In France during the late 1950s, the idealism and political movements of the immediate postwar years gave way to a more apolitical culture of consumption and leisure. The rising generation was dubbed the Nouvelle Vague, the “New Wave” that would soon govern France. Many of these young people read film journals and attended screenings at cine-clubs and art et essai (“art and experiment”) cinemas. They were ready for more offbeat films than those of the Cinema of Quality.
The film industry had not fully tapped these new consumers. In 1958, film attendance started to decline sharply, and several big-budget films failed. At the same time, government aid fostered risk taking. In 1953, the Centre National du Cinema established the prime de la qualite (“subsidy for quality”), which allowed new directors to make short films. A 1959 law created the avance sur recettes (“advance on receipts”) system, which financed first features on the basis of a script. Between 1958 and 1961, dozens of directors made their first full-length films.
Such a broad development naturally included quite different trends, but two major ones are crucial. One centers on the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, group. The other trend, often identified with the Left Bank group, involves a slightly older generation who now moved into feature production. Both groups are represented in the following box.
The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) is largely responsible for the romantic image of the young director fighting to make personal films that defy the conventional industry. Ironically, most directors associated with the New Wave quickly became mainstream, even ordinary, filmmakers. But certain members of the group not only popularized a new conception of personal cinema but also provided innovations in film form and style.
The principal Nouvelle Vague directors had been film critics for the magazine Cahiers du cinema (p. 374). Strong adherents of the auteur policy, these men believed that the director should express a personal vision of the world. This vision would appear not only in the film’s script but also in its style. Most of the Cahiers group started by directing short films but, by the end of the decade, most turned to features. They helped each other by financing projects and sharing the services of two outstanding cinematographers, Henri Decae and Raoul Coutard.
The New Wave’s initial impact came from four films released in 1959 and 1960. Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins explored the disparity between rural and urban life in the new France. The first film almost became the French entry at Cannes; the second won a major prize at the Berlin festival. Fran<;:ois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a sensitive tale of a boy becoming a thief and a runaway, won the director’s prize at Cannes and gave the New Wave great international prestige. The most innovative early New Wave film was Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, a portrait of a petty criminal’s last days. As Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard followed up their debuts, other young directors launched first features.
Many New Wave films satisfied producers’ financial demands. Shot on location, using portable equipment, little-known actors, and small crews, these films
French New Cinema and the Nouvelle. Vague: A Chronology of Major Releases
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1966
Le Beau Serge ("Good Serge"), Claude Chabrol
Les Cousins (The Cousins), Claude Chabrol
Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), Francois Truffaut
Hiroshima mon amour ("Hiroshima My Love"), Alain Resnais
Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face), Georges Franju
A bout de souffle (Breathless), Jean-Luc Godard Les Bonnes femmes ("The Good Girls"), Claude Chabral Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player), Francois Truffaut Zazie dans le metro ("Zazie in the Subway"), Louis Malle
Lola, Jacques Demy
Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), Jean-Luc Godard L'Annee derniere a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), Alain Resnais Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), Jacques Rivette
Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim), Francois Truffaut Le Signe du lion ("The Sign of the Lion"), Eric Rohmer Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live), Jean-Luc Godard Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7), Agnes Varda L'lmmortelle ("The Immortal One"), Alain Robbe-Grillet
Le Petit soldat ("The Little Soldier"), Jean-Luc Godard Ophelia, Claude Chabral
Les Carabiniers ("The Riflemen"), Jean-Luc Godard
Le Mepris (Contempt), Jean-Luc Godard
Muriel, Alain Resnais
Judex, Georges Franju
Adieu Philippine, Jacques Rozier
La Peau douce (The Soft Skin), Francois Truffaut
Bande a part (Band of Outsiders), Jean-Luc Godard
Une Femme mariee (A Married Woman), Jean-Luc Godard
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), Jacques Demy
Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard
Pierrot le fou ("Crazy Pierrat"), Jean-Luc Godard
Le Bonheur ("Happiness"), Agnes Varda
Masculin-Feminine, Jean-Luc Godard
Fahrenheit 457, Francois Truffaut
La Guerre est finie ("The War Is Over"), Alain Resnais
Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot ("Suzanne Simonin, the Nun by Denis Diderot"), Jacques Rivette
Les Creatures ("The Creatures"), Agnes Varda La Collectionneuse ("The Collector"), Eric Rohmer
Made in USA, Jean-Luc Godard
Deux au trois chases que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her), Jean-Luc Godard La Chinoise ("The Chinese Woman"), Jean-Luc Godard Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort), Jacques Demy
Trans-Europe Express, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud's), Eric Rohmer
20.13 Antoine Doinel, at the edge of the sea, turns to the audience in world cinema’s most famous freeze-frame (The 400 Blows).
20.14 In
Chabrol’s Les Cousins, a browser finds a book on Alfred Hitchcock, written by Eric Rohmer and... Claude Chabrol.
Could be made quickly and for less than half the usual cost. Often a film would be shot silent and postdubbed. And, for three years, several New Wave films made high profits. The trend brought fame to Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy, Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, and other stars who would dominate the French cinema for decades. Moreover, Nouvelle Vague films proved more exportable than many bigger productions.
As the very name New Wave indicates, much of the group’s success can be attributed to the filmmakers’ rapport with their youthful audience. Most of the directors were born around 1930 and were based in Paris. By concentrating on urban professional life with its chic fashions and sports cars, all-night parties, bars and jazz clubs, this cinema suggested that the cafe scene was being captured with the immediacy of Direct Cinema. The films also have thematic affinities. Authority is to be distrusted; political and romantic commitment is suspect. The characters’ gratuitous actions bear traces of pop existentialism. And in an echo of Poetic Realism, the Tradition of Quality, and American crime movies, the films often center on a femme fatale.
The New Wave directors also share some basic narrative assumptions. Like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, these filmmakers often build their plots around chance events and digressive episodes. They also intensify the art-cinema convention of the open-ended narrative; the famous ending of The 400 Blows made the freeze-frame technique a favored device for expressing an unresolved situation (20.13). At the same time, the mixture of tone characteristic of Italian Neorealism gets pushed to the limit. In the films of Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol, farcical comedy is often only an instant away from anxiety, pain, and death.
Further, the Nouvelle Vague was the first group of directors to refer systematically to prior film traditions. For these former critics, film history was a living presence. In Breathless, the hero imitates Humphrey Bogart, while the heroine comes from Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958). Partygoers in Paris Belongs to Us screen Metropolis, while in The 400 Blows the boy steals a production still from Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika. Celebrating their own notoriety, the directors cited each other or their friends at Cahiers du cinema (20.14). Such awareness of a film’s debt to history helped usher in the reflexive filmmaking of the 1960s.
Since the Cahiers critics favored a cinema of personal vision, it is not surprising that the New Wave did not coalesce into a unified stylistic movement like German Expressionism or Soviet Montage. The development of the directors’ careers during the 1960s suggests that the New Wave was only a brief alliance of varied temperaments. The two most exemplary and influential directors were Truffaut and Godard (see box), but several of their colleagues also made long-term careers in the film industry.
“You become a director,” Claude Chabrol wrote, “when you find the money to make your first film. ”3 His wife’s inheritance financed Le Beau Serge, which won a prime de la qualite that nearly covered its costs before it was released. The success of Les Cousins allowed Chabrol to make several films quickly. His admiration for Hitchcock turned him toward moody psychodramas, often with touches of grotesque humor (Les Bonnes femmes,
World History
