French New Wave

W ant ant to get into the new wave, but feeling a bit overwhelmed? We'll take you for a quick spin through the basics... FRENCH NEW WAVE: WHERE TO START © 2008 Simon Hitchman

CONTENTS hat is the French New Wave, anyway? hat are the best films for beginners?

the French New Wave, anyway? The Nouvelle Vague: A Beginner's Guide The directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague, including Francois Truffaut, Truffaut , Jean-Luc Godard, Godard , Claude Chabrol, Chabrol , Eric Rohmer , Jacques Rivette,, Louis Malle, Rivette Malle, Alain Resnais, Resnais, Agnes Varda, Varda , and Jacques Demyh Demyhave made, between them, films numbering in the many hundreds. (F reference, you can see the New the  New Wave Encyclopedia for films we consider to be a part of the French New Wave.) If you were to add to this t of those various filmmakers of the era who have been labelled as New Wave at one time or another, as well as those influenced by the mov  both in France and abroad, abroad, then the number of potential potential films would run into many thousands. thousands. Getting to grips with the New Wave thus understandably might seem a daunting prospect for somebody wanting to explore the movement f  time. With that in mind, this introduction will provide some general context and an overview of some of the French New Wave's most basic It will also offer some suggestions about where to start your investigations, as well as an overview of the seminal "must see " films which be the movement. If you‟ve already seen many of t he best known New Wave films, or are loo king for a more specific approach, you might try 10 New Wave Film Lists, Lists , which drill down by director, sub-genre, performance and other various categories.

Fifty years on: Why the New Wave Still Matters It has now been more than half a century since the directors of the New Wave (in French, Nouvelle Vague) electrified the international film scene with their  ry new way of telling stories on film. The New Wave itself may no longer be "new", but the directors and their films are st ill They are the progenitors of what we have come to think of as alternative cinema today, and they had, and continue to have, a nfluence on popular culture in the West and throughout the world. Without the Nouvelle Vague there may not have been e, Soderbergh Soderbergh,, or Tarantino or Tarantino (or Wenders (or Wenders,, or Oshima or Oshima,, or Bertolucci or Bertolucci)), and music, music ,fashion and advertising would be without a t of reference. Francois Truffaut directing. .

rs of the Nouvelle Vague, and those of their like-minded contemporaries in other countries, created a new cinematic style, using gh techniques and a fresh approach to storytelling, that could express complex ideas while still being both direct and emotionally Crucially, these filmmakers also proved that they didn't need the mainstream studios to produce successful films on their own mphasizing the personal and artistic vision of film over its worth as a commercial product, the Nouvelle Vague set an example d others across the world to follow. In every sense, they were the true founders of modern independent independent film, and t o watch them t time is to rediscover cinema.

Breathless,, dir . Jean-Luc Godard [1960] . Breathless .

New Type of Filmmaking Filmmaking neral idea of what this new cinematic approach meant, it mi ght help to understand that before they were directors, the main players of the New Wave were the original film geeks, or cinephil s very important in a culture-starved post-war France, and most of the New Wave directors spent a great deal of time in their early years writing or thinking about it. Some were film critics, s ers of film - nearly all sharpened their cinematic sensibiliti es through long hours spent in the various Parisian cinematheques and film clubs. Their influences included everything from movies ctors like Roberto Rosselini to hard-boiled noir and B movies from America, as well as early silent classics and even the latest technicolour Hollywood musicals. From this passion for cinem a belief in the theory of the auteur: that is, a conviction that the best films are the product of a personal artistic expression and should bear the stamp of personal authorship, much as great wor  ear the stamp of the writer.

Although they admired many of the studio films being made at the time, they also felt that most mainsteam cine especially in France, was not expressing human life, thought, and emotion in a genuine way. Many of the popula of the era, they argued, were dry, recycled, inexpressive and out of touch with the daily lives of post -war French While the Nouvelle Vague may never have been a formally organized movement, its filmmakers were linked by conscious rejection of the ‘cinéma de qualité’ („cinema („cinema of quality‟), the pompous and expensive costume pictures dominated the French filmscape at the time. Besides being made to impress rather than express, these films gene afforded their directors very little freedom or creative control, instead catering to the commercial whims of prod screenwriters. Those New Wave directors who started as critics, mainly writing for the French journal called Ca Cinema, regularly praised the films they loved and tore apart those films they hated in print. Through the process  judging the art of cinema , they began to think about what it was that might make the medium special . More impo they were gradually inspired to begin making films themselves. While each director had a slightly different agenda, agenda, Truffaut could be said to encapsulate the group's mission when he said, "The film of tomorrow will not b  by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adve

Une Femme Est Une Femme, dir. Jean-Luc Godard [1961] .

Broadly speaking, the New Wave rejected the idea of a traditional story in the "Old Hollywood" sense - stories b narrative styles and structures lifted from earlier media, namely books and theatre. The New Wave directors did to hold your hand through each scene, directing you emotion by emotion, through a fixed narrative. There was a that this sort of storytelling interfered with the viewer's ability to perceive and react t o film just as they would pe react to life. These directors wanted to break up the filmic experience, to make it fresh and exciting, and to jolt th moviegoer out of complacent viewing - to make the viewer think and feel not only about what they were watchin about their own lives, thoughts and emotions as well. Dialogue was to be as realistic as possible, or strange in a made one think beyond the film, or inspired new ideas. Expressing the truth was of the utmost importance. The o not simply to entertain, it was to sincerely communicate.

(or lack thereof) of these new directors were often revolutionary, but the films' modest budgets often forced them to become technically inventive as well. As a result, the movies of the Nouv e became known for certain stylisti c innovations such as: jump cuts (a non-naturalistic edit), rapid editing, shooting outdoors and on location, natural lighting, improvised dialogue and plottin rding (as opposed to the dubbing that was popular at the time), mobile cameras, and long takes. In addition, their films often engaged, although sometimes indirectly, with the social and politi of their times. You can read a more in-depth history of the French New Wave in our history article .

International he French New Wave is the best known, similar cinematic movements were happening elsewhere, also the cultural and social change that came in the wake of the Second World War. In Britain, the emergence of  inemamovement inema movement in the 1950‟s paralleled the course of the French New Wave. The first productions of these s who included Lindsay Anderson, Anderson , Tony Richardsona Richardson and Karel Reisz were documentaries chronicling ass life that had a freshness, energy and modern satirical edge. These qualities were also characteristic of their  t feature films, many of which were adapted from the plays and novels of the so called “Angry Young Men”

, in Europe, the New Wave helped to inspire groups of like-mi nded young directors in Communist controlled akia, Poland, and Hungary. Shooting on location, often using non-professional actors, they sought to capture as really lived in their societi es. Italian cinema too, was encouraged by the example of the New Wave, as it ond the Fantastical realism of Federico of  Federico Fellini, Fellini, the existential modernism of Michelangelo of Michelangelo Antonioni, Antonioni , and the terialism of Federico of Federico Fellini, Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and and Francesco Rosi. Rosi. Later in the 1960‟s, the directors of  an Cinema -- like Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog -- took the New Wave d created a style of cinema uniquely their own. ary film movements also arose in Japan and Brazil where directors like Nagisa like  Nagisa Oshima and Glauber  e films devoted to questioning, analyzing, critiquing and upsetting social conventions. Indeed, in countries world, young filmmakers armed with hand-held cameras and ideas inspired by the Nouvelle Vague were s on their own terms. All had their own particular flavour, but, in each case, came into being as a reaction at had come before and arose out of the feeling that such breaks in tradition were necessary to the positive f cinema in their country.

The Firemen's Ball, dir. Czech New Wave director Milos Forman [1967

Although they admired many of the studio films being made at the time, they also felt that most mainsteam cine especially in France, was not expressing human life, thought, and emotion in a genuine way. Many of the popula of the era, they argued, were dry, recycled, inexpressive and out of touch with the daily lives of post -war French While the Nouvelle Vague may never have been a formally organized movement, its filmmakers were linked by conscious rejection of the ‘cinéma de qualité’ („cinema („cinema of quality‟), the pompous and expensive costume pictures dominated the French filmscape at the time. Besides being made to impress rather than express, these films gene afforded their directors very little freedom or creative control, instead catering to the commercial whims of prod screenwriters. Those New Wave directors who started as critics, mainly writing for the French journal called Ca Cinema, regularly praised the films they loved and tore apart those films they hated in print. Through the process  judging the art of cinema , they began to think about what it was that might make the medium special . More impo they were gradually inspired to begin making films themselves. While each director had a slightly different agenda, agenda, Truffaut could be said to encapsulate the group's mission when he said, "The film of tomorrow will not b  by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adve

Une Femme Est Une Femme, dir. Jean-Luc Godard [1961] .

Broadly speaking, the New Wave rejected the idea of a traditional story in the "Old Hollywood" sense - stories b narrative styles and structures lifted from earlier media, namely books and theatre. The New Wave directors did to hold your hand through each scene, directing you emotion by emotion, through a fixed narrative. There was a that this sort of storytelling interfered with the viewer's ability to perceive and react t o film just as they would pe react to life. These directors wanted to break up the filmic experience, to make it fresh and exciting, and to jolt th moviegoer out of complacent viewing - to make the viewer think and feel not only about what they were watchin about their own lives, thoughts and emotions as well. Dialogue was to be as realistic as possible, or strange in a made one think beyond the film, or inspired new ideas. Expressing the truth was of the utmost importance. The o not simply to entertain, it was to sincerely communicate.

(or lack thereof) of these new directors were often revolutionary, but the films' modest budgets often forced them to become technically inventive as well. As a result, the movies of the Nouv e became known for certain stylisti c innovations such as: jump cuts (a non-naturalistic edit), rapid editing, shooting outdoors and on location, natural lighting, improvised dialogue and plottin rding (as opposed to the dubbing that was popular at the time), mobile cameras, and long takes. In addition, their films often engaged, although sometimes indirectly, with the social and politi of their times. You can read a more in-depth history of the French New Wave in our history article .

International he French New Wave is the best known, similar cinematic movements were happening elsewhere, also the cultural and social change that came in the wake of the Second World War. In Britain, the emergence of  inemamovement inema movement in the 1950‟s paralleled the course of the French New Wave. The first productions of these s who included Lindsay Anderson, Anderson , Tony Richardsona Richardson and Karel Reisz were documentaries chronicling ass life that had a freshness, energy and modern satirical edge. These qualities were also characteristic of their  t feature films, many of which were adapted from the plays and novels of the so called “Angry Young Men”

, in Europe, the New Wave helped to inspire groups of like-mi nded young directors in Communist controlled akia, Poland, and Hungary. Shooting on location, often using non-professional actors, they sought to capture as really lived in their societi es. Italian cinema too, was encouraged by the example of the New Wave, as it ond the Fantastical realism of Federico of  Federico Fellini, Fellini, the existential modernism of Michelangelo of Michelangelo Antonioni, Antonioni , and the terialism of Federico of Federico Fellini, Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and and Francesco Rosi. Rosi. Later in the 1960‟s, the directors of  an Cinema -- like Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog -- took the New Wave d created a style of cinema uniquely their own. ary film movements also arose in Japan and Brazil where directors like Nagisa like  Nagisa Oshima and Glauber  e films devoted to questioning, analyzing, critiquing and upsetting social conventions. Indeed, in countries world, young filmmakers armed with hand-held cameras and ideas inspired by the Nouvelle Vague were s on their own terms. All had their own particular flavour, but, in each case, came into being as a reaction at had come before and arose out of the feeling that such breaks in tradition were necessary to the positive f cinema in their country.

The Firemen's Ball, dir. Czech New Wave director Milos Forman [1967

It was happening even in America, the very heartland of commercial cinema. Directors such as John Cassavetes trail for independent American cinema with films like Shadows which bore remarkable similarities to t he work  French New Wave. At the same time, the Direct Cinema documentary movement lead by Richard Leacock, D. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers. They applied similar techniques as the New Wave and Free Cinema in a directly capture reality and represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship of reality with cinema. Later, the Nouvelle Vague was a major inspiration on the New the  New Hollywood generation of directors such as Arth Penn,, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese who began blazing th eir own paths in the late 1960‟s and 70‟s. This i Penn has continued to the present day with many of the maj or figures in contemporary independent American cinem including Steven Soderbergh, Soderbergh , Quentin Tarantino, Tarantino, and Wes Anderson, Anderson , professing admiration for the movement generously used its techniques. As Scorsese himself put it: 'the French New Wave has influenced all filmmaker  have worked since, whether they saw the films or not. It submerged cinema like a tidal wave'.

Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarantino [1994] .

e the best films for beginners? elow are meant as a beginner's guide to the most well known and influential films made by French directors in the Cahiers group, group , Left Bank group, group , and those outsiders in France who were as ovement, made from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. There are many other films associated with the movement. For our complete list of  French New Wave films, films , you can see our Fil our  Fil dia.. And for more in-depth lists of recommended movies, t ake a look at our Top dia our  Top 10 French Film lists. lists . International films and film lists will be coming soon.

rs du Cinema Directors  pinions differ as to which directors belong in the Nouvelle Vague Vague and which don‟t, all are agreed agreed that the five directors (Claude Chabrol, Chabrol ,Francois Truffaut, Truffaut , Jean-Luc Godard, Godard , Eric Rohmer an Rohmer an ho wrote for  Cahiers du Cinema, are the core of the movement. The following is a selection of key films by members of this group which defined the New Wave during its heyday. We've star  films and have picked out the most fundamental to the movement.

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) Francois Truffaut

À Bout De Souffle ( Breathless, 1960 )Jean-Luc Godard  Breathless, 1960)

This smash hit of the 1959 Cannes Film Festival may not have technically been the first New Wave movie, but it was the first to gain widespread attention and is often cited as the real beginning of the Nouvelle Vague. Truffaut drew on inspiration from his own troubled childhood for this classic story of youthful rebellion.

In one of the most audacious directorial debuts in film history, Godard redefines the rules of cinematic storytelling this thrilling homage to American gangster flicks which ma a star of Jean-Paul Belmondo and continues to influence fil and fashion.

Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano  Player, 1960) Francois Truffaut Comedy and tragedy go hand in hand in Truffaut‟s eloquent and playful homage to Film Noir. In the lead role Charles Aznavour is brilliant as Charlie, the washed up pianist, who is forced to face up to the past he has tried to forget, when his gangster brother comes to the bar where he works one night.

1960) Claude Chabr  Les Bonnes Femmes (The Good Girls, 1960)  New Wave realism meets Hitchcockian suspense in this compelling drama chronicling the lives a nd loves of four  Parisian shop girls over the c ourse of several days. The unsentimental portrayal of contemporary young women  proved too distressing for some and the film provoked provoked a  backlash which saw Chabrol retreat into more escapist material until the late 60s.

Jules et Jim ( Jules 1962 )Francois Truffaut  Jules and Jim, 1962) Truffaut‟s enduring masterpiece is a capti vating story of love and friendship between three people over the course of  twenty-five years. A stylistically thrilling work of cinema,  brimming with charm, full of of innovative storytelling techniques, and running the gamut of emotions, from j oie de vivre to tragedy.

Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) Jean-Luc Godard Brigitte Bardot gives one of her best performances in Godard‟s emotionally raw account of a marital break up set against the intrigues of the international film industry. With its beautiful soundtrack by Georges Delarue, and sumptuous Mediterranean colours, it has the weight and resonance of  classical tragedy.

Alphaville (1965) Jean-Luc Godard Science-fiction and film noir collide in the bizarre city of  Alphaville where free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion have been elim inated. Can secret agent Lemmy Caution fulfil his mission to kill Professor Von Braun and destroy the evil computer Alpha 60?

Ma Nuit Chez Maud ( My  My Night With Maud, 1969) Eric Rohmer  A brilliantly insightful and sublime meditation on adult indiscretions. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a chaste engineer  who believes he has found his perfect woman, yet finds his certainty challenged while accidentally spending a night with the intelligent and seductive Maud.

ank Group

1962 )Jean-Luc Godard Vivre Sa Vie ( My  My Life to Live, 1962) Twelve Brechtian tableaux chronicle the life and death of a young woman, beginning as a cinema verite documentary a ending as a Monogram style B movie. A fierce critique of  consumerism in which people become just another  commodity to be bought and sold.

Bande à Part ( Band 1964 )Jean-Luc Godard  Band of Outlaws, 1964) Anna Karina teams up with a couple of petty crooks played  by Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur Brasseur in this freewheeling crim caper thriller set in and around the streets of Paris. This is on of Godard‟s most playful movies, full of off the cuff  invention and memorable set pieces.

1965 )Jean-Luc Godard Pierrot le Fou (The 400 Blows, 1965) One of Godard‟s greatest achievements, this pulp-noir pulp-noir antithriller has been described as cinematic Cubism Shot in dazzling primary colours and loaded with references t o literature, painting, other movies and pop culture, Pierrot Le Fou is, amongst other things, about the struggles of the artist, Vietnam, and the death of romance.

Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970) Claude Chabrol A village schoolteacher begins to suspect that her close friend, the local butcher, might enjoy carving up more than steak and porkchops. Widely considered Chabrol's greatest work, this Hitchcock-inspired thriller is rich in both authent atmosphere and nerve-jangling suspense.

he Cahiers du Cinema directors became the most celebrated members of the Nouvelle Vague, there was another loose contingent of brilliant and highly original filmmakers who were also ass ovement. This was the Rive Gauche or Left Bank Movement whose core members included Chris Marker , Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda. These filmmakers had backgrounds in documentar  n interest in experimental storytelling, and an identification with the political left. (Although it is worth noting that the label "Left Bank" was constructed by journalists years after the fact. At did not consider themselves part of any group). Other associates of the movement included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Henri Colpi, and, by virtue of his marriage t o Agnes Vard acques Demy. The following is a selection of films to watch by thi s group made during the New Wave era. For more suggestions visit our Top 10 Lists and the French New Wave Encycloped

Lola (1961) Jacques Demy Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Alain Resnais An intense love affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect in postwar Hiroshima leads to painful revelations about past love and wartime suffering. A highly original and visually stunning masterwork from Resnais.

Jacques Demy‟s auspicious debut is “a musical without music” set in the port city of Nantes, and staring Anouk  Aimee as the title character, a cabaret singer awaiting the return of her long-absent lover from overseas. Meanwhile s is being courted by a childhood friend and an American sailor. Will she wait for her true love or settle down to a ne life...

L’Année Derniere à Marienbad ( Last Year at 

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962)Agnes Varda

 Marienbad, 1961) Alain Resnais A complex cinematic mystery story that breaks all the rules of  traditional narrative film-making. The critics are still arguing about what it all means. Watch carefully and make up your  own mind...

La Jetée (The Pier, 1962) Chris Marker  In a post-apocalyptical world a m an is chosen to undergo a time-travel experiment by virtue of his one enduring childhood memory: a woman‟s face at the end of the pier at Orly airport. Once seen this unique film is never forgotten. The inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys.

Corinne Marchand plays Cleo, a young woman adrift in the streets of Paris, who suddenly realises she might be about to lose everything. Agnes Varda uses cinema-verite tec hniques to film a very human drama in one of the key films of the  New Wave.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of  Cherbourg, 1964) Jacques Demy A wistfully melancholic love story in which every line of  dialogue is sung. This romantic musical is the perfect introduction to the enchanting world of Jac ques Demy. If yo like this,try the equally enchanting Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort )

s, Mavericks and Inheritors  phrase was ever invented, there was in fact already a "new wave" of directors in France breaking with the traditional modes of production and setting an example that others would follow. Al rent in both content and style, the films of directors such as Jean-Pierre Melville,Jean Rouch, Louis Malle and Alexandre Astruc were visionary and innovative. Later these directors became ouvelle Vague movement, although some of them, such as Jean-Pierre Melville, rejected the label. ew Wave became a success, a whole new generation of filmmakers in France were inspired to follow their example. Over 20 direct ors released their first films in 1959 and this number doubl ear. In 1962, a special edition of  Cahiers du Cinema was released in which 162 new French Filmmakers were listed. Inevitably many have not stood the test of time, however the best of the g and enduring careers. ws is brief list of key films by these directors leading up to, during, and immediately after the Nouvelle Vague period.

Bob le Flambeur ( Bob the Gambler,1955) Jean-Pierre Melville

Et Dieu... Créa la Femme ( And God Created  Woman, 1956) Roger Vadim

Suffused with wry humour, Melville‟s film, set in a morally ambiguous world of smoky bars and late night gambling dens, melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication, laying a roadmap for the French New Wave to follow.

Vadim‟s directorial debut broke box office records and censorship taboos in its teasing display of sex and eroticism in Saint-Tropez. Its success lauched the career of Brigitte Bardot and gave independent producers the confidence to  back the up-coming films of the New Wave

Ascenseur Pour l' chafaud ( Elevator to the Gallows, 1958) Louis Malle

Les Yeux sans Visage ( Eyes Without a Face, 1962) George

In his debut feature, Louis Malle captures the beauty of Jeanne Moreau, the brilliant camerawork of Henri Decae, and the musical genius of Miles Davis in a tightly constructed film noir.]

Secluded in the French contryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beaut of his daughter‟s disfigured face, but at a horrifying price. Franju‟s lyrical horror film has become a classic of the genr 

Franju

Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within, 1963)Louis Malle Adieu Philippine (Goodbye Phillipine,1962) Jacques Rozier  As a young man awaits his army call-up he begins a romance with two girls who are close friends. This beautifully shot ode to lost innocence is one of the quintessential works of the  Nouvelle Vague.

A melancholic study of a self-destructive writer who resolve to kill himself a nd spends the next twenty-four hours trying reconnect with a host of wayward friends. Maurice Ronet gives an outstanding performance as Alain who has spent hi life “waiting for something to happen”, but refuses to accep the compromises of adulthood.

Un Homme et une Femme ( A Man and a Woman,1966) Claude Lelouch

Le Samourai (1967) Jean-Pierre Melville

Claude Lelouch scored an award-winning international hit with this eloquent love story which became famous for it‟s lush visuals, the performances of it s two leads Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and its unforgetable musical theme.

Alain Delon is the ultimate existential loner in Jean-Pierre Melville‟s ultra-cool crime classic. Combining 1940s American gangster films and 1960‟ s French pop culture wit Japanese warrior philosophy, Melville‟s hip, stylish thriller  has often been imitated but never bettered.

French New Wave by Craig Phillips An artistic movement whose influence on film has been as profound and enduring as that of surrealism or cubism on painting, the French Ne w Wave (or Le Nouvelle Vague) made its first splashes as a movement shot through with youthful exuberance and a brisk reinvigoration of the filmmaking process. Most agree that the French New Wave was at its peak between 1958 and 1964, but it continued to ripple on afterwards, with many of the tendencies and styles introduced by the movement still in practice today.

 Jules et Jim Le background Immediately after World War II, France, like most of the rest of Europe, was in a major state of flux and upheaval; in film, i t was a period of great transition. During the German Occupation (1940-45), many of France's greatest directors (René Clair , Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder among them) had gone into exile. A new generation of filmmakers emerged - but wait! This isn't the New Wave, relax, we're not there yet - and chief among

René Clément , who had co-directed the classic surrealist fairy tale Beauty and the Beast with playwright Jean Cocteau, and then in the 1950s, furthered his reputation with Forbidden Games. After the traumatic experience of war, a generation gap these was

of sorts emerged between the more "old school" French classic filmmakers and a younger generation who set out to do things differently. In the 50s, a collective of intellectual French film critics, l ed by André Bazin and Jacques Donial -Valcroze, formed the groundbreaking journal of film criticism Cahiers du Cinema . They, in turn, had been influenced by the writings of French film critic Alexandre Astruc, who had argued for breaking away from the "tyranny of narrative" in favor of a new form of film (and sound) language. The Cahiers critics gathered by Bazin and Doniol-Valcroze were all young cinephiles who had grown up in the post-war years watching mostly great American films that had not been available in France during the Occupation. Cahiers had two guiding principles:

1) A rejection of classical montage-style filmmaking (favored by studios up to that time) in favor o f: mise-en-scene, or, literally, "placing in the scene" (favoring the reality of what is filmed over manipulation via editing), the long take, and deep composition; and 2) A conviction that the best films are a personal artistic expression and should bear a stamp of personal authorship, much as great works of literature bear the stamp of the writer. This latter tenet would be dubbed by American film critic Andrew Sarris the "auteur (author) theory." This philosophy, not surprisingly, led to the rejection of more traditional French

Henri-Georges Clouzout , Marc Allegret, among others), and instead embraced commercial cinema (Clair, Clement,

directors - both French and American - whose personal signature could be read in their films. The French directors the Cahiers critics endorsed included Jean

Vigo, Renoir, Robert Bresson andMarcel Ophüls; while the Americans on their list of favorites included John Ford, Howard Hawks,Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles, indisputed masters, all. There were also a few surprising, even head-scratching favorites,

including

Jerry Lewis (thus beginning the stereotype about France's Lewis obsession) and Roger Corman.

Many of the French New Wave's favorite conventions actually sprang not only from artistic tenets but from necessity and circu mstance. These criticsturned-filmmakers knew a great deal about film history and theory but a lot less about film production. In addition, they were, especially at the start, working on low budgets. Thus, they often improvised with what schedules and materials they could afford. Out of all this came a group of conventions that were consistently used in the majority of French New Wave films (similar to, but less encapsulated than, Denmark's including:

     

Dogme 95"manifesto"),

Jump cuts: a non-naturalistic edit, usually a section of a continuous shot that is removed unexpectedly, illogically Shooting on location Natural lighting Improvised dialogue and plotting Direct sound recording Long takes

Many of these conventions are commonplace today, but back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this was all very groundbreaking. Jump cuts were used as much to cover mistakes as they were an artistic convention. Jean-Luc Godard certainly appreciated the dislocating feel a jump cut conveyed, but let's remember - here was a film critic-turned-first-time director who was also using inexperienced actors and crew, and shooting, at least at first, on a shoestring budget. Therefore, as Nixon once said, mistakes were made. Today when jump cuts are used they even feel more like a pretentious artifice. Many will argue (and rather pointlessly when it comes down to it) which film was the first of the French New Wave; officially, the first work out of this group wasn't a feature at all, but rather, short films produced in 1956 and 57, including

Jacques Rivette 's Le coup du berger  (Fool's Mate)

andFrançois Truffaut's Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers). Some point to Claude Chabrol 's Le beau Serge (1958) as the first feature success of the New Wave. He shot the low budget film on location and used the money raised from its release to make Les cousins ; with its depiction of two student cousins, one good, one bad, it's the first Chabrol film to contain his uniquely sardonic view of the world. Les cousins is particularly interesting when looking at the typical qualities of early French New Wave works, because of its long, memorable party sequence which climaxes in a very cruel joke. The Wave Breaks: Truffaut But it was in 1959 that the wave really broke: that year featured three seminal films, and with them, three major filmmakers would emerge. In 1959, a Cahiers critic so acerbic he'd been banned the year before from the Cannes Film Festival, returned as a director, bringing with him a film that would stun the world. That film, François Truffaut's first feature, was

Les quatre cents coups, or The 400 Blows.

