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.