In the aftermath of World War II, New Waves rose around the world. Few are more influential and important in film history than the French New Wave, which continues to reverberate even today through its impact on film style, film narrative, and even film theory.
The french new wave
After a long period of dominant classicism that ran from the silent era through the rise and ubiquitous influence of the studio system in America, a number of filmmakers in many other countries began to coalesce into film movements, each of them animated by a desire to deviate from the standard traditions of cinema that, in their opinion, had failed to keep pace with historical events. The outbreak of World War II, an utter cataclysm that saw unimaginable horrors—the incarceration and extermination of millions of Jews and others in the Nazi concentration camps, the devastation of Europe from bombing campaigns, the Americans dropping two atomic bombs on civilian targets in Japan, the relatively quotidian human cost extracted by five years of brutal combat—left the world feeling shaken and unnerved by the depth of human suffering it had just not only witnessed, but actively participated in. Centuries of tradition had led to the greatest catastrophe in human history; filmmakers were just one group of people starting to question everything that had been taken for granted up to that point.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s book Making Waves is an excellent survey of the various New Waves that rose around the world in the aftermath of the second world war. In his estimation, many New Waves around the world were driven by similar impulses. He says, “almost without exception the new cinemas were a rebellion. Principally this rebellion was aesthetic and was in opposition to what I have elsewhere called the ‘false perfection’ of the studio film.” New Wave filmmakers were tired of a cinema that they felt represented an inaccurate picture of the world, especially after the horrors of World War II. They were animated by a desire to make films that looked hard at the world with a critical perspective, and would no longer offer simple, classical filmmaking that relied on unity of meaning and conflict resolution. New Wave filmmakers were interested in disunity, discordance, and disruption. Their desire to dismantle established paradigms largely dictated that they had to work outside of the systems that had been built on the very traditions they sought to destroy. Nowell-Smith says that though their “rebellion was vociferous,” these “new cinemas were on the whole poor cinemas.” They worked with low budgets and often without professional resources; however, these New Wave filmmakers used these creative constraints as an impetus for innovation. They turned their liabilities into assets.
Though the war ended in 1945, the New Wave cinemas did not take hold immediately. It took some time for filmmakers to reckon with the aftermath of the war; many were too young in 1945 to pick up a camera, let alone use it to make work that would be one prong of a frontal assault on the classical cinema. But, by the end of the 1950s and the dawn of the 1960s, New Wave filmmakers around the world were starting to enter the conversation with films that were bold, different, and challenging. As much as the classical cinema privileged clarity, the New Wave films emphasized ambiguity. While classical filmmaking relied on stylistic invisibility, New Wave work drew attention to style. If classical films avoided taboo subjects or tried to reconcile them into the status quo, New Wave movies confronted the forbidden directly, exploring uncharted cinematic territory. New Waves rose around the world: Japan, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany, and eventually, America—the dominance of Hollywood was so strong that the United States was among the last finishers in the race to New Waves, finally getting there in 1967.
Among the most influential of the New Wave movements was the French New Wave (nouvelle vague in the language of origin). Nowell-Smith calls it “the best known, best documented, and most discussed of all the new cinemas of the 1960s.” French New Wave filmmakers achieved this status in part because they were their own best advocates. Though the first films assigned to the New Wave category were not made until 1958, it is probably more accurate to say that the real origins of the French New Wave lie in the pages of a film magazine called Cahiers du Cinema, led by critic Andre Bazin. The Cahiers magazine was among the first publications specifically devoted to film, and played a major role in legitimizing cinema as an art form, elevating it from its status as little more than cheap entertainment. The magazine was full of essays by young critics who argued for the stylistic and thematic richness of Hollywood movies, praising classical filmmakers like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and many more. If cinema had great artists, they argued, then it could be a great art.
The Cahiers critics played a major role in generating and then advocating for important ideas in cinema, including what would come to be known as the auteur theory. Because the war had disrupted the accessibility of films while the Nazis occupied France and embargoed all American films, these French critics missed out on several years of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Once the war was over and the embargo was lifted, they had some catching up to do. They started to notice that if they watched several films by the same director, they could identify similarities in style, theme, and genre. In seeking to raise the respectability of the art form they cherished, they began to think about cinema in relationship to literature, focusing their criticism on cinematic literary adaptations. The role of the author stood out to them as an underexplored idea in film. Eventually, led by critic Francois Truffaut, many of these writers came to embrace a concept that would come to be known as the auteur theory. Auteur, of course, means author. They wrote about the concept in the pages of Cahiers; then, a lot of those writers, including Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, put down their pens and picked up cameras—they became directors. After having spent a considerable part of their early careers advocating for the primacy of the directorial vision, they then set about making highly personal films that fulfilled the promise they made in writing. They became auteurs.