The 400 Blows It would be the first of many semi-autobiographical films Truffaut would make with actor Jean-Pierre Léaud (who bore a fairly close resemblance to the director) playing Antoine Doinel. The 400 Blows was a stunningly unsentimental (especially compared to Truffaut's last few films) but poetic account of a teenage delinquent who runs away from home rather than deal with his uncaring parents and teacher, only to find li fe on the streets a rough challenge. The film masterfully tells the story from Doinel's point of view, but doesn't flinch away from the raw emotions of the situations, and has

Raising Victor Vargas and Trans. The final shot is one of the most unforgettable in all of  modern cinema. Truffaut's next two films in the Doinel saga would be the short featurette Antoine et Collette and the charming Stolen Kisses, which is a fairly episodic but beautifuly observed romantic comedy; in that film, Truffaut depicts Paris in the way that Woody Allen does New York, as a beautiful and whimsical place. Interesting, too, how Stolen Kisses was released in 1968, the same year that the student surely been an influence on films as distinct as

protest movements were rocking France and the world, while the film remains deceptively serene. The anxiety seems to lie just beneath the surface. Truffaut's follow-up film, Shoot the Piano Player , was a box-office dud upon initial release but was given a critical reappraisal soon after. An offbeat crime film that was quiet, romantic, personal and audacious, people weren't sure what to make of it at the time, but its cinematic literacy and

cheekiness would inspire future filmmakers (the pulp fiction origins of the story and the inept crooks surely must have inspired

Tarantino, among

others). The Ray Bradbury adaption Fahrenheit 451 was another underrated film, likely because at the time many people were treating it more like straight science fiction than as a parable, a world not too different than our own. It's a surprisingly moving, rich film that deserves a fresh look. Much of Truffaut's later work seemed to fall into more sentimental or maudlin territory, but there are the occasional gems ode to filmmaking, chief among them.

Day for Night , his playful

Godard Far more politically engaged than Truffaut was Jean-Luc Godard; in fact, the two were known to have been mutually disaffected with each other. Arguably, Godard, for whatever his inconsistencies, i s the one who might ultimately have been the most influential and remembered. HisBreathless ( A bout de souffle), which was remade weakly in America in 1983, is still probably the most often cited film when the topic shifts to the French New Wave, and for good reason: it's a kinetic joy, full of jump cuts, lavish Paris location shooting, wi th cool jazz on the soundtrack, a noirish mood, and a lovely, literate romance, all adding up to one for the ages. Interestingly, the film is based on a story by Truffaut, the only time the two would come close to collaborating on anything.

Breathless Godard was the most prolific of all the major figures of this movement; he produced roughly two films a year in the 1960s, and amazingly, many of them still hold up today. In Le Petit Soldat and Pierrot le Fou in particular, Godard gave us his protoypical male characters, men who were full of self-doubt; the politics in the former seem a little more naive than what you'd find in Godard's later, more overtly politicized work, while the latter is essentially a mishmosh of every genre the New Wave seemed to have an interest in deconstructing (gangster, romance, musical) while ultimately ending up in tragedy-land. My favorite Godard film is A

Band of Outsiders ( A band aparte) which has an innate sense of playfulness at work Anna Karina at her most lovely (and naive). It features a memorable pantomime dance with Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey (who played, in Godard's own words, "the little suburban cousins of  [Jean-Paul]Belmondo" in Breathless), and an overall sense of  joie de vivre not seen in some of Godard's other films. as Godard very loosely adapts a book noir and (his wife at the time)

 Alphaville, Godard's homage to both science-fiction and American detective stories, is a fascinating, if slightly alienating, production; Godard's frequent collaborator, cameraman Raoul Coutard, shot modern-day Paris as a "dehumanized city of the future." It's one o f Godard's more even-keeled and sustained films and an interesting parable about the alienating role technology plays in our lives. In fitting with the upheavals of the era, Godard became more overtly politicized in the late 60s and formed a film collective called the Dziga Vertov Group (named after the great Russian filmmaker ). His films then started to become increasingly inaccessible (not that he was ever striving for mainstream success, mind you). In that period, he produced a number of shorts outlining his politics, traveled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. One notable exception is the fascinating, but disturbing Weekend , which contains one of the chillingly great set-pieces in all of cinema, a ten-minute tracking shot of the world's largest traffic jam as well as a cutting portrayal of the bourgeoisie. As Amy Taubin recently wrote in the Village Voice, Weekend is "kinetic and cruel... the film in which Godard really sticks it to narrative. Not only is it devoid of a single character anyone could care about, the fact that I've given away the ending doesn't matter a jot." Godard the experimenting Marxist will still occasionally turn out interesting works, but they give the appearance of someone who seems to have gone off  the deep end or lost touch with reality as most of us know it in his attempts to show his own. But th is is Godard - simultaneously exasperating and brilliant, self-important and important. "I've always chosen to do what others aren't doing," he said i n a 2001 interview with the BBC. "No one does that, so it remains to be done, let's try it. If it's already being done, there's no point in me doing it as well." And so it goes. And on goes his legacy, too.

Resnais The last of the three seminal initial films of the French New Wave released in 1959 is Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour  , probably the most inventive of all early New Wave works in terms of  structure. Resnais's remarkable film unfurls not unlike a poem, an elliptical tracing of memory lost and time regained, the chronology of which makes Memento look straightforward. What separates this work from most of the other French New Wave classics is its strong screenplay (by novelist Marguerite Duras) - whereas many of the other films relied at l east in part on improvisation and less on a collaborative process with a separate writer. Resnais is actually a generation older than the Cahiers kids and, if he was "traditional" in any way, it was that he was more inclined to work from an original script than other members of the New Wave. But he was also equally interested in Henri Bergson and the avant-garde and first found

Last Year at  Marienbad is a complete puzzle (written by Alain Robbe-Grillet), also acclaim at the height of the New Wave. His

scrambling the way time unfolds, rendering past, present and future basically meaningless. It's unsettling, to say the least, and either one of the most important films of the period, or pretentious nonsense, depending on your mood. I vote for both. Rohmer, Chabrol, and the rest of le gang

Eric Rohmer was the editor of the Cahiers du Cinema when he tried his hand at feature filmmaking. He shot his first full-length film, The Sign of  Leo(which sadly is not available on DVD at this time), in 1959 at the age of 40 with a bit of financial support from the Cahiers crowd. The gloomy tale of a

man who believes he's coming into a great inheritance only to wind up homeless and destitute did not fly well with audiences. They would eventually come around to him, though, abandon him and return again. What distinguishes Rohmer from the other New Wave directors, as Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer has pointed out in Senses of Cinema, is that "there is rarely any high drama in his work... He has no cops and robbers, no killers or pimps or thwarted lovers. Even his adulterer in L'Amour l'apres-midi (Chloe in the Afternoon/Love in the Afternoon , 1972) doesn't actually commit adultery - he barely even kisses the woman who tempts him." That said, if, as with Resnais and Godard, Rohmer's approach to filmmaking is primarily intellectual, he paints a far more naturalistic and often more sensual canvas. Though each film stands on its own, he's often conceived of them as parts of cycles: Six Moral Tales , Comedies and Proverbs andTales of  the Four Seasons. "In the Rohmer oeuvre," Andrew Sarris wrote a few years ago, "there are no two or three masterpieces that tower over the re st of his efforts. His films, like the novels of Honore de Balzac or Anthony Trollope, are a continuous stream of narrative art with crests and shallows here and there, but no dry gulches anywhere."

Les Biches Truffaut would famously pay homage to one of his auteur idols when he conducted a book-length in terview with Alfred Hitchcock, but it was Chabrol whose work would be most often compared to Hitchcock (and he, too, wrote a book, with Eric Rohmer, on Hitch, which is now calledHitchcock: The First  45 Years). The comparison isn't entirely fair. Chabrol's work has focused more on smaller-scale crimes of passion within the framework of a family or community. But there's no doubt for anyone who has seen one of Chabrol's suspense films that he owes a debt to Hitchcock in terms of both genre and style (compare the closing tracking shot of La

femme infidele with that of Vertigo, for instance). Chabrol's early work Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) is a perfect example of his carefully crafted filmmaking style, much more so than would be found in some of the early work of his compatriots. Like Godard, Chabrol, in Les bonnes femmes, wittily attacks bourgeois aspirations, but like Hitchcock, he was also fascinated by guilt and obsession, and entirely unsentimental about it. Yet there's a hint of compassion here that keeps the whole from feeling distant.

About the only woman to be included in this male-dominated group is

Agnés Varda, whose husband, Jacques Demy was also a Cleo

renowned film director in his own right. Varda's most important contribution to the movement is generally considered to be her second film,

from Five to Seven (although those who have seen her first, La Pointe-Courte, from 1955, have raved about it and consider it to be a crucial early work in the New Wave). Cleo took place in real time, tracking the course of two hours (actually 90 minutes) in a day in the life of a pop singer who is waiting to find out whether or not she has cancer. She wanders the streets, meets a soldier, finds renewed reason for hope. The film still holds up today, with a grace to its photography and a joyful humanity in its characterizations. Varda's follow-up works wouldn't quite match Cleo, (although her bold yet poetic

Vagabond is worth checking out, mostly for Sandrine Bonnaire's performance) but more recent forays in to and I . She also made a personal documentary about her

documentary film have proved quite interesting, most recently with The Gleaners late husband's childhood, Jacquot de Nantes , which is a lovely, lyrical tribute.

Cleo from Five to Seven Demy is still most famous for Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort , homages to the Hollywood musical. Although arguably not part of the New Wave himself because his films of the era were seemingly lighthearted and fluffy, I'd argue that his tips of  the hat to the musical are no less engaging than Godard's or Truffaut's to the gangster film, and that he deserves a place in this canon. Sadly, very little of  Louis Malle's New Wave work from the 60s is on DVD; we have only Spirits of the Dead , a compilation for which Malle contributed one of the three films, and this is hardly the best example of his work. His first film,  Ascenseur pour l'Echefaud (Elevator to the Gallows ) was a distinctly moody suspense story in the best American tradition held together by a hypnotic score by cool American jazz musician Miles Davis. Probably Malle's most decidedly New Wave contribution was the unforgettable Zazie dans le Metro, which features many of the movement's favorite conventions - jump cuts, in-jokes and a jarring narrative jumble. A precocious and shockingly (and hilariously) lewd teenage girl named Zazie moves into

John Waters and pureed with a pint of  Richard Lester (Hard Day's Night , The

her drag queen uncle's flat and it all becomes something you might imagine if you combined Madeline with the French New Wave. The film's often frenetic, comic editing might have influenced

Knack ). Although he had been criticized by some film critics for not being distinctive enough as an

auteur, because he tended to lose himself in projects, because his work dared to show range, Malle remained an i mportant director through his later years - most notably with masterful dramas like Au

Revoir les enfants and Atlantic City .

Gangster riffs Owing a large debt of inspiration to American gangster films of the 30s and 40s, the French wave of crime melodramas were unique hybrids of American-

Jean-Pierre Melville who, while not generally considered a part of this movement, was undoubtedly influential upon its players. His Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler ) was a favorite of two young filmgoers named Truffaut andGodard; it was a hip rendering of the previously tired-out gangster genre which employed location shooting to give it an style loner-ism and French ennui. It is

immediacy.

Bob le Flambeur  And we shouldn't overlook Jules Dassin's Rififi , which, like Bob le Flambeur , is probably more a New Wave influence than an actual product of  the movement. With the look of a Hollywood film noir but far more existential than anything you'd find coming out of the US, Rififi influenced a host of  botched crime caper movies in the decades that would follow. Godard's Breathless was dedicated to Monogram Pictures, an American b-movie studio that turned out a slew of fine little movies on a tight schedule and a low budget, and Breathless seemed to be both inspired by and a parody of that studio's gangster pictures. Truffaut's own foray into this arena,

Shoot the Piano Player , could just as easily have used the same dedication.

Documentary I don't want to give short shrift to all the important documentary work going on in France during this time period, the makers of which overlapped closely with the feature directors. In fact, quite a few of  these filmmakers were influenced by and worked in documentary. Alain Resnais made documentary shorts for the first eleven years of his career, starting with films about artists - Van Gogh,

Picasso (Guernica) - in the late 40s and early 50s, and peaking with Night  and Fog (1955), the disturbing, brilliant meditation on the horrors of the Nazi concentration Gaugin,

camps. The influence of documentary style becomes obvious when watching some of Resnais's feature

Agnés Varda, who began her creative life as a photographer, would dabble in documentary, and Chris Marker , a long-time cult favorite who received fame very belatedly after his La Jetée was cited as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, also created documentaries, or more appropriately, film essays, such as the stunning Sans Soleil , Cuba si!, Le joli mai , and others, in the 1960s and 70s. And Marcel Ophüls (son of director Max) would make the renowned, epic masterpiece about the Nazi occupation of France, The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), which was nominated for an Oscar (and makes several an amusing cameo in Woody Allen's Annie Hall . film work. As mentioned before,

Les acteurs It's hard to think of the French New Wave without also thinking of some of the memorable faces that

Jean-Paul Belmondo's sad-eyed face, the eyes that eventually shut, Jean Seberg, in the same film, forever entrenched in our memories with her beret and newspapers; French cinema institutionCharles Aznavour, in Shoot the Piano Player (and later, serenading our lover protagonists in Jonathan Demme's erratic ode to the French New Wave, The Truth About Charlie); Brigitte Bardot (va-va-voom) in Godard's filmmaking fable Contempt  ; Jean-Pierre Léaud, growing up and sowing his oats right before our eyes;Anna Karina, smart and feisty yet darkly seductive and, dare I say it, have lit up the screen: in Breathless;

quintessentially French.

Le recap The filmmakers of the French New Wave are unique and distinctive enough to stand out on their own but they collectively comprised one of the most influential movements in cinema history. Some of the films have aged better than others but many remain firmly entrenched in our memory banks. Even though they weren't aiming at mainstream success, many of these films became popular and critically acclaimed worldwide, the subject of much debate, and, ultimately, the inspiration to filmmakers everywhere. The five filmmakers who came from the Cahiers du cinema (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer) were incredibly prolific: in the years between 1959 and 1966, the peak of the New Wave, they made 32 films. When you throw in the other talented auteurs intertwined with this group, you have a broad coalition of artists who made some of the most groundbreaking films of the second half of  the 20th century. Their contribution to the film art cannot be underestimated. The Next Wave

Some of the directors who reached prominence as part of the French New Wave are still working today (including Chabrol and Rivette, whose

Va

Savoir was one of the better films from France over the last couple of years). Meanwhile, the influence lives on. In our

recommendation box below you will see a sampling of some contemporary filmmakers who can trace some of their stylistic roots back to the French New Wave. French New Wave Bits of Trivia



Truffaut might be more remembered by younger generations for his acting appearance in

Steven Spielberg 's Close Encounters

of the Third Kind .

