La Nouvelle Vague is an art movement that was started by a few cinema enthusiasts who carried similar philosophies and relied on experimentation and style to convey complex thoughts and ideas, and not just for the sake of narration, they didn’t have money to make films, so they shared their love for them, developing in the process a shared basis for what would constitute what is arguably the most important film movement of all time, it wasn’t thought of as a movement at the beginning though, even by its originators, as they thought of it as a “quality”, per François Truffaut who’s one of La Nouvelle Vague’s main heroes, even the members of the movement, something that is supposedly intrinsic to art movements in general, is not agreed upon, as Jean-Luc Godard, another one of its members, said that it’s only him, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette who are included in the new wave, a group that is known as the “right bank” of the new wave, as opposed to the “left bank” which consists of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, who were less cinephilic and more spontaneous in their approach, the groups were not (as the names might suggest) in opposition, as they all advocated for each other’s cinema, the “right bank” however, are the ones who are classically thought of as the creators of the new wave as a true artistic concept.
They began as critics and cinephiles who wrote for ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’, a film magazine founded in 1951 as a successor of the earlier magazine ‘Revue du Cinéma’ that included Cahiers’ three co-founders: André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. However, while Cahiers’ early input was mainly advocative for objective realism and lack of montage, which were Bazin’s personal views, things that are more fond of poetic realism than that of the new wave, the younger critics gradually diverged from these convictions and grew fond of the American style of filmmaking, that of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks, pioneers of Classical Hollywood cinema, which conversely developed into New Hollywood through the influence of the French New Wave.
These young critics frequented theaters and dwelled in admiration of their cherished Hollywood heroes, as an act of rejection of contemporary mainstream French cinema, although Classical Hollywood relied on its own set of rules too, perhaps the same rules as the ‘French quality’ cinema that they grew tired of, it possibly indicates a sense of inferiority that hits as if western filmmaking is better simply for the sake of its flashy Hollywood identity, dismissing Hollywood’s varied European roots: Chaplin, Von Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Murnau, Lang, Wilder, just to name a few, up to the origins of the medium’s success with Georges Méliès magnum opus ‘A Trip to the Moon’ (1902) getting pirated by many American studios (notably Edison Studios) leading to a surge in popularity of the motion picture, and the influence that same film had on Edwin S. Porter who correspondingly pioneered American cinema through his 1903 film, ‘The Great Train Robbery’. The idea that the director is the main force behind a film, its author basically, something that we’ll get to discuss later, shaped the way Cahiers’ critics thought of cinema as art, and as an exercise to that theory, these critics started displaying these philosophies by actually directing films themselves, especially as film cameras started getting cheaper and more accessible, which led to the crystallization of the new wave, a term coined by Bazin himself, Chabrol’s ‘Le Beau Serge’ (1958) is traditionally accredited as the French new wave’s first film, but Varda’s ‘La Pointe Courte’ (1955) came before, although it had no affiliation with Cahiers so it wasn’t considered as a clear-cut part of the movement, some might consider it no more than a precursor to it, but they all shared similar ambitions, as La Nouvelle Vague’s main aim was to break free from the traditional mold of French cinema, new wave directors had to work with tiny budgets and borrowed gear, but they managed to use the lack of resources to break conventions and develop their own personal styles.
This crafty attitude was influenced by Italian Neorealism, another very important cinematic movement, and despite the fact that they carried different ideologies, as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni and co. were more concerned with depicting the lives and struggles of the working-class in the aftermath of WWII, while the French new wave was more focused on deconstructing conventional cinema and experimenting with cinematic language, they still entailed similar visual characteristics, often using non-professional actors, shooting on location, and using unconventional camera angles, lighting, and editing styles. The new wave’s success showed that studios are not always needed to produce good cinema and that filmmakers can produce works of art without the backing of major studios, this paved the way for more independent and experimental styles in the future, and low-budget indie films still use New Wave films as a primary reference to this day, inspiring them to take risks, explore new techniques, and challenge the status quo.
New wave films broke existing filmmaking rules and had an experimental approach which led to documentary-esque cinematography that encouraged actors to improvise and bring their own interpretations and experiences to their roles, allowing for a greater degree of spontaneity and naturalism in performances, the visual style was important too, since films were shot on location and under natural light, it brought the ability to shoot 360° in space as there were no sets and no artificial lights, handheld cameras were also a prominent characteristic in the new wave, this opened into a legitimation of working in a raw, naturalistic style, and therefore using film as a medium to express ideas, like painting or literature, it was not just about telling stories but also translating thoughts and ideas with style, a style that put emphasis on clever editing, rejection of linear storytelling and expository dialogue in favor of quick cuts and voice-overs, it also deployed breaking the fourth wall to deconstruct the art form as a facet of post-modernism, a rejection of suspending disbelief using a confrontational style of filmmaking that underlines the fact that you’re watching a movie, and thus, an art piece, something accentuated heavily by Jean-Luc Godard, he also, for the same purposes, managed to the innovate the jump cut, a tool to skip time while conserving space, which goes against many cinematic notions, mainly the 30-degree rule, which dictates that the second shot should always be at least 30 degrees away from the first one, this simple innovation has seamlessly slipped through all shapes of visual media, markedly in Youtube videos.
