THE FRENCH NEW WAVE
While the American industry floundered, not finding a viable direction until the end of the decade
the Europeans dazzled the film world w. their radical experiments in form.
WATCH: Breaking the Rules (French film documentary)
It was an era of burgeoning film movements–the French NEW WAVE, the revitalized British industry, and the short-lived Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
French New Wave
Young film students “turks” (Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol et al) Eric Rohmer, disillusioned with the current French ‘tradition of quality’ (well- made, but un-cinematic “ILLUSTRATED” adaptations of novels)
- became appreciative critics of the deluge of American films that flooded France after WW II (after 4 yr Occupation ban) & wrote for the lively journal CAHIERS DU CINEMA. (coined tern ‘film noir’—black film of money/murder of fall guys and femme fatales)
Then finally turned reactionary filmmakers from 1958-1963.
Characteristics of emerging “nouvelle vogue”
- ‘Freer’ style of spontaneity, improvisation, and location shooting through technological development of lightweight hand-held cameras, portable synchronous-sound recorders, light-sensitive “fast” film stocks, and zoom lenses.
- Despite love of tight narrative structures of American films, they tended to favor loose loose plot lines. (not goal oriented)
- Discursive plots that allowed for considerable improvisation and personal digressions such as homages to earlier directors.
- Mixed genres and alternated moods by including incongruous touches of comedy in the middle of serious scenes, lyrical interludes, or sudden explosions of violence in the middle of comic scenes and so on.
- Included self-reflexive techniques such as authorial intrusions to make the audience constantly aware that they are watching a movie (i.e. post-modern).
- Editing is unconventional:
- Time/Space experimentation via jump cuts, iris shots, freeze frames, wipes, and fast and slow-motion.
- Sequences sometimes begun with a disorienting CU, then wider shots to establish the context.
- Unknown actors (who later became stars!) such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
FILMMAKERS
Francois Truffaut: Most prominent
Truffaut posited now-famous AUTEUR THEORY: that a film director is the ‘author’ of his ‘art.’
- Thus, a good film is one in which the director has asserted his personality (recurring themes, obsessions, and stylistic traits) in defiance of studio style and the genre’s established conventions–thus producing an exciting aesthetic tension.
They admired genre masters as Hitchcock, Ford, and Hawks whom, they maintained did not simply ‘illustrate’ their studio- assigned scripts but expressed their own personal vision by exploiting their mise en scene as a complex, highly expressive language.
(Problem: not every film made by an auteur is ‘good,’ so auteur theory is a problematic criterion for determination of quality.)
Recurring preoccupations are joys and pains of love, the importance of friendship, and the mysterious allure of the female.
WATCH: Jules & Jim trailer
https://youtu.be/x5IAYIUKTaI
The darker (but awesome) Story of Adele H. (1976) and (the more awesome!) The Woman Next Door (1981) deal w. crazy, self-destructive love–a recurring preoccupation with Truffaut, and a characteristic theme of many new-wave directors.
Jean-Luc Godard: Most influential and the radical innovator of new wave
WATCH: Jean-Luc Godard: Fragments of Early Work doc
Americanesque phase: 1959-65
In series of loosely connected, semi-doc episodes, he investigates such characteristic themes as the battle of the sexes,
- the dehumanizing effects of capitalism,
- the difficulty of honest communication,
- and the loneliness and sterility of contemporary urban life.
He described his movies of this period as “essays,” and compared making a film to keeping a personal diary, an assemblage of observations from everyday life. Instead of polished, carefully planned films, Godard decided to “throw the rough draft at the public” — “I don’t really like telling a story. I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider my own ideas.”
Emphasized ideas over everything—and as a political leftist, he attacked American capitalism (comparing it to prostitution), and so the films it produces for being bourgeois, reactionary, and insidiously seductive in their narcotizing effects on the viewer. “There is only one solution, and that is to turn one’s back on the American cinema.”
Works w/o scripts, only a few notes. Created movies which are uneven: boring sections, clumsily executed scenes, and obscure ideas. Most of these films are replete w. visual and verbal homages to Godard’s cinematic idols–as well as quotations from his favorite books, and anything else that struck him as interesting while he was making the movie.
WATCH: Breathless—Driving Scene
The OBJECTIVE was To AWAKEN people to the need for political change, so he presented situations/characters objectively to make the viewer think and analyze them rather than feel or vicariously identify with them.
Godard borrowed a variety of distancing techniques from German Marxist Dramatist Berthold Brecht to prevent the audience from identifying emotionally with his characters.
SO no plots or emotionally involving close-ups, instead-
- political debates,
- interview scenes,
- lengthy monologues to the camera,
- authorial intrusions in the form of written title or voice-over commentaries–constant reminders that the images of a movie are ideologically weighted.
Godard’s scenes are often played before posters or billboards to remind the viewer of the sinister omnipresence of the media in shaping our lives and values. Throughout Masculin-Feminin (1966) for example, we are assaulted by advertising slogans, commercial products, and sales pitches–the ‘Big Sell.’ The youthful protagonists–Godard calls them “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”–are alienated and rootless, with no permanent homes or family ties.
Post-1968: MAOIST PHASE:
Godard was totally radicalized by the political events of May, 1968 in which a coalition of college students, intellectuals, and workers was suppressed by the government for protesting American imperialism.
Repudiating all his previous films as “bourgeois,” he vowed to use film as a tool of Marxist revolution. Serious decline in quality. Strident, dogmatic, crudely propagandistic, and often obscure to point of incomprehensibility.
Legacy of the New Wave
Narrative is NOT the only way to structure a movie
- Stylistic virtuosity can be a value for its own sake,
- i.e a great movie is the product of an artist’s personal vision (i.e. Auteur Theory!)
They demonstrated that good films can be made with small crews and modest resources.
Above all, they served as an inspiration to other ambitious filmmakers, encouraging them to explore fresh ideas, to risk failure rather than to clutter up the cinematic landscape w. safe, predictable movies
As such, they had an extensive impact on form and content of American films of the late 60s such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, etc.