French New Wave
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The New Wave (
The term was first used by a group of French film critics and cinephiles associated with the magazine
Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of filmmaking often presented a documentary style. The films exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming techniques included fragmented, discontinuous editing, and long takes. The combination of realism, subjectivity, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end.[6]
Although naturally associated with
Origins of the movement
Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including
Truffaut also credits the American film
The auteur theory holds that the director is the "author" of their movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film. They praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, and made then-radical cases for the artistic distinction and greatness of Hollywood studio directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The beginning of the New Wave was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying this philosophy to the world by directing movies themselves.
Apart from the role that films by Jean Rouch have played in the movement, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is traditionally (but debatably) credited as the first New Wave feature. Agnès Varda's La Pointe Courte (1955) was chronologically the first, but did not have a commercial release until 2008. Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959), and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish. Part of their technique was to portray characters not readily labeled as protagonists in the classic sense of audience identification.
The auteurs of this era owe their popularity to the support they received from their youthful audience. Most of these directors were born in the 1930s and grew up in Paris, relating to how their viewers might be experiencing life. With a high concentration on fashion, urban professional life, and all-night parties, the life of France's youth was exquisitely captured.[11]
The French New Wave was popular roughly between 1958 and 1962.
New Wave critics and directors studied the work of Western classics and applied new avant-garde stylistic direction. The
In a 1961 interview, Truffaut said that "the 'New Wave' is neither a movement, nor a school, nor a group, it's a quality" and in December 1962 published a list of 162 film directors who had made their feature film debut since 1959. Many of these directors, such as Edmond Agabra and Henri Zaphiratos, were not as successful or enduring as the well-known members of the New Wave and today would not be considered part of it. Shortly after Truffaut's published list appeared, Godard publicly declared that the New Wave was more exclusive and included only Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, and himself, stating that "Cahiers was the nucleus" of the movement. Godard also acknowledged filmmakers such as Resnais, Astruc, Varda, and Demy as esteemed contemporaries, but said that they represented "their own fund of culture" and were separate from the New Wave.[14]
Many of the directors associated with the New Wave continued to make films into the 21st century.[15]
Film techniques
The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Weekend). Also, these movies featured existential themes, often stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. Filled with irony and sarcasm, the films also tend to reference other films.
Many of the French New Wave films were produced on tight budgets, often shot in a friend's apartment or yard, using the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots.[16]) The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations. For example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle), after being told the film was too long and he must cut it down to one hour and a half he decided (on the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) to remove several scenes from the feature using jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that did not work were simply cut from the middle of the take, a practical decision, and also a purposeful stylistic one.[17]
The cinematic stylings of the French New Wave brought a fresh look to the cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that broke the common 180° axis of camera movement. In many films of the French New Wave, the camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but rather to play with audience expectations. Godard was arguably the movement's most influential figure; his method of filmmaking, often used to shock and awe audiences out of passivity, was abnormally bold and direct.
Godard's stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer's supposed naivety. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as a character stepping out of their role in order to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time.
Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer's disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes without an attempt at unity; or an actor whose character changes from one scene to the next; or sets in which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.
At the heart of New Wave technique is the issue of money and production value. In the context of social and economic troubles of a post-World War II France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods, and were inspired by the generation of Italian Neorealists before them. Half necessity and half vision, New Wave directors used all that they had available to channel their artistic visions directly to the theatre.