The French spelling of  A Band of Outsiders - A band aparte - inspired the name for Quentin Tarantino's production company. 

http://www.criterion.com/explore/4-french-new-wave

1940 - 1944: The Occupation Paris during the Second World War was a dark city. The  blackout imposed by the occupying German forces meant that lights had to be turned off, a shortage of petrol kept cars off the road, while a curfew kept most people off the streets at night. During the day, numerous regulations, censorship and propaganda, made the occupation increasingly unbearable. One of the few distractions available to the French citizens was the cinema, but the choice of what to see was limited. American films were banned, and aside from German productions which consisted mainly of imitations of Hollywood musical comedies and melodramatic propaganda movies, they only had access to the 200 odd French films that were produced during this four year period. These films, which had to be approved by the German censor, were, with a few exceptions, pale imitations of  the great French cinema of Marcel Carne, Rene Clair, Marcel Pagnol, and Jean Renoir  that had come before the war.

To a generation of cinephiles like Andre Bazin, Alain Resnais and Eric Rohmer , who had grown up in the rich cinematic culture of the 1920‟s and 30‟s, this lack of choice added to the sense of loss they already felt as a consequence of the war. And it wasn‟t just French films they missed, they could also no longer see the American genre films they loved: westerns, comedies and adventure films by directors such as Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, Leo McCarey and Ernst Lubitsch. This experience of loss led them to prize freedom of expression and truth of representation above all else; values which would become central to their later work. Le Corbeau (The Raven) [1943]

For a younger generation born around 1930, who would later make up most of the directors of the New Wave, the cinema became the centre of their universe and a refuge from the harsh reality of the world outside. They were too young to know very much about the films that had come before the war, and had no reviews or criticism to guide them, but they instinctively cherished a handful of films made during the occupation like Lumiere d ’ete (1943) by Jean Gremillon,  Les Visiteurs du Soir (1943)  by Carne and Prevert, Le Destin Fabuleux de Disiree Clary (1941) by Sacha Guitry, Goupi Mains Rouges (1943) by Jacques Becker, and above all, Le Corbeau (1943) by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

France After The War In 1944 France was liberated from German Occupation by the Allied forces. In the years that followed the Liberation, cinema become more popular than ever. French films such as Marcel Carne‟s Les Enfants du paradise (1945) and Rene Clement‟s La  Bataille du Rail (1946) were a great success. Italian and British imports were also  popular. Most popular of all were the stockpile of films now streaming in from Hollywood. During the occupation the Nazis had banned the import of American films. As a result, after the war, when the ban was lifted by the 1946 Blum-Byrnes agreement, nearly a decade‟s worth of missing films arrived in French cinemas in the space of a single year. It was a time of exciting discoveries for cine-philes eager to catch up with what had been happening in the rest of the world.

Reviews and Journals

The Liberation brought with it a great desire for  self-expression, open communication and understanding. The discussion of film, inevitably,  became part of the discourse. Journals, such as L’Ecran Francais, became a platform for writers like Andre Bazin to develop their theories and convey their enthusiasm for film. Bazin saw cinema as an art form, and one that deserved serious analysis. His interest was in the language of film –  favouring the discussion of form over content. Such an attitude tended to bring him into conflict with the predominantly left wing writers at the paper, who were more concerned with the political standpoint of a film. Andre Bazin

Another writer at the magazine who shared Bazin‟s sense of aesthetics was Alexandre Astruc. In 1948 he wrote an article titled “Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera as Pen”, in which he argued for cinema, like literature, to become a more personal form, in which the camera literally became a pen in the hands of a director. The article would become something of a manifesto for the New Wave generation and a first step in the development of “auteur theory”. Another popular magazine amongst cinephiles was Le Revue du Cinema. This was a  publication devoted to the arts and therefore much less concerned with politics and issues of social commitment. American cinema was discussed as much as European cinema and there were in depth studies of directors like D.W. Griffith, John Ford, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. Andre Bazin contributed some important articles to the magazine on cinema technique, as did the young Eric Rohmer , whose piece, “Cinema, the art of Space” would have a lasting influence on the directors of the New Wave.

Film Clubs

The same enthusiasts who avidly read the film journals now  began setting up film clubs, not just in Paris, but all over France. The most famous of  these was Henri Langlois‟ Cinematheque Française, which first opened its doors in 1948. The cinema, which he co-founded with Georges Franju, was small, consisting of just 50 seats, but the programme of films shown was both comprehensive and eclectic, and it soon became a mecca for serious film enthusiasts Henri Langlois

Langlois believed the Cinematheque was a place for learning, not just watching, and he wanted his audience to really understand what they were seeing. It became his  practice to screen films on the same evening, that were different in style, genre and country of origin. Sometimes he would show foreign films without translation or  silent films without musical accompaniment. This approach, he hoped, would focus the audience attention on the techniques behind what they were watching, and the links connecting films that might otherwise appear very different. It was here, at the Cinematheque, that many of the important figures of the New Wave first met. Francois Truffaut, only sixteen, was already a veteran film-goer. From a young age, the cinemas of Paris had been his refuge from an unhappy home life. He had even set up his own cine-club,  Le Cercle Cinemane, although it only lasted for  one session. Jean-Luc Godard was another who immersed himself in the cine-clubs. He was studying ethnology at the Sorbonne when he first started going to the Cinematheque, and, for him too, cinema became something of a refuge. He later  wrote that the cinema screen was “the wall we had to scale to escape from our lives.” Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, Pierre Kast, and others who would later become directors, received much of their film education at film clubs like the Cinematheque and The Cine-Club du Quartier Latin. For true cine-philes like these, watching films was only part of the experience. They would also collect stills and posters, read and discuss the latest film articles and make lists of favourite directors. It was all a way of putting what they were watching into some kind of   perspective and developing their own critical viewpoints. Another avid member of the cine-club audience was Eric Rohmer . He had already  published articles in other film journals, and now, with his two friends Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, he set up his own review called  La Gazette Du Cinema. Although the paper only had a small circulation, it was a means by which they could express their views on some of the films they were watching. Others like Truffaut and Resnais soon followed, writing articles for magazines like Arts and Les Amis du Cinema.

Cahiers du Cinema The most important and popular film journal of all first appeared in 1951. Set up by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Andre Bazin out of the ashes of the  La Revue du Cinema, which had closed down the previous year, it was called Les Cahiers du Cinema. The first issues of the review, with its distinctive yellow cover, featured the best critics of the time writing scholarly articles about film. However, it was with the arrival of a younger generation of critics, includingRohmer , Godard, Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut, that the paper really began to make waves. Bazin had become something of a father figure to these young critics. He was especially close to Truffaut, helping to secure his release from the young offenders institute where he was sent as a teenager, and later from the army prison where he was locked up for desertion. At first, Bazin and Doniol-Valcroze allowed the young cine-philes a small amount of column space to air their  often combative opinions, but, in time, their articles gained more and more attention and their status rose accordingly. One thing these young writers shared was a disdain for the mainstream "tradition de qualite", which dominated French cinema at the time. In 1953, Truffaut wrote an essay for Cahiers entitled "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema", in which he virulently denounced this tradition of adapting safe literary works, and filming them in the studio in an old fashioned and unimaginative way. This style of cinema wasn‟t visual enough, Truffaut argued, and relied too much on the screenwriter. He and the others labelled it „cinema de papa‟, and compared it unfavourably with the work of film-makers from elsewhere in the world.

Francois Truffaut

...

Bazin delayed the article‟s release for a year, fearing they would lose readers and anger the film-makers who were being attacked. When it was eventually published it did cause offence but there was also considerable agreement. The passionate and irreverent style of Truffaut‟s writing, like that of the other young critics, was a shift away from the hitherto austere tone of  Cahiers. It brought the  journal both a notoriety and popularity it hadn‟t had before. Now

he, Rohmer , Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol, were given the opportunity to promote their favourite directors within the review and develop their theories.

Favourite Directors Henri Langlois always believed that watching silent films was the  best way to learn the art of cinema, and he frequently included films from this period in the Cinematheque Français programme. As a result the new wave group had a great respect for directors like D.W. Griffith, Victor Sjostrom, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim, who had pioneered the techniques of filmmaking in its early years. When they began making films themselves, silent movies would continue to be a source of inspiration for the New Wave directors

Fritz Lang

Three German directors, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, were held in high esteem by the New Wave. Lubitsch‟s sophisticated comedies were held up f or  their exemplary screenwriting and perfect dramatic construction. Lang, whose later  American films were generally felt by most critics at the time to be inferior to his early masterpieces like Metropolis and M , was defended by the Cahiers critics who  pointed out that the expressive mise-en-scene of his German films had been interiorized in the intense Film Noir dramas he was now making in Hollywood. These later films such as Clash By Night and The Big Heat , they argued, were every bit as complex as his earlier works. Murnau, the director of masterpieces like Nosferatu and Sunrise, although largely forgotten by contemporary critics, epitomised for the New Wave an artist who used every technique at his disposal to express himself filmically. They sung his praises in the pages of  Cahiers, and helped to re-establish his reputation as a cinematic visionary. Another European influence on the New Wave was the Italian neo-realism movement. Directors like Roberto Rossellini ( Rome, Open City) and Vittorio de Sica (The Bicycle Thieves) were going direct to the street for their inspiration, often using unprofessional actors in real locations. They cut the costs of filmmaking by using lighter, hand-held cameras, and post-synching sound. This approach enabled them to avoid studio interference and the demands of producers, resulting in more personal pictures. These lessons learnt from the neo-realists would prove a major factor in the success of  the Nouvelle Vague ten years later. Roberto Rossellini

A number of American directors were also acclaimed in the pages of  Cahiers du Cinema including not only well known directors like Orson Welles ( Citizen Kane), Joseph L. Mankiewicz ( The Barefoot Contessa) and Nicholas Ray ( Rebel Without a Cause), but also lesser known B movie directors like Samuel Fuller ( Shock Corridor ) and Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past ). TheCahiers critics broke new ground when they wrote about these directors as they had never been taken so seriously before. They ignored the established hierarchy, focusing instead on the distinctive personal style and emotional truth they saw in these films. By contrast, contemporary French cinema was a major  disappointment to the New Wave group. The year that followed the Liberation of France saw the release of  some outstanding films including Marcel Carne‟s  Les  Enfants du Paradise, Robert Bresson‟s Les Dames du  Bois de Boulogne, and Jacques Becker‟s Falbalas. However, since then, complacency had set in. There was none of the frank honesty of Italian neo-realism. Instead, most of the films that dealt with the war and the Resistance seemed to be sentimentalized versions of what ] had really occured. It was clear that the majority of  ...  people, including most French filmmakers, were not yet ready to confront the shame of the Vichy government and the many who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Rebel Without A Cause [1955

In their articles, the young critics showed their disdain for the "tradition de qualite"  prevalent at the time. Even directors who they had once admired like Henri-Georges Clouzot and Marcel Carne seemed now to have lost their ambition; content to play the studio game. Other directors with a more realistic style, such as Julien Duvivier, Henri Decoin and Jacques Sigurd, were equally disappointing; portraying a cynical view of  contemporary society that was stylistically static and uninspired. For the N ew Wave cine-philes, who had expected so much after the war, it felt like a betrayal; and it explains why their attacks in print were often so vitriolic. However, there were some contemporary directors who made personal films outside the studio system like Jean Cocteau ( Orphee), Jacques Tati ( Mon Oncle), Robert Bresson ( Journal d’un cure de campagne), and Jean-Pierre Melville ( Le Silence De  La Mer ), who were much admired.Melville was a real maverick who worked in his own small studio and played by his own rules. His example would influence all of the  New Wave and he is frequently cited as a part of the movement himself. At the same time, the Cahiers critics praised certain French directors of an earlier era like Jean Vigo ( L’Atalante), Sacha Guitry (Quadrille), and most of all Jean Renoir ( La Regle du  Jeu), who was held up as the greatest of French auteurs.

Auteur Theory

Alfred Hitchcock 

...

For the New Wave critics, the “concept of the auteur” was the key theoretical idea underlying their aesthetic viewpoint. Although Andre Bazin and others had been arguing for some time that a film should reflect the director‟s personal vision, it was Truffaut who first coined the phrase “la politique des auteurs” in his article "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français". He maintained that the best directors have a distinctive style, as well as consistent themes running through their films, and it was this individual creative vision that made the director the

true author of the film. At the time auteur theory was considered a radical new approach to cinema. Before, it had been the screenwriter, or the producer, or the Hollywood studio, who was seen as the principle creator of a picture. The Cahiers critics applied the theory to directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks who had previously been seen as merely excellent craftsmen, but had never been taken seriously as artists. By uncovering the complex depths in the work of  directors like these, the young writers broke new ground, not only in the way a film was understood, but in how cinema itself was perceived.

Howard Hawks

Mainly as a result of this radical new way of looking at cinema, the reputation of Cahiers du Cinéma began to grow. In Hollywood the review became essential reading and directors like Fritz Lang, Joseph Mankiewicz and Nicholas Ray were  photographed with a copy of the magazine in their hands. Filmmakers like these weren‟t used to people discussing their work with such accuracy and depth. They were deeply impressed by these young enthusiasts with their strong opinions and  perceptive insights into the art of cinema. Inevitably, as the ideas and writing of the Cahiers critics became better known, there was a backlash. The aggressiveness of the review was felt to be too extreme by some. It brought about a feeling of resentment, and even hatred, in those targetted. As a result a kind of warfare raged between the young radicals and the old guard of French cinema.

