Cinema and Nation:

French Cinema
Week 5: The New Wave
 French New Wave
• Decline of French film industry after WWII

• ​Losses of war and occupation

• ​1946 laws gave French films very limited exclusivity

• ​Influx of US films postwar

• ​Based on cumbersome infrastructure, studio system, sets, labour intensive

• ​ esthetic stagnation: over-emphasis on scripts, preproduction, production

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values, experience and low-risk topics. Also belief that audiences wanted
escapism pushed so far that films were completely divorced from people’s
experiences
​ ruffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette trained at Cinémathèque – set up by
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Langlois and Franju – and so were outside the traditional path

​ ruffaut was taught by Bazin – close connection between criticism and

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practice.

​ e watched international cinemas from all periods – opens interest in

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form, the cinematic as well as international scope – not just about
French literary tradition

•The influence on him of earlier French cinema including avant garde,

René Clair, Jean Vigo (Zéro de conduite), poetic realism, and more
recent directors like Varda, Melville, Bresson

•Bazin among others begins Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951 – Truffaut

wrote about international film, experimental film, and took film
criticism seriously
In his landmark 1948 essay ‘Birth of a New
Avant-Garde’, filmmaker Alexandre Astruc
advanced the notion of

le caméra-stylo (camera pen) ...

...which imagined the cinema eventually

breaking free from the concrete demands of
generic narrative and where images
(together with sounds) become a means of
writing just as flexible and subtle as written
language.
 Greatly influenced by Astruc's theory, it was only
a few years later that in 1954 critic and later
filmmaker François Truffaut, in his classic
statements which fuelled the emergence of the
French ‘New Wave’, spoke of the (preferably
writer-) director as an AUTEUR:
• the cinematic equivalent of a novelist, capable of
expressing themselves through recurring thematic
elements, distinctive ways of building characters,
and, above all, through the deployment and
movement of actors and objects within the time and
space of the shot.
Truffaut was hugely critical of many of the traditions of French
cinema as they exhibited themselves in the 1950s. He dismissed
these as a ‘Cinéma de Papa’ which desperately needed renewal:

•‘It was not merely the specific failings of the most respected
scriptwriters of the day that displeased him, but the fact that they
were considered central to the quality of the film, that these were
‘scriptwriters’ films in which the director was merely ‘le monsieur
qui met les cadrages là-dessus’ (‘the gentleman who adds the
pictures to the scenario [or script]’: Truffaut 1987: 224).

•For Truffaut as for the rest of the Cahiers [du Cinema] team, this
was heresy, for if film was to become an art-form in its own right,
then the artist was surely the one who ‘wrote’ in film-language,
that is the director.’..

Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram, Francois Truffaut (Manchester: MUP, 1998), pp. 22-24.
Critic T. Jefferson Kline sets out the context and
influences from which the French New Wave
emerged in the late 1950s:

• New technology, enabling low budget film

production (hand-held Camiflex cameras, film stock
suitable for filming in a variety of lighting conditions).

• Decline of the post-Second World War French

film industry, with film production widely seen as
stagnant and bankrupt) theatrical, and laden with
highly crafted dialogue (rather than truly ‘cinematic’).
And cinema attendance in rapid decline.
 The emergence of a new generation of hugely cinephile and cine-
literate critics (in new film magazines such as Cahiers du cinéma)
who were given the opportunity to put their controversial views (about
Hollywood and French cinema) into practice.

• Adventurous film producers willing to work within financial austerity,

which in turn meant they could risk allowing these newly emerging
directors a great deal of personal creative freedom.

• The emergence of auteurism, a new critical discourse about the

importance of the film director, and the possibilities and attractions of
his/her ‘personal’ cinematic style, which helped to create a solid market
specifically for ‘films by a particular director’ (rather than just from a
particular studio, with a particular star, in a particular genre) amongst a
cinephile public

(T. Jefferson Kline, ‘The French New Wave’, in Elizabeth Ezra [ed], European Cinema [Oxford:
OUP, 2004])
Back to Truffaut…

• ‘A film costing 300 million francs must please every

possible audience in every country. A film costing 60
million francs can make a profit in France alone or by
touching certain groups in different countries.

• Tomorrow’s film will not be made by camera

technicians but by ARTISTS for whom shooting a
film constitutes a formidable and exalting adventure.
Tomorrow’s film will resemble its author …
Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.’
(François Truffaut, Arts, 15 May, 1957)
• How did these ideas make their way into new wave
practice?

• ​ orking outside the studio system; lower production

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values, shooting on location, hand held camera, few extras,
sets, etc. Settings had to be everyday – and were often in
Paris where the directors were based. Stories became about
everyday life –instead of drawing from a French literary
tradition, films represented contemporary France.

• ​ ilms by Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc

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Godard, Jacques Demy, etc

• ​ he "New Wave" only lasted a short time: most directors

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either stop making films or move into much more
commercial work