French New Wave (1958-62), PART I | film selection
The actual French New Wave was brief. But in this short period between the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, over a hundred new directors – among them Louis Malle, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard – emerged and increased the output of French cinema enormously. New stars like Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo made their debuts in these films. And whereas each of these directors developed a different style – Godard’s films were quite different from Truffaut’s for example – they all shared a sense of unity by rejecting common cinematic conventions and practices. Both Truffaut and Godard were among the critics of a journal dedicated to cinema culture called Cahiers du Cinéma. Created in 1951 by André Bazin, it stood in the tradition of disillusioned young film buffs of the Paris Cinémathèque and Ciné-Clubs after 1945. They showed American film-noirs, Italian neo-realist movies or previously banned films like La règle du jeu/ The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France 1939). Bazin also engaged in an intellectual debate with Jean-Paul Sartre about Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) in 1945 highlighting an emerging lively French film-culture. The critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma saw the struggling postwar French cinema as a sign of a national culture in crisis. Italian and Japanese cinema in comparison boomed while French films, allegedly uninspired literary adaptations, won fewer international awards.
Jean-Pierre Melville was among the first important new directors rising in the atmosphere of change. And most importantly, Melville showed that the French film industry was indeed not welcoming original ideas, outsiders and newcomers as the Cahier critics had charged. But at the same time he proved that it was possible to succeed with a new, independent approach. Truffauts’s Les Quatre Cents Coups/ The 400 Blows was the next stage and the final breakthrough of this new approach to filmmaking wining the director’s prize (though not the Palme d’Or at Godard’s disgust) at Cannes in 1959. But Truffaut, Godard and other critics from the Cahiers had at least succeeded in pushing the cultural elite to recognize that films, and those made by auteurs in particular, were genuine art. When they were finally successful, confirmed by Godard’s A bout de souffle/ Breathless in 1960, many young directors followed the lead of Godard and Truffaut using their own funding for low-budget on-location productions and making movies that could ignore traditional limitations. The French New Wave’s impact would be of a global reach influencing, for example, the cinema of New Hollywood beginning in the late 1960s. -Heiko Stang
The actual French New Wave was brief. But in this short period between the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, over a hundred new directors – among them Louis Malle, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard – emerged and increased the output of French cinema enormously. New stars like Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo made their debuts in these films. And whereas each of these directors developed a different style – Godard’s films were quite different from Truffaut’s for example – they all shared a sense of unity by rejecting common cinematic conventions and practices. Both Truffaut and Godard were among the critics of a journal dedicated to cinema culture called Cahiers du Cinéma. Created in 1951 by André Bazin, it stood in the tradition of disillusioned young film buffs of the Paris Cinémathèque and Ciné-Clubs after 1945. They showed American film-noirs, Italian neo-realist movies or previously banned films like La règle du jeu/ The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France 1939). Bazin also engaged in an intellectual debate with Jean-Paul Sartre about Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) in 1945 highlighting an emerging lively French film-culture. The critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma saw the struggling postwar French cinema as a sign of a national culture in crisis. Italian and Japanese cinema in comparison boomed while French films, allegedly uninspired literary adaptations, won fewer international awards.
Jean-Pierre Melville was among the first important new directors rising in the atmosphere of change. And most importantly, Melville showed that the French film industry was indeed not welcoming original ideas, outsiders and newcomers as the Cahier critics had charged. But at the same time he proved that it was possible to succeed with a new, independent approach. Truffauts’s Les Quatre Cents Coups/ The 400 Blows was the next stage and the final breakthrough of this new approach to filmmaking wining the director’s prize (though not the Palme d’Or at Godard’s disgust) at Cannes in 1959. But Truffaut, Godard and other critics from the Cahiers had at least succeeded in pushing the cultural elite to recognize that films, and those made by auteurs in particular, were genuine art. When they were finally successful, confirmed by Godard’s A bout de souffle/ Breathless in 1960, many young directors followed the lead of Godard and Truffaut using their own funding for low-budget on-location productions and making movies that could ignore traditional limitations. The French New Wave’s impact would be of a global reach influencing, for example, the cinema of New Hollywood beginning in the late 1960s. -Heiko Stang
the 400 blows, 1959
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breathless, 1960
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shoot the piano player, 1960
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jules and jim, 1962
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