Ec Article 7

8/22/2019 Ec Article 7

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T. Jefferson Kl ine

Arl art~stlcwave, l~kehe works of art wh ~c h ompose ~ t ,s no t a substance' around a def~nable'essence, but a response to pressures and ~rfluencesonverging from many d~fferen tlayers' 01real~ty-socal, pol~t~ca~cono.rilc, ~deo log~c al,r:lstlc and personal

Raymond Durgnat

The scene 1s Paris. It is !ate summer ~n 1959 . Flineu rs along the champs-Elyseescast nervous sidelong glances at a handsome young coup le am bling d own The

boulevard, preceded by a laundry cart, sh rouded on three sides by curtains. Hid ing in thislmprovrsed tracking truck, the youn g Raoul Coutard alms a hand-held Cameflex cameraat the couple. No battery of iiood lights illum ~nate sh ~ s cene, shot i n wha t Jacques Rozieiwas to dub 'tournage a la sauvette' (sh oo ting on the ru n), because Coutard has dis-covered that 18-m lengths of highly sens~tlveH~ lfo rd PS film can be spliced together Intoreels of 120 meters-enough to capture a sequence of th ~ silm. When nig ht falls on theCity of L~g ht, hoot~ ng il l continue, sti ll w~ th ou tloods, because Coutard has worke d ou ta special emu ls~ on t the nearby GTC labs, creating a degree of se ns~ t~vityquivalent toan 800 ASA read~ ng,hus enabling h im to record Images with ou t a lo t of lig ht. Jean-LucGodard has begun, In th ~ singie dramatic endeavor, his surreptitious pursuit of Jean-PaulBelmondo (allas Laso Kovacs, car thief) and his full frontal assault on the bast~on f th e


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P O S T W A R C I N E M A

French filnl ind ustry The result will be A bo ut de souffle (Breathless), a fi lm thar was t ocnange forever the way we thlnk about cne ma

Wh at had driven Go dard, Cou tard, Belmondo, an d Jean Seberg Into the streets, freelyInventing bo th story and fi lm technology as they we nt ? What allowed Godard to spendh~ s ights w rl tn g notes for the next day's sho ot~n gn utter defiance of the tradlton s ofcareful de co~ pag edli/lsicr of scenes Into a shootlnq sc r~ pt i nd minutely planned takesand decors? W ho w oul d flnance such a zany enterprise and w hy7

The decline of the French film industry after the warThe answers to all of these questions lay in the catastrophic decline of the French f l mIndustry after WJorld \Nar II. Following the Occupation, a varlety of pressures and influ-ences converged to devastate a war-weakened lnstltutio n Perhaps the greatest of thesethreats came fro m w ithin the Industry itself. For years, films had been shot at the greatstud108surrounding Paris, and at the Liberation there were st111 ~f te en tudios in op era-tion, principally at Billancourt and Boulogne. Indeed, ~t was perhaps prophetic that thestudios at Mo ntreu il, b uilt in the 19208, were called 'Albatros', for the studio system ofthe late 1940s hung around the necks of ~ ts ractit~oners ike Colerldge's omen of dis-aster. Shooting In studlos required enormous and elaborate sets, crowds of extras (w hohad thelr ow n labor unlo n), complicated technologies of lighting, and sufficient expertisein management to coordinate this vast division of labor. Not surprisingly it was theproducers, no t the film directors, wh o were th e ultim ate arblters on the set. Nor was it asecret that the training for such work required certlflcatlon by the prestigious IDHEC(Institut des Hautes Etudes Clnematographiques, the natlonal fllm school), followed bylong years as an apprentice spent learning the 'cra ft' at the feet of established directorsand cameramen. Gwen the expense of every detail, and the authority of the producer,film directors were considered principally technicians, slaves to commercial efficiencyrather than masters of style. Their job was to provide b ea ut~ fulmages, with hlgh produc-tlon values to illustrate the screenplays approved by the producers. Directorial debutswere usually made after th e age of forty a nd usually well after any spark of creativity ha dbeen carefully replaced by adherence to con vention and academic tradition. Innovationand rlsk were t he last thlngs on the producers' minds, wh o sought instead trled and trueformulas and lmi tat~ on f what already 'work ed'.

It didn't help matters that the industry was reeling financially after the war. Nor didthe gove rnment's atte mp t to Intervene really help. By signing the Blum-Byrnes accordsof 1946 , supposedly deslgned to put the French cinema back on its feet, the govern-ment guaranteed French films exclusivity a mere slxteen weeks a year. That left thirty-six


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T H E F R E N C H N E W W A V E

weeks open to a sieady Influx of Ho lly~v oodi lms Nor d ~ dncreasing the French shareto twenty weeks in 1948 make m atters mucl: better, Ey that t~rx e, he indusiry had

on the solution of trylng to com pete \iv!:h Hol iy~v ood ~ it h series o i movies th aihad an 'international' appeal. strong prodlrc ticn values, well-know r, stars, and, generally,a highly mannered style removed from everyday reality. This taste for convention andartif ic~ality ai also likely spurred by the bel~ef hat audiences preferred to rc;rn awayfrom the harsh tealip! cf pcst\,var France ar?d unwelcome m en or es o f the O ccuparion.~ h u s , ar from portraying the culture aiid concerns of ti-e~raudiences, screenwritersturned lncreaslngly to adaptations of classic novels to help the~raudiences escapef r o~ nhe realit ies of the day Fiims like Rene Clair's L ei grandes rnanceuvres (The G randManeuver, 1955), Clouzot's Le Sala/rp de la peur (L9e b'/qes o f Fear, 19533 and~utant -Lara ' se Rouge et ie noir iL9 e Red an d the B/JCK, 1954) emanated from a belhefthat clnema was nothing more than an elaborate way of illustrating a story, whoseclever dialogue displayed a k ~ n d f cynlcal one-upman ship of the kind later foregroundedin Patr~ceLeconte's Ridicule (19 96) Indeed, the studio systern ~ncreasingly esembleda morose vision o f LOUIS XVl's court, where producer and favored screenwrlters wereklngs and chosen counselors and there prevailed what Jean Dcuchet (1999- 31) callsa form of 'congenital desp a~r', and wha t Cedric Anger (in de Baecque and Tesson1998: 20 ) terms 'une plastique du malheur' (the malleable art of unhappiness). Frenchcinema had become the obsequious h andmaiden of screenwrlters like Jean Aurencheand Pierre Bost, whose 'genius' as Er~cRohme r was to say, lay in a 'duty-bound use ofthe legacy of the~r recursors and a farnll~aritywith all the ways that, by some kind ofconditioned reflex, partcular emotional react~ons ould be provoked In the audience'(Hillier 1985 : 2 0 5 ) .

