The French New Wave and lts

Native Context

The Occupation and Postwar Cinema

During the German Occupation of France, from 1940 to 1944-when Feyder, Renoir,
Duvivier, and Clair were ali in exile-a new generation of French directors emerged,
most of whom had worked as scriptwriters or assistants under the majar figures of poetic
realism in the 1930s. 1 Claude Autant-Lara (1901-2000), who had worked as a designer
for Marce! L'Herbier and as an assistant to Clair, directed a number of sophisticated
period films during the Occupation, including Le Mariage de Chiffon (1942), Lettres
d'arrwur (1942), and the satirical Douce (1943). Autant-Lara's critica! reputation rests
most firmly, however, upon a series of stylish literary adaptations written by Jean Au-
renche (1904-1992) and Pierre Bost (1901-1975) that he made in the postwar era-
especiallyLe Viable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh, 1947; from the Raymond Radiguet
novel),2L'Auberge rouge (The Red lnn, 1951; from Aurenche), Le Blé en herbe (The
Ripening Seed, 1954; from Colette), Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1954;
from Stendhal), and Le Joueur (The Gambler, 1958; from Dostoevsky). Writing as a
team, Aurenche and Bost became specialists in tightly scripted films; they also worked

f h o f n was the founding of the Institut des Hautes

l. Perhaps the most important film event o t e , ee~b~e~ºin1943.This ovemment-subsidized film school
Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) by Mareel L He d ti gellas in history and aesthetics. lt
toda a- . . . t of film pro ue on as w
y ouers professional trammg m every aspee h fil . dustry and its high standards have
'd · h' t O nter the Frene m m ,
proVI es certifieation for persons wis mg e azin FrenchCinemaof the Occupationand Resistance :
attracted students from all over the world. See André B N Yí k- Ungar 1981)· see also Evelyn Ehrlich,
TheBirth of a Critical Esthetic, trans. Stanley Hochman (Oew ºt~ ·n(New,York-Columbia UniversityPress,
einemaofParadox:French Filmmakingunder the Germand F'lm ccupa io .
Study in France(Ann Arbor, Mieh.: UMI
l985), and Edward Lowry, The FilrrwlogyMovement an i
ResearchPress, 1985). . 985 d the Italiandirector Marco
al.
2· Remade in separate versions by the Au st r 1 an director Seott M urray m 1 an
Bellocehio in 1986.

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 lts Native Context
Wave an d
432 The French New
13.1 Jeuxinterdits (RenéClément,1952): BrigitteFossey,
GeorgesPoujouly.
closely with the director René Clément (1913-1996),
whose first film had been a neorealistic account of the
activities of the French Resistance, La Bataille du raíl
(The Battle of the Raíls, 1946).
Clément also co-directed La Belle et la bete (Beauty
and the Beast, 1946) with playwright Jean Cocteau and
made the suspenseful anti-Nazi thriller Les Maudits
(The Damned, 1947). But his two greatest films of the
postwar era, both written by Aurenche and Bost, were
the poetic antiwar drama Jeux ínterdits (Forbidden
Carnes, 1952) and a strikingly evocative adaptation of
mla's L'Assomrrwir entitled Gervaise (1956). These films
won multiple intemational awards, as did Clément's
comic masterpiece Monsieur Ripois (The Knave of
Hearts), shot in England in 1954. Afteiward Clément
tumed to big-budget intemational coproductions like Is
París Bumíng? (1966) andRideron the Rain (1969), most
of them distinctly mediocre. 3
Jean Grémillon (1902-1959), who had made impor-
tant films in the silent era (Un Tour au large, 1927;
Maldone, 1928), produced his greatest work during the
Oc~upation-Lumíere d'été (1943), a Renoiresque por-
tnut of the decadent French ruling classes written by
Jacques Prévert, and Le Ciel esta vous (English title: The
Woman Who Dared, 1944), a beautiful film about a pro-
vincial woman who breaks the world record for long-
distance flying with the help of her husband and the
people of her town. After the war, Grémillon turned to
the documentary but continued to exercise g t · fl
. rea m u-
ence upan French cmema as president of the e· é
m ma-
theque Fran~aise (see p. 441).
13 •2 La Bel/e et la bet~ (Jean Cocteau and RenéClément, :
19461
JosetteDay, Jean Mara1s.
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), who had confinedhimseli
to writing scripts during the Occupation (for JeanDelan-
noy' s modernized version of the Tristan and lsolde
legend, L'Étemel retour [The Eternal Return, 1943];
for Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
[The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, 1945];see p. 434 ),
retumed to filmmaking in the postwar years. Perhaps
more than any other figure, he incamated the literary
tendency of French cinema during this period. In 1946
he wrote and co-directed (with Clément) an enchantingl y
beautiful version of the Flemish fairy tale La Belleetla
bete (Beauty and the Beast) in a visual style basedupün
the paintings of Venneer; it stands today asperhapsthe
greatest example of the cinema of the fantasticin the
history of film. 4 Next, Cocteau directed two filmversions
of his own plays, the satirical Ruy Blas (1947)and us
Parents terribles (English title: The Stonn Within,19481 ·
f · gle
ª domestic tragicomedy set within the confines ª O 5tl1
.h
room. WIt Orphée (1950), a modero version 0
. f the
3 Lºk
• 1 e Autant-Lara, Clément continued to contributetradltional
nar
·
didJeail
rative films to the French cinema well into the 1980s.So,too,
Delannoy (e.g., Bemadette, 1988), also discussedon thispage. ¡Ji.ll
4· B_eautyand the Beast was remade in 1979 by the Slovak su:f~k
JuraJ Herz (b. 1934), mixing French and Middle Euror¡ArtiS t
tradit" ( 1 d u01te<
ion~ see Chapter 16). Americanversionsincu eª directed bf
B~film directed by Edward Cahn (1963), a 1976 telefilrn e 0f ¡g!jl
Fielder Cook, and Disney's award-winning animated featurrdoco1,11·
(?aksryTrousdale, Kirk Wise). On Cocteau himself,see Edgac cteoú.,,..
nn ky's fil J . tl eoll
0
m ean Cocteau-Autoportrait d'un inconnu v
Port · if
rait o an Unknown Man, 1984).
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 The Occupaf ion an d Postwar Cinema 1 433
heus Jegend , eocteau retumed to th
orp . fLe e surreal
rnythic reg1onso Sang d'un poete (Bl00 d ' psy-
c 10
1
) to create
h'1s most brilliant film H d ofaP oet,
30
¡91 Les Enftmts terribles (The T~rríbela apt~d his
p ay . e Childre
cted by Jean-P1erre Melville) for the scre . n,
díre . h· en m 1950
ave the cinema 1s final artistic statem .
afld g' , ent in Le Tes
~ont d 'Orphee (The Testament 0 + Orph -
tat,w . . . . 'J eus, 1959), a
surreahstic fabJe that 1s replete with personal symb oIs and
attempts to suggest the relationships a mong poetry
that
inyth,death, and the unconscious. '
Jacques Becker (1906-1960) is another figure wh0
...,erged
e,.. during the Occupation . and came to p ro minen. ce
in the postwar years. As ass1stant to Renoir from 1931 to
1939, Becker tended . to direct films that cut across th e
-ditional class barners of French society . Gou~. Mmm .
u• . . 13.3 Casque d'or (Jacques Becker, 1952): Simone Signoret (in the
Rouge(Enghsh _title: It Happened at the Inn, 1943) is title role) and friends.
a realisticportrait ~f peasant life; Falbalas (English title:
PorisFrills,1945) 1s a drama set in the Parisian fashion
houses;Antaine_et Antoine~e (1947) is a tale of young markable, but his second, Le Corbeau (The Raven, 1943),
)ovein a working-class milieu; Rendez-vous de juillet established him as the chief progenitor of French film
(1949)offers a sympathetic study of the attitudes and nair. This darkly pessimistic tale of a town destroyed by
ambitionsof postwar youth; and Édouard et Caroline poison-pen letters is a masterpiece of psychological sus-
(1951)examines young married life in high society. But pense, but because it was produced by the Nazi-owned
Continental Corporation and seemed to be anti-French
Becker's masterpiece is unquestionably Casque d'or
(although it was actually misanthropic) , both Clouzot and
(GoldenHelmet!Golden Maríe, 1952), a visually sump-
his coscenarist, Louis Chavance (1907-1979 ), were
tuoustale of doomed love set in tum-of-the-century Paris
accused of collaboration and briefly suspended from the
andwritten by Becker himself. Cast in the form of a
French film industry after the Liberation . Clouzot , in
periodgangster film and based upon historical fact, fact, was apolitical, but his films typically dealt with the
Casque d'ar is a work of great formal beauty whose visual brutal, the sordid, and the neurotic , and his entire career
textureevokes the films of F euillade and engravings from was marked by an aura of scandal. His first postwar film,
labelle époque. Touchez pas au grisbi (English title: Quai des atfevres (English title: Jenny Lamour , 1947) was
Honorarrwng Thieves, 1954), adapted from an Albert a violent thriller tl1at transcended its genre by creating
Simoninnovel, is a sophisticated tale of rivalry between Hitchcockian suspense. In Manan (1949) , Clouzot mod-
contemporaryMontmartre gangs; it started the vogue for emized the Abbé Prévost's eighteenth-century classic,
gangsterfilms and thrillers that typified French cinema Manon Lescaut, setting it in the post-Liberation conte~i
inthe late 1950s (for instance, the American émigré Jules of the Paris black market and the illegal emigration of
Dassin 's Rififi,1955).After making three commissioned Jews to Palestine. And with Le Salaire de la peur (The
filmsof uneven quality, Becker directed his final master- Wages af Fear, 1953),6 Clouzot achieved a masterpiece
piece,LeTrou(The Hole!The Night Watch, 1960), shortl~ of unrelenting horror and alienation in a film about a
beforehis death in 1960. Like Bresson's Un Condamne group of down-and-out Europem1 expatriates trnpped in
ªrnorts'estéchappé(A Man Escaped, 1956;see PP·435), a miserable South Americim town who are diiven by
:hi~
film,set entirely in a prison cell where five men plot
n ill-fated escape, is a restrained exploration of loyalty, 5. Becker's son Je11nemerged 11s1111important fib•m-e in the l9S0s with
freed0 m, and human dignity. 5 L'Eté meurlri er (Que Deadly S1111111wr, H)83), a supt>riorndaptation of
Sébostien Jnprisot's suspense thriller. mipted by the author.
. Anotherimportant director whose career began dur-
ingthe Occupation was Henri-Georges C Iouzo t ( 1907- 6
_ Remmle by the:•Americ1111 direc·tor\ illimn Friedkin in 19i7 as Sor-
cerer. Tlie Wa~l'Sof Fl'<lf w1.1s cut for its Americim rele11s
e from 148 to
1977) r A D pont and
A. ' a 1ormer scriptwriter for E. · u 10
5 ."ninutes: the missing lootnge w1L~ restort.'(1in II l!:.l9lrerelense.
natoleLitvakat UFA. Clouzot's first feature was unre-

