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, Wilder) and Mildred Pierce (1945, 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.
|
|
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.
Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most influential and important of the French New Wave figures. Like many of his contemporaries, he got his start as a critic writing about cinema, which he considered a substantial and important art form. His critical appraisals of film as a medium were designed to elevate cinema beyond its perceived status as mere entertainment and into something worth taking much more seriously. His early criticism reads like a diary of a film viewer’s experiences, as he uses his own reflections on the films he has seen to work towards a greater understanding of the formal properties of the medium. Here he is writing about Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), in which he reveals a sophisticated understanding of the director’s general tendencies manifest in the particular film he is discussing: “When he leaves the studio to shoot on location, the director of To Catch a Thief allows his actors more freedom, lets his camera linger on a landscape, seizes neatly and firmly on every droll character or bizarre object to come his way.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Godard eventually made the switch from writing film criticism to making films himself, first creating a series of short films and then making his debut with Breathless (1960), a self-conscious movie that deliberately references Hollywood gangster movies. It is the story of a petty thief (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg), which, like most American gangster films, ends badly for the protagonist—he dies in the street, shot down by the police. From this description, Breathless might not seem like any major earthquake, but it was Godard’s formal approach that broke from classical cinema’s rules of editing and framing that really had an impact. Specifically, he uses an editing pattern of jump cuts that defy continuity cutting; instead of matching action, he wildly jumps from shot to shot without regard for the rules. You can see this strategy of jump cutting on display in the clip below from Breathless, in which he cuts to the same shot without marking the passage of time through a dissolve; Seberg’s hands change position jaggedly, disrupting the smooth pattern of editing that most classically constructed films obey.
Godard is above all a formalist; his early films do rely on narrative, but they reveal his heavier interest in the way that films can be constructed or deconstructed through the manipulation of framing, editing, sound, and music. In Band of Outsiders (1964), one of his characters calls for a moment of silence in a crowded diner; the film obliges, with Godard cutting out all ambient sound and letting the audience sit with the dead air.
Through his interest in form, Godard’s cinema increasingly abandoned narrative in favor of his left-wing politics. Beginning in the middle 1960s, most of his films carried an explicitly Marxist point of view; he aimed an often satirical eye at the hypocrisies of French and American society, with the two countries’ disparate involvement in the Vietnam War a particular point of contention for Godard. His formal approach to confrontationally political cinema is firmly on display in Weekend (1967), which features a series of terribly bloody car accidents that most of the film’s characters ignore completely or are inconvenienced by as they try to get to their vacation spot.
The film uses a series of difficult formal approaches that are almost anti-narrative to criticize societal indifference to suffering. Here is an extended moment from Weekend, in which a traffic jam seems to go on forever; Godard doesn’t cut, but keeps the camera moving to the right as the line of cars, their horns blaring, stretches seemingly into infinity. The whole point of the shot is its duration—as an audience member, you’re supposed to notice, and by frustrated by, how long it runs.
|
|
Godard’s film Le Petit Soldat (1963) comes at a pivot point for the filmmaker; though his work was always political, Le Petit Soldat’s narrative, which is about a photographer drawn into espionage surrounding the Algerian War—a favorite target of left-wing French filmmakers who saw the conflict as a terrible example of their country’s imperialist ambitions—brings politics to the forefront for the first time in Godard’s films.
Le Petit Soldat shows Godard’s heavy interest in form; though the film is driven by narrative and features characters, it also demonstrates how Godard uses the tools of cinema to manipulate audience expectations. Consider the heavy use of handheld camera, which is a visual trait characteristic of many French New Wave films. In Le Petit Soldat, the shaky camera, which often follows characters as they walk or drive, lends it a kind of documentary-like authenticity. Unlike classical cinema, where the camera usually did not draw attention to itself, Godard consistently wants you to notice the visual style.
Rather than cutting between two people talking, for instance, he’ll quickly pan back and forth between them, letting the image blur as the camera finds its new subject. This is not a polished Hollywood product, but something far different, which refuses to obey the artificiality of the world created by the camera. Instead, Godard wants to draw attention to the ways in which the camera creates and shapes the world, rather than reflects it. Ironically, though, Godard believes that revealing this artifice makes the film more authentic.
