Chapter 11 French New Wave

Home , Auteur, Cahiers du Cinema, Claude Chabrol, French New Wave, Jacques Rivette, Jean Renoir

Chapter 11

French new wave

Background

Do you know who is an author? Of course, you do. But do you know what is “auteurism’? Or what is “auteur theory”? Let us first understand that auteur is a French term for author. In film lexicon, however, an “auteur” is not a writer, but a director. We might ask how does a director become an auteur?

Well, it all began on March 30, 1948, when Alexander Astruc, a literary critic-cum-cineaste, published an article, “Le camera stylo”, in L’Ecranfrancaise, announcing a New Wave in cinema. Astruc based his article on analogy, comparing a film director to a novelist, whereby a camera became a pen. The comparison implied that cinema had a language of its own. The idea was clear: to elevate cinema to the level of the other arts, and to emphasize on its personal and psychological value.

Francois Truffaut built on this idea a few years later when he wrote his celebrated “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema” (1954), a theoretical essay that paved the way for the French New Wave. It ridiculed the “tradition of quality,” evident in films by the likes of Claude Autant-Lara and Jean Dellanoy, where the script was paramount and the emphasis was on psychological realism and tasteful, artistic production values. Together, Truffaut-Astruc challenged the conventional idea that film is a producer’s medium, causing the idea of politiques des auteurs to become a central concept of the Cahiers and the New Wave.

The nouvelle vague relied on a close relationship between criticism and filmmaking, that is, the films were informed by manifestos by film critics who often became directors themselves. The Cahiers critics formed their pantheon of important auteur-directors, including Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati, Jacques Becker, Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawke, Nicholas Ray, Jean Vigo, and so on. Though the auteur theory has been hotly debated since its inception, it nevertheless, is an important tool to understand films through an understanding of the directors and their body of works.

The first of the Cahiers critics to come up with a film was Chabrol with Le beau Serge (1958), followed by Truffaut with The 400 Blows. Both films tackle the theme of coming of age, and were largely filmed on location. Other films, such as Rohmer’s Le signe dulion (1959) and Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1960) followed; but it was with Godard’s A bout de soufflé that the New Wave arrived with a bang. The nouvelle vague officially lasted from 1959-60, but it had a lasting effect on later French and international films in that particular auteur-centric cinema also developed in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Brazil, Japan, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

In the ensuing sections, you will learn a great deal about the nouvelle vague and its champions.

Film noir and the French New Wave

During World War II, American films were not screened in occupied (Vichy) France. This meant that immediately after the War, there was a great demand for Hollywood products. Some of the much-appreciated films were: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Citizen Kane (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944). Through these films, the French cinephiles recognized that a key event had taken place. Most of these films were based on the popular novels by writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain, and many others. Film noir combined the hard-boiled prose of these writers with European Expressionist cinematography, which immensely appealed to the Cahiers critics. We will learn more about film noir in chapter 8, The Golden Age of Hollywood.

Did you know?

The first writer to use the term film noir in print was Nino Frank in 1946, in a article in L’Ecranfrancaise.

The first issue of Cahiers du cinema

In April 1951, the first issue of Cahiers du cinema appeared. The magazine’s presiding figure was Andere Bazin, who worked in the postwar French cine-club movement, and contributed to the Revue du cinema and other journals. For Cahiers, Bazin and his associates hired young writers from cine-club newsletters, the regulars of the Cinémathèque Francaise who later formed the nucleus of the French New Wave, for example, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard. They favored Hollywood genre films over the “quality” French cinema.

A striking feature of this group of writers was that they defended the films they loved and ripped apart the ones they hated. They treated film criticism as a means of confrontation, where the goal was to change how films were viewed and how they were made.

Within the next few years, the group’s first films came out. Cahiers du cinema can be credited with marking a permanent change in criticism and filmmaking.

The “first” film of French New Wave

Title: Bob Le Flambeur (1955)

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Cast: Roger Duchesne, Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy

The Plot: A heist film, where the central character assembles a gang of friends and experts to crack the safe of a casino.

Did you know? The director Jean-Pierre Melville played a cameo in Godard’s Breathless. He went on to direct films such as Le Cercle Rouge (1970) and Le Samourai (1967).

Legacy: The film has influenced many directors: Stanley Kubrick in The Killing, Paul Thomas Anderson in Hard Eight, Neil Jordan in The Good Thief, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and Lewis Milestone and Steven Soderbergh for their Ocean’s series.

The French masters

 Alain Resnais (1922- )

Resnais studied film editing at France’s first film school, IDHEC. After leaving college, he directed a couple of documentaries, including the celebrated Night and Fog (1955), a highly evocative work on the horrors of Auschwitz. Influenced by comics, graphic novels and the experimental works of the French writer Marcel Proust and the German writer Franz Kafka, Resnais’s works reflect homage to all three. In fact, Resnais’s films illustrate a crossover between the developments in nouveau roman (new novel) and the nouvelle vague cinema.

