A History of the French New Wave Cinema

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Despite their differences, these films share connections, a common essence which is nothing less than their notion of mise-en-scène, or a filmic écriture, based on shared principles. Just as one recognizes the vintage of a great wine by its body, color, and scent, one recognizes a nouvelle vague film by its style. —CLAIRE CLOUZOT, Le cinéma français The New Wave was a freedom of expression, a new fashion of acting, and even a great reform on the level of make-up. I was part of a new generation that refused to wear the two inches of pancake base paint and hair pieces that were still standard equipment for actors. Suddenly, you saw actors who looked natural, like they had just gotten out of bed. —FRANÇOISE BRION, in La nouvelle vague The French New Wave is one of the most significant film movements in the history of the cinema. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the New Wave rejuvenated France’s already prestigious cinema and energized the international art cinema as well as film criticism and theory, reminding many contemporary observers of Italian neorealism’s impact right after World War II. The New Wave dramatically changed filmmaking inside and outside France by encouraging new styles, themes, and modes of production throughout the world. Suddenly, there were scores of new, young twenty- and thirty-something directors, such as Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, delivering film after film while launching a new generation of stars, including Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Jean-Paul Belmondo. As a result of new production norms and a cluster of young producers anxious to participate in this burst of filmmaking, roughly 120 first-time French directors were able to shoot feature-length motion pictures between the years 1958 and 1964. Moreover, many of those young directors made several films during those years—Jean-Luc Godard alone released eight features in four years—so the total number of New Wave films is truly staggering. The New Wave taught an entire generation to experiment with the rules of storytelling, but also to rethink conventional film budgets and production norms. A whole new array of options for film xv aesthetics was born, often combined with tactics from the past that were dusted off and reinvigorated alongside them. Thanks in part to a renewed interest in the New Wave in France on its fortieth anniversary, increased attention has recently been directed at this movement from a wide range of critics and historians, including prominent figures in French film scholarship like Michel Marie, Jean Douchet, and Antoine de Baecque. The French film journal Cahiers du cinéma also organized a special issue devoted to the nouvelle vague.1 But given the depth, significance, and variety of the New Wave, much about the movement is still left unexamined. Large survey histories necessarily condense this era and its major figures into simple summaries, while texts devoted to the French cinema or to the New Wave in particular, such as James Monaco’s The New Wave, Roy Armes’s French Cinema, and Alan Williams’s Republic of Images, offer quite different perspectives on the New Wave, though they all end up privileging the directors who had begun as critics for Cahiers du cinéma before shooting their first features.2 For Monaco, the New Wave really amounts to François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, and he is unconcerned with defining the movement or its dates. Armes divides New Wave–era France into clusters of renewals coming from various new groups of directors. For him, however, New Wave directors have to come directly from criticism; hence he, too, regards the Cahiers du cinéma filmmakers as the only pure members. Armes avoids explaining the New Wave as a historical or critical term. Williams does a more complete job, especially for a large survey history, establishing some key influences and classifying the most important directors as the “reformists,” including Malle, Chabrol, and Truffaut, in contrast to more marginal directors, like Rohmer, or radical directors, such as Godard. All these sources help round out a sense of the significance of new directors , themes, and production techniques, but they generally fail to grant adequate space to the cultural context of 1950s France, the history of Cahiers du cinéma’s participation, or the resulting films’ unusual narrative tactics. Readers are often left without a...