Difference between revisions of "New Wave" - New World Encyclopedia

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"Nouvelle Vague" redirects here. For the music group of the same name, see Nouvelle Vague (band).

François Truffaut's New Wave film Jules et Jim

The New Wave (French: la Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced in part by Italian Neorealism. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. Many also reflected in their work the social and political upheavals of the era through their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative which emulated the general break that was taking place in French culture with the conservative paradigm.

Origins of the movement

The peak of French New Wave cinema was between 1958 and 1964, although popular New Wave work existed as late as 1973. The movement's origin goes back to World War II, when France was an occupied country and beset with internal tensions created by a population that in part resisted and in part collaborated with the Nazis. The dichotomy took a toll on the nation's psyche, and when the war ended in 1945, many embittered and confused individuals were eager for the emergence of an enlightened culture.

A distinctive philosophy—existentialism—was the answer for a select class of citizens, as it stressed the unique position of the individual as a self-determining agent responsibility for his or her own validity in life. The crux of the existentialist's spirit was to fight indifference through authentic action, taking full responsibility for all of one's decisions as opposed to playing pre-ordained roles dictated by society. In short, the philosophy was what the intellectual and creatively perceptive crowds of post-war France saw as their gateway to personal freedom after a suffocating four years at war.

Existentialists made up only a small fraction of the politically and financially drained French population of the time, the majority of which fell back to the comfortable and familiar traditions of life as it was before the war. One such tradition was the continued practice of straight narrative cinema, or classical French film. Desperate to go forward rather than to remain stagnant, much less go backwards, in time, it was the distress of the existentialist, artistic, and intellectual citizens of France that served as the catalyst for the inevitable New Wave rebellion that would take place.

Andre Bazin was one such intellectual, a film theorist and critic who is often regarded as the spiritual father of Nouvelle Vague. He led the calvary in his critique on the old culture's reliance on past forms, particularly the way these forms could force the audience to submit to a dictatorial plot-line. Alongside Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, Bazin was a co-founder of the influential magazine "Cahiers du cinéma". The magazine served as the pulpit for the lead voices in the revolution, also including contributors Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, who wrote at-length in attack of the classic style of French Cinema. Together this early group, pressed by their committment to form a new cinema, reconstructed concepts of how a film could be made, as well as the greater purpose that cinema could serve. Their desire was for cinema to become as worthy of academic study as any other art. This was the birth of Nouvelle Vague.

The filmmakers that were most highly esteemed by the writers of Cahiers du cinéma were 1930's French film-makers Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, as well as Italian neo-realists Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Highly critical of Hollywood in general, there were a few American directors that the magazine did respect however, including Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, John Ford, and Howard Hawks, who they saw as auters (authors) of their films despite the fact that they worked within studio systems making genre pictures. The "auter theory", inspired by these American directors was developed chiefly by Truffaut beginning with his 1954 article La qualité française (The Tradition of Quality), and would lay the groundwork for a surge of concepts that would define the New Age style of filmmaking. The crux of this new tradition was that the film should be a personal expression of its director (author), with a personal signature visible from film to film.

In the late 1950s the Cahiers du Cinéma critics were granted the opportunity to put their theories into practice when film subsidies were brought in by the Gaullist government. The founding group of French New Wave directors initially collaborated and assisted each other, which helped in the development of a common and distinct use of form, style and narrative, which was to make their work instantly recognizable. These early filmmakers took a low-budget approach, which forced them to focus only on the essential art form. This resulted in a very simple, organic look and feel, which many audiences found more comfortable to relate to.

Based off of the initial success of early films, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), and the international successes, Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups (1959), and Godard's À bout de souffle (1960), soon talents not a part of the core Cahiers du Cinéma contingent were joining the scene, including future stars Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Demy. From here the movement would flourish with its vast collection of underground classics in addition to a substantial crop of financial and critical successes that would find audiences world-round.

The five Cahiers directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer) made 32 films between 1959 and 1966. After 1964 the key elements of the French New Wave were already starting to enter mainstream cinema. The directors meanwhile began to branch off from each other, diverging more in style as they developed their own distinct pictorial and narrative voices.

