New Wave



WHAT WAS NEW ABOUT THE NEW WAVE?

Expressing in general terms what made the New Wave new is inevitably very difficult, given that the filmmakers did not consciously form a movement or group with a unified aesthetic agenda and might be better considered as a loose grouping of disparate filmmakers brought together, to some extent, by historical accident. Truffaut, retrospectively, claimed that for him the nouvelle vague meant, simply, "to make a first film with a reasonably personal theme before you were 35"; he reduced the movement to a few stylistic or production features in commenting that in Un Homme et une femme ( A Man and a Woman , 1966) the director Claude Lelouch (b. 1937) "shoots with a hand-held camera and without a carefully planned script: if he isn't part of the nouvelle vague , then it doesn't exist" (Hillier, 1986, p. 107). Similarly, Rohmer claimed that the greatest innovation was "making films cheaply" (Hillier, 1986, p. 87). Even the Cahiers "group" was probably more a group as critics than as filmmakers, when their different sets of interests and concerns immediately began to set them apart from each other.

Even so, we can say that Godard, Truffaut, and the Cahiers group in general felt that mainstream French cinema—excluding the French auteurs they admired—had lost touch with everyday French reality (something they valued in the contemporary Italian cinema of Rossellini and others). This did not mean that they wanted to make problem pictures about contemporary French society; rather, they felt that filmmakers should show and talk about what they knew best at first hand—the everyday life around them. Writing in Arts in April 1959, Godard noted the irony that Truffaut had been debarred from an official invitation to the Cannes film festival as a critic in 1958 but that The 400 Blows had been selected by Malraux as France's only official entry in 1959: "for the first time a young film has been officially designated by the powers-that-be to reveal the true face of the French cinema to the entire world" (Godard, 1972, p. 146). Addressing the ranks of the old directors of the cinéma de papa , having castigated the camera movements, subject matter, acting, and dialogue of their films, Godard put it this way: "We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent; in other words, things as they are" (Godard, 1972, p. 147). The films of Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette tend to forgo "big" subjects in favor of demonstrating a familiarity with the recognizable mores of everyday French life centered on streets, bars, shops, apartments, and on family life and male–female relations, sexual and otherwise, often among young people. Their films evoked a strong sense of what contemporary France—particularly, though by no means exclusively, Paris—looked and sounded like. Location shooting was a major factor here, aided by a responsiveness to the way people talked: the use of slang and swear words in Godard's Breathless proved offensive to some sectors of the audience while ringing wholly true, of course, to others.



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