April 2006

Talking About the Movies: Remembering the French New Wave

By Frank Beaver

At the same time that British cinema was giving rise to the Angry Young Men/ Kitchen Sink Realism movements—the subject of "Talking About the Movies" last month—just across the English Channel, French film was undergoing a revolution of its own.

The British revolution of the 1950s had been led by socially minded documentarists and class-conscious playwrights. But the French "nouvelle vague," ("New Wave") was an upheaval inspired by young filmmakers who had developed a love of cinema theory while writing for Andre Bazin’s important journal Cahiers du Cinema. Among them were Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Alexandre Astruc, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, all gifted critic-historians whose study of film conditioned wide and diverse artistic responses in their later careers as directors.

Their artistry would not be compelled by any single credo but by a desire to revive and reclaim admired qualities of film expression they had discovered while writing about cinema’s past.

The New Wave’s formative years can be tracked through two short films: Truffaut’s Les Mistons ("The Misfits") of 1957 and Godard’s All Boys Are Called Patrick, also 1957.

Each director approached his story in distinctive ways. Les Mistons revealed Truffaut’s autobiographical interest in depicting young males in their confrontation with a complex, restricting adult world. The short film tells a coming-of-age story about a pack of boys whose attraction for a beautiful young woman, their imagined "love," turns mean-spirited when she takes on a handsome boyfriend. The narrative is both psychologically convincing and playful.

In one instance Truffaut restages Watering the Gardener, the 1896 French film by the pioneering Lumiere brothers: one of the boys is shown stepping on a gardener’s water hose and then releasing the water as the befuddled man peers into the hose’s nozzle. This reclaimed moment of slapstick comedy was shot at 16 feet per second for further historical referencing. Les Mistons contained pixilation, slow motion, reverse motion and a variety of cinematic in-jokes that together enhanced the film’s spirited, rebellious theme.

Godard’s first film, All Boys Are Called Patrick, was, like Truffaut’s film, also a short narrative filled with and shaped by cinematic referencing and film in-jokes for the cineaste. Its plot is that of two young female roommates who are unsuspectingly wooed by the same overly charming young Frenchman. The dialogue, peppered with comments about Hollywood movie stars, and the visual imagery (apartment walls hung with movie posters) together suggest that the young women live in a world of fantasy tailored by the mythology of movies.

Godard’s ending, occurring in a moment of double awareness for the two women, is designed as an ironic, albeit whimsical, commentary on the differences between movies and real life.

In 1959, Truffaut and Godard, both still in their 20s, released feature-length films that, in their popularity and diversity, gave notice of the definite arrival of a "new wave" in cinema art. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows presented the poignant account of a boy longing for freedom from an oppressive adult world. The film was again autobiographically inspired, but at the same time it paid homage to the early great French director Jean Vigo whose classic Zero for Conduct (1933) had also been an autobiographical tale of a stark childhood.

Film technique in The 400 Blows was eclectic, combining improvisation and fluid camera to convey the protagonist’s "freer" moments, then resorting to tight close-up shots to reveal tension in the scenes with adults. The verité effect of a hidden camera in a scene with a psychiatrist added intense realism, and an unforgettable freeze-frame in the film’s last shot left an image of the boy which suggests symbolically that he is being held "captive" by the world in which he resides.

During his years at Cahiers du Cinema, Godard wrote extensively and appreciatively about Hollywood B-movies and was particularly fond of noir-styled gangster films of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Director Nicholas Ray caught Godard’s attention with his films about young, alienated screen characters in contentious battle with society, such as They Live by Night (1948), Born to Be Bad (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1951) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

Ray’s stark, nihilistic character studies inspired Godard’s first feature, Breathless, a 1960 gangster-styled narrative that he dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a small B-movie Hollywood studio. The two protagonists in Breathless were characterized as detached, indifferent, bordering on moral collapse. The male "hero" is a young car thief who kills a policeman and is later shot and killed after his offbeat American girlfriend informs on him. The man’s last moments portray someone seemingly as indifferent to death as he was to life.

In the end Breathless is less a genre action film than an existential exercise in the delineation of youths living mainly by impulse. Godard builds a sense of contemporaneity by jump-cut editing, handheld camera, improvisation and a chaotic, cluttered mise en scene (that is, everything in the composition of a shot).

The careers of other "new wave" directors (Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Alexandre Astruc, Louis Malle and Roger Vadim) were developing at the same time Truffaut and Godard were making their marks in film, and together all confirmed the widespread cinema revival in France in the 1950s. Each proved to be a director who on the one hand exhibited a love of film tradition and on the other a willingness to break with convention.

The impact of the movement was lasting. The French New Wave provoked a reconsideration of film art—of both its older and newer possibilities—and it did so in such spirited, free-wheeling ways that the medium was changed forever.

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.