La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) ! Close-up from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), the first narrative feature directed by Alain Resnais. La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) 1 AFTER WORLD WAR II, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION After World War II, film art as a form of social dialogue and ‘intervention’ was in France promulgated by an international group of artists that emerged from a 1940s art clique, the Lettristes. The new group, commonly referred to as the situationists, publisher of the journal Internationale situationniste (1958-69), was influential among young French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard because of its attack on the ‘society of the spectacle’. Guy Debord, most prominent member of the situationists, produced six films (1952-78), rigorously collaged from found footage with narration written largely from quotations. Essential to situationist theory was a critique of advanced capitalism. Situationists argued that individual expression diluted or destroyed by consumerism and the consumption of commodities created alienation in society, and inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Situations constructed for the purpose of reawakening authentic desires, of experiencing the feeling of life as an adventure, and of the liberation from everyday life were central concepts, and The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, a key text for the situationists and the title of one of Debord’s films, proved highly influential in shaping the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France. Another leading influence to young French filmmakers of the early 1960s was filmmaker Agnès Varda’s first narrative film, La Pointe Courte (1954), about an unhappy couple 1 Peter Graham, The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968) Development of Film II — King 1 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) working through their relationship in a small fishing town. The film was influenced by neorealism and by Varda’s own philosophical studies, particularly a theory of Gaston Bachelard by which ‘certain personality traits are found to correspond to concrete elements in a kind of psychoanalysis of the material world.’ In the film, this is shown by the opposition of objects such as wood and steel as the personality traits of characters’ clash. Alain Resnais edited the film, and in a few years Resnais himself would direct two of the most influential films of La Nouvelle Vague. A third precursor to the filmmakers of La Nouvelle Vague (meaning New Wave, coined by Françoise Giroud in L’Express) was work by documentary director Jean Rouch, who filmed in Africa while working for Niger’s French colonial administration in the early 1940s. His seminal film Moi, un noir (Me, a Black, 1958) pioneered the technique of jump cut, a direct influence on editing in Varda’s films and Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film Breathless. Rouch’s collaboration with sociologist Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été / Chronicle of a Summer (1961) cemented cinema-vérité as a fresh, integral documentary technique. Chris Marker conjures a world of dream-memory-time travel in his only narrative film, La Jetée (1962). FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY WAKES UP In addition to theoretical and political thought, several other mechanisms helped to launch the French La Nouvelle Vague, which took the industry by surprise in 1959. First, the political context was favorable: the newly installed government of President Charles de Gaulle was keen to promote a French film industry to counter what it saw as the cultural influence of Hollywood and its large slice of box-office revenues. The new government introduced avance sur recettes, a subsidy to seed film production funded by a tax on movie ticket sales, enabling many unknown filmmakers a chance to direct. That chance was eagerly seized by a group of dynamic critics writing for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Technical developments such as faster film stock and lighter cameras and sound recording equipment facilitated the location shooting, improvisation, and experimentation that were the hallmark of New Wave directors. Another factor was the attitude of established producers who realized the vitality of young filmmakers. From 1960 to 1993 France was Europe's leading filmmaker. Although attendances fell over the period, they held up much better than in other countries, even after the home video market took off in the late 1980s. In 1991, for example, France made more feature films (156), had more screens in operation (4,531), and sold more tickets (117.5 million) than any other western country except for the U.S. The period falls into three broad phases, each beginning with a major politico-cultural event, each roughly a decade apart: Development of Film II — King 2 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) 1. The beginning of Nouvelle Vague in 1959 2. May 1968 general strike 3. The arrival of a Socialist government in 1981 Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups / 400 Blows (1959). THE NEW WAVE Although the traditional genres of French cinema—policiers, comedies, social dramas, period costume films.—continued to thrive throughout the period, and have held up on the whole much better than their equivalents in other European cinemas, the most striking development in French cinema was the proliferation of auteur films, inspired in part by notable American filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and the screening of independent filmmaker John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959). Spearheaded by François Truffaut and his colleagues at the film journal founded by critic André Bazin, Cahiers du cinéma, la nouvelle vague was a reaction against mainstream French films, especially their tendencies to be formulaic and studio-bound. One of the first Cahiers critic-turned-director to attract media attention was Truffaut himself, with Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), followed by Jean-Luc Godard with A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960). These two films had in common a casual approach to the ‘rules' of mainstream cinema, a freer editing style, and loosely constructed scenarios. The years 1959 and 1960 also saw the release of first or second features by Left Bank directors not from Cahiers, notably Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). 