New Wave Cinema

I

Introduction

New Wave Cinema (in French, “nouvelle vague”), term coined in 1958 by the journalist Françoise Giroud in an article for the magazine L’Express about the concerns and activities of young people in France. It was quickly applied to the explosion of new French film-making talent that came on the scene within a few months in 1958-1959. Ironically, it was first applied to Les Tricheurs (1958), a film about young people by Marcel Carné, the director of several of the most highly regarded “poetic realist” films of the 1930s, who bitterly resented the decline his reputation suffered as the opinions of the critics and future directors who spearheaded the New Wave became more influential.

II

Cahiers du Cinéma

Central to the critical polemics of this group, first formulated in articles for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (founded in 1951 by André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze), was hostility to what its members called “le cinéma de papa” (“daddy’s cinema”), that is to say, the well-made but often impersonal films of the established generation of French directors. These, they argued convincingly, were too dependent on verbal rather than cinematic ideas: a line of dialogue rather than, say, a camera movement.

The Europeans whose work they did admire—directors such as Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and, outside France, Roberto Rossellini and Ingmar Bergman—often collaborated on or wrote the screenplays for their films, and were thus able to invest their work not only with personal themes, but also with a personal approach to film-making. Many established French critics had little regard for much of this work, often dismissing it as old-fashioned, technically unpolished, or too unorthodox.

The logic of their argument led the Cahiers du Cinéma critics to adopt a “politique des auteurs”, a “policy of authors”. This focused attention on films which, as a result of the director’s handling of the interplay between theme, filmic style, and production conditions, revealed a distinctive authorial vision, though the director was often only able to articulate this through the practice of film-making, and unable to formulate an adequate verbal account of it. This “policy” led to the critical reassessment of Hollywood, and the work of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray, among many others. Conventionally dismissed as mere popular entertainment, this cinema was, Cahiers du Cinéma critics argued, more significant and worthy of attention than “quality” French cinema.

Equally importantly, and less controversially, it provided an artistic tradition on which such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol were to draw and to which they might refer when they moved from criticism and the making of short films to the direction of features.

A

Aesthetics and Economics

Several factors made this move possible economically. Performers with star quality, such as Anna Karina (for six years the wife of Godard), Jeanne Moreau, and Jean-Paul Belmondo, were not yet stars, and thus not costly to work with. Several other key people (cameramen, for example) were at the start of their careers and thus also comparatively inexpensive. They were prepared to work fast in small crews with limited resources. Location shooting made many studio overheads, particularly set construction, unnecessary.

Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, À Bout de Souffle (shot in 1960; Breathless), is a radical example of the practice. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard cemented together lengths of Ilford HPS still stock to make 120-m rolls for use in a Cameflex movie camera, thus anticipating the introduction of Ilford HPS film stock, which came on the market shortly afterwards. As Godard wanted to shoot in available light (that is to say, without using any special artificial film lighting), Coutard forced the film (he increased its speed by using a special processing bath).

On page 253 of his book Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (1992), Barry Salt describes further innovations during the shooting of Godard’s second feature, Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier; scheduled for release in autumn 1960, but banned by the censors until January 1963 on political grounds). Here, Coutard “introduced the practice of bouncing light off the ceiling from rows of photoflood reflector bulbs fastened above the tops of window and door frames, and pointing upwards at the ceiling. This type of lighting mimics and boosts the natural light coming through the windows ...” this made it unnecessary to force the development of the fastest stocks, and, because the light was more or less non-directional, it permitted filming from all directions without the lighting units getting into the shot.

Production economics were also helped by the availability of some private money. Chabrol’s first feature, Le Beau Serge (released in 1959), was financed by a legacy to his wife. It won a prize at the 1958 Locarno Festival, and Chabrol was able to go on to set up his second feature, Les Cousins (1959; The Cousins), which was immediately successful critically and commercially, finance Eric Rohmer on Le Signe du Lion (1959), and help Jacques Rivette with money and left-over film stock on his ambitious feature debut Paris nous Appartient (1960; Paris Belongs to Us). Such collaborations were an integral part of the way the Cahiers du Cinéma group thought about production in the early days of the New Wave.

For example, following the success of Quatre Cents Coups (1959; The 400 Blows), Truffaut was able to help Godard find backing for À Bout de Souffle. He had also formulated a complex scheme whereby, in order to cut production costs, members of the group would take it in turns to direct their own films and work as assistants on each other’s films. Alain Resnais was invited to join the group, and it was envisaged that Alexandre Astruc would also participate.

The latter’s ideas about “le caméra-stylo” (“the camera as pen”), which suggested the development of a film language that went beyond the visual illustration of a narrative, and was flexible enough to convey philosophical ideas and psychological insights, had been an important influence on the thinking of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics. It became equally an influence on their early practice as film-makers as, initially, they set out to articulate and explore new relationships between images, words, ideas, themes, narrative, and characterization.

An indication of what might be achieved artistically by this reworking of the relationship between the different strands of filmic discourse, setting one in play against the other, is provided by a famous sequence in Le Petit Soldat, in which the photographer Bruno (Michel Subor) is shooting a portfolio of stills of Véronica (Anna Karina). As he does so, he gives voice to his philosophy of representation: “To photograph a face is to photograph the soul behind it. Photography is the truth. And the cinema is the truth 24 times a second.” However, the sequence is memorable above all for the kinetic poetry generated through the interaction of staging, cinematography, and editing, rather than for any revelation of character achieved from the use of the camera, or even Bruno’s account of the nature of cinema, attractive though the latter was to critics, who, at the time, were witnessing and welcoming the birth of cinéma vérité.