Two fathers of the New Wave: Langlois and Bazin

Thoroughiy disenchanted with what they were to term 'le cinema de papa' (Dad'scinema) or ' la traditio n de qu ailte' (the tradition of qua lity), a srnall but very vocal groupof critcs began in the early 1950s the wor k of sapping the foundations of thls totteringedifice. Jean-Luc Godard, Francols Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Don~ol alcroze,and Claude Chabrol had been trained not a t the IDHEC bu t at the Cinematheque, andtheir professsors were n ot skilled technic~a ns u t two deeply thou ghtfu l amateurs of theseventh art, Henri Langlois and Andre Bazin. Since 1936 Langlois had been collecting,archiv~ ng, nd sh owing rare and classic films from the wo rld over at the Cinemathequ e.Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and their companions became regular visitors to Langlois'sscreenings beg inn~ngn 19 49. Langlols's unusual approach to pro gram ming was to have


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a formative effect on these young cinephiles, for he frequentiy grouped together silentfilms, and films from different countries, genres and periods, many of which had noFrench sub t~tl es. he desired effect, he was t o argue, was that his vlewers learned to makeconnect~onsbetween many different national styes and had to rely for their viewingpleasure on th e purely visual aspects of the films (the 'ho w' ) rather than o n conventionalstorytelling (the 'what'). Thus Langlois could legitimately claim to have taught an entiregeneration of French directors h o w to see a film . Langlois's pedagogy was comp lementedby Baz~n's.The latter had begun writing serious film criticism in the 1940s, and, from1946 to 1949 had published several major theoretical statements on f ~ l mn Jean-GeorgesAurio l's La Revue du cinema. In March of 19 48 Auriol also published Alexandre Astruc'shugely influential 'Na~ssance 'un e nouvelle avant-garde: la camera stylo' (Birth of a newavant-garde: the camera-pen), In which Astruc claimed that, far fr om being a mere slaveof the concretely visual, 'the camera could become a means of wrltl ny as supple and assubtle as wrltten language and the cinema could truly make itself the expression oftho ug ht'. Bazin took u p this idea In his 'L'Evolutron du langaye cinematograph ique' (Theevolution of film language), in wh ich he focused on the n otlon of cinematic language asthe chief object of the crltic's conc ern.

When A uriol died in a car acc~den tn 1950 , La Revue du cinema failed a nd Bazin wasforce d to fln d other outlets for his energies. He first foun ded Objectif49, a cine-club thatshowed new films and invited directors to speak about their work, among them OrsonWelles, Roberto Rossellini, and Jean Renoir. Frustrated w ith the tra d~ t~ on -b ou ndelectionsat Cannes, Objectif49 also sponsored a 'Festival du film mau dit' (Festival of condemn edfilms) at Biarritz (no doubt hoplng to restage the crucial lift glven to Impressionism inpa intin g by the Salon des Refuses (Rejects' Ex hiblt~on) f 1874 ). A t B iarritz, Jean Vigo 'sL'Atalante (1 934) and Jean Renoir's The Sout her ner (l94 5) were viewed for the first time.After the second attempt at a 'Festival du maudit' failed, Bazin, Lo Duca, and JacquesDon iol Valcroze turne d t o Leonid Keigel to secure funding for a new ournal b aptized LesCahiers du un ema, who se flrst issue appeared in April 1951

The founding of Les Cahiersdu cinemaBazin's influence on the future of French cinema cannot be overstated: not only did hehelp found Cahiersand set the to ne fo r serious film cr~ticism, ut he marshalled the troopswh o were t o make the assault on the bastion of c~ nem aticradition. Bazln met the 16-year-old Fra n~ ols ruffaut at his fi lm club, and not on lytw ice bailed him ou t of serioustroub le (including a heroic effort t o have him released fr om a military prlson in 1951 afterhe was arrested for desertion) but virtually adopted hi m at h ~ s om e at Bry sur Marne.


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~ r u f f a u then introduced Bazin to Godard, Chabrol, and Rivette, and the troops wereassembled for ba ttle. Indeed, one could almost date th e bir th of the New Wave fro mthe November 1953 issue of Cahiers, which included articles by Rivette, Truffaut, andchab rol. Under Bazin's leadership, Cahiers adopted a strategy of refusing to review thestandard French fare, articulating a ne w aesthetic and standard for film criticism, high-lighting experimental cinema and introducing the best international filmmakers to theFrench public. Bazin had also propounded a belief in the relat~onshipbetween f i lmtechnique and metaphysics, and convinced the younger contributors to Cahiers that afilm's meaning should be sought in its formal structure.

This belief that cinema was an art (i.e., the p rodu ct of indiv~ dual enius and a p articu-lar sensibility, and no t merely an ind ustry), capable of rendering a metaphysical mean ingin its ow n specifically cinematic language, was to become the rallying cry around w hichCahiers would organize its politique des auteurs (auteur policy) and, consequently, itsattacks on /a traditio n de qualite. And, although Bazin had discovered these qualitiesin Robert Bresson, a highly individualistic and independent director, his younger col-leagues immediately applied his ideas to directors whom we might today consider theantithesis of Bresson. Jacques Rivette proclaims 'the genius of Howard Hawks, a directorof intell igence and precision, the only American director who knows how to draw amoral' (Cahiers 23, May 195 3). Francois Truffa ut lauds David M iller and compares hisfilms to those of Bresson (Cahiers 2 1, March 1953), but is not content merely to praisethe American

From the moment of his arrival at Cahiers, Truffaut displays an almost obsessive hos-tility to the French film industry, so much so that the editors hesitate to invite him intotheir mids t. It is no t enough t o applaud American directors like Miller; Truffa ut castigatesFrench film as noth~ngmore than 'three hundred continuity shots stuck together ahundred and ten times a year' (And rew 1978: 184-5). Despite a flurry of requests to theCahiers editors to rein him in, Truffaut's venom was to reach its apogee in his no w famous'Une certaine tendance d u cinema fra n~ ai s' 'A Certain tendency wit hin French cinema',Cahiers 34, January 1 954) . If the cinema was rebo rn after t he w ar in th e Poetic Realism offilms like Qua ides brumes, Tru ffaut argues, it died again wh en Claude Autant-Lara, JeanDelannoy, Rene Clement, and Yves Allegret, and th e~ r creenwriters Jean Aurench a ndPierre Bost, replaced Poetic Realism w it h 'psychological r ealism '. These p erpe trator s of latradition de qualite, Truff aut rants,aim at realism [but] always destroy it at the very moment of capturing it, so concerned are theyto lock up their actors in a closed world, barricaded by formulas, by puns and maxims, rather thenlett~nghem show themselves as they are . . . This so-called superiority of the authors over the~rcharacters turns them ~ n tonfinite ly grotesque [beings]


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Opposed t o these 'v il la ins ', T ru f fau t p roc la ims, t here are a fe w c ineastes wi th v ision: JeanRenoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Coctea u, Jacques Becker, A b e Gance, Ma x Ophuls, JacquesTati , and Jacques Leenhard t-who by a ' cur ious co~nc iden ce . . a r e a u te u r s w h o o f t e nw r i t e t h er r o w n d i a l o gu e a n d . . . even invent the s to ries they f i lm ' (T ru f fau t 1987: 233).*A n d i f it rsn't a lready clear th at th is is a war, T ruffau t trumpets, ' I do no t be lieve in thepeacefu l coex is tence o f la t rad i t ion d e qua l i te and a c inema o f au teurs' (1 9 8 7 : 225-6).