Finally, the French New Wave, as the European modern Cinema, is focused on the technique as style itself. A French New Wave film-maker is first of all an author who shows in its film their own eye on the world.[18] On the other hand, the film as the object of knowledge challenges the usual transitivity on which all the other cinema was based, "undoing its cornerstones: space and time continuity, narrative and grammatical logics, the self-evidence of the represented worlds." In this way the film-maker passes "the essay attitude, thinking – in a novelist way – on his own way to do essays."[19]
Left Bank
The corresponding "right bank" group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with
Left Bank directors include
Left Bank films include
Influential names in the New Wave
Cahiers du cinéma directors
Source:[23]
Left Bank directors
Other directors associated with the movement
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Actors and actresses
- Anna Karina
- Anne Wiazemsky
- Anouk Aimée
- Brigitte Bardot
- Charles Aznavour
- Emmanuelle Riva
- Jean-Paul Belmondo
- Gerard Blain
- Jean-Claude Brialy
- Françoise Dorléac
- Stéphane Audran
- Bernadette Lafont
- Jean-Pierre Léaud
- Claude Jade
- Jeanne Moreau
- Maurice Ronet
- Jean Seberg
- Delphine Seyrig
- Jean-Louis Trintignant
- Sami Frey
- Catherine Deneuve
Other collaborators
- Raoul Coutard – cinematographer
- Henri Decaë – cinematographer
- Georges Delerue – composer
- Paul Gégauff – screenwriter
- Michel Legrand – composer
- Marilù Parolini – photographer, screenwriter
- Suzanne Schiffman – screenwriter
Theoretical influences
Theoretical followers
See also
- Iranian New Wave (Mowje Now)
- Japanese New Wave (Nūberu bāgu)
- Australian New Wave
- British New Wave
- Philippine New Wave (Contemporary Philippine Cinema)
- Cinema Novo (Brazilian New Wave)
- Novo Cinema (Portuguese New Wave)
- Czechoslovak New Wave
- Film noir
- Hong Kong New Wave
- Kitchen sink realism
- L.A. Rebellion
- National cinema
- New French Extremity
- New German Cinema (German New Wave)
- New Hollywood (American New Wave)
- No Wave Cinema
- Nuevo Cine Mexicano
- Parallel Cinema(Indian New Wave)
- Romanian New Wave
- Remodernist Film
- Taiwan New Wave
- Third World Cinema
- Dogme 95
- Yugoslav Black Wave (Jugoslovenski crni talas)
- Vulgar auteurism
- Extreme cinema
- Slow cinema
- Film gris
- B movie
- Cinephilia
- Postmodernist film
- Pauline Kael – film critic in opposition of the auteur theory popularized by Sarris
- Independent film
- Experimental film
- John Cassavetes – American independent filmmaker in the same vein as the French New Wave
- Arthouse action film
Notes and references
- ^ a b "Movie movements that defined cinema: the French New Wave". Archived from the original on 27 June 2019. Retrieved 27 June 2019.
- ^ a b c d Marie, Michel. The French New Wave : An Artistic School. Trans. Richard Neupert. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2002.
- ^ Grant 2007, Vol. 4, p. 235.
- ^ Grant 2007, Vol. 2, p. 259.
- ^ Truffaut, Francois (16 April 2018). "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 February 2021. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
- ^ Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.407–408.
- ^ "La Camera Stylo – Alexandre Astruc". from "The French New Wave", edited by Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham. 30 March 1948. Archived from the original on 13 June 2017. Retrieved 13 June 2017.
- ISBN 9780470776957.
- Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.407
- ^ Sterritt, David. "Lovers and Lollipops". TCM.com. Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved 26 December 2023.
- ^ Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.409
- OCLC 456494962.
- OCLC 438564932.
- ISBN 978-0-8050-8015-5.
- ^ Scott, A. O. (25 June 2009). "Living for Cinema, and Through It". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 10 August 2017. Retrieved 24 February 2017.
- ^ Champs-Élysées street scene in Godard's Breathless. Girdner, Ashlee (11 March 2013). "Back to the Scene: The Champs Elysees in Breathless and Beyond". Bonjour Paris. Archived from the original on 25 August 2017. Retrieved 2 April 2016.
The solution for this was to hide Coutard inside of a three-wheeled mail cart, which was fitted with a hole just big enough for the camera lens to stick out, and he then would be pushed alongside the chatting stars.
- ^ "Breathless (1960)". Archived from the original on 5 September 2017. Retrieved 21 July 2018 – via www.imdb.com.
- ISBN 9780976704225. Archivedfrom the original on 31 March 2023. Retrieved 7 November 2015.
- ^ Sainati, Augusto (1998). Supporto, soggetto, oggetto: forme di costruzione del sapere dal cinema ai nuovi media, in Costruzione e appropriazione del sapere nei nuovi scenari tecnologici (in Italian). Napoli: CUEN. pp. 154–155.
- ^ a b Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.412
- ^ a b Jill Nelmes, An Introduction to Film Studies, p. 44. Routledge.
- ^ "Donato Totaro, Offscreen, Hiroshima Mon Amour review, 31 August 2003. Access date: 16 August 2008". Archived from the original on 4 December 2013. Retrieved 21 September 2008.
- ^ a b New Wave Film.com Archived 13 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine, "Where to Start Guide", section outlining directors. Accessed 30 April 2009.
Works cited
- Grant, Barry Keith, ed. (2007). Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. Detroit: Schirmer Reference. ISBN 978-0-02-865791-2.