Godard was one of cinema’s biggest innovators, he considered content and form to be related, even identical, with films that encourage their audience to understand the filmmaking process on a mechanical level, while mainstream cinema aimed to suspend disbelief, Godard kept reminding the viewers that what they’re watching is crafted while making the main purpose behind his films not to entertain, but to educate, and while many French new wave filmmakers decided to elaborate on their thoughts using some conventional cinematic devices -even when being progressive about it-, Godard’s on-your-face approach made for confrontation between him and the audience, often directly mentioning through his characters current events in the French socio-political world such as the Algerian War, the war in Indochina and the Cold War à la ‘Masculin Féminin’ (1966). Godard’s films often included young characters in the streets of Paris, in a raw and realistic way, as he rejected the notion of escapism in favor of daily life scenarios, as he famously wrote in ‘Le Petit Soldat’ (1963) that “photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times per second”, he sought to interrogate everything from war, to love, to cinema, to masculinity, and femininity, all these provocative elements helped articulate his opinions through a cinematic lens, but often came at the expense of making a coherent piece, as Godard’s cinema never emphasizes the narrative, it often leads to political statements that are dull even to people who share the same views, the characters are just a mouthpiece for Godard’s thoughts rather than beings in their own reality, and he’s fully aware of that, the paper-thin plot always evolves in a direction where the characters can get to have these layered discussions about societal issues, and while these conversations tend to be interesting, they often find themselves in a story of little to no emotional impact, drenched in many innovative cinematic techniques, like in ‘Breathless’ (1960), to the point where style is evened out with substance, but the substance in question is rooted in pretensions and self-indulgence, nevertheless, Godard’s point of strength resides in his visual innovation, and the way he uses cinematic language to play with spatiotemporal conventions, but these notions worked better for Godard’s influencees than for Godard himself.
There’s also François Truffaut, who I consider to be the true master of the movement, and despite the fact that he was never the innovator that Godard was, his cinema always had heart and passion for the art form, which Godard also had surely, but Truffaut made us empathize with his characters and presented the French reality through lively characters, rather than mere agents of political essayism, his most popular film ‘The 400 Blows’ (1959) is a testament to that, the semi-autobiographical directorial debut embodies Truffaut’s own childhood hardships told through the riveting lead performance of a very young Jean-Pierre Léaud who played Antoine Doinel, Léaud not only managed to capture Truffaut’s life events but also the tension he felt around the repressing environment he lived in as a child, Truffaut centered his film around that idea and contrasted it with wide shots and lively settings during the scenes where Antoine is free, Truffaut’s camera worked as a pen, he managed to capture shots that explored human emotions in a deep way, with his films often including characters facing difficulties that push them to question their life and identity, creating a natural sense of ambiguity and tension, without resolving into a pure technical display, he still used fresh filmmaking devices such as non-linear storytelling, but that only allowed him to explore even more themes simultaneously and the inner lives of his characters in a realistic but modest fashion, unlike the dramatization of everyday life under the guise of ‘psychological realism’, a prominent feature in pre-Nouvelle Vague cinema.
La Nouvelle Vague’s rejection of mainstream French cinema wasn’t totally misplaced, as Truffaut’s article ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’ in the January 1954 issue of Cahiers expressed dissatisfaction with safe traditional literary adaptations for easy acclaim and quick monetary gain, the article mainly targeted the scriptwriting partnership of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, and their idea of ‘psychological realism’ that he truly opposed, as he considered it to be a cheap copy of the more aesthetic and agreeable poetic realism, and a holier-than-thou way of conjuring realism in cinema, realism that was more of an over-exaggeration of everyday reality through means of gratuitous vulgarity and the heavy-handedness of death and other obscenities, which he described as ‘anti-bourgeois cinema made by bourgeois for the bourgeois’, he also mentioned that Aurenchébost’s approach in novel adaptation is not only lazy and unoriginal, but also that the simple fact that they believe in the idea of unfilmable scenes is a betrayal to the cinematic form, this batch of novelists/screenwriters that feels that they’re lowering themselves when they ‘write for the cinema’, as they purposefully aim for mediocrity when they write scripts that can be understood by the lowest common denominator, as opposed to other contemporary filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau and many others who revered cinema, filmmakers who were authors of their own films and not just cupbearers for films that were already considered done by the end of their writing process, middlebrow directors like Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, and Yves Allégret, who often went for “la tradition de qualité”, a term that is in fact pejorative, and it refers to high-minded cinema that, by its awards and its success in theatres, demonstrates quality know-how, but is ultimately immersed in academicism and conformity.
Consequently, films in that vein were credited to scriptwriters and studios, and directors had little to no importance, which prompted Truffaut’s claim that ‘la tradition de qualité’ and ‘cinéma d’auteur’ can never coexist in peace, as this era of French filmmaking was a bastardized version of it, squeezed between classic French cinema and the new wave, it came to be known as ‘cinéma de papa’, and it’s largely unavailable to watch nowadays and has faded into obscurity, what hasn’t faded though, is the influence of Truffaut’s ideas in the film criticism circles, so that his idea of ‘cinéma d’auteur’ not only avoided fading into obscurity, but actually expanded in reach and relevance over the course of the next few years that it gave birth to Auteur Theory, which is the most important director-focused notion in film theory and our next subject.
Taha Louafi
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