Auteur politicsThat Tru f fau t is suppo r ted in th rs ons la ught by h is fe l low 'young Turks ' is obv ious , fo r , inhis f irst sho rt f i lm, Tous les garcons s 'apellent Patr ick (A ll the Boys Ar e Called Patrick,1959) , Go dard wi l l inser t a shot o f h imse l f f i lme d next to h is you ng hero ine in a ca feread lng an i s sue o f A r t s th a t spo rts in huge t ype th e head l ine to T ru f fau t ' s o the r famousbar rag e: 'LE CIN EM A FR ANCAIS CREVE SOUS LES FAUSSES LEGENDES' (French c ine ma isco l laps ing bene ath the w e ~ g h t f fa lse legends). In this essay Tru f fa u t re f ines his idea o fthe au teu r :We could declare quite simply that, contrary to wha t has been writt en rn histories of film, contraryto statements ma de by film d irectors themselves, a fil m is no more a question of tea mwo rk than anovel, a poem, a symphony, or a painting. The great directors, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini,Alfred Hitchcock, Ma x Ophiils, Robert Bresson, and m any others, themselves wrl te the films theyshoot. Even if they are inspired by a novel, a play, a tru e story, th e po int of departure is merely apretext. A filmmaker is not a writer, he th ~n ksn images, in terms of mise-en-scene, and wrl tin gthings down bores him. (Truffaut 1987: 234-5)T r u ff a u t g oe s o n o c o d if y w h a t w a s t o b e c o m e t h e f o u n d i n g u s ti fi ca ti o n f o r t h e p o l i t i q u edes auteurs:I don't beleve in good or bad films, I believe in good and bad director s. . . A director [metleurenscene] possesses a style that yo u f ~ n dn all of his films and this is true of the wors t filmmakers an dtheir worst films. The differences from one film to the next, a more ingenious screenplay, betterphotography, whatever they may be, have but little importance, for these differences are mostofte n due to external factors, m ore or less finan c~ng ,more or less time for shooting. The essentialthlng is that an intelligent and gifted director remains intelligent and gifted no matter what fil mhe makes. I am a partrsan of judging ( when it comes tim e to p dg e) no t films bu t filmmakers. I willnever like a film by Delannoy. I will always like a f ~ l m y Renoir. (Truffaut 1987: 247)There has never been a m or e fo r t h r i gh t and succ inct s ta teme nt o f au teur po l i tics .Wi th th is h igh ly romant ic ized not ion o f c rea trve gen ius , T ru f fau t accompl ishes t w o major

* All translat~onsrom works In French quoted here are rnlne -TJK


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objectives, he establ~shes ersonal style (m ise-en-scene) as th e sole criter ion of aestheticjudgment, and he elevates himself (and his cohorts at Cahiers) as the sole arbiters ofa d m i s s ~ ~ no the cinematic pantheon. His emphasis on arbitrary (and, indeed, a priori)choices and on personality makes h ~ s rt~cu latio n f the auteur less a theory than apolitics-nay, a polemics. For the Cahiers critics, Auta nt-L ara was bad; Hitchcock wasgood. Delannoy was awful, but Nicholas Ray was a genlus. Eventually, the exaggeratedlypolemical side of auteurism was to cause its originator, Andre Bazin (among others),to condemn its most glaring abuses and contradictions as a 'hazardous adventure'(Cahiers 70, April 1957); bu t Bazin's reaction glossed over wh at may have been the m ostimportant aspect of auteur polit~cs-its art~ culat ion f a prolegomena for a n ew Frenchcinema under the guise of praising Holly wood directors.

And if this n ew cinema was too pluralistic to have a single ars poetica, ~t neverthelessneeded a rallying cry, and Francois Truff aut pr ov ~d ed ne:A film cost~ng 00 m~ll ionrancs must please every poss~ble udience in every country. A filmcosting 60 m~llion an make a pro f~ tn France alone or by touching certain groups in differentcountries. Tomorrow's film will not be made by camera technicians but by artlsts for w hom shoot-ing a f ~ l m onstitutes a formidabie and exalt~ng dventure. Tomorrow's film will resemble itsauthor . . Tomorrow's film will be an act of love. (Arts, 15 May 1957; in Truffaut 1987: 248-9)This pronouncement derives from two complementary imperatives: auteur politics andfinancial austerity. To gain a foothold in the bastion of French cinema, each of these'commandos . . . In the front l ine of battle ' (Godard's phrase) had t o f ind a way t o makemovies for one-fi fth t o one-tenth o f t he cost of studio productions. Austerity wouldin turn dictate the means of production, which in turn wo ul d have profound aestheticimplications Iron~cally, very budgetary restriction implied an increase in creative liberty.In abandoning t he studio, th e young directors would be giving u p elaborate decors,crowds of extras, established cameramen, scriptwriters, gaffers, continuity people, bigstars, and, of course, the well-heele d producers wh o paid fo r and organized all of thesecrowds. By taking t o the street to escape the heavy-handed rule of these producers,each became, in h igher o w n way, a k een observer of everyday life, teiling simple talesinterpreted by unknown actors whose innocently maladroit gestures were captured byhand-held cameras. E veryth~ng bout t he tradit ion de qualite th at had been condemnedby the Cahiers critics woul d be abandoned in their first cine matic endeavors as much fo rf ~ n a n c ~ a loncerns as for aesthetic ones. Yet by p roc la~ mi ng n intensely personal cinema,Truffaut gu aranteed a commu nity of individual styles and met hods rather than a schoolwith a common program.Program or n ot, crit~ cal ust storm notwithstanding, no school or collection of individ-uals would likely have emerged for their directorial debuts had the film industry not


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entered upon increasingly hard tlmes. Between 1 958 and 1963, attendance at cinemasthrough out France dropp ed by roug hly 100 m illion, to 290 millio n. Some producers hadbegu n to question the financial wisdom of backing hugely expensive studio productionsthat w ere increasingly runnin g on em pty at the box office.