Film techniques

French New Wave cinema was distinct of its time in that it was a personal cinema, often even autobiographical. Characters were frequently marginalized, young bohemians and loners, with no family ties. They behaved spontaneously and were often anti-authoritarian, with a general disdain for politics that was expressed as a disillusionment with foreign policy concerning Algeria and Indo-China. The shift most signaturely depicted was that of the film's character(s) making and dealing with the decision to discontinue playing the roles expected of them by society.

Nouvelle Vague usually kept its distance from the studio, preferring to shoot on location. They used the lightweight hand-held cameras designed normally for documentary use, faster film stocks which required less light, as well as unheavy sound and lighting equipment. The use of portable, flexible equipment allowed their films to be shot in good time at low costs, which gave room for more experimentation and improvisation, or in short: more artistic freedom.

On-location shooting also created a more casual and natural look to the scenes; the mise-en-scène of Parisian streets and coffee bars became a defining feature of the films. The mobile cameras, of which there was usually only one in use, was very mobile and thus could be used in highly inventive ways, with a great deal of fluid panning and tracking: following characters down streets, into cafes and bars, or looking over their shoulders to watch life go by.

French New Wave films also had a free editing style that consciously broke many of the editing rules that most Hollywood companies had looked at as absolutely irremissable. This included the use of frequent jump cuts or the insertion of irrelevant material extraneous to the story, just for fun, which reminded the audience that they were watching a film. Additionally, long takes were very common in Nouvelle Vague films as well as the use of "real time".

New Wave actors were typically encouraged to improvise their lines, or to even talk over each other's lines, to maintain an exchange between individuals that was more true to life. This style would sometimes result in lengthy scenes of inconsequential dialogue, in contrast to the heavy-scripted speeches of more traditional film acting. Monologues were also used, as were voice-overs that expressed the character's inner feelings.

A reflection of the acting and the spirit of the New Wave style were the films' loosely constructed scenarios, sudden shifts in tone, and many other unpredictable elements, creating an impression on the audience that anything might happen next. Films were also distinctive for open endings, with situations and conflict left unresolved.

anarchic, humour found in many Nouvelle Vague films.

The way the films were made reflected an interest in questioning cinema itself, by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making. In this manner, the French New Wave directors strove to present an alternative to Hollywood, by consciously breaking its conventions, while at the same time paying homage to what they regarded as good in Hollywood cinema. Godard's A Bout de Souffle set the tone for La Nouvelle Vague, by telling a simple story about a relationship in a convention-challenging style with numerous references to previous cinema. In addition to telling a love story, the film can also be seen as an essay about film-making.

Women were often given strong parts, that did not conform to the archetypal roles seen in most Hollywood cinema, for example, Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) and Corinne Marchand in Varda's Cléo de 5 á 7.

The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as seven-minute tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End). Also, these movies featured existential themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence.

Lightweight cameras, lights and sound equipment allowed the New Wave directors to shoot in the streets, rather than in studios. This fluid camera motion became a trademark of the movement, with shots often following characters down Paris streets. Many of the French New Wave films were produced on small budgets, often shot in a friend's apartment, 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). 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), several scenes feature jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take: parts that didn't work were simply cut right from the middle of the take, a purposeful stylistic decision.

The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that go beyond the common 180º axis. The camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but to play with and break past the common expectations of cinema. The techniques used to shock the audience out of submission and awe were so bold and direct that Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer’s naivete. 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 her 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 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-WWII France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods. Half necessity and half vision, New Wave directors used all that they had available to channel their artistic visions directly to the theatre.

Lasting effects

As with most art-film movements, the innovations of the New Wavers trickled down to the American cinema. Beginning with the heavily evident stylistic similarities in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the following generation of American young, studio-hired filmmakers known as New Hollywood (e.g. Altman, Coppola, De Palma, Polanski and Scorsese) of the late 1960s and early 1970s all claim and display influence from the French tradition of the previous decade.

