French New Wave

For more details of this legacy see British New Wave cinema.

French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague (see also auteur/auteur theory)

Not really a movement, but certainly an important moment in film
history. The French New Wave came about in the late 1950s,
although, as we shall see, it did have precursors. The term refers to
films made, on the whole, by a new generation of French film-
makers which were low-budget and, most importantly, went against
the prevailing trends in 1950s cinema of literary adaptations, costume
dramas and massive co-productions – a cinema which had been
labelled by the Cahiers du cinéma group as the ‘cinéma de papa’
(old fogeys’ cinema; see auteur).
The term Nouvelle vague was not in the first instance
associated with these film-makers. Indeed it was originally coined
in the late 1950s by Françoise Giroud, editor of the then centre-left
weekly L’Express, to refer to the new socially active youth class.
However, the term very quickly became associated with current
trends in cinema because of the appeal of the youthful actor Gérard
Philipe and, more especially, the tremendous success of twenty-
eight-year old Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu créa la femme (1956) and the
mythologizing effect it had on Brigitte Bardot. This meant that
producers in the late 1950s wanted work made by ‘young ones’ –
both on screen and behind the camera. This demand helped to
propel a new wave of film-makers on to the screen. This was not
the exclusive reason, however, for this ‘new’ cinema. In demographic
terms the older guard of film-makers, who had held the reins from
the 1930s through to the 1950s, were ageing fast or dying off. This
created a gap for a new wave of film-makers (some 170 in the period
1959–63) who in turn became associated in people’s minds with the
Nouvelle Vague. In the collective memory, all that remains of La
Nouvelle Vague today is this group of film-makers – not the new
youth class. A misnomer made myth.
Misnomer or not, an important effect of this demand for a jeune
cinéma was that it created the myth that those making it were all
young. There was also a commonly held belief that, because some
of the more notorious first films of the New Wave to hit the screens
were made by critics from the influential Cahiers du cinéma group
(Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer,
François Truffaut), all of this cinema came from film-makers who
had not been through the normal circuit of assistantship to

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established directors. The facts attest differently. The film-makers

loosely grouped into this so-called ‘jeune cinéma’ were in their
early thirties. During the period 1959–60, of the sixty-seven film-
makers making their first feature film, only 55 per cent came from
backgrounds not directly attached to film-making, and the remaining
45 per cent was made up of short-film directors (like Alain Resnais
or Agnès Varda) and film assistants.
Another myth perpetuated was that this cinema coincided with
the birth, in 1958, of the Fifth Republic. Two films, Le Beau Serge
(Chabrol, 1958) and Les 400 Coups (Truffaut, 1959), were seen as
the trail-blazers of this New Wave, shortly followed by Godard’s A
bout de souffle (1959) and Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
History is not so convenient. There were of course precursors. On
the one hand, there was the influence on film-making practices of
the theoretical writing, primarily emanating from the Cahiers du
cinéma journals of the 1950s, which advocated the primacy of the
auteur and mise-en-scène. And, on the other, there were film-makers
who were already making films that went counter to dominant
cinematic practices of the 1950s. They were just not associated
with any group. Low-budget, non-studio films were being made. In
fact Agnès Varda’s 1954 film La Pointe courte is often cited as the
herald of this movement. The modes of production and the counter-
cinema practices she put in place became commonplace by the late
1950s. Location shooting, use of non-professional actors (or
unknown ones from the theatre, such as the young Philippe Noiret
in Varda’s film), a deliberate distanciation so that spectator
identification cannot occur, no necessary sense of chronology or
classic narrative are a first set of hallmarks of Varda’s style that are
recognizable in the New Wave films. Her subversion of genres, her
use of counterpoint, of juxtaposing two stories – one based in the
personal, the other in the social – and her deliberately disorienting
editing style are other important features of her cinematic style
which Resnais for one has acknowledged as influencing his own
film-making practices.
Another last myth that needs examining is the belief that because
this cinema was controversial or different in style it was also a
radical and political cinema. This is predominantly not true: the
New Wave film-makers were largely non-politicized. If their films
had any political aura it came down to the fact that some film-
makers carried on the 1930s tradition of criticizing the bourgeoisie,

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but now placed their narratives in contemporary discourses – that