In his first film, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), based on a screenplay by the new wave author Marguerite Duras, Resnais draws on the experience of his documentary short films. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is having an affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima where she has come for a film shooting. Resnais uses documentary footage of the 1945 bombing of the city, and as a matter of fact, the film began as a documentary about Hiroshima and the bomb). A remarkable moment in the film occurs when Riva looks at her lover (Okada) sleeping, his outstretched right hand twitching slightly. This leads with a jolt to the memory of the twitching arm of her dying German lover, almost fifteen years earlier, as she kisses his blood-soaked face. The near Proustian scene is a brilliant example of shock cut in cinema.

Resnais’s surrealist Last Year at Marienbad (L’année derrière a Marienbad, 1961) is a film about loss and regret. Students of literature would be familiar with the legend of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe falling in love with a young girl at Marienbad. Rejected by her, he penned a personal poem “Marienbad Elegy.”

Resnais sets the scene in an elegant baroque castle, which has been converted into a luxury hotel. A haven for the rich, the clientele spend their time with card games, theatre performance and strolling in the Baroque garden outside. Based on a screenplay by the nouveau roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the film is a puzzle involving three characters: A (Woman), X (her lover, or claims to be) and M (her husband or even a figure of authority). The film is narrated by X, who tells A that they met last year, and were lovers. A has, or at least claims to, no recollection of this affair; and pleads X to leave her alone. X recalls a death, still A does not remember anything.

Marienbad’s formidable reputation rests on its status as a puzzle that can never be solved, where the director flouts all the traditional cinematic rules between subjective and objective points of view. Like in most works of Resnais, the past weighs like a nightmare and memory plays havoc with the characters. A poetic work, Marienbad enjoys its status as a touchstone of modernist cinema.

Resnais’s other works include Muriel ou le Temps d’un Retour (1963), Providence (1977), and Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980). His most recent work is Wild Grass (2010), which is a tale of an old man’s now-or-never reckless adventure. The open-ended film deploys colour as an animating force. Based on Christian Gailly’s novel L’incident, Wild Grass concerns the chance encounter of a man and a woman. The inciting “incident” is the theft of the woman’s yellow handbag and the man’s discovery of her red wallet, which the thief has discarded. The film opened to positive reviews, and Resnais was particularly appreciated for the use of music, the bold camera movements and the voiceover narration with its constant shifts between first-and third-person address.

 Francois Truffaut (1932-84)

One of the most influential figures of the French New Wave, Truffaut was also the most commercially successful of the post New Wave group. He was greatly influenced by the American B-film, film noir, and the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. An early meeting with Andre Bazin transformed the young delinquent into a passionate critic of cinema.

Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959): Truffaut put all his ideas into practice while making his first feature. The young protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), is a result of an unwanted pregnancy─ like Truffaut. The boy lives in a match-box of an apartment in Paris with his mother and stepfather. Faced with an indifferent mother and antagonistic teachers, Antoine seeks solace in the company of his friend, stories by Balzac and cinema. Shot on real Paris locations, Truffaut pays homage to the process of filmmaking when young Antoine rides in an amusement-park centrifuge which resembles a zoetrope in its earlier avatars. Interestingly, the title literally means, “raising hell.”

One of the most heart-warming scenes in the film is where Antoine’s otherwise distracted mother embraces him like never before, showers him, tucks him in bed, and confides in him about her own misfortunes. She promises him money if he scores top marks in English composition. Inspired, Antoine reads Balzac and is so enamored that he makes a shrine for the writer and lights a candle. The shrine catches fire and Antoine is at the receiving end of his father’s temper, when the mother intervenes again. She suggests they all go watch a film and it becomes the only happy night in Antoine’s life, full of laughter, music and ice cream. Next day, Antoine is reprimanded at school again, and is accused of plagiarizing Balzac’s writings in a composition “the death of my grandfather.”

Gradually sinking into delinquency, he is placed in a reform home. As the film draws to an end, Antoine manages to escape from the reform school and runs towards the sea. Upon reaching it, he turns and looks into the camera, as his image suddenly zooms in and freezes. The scene can be interpreted in different ways, one of which is there is, after all, no escape for juvenile delinquents. The camera implicates different social institutions for the irresolvable situation: society at large, family as a unit, parents, and the education system. The shot can also be read as a call for help from the audience, thereby disrupting the filmic spectacle.

The 400 Blows, dedicated to Andre Bazin, is considered one of the greatest films of the French New Wave; and has crystallized Truffaut’s reputation as a modern filmmaker.

Truffaut’s second film Tirezsur le pianiste or Shoot the Piano Player (1960) was not a commercial success when it first opened but has gained reputation as a classic over the years. It owes its popularity to a confounding mix of genres: gangster, comedy, with elements of noir thrown in.

Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1961): Adapted from a novel, this sensitive film is about two close friends, Jules and Jim, who fall in love with the same woman, Catherine, are separated by World War I, and later try to live together in a ménage a trois. The situation is made possible because Jules, married to Catherine, would rather tolerate infidelity than lose either one of them. The crisis is brought about as Catherine, realizing the hopelessness of their situation, one day shows up with her new motorcar. She invites Jim to take a ride and tells Jules to watch them. She then drives straight off the edge of an unfinished bridge, thus, killing both herself and Jim.

After directing “Antoine et Colette” for the anthology film L’Amoura vingtans (1962), Truffaut produced Le Peaudouce (The Soft Skin, 1964). His alter-ego, Antoine Doinel─each time played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, was revisited in Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979). The adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) was Truffaut’s first film in colour and English

La Nuitaméricaine (Day for Night, 1973) is a personal account of the precarious relationship between life and illusion and the off-screen upheavals between the members of the film production team. Starring Truffaut himself as a film director, there is a moment where he, as a boy, steals a poster of Citizen Kane from the front of a theater. The film won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and is a glorious tribute to filmmaking.

If you watch Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you will be sure to notice Truffaut in an acting part. Though accused by some of his contemporaries, Godard included, of selling out to commercialism, Truffaut at heart always remained a film enthusiast, capable of enjoying a wide spectrum of films, irrespective of boundaries.

Truffaut died of a brain tumour in 1984; he was fifty-two years old, and left behind twenty-one films.

 Jean-Luc Godard (1930- ) Born to a Swiss-French family in Paris, Godard started his career as a film critic. He wrote in Cahiers, “The whole New Wave can be defined, in part, by its new relationship to fiction and reality.”

A bout de soufflé (Breathless, 1960): “Modern movies begin here,” says Roger Ebert. “No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1941 has been as influential.”The plot in Breathless centres on Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a petty Parisian crook, who has just murdered a policeman. Anxious to flee the country, he persuades his girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg) to accompany him. The title suggests “at the end of breath” and true to the spirit of the title, the film races to the beat of the (anti) hero’s on-the-run, edgy lifestyle.

The film’s ending, like several aspects of the film, has an ambiguity to it. The dying hero, betrayed by his girlfriend, looks at her, strikes poses and utters, “C'est vraiment dégueulasse,” translated by a bystander as, “You are really a little bitch.” The expression can also mean, “disgusting” or suggest a feeling of nausea, famously invoked by the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Patricia, at this point, turns her head away from Michel, the camera and from the spectators. Few films have understood the existentialist view of society, human condition, and cinema itself in a better way.

As a key film of the French New Wave, Breathless rejected the well-made traditional French cinema and adapted an edgier and more experimental style. You would be surprised to know how many exponents of French New Wave collaborated on Breathless: original story by Truffaut, production design by Chabrol, and acting pats for the writer Daniel Boulanger, Jean–Pierre Melville as well as for Truffaut and Godard. Notice how Michel (Belmondo) launches into monologue while driving along in his stolen car. Although earlier too we had actors addressing the camera directly, for example, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope, but in Breathless we find the screen as a space where private freedom could be indulged.

Breathless also made a star out of Jean-Paul Belmondo, a former amateur boxer. Like James Dean and Marlon Brando, he became a role model for a generation. Jean Seberg, with her short hair, became a style icon for the young girls of her time. Breathless has been that one film to which time has been extremely kind. Enthusiastically received on its release, film critics celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2010 by positive reviews and appreciation. An academic website, http://cinemagodardcinema.wordpress.com/, is also devoted to active discussion of Godard and his works.

The film was remade with Richard Gere in 1983, and was set in Los Angeles. A debacle on all fronts, it prompted Alan Resnais to comment, “Richard Gere is a non-smoker. No one could act as well as Belmondo with a cigarette in his mouth.”

Godard’s other important features include Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1960), which was banned by the French government for three years because it commented on the Algerian War; A Woman is a Woman (1961), a musical; Contempt (1963), a defiant take on Alberto Moravia’s novel with Fritz Lang, Brigitte Bardot, and Michel Piccoli; Alphaville, a noir sci-fi; Pierrot le fou, a road film with Belmondo; and My Life to Live.

Godard and ‘jump cut’

The jump cut involves an uncanny jolt in a film’s progress, drawing the viewers’ attention to disturbing elision of time and space. A film might cut abruptly from one location to the next without any attempt to employ those devices or matches of eyeline that are essential for continuity. It was the French pioneer Georges Melies who first recognized that a jump cut could generate magical or comic effects if the appearance of a subject filmed from a single vantage point was altered between shots.

Although Godard was not the first to use or think about the possibilities of a jump cut, modern use of the technique has more or less come to be associated with him. Breathless, as a finished film was long by thirty minutes and instead of cutting out whole scenes or sequences, Godard chose to trim within scenes, thus creating the jagged cutting style.