Short Films

The young group of writers at Cahiers du Cinéma were not content however, with merely being critics. They wanted to be filmmakers too. At the time there were two recognised routes to becoming a director. You could go through a long apprenticeship as an assistant director until, after many years, you were finally deemed ready to call the shots yourself. This approach was antithetical to the desires of impatient young directors with ideas of their own and a disdain for the conservative material they would have to work on. The other method was to apply for a short film funding scheme. This government approved scheme ensured all films were made to a professional standard and was equivalent to a number of assistant positions. In the end, it enabled the candidate to obtain the work card needed to make features. Some of the older members of the New Wave began this way by making critically acclaimed documentaries: Georges Franju ( Les Sang des bêtes, Hôtel  des Invalides), Alain Resnais ( Night and Fog, Toute Le  Mémoire du Monde, Le Chant du Styrene), andChris Marker ( Les Satues Meurent Aussi, Dimanche a Pekin, ...  Lettre de Siberie), and Pierre Kast ( Les Femmes du Louvre). Others soon followed their example including Louis Malle ( Le Monde du Silence), Agnes Varda ( La Pointe-Courte), and Jacques Demy ( Le Sabotier du Val de Loire). Les Sang des Betes [1949]

The Cahiers group, however, rejected both of these approaches. They knew they would have to bypass the rules of the system if they wanted to break into the industry and make the kind of films they wanted to make. While still writing for the magazine, they gained experience and contacts. Chabrol worked as a publicist at 20th CenturyFox, Godard worked as a press agent, Truffaut worked as an assistant for Max Ophuls and Roberto Rossellini, and Rivette worked with Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker. Sooner or later, though, they realised, if they wanted to direct, they would have to start by making short films, raising money anyway they could. Rohmer  began in 1950, directing Journal d’un Scélérat , followed  by Charlotte et Son Steak . Rivette, working with a script by Chabrol, directed Coup du Berger . In 1952Godard directed a documentary called Operation  Beton about the building of the Grande Dixene dam in ... Switzerland. He made the film with funds he earned by working as a labourer on the dam. After selling this, he had the means to make two dramatic shorts: Une Femme Coquette and Tous Les Garcons S’Appellent Patrick . As they gained experience, their  Les Mistons [1957]

films became more sophisticated. Rohmer made Bérénice in 1954, La Sonate a  Kreuzer in 1956, and Véronique et son Cancre in 1958, to increasingly high standards. Meanwhile, Truffaut had set up his own film company,  Les Films du Carrosse, with the help of his wealthy new father in law, and in the summer of 1957, shot Les Mistons, based on a story by Maurice Pons. Pleased with the success of the film, its financial backer suggested he make another. Truffaut began making a short comedy set against the backdrop of the flooding that had been taking place in and around Paris at the time, but had trouble finding the right tone and handed over the footage he‟d shot to Godard. Godard felt no obligation to follow Truffaut‟s script however, and created an unconnected story with an off the wall commentary that  broke all the conventions followed by traditional filmmaking. This film, Une Histoire d’Eau, was the most original, and most New Wave, of all the short films produced at the time. Other important shorts made at this time, and in subsequent years, included  Le Bel   Indifferent (1957) by Jacques Demy, Pourvu Qu’On Ait L’Ivresse (1958) by JeanDaniel Pollet, and Blue Jeans (1958) by Jacques Rozier . These were followed by by first films from Maurice Pialet( Janine, 1961), Jean-Marie Straub ( Machorka-Muff , 1963), and Jean Eustache ( Du Cote de Robinson, 1964).

New Developments When the New Wave directors graduated from making short films to feature films in the late 1950‟s, their  ability to do so came about largely as the result of a combination of fortunate coincidences. Up until this time, filmmaking had always been an expensive  business and it was necessary to have the backing of a major studio. Now, new circumstances came into play that enabled them to bypass this stumbling block.

Truffaut and crew on location!

After the war, the Gaullist government had brought in subsidies to support homegrown culture. A further act, 1958‟s "Constitution of the Fifth Republic", resulted in more money being available for first time filmmakers than ever before. Private investment money became more readily available and distributors were keen to back new directors. At the same time, technological developments meant filmmaking equipment was  becoming cheaper. New, lightweight, hand-held cameras, developed for use in

documentaries, such as the Eclair and Arriflex were now available, as were faster film stocks which required less light, and portable sound and lighting equipment. These advancements meant filmmakers no longer needed a studio to make a film. They could now go out and shoot on location using smaller crews set against authentic  backdrops. Working fast on low budgets encouraged experimentation and improvisation and gave the directors more control over their work than they might have had otherwise.

The First Wave  Et Dieu... Crea La Femme ( And God Created  Woman) (1956) is often cited as the first New

Et Dieu... Crea La Femme (And God Created Woman) [1956]

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Wave feature film. Directed by a 28 year old writer-director named Roger Vadim, and starring his then wife, 22 year old former model and dancer, Brigitte Bardot, it celebrated beauty and youthful rebellion and proved that a low budget film made by a first time director could be a success both at home and abroad. Although now somewhat dated, at the time the film was an inspiration to young directors hoping to make their  first film on their own terms.

An even more inspiring figure was Jean-Pierre Melville, whose 1956 crime caper  Bob  Le Flambeur ( Bob The Gambler ) was a landmark in the French thriller genre. Shot on location on the streets of Paris and in the director‟s own home made studio, its  portrayal of the doomed gambler of the title, was both grittily realistic and audaciously stylized. The New Wave critics quickly recognised that Melvillewas the real deal: a maverick with an authentic cinematic vision all his own. Worlds away from Melville's tough gangsters were the strange, haunting films of Georges Franju. Co-founder of the Cinématheque Francais, Franju had graduated from archivist to film-maker with shorts like  Le Sang des Bêtes shot in a Parisian slaughter house. His ability to combine the poetic and the graphic, and to evoke the uncanny in a realistic setting, were seen to full effect in  La Tête Contre Les Murs (Head Against the Wall ) (1958), and Les Yeux Sans Visage ( Eyes Without a Face) (1959).

Louis Malle made his name working with marine scientist Jacques Cousteau on the Palme d‟Or winning underwater documentary Le Monde  Du Silence (The Silent World) . Coming from a wealthy background, Malle was able to raise the money to make his feature film debut  Ascenseur   Pour L’Echafaud (   Elevator to the Gallows ) in 1957 when he was still only 25 years old. Featuring a  breakthrough performance from Jeanne Moreau in the lead and Miles Davis groundbreaking soundtrack, the picture – a fatalistic film noir  – was a success. He followed this up with  Les Amants(The Lovers) in 1958, again starring Moreau. The film provoked considerable controversy over its frank treatment of sexuality, and partly as a result of this, became an even bigger success, marking out the young director as a rising talent. Le Beau Serge [1958]

Claude Chabrol was the first of the Cahiers critics to make the move into feature films. Using money inherited from his wife‟s family, Chabrol wrote, directed and  produced Le Beau Serge ( Beautiful Serge) (1958), featuring Jean-Claude Brialy and Gerard Blain in the lead roles, despite having no previous filmmaking experience. Shot on location in a provincial village, using natural light, the film upset the  professional establishment by breaking the rules of what they considered good filmmaking, and it was refused entry to Cannes. However, the director took it to the festival himself where it was well received, earning enough in sales to finance his next feature, Les Cousins(The Cousins) (1959). Set in Paris, Les Cousins again starred Brialy and Blain, in a plot that effectively reversed the scenario of  Le Beau Serge. The film was both a critical (it won the Golden Bear at the 1959 Berlin Film Festival) and commercial success. Having  broken through as a director, Chabrol used the production company he had set up to support the debut films of Jacques Rivette ( Paris Nous Appartient ) and Eric Rohmer ( Le Signe du Lion).

Cannes 59: The Wave Breaks

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) [1959]

The term New Wave first appeared in 1957 in an article in L’Express entitled “Report on Today‟s Youth.” The article, by the journalist Francoise Giroud, and the book  she published the following year called The New Wave:  Portrait of Today’s Youth, had nothing to do with cinema, but was about the need for change in society. However, the term was borrowed by journalists who used it to apply to the young directors creating a storm at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and soon the phrase caught on internationally.

The film most responsible for bringing the attention of the world to this new cinematic movement wasFrancois Truffaut‟s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (1959). It caused a sensation at the festival that year. Its young star, Jean-Pierre Leaud,was carried out of the screening in triumph and Truffaut won the best director award. Suddenly the world‟s media were talking about the New Wave. Ironically, Truffaut had been banned from the festival the previous year because of his uncomplimentary remarks about French cinema in Cahiers. Now he was a star  director and those who had opposed him were rapidly pushed aside. Also screened at Cannes that year was Alain Resnais‟ Hiroshima, Mon Amour , which was awarded the International Critics‟ Prize. Resnais had already made a name for  himself as a documentary director with Nuit Et Brouillard  ( Night and Fog ) (1955), the first film to focus on the Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War. Like the documentary, his debut feature film used innovative use of flashback, to illuminate themes of time and memory and the horror of war. The film was acclaimed for its originality and became an international hit.

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” - Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard

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In Cannes, Truffaut met Georges de Beauregard, an enterprising  producer willing to take a gamble on a young director .Truffaut introduced him to Jean-Luc Godard who  proposed several projects, including an idea Truffaut had come up with based on a story he had seen in a newspaper. Beauregard liked the scenerio and bought the rights off Truffaut for 100,000 francs. Godard was an unknown however, so as an added guarantee, Beauregard insisted that Godard‟s friends, who wer e now well established, appear in the credits. Truffaut was credited with the screenplay and Chabrol as artistic advisor.

More than any other film  À Bout de Souffle ( Breathless) (1960) exemplified the  New Wave movement; serving as a kind of  manifesto for the group. While the plot, reminiscent of a thousand Film Noir B movies, is simple, the film itself is stylistically complex and revolutionary in its breaking of traditional Hollywood storytelling conventions. All of the trademarks of the New Wave are evident: ....  jump cuts, hand-held camerawork, a disjointed narrative, an improvised musical score, dialogue spoken directly to camera, frequent changes of pace and mood, and the use of real locations. As Godard said, the film was the result of “a decade‟s worth of making movies in my head”. A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) [1960]

 À Bout de Souffle was a commercial and critical success, playing to packed houses in Paris, and winning the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival. Its stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg became fashion icons for the young, and audiences across the world responded to the picture‟s iconoclastic spirit. Godard had taken his first step toward reinventing cinema. Like Godard, Truffaut had a passion for American pulp crime novels and Film Noir. His own unconventional take on the genre began with his second picture which was adapted from a novel by David Goodis called  Down There. This was a deliberate move away from what he felt the public expected of him after the autobiographical nature of his first film. Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (Shoot The Pianist ) was packed with cinematic references and deliberate subversions of genre conventions. It was a chance for the director to enjoy himself and prove he wouldn‟t be easily catagorized. Although considered a classic now, Tirez Sur Le Pianiste baffled audiences at the time who were used to a more conventional style of storytelling. The film was not a financial success and Truffaut, who had planned to turn his company Les Films du Carrosse into a kind of New Wave studio, was forced to lower his expectations. From this time onwards he made it a rule only to produce his own films, and any  projects sent to him, he referred to other producers.

Zazie, Lola, Catherine and Les Bonnes Femmes

The start of the 1960‟s saw the release of a diverse collection of New Wave films all featuring female characters at their centre. Typically unpredictable, Louis Malle followed Les Amantswith Zazie Dans  Le Metro (1960), a lively, surreal farce shot in colour. Adapted from a novel by Raymond Queneau, the story follows an eleven year old girl and her eccentric uncle Les Bonnes Femmes [1960]

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on a mad cap chase around Paris. Claude Chabrol also reacted against his  previous work with Les Bonnes  Femmes(1960), an unusual mix of Hitchockian thriller and documentary realism, examining the ups and downs in the lives of four shop girls. The film details their hopeful but ultimately doomed attempts at finding romance. Jacques Demy‟s debut feature Lola (1961), set in the seaside town of Nantes, drew on .... musicals, fairytales, and the golden age of  Hollywood for its inspiration, and set the tone for all his subsequent pictures. Featuring Anouk Aimee in the title role, this often downbeat tale of lost love and the machinations of fate was told with a joie de vivre that would become characteristic of Demy's unique cinematic oeuvre. Jules Et Jim [1961]

That same year, Francois Truffaut was planning Jules et Jim the story of two friends who both fall in love with the free-spirited but capricious Catherine. He had initially come across the semi-autobiographical book by Henri-Pierre Roche by chance in a second hand bookshop, had fallen in love with it, and considered making it his first feature. However, realising how difficult it would be to get right, he put it to one side until he had more experience under his belt. Now he had the experience and used it to create what would become one of the most famous and popular films of the French  New Wave.

 Jules et Jim (1961) was a stylistic tour de force, incorporating newsreel footage,  photographic stills, freeze frames, voice over narration, and a variety of fluid moving shots executed to perfection by cameraman Raoul Coutard. Despite

this, Truffaut stayed remarkably faithful to the source material. The unconventional love triangle at the centre of the story and the determination of Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) to find sexual satisfaction outside of society‟s conventions caused much controversy at the time of the film‟s release but did nothing to hinder the film‟s success.

The Left Bank Group

The Left Bank Group, from left: Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy (holding camera, front right)

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In the early 1960s, critic Richard Roud attempted to draw a distinction between the directors allied with the influential  journal Cahiers du Cinéma and what he dubbed the “Left Bank” group. This latter  group embraced a loose association of  writers and film-makers that consisted  principally of the directors Chris Marker , Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. They had in common a background in documentary, a left wing political

orientation, and an interest in artistic experimentation. Another associate of the group was the Nouveau Roman novelistAlain Robbe-Grillet. In 1961 he collaborated with Alain Resnais on L’Annee Derniere A  Marienbad ( Last Year in Marienbad ). The film‟s dream-like visuals and experimental narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, divided audiences, with some hailing it as a masterpiece, and . others finding it incomprehensible. Despite the critical disagreements, the film won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, and its surreal imagery has become an iconic part of film history. L'Annee Derniere A Marienbad (Last Year At Marienbad) [1961]

Chris Marker  began making documentaries in the early 50‟s, collaborating with his friend Alain Resnais on Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1950-53), which begins as a simple film about African art and gradually changes into an anti-colonialist polemic.

Over the following years he developed a unique essay style of documentary filmmaking. His one fictional film, La Jetee (1962), a science fiction story about a time traveller, composed almost completely of still photographs, has become a classic in its own right. Agnès Varda is the most celebrated female director to be associated with the New Wave. She began as a photographer, then turned to the cinema and directed  La Pointe Courte (1954), a low budget documentary-like feature film about the break up of a marriage which, in its production method and style, presaged the coming New Wave. Over the following years, she made a number of shorts and documentaries, before directingCleo from 5 to 7 (1962). This real time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits the results of a life or death medical report became one of the  benchmarks of the Nouvelle Vague movement.

