New Wave

THE RENEWAL OF FILM FORM

However, this might suggest that the films were naturalistic, observational studies of contemporary French life. Although this was an important component— The 400 Blows , for example, seems a clear descendant of the Italian neorealism of Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, though more personal and autobiographical in tone—other elements, potentially at odds with naturalism, combined with it. For example, the Cahiers critics' love of American cinema did not mean that they made films remotely like American ones, but American cinema—and cinema in general—served as a point of reference both for the films and their characters. Thus, Truffaut's second feature, Shoot the Piano Player , combined an evocative sense of contemporary place, time, and character with elements of the gangster film, melodrama, and comedy—a veritable "explosion of genre," as Truffaut put it; Breathless uses Humphrey Bogart and the American crime film (dedicated as it is to the B-movie studio, Monogram) as a point of reference, but from the point of view of a thoroughly French and contemporary (anti-)hero.

Having reproached the cinéma de papa for losing any sense of what was cinematic about the cinema, New Wave directors were also concerned that audiences should experience their films, in a variety of ways, as cinema . This could mean a variety of things. The directors expressed their passion for, and pleasure in, cinema through the exuberant and often flamboyant ways they embraced the possibilities of the medium, as well as through references to scenes and characters in films they loved. Godard said that he wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of filmmaking were being just discovered for the first time. Breathless jettisons much conventional narrative continuity, with jump cuts and narrative elisions, random actions, long takes, and the like, while Shoot the Piano Player introduces an array of cinematic devices, such as sudden big close-ups, subtitles, and irises, borrowed freely from film history. Such strategies gave the early New Wave films a modernity and lightness of touch, and an improvised or spontaneous feeling, very different from the rather literary, ponderous, studio-bound films that typified mainstream French cinema in the 1950s. Truffaut's style soon became more conventional, and Rohmer and Chabrol did not really abandon or continue to question narrative conventions; but Godard remained consistently iconoclastic and experimental beyond the main period of the nouvelle vague . My Life to Live is both a fiction about the life of a prostitute—in a series of Brechtian tableaux—and at the same time a systematic exploration of the function and meaning of camera movement, editing, narrative, and sound. Two or Three Things I Know About Her is both a fiction and a documentary essay about the reorganization of Paris as well as a rigorous examination of film form and the director's decision-making process. Rivette later placed himself well beyond the mainstream with long-form improvisations like L'Amour fou (1968, over four hours long), Out One: Spectre (1973, in four -hour-plus- and twelve-hour versions) and the more commercial but still experimental Céline et Julie vont en bateau ( Celine and Julie Go Boating , 1974, over three hours), often using theater as a metaphor for cinema. Effectively, Truffaut, Chabrol, and Rohmer, having helped to put the cat among the pigeons, integrated into mainstream French production, making bourgeois films for bourgeois audiences; only Godard and Rivette continued to fly the flag of radical experimentation. Godard in particular responded to the political turmoil of May 1968 and its aftermath with highly politicized and theoretical as well as formally radical films like Le Vent d'est ( Wind from the East , 1970), before trying to regain a wider audience with Tout va bien ( All's Well , 1972).

In Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour the Cahiers group recognized a different kind of modernity and modernism than they claimed for their own work—though Godard and Rivette very soon represented different versions of modernism in cinema. Rohmer acclaimed it a "totally new film" and Resnais as "the first modern film-maker of the sound era" (Hillier, 1985, p. 61). Resnais's strategies of montage and parallelism made him appear the successor to Sergei Eisenstein and other 1920s Soviet modernists, while the equivalent to—and even advance on—then current strains of modernism in the French novel. This was not surprising, given that Resnais directed scripts by leading writers of the nouveau roman ("new novel"; a literary movement of disparate styles but concerned above all with time and the effects of modern technology) writers like Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) ( Hiroshima mon amour ), Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922) ( Last Year at Marienbad ), and Jean Cayrol (1911–2005) ( Muriel , Night and Fog ). At the same time, Resnais's stylized use of ambiguity, subjectivity, poetic voice-over, flash inserts, camera movement, and sound marked his work as far removed from naturalism; his subject matter—much more obviously "weighty" and philosophical, with themes like war and the nuclear age, time and memory—made his work more recognizably "art" cinema than seemed at first the case with the work of the Cahiers group. Accordingly, Resnais's work and that of other Left Bank directors—despite the intense controversy generated by Hiroshima mon amour because of its subject and the demands it made on its spectators—was more readily accepted as art cinema both in France and elsewhere. Many critics who had problems working out what kind of "art" Godard was making had no such difficulties with Resnais, even if—as happened most notably with

Last Year at Marienbad —no one seemed quite sure what it all meant or what it was all about.