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 Native L..OrH"'"'
W ve and lts L'itt le Beach ¡n

...-
434 1 The French NeW a . J ~;such a Pretty
(R.ípttU,t, ' "48)
• •• .
l
P ag~ es (English title: The Cheats, 1950), aUWti , él.l\d
\1lli(W ,, 1 Maneg . d (1920-1987) . The former la\\/\, ttel\by
1ERN OIL Jacq (1909-1989) was ano th er popular ·di,er A.lldté
ues S1gur
Cayatte . the late 1940s. But h'1s major clairectorof
fil
dark rns in s upon his . e
1our ...JUdi c1'al" films sern
. to Sig.
nin.canee re St . . nptedl.
aak-Justice est faite (Justice Is Done uy
eh ar1es Sp , ( , 195())
me s taus des assassms We Are All M de ,
Nous som U1< ~
ant le déluge (Befare the Deluge, 1953) ers,
1952 ), A v . , and4!
. r noir (The Black File, 1955)-a series of se •l·
Dossie
n the French legal system. 8 The same g
ª"un
attac ks u Po period
. d the best work of Jacqueline Audry (lC\t\
witnesse iJ\J&..
1977), who collaborated closely with her husband,the
. twn"ter Pierre Laroche (1902-1962), to prod
13.4 Le Salaire de la peur (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953): Charles scnp . uce
Vanel.
tasteful adaptations of work by Sartre (Huis clos[NoExit
1954]) and Colette (Mitsou, 1956) . '

despair and greed to undertake the suicidal mission of
hauling nitroglycerine for an American oil firm.
Alwaysa meticulous and professional craftsman in the
French studio tradition , Clouzot became increasingly
erratic as the 1950s progressed . The film that confirmed
his intemational reputation, Les Diaboliques (Diabolique,
1955), is a brilliantly manipulative exercise in horrific sus-
pense involving a complicated murder plot in a boarding
school. Llke Hitchcock 's Vertígo, it was adapted from a
novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas N arcejac. Similarly,
Le Mystere Picasso (The Picasso Mystery, 1956) is an
ingenious 75-núnute study of Picasso at work shot in
desaturated color and CinemaScope. But Les Espions
(The Spies, 1957), set in a psychiatric clinic, is a failed
attempt to combine the bitter naturalism of his earlier
films with surrealistic fantasy. La Vérité (The Truth, 1960)
is a professional but glib film cast in the form of a murder
trial and narrated in flashbacks. A projected film on the
destructive effects of jealousy, L'Enfer (1964), was
scrapped beca use of Clouzot' s ill health, 7 and he was able
to complete only a single feature before his death in
19:7-~e controversia! and somewhat experimental La
Pnsonmere (The Prisoner, 1968), which retums to the
perverse and pathological mode of Le Co~beau t o exam-
.
me the dynamics of sexual degradation.
Mining the same dark vein as Clouzot in th
· d Al e postwar
peno was Yves légret (1907-1987) broth d 7. L'Enfer was fi ali
. , eran for-
mer ass1stant to the veteran director Marc Ali' ( Ch ªb rol m 1993.
egret 1900-
1973), who became something of a specialist 1. fil . 8. Cayatte made La
with Dédée d'Anvers (Dedee 1947) Une s· ~ . m noir
JO1ie petite
' ' i to terrorists.
R0BERT BRESS0N ANO JACOUES TATI
Clearly, except for film noir, the prevailing mode ofpost-
war French cinema was literary adaptation, whichcaused
French films to become increasingly verbal and theatri-
cal. It was against this tendency-identified as "thetra-
dition of quality" ("la tradition de la qualité") by Fran~is
Truffaut and the other critics writing in Cahiersdu
cinéma-that the New Wave reacted in the late 1950s
and 1960s. In fact , the war had not produced a breakwith
cinematic traditions in France as it had in Italy andother
European nations, except for the innovative work ofRob-
ert Bresson and Jacques Tati.
Robert Bresson (1907-1999), a forrner scriptwriter ,
was the more important of the two. His two Occupation
films-Les Anges du péché (The Angels of Sin,1943),
written with the playwright Jean Giraudoux, andLes
Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Baisde
Boulogne, 1945), freely adapted by Bresson andJean
~oct_eau. from a story by the eighteenth-century writ~~
ems Diderot-established Bresson as a serious aocldis
ciplined artist within the "scenarist," or literary, tradition
of French cinema. But in Le Journal d'un curédecamd
pagne (The Diary of a Country Priest, 1950),adapte
. b CJaude
. n Y made, from Clouzot's oriuinal scnpt. Y
o·
. lerni
C'»
film00 th Raisond'état (Reasonsof State)in 197B
, aPo Jes
e corrupt p cti f . 'ts ¡1f11lS 5
ra ces o the French govemment ,n1

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• Le¡ournald'un curé de campagne (Robert Bres
13·' du Nicole Maurey son, l950):
c1aude Lay , • which took him severa! years to complete, Tati plays a
fro!D the novel by Georges Bemanos, Bresson displayed a
bighl y personalized style whose psychological realism is
predicatedupo~ an absolute aust:rity of acting, dialogue,
¿n
andmise-en-scene_. of Bresson s later films display this
austerityand precis1on of style, which has led sorne critics vague, wacky, middle-class Frenchman who goes to spend
to callhim a classicist, although he preferred to be
thoughtof as a realist practicing close to the borderline of
abstraction.His masterpiece, Un Condamné a mort s'est
échappé (A Man Escaped, 19.56), concerns the arrest,
escape,and recapture of a young Resistance fighter dur-
íngthe 0ccupation, and it takes place almost entirely in
thecondemned man' s cell. Most of Bresson' s subsequent
films-Pickpocket(19,59),Le Procés de Jeanne d'Arc (The
TrialofJoan of Are, 1961, which, like Dreyer's film, is
based upon the actual trial records), Au hasard Balthasar
(1966),Mouchette(1967), Un Femme douce (A Gentle land and works as an executive in a plastics factory. The
Creature,1969), and Quatre nuíts d'un réveur (Four humanistic irnpact of the satire is not unlike that of Clair' s
Nights ofa Dreamer,1971, an adaptation of Dostoevsky's
novellaWhite Nights)-were derived from literary
SOurces and dealt with humanist themes. Others are more
pessimistic.Lancelotdu lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1976)
offersa dark, ascetic vision of a Camelot that has outlived
its 0wn ideals. In Le Viable probablement (The Devíl
f,robably, 1977),it is contemporary society that has out-
ivedits ideals and its promise. L'Argent (1983), based on
~ shortstory by Tolstoi, is a film devoid of all psychology;
it is about a man' s irreversible descent into crime ªnd
degradationand shared the Cannes Grand Prix for Best
Directtonwith Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia in th e year
ofits
· release. All of Bresson's aki I
films are pain 5t ng Y
The Oc:cupati on and Postwar Cinema 1 435
crafted attempts to bring to life the spiritual dilemmas of
tbe race through the moral struggles of individuals, which
makes Bresson a kind of contemporary Carl-Theodor
Dreyer. And, indeed, André Bazin often suggested that
Bresson, more than any practicing director, had suc-
ceeded in fusing the values of the silent cinema with those
of sound.
Jacques Tati (b. Jacques Tatischeff, 1908-1982), a for-
mer music-hall entertainer and pantomimist, became one
of the international cinema' s great comic talents in the
postwar era, rivaling such masters of the silent film as Max
Linder, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. In his first
feature, ]our de Jete (Bíg Day!The Village Fair, 1949),
French postman who is seduced by a documentary into
employing sophisticated American postal-service technol-
ogy in his small village, with disastrous results . As
in all of Tati's films, the humor, which is largely visual,
is achieved through scrupulous planning and brilliant
mime. 9 In Les Vacancesde M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holíday,
1953), Tati created a new comic character, Mr. Hulot, a
his holiday ata seaside resort in Brittany. Hulot's misad-
ventures there are represented to us as a series of meticu-
lously worked-out sight gags, in which things simply
"happen" to the characterwith no particular logic or cause.
With Mon ancle (My Uncle, 1958), his first film in color,
Tati turned to the more serious vein of satire. Here,
H ulot' s traditional and somewhat archaic lifestyle in an old
quarter of Paris is contrasted to the antiseptic and mecha-
nistic environrnent of his brother-in-law, Arpel, who lives
in an ultrarnodern house in the city's new suburban waste-
Á nousla liberté (1931) orChaplin'sModern Times (1936),
although its appeal is totally unsentimental.
9. JourdeJete, which took prizes at both Venice and Cannes , was orig-
inally shot in a three-color additive lenticular process patented as
Thomsoncolor that proved to be undevelopable in postproduction . For-
tunately, Tati had simultaneously shot a black-and-white backup vers~or
of the film, and this was ultimately cut together as the release pnnt
Had it been released as intended, Jou-rdeJetewould have been one o
the first French features in color. In 1987, it was discovered that th,
· · al 15,000-foot color negative had been preserved by Tati's daugli
ongm ..
ter, th e film editor Sophie Tatischeff (whose credits mclude her father
.
Traficand Parade),and it has since be_en restored at ~e Euroc1tel lal
in Joinville. (Interestingly, the restoration cost approXImately $517,00
whereas the original was produced for $36,000.)
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 . contt::I'•
lts Nat1ve
Wave an d
436 The French New ..
X OPHULS
MA . fi re working in French cinel"h.
aJor gu
Another m h had a profound influence on th 1e
"'ª1nt~
donew o eNt!I
1950s, an _00 that succeeded him, was MaxÜph·· v
Wave generati ·mer 1902-1957). Ophüls was 11~
Ü pen 11e1 ' a(;
(b. Max P h d directed films far UFA between er.
1
man Jew who . a to power in 193 3 (D·ie verkauüe B930
·tl r's nse
H 1 e d B ·de 1932]; Liebelei [19331).Forth ra1¡¡ :J<
and
B rtere e next
[The ªears
h
e
ri
m
'
ade films in Italy, the Netherlands
. , and
seven Y where he ultimately became a c1tizenin
1938
France, r d to flee to Hollywood when Fr ·
l ··I was iorce anee
Op m s N . ·n 1940 and after four years of anon
r 11t O the azis 1 ' . )1Jl.
1e
. he was n fi ally able to make a senes of stylish m ¡
eo.
ity,
d
p
s for ara
mount: The Exíle (1947), Letterfrorn
an
13.6 JacquesTati as Monsieur Hulot in Mon onde (JacquesTati, rama nr. man (1948), Caught (1949), and Tl1e Reek.
1958).
Unknown vvo hi
t ( 1949) which are among sverybestfihns
less Mamen ' h··¡ d ·
Returnmg . to France in 1949, .Op u s entere the period
of his greates t Creativity ' making four elegant, masterfu¡
films in succession between 1950 and 195~-La Ronde,
Tati's next film, Playtime (1967), took him three yea~s
. Madame de · · · ' and Lola Montes. Ophülshad
Le p laisir,
to complete and was shot in color and 70mm PanaVI-
sion with five-track stereophonic sound. Using the full always wor ked within the studio system, so that the sub-
resources of the widescreen format to create spectator .
1ect ma tt e r of his films-often. light
. and operetta-like-
..
involvement, Tati offers in Playtime a series of quietly was never as important to him as visual style. And lt ISfar
humorous vignettes about a group of American tourists their dazzling mise-en-scene that Ophüls's last fourfilms ,
who come to see the "real" París and end up experiencing all photographed by the great French cameraman Cluis-
a space-age city of steel, glass, chrome, an~ pl~ti~. tian Matras (1903-1977), are most remarkable.
Widely regarded today as a modernist masterp1ece, it 1s La Ronde (1950) is an adaptation of an Arthur
not a film of belly laughs, but of sustained, intelligent Schnitzler play set in tum-of-the-century Vienna. Itsten
humor, and it clearly represents Tati's finest achievement. separate episodes posit that love is a perpetual round-
But Playtime was a multimillion-dollar commercial fail- about in which one partner is regularly exchangedfor
ure, 1 and since he had financed it himself, the director another until the pattem comes full circle, likethe
was nearly bankrupted. To recoup his losses, Tati made movements of a waltz, only to begin again. This unbro-
Tra.fic(Traffic, 1971), a minor Hulot film that comments ken circle of affairs is presided over by a master of rer-
upon the auto manía of modem industrial society. His emonies who manipulates and comments on the
last work was Parade (1974), a children's film made for
behavior of the characters, becoming a surrogate for
Swedish television that featured Tati performing panto-
Ophüls himself. Le Plaisir (English title: HouseofPlea-
mimes at a circus show. After this, he developed the sce-
sure, 1952) is derived from three Maupassant stories .
nario for another Hulot film to be called Confusion but
linked by a narrator· they illustrate the theme that ple ,i-
was unable to find backing for it. A painstaking craftsman ' · . Like
who planned every detail of his films far in advance of Sure may be easy to come by but happiness 1snot.
production, Tati made only five features in his entire all of Ophüls' s work, the film is marked by meticulous
career. Nevertheless, he was a master cinematic humor-
ist, whose concept of comedy was almost purely visual,
and he deserves to be ranked with the greatest of the 1 I ¡·· to ¡OS
silent comedians for the breadth of his humanity and the ·. n an _effort to salvage the film, Tati reduced it froni ~ ¡51i i1rs
'.nmutes for European distribution· for distribution in the Uiutet_ t ¡o,
restrained brilliance of his comic achievement. 1972
m · Playtime was further red~ced to 93 minutes .\ll d rclr,w,,.
35mm monaural format.