The Tide Turns In December 1962, Cahiers du Cinéma published a special issue on the “New Wave”, which included long interviews with Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, and a list of 162 new French directors. Among the first time directors discussed were Jacques DoniolValcroze ( L’eau a la Bouche (1960)), Pierre Kast( Le  Bel Age (1960)), Luc Moullet (Un Steack Trop Cuit (1960)), Jean-Daniel Pollet ( La Ligne deMire (1960)), Jean-Pierre Mocky ( Les ....  Dragueurs (1960)), and Jacques Rozier ( Adieu  Philippine(1962)). The success of the early New Wave had opened the gates for a generation of unknown directors to break through into what had previously been a very closed industry. Films were now being made by young people, for young people, and staring young people. Adieu Philippine [1962]

Inevitably, there was a media backlash. The failure at the box office of  Tirez Sur Le  Pianiste, Une Femmes est une Femmes and other high profile releases gave the press ammunition to attack the movement. They reproached the young directors o f the New Wave for making films that were “intellectual and boring”. At the same time the old guard believed it was making a comeback with a string of successful films beginning with Rue des Prairies (1960), staring Jean Gabin. There was dissent too at Cahiers du Cinéma. Most of its leading writers were now directors and no longer had the time to devote to writing for the magazine. As a result,

 by the early 60‟s, a second generation of young cinephiles had replaced the first group. This new group did not always share the same opinions as its predecessors, leading to clashes with editor in chief, Eric Rohmer . Supported by the new writers, Jacques Rivette took over as editor, and the sense of  community at the review fractured. The production of the New Wave group film Paris Vu Par (1964) – a series of sketches by different directors – signalled the change. Rivette, and Truffaut who had supported him, were symbolically excluded from contributing. The split had begun. Each of the filmmakers associated with Cahiers now went their own, increasingly divergent, ways.

"The Cinema is truth 24 times a second." - Jean-Luc Godard By the mid-60‟s Jean-Luc Godard was probably the most discussed director in the world. The films came in rapid succession, each one a further step towards a personal reinvention of  cinema. After  À Bout de Souffle, came a  political thriller, Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) (1961), a technicolour wide screen musical, Une Femme Est Une Femme ( A Woman is a Woman) (1961), a social drama .... about prostitution, Vivre Sa Vie (One Life to  Live) (1962), and a war film, Les Carabiniers (The Soldiers) (1963).

Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live) [1962]

These early films had made a star out of Belgian-French actress Anna Karina, whom Godard had married in 1961. With his next film, Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963), he reinvented Brigitte Bardot‟s public image, giving her the chance to prove she could act. The film - a story about the breakup of a relationship set against the pressures of  commercial filmmaking - became Godard‟s biggest box office success, ensuring continued financial backing for his prolific output. In the following years, Godard continued to make films that established him as the definitive New Wave director. After the lush Mediterranean scenery of  Le Mepris, he went back to the streets of Paris, showing a gritty view of the city in crime caper  Bande A Part ( Band of Outlaws) (1964), and an alternative view in the dystopian sci-fi feature Alphaville (1965).

Weekend [1967]

 Next came a road trip to the South of  France for the brilliant Pierrot Le  Fou (1965). Pairing Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina and abounding with ideas and references to  both high and low culture (it even features a cameo from B movie maestro Sam Fuller), the film was a culmination of all the director‟s radical filmmaking techniques up to that point.

Godard‟s political views became increasingly central from now on. Masculin,  Feminin(1966), was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Next came Made in the U.S.A (1966), a playful crime story inspired by Howard Hawks‟s The Big Sleep (1945).2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her ) (1967), starred Marina Vlady as a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute. Le Chinoise (1967) focused on a group of students engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Later that year, Godard made a more colourful political film. Weekend (1967) follows a Parisian couple as they go on a trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues is a darkly comic, sometimes horrific, confrontation with the tragic flaws of the bourgeoisie.Weekend ‟s enigmatic closing title sequence concludes with the words “End of Cinema”, a declaration which signalled an end to the first  period in Godard‟s filmmaking career.

Love, Murder, and Morality Tales Francois Truffaut followed Jules et Jim with La Peau  Douce (Soft Skin) (1964) another story about an ill-fated love triangle, but this time in a contemporary setting. Despite excellent perfomances and a compelling narrative the film was not a financial success, and, over the next few years, Truffaut‟s career slowed as he worked on his book  about Alfred Hitchcock, whilst struggling to get his film adaptation of Ray Bradbury‟s  Farenheit 451 off the ground. When he came to shoot it the larger scale production was difficult for Truffaut, used to working on low budgets and .... unable to communicate easily with the English speaking crew, and the resulting film failed to match its initial conception. Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) [1964]

Jacques Demy had his greatest success with his third film  Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg ) (1964). The film, staring a 20-yearold Catherine Deneuve, tells a tragic story of everyday life but is transformed  by Demy into a tender romance in which all the characters sing their lines and the town is painted in a range of beautiful colours. The film was a critical and commercial success, winning the Palme d‟Or at Cannes. He followed this with the equally captivating Les Demoiselles de  Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort ) (1967). Louis Malle‟s typically diverse range of  1960‟s films included Vie Privee ( A Very  Private Affair ) (1962) in which Brigitte Bardot played a virtual parody of her real life persona; Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) (1963), the powerful study of a writer trying to find a reason not to kill himself; the internationally successful Viva  Maria! (1965) which teamed Brigitte . .... Bardot with Jeanne Moreau in a tale of  revolution in South America; and  Le Voleur (The Thief ) (1967), a comedy drama about a thief staring Jean-Paul Belmondo. After the failure of the last of  these, Malle admitted he was tired of the mainstream film industry, and, in 1969, he travelled to India, where he made two uncompromising documentaries about the  poverty he found there. Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) [1963]

In 1962 Eric Rohmer made La Boulangere de Monceau (The Bakery Girl of   Monceau)(1962), the first in what would become a celebrated series of films released over the next ten years under the title Six Moral Tales. Each of the films, which included Ma Nuit Chez Maud ( My Night with Maud ) (1969) and Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee) (1970), explored the entanglements, temptations and disappointments facing contemporary relationships. In them Rohmer established a cinematic style all his own, notable for its economical camerawork, warmly ironic tone, and strict fidelity to the true representation of reality. More conventional in his approach than the other New Wave directors, Claude Chabrol‟s mid-1960‟s output failed to draw the attention accorded to his contemporaries. Out of step with the mood of the times, for a while Chabrol appeared to lose direction. Then came the series of psychological thrillers starting with  Les  Biches (The Does) (1968), and including La Femme Infidele (The Unfaithful Wife ) (1969), and Le Boucher ( The Butcher   ) (1969), which established his world-wide reputation.

Jacques Rivette‟s debut feature Paris Nous Appartient ( Paris Belongs to Us) (1960) had been a monumental undertaking, taking two years to make and featuring a cast of  thirty actors. However it‟s labyrinthean plot and uneven pace found little favour with audiences. His next film,  Le Religieuse (The Nuns) (1966) was considerably more commercial, becoming a success de scandal when the government blocked its release for a year. The relatively straightforward narrative of this film was, however, uncharacteristic of the director‟s vision, and, it was with the highly experimental and original films that followed, including L’Amour Fou ( Mad Love) (1968), Out 1 (1970), and Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau(Celine and Julie Go Boating ) (1974), that Rivette made a more lasting impact.

1968 - Year of Revolution In the spring of 1968, a minor protest  by students at Nanterre University quickly escalated, leading to major  civil unrest all over France. On May 10th in Paris there was a violent confrontation between student demonstrators and the police. Over  the following days discontent with the Gaullist government spread into the labour force and workers began  joining in the protest with a series of  strikes and factory occupations. Ultimately, the De Gaulle government held firm, and,  partly because of divisions within the leftist opposition, the protests died away. The Paris Riots, 1968

Earlier in 68, events in the world of cinema had helped to trigger the riots that followed. It began when Henri Langlois, who had set up and nurtured theCinématheque Francaise, was fired as its head by the Minister of Culture Andre Malraux. Claiming administrative incompetence as his reason, Malreaux terminated the archive‟s subsidy and moved to appoint a new head. The firing sparked protests among Parisian film students who continued to receive much of their education through screenings at the Cinematheque, as well as New Wave directors like Truffaut, Godard, Rivette and Resnais who proudly proclaimed themselves “children of the Cinématheque.” Even the Cannes festival was drawn into the protest as Louis Malle and Roman Polanski resigned from the festival jury, and Truffaut and Godard burst into a screening and hung from the curtains to physically stop the festival from continuing.

Support too came from abroad in the form of telegrams from world famous directors like Hitchcock, Kurosawa and Fellini. Eventually Malraux was forced to back down and Langlois was reinstated.

Aftermath The Langlois affair showed that, despite their differences – both political and cinematic – the directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague could still come together  as a group. Indeed, after their work came under attack from critics, and the film establishment began to reassert itself, they felt more willing to assert themselves as  part of a movement than they had at the start. As Truffaut wrote in a 1967 issue of  Cahiers du Cinéma: “Before, when we were interviewed – Jean Luc, Resnais, Malle, myself and others – we said, „The New Wave doesn‟t exist, it doesn‟t mean anything.‟ But later, we had to change, and ever since that moment I‟ve affirmed my participation in the movement. Now, in 1967, we are  proud to have been and to remain part of the New Wave, just as one is proud to have  been a Jew during the Occupation.”

Then and Now: The New Wave Continues An enduring legacy of the French New Wave movement was the inspiration it provided for  similar movements in other countries. In America, the “movie brat” generation of  filmmakers that emerged in the late 1960‟s and 70‟s, was profoundly influenced by the storytelling techniques pioneered by the Novelle Vague directors. In Europe too, young directors in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere, were motivated to break with the  past and tell their own stories. Even further  .... afield, in countries such as Japan, Brazil, and Canada, similar movements prospered for a while. La Maman et la Putain (The Mother and the Whore) [1973]

In France the success of the Nouvelle Vague continued to open doors for new directors. Barbet Schroeder ( More (1969)) Jean Eustache ( La Maman et La  Putain (1973)), Andre Techine( Paulina s’en Va (1975)), and Philippe

Garrel ( L’Enfant Secret (1979), made up part of what could be considered a post New Wave second wave. They, and other directors like Jean-Claude Biette, Claude Guiguet, and Paul Vecchiali, began, like their predecessors, writing for  Cahiers du Cinéma, before turning to filmmaking themselves. In the 1980‟s a new generation of  young directors emerged in France. Dubbed by the media the "New New Wave", the three main figures in the group, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson and Leos Carax, were quick to distance themselves from the earlier  movement, expressing anti-New Wave sentiments in interviews. Their films, . which included the hits  Diva (Beineix (1980), Subway (Besson (1985), Betty Blue (Beiniex (1986), The Big Blue (Besson (1988), and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax (1991), were criticized for favouring style over substance. Their style of filmmaking became known as the „cinema du look‟, and, although popular, was felt by many to offer little more than slick visuals and alluring stars. La Belle Noiseuse [1991]

The tragic early death of Francois Truffaut in 1984 brought an end to the career of the  best known and best loved of the French New Wave directors. His later work, although varied and not always successful, included such highlights as the Oscar  winning Day for Night (1973), the poetic La Chambre Verte (The Green Room) (1978), and Le Dernier Metro (The Last Metro) (1980), a story of the Resistance which was a critical and box office triumph in France. Apart from his work, Truffaut himself has become an icon and inspiration for impassioned, idealistic young directors, determined to remake cinema on their own terms. As for his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, they continue making waves in the twenty-first century. Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer , Rivette, Varda,Resnais, Marker , and others associated with the movement, are all now auteurs in their own right with an international following. Their prolific output continues to challenge audiences and expand the boundaries of cinematic expression. Retrospectives of their work and new  prints of New Wave classics continue to keep alive a cultural revolution that produced some of the greatest films ever made and changed the course of cinema history. The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague  ) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of  French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism [1] andclassical Hollywood cinema .[1] Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their selfconscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthfu l iconoclasm. "New Wave" is an example of  European art cinema.[2] Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the

conservative paradigm. Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of filmmaking presented a documentary type style. The films exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming techniques included fragmented, discontinuous editing, and long takes. The combination of objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end.[3] Contents

[show]

[edit]Origins

of the movement

 Alexandre Astruc's manifesto, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo." This article appeared in L'Ecran, on 30 March 1948. This is one of thirty essays devoted to the cinema during this period, and this article specfically outlines some of the ideas t hat are later expanded upon by François Truffaut and the Cahiers du cinéma. It begins to argue that 'cinema was in t he process of becoming a new mean of expression on the same level as painting and the novel:' "a form in which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does i n the contemporary essay or  novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the "camera-stylo. "[4] Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer , Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Cahiers co-founder and theoris t André Bazin was a prominent source of influence for the movement. By means of criticism and editorialization, they laid the groundwork for a set of concepts, revolutionary at the ti me, which the American film critic Andrew Sarris called auteur theory . (The original French "La politique des auteurs ", translated literally, as "The policy of authors".) Cahiers du cinémawriters critiqued the classic "Tradition of Quality" style of  French Cinema. Notable among these was François Truffaut in his manifesto-like article "Une Certaine tendance du cinéma français". Bazin and Henri Langlois, founder and curator of the Cinémathèque Française , were the dual father figures of the movement. These men of cinema valued the expression of the director's personal vision in both the film's style and scrip t.[5] Truffaut also credits the American director, Morris Engel and his film "Little Fugitive" with helping to start the French New Wave, when he said "Our Fre nch New Wave would never have come into being, if it hadn't been for the y oung American Morris Engel who showed us the way to independent production with (this) fine movie." The auteur theory holds that the director is the "author" of his movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film. They praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, and made then-radical cases for the artistic distinction and greatness of Hollywood studio directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The beginning of the New Wave was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying this philosophy to the world by directing movies themselves.  Apart from the role that films by Jean Rouch have played in the movement, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is traditionally (but debatably) credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish. Part of their technique was to portray characters not readily labeled as protagonists in the classi c sense of audience identification. The auteurs of this era owe their popularity to the s upport they received with their youthful audience. Most of these directors were born in the 1930s and grew up in Paris; relating much to how their viewers were experiencing life. With high concentration in fashion, urban professional life, and all-night parties, the life of France's youth was being exquisitely captured .[6] French New Wave was popular roughly between 1958 and 1964, although New Wave work existed as late as 1973. The socio-economic forces at play shortly after World War II strongly influenced the movement. Politically and financially drained, France tended to fall back on the o ld popular pre-war traditions. One such tradition was straight narrative cinema, specifically classical French film. The movement has its roots in rebellion against the reliance on past forms (often adapted from traditional novellic structures), criticizing in particular the way these forms could force the audience to submit to a dictatorialplot-line. They were especially against the French "cinema of quality", the type of high-minded, literary period films held in esteem at French film festivals, often regarded as "untouchable" by criticism. New Wave critics and directors studied the work of western classics and applied new avant garde stylistic direction. The low-budget approach helped filmmakers get at the essential art form and find what was, to them, a much more comfortable and honest form of production . Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and many other forward-thinking film directors were held up in admiration while standard Hollywood films bound by traditional narrative flow were strongly criticized. Many of the directors associated with the new wave continued to make films i nto the 21st century .[7]

The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End ).  Also, these movies featured existential themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. Many of the French New Wave films were produced on tight budgets; often shot in a friend's apartment or yard, using the director's f riends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots). The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic i nnovations. For example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless ( À bout de souffle), after being told the film was too long and he must cut it down to one hour and a half he decided (on the suggestion o f Jean-Pierre Melville ) to remove several scenes from the feature using  jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that didn't work were simply cut from the middle of the take, a practical decision and also a purposeful stylistic one .[8] The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and s hots that go beyond the common 180° axis. The camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but to play with the expectations of cinema.