Chabrol seizes the m ome nt

I tw as in th~ s limate of concern that the young Turks seized the momen t. I t fell to ClaudeChabrol to get things rolling. Ch abrol was doubtless rnspired by the examples of Jean-Pierre Melville and Agnes Varda, whose films Le Silence de la mer (1 947) and La Pointecourte (1954), respectively, had been produced entirely outside any controls by govern-ment or labor unions. Both films had been hailed by the Cahiers critics as inspirationalbreakthroughs against the tight restrictions of the industry. With funds his wife hadinherited, Chabrol created his ow n produ ction company, AJ YM (based on his wife's andchildrens' init~als), orro wed a Gevaert 36 camera, convinced Henri Decae to be his cam-eraman, and headed off t o Sardent to film Le Beause rge (1958). Shot entlrely on locationover a seven-week period, using relatively unk now n actors, a small band o f technicians,and a Citroen 2CV for track lng shots, Le Beau Serge emerged as a model of lo w-b udg etbut high-quality film prod uction. Its evocation of life in a small provincial to w n radiated asense of authenticity and ra w emotion al power.

Meanwhile, the French government, concerned by the ever-growing dominance offoreign films, ha d passed in 1948 la loi d'a ide au cinema (the law in aid of cinema), whichredistributed to the French film industry monies raised from taxes on all movie houses inFrance. These monies were directed to filmmakers on cond ition tha t they be reinvested innew f i lms. This law was modif ied in 1953 to include a jury w h o w ould award thesemonies to 'quality' projects'. Le Beau Serge was considered to b e just the sort o f film th eCentre National de la Cinematographie (CNC, the b ody in charge of distributing funds)was looking fo r. Awarded 35 million francs, Chabrol's fi lm was sh own at th e Festival deCannes In 1958, where Edmond Tenoudji saw it and decided to distribute i t. Given theausterity of Chabrol's productio n methods-he economized on sets, makeup, sound,and actors-35 million francs all bu t paid for his first film, and allowed him to tu rn imme-diately to a second project, Les Cousins (The Cousins, 195 9).

Like Le Beau Serge, Eric Rohm er's first film, Le Signe d u ion (1959), contr ibuted to thesense of a group aesthetic, for it was based on a screenplay by Rohmer himself and wasfilm ed primarily in the streets of Paris, as Roh mer and his cameram an, Nicolas Hayer,spent the mon th of August follo win g Jess Hahn arou nd the French capital. The film hasall the raw street feeling of some of the Italian Neorealist works idolized by the Cahiers


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group, and in the main eschews plot lines for a kind of slow docume ntary recording of thegradual degradation of the main character. Hahn's peregrinations th rough the differentneighborhoods of the capital, including a painful trek on fo ot from Neuilly to the Ile de laCite, introduce a theme th at was t o become, at least mom entarily, dear to man y of thedebuting Cahiers filmmakers: an intimate portrait of Paris. This was a direct challenge tothe tradition de qu alite filmmakers, w ho had created wh at C. Anger (de Baecque andTesson 199 8: 20) calls 'a decor for seduc tion and ga llantry' o ut of their s tudio versions ofthe city.

Truffaut: from pariah to prince of Cannes

Like Chabrol, Tru ffaut d id no t sit idly by waiti ng fo r his chance, and, like his colleague,he used family money t o fou nd his ow n pro duction company, Les Films du Carrosse(a title that pays homage to Renoir's Carrosse d'or (The Golden Coach, 1952)). FrancoisTruffaut had met Madeleine Morgenstern In the summer o f 1956 and, the follow ing year,convinced his futu re father-in-law, Ignace, to help find backing for his first film. Whenlgnace Wlorgenstern n form ed his daughter's impetuous friend tha t he 'd lined up 'a mere'tw o m illion francs, Truffaut was forced to ab ando n his dreams of a full-length feature an dturn to a short subject, Les Miston s (The Mischief Makers, 1957), based on a story byMaurice Pons (whose expenses-paid visit to t he set ate u p one -eighth of th e film's en tirebudg et). After another 'anonymous' financial intervention by lgnace Morgenstern, thefilm was co mple ted and sho wn at th e Festival de Tours in November 1957, and went onto garner prizes at the Brussels and M annh eim film festivals and a Blue Ribbon award inthe US. Ironically, however, th e success of this first ef for t did n ot carry over to Cannes, forTruffaut's harsh cr~ticisms f th e Cannes choices and jury resulted in his expulsion fromthe festival In 195 8 Furious, Truffau t wrote, 'I 'm going t o toss off a thing so sincere thatit wil l scream wi th truth and be formidably powe rful; I 'm going to show them that truthpays and that m y truth is the only truth ! ' (Arts 652). And so he wo uld !

Unable to attract the supp ort of Pierre Braunberger, one of the more adventurous filmproducers around, Truffaut went back to h ~ sather-in -law to finance his next film, a bitreluctantly to be sure, since the older m an was the producer of such super-productons asHenri Verneuil's La Vsche e t le prisonnier (The Cow a n d 1, 1959), starring Fernandel-exactly the kind o f film mos t reviled by the Cahiers critics. The first step in the m aking ofLes Quatre cen ts coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) was to audition fo r a young actor to playthe lead role. W he n Truf faut saw Jean-Pierre Leaud, he was astonished by the instinctivetension projected by this street urchin, and the collaboration that was to last untilTruffaut's death in 1 984 was launched. Leaud was perfec t for the semi-autobiographical,


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63 Les Quatre cents Coupslow-b udge t project slnce he came from socially d~sadvantaged ond ~t ~o ns~ m ~ l a ro thoseTruffa ut had kno wn as a ch~ ld, nd was obv~ously ntra~n edn the 'art' of actlng

Sh oot ~n g egan In November 1958 In a I~tt l e~xth-floor partment In the rue MarcadetIn Paris, and fr om there sp~l led ut Into the place Cl~chy,where Truffaut ha d spent his o w nyou th Much o f the dialogue of the f~ l m as unrehearsed, Indeed, Truffaut shot the sceneIn the correct~o nalacil~ty here Antolne IS interwewed at length by a 'spycholog~st' ~ t hno prepared text at all No counter-shots of the psyc holog~st ere Included in the or ig~ na ltake, and the result was so stunnlng that Truffaut decided to Include ~t n the f ~ l m ~ th o u tany cuts or tra d~ t~ on alounter-shots For the end of the f~ lm , ruffaut followe d Leaud outonto a beach In a makesh~ftruck cut down for the purpose, Henr~Decae perched pre-car~ously n the hood w ~ t h ~s ameflex barely secured After years of a steady diet ofa r t ~ f ~ c ~ a lnd academic stud 10 roduct~ons, he French New Wave shot as ~fw ~ t h ' c a nd ~ d'camera Real apartments and the c ~ t y f Par~s rov~de dhe sets, and the only actors ~n h ef ~ l murne d o u t to be cameo wa lk-ons by Jean-Claude Brtaly and Jeanne Moreau, w hohappened to be In the ne ~ghb orho od Almost In sp ~ te f themselves, the critlcs fou nd


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tb T H E F R E N C H N E W W A V E$&f Les Quatre cents coups to be every blt as 'true' as Truffaut had angr~ly romised only a. . year previously. The film's selection as the French representative to th e Cannes festival

was sweet revenge indeed-Truffaut had gone from pariah to prince faster than a frog in1. a fa~ ry ale. His vlctory was to be compromised however, by the de ath of his adoptivefather, Andre Bazin, who succumbed to leukemia only one week after shooting hadbegun. In gratitude, Truffau t dedicated h ~ silm t o the found er and intellectual leader ofLes Cahiers du c~ nem a, nd auteur, in th e deepest sense, of the n ouve lle vague.