Godard is also highly interested in cinema’s sonic possibilities. Throughout Le Petit Soldat, he manipulates voice over. Instead of using narration to advance the story by conveying plot information, he often creates redundancies. His protagonist Bruno (Michel Subor) will say something in voice over, and then we will see it happen on screen exactly as he described. This violates a general tendency of mainstream storytelling, in which voice over that merely describes on screen events is avoided entirely—Godard deliberately violates a rule, calling its value as a rule into question.
Jean-Luc Godard is just one of the number of figures of the French New Wave; to a person, they took the cinematic art form seriously, and believed that it could be used to explore the human condition and important political ideas. For the New Wave directors, film was more than simple entertainment. First as writers, and then as filmmakers, their work was completely devoted to the art form itself.
clip quiz - the french new wave
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
JULES AND JIM (1962, Truffaut)
French New Wave directors like Francois Truffaut tried to inject new life into the French cinema. What feels new or exciting about this clip from Jules and Jim? |
|
THE COUSINS (1959, Chabrol)
French New Wave filmmakers wanted to draw attention to the camera rather than burying its moves in narrative. What noticeable camera trick do you see in this clip from The Cousins, and why would director Claude Chabrol do it? |
|
VIVRE SA VIE (1962, Godard)
French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard deliberately tried to make you aware of the cinematic image as artificial. How does this clip from Vivre Sa Vie defy your definition of what a movie scene is supposed to do or be? |
|
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961, Resnais)
Describe the feelings you get from watching this sequence, taken from the surrealistic French film Last Year at Marienbad. What is it trying to make you feel, and how does it do that? |
|
AGNES VARDA - CLEO FROM 5 to 7
Though many of the most famous French New Wave directors were men, Agnes Varda carved out a considerable legacy of her own in her long career as a filmmaker. She directed fictional feature films, shorts, and made a number of both ethnographic and highly personal, self-reflective documentaries about her life, career, relationships, and, as always with French New Wave directors, the cinema itself.
Varda made her debut with the personal drama La Pointe Courte (1955), which follows a couple whose marriage is falling apart. She wrote and directed the film four years before the oft-acknowledged beginning of the French New Wave in 1959 with the release of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows; in some ways, this early release date makes Varda the first French New Wave filmmaker, despite the reputations of Truffaut, Resnais, and Godard. A collection of short films followed, before Varda returned to feature filmmaking with the highly personal Cleo From 5 to 7 in 1962, which stars Corinne Marchand as the title character Cleo, who wanders the city of Paris while awaiting test results from her doctor, which will confirm whether or not she has cancer.
Throughout Cleo From 5 to 7, Varda’s camera privileges scenes of Cleo quietly walking and contemplating her potential future (or, if the worst comes to pass, lack thereof). Like other New Wave directors, Varda is interested in using film form to explore characters in new ways; her film creates a space for a female character to struggle with the kind of existential dread that her contemporaries would reserve for their mostly male protagonists. Cleo’s time in Paris while she awaits the notification from her doctor oscillates between recognition (as she meets people she knows for brief conversations) and total anonymity. The film’s power comes in our awareness that Cleo’s life may hang in the balance, and the total unawareness of that possibility of the people she is surrounded by. She is put in the agonizing position of waiting to find out whether she will live or die, and no one around her is any the wiser; they go on about their days, blissfully unaware of Cleo’s private struggle. Varda places Cleo in public spaces to highlight the gap between her inner life and the life that other people perceive.
Despite the film’s heavy subject matter, Varda maintains a sense of play that would dominate much of her cinema, including her fiction films and documentaries alike. This comes to the forefront in the scene midway through where Cleo watches a silent film. Created for Cleo From 5 to 7, the silent film stars New Wave icons Jean-Luc Godard and his muse/lover/wife, Anna Karina. This is typical of French New Wave films; this moment in cinema in France was highly collaborative, with many of the directors forming a kind of community. For Godard and Karina to appear in Varda’s film, especially in a film-within-the-film, is a perfect encapsulation of the movement’s self-reflexivity. Each French New Wave movie is, to a certain extent, about whatever the story is, but also about movies themselves.
Throughout Varda’s long career (she died at 90 in 2019), she developed a reputation as a feminist icon of the French New Wave whose work was deeply personal. Upon her death, director Martin Scorsese remembered her this way: “I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art … which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s — every image, every cut … What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching … and alive.”
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.