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 1 he
13.7 Le Plaisir(Max Ophüls, 1952): Simone Simon.
attentionto period detail and by an incessantly moving
camera.In one famous sequence, the camera circles the
exteriorof a brothel time and time again, never entering
theset but peering voyeuristically through windows at
signilicantdramatic action taking place within. In
Madame de . . . (English title: The Earrings of Madame
de··., 1953),also set at the tum of the century, Ophüls
constructsyet another circular narrative that rotates
around a central axis of vanity , frivolity, and lust. Here ,
~e passageof a pair of earrings from a husband to his
Wifeto the husband's mistress to the wife's lover and
final!
y back to the husband again constitutes a single per-
fectrevolution in the roundabout of infidelity . The char-
acter
5 are ultimately shallow because ever ything m
·
~fadarnede . .. is subordinate to its aesthetic design. As
1
tomirror
· the movement of the waltzes on th e soun d
~;ck
,the camera whirls and pirouettes continuously to
o owthe film's principals through its glittering period
deco fal · vers10 .
wh¡r, suggestingthat life is itself a kind O w tz m
chali of us are caught up while the music plays.
Occupation and
Postwar Cinema 1 437
Lola, Montes (1955) is
OphüI· ·
generally considered to be
wo k C s s masterp·
. th
iece, e consummation of his life's
sper t· once1ved
. bY its
· producers as a big-budget super-
cace 1 m Et
. t . as manco1or and CinemaScope with an
m emational cast Of st .
lif, f ªrs, 1twas based on the scandalous
e O a mediocre mneteent · h -century dancer who be-
came
. h the m· t f
is ress O the composer Franz Liszt and dur-
mg t e revolutions of 1848 , of Ludwig I deposed king , of
Bavaria Sh fi ali d '
ki · e n Y en ed as a circus performer selling
~~s to eam her keep . Ophüls cared nothing far the
su Ject, remarking of Lola herself, "Her role is roughly
tbe sa~e as that of our pair of earrings in Madame
de· · · · That is, he merely used her story to create a daz-
zling exerc1se· m · al sty1e, and Lola Montes became one
· VIsu
of the most intricate, opulent, and elaborate films to
a~pear on the French screen since Abel Gance's Napo-
leon (1927) . lronically, Ophüls was initially opposed to the
use of CinemaScope, but his sense of visual patterning
was such that he tumed Lola Montes into a stunning exhi-
bition of composition far the widescreen frame . He fre-
quently broke the horizontal space of the screen with
vertical dominants and framed shots through arches, col-
umns , and drapery. He learned to compase close-ups by
balancing both sides of the frame , and at other times-
as during the circus scenes-he would fill the entire
CinemaScope frame with significant dramatic action. The
film begins and ends within the circus tent, where the
ringmaster introduces Lola's act by recalling the circum-
stances of her past life, which is then represented on the
screen in a series of achronological flashbacks. Ophüls
uses color nonnaturalistically throughout the film, espe-
cially in these flashback sequences, where each is tinted
according to its prevailing emotional tone . Finally, the
camera seems never to stop its circular tracking around
sorne invisible axis, in or out of the tent, making the cir-
cularity of things seen on the screen a metaphor for life
itself . As Andrew Sarris has remarked, "With Ophüls it is
movement itself that is .emphasized rather than its ter-
minal points of rest."
As with Intolerance (1916) and Citizen Kane (1941),
the narrative technique of Lola Montes was so uncon-
ventional that audiences stayed away from it. In response,
its producers, the Gamma Company, first_cut the film
from 140 to ll0 minutes, and finally re-edited the story
in chronological sequence for release in a 90-minute
· n still the film's commercial failure was so com-
,
plete that Gamma was eventually bankrupted by it,
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 . Context
d lts Nat1ve
438 1 The French New Wave an

lnfluence of
the Fifties
Documentary
Movement and
1ndependent
Production
By 1955, French com
mer.
ci al cinema was approach.
ing stagnation beca
use
many filmmakers whohad
emerged during the 0ccu.
pation were finn¡,
ensconced withinthestudi ~
system or working on big-
budget spectacles and
13.8 Lo/a Montes (Max Ophüls, 1955): Martine Carol. intemational coproduc-
tions. The cinematic indi-
vidualism of Bresson and
and it seems likely that Ophüls's death from a rheumatic Tati, and also of Cocteau, offered the succeeding gener-
heart condition in 1957 was hastened by the mutilation ation of French directors examples of how film couldbe
of his masterpiece. In 1969, however, the original version used as a medium of personal expression; and Ophülshad
was reconstructed and rereleased, to great critica! forecast the possibility of a purely audiovisual language
acclaim. for the screen . But the major stylistic influences uponthis
The key to Ophüls 's style is his mastery of the long next generation of filmmakers carne from the French
take and, especially, of the continuously moving camera. documentary movement of the 1950s, which wastheir
Ophüls was also a genius at composition within the training ground, and from the films of independent direc-
frame, and the inRuence upon him of both Gennan tors working outside the studio system of production.
Expressionism and French pictorial lmpressionism was The documentary movement can be said to have
profound. In his passion for decor and his obsession with begun in 1946 with Georges Rouquier's Farrebique ,ª
the sensuous surfaces of reality, Ophüls most closely
lyrical feature-length documentary about peasant life0~
resembles Josef von Stemberg . In his cynicism and
ª farm through the four seasons .2 Jean Grémillon (LeSr.x
worldly wit, he is clase to Emst Lubitsch. That his films
Juin a l'aube [The Sixth of ]une at Dawn, 1945])and
are devoid of content-a charge frequently Ieveled
Roger Leenhardt (Les Demieres vacances [TheLastHol·
against both von Stemberg and Lubitsch-is quite true
if we mean by the tenn verbal or conceptual substan ce.'
iday, 1947]) both made countless short documentarles
th roughout the 1950s on art and on the lives of greatin~º·
But as the New Wave generation was to argue and to
demonstrate time and again' the substance of cmema · But th e master of French documentary cinema duoog
is audiovisual, not verbal, and it exists on a level of
discourse-like that of the circular tracking sh ost m . 2. Thirty- . ds fron1the
Lola Montes-where perception and concept u alº1zation . . seven years later Rouquier produced , With fun . .r0,tt
U .S. National E d ¡ Biqu ep
become one . (lgs 3 ), wh · n owment for the Humanities, a seque' ningd>Jli"
. ich focuses on the new generation of the same fan
munity.