Resnais
Any number of French New Wave filmmakers is worthy of study, but Alain Resnais is one of its most interesting figures. According to Nowell-Smith, Resnais “was not like anyone else in the French (or any other) cinema.” He made several early influential New Wave films, including the elliptical rumination on time and space Last Year at Marienbad (1961), one of the most daring of the early works in the period in its total rejection of formal and narrative coherence; set in a palatial country resort, the film drifts throughout the majestic rooms, capturing bits of conversation amongst the various visitors, collapsing clear definitions of time. It is unclear when these discussions are happening, and only slowly becomes clear who the conversers actually are. The film demonstrates the ideas that interested Resnais in his early work, which Nowell-Smith identifies as “time and memory, the unreliability of memory and narration.” Works like Marienbad illustrate that “the weaving together of these themes, and the centering of traumatized memory or non-memory on a body rather than just a voice, is something which requires not only a film but a uniquely intelligent and scrupulous filmmaker to bring out.”
Before Marienbad, however, Resnais made Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). As a description of the film’s general effect, you could do worse than this summation from author Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier: “At the precise moment when the lines of meaning converge they disappear, or disperse laterally: a thematic is enounced, but no theme can be isolated, no phrase separated from the voice which utters it; characters appear clearly constructed but they divide into two interweaving networks; the remorseless diffraction of the editing breaches the film open to an audial and visual space which the action cannot saturate.” Like many French New Wave films, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a formal experiment, in which Resnais deemphasizes narrative in favor of mood; he wants to use cinema to explore ideas and feelings, and is skeptical of traditional story structure as a proper vehicle for that exploration. He challenges classical filmmaking’s tendency to stuff ideas into a propulsive, causality-driven narrative motivated by psychologically identifiable characters.
The film’s setting is among its many provocations: Hiroshima was obviously the site of harrowing devastation after the nuclear attack left hundreds of thousands dead, and along with the bombing of Nagasaki, leveled a psychological blow on Japanese society that left deep cultural scars. Resnais’s deliberate choice of subject matter—a love story between a French woman and a Japanese man—pointedly avoids direct acknowledgement of the setting’s thematic resonance. In essence, this story could have taken place in Tokyo or another city in Japan; it might have even taken place in another country entirely, and still maintained the west-meets-east structure of a French woman and her international paramour. The bombing of Hiroshima is hardly absent from the film, however; Resnais reminds us of the setting at several moments, letting the camera linger over place details unique to the city that suffered such a brutal violation.
The presence of the atomic bomb attack in memory is a strong indicator of Resnais’s interest in the relationship between memory and time. Cinema has always been able to strongly evoke the immediacy of the present, especially because of its propulsive ability to generate excitement through movement: a character has to stop a bomb going off right now, or has to save someone from drowning right now, or has to get to the church to interrupt a wedding right now. However, the associative power of imagery also lends cinema a tremendous ability to leave the present entirely, and without much effort on the part of the editor or the audience. In 1940s Hollywood cinema, filmmakers began to rely much more overtly on flashback structure in their work. There are many examples of this: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is often cited, but many noir films, including Double Indemnity (1944, Dir. Billy Wilder) and Mildred Pierce (1945, Dir. Michael Curtiz, pictured below), rely on a similar flashback structure. Those uses of flashback are often classically motivated, however, and their clarity of meaning is established through cinematic adherence to convention. You know what visual signifiers indicate a flashback is about to begin: a character begins to describe a series of past events; the camera pushes in on that character, settling in a close-up; music begins to rise, already anticipating the transition soon to follow; the image ripples and cross-fades to another shot, often an echo of the close-up the film has just left; the dialogue the character had been speaking on screen now becomes voice-over; we have moved from the present to the past in a few short seconds, guided by repeated, transparent techniques that maximize clarity and solidify our sense of when we are.
In his work, Resnais deviates from classical structure not by abandoning its interest in non-linear storytelling, but through modifying his formal approach to signifying a flashback. The imagery becomes more poetic, rather than causal. Shots are associated rather than linked directly. His flashbacks feel like fleeting memories, emphasizing the distinction from classical technique. In classical cinema, once the flashback takes over, the images almost never call what we are seeing into doubt—they represent a true rendering of what happened. In New Wave cinema, filmmakers are more open to unreliability in the images they use. These are shots that evoke the ways in which memory can be manipulated, or the ways it comes in bits and pieces rather than full, concrete scenes (as it does in classical filmmaking). When Resnais’s characters remember, they remember only selectively, not in entirety.
In the commentary at right on the opening of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), I examine how film might be used to create poetic effect, which demonstrates how far the French New Wave filmmakers wanted to go from the classical storytelling techniques favored by Hollywood.
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The poetry of Hiroshima Mon Amour’s opening sequence demonstrates how filmmakers might rely on its conventions. Resnais repeats images: his lovers locked in an embrace, with special emphasis on their hands. His shots of the warped and scarred hands and bodies of the bomb’s victims serve as a point of contrast. His camera is frequently in motion, simulating the effect of flowing lines of verse. His editing is associative rather than narrative; he places images in relationship to one another without inherent connection. He forces the connection through juxtaposition. It is a lyrical sequence of intense feeling that resembles the effect of poetry in motion.
New Wave filmmakers around the world were guided by their instinct to provoke. They were tired of the traditional reliance on classical norms and conventions, and wanted to break the rules. This approach motivated their choice in subject matter, but also the stylistic choices they made. In general, they were more comfortable with ambiguity, a reflex engendered by the absolute moral upheaval of World War II. Films like Hiroshima, Mon Amour, demonstrate New Wave philosophy in practice.