2 After the inventiveness of Les Quatre cents coups and, even more strikingly, Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) and Jules et Jim (1961), François Truffaut subsequently took a quasi-autobiographical vein with the Antoine Doinel series (with his youthful lead actor Jean-Pierre Léaud) and tried his hand at several traditional studio genres. In two of his most rewarding films, L’Enfant sauvage (Wild Child, 1965) and La Nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1972) Truffaut himself acts—exploring, indirectly and directly, the relationship between director and film, reality and fiction. 2 La nouvelle vague was used indiscriminately to cover all young filmmakers at that moment, although many of the films were quite conventional or (as with Hiroshima) composed and deliberate in their introduction of formal innovation. Development of Film II — King 3 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) ! MAY 1968 Le Joli mai (1963) Chris Marker’s documentary about politics in France. France tottered on the brink of political anarchy in May 1968 as a result of a failed government. This affected not just film production structure but film content. With filmmakers themselves having a greater say in the attribution of the avance sur recettes, a wider spectrum of directors (including many women) got a chance to make their first features in the early 1970s. A handful of militant films that focused on the 'events' and their repercussions were made, such as Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Tout va bien (1971). May 1968 created a climate of greater freedom and certain historical and political taboos were swept away. For instance, Marcel Ophuls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la pitié, 1971) examined the long-avoided question of French government and citizens’ collaboration during the German occupation of World War II. A major feature of the period since the mid-1970s has been the emergence of an increasing number of women directors. Up to this point Varda and Duras had been virtually on their own. The phenomenon can be explained by the rise of the women's movement since May 1968, and the fact that the avance sur recettes system now supports independent filmmakers. Women directors have often addressed feminist concerns, but, with the ebb of feminism in France from the late 1970s on, they have mostly worked in isolation and shunned the notion of a structured 'woman's cinema'. Nelly Kaplan, who had been Abel Gance's assistant in the 1950s, started the feminist breakthrough with her corrosive La Fiancée du pirate (Dirty Mary, 1969), a film about an abused woman who gains control over a village by becoming a prostitute. Coline Serreau scored a huge box-office hit with her comedy 3 hommes et un couffin (Three men and a cradle, 1985, remade in the USA as Three Men and a Baby). In this period, many women directors made autobiographical films. This is true of Diane Kurys's best work, Coup de foudre (1979) and Diabolo Menthe (1977), in which she remembers her childhood and adolescence with engaging freshness. Like several of the women filmmakers mentioned above—as well as Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, and Nicole Garcia, who have also directed films—Josiane Balasko is better known as an actress than as a director. She started in café-théatre, a subversive cross between shoestring theatre and cabaret that came into its own after May, 1968. It provided cinema with a wealth of excellent performers with a natural, no-holds-barred sense of humor and lack of narcissism suited the mood of the 1970s. Development of Film II — King 4 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) France's lively film culture is reflected in the existence of many film magazines. At the 'serious' end of the market, Positif has remained true to its old principles, though it is now less militant, and attracts the same sort of readership as its bigger-selling rival Cahiers du cinéma. Paris offers a choice of films unparalleled anywhere in the world. Several commercial cinemas pursue a programming policy of one-off showings not very different from that of subsidized film theatres, of which there are three: Cinémathèque Française, the Pompidou Centre (Salle Garance), and the Vidéothèque de Paris. As a result, over 350 different films are shown in any given week in Paris. France hosts over a dozen film festivals each year, most famously the international festival and marketplace in Cannes. The favorable cultural environment partly explains why attendance and the number of screens decreased slowly compared with the rest of Europe and the U.S. Jean-Luc Godard, also a critic at Cahiers du cinema, made in many ways the most characteristic and at least internationally, the most influential of the New Wave films with his first feature Breathless, written by Godard from a story by Truffaut and shot by cinematographer Raoul Coutard in four weeks for less than ninety-thousand dollars. The low budget, flash production, and what turned out to be surprising profits for such a lowbudget romance, convinced producers to line up as backers for Godard’s subsequent run of films. Over the next ten years, Godard directed 21 films. His film language and evenly-paced narratives transitioned from traditional to experimental agitprop drama/ comedy, influencing virtually every American film director, including Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and Martin Scorsese, as well as foreign directors like Wong Kar-wai, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bernardo Bertolucci. ! Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé (Breathless, 1960) Development of Film II — King 5 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) Jacques Rivette, by contrast, created long and largely experimental films mixing fiction and documentary, working from improvisation, and exploring the relationship between director and actor or artist and model, inviting us, as does later Godard, to reflect on film as a system of signs rather than a narrative process. Rivette scored a modest success with Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie go Boating, 1974) and a definitive one with La Belle Noiseuse (1990), a study of a painter's obsession with his model/ muse, released in both a two-hour and a four-hour-long version. LEFT BANK GROUP The predominance of former Cahiers critics among the New Wave directors has tended to obscure the role played by that magazine's inveterate rival, Positif. Positif’s militancy and anti-clerical stance contrasted with the avowedly apolitical but in fact right-of-center sympathies of the Catholic-tinged