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 lnfluence of the Fiff D
ies ocumenta
ry Movement and lnd
thiS period was Georges Franju (l 9 l2-l ependent Production 1 ...
987
· ·mnalfihnmaker who was deeply infl ), a totally
oJ1b- uenced b e
e rnressionism and has often been call d Y erman
¡;,Xr . b . . e a surrealist
F ranJU had een working m cinem ·
a smce 1937 wh ·
he made a 16mm amateur film with H . ' en
. fir . fi enn Langlois
1
f{owever, us st ma1or lm was Le Sang des b"etes (The·
h
8/oodof t .e Beasts, 1949) . , a brutally gra Ph·ic d ocumen-
tar)' short about th e daily activity of a sla ht h
. . b b ug er ouse in
aq uiet Pans1an su ur , whose butchery w asma d e d ehb- .
erately resonant of the horrors .
of the Naz·1 d eat h camps .
E11 fassant par la Lorrame
. (Passíng by Lo rrame,
. 1950)
depictedthe steel mills of that peaceful reo-i fi
. .
consummg the lives of the men who worked th
oἼas umaces
. al,J_ "bl h em. In
Hóteld'.eS mv w.es, poss1 y is finest film , F ranJu . tumed 13.10 Nuit et brouillard(Alain Resnais,1955).
an ostensibly . objective . account of the F rene h W:ar
Museummto a devastating . antiwar statement b yexposmg .
the human suff enng that underlies the myths o f h ermsm · their faces onto the head of his own disfigured daughter .
andglory enshrined by that institution. Other important His Pleinsfeux sur l'assassin (Spotlight on the Murderer,
Franjushorts were Le Grand Mélies ( 19.52) and Monsieur 1961) is an atmosph eric thriller adapted from a novel by
et MadameCurie (1953), documentary tributes to the Boileau and Narc ejac . Franju 's next two films were adap-
great pioneers of modero cinema and modem science tations from Fran~ois Mauriac: Thérese Desqueyroux
respectively.In 1958 Franju directed his first feature, L~ (1962) and juclex (1963), an hommage to Louis Feuil-
Tétecontre les murs (English title: The Keepers), a half- lade's twelve-part serial of 1916. Franju made only five
other features-Thomas l'imposteur (Thomas the Impos-
documentary, half-surrealistic account of a sane man who
ter, 1965), Les Rideaux blancs (The Whit e Curta-ins,
is committed to a French lunatic asylum; the film is often
1966), Marcel Allain (1966), La Faute ele l'Abbé Mouret
citedas a forerunner of the New Wave. The grisly horror
(The Sin of Abbé Mouret , 1.970), and L'Homm e sans vis-
filmLes Yeux sans vísage (Eyes wtthout a Face, 1959;
age (Man withcntt a Face, 1974)-all but one of them
released-cut and dubbed-in the Uníted States as The
intens ely poetic visualizations of literary works , which
HorrorChamher of Dr. Faustus) concerns amad doctor
have little in common with the style of th e New Wave
who kidnaps young girls in a futile effort to transplant that his own documentarl es help ed to create.
Alain Resnais (b. 1922), whose fi.rst featur e , Hiro-
shirrw,mon amour (1959), becam e th e clarion call of the
New Wave, was another important figure in the Fr ench
docum entary movement. He made docum entar y short s
for the first eleven years of his caree r, beginning with a
series of Alms about art-Van Gogh (1948). Gauguin
(1950), Guernica ( 1950)-an<l prog ressing to Nuit et
brouillard (Ntght and Fog, 1955), a prufu11ndlydistmbing
meditation on the horrors of the Nazi <le ath camps and
on th e way tim e anc.l me mory affed our perception of
th em, writt en by Jean CayruP with an original score by

3. Cliyrol (I,, 11:111)

ls II fi'rnnch novolist anti scriplwriter wliu wus him-
Helf depurted to tlie cumps._Thc titlu ancl cuntrolllng mctaphor of H •s-
nulH'sfilm wus borruwed lro111Poe,m de la ,mil i:l tlu /Jroulll1ml, u
volurne of poetry un thc expcrlence thut Cayrol publishcd 111l!J45. H
Jater wrote the script of Resnals"sma.~terpiec , Muriel ( 100.1).

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 d lts Native Context
The French New Wave an

. . Toute la memotre du rrwnde (The. MemortJ

Hanns E1sler d" 1.0
of the World, 1956), a study of the books "impnsone al
the French National Library, has a s1mt · ·1ar tempor
theme as do most of Resnais's features. h
' .
Other figures assoc1atedWI 'th th d
e ocu mentary s ort
. ·oal
in the 1950s were Chris Marker (see p. 471), an ongt .
and highly personal fi.lmmakerwho would later orgaruze
the radical cooperative, La Société pour le Lancement
des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON), for the production of
Loin du Vietnam (1967) and similar polemical work; the
ethnographic fi.lmmaker Jean Rouch (see PP·471- 72),
who became the apostle of cinéma vérité in the 1960s (he
invented the term by translating Dziga Vertov's Kino-
pravda into French for his coproduction, with the soci- ~ 3_11 Le Doulos (Jean-PierreMelville, 1962): Jean-Paul

ologist Edgar Morin, Chronique d 'un été [ Chronicle of a Belmondo.

Summer, 1961]); Frédéric Rossif (1922-1990), who spe-
cialized in compilation films (Mourir a Madrid [To Die in
Madrid, 1962]); and Agnes Yarda (b. 1928), a former pho-
tographer whose first feature , the influential La Pointe-
Courte (1955), is discussed below (see also p. 464).
The example of independent production outside of the
traditional studio system was another important influence
upon the emergent New Wave generation. Jean-Pierre
Melville (b. Jean-Pierre Grumbach, 1917-1973) was a
vastly significant figure in this regard. A lover of cinema
from an early age, Melville founded his own production
company in 1945. His first feature , Le Silence de la mer
(The Silence of the Sea, 1947), eamed him the admiration
of Cocteau , who commissioned him to direct Les Enfants
terribles in 1949. The commercial success of Quand
tu liras cette lettre (When You Read This Letter , 1952)
allowed Melville to purchase his own studio and move
into totally independent production. The result was the
much-admired gangster film Bob le fiambeur (1955), a
highly personalized work whose production methods-
location shooting, small crew, use of unknown actors (ali
borrowed , of course, from neorealism)-became the
model for New Wave filmmakers. Melville's work itself
became increasingly commercial after he directed Léon
Morin , pretre (Léon Morin, Priest, 1961), a star vehicle
for Jean-Paul Belmondo, but his fascination with the
iconography of the American gangster film and the
underworld of urban crime caused him to produce a tril-
ogy of popular gangster films in the 1960s that are among
the most admired in the genre-Le Doulos (The Finger
Man, 1962),Le deuxiemesouffie(SecondBreath, 1965)
and Le Sarrwurai' (The Samurai, 1967).
Another independent production that foretold the
N ew Wave-and that sorne critics have called its first
manifestation-is Agnes Varda's La Pointe-Courte(l95.5 ).
This film about the dissolution and reconstructionofa
marriage set against the backdrop of a small fishingvillage
was produced by a collective of crew and actors.It was
edited by Alain Resnais and is considered to be a direct
antecedent of his own Hiroshima, rrwn amour(1959 ).
The drama of the husband and wife is highly stylizedand
"literary," but the day-to-day life of the villageis pre-
sented in semidocumentary form. (Yarda apparentlygot
the idea of using two counterposed structures fromread-
ing the first French translation of Faulkner's TheWild
Palms in 1953.) 4
It was the early films of Roger Vadim (1928-2000 ),
however, that contributed most to the economicdevel·
opment of the New Wave. The spectacular commerci~
success of his independently produced first feature , Et
Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman
, 1956
),
demonstrated to the stagnant French film industrytbat
young directors and new themes could attract Iarge audi
·
ences. A visually sumptuous production in widescree~
and color, Et Dieu créala femme was a sensitiveexaJIII
nation of the vagaries of amoral youth set against tbe;·
urious background of St . Tropez. It starred Vadirn 'sv e,
¡g1i), 1
4
· See Bruce Kawin, Faulkner and Film (New York:U~g:arkt>í ....
:)~6-4 9. According to Kawin, Yarda,Resnais,andchns wve.as
3
' disti:~nds-~ere part of "the Left Bank group" of the N~~eir¡ns pi-
. t from the Cahiers group." The former drewmuchO eJrh1·
ration from d . re Ulore
· l d mo errust literature whereasthe latter we
s1vey evoted to film as film. ,