The techniques used to shock and awe the audience out of submission and were so bold and direct t hat Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer's supposed naivety. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trit e or  commonplace, such as a character stepping out of their role in order to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time. Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer's disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes without attempt at unity; or an actor  whose character changes from one scene to the next; or sets i n which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.  At the heart of New Wave technique is the issue of money and production value. In the context of social and economic troubles of a post-World War II France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods. Half necessity and half vision, New Wave directors used all that they had available to channel their artistic visions directly to the theatre. Finally, the French New Wave, as the European modern Cinema , is focused on the technique as style itself. A French New Wave film-maker is first of all an author  who shows in its film his own eye on the world .[9] On the other hand the film as the object of knowledge challenges the usual transitivity on which all the other  cinema was based, "undoing its cornerstones: space and time continuity, narrative and grammatical logics, the self-evidence of the represented worlds." In this way the film-maker passes "the essay attitude, thinking  – in a novelist way  – on his own way to do essays. "[10] [edit]Left

Bank

The Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, group is a contingent of filmmakers associated with the Fre nch New Wave, first identified as such by Richard Roud.[11] The corresponding "right bank" group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with Cahiers du cinéma(Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard).[11] Unlike the Cahiers these directors were older and less movie-crazed. They tended to see cinema akin to other arts, such as literature. However they were similar to t he New Wave directors in that they practiced cinematic modernism. Their emergence also came in the 1950s also benefited from the youthful audience .[12] The two groups, however, were not in opposition; Cahiers du cinémaadvocated Left Bank cinema .[13] Left Bank directors include Chris Marker , Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda.[11] Roud described a distinctive "fondness for a kind of  Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of i nvolvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking ", as well as an identification with the political lef t.[11] The filmmakers tended to collaborate with one another .[13] Jean-Pierre Melville , Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras are also associated with the group .[14] The nouveau roman movement in literature was also a strong element of the Left Bank style, with authors contributing to many of the films. Left Bank films include La Pointe Courte, Hiroshima mon amour , La jetée, Last Year at Marienbad , and Trans-Europ-Express. [edit]Influential

names in the New Wave

[edit]Cah ier s d u c in é m a Directors 

Claude Chabrol



Jean-Luc Godard



Jacques Rivette



Éric Rohmer 



François Truffaut [15]

[edit]Left Bank Directors 

Henri Colpi



Jacques Demy



Chris Marker 



 Alain Resnais



 Agnès Varda[15]

[edit]Other Directors associated with the movement 

 Alexandre Astruc



Louis Malle



Jacques Doniol-Valcroze



Jean-Pierre Melville



Marguerite Duras



Luc Moullet



Jean Eustache





Georges Franju



Jean Rouch



Philippe Garrel



Jacques Rozier 



Pierre Kast



Straub-Huillet

 Alain Robbe-Grillet



Claude Lelouch



Roger Vadim [15]

[edit]Other Contributors 

Raoul Coutard  – cinematographer 



Henri Decaë  – cinematographer 



 André Weinfeld – cinematographer 



Georges Delerue  – composer 



Paul Gégauff  – screenwriter 



Michel Legrand  – composer 

Suzanne Schiffman  – screenwriter  [edit]Actors & Actresses 





Stéphane Audran  Anouk Aimée



Françoise Dorléac



Claude Jade  Anna Karina



Brigitte Bardot





Fanny Ardant



Bernadette Lafont



Charles Aznavour 



Jean-Pierre Léaud



Jean Paul Belmondo



Jeanne Moreau



Gerard Blain



Maurice Ronet



Jean-Claude Brialy



Jean Seberg



Jacques Charrier 



Delphine Seyrig



Catherine Deneuve



Jean-Louis Trintignant

 Alexandre Marques  [edit]Theoretical influences 

 Alexandre Astruc



 André Bazin



Robert Bresson



John Cassavetes



Henri Langlois

Roger Leenhardt  [edit]Theoretical followers  

Jonathan Rosenbaum  Andrew Sarris

[The Classroom] French New Wave: The Influencing of the Influencers Written by Kristen Coates, on May 28, 2010 at 9:39 am

NOTE: [The Classroom] is dedicated to an in-depth, academic look at an area of cinematic history. This is the first article of its kind. If there is a specific  topic you would like us to cover, send us an e-mail . Enjoy!  From time to time, filmmakers, film critics, and film buffs will make references to a period in film history known as the French New Wave. For some people this is a term to throw out just to sound impressive, while for others it carries inspiration and significance, representing a defining moment of  cinematic individuality and innovation. However, it is important to recognize that this moment in history did not happen overnight, and was in fact the culmination of many different influences from the film periods prior. For those with no knowledge of French New W ave, we‟ll start this overview from the

top. French New Wave was a term often associated with a group French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, marked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. The term was first coined by journalist Françoise Giroud in his 1958 writings for the magazine L’Express, when he used the term to describe the new generation emerging at the start of the Fifth Republic, and with their sudden emergence in 1958, this group of young filmm akers were thought to embody this phenomenon in their work. Through their immersion in French cine-clubs, they became exposed to Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema, which offered an alternative to what they saw to be a decline in French cinema. Voicing their opinions together as film critics, they rebelled against the mainstream cinematic trend, which in post- war conditions had fallen back on old traditional and heavily reliant on novellic adaptations and the notion of a “cinema of  quality”.

By the end of the 1950s, many of these then critics began to write and direct their own films, which often involved experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm. While many filmmakers would end up being associated with Nouvelle vague, or 

New Wave, a core group of film critics turned filmmakers from a single periodical, including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol.

Cinémathèque

From 1946 to 1958, the Fourth Republic of France (governed by the fourth republican constitution) marked a period of governmental instability during an era of post-war economic growth. In many ways, the Fourth Republic was a revival of the pre-war Third Republic, and was equally ineffective and problematic. The film industry in France mirrored this to a degree, falling back on its pre-war aesthetics in story choices, often based closely on literature, and limiting funding to only those already established within the system. During this time, a number of film societies and ciné-clubs began, and for the first time since the end of the war, French audiences were exposed to a diverse variety of cinema outside the French studio sphere. Henri Langlois, founder and curator of the Cinémathèque Française, was one of the father  figures of the movement, known for screening and collecting historical films. Langlois was a cinephile and film archivist, who worked the preserve films and film history in the post-war era. Langlois began collecting films in the 1930s, and had accum ulated one of the world‟s largest collections by the outbreak of World War II. At the threat of having his collection destroyed by the German authorities, he smuggled huge numbers of films to unoccupied areas of France for protection. Following the war, Langlois was able to attain a subsidy from the French government for the collection, as well as a small screening room to show the films. During this time, the audience for mainstream cinema was in decline, but cinema culture was maintained through these ciné-clubs and art houses, which focused on retrospective and noncommercial cinema. Two ciné-clubs regularly patronized by future filmmakers of nouvelle vague were the “Ciné -club du Quartier Latin,” and “Objectif 49.” “Ciné -club du Quartier Latin,” (translates to Cinema Club of the Latin Quarter) specialized in American films, and was frequented by Jacques Rivette. “Objectif  49” organized by cinephiles like André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Alexandre Astruc, as well sponsorship from Robert Bresson and Jean

Cocteau, showed its members new, unreleased films. “Objectif 49” founder Jean-Geores Auriol also founded the only serious film magazine in France at the time, Revue du cinema. When the magazine collapsed around the time of Auriol‟s accidental death in 1950, a void was created in French criticism that Bazin and his contemporaries hoped to fill.

When Bazin finally did establish his own periodical, Cahiers du cinema, it was in these ciné-clubs that he met many of the young cinephiles he would recruit as writers. Later in his career, then filmmaker François Truffaut would open his film Stolen Kisses (1968), part of his Antione Doniel cycle, with a shot of the then closed up Cinémathèque, dedicating the film to Langlois, reflecting back on this period in his life.

Cahiers du cinema

 André Bazin, alongside Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca, f ounded the film magazine Cahiers du cinema in 1951. Bazin championed films that depicted what he referred to as an “objective reality” that didn‟t mask the hardships and harsh realities of everyday life, s uch as in Italian neorealist

films and documentaries. He also firmly supported the notion that films should be personalized by the director, each one representing the director‟s personal vision.

 At the time of the Cahiers formation, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette were writing for their own journal, Gazette du cinema, (which had been created after the demise of Revue du cinema) and thus became some of the first Cahiers writers. Also at the time of magazine‟s foundation Rivette had already begun making his first short films. This is an important thought to keep in mind, as many of the writers who wrote for Cahiers envisioned themselves making their own films at some point. It is important to recognize that while the Cahiers critics shared some viewed, there was diversity among the group, ranging both in age, as well as cinematic aesthetics. It was through this diverse thinking that they were able to have engaged debates, and challenged each others‟ views. Many of the writers for Cahiers were frequent attendees of Cinémathèque Française, and would often write about it in their magazine, regarding it as their version of a film school. Truffaut was one of these individuals, who had met Bazin many years earlier through a film society. In 1950, Truffaut had enlisted in the army, gone AWOL, and ended up in a military prison. It was Bazin who had helped him get released and discharged from the army, and at the time he began writing for Cahiers, Truffaut had been living with Bazin and his wife, as Bazin became the paternal mentor teenage Truffaut had long been lacking. During this time, among the films shown at the Cinémathèque Française were Italian Neorealism films, as well as classical Hollywood films. Italian Neorealism refers to a period in Italian film where stories were set against the poor and working class in post-World War II Italy. The style was further  defined and supported by critics of the Italian periodical Cinema, who had tired of the poor quality mainstream films of the time. Cahiers writers were drawn to these films for their realist depicts of post-war economic and moral conditions, as well as the stylistic choices of filming on location, often using non-professional actors. Classical Hollywood cinema refers to the period of American film prior to the 1970s. Stylistically, it was an “invisible” style, where continuity could

provide a sense of seamlessness without drawing attention to the camera. The term also applies to the mode of production at the time, meaning the Hollywood studio system. In this system, all film workers were employees of a specific studio, giving each studio its own sense of style, diminishing the individual styles of the directors. However, those directors who were able to rebel against these restrictions, infusing films with their own unique style and aesthetic (such as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford), did not go unnoticed by the Cahiers critics. They applauded the films of these directors, as they began to explore the notion of authorship i n relation to directors. In a conversation with a number of  Cahiers writers, Howard Hawks describe his experience with his first sound film, Dawn Patrol : “I myself wrote almost the entire scenario, and during the shooting, everyone kept telling me, „It‟s not good dialogue, it‟s not dramatic. Ev erything is flat. Everything you‟re doing is going to be flat.‟ No one liked the film because none of the characters cried or screamed. When the editing was finished, the studio had

so little confidence in the movie, they dispensed with the premiere. They preferred to release it discreetly, and then it turned out to be the best film of  the year, and then they got in t he habit of screening it for other directors and saying, „That‟s what good dialogue is like.‟”

The group also rebelled against the notion of French “cinema of quality” or “tradition of quality”. At the time, high-budget literary period films were the

mainstream trend, and were highly regarded at French film festivals. They also recognized French filmmakers who shared their ideals such as Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. In May of 1957, after years of publicly criticizing the majority of French cinema, a number of  Cahiers critics gathered around a tape recorder to discuss the current state of film in France. With what Bazin described as the most radical and decided opinions, Rivette began the discussion by stating:

I think that French cinema at the moment is unwittingly another version of British cinema, or to put it another way, it’s Bri tish cinema not recognized  as such, because it’s the work of people who are none the less talented. But the films seem no more ambi tious and of no more real value tha what is exemplified in British cinema… British cinema is a genre cinema, but one where the genres have no genuine roots… It’s a cinema that limps along,

caught between two stools, a cinema based on supply and demand, and  on the false notions on supply and demand at that. They believe that that’s the kind of thing the public wants and so that’s what they get, but in trying to play by all the rules of that game they do ti badly, without either honesty or 

talent. While this commentary denounces British genre films, it is important to note that Rivette was a fan of American genre directors from the 40s and 50s, such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Robert Aldrich. He despised cinema that felt mass produced, and praised that which demonstrated personal vision. It was in this same conversation that the critics discussed the important of a national cinema, and the need to create films that would attain international distribution. Rohmer this topic by declaring, “it‟s precisely its universal character that gives American cinema its value. American cinema gives a lead. What should be deplored is not so much that French cinema isn‟t producing worthwhile work, but that its work is shut off- I mean it doesn‟t

influence the work in other countries. There is no French school, at least not any more, while there is an American school and an Italian s chool.” He then continued this thought in saying, “French cinema doesn‟t depict French society, while American cinema, like Italian cinema, is able to raise society

to a level of aesthetic dignity. Perhaps in conclusion we could try to find out, if not why, at any rate in what way French cinema fails to represent contemporary France.”

