New Wave
- "Nouvelle Vague" redirects here. For the music group of the same name, see Nouvelle Vague (band).
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 French existentialist's spirit of this era was to fight indifference and conformity through authentic action, taking full responsibility for 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 most respected by the writers of Cahiers du cinéma were 1930's French directors 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 style and techniques
Serious in tone as well as anarchically humurous, films were made not only to tell a story but to question cinema itself, by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making with their own contrasting methods. In this manner, the French New Wave directors strove to present a flipside to traditional cinema.
In particular, 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 leap of discontinuation of playing the normal roles expected of them by society. These narrative trends were in accord with the existential themes directors favored.
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.
Directors usually kept their 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", such as the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End.
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.
Many of these techniques, used to catch viewers off guard, were so outrageous that Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a radical struggle against mainstream cinema, or as an audacious assailment on the viewer’s naivete.
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 also 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 (Japanese for "New Wave") 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 as well. 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
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