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13,12EtDieu créa la femme (Roger Vadim, 1956): Jean-Louis
Trintignant,
BrigitteBardot.
BrigitteBardot, and featured a number of explicit lave
scenes , which made it an intemational hit. In subsequent
films,such as Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liai-
sons, 1959), Et Mourir de plaisir (English title: Blood and
Roses , 1960), La Ronde (English title: Circle of Lave ,
1964-a remake of the Ophüls film), Barbarella (1968),
andPrettyMaids All in a Row (United States, 1971),
Vadim 's commercialism and exploitativeness increased,
buthe remained an impeccable craftsman and elegant
stylistof the widescreen color film. 5 Moreover, it was
V:d
· more than any other single figure m
. the Frene h
.ªim,
cinema
, who opened the doors of the industry to his gen-
eratio °
n f filmmakers and provided the econom1c. JUS
. ti'-
fication
for the N ew Wave.
Astruc, Bazin, and
Theory:
Cahiers
du Cinéma
l~ili . .
ca eoretical justification for the N ew Wave cmema
,\s:efromanother source: the film critic Alexauclre
ruc(b. l923), who published a highly influential article
1 441
in L 'Ecranji ranc;aise
. (
no. 144) in March 1948 on the con-
cept of the ,
e .. camera-stylo, whkh would permit the cin-
ma to become a means of expressíon as supple and
s" b tle as that 0 f ·
wntt en language" and would therefore
accord film , k
ma ers the status of authors, or auteu rs.
Astruc·s nofJOnwas to b reak away from the tyranny of
narrative
l in O r der to evolve a new form of audiovisual
~nguage. He wrote : "The fundamental problem of the
cmema is h ow t o express thought . The c-reatíon of this
language has preoccupied all the theoretídans and writ-
ers in th e h is
' tory of cmema,
· from Eisenstein clownto the
scriptwriters and adaptors of the sound dnema ." Like
Bazm,. Astruc questioned· the values of classical montage
and was an apostle of the long take, as exemplified in the
work of Mumau. Astruc later became a professional
director after apprenticing himself to Marc Allégret
(1900-1973), but his own films (Le Rídeau cramois i [The
Crimson Curtain; English title : End of Desire , 19521 and
Une Vie [A Life, 1958]) do not attempt to realize the ideal
of the caméra-stylo. Following the example of Gerrnan
Expressionism , Astruc's films tend to be highly stylízed
elaborations of visual imagery that mal<e excessive use of
mannered compositions and camera angles.
Astruc was succeeded as a theorist by the vastly influ-
ential journal Cahiers du cinéma (literally, "cinema
notebooks "), founded in 1951 by André Bazin (191~
1958) and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (1920-1989 ), which
gathered about it a group of young critics-Fran~is
Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard , Claude Chabrol , Jacques
Rivette, and Eric Rohmer-who were to become the
majar directors of the New Wave. These young men
were cinéphiles, or "film lovers." The y had grownup in
the postwar years watching great American films of the
past and present decades (many available for the first
time only when the German Occupation ended) as well
as classical French films at the amazing Cinématheque
Fran~aise in París, the magnificent film archi ve and pub-
líe theater founded in 1936 by Georges Franju and Henri
Langlois to promote cinema study and cinema culture in
France and throughout the world. During the Occupa-
tion, Langlois kept the enterprise in operation secretly at
5. Vadim's adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereusesmodernized Chod-
erlos de Laclos's controversia! 1786 novel, setting it in contemporary
Paris and Deauville. In 1988, a period version was filmed in France by
the British director Stephen Frears (in the same year V.idim himself
remade And God Created Woman in the United States with Rebecx:a
De Momay in the Bardot role); and in 1989 Milos Forman directed a
French-American version entitled Valmont.
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 d lts Nat ive Context
442 1 The French New Wave an 1954 began by attacki
(0 o· 31) for January ' . ng the Po8
great personal risk, and afterward, th rough AO dré Mal- . .
"tradibon of quality"-that 1s, the commercialscenl\,,, .ar
raux, minister of culture, he obtained a large government st
b tra dibon
. ofAurenche and Bo , Spaak, and dire,,. '-lOrs
ªl'is
t
subsidyfor it. Todaythe Cinématheque is the largest pu - . Clément , Clouzot, Autant-Lara, Cay tt st1ch
fil as C 1air, h h . ae.
lic film archive in the world housing over 50,000 ms, Yves Allégret, with its e~vy_ emp ahsison plot and ~~d
three theaters and a muse~m in the Palais de Chaillot Th key figure in th1s11terary/t eatricalci 1.11a
,
, h logue. e b . nellla
devoted entirely to film history.6 lt was Langloisw O pre- . twriter the director emg merely "th \Vas
V' nd the scnp ' . ,, h .. e gentl
served the works of Griffith, Keaton, Canee, igo, ª h added the p1ctures. To t ese littérateu e,
Renoir for the postwar generation of cinéphiles and intro- ::7r -W,,c:néma de papa ," Truffaut counterpos: · ~d
duced them to the then-unrecognized genius of directors . , d'auteurs " in the work of such French . un
like Ingmar Bergman and the great Japanese masters ~:::rs as Canee , Vigo, Renoir, Cocteau, Becke;;:ter.
AlciraKurosawa and YasujiroOzu (see Chapters 15 and d Ophüls and of numerous American dire t res.
18). Under Langlois's tutelage, these young men carne to son, an ' h d e 0rs-....
love film and desperately wanted to become filmmakers b oth maJ·or and minor-who
d
.ª h
someho_w _managedto
al make personal statements espite t e restnctionsimposed
themselves, but they found the French commerci cin- them by the studio system. Sorne of the Ame.
ema inaccessible to them because of the powerful influ- upon k k ncan
ence exerted by the trade unions. Since they knew more Choices-Welles, Hitchcoc , Haw ali
s, Lang, Ford, Nich .
about film than any other generation in history, based on olas Ray, and Antbony Mann , masters of mise.en ,
the experience of actual viewing, they became critics and scene-made perfect sense. Otbers-Jerry Lewis,Otto
theorists instead. Preminger, Roger Corman-were based less on thequal -
The Cahiers critics had two basic principies. The first, ity of their films than on evidence of their personaldirec -
deriving from Bazin, was a rejection of montage aesthet- torial control. And the unqueS ti Oning allegiancethatthe
ics in favor of mise-en-scene , the long take, and compo- Cahiers group gave to the figures in its pantheon made
sition in depth. Mise-en-scene , the "placing-in-the-scene," many skeptics wonder whether one form of iron·dad
is probably best defined as the creation of mood and dogmatism had not simply been exchanged for another .
ambience , though it more literally meaos the structuring But for ali its deficiencies (and a proneness to fanaticism
of the film through camera placement and movement, and cultism seems to be a major one), the auteurtheory
blocking of action, direction of actors, etc.-in other does offer a valuable schematic model for interpreting
words, everything that takes place on the set prior to the the filmmaking process and goes sorne way towardsolving
editing process. Integral to the concept of mise-en-scene a very basic methodological problem of film criticism :
is the notion that film should be not merely an intellectual that is, to whom or what does one attribute cinematic
or rational experience, but an emotional and psychologi- creation? Furthermore, the Cahiers critics were ableto
cal one as well. The second tenet of the Cahiers critics, partially vindicate the auteur theory by becomingfilm-
derived from Astruc, was the idea of personal authorship makers themselves and practicing it.
that Fran~is Truffaut expressed in a 1954 essay entitled The New Wave's challenge to the "tradition of qualit y"
"Une certaine tendance du cinéma fran~ais" ("A Certain was economic as well as aesthetic. Under the system that
Tendency in French Cinema") as la politique des auteurs. prevailed from 1953 to 1959, govemment aid was
Tlús "policy of authors ," christened "the auteur theory" awarded to productions by the Centre Nationaldela
by the American critic Andrew Sarris, states that film
should ideally be a medium of personal artistic expression
and that the best films are therefore those that most
clearly bear their maker's "signature"-the stamp of his
6 · Although a warehouse fire in 1980 destroyed sorne 7,00oof
Fren~h titles, the Cinématheque today has access to the State Fhi:
t
or her individual personality, controlling obsessions, and Archive (les Archives du Film , Centre National de la Cinématogra!' th
cardinal themes. The implicit assumption was that with at Bois.d'Arcy where, since 1977 the govemment has mandated d,;
deposit of one print of every new French release. See RichardRoujse
each successive film an auteur grows increasingly profi-
Passionfor Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathequ e FraioiS ,'
cient and mature of vision, an assumption that is not (New .York: Viking, 1983), Michel Ciment, "The Legacyof La11; aod
1
always borne out by fact. Amencan Film 12, 3 (December 1988): 17-19, and Glenn Myre [,iSll
Truffaut's essay, which appeared in Cahiers du cinéma Georges P. Langlois, Henri Langlois: First Citizen ofCinemo ,trans,
Nesselson (New York: Twayne, lOOS).

