French New Wave

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

Image:Julesetjim.jpg 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 self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.

Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Co-founder and theorist André Bazin was a prominent source of influence for the movement. By means of criticism and editorialization, they laid the groundwork for a surge of concepts which in later decades of film study (originally in the 1970s) was coined as the auteur theory. It holds that the director is the "author" of his movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film. They praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, and made then-radical cases for the artistic distinction and greatness of Hollywood studio directors such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The beginning of the New Wave was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying this philosophy to the world by directing movies themselves. Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is generally credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with his The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the actitivities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish. Other directors active at the time although not necessarily part of the core Cahiers crew included Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy.

The movies featured hitherto unprecedented methods of expression, such as seven-minute tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's Le weekend). Also, these movies featured existential themes, such as the stressing of the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. Image:A Bout De Souffle - b.JPG 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 the Paris streets.

Many of the French New Wave films were produced on extremely small budgets. Often they were shot in a friends' apartment, and used 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, 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 style had an impact on American movies as well. After Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) the New Hollywood directors (e.g. Altman, Coppola, De Palma, Polanski and Scorsese) of the late 1960s/early 1970s made movies inspired by their European (and in particular French) counterparts. The latest American directors who admit a serious influence of the French New Wave are Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson.