2. Nouvelle Vague The term Nouvelle Vague derived from sociological journalism. La Nouvelle Vague arrive! was the title of the first of several articles based on surveys on French youth – 18 to 30 years old – published in L’Express by Françoise Giroud between 3rd October and 12th December 1957. The articles made clear that WWII, the reconstruction, the crisis were finally over. The young looked at the future, not the past. It was a time of transition, when the protagonist role traditionally held by their fathers’ generation was and had to be passed on to them.
3. The three interlocking axes of French New Wave Cinema Autorship: the Nouvelle Vague theorists and film-makers strove to lift cinema out of mass entertainment and (re)place it in the domain of “Art”. The new Wave practitioners thus theorised and celebrated the director as “autor”. Cinephilia: the New Wave filmmakers were steeped in the love of cinema, especially, though not exclusively, Hollywood. Representation:New Wave films notoriously ‘broke rules’ with their location shooting, dislocated narratives and idiosyncratic editing – while offering seductive images of ‘modern’ gender relationships and lifestyles against the background of iconic Parisian locations.
4. The tenets of the Nouvelle Vague Behind the ascent (or the explosion) of the Nouvelle Vague is a sound critical approach, which questions, challenges and shatters the turgid and somewhat blinkered pre-existing artistic canon, which remained stubbornly and rigidly faithful to acquired values. The Nouvelle Vague invents new points of reference and creates new objectives. It is the style, not the content, that captivates the interest and stimulates the debates of critics, experts, film-makers and cinema goers. The politique des auteurs advocates cinema not as a “common” or “set” syntactically frozen idiom, but as an individual artistic expression. Cinema is not just an industry, the camera is not just the “machine” any more, for it becomes AlexandreAstruc’s “caméra-stylo”: the camera can and must be used with the same artistic freedom and ductility with which a writer uses his/her fountain pen. Cinema, therefore, is not an idiomatic code (see above), but a fluid language that allows to express “any kind of thoughts”.
5. The Tradition of Quality The Tradition of Quality emphasised craft over innovation, established directors over new directors preferred the great works of the past to experimentation. Literary adaptations to prove the cultural superiority of French film in the face of the massive influx of Hollywood movies into the French market. Polished acting style, popular stars, elaborate sets and costumes: a ‘classical’ cinema Five general characteristics: 1. High production values 2. Theatrical and literary classics/prestigious cultural heritage 3. Studio-bound 4. Importance of scriptwriters 5. Star vehicles Most popular genres: comedies, thrillers,
6. Cinephilia Flourishing Ciné-club movement, inaugurated by Louis Delluc in the 1920s A significant force in French culture and the development of French cinema. The clubs had developed a highly literate audience for film, sophisticated in their taste an informed about the historical issues governing the development of film. Cinephilia a distinct culture on the French cultural scene A new type of film spectator, film critic, director. Intellectual climate a major force in film aesthetics, and later the film industry Evolution of the social status of cinema Film culture: journals, cine-clubs all-time high Henri Langlois and the Paris Cinémathèque (1936) Debates about the status of film as art reanimated by a new generation of critics.
7. AlexandreAstruc’s 1948 manifesto […] After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the ‘caméra-stylo’ [camera-pen]. From ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Caméra-stylo’ in L’Ecran Français, n.144, 30 March 1948.
8. Astruc’s main points Cinema is breaking free of its limiting role as spectacle or filmed theatre. Now cinema ‘is a language that can express any kind of thoughts’. Directing should not be considered simply a means of presenting a scene but rather become ‘a true act of writing’. The author ‘writes with a camera as the writer writes with a pen’. Like literature or philosophy, film could tackle any subject. First affirmation of the notion of the film auteur Refuting the constraints put in place by popular cinema, mass audiences demands for entertainment and distraction.
9. Cannes Festival, 1959 May 1959 – two new works cause sensation and attract both national and international interest: Les 400 Coups[Truffaut] and Hiroshima Mon Amour [Alain Resnais]. The former receives the Best Director Award and, shortly after, the Critics Award from the New York Critics’ Circle. The winner of the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, however is Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus, a film that remains aesthetically faithful to those traditional, well-affirmed film making formulae and modes Truffaut had attacked in Les Cahiers du Cinéma since 1954, the year he published his polemical attack on French cinema A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.
10. A certain tendency of French cinema (1954) Against the Tradition of Quality. Truffaut accuses French Cinema of being “formulaic”, of being dominated by scriptwriters, of being backward looking and of being “bourgeois “ Distinguishes between two types of director: a)Metteur en scène: technicallycompetent b)Auteur : true film artist: uses the medium creatively, has a recognisable formal approach, identifiable style and world-view, consistent themes across his body of work, ‘man of the cinema’ with personal vision. Truffaut argues for a new kind of cinema, “a cinema of authors" and claims that a film should be the expression of a director’s personal preoccupation. He states that “Tomorrow’s film will resemble its author”.