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 TheN ew W ave : First Films 443
, atographie (CNC, founded 1946 )
C¡¡1erTl ·a1 di on the b .
·on so potenti rectors need d as1sof
t1tatJ ' e an est bI·
feP d of success, and very few new p ª 1shed
fecorterthe industry. But in 1959, the
toefl
1::p 1
e lco~d hope
s re ating t O ·¿
fi]JTJproductions were changed to allow first ai
forc.. ded by the state on the basis of a b . films to
be¡un su m1tted .
enabling hundreds of new filmmak scnpt
~ 0 oe, ers to bec
. ownproducers and creating the eco . ome
the1r nom1c context
e New Wave. Moreover, the intemati al
forth fil ük on commer-
._1 success of ms e Les Quatre cent 8
c1íll d coups (see
..,) whích was pro uced for $75 OOO d b
beº""'
1 . . . . ' an rought
000 for 1ts Amencan distnbution right 1
$500 ' s a one, dra-
rna ·callyincreased the number ofprivate p ro d ucers will-
tJ
. gto finance new work. Thus, for a while at least, until
!fl
e failuresmounted, Truffaut's concept of un cinema . , l l.13 Jean-Pierre Léaud in Les Quatres cents coups (Fran~ois
th Truffaut, 1959), the first Antoine Doinel film.
d'auteurswas reaüzed
. f in France by placin g th e control
oftheconception o a film in the same hands that con-
trolled the actual production. Chabrol to tum for a while from the New Wave mode to
more conventional thrillers like Landru (English title:
Bluebeard, 1962) and Le Scandale (English title : The
TheNew Wave: First Films Champagne Murders, 1966).
Nevertheless, 1959 was the annus mirabilis for the
Thefirst films of this "new wave" (nouvelle vague)7 of N ew Wave because in that year three of the major figures
Frenchdirectors were independently produced dramatic of the movement released their first features. Fran~ois
shorts, many of them shot in 16mm and subsequently Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), made
blown up for 35mm exhibition. Jacques Rivette's Le Coup for $75,000with a loan from his father-in-law when the
duberger(Fool'sMate, 1956), Fran~ois Truffaut' s Les director was twenty-seven years old, is a lyrical but wholly
Mistons(The Mischief-Makers, 1957), and Jean-Luc unsentimental account of an adolescent delinquent, shot
Godard'sTausles garfons s'appellent Patrick (All Boys on location in Paris. Dedicated to the memory of André
Bazin (who died on the second day of shooting) and pho-
AreNamedPatrick, 1957) ali fall into this category. But
tographed in Dyaüscope (a French version of Cinema-
the first feature-length success of the New Wave is
Scope) by the talented N ew Wave cinematographer Henri
generally acknowledged to have been Claude Chabrol' s
Decae (1915-1987), the film is consciously evocative of
firstfilm,Le Beau Serge (The Handsome Serge!Bitter
Vigo's Zéro de conduite (1933). lt won the prize for Best
Reunion , 1958), though Varda's La Pointe-Courte pre-
Direction at Cannes in the year of its release, as well as
cededit by three years. While still a Cahiers critic,
the New York Film Critics award for Best Foreign Lan-
~~abro)(b. 1930) shot Le Beau Serge, about the reha- guage Film in 1959.8 (In the same year, the highly coveted
b,btationof a village drunkard, on location with funds
provided by a small inheritance. The success of Le Beau
Serge enabled Chabrol to follow it with Les Cousins (The 7. The tenn was apparently first applied to the phenomenon by critic
Cousíns, 1959),an ironic study of sexual intrigue and Fran~is Giroud of L'Express and traveled almost immediately to the
murder d ,!r
Th. set against the backdrop of Parisian stu ent we .
United States, where the movement was sometimes facetiously referred
to as the "new vague," owing to the perceived difficulty of its films.
· ~ inffuenceof Hitchcock became increasingly apparent
1n,4D . 8. Tbe title derives from the Frencb expression "Faireles quatre-cents
¡ oubletour (English title: Leda/Web of Pass-ion, coups,"meaning to get oneself into a lot of trouble by "raising hell," so
99
th:), ª highly stylized tale of pathological murder, and to speak. Originally 94 minutes, Les Quatre _cents ~ps w_asre-edit~
byTruffaut to 101 minutes for the Annecy Film Festival tribute to him
l~arkly satineLes Bonnesfemmes (The GoodWomen, in 1967; for the same event, he reduced Les Mistonsfrom 26 to 17
ofp.)'.~füm about the lives (and, in one case, the deatb) minutes.
clris1an
shopgirls; its huge commercial failure caused

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 d lts Native Context
444 The French New Wave an . • ...v -

k of another
Cann es Golden Palm award went to t h e wor I
tor Marce
unpracticed ' unconventional Frene l1 direc ' also

r ••
Camus's Orphée noir [Black Orpheus, 1958]). !t waski d
the first film in Truffaut's Antoine Doinel senes, ª n
. . I tarring Jean-
of continuing cinematic autob10grap 1y s r
. ~
Pierre Léaud (b. 1944), an actor who physically resernbles
Truffaut. The series includes Antaine et Colette (a con-
tribution to an intemational compilation film entitled
L'Anwur a vingt ans [Lave at Twenty, 1962]), Baísers
volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968), Domicíle conjuga! (Bed &
Board, 1970), and L'Anwur en fuíte (Lave on the Run,
1979).
More remarkable in structure and theme was Alain
Resnais's first feature, Híroshíma, nwn anwur (1959),
which, like Nuít et brouíllard, examines the relationship
between time and memory in the context of a terrible
atrocity. With a brilliant script by the novelist Marguerite
Duras (who was to become an important director herself
in the 1970s) and cinematography by Sacha Viemy (1919-
2001) , the film concems a love affair between a French
actress working in Hiroshima and a J apanese architect, in
the course of which both recall their memories of the past
war in Asia and Europe. Resnais maintains the counter-
point between present and past by continuously shifting 13.14 Belmondo in A bout de souffle.
narrative modes from objective to subjective and, in sev-
era! extraordinary sequences, by combining dramatic
pendent of the industry. (Happily, many af the firstNew
footage af the cauple making lave with dacumentary
foatage af the aftermath af the Hiroshima blast. Hiro- Wave films, including Breathless, made a great dealof
shima, nwn anwur, like Les Quatre cents coups , was a money, which temporarily insured the future of the
great cammercial success and conferred further prestige movement.) Modeled on the American gangster filmina
upan the New Wave by winning the New York Film Crit- simultaneous spirit of parody and hommage, Breathle ssis
ics award for Best Fareign Language Film in 1960. about an amoral young thug on the run who is finall
y
The thi~d impartant New Wave film of 1959, Jean-Luc betrayed to the police by his American girlfriend (delib-
Gadard's A bout de souffie (Breathless), was in manyways erate shades of Pépé le Moko, 1937, and Quaidesbnnn
es,
the mast characteristic and influential film of the move- l938), and it contains virtually every major technic~
ment. Breathless, which was written by Godard after a characteristic of the New Wave film. These includeuse
stary by Truffaut and shot by cinematographer Raoul of shaky, handheld 35mm camera shots,1 locationshoot·
Coutard (b. 1924) in four weeks for less than $90 ,000 ,9 1S •

de dicate d to Monagram Pictures, one of the Iarger Amer-

9· Brealh less was filmed on location in Paris and MarseillesfrornAut
ican B-filrn studios af the 1930s and 1940s , w h'1ch were 17 to September 15, 1959, and released on March 16, 1960 · Truri.\p
farnaus for ~heir ability to tum out tightly paced films on wrote the ongm · · al story in 1955-56 and his name also appearsas se
B ,at/1·
short shootmg schedules and poverty-line b u d gets. T h·s lwriter. in th e ere dits. Tlus ·aIbacking for. rtdela
. was a ploy' to gain financ1
. 1
was prec1sely the ideal of the N ew Wave (o t l e~s smce Les Quatre cents coups had just won the GrandprtGX oJJ
. . . r, a east, of m1se-en-scene at Cannes (the scenario was actu·aliy wn·ttenby r jii11
1ts clommant Cahzers branch) but instead f
' o maki·ng alone) B ¡1z
· reat ess was remade in 1983 by independent
directo 11
-eti
ch eap films in arder to make a quick profit th N
. , e ewWave
McBrid ·h
e t e, wit ª new script by McBride and L.M. Kit ar
e son1
directors made cheap filrns in order to be bl on emporary Los Angeles. 1
í.!] . .
11 ms at ali smce their productions were ne
ª e to. make
. 1 F ¡co11t.if<
cessan 1y mde- ~ odr~he tracking shots of Breathless , e.g., Godard pushec
oun m a wheelchair.

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 The New Wave: Origins of Style 1 445
,,tural lighting, improvised plot and d·a1
.11
<1
0 n,. di 1 ogue d
1 ' t sound recor ng on location With b ' an
i~ . es that were e Iectronically synchr ~~k~ ~ump cut, in which a section of a single continuous shot
1
11.11
. d pe is eli~inated and then what remains is spliced together,
111!1C • oruze With the
ciunera. . creating a completely nonnaturalistic ellipsisin the action
Butthe most imp~rt~t technical characteristic of the and calling attention to the director' s power to manipu-
.., Wavefilm was 1ts Jagged, elliptical style of diti late ali aspects of his medium. This radical elimination of
r.Je.,. d hi h e ng,
,11hich einploye a g percenta~e of jump cuts Within transitional scenes (of what Hollywoodcalls establishing
andmisinatches betwee~ sc~nes m order to destroy the shots-medium or long shots of exteriors that indicate
,;a]andtemporal continwty of the vieWingexp . changes in dramatic space), and even of continuity within
spal• . enence.
AsBreathless begms, for e~ample, we Witness the follow- the shot itself, was thought extremely confusing when
. equence of events: M1chel, the young hood ,set alsa Godard and his peers first practiced it on a large scale,
,ngs
carin Paris with the help of his French mistress and and yet it is no more than a logical extension of the dis-
speedsout into the cou~tryside alone; he passes at high coveries of Mélies, Porter, and Griffith that cinematic
narrative is by its nature discontinuous or, as Eisenstein
speedseveral other veh1cles on his side of the road; he
discovered, that spatial and temporal continuity in the
brieflycontemplates picking up two female hitchhikers·
cinema resides not on the screen but in the viewer's mind
and, to occupy the time, he talks to himself and to th~
as it makes the connections that the images on the screen,
audienceabout a variety of subjects. Next, he passes a
by their arrangement, suggest. In the conventional con-
¡argetruck at a road construction site and suddenly finds
tinuity, or "invisible," editing style of classical Hollywood
hirnself pursued by two motorcycle cops; he pulls off the cinema, orderly narrative transitions were felt to be cru-
roadinto a small wooded area and pretends to be having cial. As late as 1958, Orson Welles was forced by Univer-
cartrouble. One cop passes him by, the second spots him sal to shoot additional establishing scenes for his Touch
andpulls into the wood. At this point, Michel reaches of Evil so that his fast-paced editing would not confuse
intothe car, grabs a revolver, and guns clown the cop. He contemporary audiences. Today, elliptical editing and the
thenflees across an open field and hitchhikes back to jump cut have passed into our conventional cinematic
Paris . In a conventional commercial film of the day- lexicon so pervasively that it is not unusual to 6.nd them
French,American, British, or Italian-this sequence in abundance in any television series. But in 1959 ellip-
wouldhave been rendered in many separate shots fully tical editing was thought radically innovative, and it
depictingeach of the actions. In Breathless, the whole became paramount among the stylistic conventions asso-
sequenceis conveyed in only several brief shots: alter- ciated with the New Wave.
natingclose-ups of Michel and his mistress on a Paris
street;a quick take of the car theft at eye level; medium-
closeshots, taken from the passenger' s seat, of Michel The New Wave: Important is what the audience
says, not what the critic say
driving the car; medium-long shots, which pass away rap-
idlythrough the windshield, of the road and later the Origins of Style
hitchhikers;a shot of the motorcycle cops appearing in
These conventions, like all film conventions, sprang from
thereaiview mirror, followed by one of Michel pulling
two sources-theoretical conviction and material circum-
offthe road and opening the hood of his car as the cop
stances (not necessarily in that order). The material cir-
discovers him; an extreme close-up of the revolver, fol-
cumstances were these: the young directors of the New
lowedby a medium-long shot of the murder; a long shot
Wave were the firstjilm-educated generation of filmmak-
of1ivuc
' · hel running across a field; an d a me di um shot of
ers in history. They approached the cinema from the
hi~arrivingin París as a passenger in the backs_eat of an experience of having viewed almost the w~ole of its his-
Ull!dentifiedcar. Later in the film, Godard begms many at Langlois's Cinématheque Fran~aise and from
scene · h
5 WJ.ta h uge disonenting
. . . e 1ose-up an d only later tory all d · · all ·
having written about it theoretic y an cnhc y m
cuts,or pulls his camera back to reveal the context of tbe Cahiersdu cinéma for nearly a decade. When they finally
action h· '
-w 1ch completely reverse d
conven °
ti' nal practice
came to P
ractice cinema, they knew more about the
.
oftheday. art form and less about the practica!
me di um as an
Mostradical of all, however, was Godard' s use of the

