Long takes
 Improvisation
 Reflexive moments
 Freeze Frame
 Truffaut‟s cameo

 Story, thematic issues and narrative structure

 Moments/events
 Open-ended, unresolved ending
 Digressive episodes
 Originally a film critic at Cahiers du cinéma, Godard was the most radical
of the New Wave; his body of work is central to modern auteur cinema.
 The son of a Franco-Swiss bourgeois family, Godard briefly studied
anthropology before he began writing on film.
 His first feature, A bout de souffle/Breathless (1960) was an instant success.
It initiated Godard‟s life long reflection on the image, which in is „first
period‟ combined a search for modernist cinema with romanticism and
cinephilia (Le Mépris/Contempt, 1963).
 Godard‟s 1960s work scrutinised France in the grip of the consumer
boom, with its spreading housing estates, computers and advertisements
 Anticipating the events of May ‟68, La Chinoise and Week end (1967)
launched Godard‟s „second period‟ of increasingly experimental work.
 With Jean-Pierre Gorin, he founded the „Dziga Vertov Group‟ aimed at
smaller, militant audiences. His aim was not to make „political films‟ but
to „make films politically‟...
 ‘As a critic, I already thought of myself as a
filmmaker. Today I still consider myself a
critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one
than before. Instead of writing criticism, I
make a film but than include a critical
dimension’.
 Inspired by Orson Welles‟ use of deep focus, André Bazin‟s aesthetic of realism
promoted an aesthetic in favour of the sequence shot.
 In the sequence shot the action developed within one continuous shot rather than
the classical montage. Think, for instance, of the American cinema that made
invisible the cuts which propelled the action or the radical montage of Eisenstein,
which emphasised the juxtaposition of images.
 Jean-Luc Godard‟s argument: all positioning of a camera is editing in itself.
 The strength of film is not its capturing the real , but the result of a particular angle,
whether provided by the camera of by the editing.
 The real does not just manifest itself but is revealed by the specific articulation of
the film. The director must find the articulation which is the most appropriate.
 In capturing reality the juxtaposition of images is sometimes as important as the
mise en scène within the image.
 Bazin and Astruc: cinema after the advent of sound had developed a fully
articulate language utilizable by any director.
 Godard disagrees: There is no cinematic language that can represent reality. What
cinema or the camera does is to allow the possibility of representing reality. There
is not reality and then the camera – there is reality seized at this moment and in
this way by the camera.
 If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the
characteristic of both: but what one seeks to foresee in space, the
other seeks in time. Suppose you notice a young girl in the street
that attracts you. You hesitate to follow her. A quarter of a second.
How to convey this hesitation? Mise-en-scène will answer the
question „How shall I approach her?‟ But in order to render
explicit the other question „Am I going to love her?‟ you are forced
to bestow importance of the quarter of a second during which the
two questions are born. It may be, therefore, that it will be for the
montage rather than the mise-en-scène to express both exactly and
clearly the life of an idea or its sudden emergence in the course of
the story.
 Jean-Luc Godard „Montage mon beau souci’ Cahiers du cinéma, 1952
 Shoot in 4 weeks on location in Marseille and Paris
 Half the average budget for the period
 Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, Hollywood‟s principal B-movie
producer specialising in low-budget Westerns, horror films, and crime
series .
 A manifesto for Godard‟s idea of a new cinema which rejected the
continuity rules of The Tradition of Quality.
 Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, small Hollywood „Poverty Row‟
company low-budget B movies
 Expose the arbitrariness of Classic Hollywood‟s continuity rules
 Unravel genre conventions/Hollywood formal paradigm
 Formally extremely influential
“What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently,
everything the cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the
techniques of filmmaking had just been discovered for the first time. “
In Tom Milne, Godard on Godard, 1972, 173