Introduction

The year 2009 was awash with fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the French New Wave, from the French consulate in Hong Kong to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Ciné Lumière in London to the Vieille Charité in Marseille and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and many other places in between. Festivals, retrospectives, and conferences commemorated what has become the landmark film movement in French cinema, widely seen as “an alternative cinema that was personal, radical and independent” whose effects “are still with us today.”¹ As these words (culled from the Irish Film Institute program—but I could have picked any number of other sources) make clear, the dominant tone has been one of celebration. It is with this in mind that I approached the contributors to this In Focus feature. All are recognized experts on the French New Wave and on this period of French film history through their publications, but all share the desire to challenge our vision of the movement, or at the very least to push the boundaries beyond the recognized canon of filmmakers—traditionally understood as comprising two groups, one around the Cahiers du cinéma (François Truffaut, Jean- Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette), the other the “Left Bank” filmmakers Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker.

Not that there is not a lot to celebrate about the French New Wave. Undoubtedly the nouvelle vague represented a break in filmmaking practice at the turn of the 1960s, introducing new ways of making films outside the mainstream industry, spreading the use of lighter technologies, ushering in an entire new generation of directors, stars, cinematographers, producers, and composers. It also, significantly, revolutionized the way people saw films and the way they wrote about them, in particular popularizing the politique des auteurs. This familiar “legend,” or “myth” in Antoine de Baecque’s terms,² whose gods are François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, surrounded by the other directors mentioned above, has been remarkably successful at perpetuating itself. This is in part due to the fact that most are still making films fifty years later (and in many cases films that still matter), as are many of the stars concerned—Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Léaud, to name but two. The brilliance, charm, and freshness of the films is clearly another important factor. For each new generation of film students and cinephiles, the modernist yet elegiac black-and-white visions of Paris offered by Breathless (À bout de souffle [ Jean-Luc Godard, 1960]) and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7 [Agnès Varda, 1962]); the cruel yet ardent sexual games of Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous appartient [ Jacques Rivette, 1960]), Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste [François Truffaut, 1960]), Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol,1960), and Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962); the sincerity and intensity of The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups [Truffaut, 1959]) and Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais,1959), all come as a fresh revelation. In short, these films of fifty years ago have a nonchalance and modernity that is still sexy and “cool” today.

Wittingly or not, the New Wave directors were adept at perpetuating their own legend through a trick of historiography. Central to this is the famous polemical article by François Truffaut titled “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” originally published in Cahiers du cinéma in January 1954,³ in which Truffaut ferociously attacked French mainstream cinema, and in particular the somber melodramas and costume films of the so-called Tradition of Quality. The article spearheaded a veritable campaign by Truffaut and others such as Godard and Chabrol to denigrate mainstream French cinema and position themselves as the figures of renewal. This classic avantgardist strategy, aimed at creating a “distinction” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) within the French cinematic field between the new generation and the rest, was successful not only in promoting the new filmmakers as both critics and cineastes, but also in creating a historiographical vacuum around the New Wave. For a long time, and to a large...