The New Wave i s christened

By the openlng of the Cannes Festival in 1959, the Inchoate movement tnat was surelynot yet a m ovement had been officially baptized 'La nouvelle vague' by Pierre Billard inCinema58. Billard was reacting in part to the numbers of directors m akin g their first films.Measured purely In numbers of ne w directors, the industry peaked in 1958. Whereasthe number of films made by new directors had averaged sixteen between 1950 and1958, that average more than doubled (to th~rty-three) ver the follow ing four years.Indeed, the press had long been busy preparing the way. In October 1957, Fran~oiseGiroud launch ed a series of articles in L'Express entitled 'La nouvelle va gue', in wh ich sheexamined the so c~ oo gy f youth culture in France-this well before anyone thought toapply the phrase t o the em ergen t cinema. As if to bear witness t o th e reality of the term,Marcel Camus's Orfeu Ne gro (Black Orpheus, 1959) carried off t he golde n palms at thefestival; Alain Resna~s'sHiroshima m o n am our (1 959) was t o have represented France,but was pulled at th e last min ute for politica l reasons. indeed, Resnais's 'Left Bank school',whlch included Chris Marker a nd Agnes Varda, had, unlike the Cahiers group, taken amuch more politically engag ed stance toward s ne w filmmakin g. D espite its withdraw al,Resnais's Hiroshima mo n am our created an explosion o f its o w n for its remarkableexperiments wi th film time and m emory, and its radical ques tioning o f all recognizablec~nem atic iscourses and con tinuity. Resnais spoke of creating a n ew form o f reading,offering the spectator as m uch freedom of imagination as the reader of a novel. Godardpromptly proclaimed Hiroshima 'the end of a certain kind of cinema', a gesture thathelped generate the belief that som ething radically new had ha ppen ed.

Addin g to this myth of th e Ne w Wave, seventeen promising n ew directors organized acolloquium at La Napoule in Cannes to affirm their opp osition t o th e industry's statusquo, wh ile Arts dedicated its entire fall issue to this 'eve nt'. The participants, capturedin a publicity pho to, included T ruffaut, Roger Vadim, C laude C habro l, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques Rozrer, and, hidde n as always be hind his dark glasses, the yo ung Jean-Luc Godard. But if they obliging ly produced a joint statement f or the eager press, they


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could agree only on vague general principles: they enc ountered 'u n desaccord total sur ledetail' (complete disagreement on the details) (Arts, June 1959).

Indeed, when Le Mo nd e published a survey in August o f 1959, ask~ ngDoes the New1 Wave exist?', Claude Chabrol, Georges Franju, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, and several

others bluntly answered: n o. For his part, Chabrol suspected that th e New Wave labelwas merely a Gaullist publicity stun t equating de Gaulle with renewal, and shamelesslymarketing the young directors like a brand of soap. On the other hand, Edgar Morin'ssurvey of the 'Ne w Wave' (Commun ication, June 1961) concluded n ot only that the NewWa ve films wer e resp onsible for a ttacking th e sclerotic, crisis-riddled French film industry,but that they also shared common tendencies, such as unaltruistic heroes, and themes,such as the perils of love. Mor in's approach to 'understanding' this 'wave' is extremelytelling, for his very question about themes and heroes tells us that French film criticismwas still, in the main, mired in literary models, unable to appreciate film as film, unableto address the real changes that were taking place. Andre Bazin's question 'What iscinem a?' and his insistence on analysis of mise en scene and the specific language of filmremained well outside the ken of most film critics. In general, crit icism had n ot caught upwi th cinematic practice. This mig ht well explain why, whe n que ried about a 'New Wave',and ill-equipped to evaluate it in purely cinematic terms, many critics and filmmakersof the time failed to see anything novel. An d yet, from our present perspective, if thereis anythin g other th an statistics that defines the 'New Wave', it is the revolution in filmpractice that would eventually cause a concomitant sea change in writing about filmthat wo uld, i n turn, allow us to appreciate wh at was ne w in the 'Ne w Wave'. The otherexplanation for the g eneral confusion about the label is that the film wh ich, more thanany other, exemplifies the New Wave had yet t o be made.

Godard oins th e frayIf Jean-Luc Goda rd appeared in the photo at La Napoule, i t was because his low-bu dgetshort subject Tous les garcons s'appellent Patrick had included a homage to Truffaut'svitr~olic t tack on the French f i lm industry in Arts. Godard's major contr ibut ion to the'Wav e' began only after the dust o f Cannes 195 9 had settled; yet it IS safe to say tha t noother single film exemplifies wha t is new in the New Wave as completely as A bo ut desouffle (Breathless, 1959) .

Godard h ad g row n u p in a well-to-do French family (a fact th at always surprises onesince he generally looks, as Fr an ~o ise iroud said, as if he' d just stepped o ff an overnighttrain trip spent in a third-class compartment). A candidate for a graduate degree inl~te ratu re t the University of Grenoble, he grew restless with traditional edu cation and


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left Grenoble (as well, he claims, as w al k~ ng ut o f the entrance exam to IDHEC, tho ug hin fact the school rejected him). Rejected also by his grandfather after raiding the familysafe, Godard discovered an adoptive uncle in Henri Langlois at the Paris Cinematheque,an d both a ne w hom e at Cahlers and a n ew social circle, who gathered at the journal'sheadquarters every night after the cinemas emptied. An avid fan of American films,Godard saved enough money to finance his first short, Operation Beton (OperationConcrete, 1954),a documentary about the construction of a dam which the construct ioncompany ended up purchasing. The decisive moment in Godard's film career camewhen the director Marc Allegret introduced h ~ mo Pierre Braunberger, a young producerwh o was eager to assume the risks of financing interesting low-bu dget films. Braunbergeragreed to finance Tousles garcons s'appellent Parick, and Godard's career was launched.Indeed, because of th e prove n success of Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins and Les Quatre ce ntscoups, producers suddenly saw small, lo w-bud get films as having significant enou gh eco-nomic potential to ga mble o n other new directors. In addition t o Braunberger, GeorgesBeauregard had become a friend o f the Cahiers group because of his early support ofJean Renoir, and Anatole Daumann (who was to produce most of Resnais's earlysuccesses) made the significant financial contributions necessary to launch several otherne w directors.