11. François Truffaut(1932-1984) Truffaut’s life left profound traces and echoes, whether overtly or covertly, in his oeuvre. The son of Janine Monferrand, he is adopted by Roland Truffaut who marries his mother when he is one year old. His relationship with the parents, and with the mother, more significantly, is often strained. His childhood is also problematic. He leaves school early and, after a few diverse jobs, he creates a cineclub in 1948. It is through the cineclub that he meets critic André Bazin, who will become his mentor and guide. In 1948 his parents send him to the Youth Observation Center, from which he manages to escape. Thanks to Bazin, he finds a job and is granted, by a judge, the right to live on his own. He joins the cineclubObjectif 49 and the Cinémathèque. In 1950, he decides, rather abruptly to join the army and requests to be sent to Indochina. During a leave he meets Jean Genet and realizes he has made a mistake joining the army. Thanks to Bazin, he is “reformed” and in March 1953 he starts writing for the Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1954, his article A certain tendency of French Cinema made him known outside the small circle of friends and collaborators: he attacks well-established post-war directors and scriptwriters, accusing them of producing works of “ready made” quality, which rely on tested ingredients.
12. André Bazin(1918 -1958) Advocated “objective reality” as expounded in his Ontology of the Photographic Image - in What is Cinema? (1958-1962). Relationship of cinema to reality: respects and reveals reality because it is a mechanical art. Cinema as a moral vocation to embrace the ‘real’. Aesthetic choices imply a relationship with reality/ a particular way of perceiving and representing the world. 4) Montage fragments reality. Deep focus (Orson Welles), wide shots (Jean Renoir) and shot-in-depth allow us to experience the ambiguity of reality. Advocates “true continuity” vs. experimenting with editing. Every aesthetic or stylistic decision betrays a worldview
13. Les 400 coups[ The 400 blows] Dedicated to André Bazin (1918-1958), Truffaut’s mentor, who died of leukaemia on 2nd day of shooting ‘Faire les 400 coups’: French idiomatic expression: to make mischief, to run riot The film is the first of five in the Antoine Doinel series with Jean-Pierre Léaud (from age 13 to 33) depicting the adolescent’s transition into a young man: Antoine et Colette (1962), Baisés volés/Stolen Kisses (1968), Domicile conjugal/Bed& Board (1970), L’Amour en fuite/Love on the Run (1979) Semi-autobiographical story by Truffaut Shot entirely on interior and exterior locations in Paris and Honfleur (costal town) Shot entirely silent, post-dubbed, except for direct address scene at the Detention Centre (improvised) Style: Long takes Improvisation Reflexive moments Freeze Frame Truffaut’s cameo Story, thematic issues and narrative structure Moments/events Open-ended, unresolved ending Digressive episodes
14. Jean Luc Godard(born in 1930) Originally a film critic at Cahiers du cinéma, Godard was the most radical of the New Wave; his body of work is central to modern auteur cinema. The son of a Franco-Swiss bourgeois family, Godard briefly studied anthropology before he began writing on film. His first feature, A bout desouffle/Breathless (1960) was an instant success. It initiated Godard’s life long reflection on the image, which in is ‘first period’ combined a search for modernist cinema with romanticism and cinephilia (Le Mépris/Contempt, 1963). Godard’s 1960s work scrutinised France in the grip of the consumer boom, with its spreading housing estates, computers and advertisements Anticipating the events of May ’68, La Chinoise and Week end (1967) launched Godard’s ‘second period’ of increasingly experimental work. With Jean-Pierre Gorin, he founded the ‘DzigaVertov Group’ aimed at smaller, militant audiences. His aim was not to make ‘political films’ but to ‘make films politically’...
15. Godard on Godard ‘As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film but than include a critical dimension’.
16. Godard vs. Bazin Inspired by Orson Welles’ use of deep focus, André Bazin’s aesthetic of realism promoted an aesthetic in favour of the sequence shot. In the sequence shot the action developed within one continuous shot rather than the classical montage. Think, for instance, of the American cinema that made invisible the cuts which propelled the action or the radical montage of Eisenstein, which emphasised the juxtaposition of images. Jean-Luc Godard’s argument: all positioning of a camera is editing in itself. The strength of film is not its capturing the real , but the result of a particular angle, whether provided by the camera of by the editing. The real does not just manifest itself but is revealed by the specific articulation of the film. The director must find the articulation which is the most appropriate. In capturing reality the juxtaposition of images is sometimes as important as the mise en scène within the image. Bazinand Astruc: cinema after the advent of sound had developed a fully articulate language utilizable by any director. Godard disagrees: There is no cinematic language that can represent reality. What cinema or the camera does is to allow the possibility of representing reality. There is not reality and then the camera – there is reality seized at this moment and in this way by the camera.
17. Montage, my fine care If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both: but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time. Suppose you notice a young girl in the street that attracts you. You hesitate to follow her. A quarter of a second. How to convey this hesitation? Mise-en-scène will answer the question ‘How shall I approach her?’ But in order to render explicit the other question ‘Am I going to love her?’ you are forced to bestow importance of the quarter of a second during which the two questions are born. It may be, therefore, that it will be for the montage rather than the mise-en-scène to express both exactly and clearly the life of an idea or its sudden emergence in the course of the story. Jean-Luc Godard ‘Montage mon beau souci’ Cahiers du cinéma, 1952
18. A Bout de Souffle/Breathless Shoot in 4 weeks on location in Marseille and Paris Half the average budget for the period Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, Hollywood’s principal B-movie producer specialising in low-budget Westerns, horror films, and crime series . A manifesto for Godard’s idea of a new cinema which rejected the continuity rules of The Tradition of Quality. Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, small Hollywood ‘Poverty Row’ company low-budget B movies Expose the arbitrariness of Classic Hollywood’s continuity rules Unravel genre conventions/Hollywood formal paradigm Formally extremely influential “What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of filmmaking had just been discovered for the first time. “ In Tom Milne, Godard on Godard, 1972, 173