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 d lts Native l.-OflL"'"'
446 1 The Frene h New Wave an . . e editing and camera styles of the Newh ,
d disrupt1v h , fil YVa,..
aspects of production th an anyone whO had ever ma . e to us constantly' "Look, t ere s a . m being lll.t<lee.b.·,.
films before them. Consequently, they made ma:y ;::;s- befare your eyes," ªnd t~ emph~IZe the püint adir"'&iit
takes that their low budgets and tight shooting se e fil es hi t chnical crew will sometirnes appear · '
the Soviet m- or s e . if JUsti~,1
would not pennit them to correct. Llke d h the frame of a narrative sequence, as · by ªCCiden 'll:
makers during the film-stockshortage that followe t e · d us that whenever we watch a film a i._ t, to
Id t remin . 'li:llldfu¡
1917 Revolution, the New Wave directors cou . ~o arti·stsare controlling the process irnrnediatelyh~. nd of
lli ti al editing ~y 0 th
afford to retake shots, so they relied on e P e borders of the frame. e
to conceal techmc . al def,ects on the screen. Jump cuts, for f h
The theoretical position o t e New Wavefil
example, were a means not only of creating perceptual is therefore that film must constantly call attenti:~:ets
dislocation in the audience, but also of restoring botched process of its own making and to the medium·s~
scenes by excising sorne actor's or cameraman's bluucler I thus the unparalleled · -..11
unique anguage- ' . cmematicé,.L
from the middle of a take. But there were sound tbeo- explosiveness of the New Wave, 1ts emphas· '-"«1,
retical reasons for the stylistic conventions of the New ~:aoical" cinem~tic tricks like the jump cut, th:s_u_~n
Wave as well as budgetary ones. If location shooting with 0- d d I 1
ns-1n
handheld cameras was inexpensive, it was also totally at and iris-out, decelerate an acce erated motion,and
odds with the fluid, studio-bound cinematography of the optically violent camera mo~ement-all devicesofwhich
contemporary commercial film. If jagged editing and film and no other medium 1s capable. In this sense, the
jump-cutting were useful in concealing defective footage, New Wave represents ª retum to Mélies and hiscon.
they also eliminated the smooth transitions that permit spicuously cinematic brand of conjuring . It envisions film
an audience to forget that it is watching a film-that is, as a special kind of magic that requires of its viewers a
a consciously crafted product of human imagination uniquely cinematic way of seeing in arder to compre -
rather than sorne "found" reality. hend. On the other hand, the New Wave reachesback
The psychological effect of these conventions-and equally to Lumiere because its most characteristictech -
they must be considered calculated effects by the direc- niques are essentially documentary in practice. In fact ,
tors as well as functions of economic necessity-is to cinéma vérité, the chief documentary mode of the 1960s
establish aesthetic distance between the audience and the and 1970s, constitutes an application of New Waveshoot-
6.lm. New Wave films constantly remind us that we are ing and recording practices to real events ratherthan
watching a film, and not the reality that a film inevitably staged ones. Furthermore, Jean-Luc Godard, the most
resembles, by calling attention to their "6lmicness"-that innovative and radical director to emerge from theNew
is, to their artificially created nature. The abrupt and, Wave, has virtually rejected narrative cinema in favor of
above ali, obvious manipulation of our perception in these cinematic "essays" on ideology and social praxis.New
films, through the use of the jump cut, hand held cam- Wave cinema is aware of this paradox because it isaware
eras, and so forth, jolts us out of our conventional involve- of its history and conscious of the mediating pasition it
ment with the narrative and our traditional identification holds between the narrative and documentary traditions
with the characters, who are often less recogruz·able as vvest em film. Th e allusions toan d "quotations
of 111 · "from
characters than as actors playing characters. This is films of the past (sometimes called hommages) witb
because New Wave cinema is, in a sense, self-reª~ive hi h N anner ·
'Ju:,"" w c ew Wave films are replete are no mere m .
cinema, or metacínema-film about the process and isms, but rather testaments to the critical-historical c1n·
nature of film ítse]f. According to the New Wavecinéastes grew
ematic consciousness out of which the movement ·
(]oosely, film artísts), the conventional cinema had too
fait~fully ~nd for too lo~g reproduced our normal way of
seemg thmgs through 1ts studiously unobtrusive tech-
niques. The invisible edíting and imperturbably smooth Major New Wave Figures
camera styles of the commercial cinema of the 1930 h .. WaveiO
1940s, 1950s, and much of the 1960s were designed t~ T e cntical and commercial success of the NeW 0e
1959 was so great that between 1960 and 1962 overdi~n ~
draw the spectator's attention away from the fact that he
hu n dre d new French directors were able to findfull
. ¡¡11
or she was watching a consciously crafted artifact. But the 111
· first features-an
for th eir extraordinary thing