Godard met Beauregard while working as a press agent at Fox, and immediatelygot the producer's attentio n by castigat~ng he film Beauregard had just produced.Beauregard's reaction was to ask Goda rd to w rite a screenplay of H an d'lslande, bu tGodard, unable to comp lete the assigment, asked Truffaut for his screenplay, A bout desouffle. Truffaut had written this story as a sequel to the life of Antoine Doinelle ofLes Quatre cents coups, but later abandoned the project. When Godard approachedJean-Paul Belmon do in a cafe near S t Germain des Pres abou t a role in his film, Belmondowas so confused by Godard's demeanor that he initially thought he was beingapproached for other reasons.

When shooting began, Godard would write the day's decoupage or shooting scriptwhile a t breakfast, and, arriving at th e set, pull a few greasy pages out of his pockets anddistribute them t o the cast. The two concerns that had mo st preoccupied Goda rd as a filmcritic-the documen tary aspect of filming and the inventio n of a pure cinema-quicklycame to the fore In this project. As Goda rd would say, he wante d to film life-to discoverlife in film, and discover film in life-so that cinematic images wo uld func tion as ling erin gtraces of life. His approach t o filming A bo ut de souffle was that of a man discovering anart form as if for the first tim e. It was no coincidence that, whe n God ard later spoke inpraise of Henri Langlois at the Cinem atheque, he began by an eloquent hom age to t heLumiere brothers' first documentary films of Pans.


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O A bou t de souff le

Certainly e v e ry o n e a r o u n d h l m h a d t h e u ne as y l rn p re s sl on t h a t G o d a r d w a s m a k ~ n g tu p a s h e w e n t , a n d a s h e h ~ m s e l f r o t e t o P le rre B r au n b er g erWe are really shoot~ng n a day-to-day bas18 I wr ~t e he scenes whlle breakfasting at DupontMontparnasse When w e view the rushes, the entlre team, ~n cl ud ~n ghe cameraman, flnd thephotography a wfu l Il~terally, egueulasse the word Jean Seberg addresses to the dy ~n g ~c he lPo~ccard t the conclus~on f the f~ lmlBu t I l lke it The Important th~nq S not that things aref~ l rnedn such and such a way, bu t s~rnply hat they get frlmed, and tha t they're not ou t of focusMy b~ gges tob IS to keep the techncal crew as far as possible from the place we're shoot~ng(D ou~ n 989 19-20)

For a mon th, God ard p ush ed Raoul Cou tard a rou nd Paris In a car t , as the la t ter , us lnga hand-he ld camera , cap tu red Be l r r i ondo and Seberg on f l lm espec~ a l l ydesigned fort h l s ou td oo r p ro jec t An d fo r eve ry ca r t ha t Be lmo ndo stea ls I n G odard 's f l lm , G oda rdh lmse l f b reaks a f undame n ta l r u le o f c l nema ' g ram mar ' I n t he f l rs t f ~ ve -m lnu t e egmen t


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of the ft m , Godard will break the 180-degree sight-line rule and wiil m ake jump-cutswithin a scene Shif ting b a c ~ nd io r lh between the back and passenger seats o f thecar, Cobtard's nerxious, subjective ma nipulation of the camera m a ~ e s s acute!y con-sclous of his presence there; indee d, a second camera shot o i the passing car revealshim 'h iding' in the b a c ~eat. Just as M ich e Po!ccard, Belmondo's character, ~mp ro\ ~is eshis every next infraction of the law, Godard improvises an aesthetic rebeilion alongwith him. Bdt both director and actor maKe their allegiance to Hoilywood (and not theFrench film industry) a point o f hon or: Belmond o poses beside movle pub licity shots ofHumphrey Bogart and imrtates his mannerisms, whlle Godard makes a Hitchcock-likecameo appearance to f~ngerhis gangster to the cops and hasten the genre-dictateddeath of his hero . Both aliusions are followed by iris fade-outs to 'signal' their hom age tofilm history.

As if in antrctpation of the wholly discontinuous approach to edit ing he would adoptbeginning w ith he rro t le fou (1965). Godard edited his f i lm witho ut th e usual academtcconcerns for story cont~nuity. hus, the gendarme is seen already crumpling to theground b efor e we hear the shot tha t kills hi m. Dralogues are cut witho ut regard t o rulesof shot countershot gramma r, and scenes are pasted together withou t the usuai narrativejustrfication As Godard tells rt, because he com mitte d the error every frrst-time direc tormakes of crea ting a film I0 0 per cent too long, he ihad to cut ' indiscr~minately' o get thefilm reduced to an acceptable length.

The question that arises repeatedly for the viewer of this f~lm s not, 'What wil lhap pen? '-for, as God ard himself explained, the rules of the genre dictated tha t thehero must die. Rather, the question that returns insistently to our consciousness isBaztn's: 'W ha t is cinem a?' It is no t so much the story (conventional enou gh by Ho llywoo dstandards), nor the characters (for all their existential aimlessness), but precisely them~se-en-scene nd monta ge of this work t hat positions the film as a paragon of NewWave cinema. (For proof of this one has only to compare A bo ut de souffle w ith JimMcBrlde's remake, Breathless [ I9821,o appreciate h ow entirely H ollywo od the story andcharacterizations are whe n returned to conventional film grammar and editing. McBrideso successfully fiattens out all of Godard's revolutionary c~nernatic estures that the filmbecomes nothing more than an emp ty copy of w hat was already an imitative gesture-albeit a rebellious one.) It is not empty posturing, then, for Godard to claim in 1962:'As a crllrc, I already considered myself a cineaste. Today I still consrder myself a critic,and, in this sense, I 'm even more of a critic than before Instead of writi ng film criticism,I make a f i lm into which I introduc e a crittcal dimension.' It is Godard's proto-Brechtiancinematography as much as any other factor that enables us today to understand justho w revolut ionary A bo ut de souffle was by hig hlighting the metacinematic aspect of his


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P O S T W A R C l N E M A

The Parado?;of New Wave Sound

One of the ironies of the hleliv 'Nave revolution in technology was ;hat, by adopting hand -he! d Cameflex cameras t o maximize the reality of the street, the yo ung d ~rectors eprivedthemselves c f the sounds of the stre et. Since th e han d-held camera's nolsy m oto r made livesjpchronized recording virtually imposs~ble, odard would frequently shout his instructionst o his zctors in The mid dle of shootinrj dialogue In the first five minutes of A Bout desouffle,Godard so confuses diegetic and extradiegetlc sounds that the spectator can n o longer tellthe ' real' f r om the ' imaginary' A t one point, Belmondo fi res the gun he has foun d in thestolen car 's glove compartment ou t the car wind ow, bu t the 'authent ic sound' of gunf iredoes no i match the playf ul image. In the same sequence, Belm ondo will turn and tell thefilm's audience, 'Ailez vous faire foutre!' (Up yours!) in flagrant disregard of the rule thatforblds actors from loo king (much less speaking) directly at/to the camera.