Perhaps the most important economic factor of all in the consolidation of the breakthrough made by the New Wave was a change in French law relating to government support for film-making. Previous legislation had already reserved funds for projects deemed to be serving the cause of cinema, or opening new perspectives for the art. Their potential was assessed in terms of cultural significance rather than financial returns in the market place. Short-film production, including the work of directors such as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda, has been benefiting since 1953.

Further legislation in 1959 set aside new funds to provide interest-free loans advanced against future box-office receipts. These could be granted on the basis of an outline or idea, and were repayable when the film went into profit. Thus, support became available to new film-makers for the first time. Though small, the loans were sufficient to help determine whether or not a film was made. Renais, Varda, and the latter’s husband, Jacques Demy, formed the nucleus of a second group who were then able to take advantage of the changed situation and embark on careers as feature-film-makers, as did another distinguished film-maker, Georges Franju.

Moreover, directors such as Roger Vadim (whose films with Brigitte Bardot had demonstrated the potential audience appeal of new performers and subject matter) and the youthful Louis Malle were able to consolidate careers already under way. Similarly, there were new opportunities for three older film-makers much admired by the New Wave: Astruc, Roger Leenhardt (another critic and director of shorts), and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Resnais collaborated with two of the leading figures in the major literary movement of the time, the nouveau roman (“New Novel”), on his first two features: Marguerite Duras scripted Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) and Alain Robbe-Grillet L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad). Both went on to direct films themselves.

Others who made major contributions to this body of work include the performers Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Jean-Pierre Léaud; the cinematographers Henri Decaë and Sacha Vierny; the musicians Georges Delerue, Maurice Jarre, and Michel Legrand; the editors Henri Colpi (who also directed features) and Agnès Guillemot; the screenwriter Paul Gegauff; and the producers Pierre Braunberger and Georges de Beauregard.

While many commentators argue that the description “New Wave” should be confined to the group of film-makers associated with Cahiers du Cinéma, the two groups of new feature directors were close, and their members occasionally collaborated with each other. Moreover, Truffaut, a great propagandist for the movement, was happy to use the term “New Wave” as a rallying cry for any new French films or film-makers that seemed of interest. As late as 1967, he was still enrolling to the cause the most promising and successful newcomers of the previous three years: Alain Jessua, Claude Berri, René Allio, Luc Moullet, and Claude Lelouch. About Lelouch, he argued polemically: “He shoots with a hand-held camera and without a carefully planned script; if he isn’t part of the New Wave, then it doesn’t exist.” At the time, some commentators labelled this group the “Second Wave”. Alternatively and more recently, Susan Hayward, in her book French National Cinema (1993), has described the explicitly political cinema that developed in the years 1966-1968 as a “second New Wave”.

B

The Influence and Development of the New Wave

Following immediately after the rise to dominance of television, the late 1950s and early 1960s represent a turning-point in cinema history, with a substantial segment of the audience seeking something new and different from the mass entertainment of previous decades: a more self-consciously personal cinema. This was provided by not only the New Wave, but also by such older directors as Ingmar Bergman and the Italians Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Luchino Visconti, who all established international reputations during this period. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that a new genre was born: the European art film, accompanied by new patterns of exhibition and appeal to the public.

Thus the “New Wave” label was applied, retrospectively, to a virtually contemporaneous movement: the alliance between the United Kingdom’s Free Cinema documentary film-makers and the writers known as the “Angry Young Men”. Centred on Woodfall Films, a company founded in 1958 by John Osborne and Tony Richardson to adapt the former’s plays for the screen, this group’s largely social realist production includes the early features of John Schlesinger, Karel Reisz, and, most importantly, Lindsay Anderson, as well as Richardson.

The idea of a New Wave, or, more generally, a “New Cinema”, was also used (particularly in the 1960s) in descriptions of the often extremely diverse work of groups of new, mainly young, film-makers in a range of countries. These included Brazil (Cinema Novo); Czechoslovakia (where the “New Wave” was, like other manifestations of the Prague Spring, snuffed out by the Soviet invasion of 1968); the Federal Republic of Germany (where Das Neue Kino followed a manifesto published at the 1962 Oberhausen Festival, which constituted a rallying cry attacking “Papas Kino”, “daddy’s cinema”); Hungary; Yugoslavia; the Soviet Union (in relation to early films by Sergei Paradjanov and Andrey Tarkovsky, among others); and the United States (where it was extended, perhaps misleadingly, to include the “underground” film-makers whose work emanated from a tradition of artistic experimentation representing a rejection rather than a reworking or rethinking of the narrative and dramatic traditions of the industry).

Even Hollywood ultimately re-formed around new conceptions of film-making and marketing, in which the deal or package replaced the factory production line as the dominant image of the industry. The changes allowed increased recognition of the creative importance of the director, this opening up a space that was filled during the early to mid-1970s by the “Movie Brat” generation (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg), followed later by directors such as Spike Lee.

The history of this development followed the pattern established in the 1960s by the French New Wave and repeated elsewhere: early critical and commercial success for quite unconventional works, followed by simultaneous shifts on the part of the majority of the new film-makers towards the practices (and often the larger budgets) of the industry, and by the industry itself away from the orthodoxies of the past. Thus, the aesthetic radicalism of a new movement is absorbed and tamed, and a new orthodoxy evolves. In Hollywood, however, great wealth and power over production were accumulated by leading stars (and their agents) as the industry changed. This has led to a massive escalation in production and marketing budgets, the latter underpinning an increasing Hollywood-based dominance of the international distribution and exhibition markets, and thus an increasing threat to the cinema exhibition of the majority of non-Hollywood films.