French New Wave

By Chris Wiegand

Oldcastle Books

Copyright © 2012 Chris Wiegand
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84243-946-3
CHAPTER 1

Making Waves: An Introduction

Beautiful women. Suave leading men. Existential angst. Black and white figures in Parisian cafés. Cigarette smoke. Lots of it.

The world of French cinema conjures up a hundred often-parodied clichés for today’s viewer and the films of the New Wave era supply their own set of distinctive images. Jean Seberg walking down the Champs Elysées selling the New York Herald Tribune. The young Jean-Pierre Léaud running through the streets of Paris with a stolen typewriter. Charles Aznavour playing honky-tonk piano in a run-down café. Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy brushing off their feet before going to sleep. Eddie Constantine, decked out in gumshoe hat and mac, arriving at the sinister town of Alphaville. Jean-Paul Belmondo wrapping dynamite around his painted face. Brigitte Bardot lying naked in a bedroom asking Michel Piccoli what he thinks of her rear. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre cycling through the countryside. The list is endless.

These images are some of the things that the New Wave means to me, yet decades after the term ‘Nouvelle Vague’ was coined in L’Express magazine, critics continue to argue over its precise meaning. Some confine the New Wave to a certain period of time, others to particular directors. Many believe that the filmmakers who wrote for the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma are the only ones we can truly describe as belonging to the New Wave. Among the directors believed at one time or another to be related to the movement are: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, Jacques Rozier, Jean Douchet, Alexandre Astruc, Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Jean Eustache.

This book doesn’t set out to cover every film made by every filmmaker connected with the movement. Instead, it looks at the early years of the movement and follows roughly a decade of filmmaking, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. This was a time when the New Wave had a certain sense of cohesion, if not in real life then often thematically and stylistically on the screen.

In choosing the films to be covered, I have primarily given space to those works that made their directors’ reputations during these years. As the temporal bias would have led to the exclusion of key critical and commercial successes, such as Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro, Chabrol’s Le Boucher and Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, I have included a checklist of other New Wave-related films at the end of the book.

Everyone’s a Critic

Before examining their films, it is worth remembering that the principal New Wave directors started their careers as critics. Many continued to write criticism while filming their own works, seeing themselves as both critics and filmmakers. This is not to say they were mere movie reviewers. They essentially redesigned the role of the film critic, recognising the medium as on a par with the other arts and giving detailed analysis to directors who had never before been treated with much respect. The birth of this new form of criticism – and of the New Wave itself – owes much to two men: Henri Langlois and André Bazin.

Across Paris at the end of the 1940s there was a large number of cinema clubs, where audiences could view home-grown and foreign films, then discuss them to their heart’s content. One of the best was Henri Langloi