is, viewing the bourgeoisie from the youth point of view. The other
reason why the New Wave might have been perceived as political,
or a reason post facto, is that there were in fact two New Waves.
The first occurred in the period 1958–62, the other during 1966–68.
The first New Wave was anarchic, but only in relation to what
preceded it: the cinéma de papa. As we shall see, the second New
Wave was more clearly a politicized cinema. Hindsight may have
conflated the two moments into one and perceived it as political.
Politicized or not, both were to inform and have an impact on future
cinemas.
1958–62 As we already know, the New Wave film-makers
rejected the cinema of the 1950s and focused their attention on the
auteur and mise-en-scène. The individual film-maker and his (sic)
signature was all. Paradoxically, given their so-called modernity
and innovativeness, this was rather a romantic ideal and
conservative aesthetic. But it must be reiterated that they were not
a politicized group. Their cinema marked a complete rupture with
the 1950s cinematic codes and conventions on both the narrative
and the visual level. In terms of narrative, there was often no récit,
no completed or necessarily realistic story as such; there was no
beginning, middle and end – more often it was a slice of life; gone
were the literary adaptations of the 1950s, no ‘high art’ literature
but rather pulp or popular fiction if adaptations were being made
(with a particular liking for American detective pulp fiction). There
were no stars. The time was the ‘now-ever-present’ of the 1960s.
Discourses were contemporary and about young people. Taboos
around sexuality were ‘destroyed’ (partly the effects of the so-
called ‘free-love’ phenomenon) and the couple was represented as
a complex entity with issues centring on power relations, lack of
communication and questions of identity. The representation of
women was more positive, women became more central to the
narrative, and more agencing of their desire.
On the visual side, the institutional iconography was
deconstructed. The establishing shots, which safely orientate the
spectator in terms of space and time, were excised. A fast editing
style, achieved by jump cuts and unmatched shots, replaced the
seamless editing style that had prevailed before. The newly adopted
lightweight camera, more commonly used for television, abandoned
the studios and went out into the streets and suburbs of Paris

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(Paris was the one icon that did not disappear). Film stock was fast
and cheap. These two latter aspects of technology gave this cinema
a sense of spontaneity and cinéma-vérité more readily associated
at the time with television production, which was mostly live at
that time.
1966–68 By the time of this second New Wave, the
contemporary discourses of the earlier New Wave had generally
become more politicized and there was no positive reflection of the
dominant ideology. Godard’s films are particularly exemplary in this
context (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1966; La Chinoise
and Weekend, both 1967). Bourgeois myths (especially those
surrounding marriage, family and consumption practices) were taken
to bits and denormalized. The consumer boom, nuclear war, Vietnam,
student politics, adolescence – all were subjects for treatment. By
now the consumer boom (already criticized in the first New Wave)
was not about comfort and a better way of life but about prostituting
the self in order to be better able to consume. The most important
consumer durable of that time, the car, was exposed as the machine
of violence and death into which our covetousness had transformed
it – a minotaur of our age (la déesse), the consumer durable that
consumes us.
This cinema then was as much about the process of film-making
as it was about denormalizing the sacred cows of the bourgeoisie.
Film-making practice, the technology of the media, exposed social
practice, consumption. It was also a counter-Hollywood cinema
that did not seek to emulate the American giant, as the 1950s
products had done, but addressed first the personal and later the
political tensions that the younger generations were experiencing
during the 1960s. Both New Waves put in place a counter-cinema
to the standardization effects of American technology (hand-held
camera, no studio, editing practices that drew attention to
themselves, no star-system). It did not de-Parisianize itself, but it
did secure a social sphere for the youth class, for both men and
women. The first New Wave was not politically engaged but it was
anti-bourgeois in sentiment (especially Chabrol’s films). And it was
motivated by a desire to present the point of view of the individual
in society. Moreover, the themes it treated filtered into mainstream
cinema as early as the mid-1960s. In the late 1960s, by the time of
the second New Wave, this cinema had become politicized,
questioning institutions and their power effects over individuals –

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questions which filtered into the more evidently political cinema of

the 1970s (the exemplary director being Constantin Costa-Gavras,
but also Louis Malle).
It is worth noting that the brief popularity of both New Waves
coincided with the political culture in which they found themselves
and with the most politically tense moments in France’s history of
that period. The first period of popularity, 1958–62, coincided with
the radical effect on institutions of the advent of the Fifth Republic
and its new constitution which invested the presidency with
executive powers – giving the president virtually supreme power
over the parliament. This period also marked the bloody
decolonization of Algeria. In this light it is easy to see why the
disruptive anarchy of the first New Wave was seen as political.
The second period of popularity, 1966–8, 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, workers’ concern at their
conditions, and concern with unemployment – all of which
culminated in the events of May 1968.
Although this cinema was criticized for its focus on the
individual – its emphasis on auteur and the confessional style of
the films – it left one very important legacy. Thanks to the huge
influx of film-makers into the industry (around 170), production
practices had to be reconsidered. For money to be spread around,
films had to be low-budget. Given the number of film-makers, the
cheaper, lightweight camera came into its own. As a result there
was a democratization of the camera. This pioneering effect was to
make the camera more accessible to voices formerly marginalized
and by the 1970s and 1980s women, Blacks and Beurs (the Arab
community in France) were entering into film-making.

French poetic realism In the mid-1930s the liquidation of the two

major film trusts in France, Pathé and Gaumont, meant that the
small independent producer could take up pole position. Whereas
before 1935, the two majors had dominated production, after 1935
and until 1939 on average 90 per cent of the French films produced
were by small independent film companies. This had a fortunate
effect on the French film industry. The collapse of the major

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