When French films did emerge that s eemed to break from the mainstream, the Cahiers tried to bring as much attention to it as possible. When Alain Resnais, a filmmaker who would become associated with nouvelle vague, directed a film titled Hiroshima, Mon Amour (sometimes written as Hiroshima, Notre Amour ) in 1959, the Cahiers applauded this film, finding it fresh and

original. The film, which explored the subject of memory, utilized an innovative use of flashbacks, providing a style with a definite break with classical cinema, reflecting a changing modern mentality i n cinematic history. erences. You can  As Godard described, “the very first thing that strikes you about this film is that it is totally devoid of any cinematic ref  describe Hiroshima as Faulkner plus Stravinsky, but you can‟t identify it as such and such a filmmaker plus such and such another.” One element of Resnais‟s film that did cause some interesting debate was his collaboration with screenwriter Magueritte Duras . Duras was primarily a

novelist, to which the critics believe could have posed a threat to the film becoming too “literary”, but the actual film was uniquely cinematic, which the Cahiers attributed to Resnais‟s talent as an auteur , and his ability to craft mise en scèneand montage. It was soon after this time that a number of  the critics began filming their own features, hoping to infuse these new stylistic elements into their work.

“La politique des auteurs” (the policy of authors)

Growing weary of French mainstream cinema of the time, Truffaut wrote an article titled ―Une certaine tendance du cinéma français‖ (A Certain Tendency of French Cinema) in 1954. This article was a reaction against “Tradition of Quality” cinema in France, a term that had be coined by JeanPierre Barrot in the magazine L’Ecran Français the year prior. Truffaut believed that this “Tradition of Quality” not only reduced the literary heritage of  France, but it also simplified cinema to the point that it was limited as an art form. Specifically, he attacks writers Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost as examples of screenwriters safely adapting and not will ing to push the cinematic medium: In truth, Aurenche and Bost work like all the scenarists in the world, like pre-war Spaak and Natanson. To their way of thinking, every story includes characters A, B, C, and D. In the interior of that equation, everything is organized in function of criteria known to them alone. The sun rises and sets like clockwork, characters disappear, others are invented, the script deviates little by little from the original and becomes a whole, formless but brilliant: a new film, step by step makes its solemn entrance into the ―Tradition of Quality.‖… They will tell me, ―Let us admit that Aur  enche and Bost are

unfaithful, but do you also deny the existence of their talent…?‖ Talent, to be sure, is not a function of fidelity, but I consider an adaptation of value only  when written by a man of the cinema. Aurenche and Bost are essentially literary men and I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by under-estimating it. Bazin and the Cahiers critics began referring to this idea as la politique des auteurs (the policy of authors), as it became an informal manifesto of the New Wave. Later translated by Andrew Sarris, this term was renamed  Auteur Theory  in 1962. Auteur theory states that the director is the “author”of his films, with a personal signature visible in each. This is a shift from the previous mentality, where the artistic focus was placed on the screenwriter.

 Another key element of Auteur theory came from Alexandre Astruc (notable French film critic and former member of “Objectif 49”) who discuss the

notion of the caméra-stylo (camera-pen) meaning that directors should wield their cameras like writers use their pens, putting the art of storytelling in their own hands. Within the commercial apparatus of filmmaking, filmmakers should wield their camera-pens to imprint their personal impression on the film. The Cahiers writers praised the directors who worked in pursuit of this goal. In 1956, Truffaut and Rivette interviewed Howard Hawks. Within the conversation, the Cahierscritics asked if Hawks edited his own films, to which he responded: “Oh yes! Simultaneously with the shooting, if possible. When I started out in this profession, the producers were all afraid that I made a film too short because I didn‟t give them enough f ilm for editing. And I said: „I don‟t want you to make the movie in the cuttingroom, I want to make it myself 

on the set, and if th at doesn‟t suit you, too bad.‟… The difficult work is the preparation: finding the story, deciding how to tell it, what to show and what not to show… I never follow a script literally and I don‟t hesitate to change a script completely if I see a chance to do something interesting.”

The group also began to establish their own visual aesthetic. Mimicking their films of preference, this included a preference for a long shot for a scene as opposed to over-editing with constant cuts. In 1958, Claude Chabrol released his film Le Beau Serge, a Hitchcock-influenced drama, which became known as the first film of the nouvelle vague, and was met with critical success. However, a number of the other Cahiers directors also had films in the works at this point, and it would be with the feature debuts of Truffaut and Godard that the movement would gain attention and momentum.

Nouvelle Vague

 At t he time the Cahiers critics began experimenting with their own films, there were institutional and technical changes that impacted the movement. Following the war, the Centre National de la Cinématographie was founded in 1946, with the intention of regenerating French cinema through financing and distribution. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of this funding was allocated to French mainstream cinema with established directors and producers. However, when the market for mainstream cinema began to decline more funds began to be allocated smaller productions, as well as awards for completed films. In 1957, Truffaut made a short film called Les Mistons, in which a group of young boys spy on a young woman, annoying her and her boyfriend. Aft er  its completion, Truffaut receive a financial reward, which he reinvested in his next project, which would be his first feature.

In 1953, Morris Engel and his wife wrote and directed the film Little Fugitive which told the story of a young child spending the day alone at Coney Island. Filmed on location, the film utilized a spontaneous production style, in which a concealed strap-on camera allowed the filmmakers to record without the knowledge of surrounding pedestrians. This was very influential to Truffaut, who was busy formulating his first feature-length film, The 400  Blows. The day after shooting commenced on the film, Bazin died of leukemia at age 40. This had a deep, emotional impact on Truffaut, who had viewed Bazin as a father-figure, and so he ended up dedicating the film in Bazin‟s memory.

While some of the film is based on his own life, Truffaut also borrowed moments from a few of his favorite films. There is one scene in which a line of  schoolboys goes jogging through Paris. One by one, the boys sneak away from the group to go play elsewhere in the city. This scene in practically a shot-by-shot homage to a scene in Jean Vigo‟s 1933 film Zéro de conduite , which drew on the director‟s childhood boarding school experiences. In an article on first person plural, Cahiers critic Fereydoun Hoveyda applauded the film, saying: Unafraid to mix genres, Truffaut begins in the usual narrative vein, then, without warning, moves into reportage, goes back to what appears to be the story and on to a portrait of manners, with a bit of comedy and tragedy inserted here and there. He tells us a complete story just as it should be told, makes his presence felt as a scrupulous observer of reality, turns investigator, then poet, and completes his film on a very beautiful image which is also a first-rate director’s idea. The 400 Blows went on to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival that year, which was the festivals second-most prestigious award at the time. This win is humorous in the sense that Truffaut had been the one critic banned from the Festival one-year prior. In 1958, Godard and Truffaut had attended Expo 58, the first major world‟s fair after World War II, located in Brussels. There, the two critics viewed and applauded Orson Welles‟s Touch of Evil . After seeing this film, Godard felt it was time to make his first feature film.

Co-written with Truffaut, Breathless featured actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg and offered a bold visual style and innovative techniques. Between breaking the eye-line match rule, he also utilized the use of jump cuts, both of which are violate classical continuity editing, which ends up being a way of breaking down the appearance of continuous time and space. One example of his use of jump cut is when the two main characters are riding around in a convertible. In one shot, Jean Seberg is sitting in the passenger seat with her hands on her legs, and then in the next cut she is shown from the same angle but now holding a mirror. There is an abrupt feeling of lost time, which moves away from the classical sense of  seamlessness. It is important to note that Godard was not the first filmmaker to make use of the jump cut. George Méliès frequently used jump cuts as a way of  simulating magic tricks, having something be absent in one frame, and then present in the next. However, Godard was the first contemporary filmmaker to utilize this technique in a narrative film, working against what he saw as the flawed classical style of then French cinema. Breathless also contains a number of cinematic references, as Godard calls attention to the medium he loves. In his portrayal of Michel, Belmondo does his best to imitate Hum phrey Bogart‟s constant lip-rubbing, and then takes notice of a photo of Bogart outside a movie theater. Later in the film, Michel and Patricia attend a screening of the film Westbound , once again drawing attention to films within the film. Godard even pays tribute to Cahiers, as Michel passes by a woman selling copies of the publication on the street. She asks him, “Monsieur, do you support youth?” He refuses, saying “No, I prefer the old.”

 As Godard and Truffaut progressed in the filmmaking careers, the y‟re styles became more differing from each other. Truffaut maintained more of a

classical style working with scripts, while Godard somewhat abandoned scripts, giving lines to his actors on scraps of paper. In this sense, Godard had more in common with Rivette, who was also very experimental in his filmmaking. In June of 1963, Eric Rohmer saw his position at Cahiers eliminated by his contemporaries, as the magazine began to move in a less-conservative, radical left-wing direction, against his desires to avoid overt politics.

 At this point, he began focusing his full energy on his filmmaking. He would later reflect on this time, saying, “I decided I would go on filming, no matter 

what, and instead of looking for a subject that might be attractive to the public or a producer, I decided I would find a subject that I liked and that a producer would refuse.”

What would follow would be a series of films he deemed as his Six Moral Tales (Contes moraux ). When examining these works, it‟s important to recognize that Rohmer isn‟t using the English definition of “moral” which would refer to distinction and identification of right and wrong. He instead draws upon the French definition of the moraliste. In his own words, he described this as, “a moraliste is someone who i s interested in the description of what goes on inside man. He‟s concerned with states of mind and feelings.” He then continued on to explain that the Moral Talesare about “people

who like to bring their motives, the reasons for their actions, into the open, they try to analyze, they are mot people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than the behavior itself.” The first two of these tales were short films (the final four were feature length), and featured voice over narration from the main male protagonist. In The Girl at the Moceau Bakery  from 1963, the character is attracted to one girl, but when she disappears, he begins courting another. While there is little conversation betwee n the characters, the tension of the story is driven fr om hearing the man‟s inner thoughts. The second tale, Suzanne’s Career , from the same year, involves the main character‟s inner thoughts as he obsesses over the girlfriend of his friend. As an interesting nod to American

cinema, the trio attends a screening of Lawrence of Arabia. Innovative at the time, these films help to set in motion what has become an accepted trend of having a protagonist‟s internal monologue serve as narration.

 After these early films, many of the Cahiers critics turned filmmakers were able to enjoy long careers as directors. Godard after a number of successful films, was able to explore a number of gangster film conventions in his 1964 film Band of Outsiders (Bande à part ). Staring his then wife and muse  Anna Karina, the film follows two men who fall in love wit h the same woman, and then plan a heist that goes horribly wrong. It‟s important to note that while the Cahiers filmmakers played an essentially role in nouvelle vague, they were not the only directors associated with

the movement, as there were a number of other small sub- groups. One of which was referred to as the “Left Bank” group, which was a contradistinction to the “Right Bank” group that the Cahiers were part of. Aside from the physical difference of being located on opposite sides of the river, the groups also had differing perspectives in the late 1950s, as the “Left Bank” directors, including Resnais, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy,

held a more left-wing political stance and were associated with the nouveau romanmovement. This distinction blurred over time, as the Cahiers group developed a stronger political opinion in the m id-1960s.

Followers/Impact on History

While many of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers enjoyed long careers that evolved over time, their work as writers in the 1950s and filmmakers in the 1960s has had a lasting impact on the history of cinema, and their mark can still be seen in the work of filmmakers today.  As previously m entioned, Andrew Sarri s transl ated and evolved Truffaut‟s ―Une certaine tendance du cinéma français‖ into what is now referred to as the auteur theory in 1962. This notion of authorship is still used when discussing filmmakers within the context of film theory. Many years after the ori ginal article, Richard Dyer summed up the importance behind Truffaut‟s proclaimation, which he described as film studies‟ greatest hit:

[Auteur theory] made the case for taking film seriously by seeking to show that a film could be just as profound, beautiful or important as any other  kind of art, provided, following a dominant model of value in art, it was demonstrably the work of a highly individual artist. Especially audacious in this argument was the move to identify such artistry in Hollywood, which figured as the last word in non-individualized creativity (in other words, non-art) in wider cultural discourses in the period. The power of auteurism resided in its ability to mobilise a familiar argument about artistic worth and, importantly, to show that this could be used to discriminate between films. Thus, at a stroke, it both proclaimed that film could be an art (with all the cultural capital  that this implies) and that there could be a form of criticism  – indeed, study  –of it.

French New Wave made films in many different genres often abandoning normal narrative conventions. Utilizing of real locations, improvised scripts, natural lighting and hand held cameras, they created a look that was distinctive, formulating their own sense of realism. One example of this style is in  A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), where there is a scene in which Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg walk down a st reet as Seberg sells copies of the New York Herald Tribune. This scene was filmed using a c oncealed camera, with common pedestrian walking into f rame and interacting with the characters. T he innovative ways of cutting productio n costs added a spontaneous feel to the film, as well as the increase sense of realism. One of the things the New Wave directors wanted to do was to draw attention to film as a medium, reminding their audience they were watching a film. One way in which they accomplished this was to h ave a character address the audience directly, breaking what is known as the “fourth wall.” While this technique was new and surprising at the time, it is one that occurs often in modern cinema. In the film Spaceballs from 1987, the villain Dark Helmet gets a copy of the movieSpaceballs on video and fast-forwards in order to find out where the heroes are headed. Instead of being able to fast-forward, he gets stuck on the moment he‟s in and does a turn -away-then-turn back maneuver as he watches himself. In the film Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, the

lead character not only addresses the audience periodically throughout the film, but at the end of the credits, questions as to why they‟re still watching since the story is clearly over. Today‟s audiences are comfortable with these breaks in narrative reality, but their existence is really credited to Nouvelle

Vague.