Cahiers. While Positif critics could be as scathing in their use of language as Truffaut (particularly when attacking Godard or when referring to the montage of Robert Bresson's Le Procès de Jeanne d’arc as 'a kind of spastic ping-pong', they could also muster invaluable enthusiasm for major filmmakers like Claude Sautet and Maurice Pialat, whom Cahiers virtually ignored in their early careers. From the outset Positif backed various directors whose talents had emerged before the New Wave, including Georges Franju and the so-called 'Left Bank' group of Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Agnès Varda. Alain Resnais started as a maker of documentary films, sometime working with Chris Marker, a film essayist and documentarian in his own right. The relationship between past and present, memory and imagination, which had already been the theme of some of Resnais’ remarkable short films of the 1950s (such as his essay on the Nazi concentration camps, Nuit et brouillard / Night and Fog, (1955) provided the backbone of his first features, Hiroshima mon amour, which inter-cuts contemporary Hiroshima with wartime France, and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad,1961). The theme of traumatic memory is pursued further in connection with the Algerian War in Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour (1963) and the Spanish Civil War in La Guerre est finie (The War Is Over, 1966). His subsequent films vary widely in subject and tone, from the period reconstruction of Stavisky (1974) and the hypnotic 'filmed theatre' of Melo (1985) to the cogently discursive Mon oncle d’Amérique (1979), the satirical La Vie est un roman (Life Is a Novel, 1982), and Providence (1976), a magisterial and deeply moving incursion into the fantasies of a dying man. What his films have in common is an extreme formal rigor in a self-avowed attempt to explore the filmmaker's, and the spectator's, unconscious. Chris Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921), member of the French Resistance during the war, began as a writer in the 1940s and early 1950s before turning to filmmaking in collaboration with Alain Resnais. Marker produced brilliant essay films such as Le Joli mai (1963), a four-hour documentary on the state of politics in France, Le Fond de ‘air est rouge (1977), and Sans Soleil / Sunless (1983), a remarkable meditation on obsession. In addition to documentary, Marker has influenced narrative filmmakers worldwide with his sci-fi short, La Jetée (1962). Agnès Varda divided her directing activities between highly individual documentaries and narrative features. After her trail-blazing first feature La Pointe Courte (1955), she directed one of her most innovative films Cléo de 5 à 7 / Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), staged in 'real time'. Several themes dominant in Cléo include the oppressive stereotypes with which men in 1960s France treat women as well as the effect the male gaze has on women. Cléo periodically examines her reflection in mirrors, while complaining that men do not take her seriously because she is a woman. Development of Film II — King 6 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) Some scenes are shot with a hidden camera on the streets of Paris, while other scenes are composed in a studio set. The celebrated editing of Cléo from 5 to 7 makes use of jump cuts and repetitions, but throughout the film maintains a close approximation of Cléo’s perspective. Cléo from 5 to 7 and the much later and tragic Sans toit ni loi / Vagabonde (1985) both address feminist issues, their starkness contrasting with the glossy Le Bonheur / Happiness (1964) and L'Une chante, I'autre pas / One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1976). Varda3 continued to make innovative, probing narratives and documentary films up to her death at 90 in 2019. ! Agnès Varda’s second feature, Cléo de 4 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1961), subtly addresses feminist issues. Of the ninety-seven directors who embarked on their first feature between 1958 and 1962, many made no mark, vanishing without a trace, while others are remembered for one or two films. But the strength of French film culture in these years was demonstrated by the involvement of contemporary novelists, not only as scriptwriters but as directors as well. Alain Robbe-Grillet, exponent of the Nouvelle roman and scriptwriter of Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, turned to direction with L’Immortelle (1962), whose rather stilted eroticism was to become the leitmotif of his career. With La Musica (1966) Marguerite Duras, the novelist who had scripted Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour, began a cinematic oeuvre distinguished by its modernity and experimentation, in particular with sound. Her frequent use of non-naturalistic, repetitive voice-over perhaps reflects her declared belief in the superiority of the novel over the cinema as a medium. The influence of the Left Bank and New Wave filmmakers continues to enrich filmmaking technique in France, the U.S., and all over the world. In the late 1960s, independent filmmakers excited a moribund Hollywood corporate industry by borrowing tropes from 3 Born 1928, Agnès Varda married filmmaker Jacques Demy in 1962 (who made quite different kinds of films inspired by Hollywood musical genre), had two children, and survives her husband, (who died in 1990 from an AIDS-related disease). Development of Film II — King 7 ! La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) French filmmakers. U.S. films as varied such as Bonnie & Clyde (1967) directed by Arthur Penn after a screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), based on a screenplay by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, show the New Wave influence in theme and subject. The revitalized Eastern European cinema of the late 1960s, especially in Czechoslavakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia, benefited from the New Wave as well. Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette continued to make new films until the end of their lives. Jean-Luc Godard, still making films, released his latest The Image Book in 2018, and Agnès Varda completed her last film, Varda by Agnès (2019) before her death. Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant in Mauvais Sang / Bad Blood (196) irected by Leos Carax, known for his poetic style focused on troubled or impossible relationships in a modern, consumerist society of alienation. Development of Film II — King 8 ! 
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