Bob Rafelson, a member of the New Hollywood movement (Five Easy Pieces), claimed that the Marx Brothers and the French New Wave influenced his vision for the television series, The Monkees, which he created and oversaw. Rafelson, with Jack Nicholson, went on to direct the Monkees' feature film, the surrealistic Head which displays a strong New Wave influence.

Likewise, the influence of the movement was seen in a number of other national cinemas globally - beginning in the 1960s, and continuing to the present day. Similar movements arose in a number of European countries, and a large nuberu bagu arose in Japan during the early 1960s, which was somewhat different in its origins, but similar in techniques and trajectory^[1]^[2].

Many contemporary filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, claim influence from the New Wave. Quentin Tarantino dedicated Reservoir Dogs to Jean-Luc Godard and named his production company A Band Apart, a play on words of the Godard film Bande à part. Wes Anderson's sardonic comedies are known to carry influence from the French New Wave; for example, the opening scenes of The Royal Tenenbaums closely mimic the style and cinematography used in the opening scene of Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7. Additionally, the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was filmed using techniques borrowed from Godard^[3].

Major figures

Jean-Pierre Melville
François Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard
Claude Chabrol
Éric Rohmer
Jacques Rivette
Alain Resnais
Louis Malle
Agnes Varda
Jacques Demy

Minor figures

Jean Eustache
Bernadette Lafont
Chris Marker
Luc Moullet

Frequent Collaborators

Jeanne Moreau
Jean-Pierre Leaud
Jean Paul Belmondo
Anna Karina
Brigitte Bardot
Jean Seberg

Theoretical Influences

Andre Bazin
Alexandre Astruc
Huaco

Notes

↑ Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction To Japanese New Wave Cinema, 1988 (Indiana Univ. Press)
↑ Oshima, Nagisa & Annette Michelson. Cinema, Censorship And The State: The Writings Of Nagisa Oshima, 1993 (M.I.T. Press)
↑ http://www.theasc.com/magazine/april04/cover/index.html

External links

GreenCine primer on French New Wave

Credits

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[1] Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction To Japanese New Wave Cinema, 1988 (Indiana Univ. Press)

[2] Oshima, Nagisa & Annette Michelson. Cinema, Censorship And The State: The Writings Of Nagisa Oshima, 1993 (M.I.T. Press)

