In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8 The French New Wave French New Wave directors skyrocketed in popularity when they swept top honors at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959: Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus received the Golden Palm; François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows won for best direction; and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour took the International Federation of Film Critics prize. Bidding on their films heated up as distributors, filmmakers, and audiences around the world welcomed the revolution. As Jonas Mekas put it, “Not since the early postwar years, when Italian neorealist films Open City and Paisan suddenly revealed to America a completely new school of film making, has any group of film makers attracted as much attention as the socalled Nouvelle Vague.”1 New Yorkers saw their first New Wave films in the fall of 1959, only a few months after the festival, when Louis Malle’s The Lovers, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Claude Chabrol’s The Cousins, and Camus’s Black Orpheus were released in quick succession beginning in October. By year’s end the four films were playing concurrently and temporarily eclipsed Ingmar Bergman. Time hastily described the trend as a “new cult of cinema” espoused by a few young Parisian film critics who contributed to the highbrow film journal Cahiers du cinéma and criticized the “factory” method of pumping out films with big stars, big budgets, and little thought. “Les Vagueistes,” as the magazine called them, speak of cinema “as of a religion. . . . They hate commercialism. They prefer to make pictures on subjects of their own choice. They would rather use unknown actors.” Their films were characterized as “frankly sexy” and their “too clever” camerawork sometimes made it “hard to see the picture for the pictures.” Time noted that the French “seem to enjoy such youthful excesses , even though many audiences have been disturbed by the curious sense 145 146 Part Two: Import Trends  of moral vacuum in many of the pictures. Aside from a general distaste for bourgeois respectability and a slight leaning toward the left, very few of the films express any moral or spiritual convictions whatever.” Time credited the de Gaulle government with enabling the trend by withholding screen subsidies from the “conservative” French industry and forcing it to try “something new and different.” “The public loved it,” said Time, and “suddenly, the New Wave was rolling, and on the crest of it dozens of ambitious young cinéastes went surfboarding to success.”2 Journalists later offered up other perspectives on the trend. For example, Maryvonne Butcher in Commonweal said that the New Wave directors shared at least two things in common, namely, youth and little money. Their youth gave them “the courage that occasionally verges on recklessness, which gives a wonderful exhilaration to the audience. To see films which have actually been made out of an excess of energy rather than pictures laboriously manipulating a paucity of ideas, is like coming to the end of a deadening heat wave.” Their lack of money “naturally hampers them in some ways, but in others it has proved of inestimable benefit.” For example, “They cannot afford to hire studios and complicated equipment, so they have been forced out on location—in the streets of Paris, the countryside of France, to small properties lent by friends over which they exercise control for short periods, and so on. This has liberated their work to an amazing extent not only from the rigidity and heaviness of the studio set but also from studio conventions and controls, so that they have a fluidity and speed which makes one marvel.”3 Genêt, who regularly informed New Yorker readers about French happenings in her “Letter from Paris” column, reported that the New Wave films “are part of today’s intimate fight between the mature and the young on both sides of the Atlantic. What these young directors have shown best is what they know best—the anarchic, spasmodic, lawless, and rebellious lives of certain modern young French, intensely lived within their own cycle. In these films, the shortcut to romance is sex, the stencil for beauty is the nudity of lovers.” She added that the minister of justice was “working on a bill for pre-censorship, or censoring the scenario before the film can be made.”4 The First Entries The French New Wave flourished as an import trend in the United States from 1959 to 1962. With one exception, the films were introduced by independent distributors such as Daniel...

Share