Most directors opted to re-record sound on-site wlthou t the camera m otor running, orrelied on an on-site tape recorder or note taker. In two cases at least, this search for realismled to bizarre solutions. When Jacques Rozler fi lmed Adieu Philippine (1963), the taperecorder used on the set turned out to be defectlve and Rozier had to spend five monthsattem pting t o l ip-read from the f i lm's images wha t the largely improvised dialogue m usthave been. Certainly the general tendency of post-sync sound was at odds wi th the imageof the New Wave. But Godard, faced with sound sync l imitat ions, turned th e si tuat ion t o hisadvantage. While m aki ng his short subject Charlotte e t son Jules (1960). God ard h adplanned t o have Belmondo do the post-sync dialogue b ut could n ot afford t o pay his actorfo r thee xtra w ork, a nd so used his ow n voice instead. As usual, Godard turne d carbon in togold: Luc Moul let argues that because of Godard's slightly out-of-sync recording, the wh olefil m takes on a marvelous fantastic quality. Mou llet termed this experiment 'a revolutionaryapproach to cinematic d ia logue w h~ ch enewed the art of fi lmmaking' (Cahiers 106, April1960 ). Thereafter, ho weve r, Godard tended t o film his dialogues wi th his characters turne daway fro m the camera as muc h as possible.

f l l m A b o u t d e s ou ff le , s ~ g n ~ f l c a n t l yn o ug h , w o u l d w l n t h e B e r l ~ n estival's pr ize for mne-~ n - s c e n en 1960 Jean P ler re Melville w as t o say, ' N o N e v ~ ave s ty le exl s ted If ~tw e r et o ex l st ~t ou ld b e pu re l y and slmp ly t he s ty le o f G o dard ' I t was Franqols Truf faut , ho w-e ve r, w h o p a ~ d o da rd h ~ s lghes t comp l imen t ' G odard pu l ve r~ zed h e s y st em a n d , l ~ k ePicasso, made everything poss~ b le ' F rodon 199 5 52) T hls f r o m a m a n w h o a ls o s a ~ d ,' The N ew Wav e w a5 ne i t he r a move me n t no r a schoo l, no r a g roup ~tw a s a quantity, ac o ll ec ti ve n a m e I n v e nt e d b y t h e p re ss t o g r o u p f l f t y o r s o n e w n a m e s w h o b u r s t f o r t h I na t w o- y ea r p e r ~ o dn a p ro fession t ha t had scarce ly accep ted mo re t han th re e o r f ou r n e wname s a year ' (France Observateur , Oc tober 196 1)


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The wa ve crests and recedes

Despite Truffaut s jkepticlsm, three years after h ~ sn~t la luccess at Cann es, Le5 Cahiers ducinema devoted ~ t s ecember 1962 issue to La Nouvelle Va gc ~e , nd IP the fo l low~ngyear, f ~ l m r~t icRaymond Durgnat was catalogu~ ngThe First Decade of the Ne w Wavedesp~te is uncerta~nly s to whe ther t o call ~ta scho ol or a mov eme nt so dlverse were1ts tendenc~es In 196 2 then, Cahiers was officially pro cl a~ m ~n gs New Wave d~rectcrsEr~cRohmer Jacques Rivette whose Paris nous app artie nt (Paris Belongs to Us, 1958 -60)st~tchedogether a 'labyrinth of scenes appearing to obey some Internal but ~nexpllcablelaw, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, co-founder of Cah~ers nd dlrector of the sensual andamuslng L'Eau a la bouche (1959). Jacques Demy, whose Lola (1961) captured thea~mlessness ~ i d ag~ca l plr lt of ten ascribed t o New Wave f~ lm sn gene ral, an d JacquesRoz~er,whose Adie u Phil ippine (1960-62) was halled as the 'parag on' of the N ew Waveby the Cahiers ed ~t or s ho declared 'after th ~ s~ l m ll the others rlng false ' In all, Cahiersl~sted162 new dlrectors of feature f~ lm sAlthoug h they cla ~m ed o have counted onlythose d~rectorswho had made the~ rlrst feature f~ l m fter 1959, they added numerous'precursors' Alexandre Astruc, Jean-P~erreMe lv~ll e, gnes Varda, and Robert Bresson-the latter, well be fore any o f the New Wave directors arrlved, had been experlmentlngwlth clnematlc language In a serles of r~gorously nt i- theatr~cal i lms, cu lm ~n at ~n gn h ~ s1959 masterplece, Pickpocket Th ~s xtenslve l~ s t f precursors ~mpl lcltly ompromised th eNew Wave s clalm to novelty, espec~ally lnce so mu ch of wh at was advanced looked l~ k ea revlsltat~on f the avant-garde spir ~t f L'Herb~er, lalr , and Deluc back In the 1920s

Moreover, novelty for novelty's sake qu~c kly ame under f~ r eTruffaut s nre z sur lepianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), Godard's Les Carabiniers (The R~flemen,1963),and Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes (The Goo d Time Girls, 1960) were all fa~lure s t thebox offlce, and Truffau t wo uld not see another com merc ~al uccess untll Jules et Jim In1962 So numerous were the f~rs t-tlm ers, nd so Inexperienced were the vast majority,that Truffaut was moved to object that the New Wave was merely a quantlty ofunknowns who had rushed' the Industry through the openlng he and the Cahiersgrouphad created The sworn enemy of the ' t r ad ~t ~o nf q ua l~ ty ' hose a celebratory Issue ofCahlers to com plain that the em phas ~s n newness had gone to people's heads, and tha tf~lm s hould n ot try to be new In every aspect but should be anchored to the trad~ tlonalclnema Indeed, by 1963, wl th the exceptions of Godard and Resnals, every other NewWave d~rector ad e~the rmoved on t o less experimental commerc~a l~ l m s r disappearedfrom vlew In any case, Truffaut clalms, by 1962 crtlcs h ad become 'even more ho st~lethan the f~ lm ndus t ry to d~ f f~cu l tl lms (Cahiers 138, December 1 962) But, Truffautcrowed, there IS st111 ometh~ngo be proud of By comparison wlt h Am er~ca n lrectors,


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w e re all intellectuals, so we can take a d~f te re ntack the disc~pline e fol low In our workmakes our f lm s m ore complete and complex [than ti-eir American cous~nsl To be sure,h e r e were a few attem pts at re vivng the Ne w Wave label by co-authorsb~pa documen-tary entitled La Nouvelle Vague par elle-mem e (The New Wave ~n ts Ow n W ords, 1964)included Interviews w ~ t h ew Wavers Godard, R~vette,Rozer, Demy, and Chabrol, andBarber Schroeder's Par15 ~vu ar (Paris as seen by , 1965 ) included shorts by lean-Dam e P olet, Jean Roucn, Jean Douchet, Rohmer, Godard, and Chabrol But Truffaut'sabsence from the latter f ~ l mS symptomatic, and rather than serving as a wan~festo,hefllm served more as the last testa men t of whatever m ovem ent there had been Indeed,the very r ot ,o n of an independem low-bu dget cinematic practice ha d all but disappearedfro m view By 196 8, 90 per cent of box -of f~c e akings In French cinemas was sharedamo ng eleven major French dlstr ~but ors n d seven American ones In other words, lnde-pendent f~l ms ere reduced t o a mere 10 per cent of the market