[3] ttp://www.theasc.com/magazine/april04/cover/index.html

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@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 ==Film techniques==
-French New Wave cinema was a personal cinema. The film-makers were writers who were skilful at examining relationships and telling humane stories. Truffaut's films were particularly autobiographical.
+French New Wave cinema was distinct of its time in that it was a personal cinema, often even autobiographical. Characters were frequently marginalized, young bohemians and loners, with no family ties. They behaved spontaneously and were often anti-authoritarian, with a general disdain for politics that was expressed as a disillusionment with [[foreign policy]] concerning [[Algeria]] and [[Indo-China]]. The shift most signaturely depicted was that of the film's character(s) making and dealing with the decision to discontinue playing the roles expected of them by society.
-The characters in French New Wave films are often marginalized, young anti-heroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. There is a general cynicism concerning politics, often expressed as a disillusionment with foreign policy in Algeria or Indo-China. In Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1959) the protagonist kills and shows no remorse, while in Varda's Cléo de 5 á 7 (1961) the protagonist stops playing the roles others expect of her, when she discovers she has cancer, and starts to live authentically.
+''Nouvelle Vague'' usually kept its distance from the studio, preferring to shoot on location. They used the lightweight hand-held cameras designed normally for documentary use, faster film stocks which required less light, as well as unheavy sound and lighting equipment. The use of portable, flexible equipment allowed their films to be shot in good time at low costs, which gave room for more experimentation and improvisation, or in short: more artistic freedom.
-The French New Wave directors took advantage of the new technology that was available to them in the late 1950s, which enabled them to work on location rather than in the studio. They used lightweight hand-held cameras, developed by the Eclair company for use in documentaries, faster film stocks, which required less light, and light-weight sound and lighting equipment. Their films could be shot quickly and cheaply with this portable and flexible equipment, which encouraged experimentation and improvisation, and generally gave the directors more artistic freedom over their work.
+On-location shooting also created a more casual and natural look to the scenes; the ''mise-en-scène'' of Parisian streets and coffee bars became a defining feature of the films. The mobile cameras, of which there was usually only one in use, was very mobile and thus could be used in highly inventive ways, with a great deal of fluid panning and tracking: following characters down streets, into cafes and bars, or looking over their shoulders to watch life go by.
-The films had a casual and natural look due to location filming. Available light was preferred to studio-style lighting and available sound was preferred to extensive studio dubbing. The mise-en-scène of Parisian streets and coffee bars became a defining feature of the films. The camera was often very mobile, with a great deal of fluid panning and tracking. Often only one camera was used, in highly inventive ways; following characters down streets, into cafes and bars, or looking over their shoulders to watch life go by. Eric Rohmer's La Boulangère Du Monceau (1962) opens by establishing the action in a specific location in Paris, and is almost entirely filmed in the streets, cafes and shops of this area. In A Bout de Souffle (1959), the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked on many of the French New Wave films, was pushed around in a wheelchair - following the characters down the street and into buildings. Innovative use of the new hand-held cameras is evident, for example, in Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959), where a boy is filmed on a fairground carousel.
+French New Wave films also had a free editing style that consciously broke many of the editing rules that most Hollywood companies had looked at as absolutely irremissable. This included the use of frequent jump cuts or the insertion of irrelevant material extraneous to the story, just for fun, which reminded the audience that they were watching a film. Additionally, long takes were very common in ''Nouvelle Vague'' films as well as the use of "real time".
-French New Wave films had a free editing style and did not conform to the editing rules of Hollywood films. The editing often drew attention to itself by being discontinuous, reminding the audience that they were watching a film, for example by using jump cuts or the insertion of material extraneous to the story (non-diegetic material). Godard, in particular, favoured the use of the jump cut, where two shots of the same subject are cut together with a noticeable jump on the screen. In a Hollywood film this would be avoided by either using a shot/reverse shot edit or cutting to a shot from a camera in a position over 30 º from the preceding shot.
+New Wave actors were typically encouraged to improvise their lines, or to even talk over each other's lines, to maintain an exchange between individuals that was more true to life. This style would sometimes result in lengthy scenes of inconsequential dialogue, in contrast to the heavy-scripted speeches of more traditional film acting. Monologues were also used, as were voice-overs that expressed the character's inner feelings.
+A reflection of the acting and the spirit of the New Wave style were the films' loosely constructed scenarios, sudden shifts in tone, and many other unpredictable elements, creating an impression on the audience that anything might happen next. Films were also distinctive for open endings, with situations and conflict left unresolved.
 anarchic, humour found in many Nouvelle Vague films.
-Long takes were common, use of real time was common
-The actors were encouraged to improvise their lines, or talk over each others lines as would happens in real-life. In A Bout de Souffle this leads to lengthy scenes of inconsequential dialogue, in opposition to the staged speeches of much traditional film acting. Monologues were also used, for example in Godard's Charlotte and her Bloke (1959); as were voice-overs expressing a character's inner feelings, as in Rohmer's La Boulangère Du Monceau.
-shot in the present tense, a common feature of French New Wave films generally. The films tended to have loosely constructed scenarios, with many unpredictable elements and sudden shifts in tone, often giving the audience the impression that anything might happen next. They were also distinctive for having open endings, with situations being left unresolved.
 The way the films were made reflected an interest in questioning cinema itself, by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making. In this manner, the French New Wave directors strove to present an alternative to Hollywood, by consciously breaking its conventions, while at the same time paying homage to what they regarded as good in Hollywood cinema. Godard's A Bout de Souffle set the tone for La Nouvelle Vague, by telling a simple story about a relationship in a convention-challenging style with numerous references to previous cinema. In addition to telling a love story, the film can also be seen as an essay about film-making.