French New Wave (general)

The French New Wave is unique in European film history as being a creative movement that sprung directly from a preceding critical moment. Unlike Soviet Montage and German Expressionism that both took their cues from developments in the theatrical and visual arts, the French New Wave was a school of cinema that looked at film history and film criticism for its inspiration and approach. Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) and Jean-Luc Godard (1930 - ) were critics for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema during the 1950s and through their reviews of the many Hollywood genre films only then being shown in France due to the wartime German Occupation they began to develop a brand new way of looking at cinema. For the critics of Cahiers it was possible to discern within the popular genre entertainment put out by big Hollywood studios a “cinema of auteurs”, films that expressed the artistic vision of the directors that created them. The films of the French New Wave therefore emerged as a practical illustration and application of the ideas and theories put forward in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema by first-time filmmakers that helped forge the romantic image of the passionate and playful young director seeking to make uncompromisingly personal films. In conjunction with this defining moment in French film criticism, the directors associated with the New Wave were able to capitalise on the newly established systems of production subsidies and financial advances by the French state keen to arrest the decline in cinema attendance that had become evident during the late 1950s. In addition, the relative youth of the directors associated with the New Wave also allowed them to tap more directly into the newly emerging demographic of film-going teenagers and young people, creating movies that showcased the Parisian youth culture of jazz bars, chic fashion and the café scene. The final element that contributed to the development of French New Wave was technological, smaller light-weight cameras and portable sound equipment that allowed for lower production costs and a more ad hoc, improvisational approach to shooting on the go.

Style The French New Wave treats generic conventions with a playful irreverence, such as crime in Bande à part (Godard, 1964) and Tirez sur le pianiste (Truffaut, 1960), science fiction in Alphaville (Godard, 1965) and romance in Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962), the purpose of which was to renew and revitalize popular genre cinema. In many ways, the French New Wave sought to invigorate commercial filmmaking by incorporating the stylistic innovations of earlier avant-garde film movements. With its disjunctive, choppy editing and quirky cinematography the French New Wave learned from Soviet Montage, while from Italian Neo-realism it borrowed elements of elliptical plotting, narrative coincidence and fragmentation, a documentarian focus on the depiction of contemporary reality and a willingness to work with improvisation and the accidents of location shooting. In addition, the French New Wave combined elements of popular culture including pulp novels or Hollywood b-movies with references to contemporary philosophy, avant-garde art and literature. Unlike any of the preceding movements in European cinema, French New Wave film was reflexive in unprecedented ways. As can be expected of filmmakers with a background in film criticism, the films of the French New Wave were filled with intertextual nods to cinema history, including the use of anachronistic silent movie techniques such as intertitles and iris wipes and cameos by famous directors such as the German Expressionist, Fritz Lang. This reflexivity often serves a distanciating function, pulling the audience out of the diegesis and foregrounding the constructed nature of the film as in the freeze frame that concludes Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups (1959) ultimately withholding any form of narrative resolution.

Legacy As with Italian Neo-realism the French New Wave served as a model for a new kind of radical filmmaking that could be emulated by young directors within different national film contexts. During the 1960s, cineaste directors across Eastern Europe departed from the traditions of their local film industries to create iconoclastic film movements such as the Czech New Wave and Young Cinema in Poland. In Britain, a similarly youthful cadre of filmmakers took to depicting the trials and tribulations of contemporary youth culture in what became known as the “Kitchen Sink” film, while in America, John Cassavetes pioneered a new form of improvisatory cinema combined with a naturalistic documentary aesthetic termed cinema verité.