Legaciesof the NewWaveFrom our present perspectlve, then, the Ne w Wave appears r~ dd le d i th paradoxes: a'group' t hat was no t one; an Insistence on the ne w desp~ te n acknowledged debt bothto class~cHolly wood directors and to French filmmakers of t he 1930s and 1940s; anendorsement of auteurism by many directors wh o didn' t w r ~ t eheir own screenplays; ananti-industry movemen t that co uld no t have succeeded w~ th ou t ~gnif icant overnmentalsupport; a ' revolut~on'witho ut any dlscern~ble ol l t ical doctr ~ne; nd a disdain fo r qualityby young d~rectors,most of wh om rushed to create comm erc~ally uccessful f l lms andthereby hastened a return to th e Industry's status quo Nor can the New Wave be sa~ dohave reform ed mainstream French cinematrc pract~ceHolly wood spectacles a nd tradl-t~ on al rench comedies continued t o d o m ~ n a t ehe French box of f~ cerom 1958 to 1968

Surely the most s~gnifi cantegacy of th e lUew Wave derives fro m Godard's an d Resnals'srad lcal breaks wi th the d om ~n an t ~nema's l lu s~ onf nar rat ~ve eamlessness and visualcontlnu lty They d ~ dot so mu ch Invent a pract ~ce s art~cula te, nd thereby expose, clne-matlc decoupage (c ut t~ ng nd rearrangement of shots) as an ontolog~ callyragmented,d~scon t~nuousiscourse. Godard's jump cuts, self-conscious actors, playful sound track,and ldlosyncratic use of f i lm gramm ar, a nd Resna~s's xperiments w ~ t harrative discourseforeground a meta-cinematic practlce As the Cahiers critics themselves put ~tn an inter-view with Er~c ohmer in 1965:Today the cinema is an art which looks at itself, turns in on ~tselfThe first object of the clneaste Sto ask the questlon what is cinema, wha t has ~tbeen up t ~ low, what can it become' Is ~t venposs~bleo contlnue to make films today w~th out eg~ nn~ ngy ask~ngh~ s uestlon?(Cahiers 172,November 1 9 6 5 )


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- r h ~ s e w s e lf - c on s c io u s ne s s o f c ~ n e r n a t i c a n g u a g e a n d c i n e m a t i c o n to l o g y n o t s u rp r i s -i n g l y c o ~ n c i d e dwith t h e e m e r g e n c e o f s t r u c t u r a l ~ s m , e m i o o g y , a n d L a c a n ia n p s y c h o -ana lys~s n F ra nc e, t o g e t h e r c r e a t l n g a n a p e r t u r e i n c r i t ~ c a l h i nk i ng that h a s ha d a l as t i nga n d p r o f o u n d e f fe c t o n o u r u n d e r s ta n d i n g o f the m e d i u m i ts e lf .

Further readingAndrew, Dudley A ndre Bazin(0xford Oxford Un~vers ry ress, :978) ranslat~on y Serge Grunberg

(Par18 Cahiers do c~ne ma lEd i to rs e 'e to le , 1983) The de f i n i tve b~ography nd interpretation oft he w or k of one of i h ~ost nf lden t ia l voices of the New Wave

De Baecque, Antoine, La Nouvelle Vague (Pars Flammar~on,1998). An ~ nvaluable o l lection ofCahiers interviews w it h the major New Wave directors, Rivette, Chabrol, Truffaut, Resnais,Godard, D emy, and Rohmer.

--and Charles Tesson ieds ) La Nouvelle Vague une legende en qu estion (Par~s Cahiers duc inema 1998) An en t~ re pecla issue of Cahiers devoted t o a re-eva luat~onby members of theo r ~ g ~ n a lrou p as well as younger crl tics Excellent essays on new t echn olog~ es f the N ew Waveand on th e Importance of the stud108 In French postwar p rod uct ~on

Douchet, Jean La Nouvelle Vague (Par18 Hara nicine math eque Franca~se, 199 8) Trans RobertBonanno, The Ne w Wave (New York DAP, 1 999) A k in d of scrap-book of the New Wave gener-ou sly e n d o w e d w ~ t h xcellent ph otogr aphs of al l aspects of the movemen t Includes sectlons onprecursors th e f i lm Industry, the studlo, techn~cal dvances and a b~o graph lcal ic t~onaryofmembers of ti -e movement

D o u ~ n ,ean-Luc La Nouvelle Vague 25 ans apres (Paris Cerf, 1983) Do wn has assembled a numb erof provoca tve evaluatons of th e m ovement, but th e real va lue of th is book 1s the col lect ion ofshor t ln te rv~ews t h New Wave pa r t~c ~pan t sn c l u d ~ n ghe compose r Georges Delerue and cam-eramen Nestor Almendros and Raoul Coutard, plus producers, srreelwrlters, and directors

Durgnat Raymond, Nouvelle Vague The First Decade (Lougbton, Essex M o to n Publ~catrons 1963)lmportant pr lmar~ly ecause of ~ t s a r l y pub l~ca t~onnd the inclusion o f f ~ l m o g r a p h ~ e sf t h ~ r t y - f~ v eNew Wave d i rectors from Jean-Gabr~l lb~coc coo Henr ~ aph~ra tos

Frodon, Jean-Michel, H istoire du c inema fra n~ats, 1: L'Age mode rne du cinema fran~ais:De la nou-velle vague a nos ours iPar is: Fa mm ar~ on, 995) A so ld h~story f the movem ent, wi th evalu-at~on s f the cont r ibut~ ons f the major New Wave di rectors

Hillier, Jlrn (ed.) , Cahiers du cinema: The 1950's: Neo-Realism, Holly wood , The N e w Wave(Cam bridg e. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 198 5). An excellent selection of articles by and Inter-views wit h New Wave d~rectors nd cr i tics.

Labarthe, Andre S , Essai sur leje une cinema (Par~sLe Terra~n ague, 1960) W r~ tt en efore Godardhad released A Bout d e souff le , t h ~ s ssay is remarka ble for the sense of w ha t IS real ly Im porta nti n the N ew Wave and wha t will lastS~c l~e r ,acques. Le Cinema fran~ais, 1 De 'La Bataille du rail' a 'La Chinoise', 1945 -1968 (Par~sRarnsayiC~nema, 990) An ~nvaluable u ide to the h istory of the New Wave, wi th pert inent andperceptive t reatments of many of the f i lms of the pe r~ od

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