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.J.
·¡ll« 1~
-tf' ·
-
fonner~· so conseivati ve · In some
1
·rect · r of a comrnercial hit , like Godard cases, the
¡¡ Idproduce for a less fortunate friend
,, 1L • - I n many oth
..,.,ch commerc1al studio would p d
1 f ,.
11 mu~~~
· e up "ith a smash hit like Breathle
,01t1 _ ss on a B-film
daet. In fact, the climate of creative and
bn i::- • th
enthusiasm dunng . ese two years was such th at virtuall
oe with the will to do so could obt,,;~ fi
zU l~-o •u.u
• e1 to 01ake a low-budget film, though man
111
11 •
(lireeting lacked e1ther the talent or the di . lin
w .
..; e1 their_proJects to a successful conclus·ion. Th e com-
b,,..o
11
ercialfailures of the less •talented began en masse .
111
lg¡p - , and by 1964 . the .studios had been so b adly disap-
ioted b, well-rntentioned amateurs that
Po e,· for fust features was more difficult t pro. uction
0100 , _ o raise t han
it had been m the 1950s. By this time ' the N ew W:ave as
a rollecthe phenomenon was over, and the French film
industrv - had resumed its conventionally n·o·
ButFrench cinema continued to be dominated creatively
by the handful of young cinéastes who had initiated the
movement and who emerged from it as distinctly major
figures-Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Res-
oais, Claude Chabrol-and by a small group of sophisti-
catedbut less spectacular talents, such as Louis Malle,
EricRohmer, Jacques Demy , Jacques Rivette, and Agnes
Varda.
FRAN<;OISTRUFFAUT
Fran~oisTruffaut (1932-1984), the most commercially
successfulof the post-New Wave group, was able to
maintainhis independence by forming his own produc-
tioncompany, Les Films du Carrosse (1957), named in
hommage to Renoir's Le Carrosse d'or (1952). His major
cinematicinfluences were the American B-film,film noir,
andthe work of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. He
followedLes Quatre cents coups (1959) with what he
called"a respectful tribute to the Hollywood B-film,"
Tirezsurle pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) based
on an American gangster thriller (Down There) by tbe
novelistDavid Goodis. The film concems Charlie, a timid
honky-tonkpiano player in a sleazy Parisian bar who, we
leamin· a series of extended flashbacks, was once th e
r,eat concert pianist Edouard Saroyan. He and his girl-
neu<l,Lena, become involved with two gangSt ers who
;e after his younger brother, and the couple is forced to
ee the . all kills hº15 employer
city when Charlie accident y
Major New Wave Figures 1 447
in
th self-defens
b e. The film ends with a shoot-out between
or Truffaut, e rothers and the gangsters at a farmhouse
.
. in the
ers, snow
. m
' _ which Le . kill d
na 1s e . Criticized on íts relea<;efor
' g to · mood t·rom comedy to melodrama to
1ts radical sh1·fts m
tragedy, . and for the mampu . lativeness
. of. its clisjointed
commercial narrative style, Shoot th e p·iano Player was nevertheless
.
Truff:aut' s B realhless-a quintessentially New Wave film
. Y
nanc1alback-
h replete with b·izarre visual
fil . puns, allusions to other
Y w o tumed
ms, ª mixture or "explosion"of genres, and all the self-
~pe~
reflexive anticonventions of the movement. Like Les
?1'atre ~ent coups, it was stunningly photographed by the
10
mnovative New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard in
Dyaliscope.
d .
Truffaut's third feature, fules et fim (1961), stands as
a tribute to the influence of Renoir and the French lyri-
cal tradition.2 As in Renoir's work, the basic themes of
fules et f im are friendship and the impossibilityof achiev-
oid cont ours.
ing true freedom in love (or, as Truffaut himself put it,
"monogamy is impossible, but anything else is worse").
Adapted from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, this beau-
tiful and sensitive film concems two close friends-one
French, the other Austrian-who fall in love with the
same woman (Catherine), are separated by World War I,
and afterward attempt to live together in a ménage atrois.
Intellectually sound, the situation proves emotionally
impossible for all three , and at the end of the film Cath-
erine drowns herself with Jim, leaving Jules to cremate
and bury them. The film is striking in its re-creation
of the period through natural settings and in the remark-
able perfonnances of its principals-especially Jeanne
Moreau3 as the manic, enigmatic Catherine. While it
appropriately avoids the self-conscious pyrotechnics of
Shoot the Piano Player, fules et Jim is gorgeously com-
posed and photographed in Franscope, yet another ver-
sion of CinemaScope , by Raoul Coutard and sustains
its emotional lyricism through the unconventional use of
telephoto zooms, slow motion, freeze frarnes, anamor-
2. Truffaut has said that ful es et Jim was also influenced by Edgar G.
Ulmer's B-Westem The Naked Dawn (1956); it, too, concems the psy-
chological and emotional vagaries of a sexual triangle .
3. Moreau (b. 1928) became a director in her own right, making an
impressive debut with the semiautobiographical Lumiere (1977), a film
about four independent and interdependent women and the dynamics
of stardom. It was followed by L'Adolescente (The Adolescent , 1979),
which deals with a young girl's passage from childhood to adolescence .
Her Lillian Gish (1984) is an affectionate documentary portrait of the
venerable actress.
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 lts Native Context
448 1 The French New Wave ªnd
* ·-
13.15 The triad in Truffaut's Ju/es et Jim (1961): Jeanne Moreau, Henri
phic distortion (ofWorld War I combat footage), and even
a helicopter shot. After directing Antoine et Colette, also
shot by Coutard in Franscope, for the anthology film
L'Amour a vingt ans (1962), Truffaut produced in collab-
oration with this inventive cinematographer a restrained
and sympathetic study of middle-aged adultery, Le Peau
douce (The Soft Skin, 1964), which was marred by an
overly melodramatic ending. His erratic adaptation of
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Truffaut' s first
film in color and English, is generally regarded as a failure
because it played clown traditional science-fiction themes.
But its portrait of a near-future society of emotionless,
hedonistic people mindlessly tripped out on big-screen
color television seems more than prophetic today, and
Nicolas Roeg's cinematography is first-rate.
In 1967, Truffaut published a book-length interview
with Alfred Hitchcock in which he demonstrated his rev-
erence for the American director by comparing him not
only to Griffith, Hawks, and Ford, but to Kafka, Dos-
toevsky, and Poe. Appropriately enough, Truffaut's next
two features were conceived as direct tributes to the
Hitchcock thriller. La Mariée était en noir (The Bride
Wore Black, 1967), photographed by Coutard, is a sus-
penseful tale of vengeance in which a woman (Jeanne
Moreau) relentlessly tracks down and kills the five men
responsible for the accidental shooting ofher husband on
their wedding day. Adapted from a novel by William
lrish-the author of the novel on which the film Rear
Wtndow (Hitchcock, 1954) is based-and with a musical
. Serre Oskar Werner.
'
score by a frequent Hitchcock collaborator, Bernard
Herrmann, Truffaut' s film contains a dense patternof
allusions to specific Hitchcock films, uses Hitchcockian
plot construction, and is intensely manipulative ofaudi-
ence expectations in order to generate suspense. LaSir-
ene du Mississíppi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969),also
adapted from a William lrish novel and shot in Dyaliscope
by Denys Clerval, is dedicated to Jean Renoir andcon-
tains many allusions to his films (especially in its "open"
ending, which is a visual hommage to the conclusionof
La Grande illusion, 1937). But in terms of style andcon-
struction, this minor thriller about the degradation ofan
honest man by a f emme fa tale is pure Hitchcock.
Between La Mariée était en noir and La Slrénedu
Mississippi, Truffaut made his second Antoine Doinel
feature, Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968),handsomel y
photographed by Clerval, a tender and affectionatepar·
trait of Antoine's coming to adult consciousness througb
ª series of affairs and, finally, his engagement to Chri5tJne
(Claude Jade). Domicile conju.gal(Bed & Bo<lrd, 197o).
tbe third feature in the Doinel series, examines thefirst
few years of Antaine and Christine's marriage, itsdeW·
rioration under the pressure of an affair, and itsultirnilt e.
IS
uneasy reconstitution. The film is light und humorot .' '
d "t l· t)l111it
an 1 s comedy is quite successful, but like Juese . ¡
0
als0 raises
· sorne serious questions about the inst,·tut1ou
· tl
mamage and its alternatives. Truffaut conclu<l
ed ie
D . l . t'W11I
Y
ome senes, begun with Les Quatrecentscoup,s
r , h Ru11,
years bemre, with L'Amour en fuite (Loveon t
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 ). which begins with __ , Major New Wave Figures 449
1919- e's uncontested
11
¡\11tOI · · . .
divorce from Chnstme and
-oeeeds through his
P~anceencounters with fig-
c s [rom his past.
0re
for L'Enfant sauvage
(fhe Wíld Child, 1969),
based upon the true
accountof a "wolf-boy" cap-
turedin the forests of cen-
tral France in 1806,
rroffautboth directed and
playedthe part of Dr. ltard,
the eighteenth-century
rationalistwho undertakes
thepainstakinglyslow edu-
cationof the wild child. Set
in its period and shot in
quasidocumentary style by
theaward-winning cinema-
tographer Néstor Almen-
dros,4The Wild Child allowed Truffaut to explore more choosing it as his title Truffaut intended to evoke the
intensively those themes of confinement versus freedom entire arsenal of cinematic tricks of which it is merely
andsocialconditioning versus nature, which he had firs; typical. Dedicated to Dorothy and Lillian Gish, the great
broachedin Les Quatre cents coups. Les Deux Anglaises Griffith actresses, the whole film is predicated upon cin-
etle continent (Two English Girls, 1971), adapted from ematic illusion, and in this respect it recalls Fellini's 8½
anothernovel by Henri-Pierre Roché and set at the tum (1963) and Bergman's Persona (1966). It is difficult from
ofthe century, inevitably evokes comparison with fules et the outset to tell whether a scene is occurring in the film
]im,of which it contains many deliberate echoes. The or in the film within the film because the cast and crew
storyof a young Frenchman' s love for two English sisters, live so closely together tllat there is little distinction
itwasTruffaut's most visually sensuous work to date. Its between their work and their personal lives. The film is
sumptuousre-creation of la belle époque is conveyed in funny, affectionate, and strangely disquieting in its grad-
ual revelation that the same people making the film
shotscomposed after Impressionist paintings of the
within the film are simultaneously making Day for Night
period, and its use of color was the most subtle Truffaut
and that confusion between illusion and reality is the very
hadachievedso far.
essence of the cinema.
UneBellefille comme rrwi (Such a GorgeousKid Like
Me,1972)is a sardonic portrayal of a murderous nympho-
;aruac that failed, on the whole, to break new gro~nd.
ut LaNuít américaine (Day far Night, 1973) proVIded 4. Almendros, a native of Cuba, won the American Academy Award for
Cinematogmphy in 1978 for Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick). He
tbeultimate in self-reflexive cinema: a film starring Jean-
worked closely with Tmffaut on ali the director's subsequent films
Pie_rre Léaud (the Truffaut figure in the Antoine Doinel except Une Belle filie comme moi (1972), La Nuit américaine(1973),
senes)and directed by Truffaut, about the making of ª and L'Argent de poclie (1976)-all shot by Pierre-William Glenn-and

~ starring Léaud and directed by Truffaut. Day for La Femme d'il coté (1981), which was shot by William Lubtchantsky.
Almendros itlso collabomtes regularly with Eric Rohmer and Barbet
h'i),.t (or la nuit américaine) is the technical term for Schroeder (see P· 462).
s Ootingnight scenes in daylight through a filter; by

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 lts Native Context
450 1 The French New Wave and
mation for JEAN-LUC GODARD
Day for N ight was in many ways a con um
s . Godard (b . 1930) is the most prolific
Truffaut. It combined the stylistic influence of Amencanr Jean-Luc dir et h
togethe di al of a11the e ors w o carne to
realism with that of French lyricism and dr ew tylistically ra c h
bis dual thematic obsessions with autobiography and psy- ~ence during the New \ Vave( · He ) as rkin~ade over fí
. . th · -an art form fil ·nce Breathless 1900 , wo g cl05eL . ·
chology m a hymn of pra1se to e cinema . 1,.c f, ature ms si IY\\:
to which he was passionately devoted for his enttre we. :aoul Coutard as his director of ph~tograph y 0 n most or
It answered the question posed by its own direct~thr- and he is among the moS mfluential ~ .
t
1,.c ?"
character- "Are films more important than llle. -Wl
them,
Id cinema toda y.
unlik e Truffaut ' GodardlS· a n..;1c
wor d 1 . a11 . ed "' llll-
an emphatic "Yes!" tl . t 11 ctual and i eo ogic Y committ filmm..L..
Th tan y in e e . 1 -~
Truffaut's next proiect was L 'Histoire d'Adele H. ( e fil almost always mvo ve some form of aut .
J whose ms . . OCri .
Story of Adele H., 1975).5 Based upon the diary ofVictor . t ogation of cmema 1tself. In a certamse
rful fil tique or m err he f . ~
Hugo's youngest daughter, this subtle and powe m they collectively constitute a t ory o cmema ~
is about the psychology of a woman in the grip of ª th any of his peers, Godard understood •L
·th better an uie
romantic obsession. Adele's romantic fascination WI ª ·al . pulse of the New Wave: "The whole N
voung English lieutenant leads her to follow rum all over
.I
essenti,, heim
Wi wrote in C ahiers,
· " can b e defined , m · part· ~ b,.,
the world until she finally goes rnad in Barbados and rnust ave, fi d ality "' Godard ·
l
·ts new relationship to ction an re . 's filll\)
spend the last forty years of her life in an asylum. The 1 h" b
ha ve consistently tested this re ations 1p y rejecting llar-
film begins like a conventional romantic melodrama , but ki f
as it progresses we are drawn into the increasing 1Y rati·ve in favor ofpraxis, the wor ·ng out o social orpolit.
demented world of the heroine with an irnpact that is ical theory within the cinematic process . Since the e~ -
both shocking and hauntingly beautiful. In The Story of 1960s, rus films have become increasingl y dialectiC'.uand
Adele H., Truffaut dernonstrates a total rnastery of the rhetorical in structure, and Godard himself calls tht>m
new cinematic language that he helped to create and tri- "critical essays." Most of these "essays " are personal to
umphantly confirrns rus status as one of the rnost impor- the point of being idiosyncratic , and Godard h~ miun-
tant film artists of our time. His films of the late 1970s tained his independence by producing them quicldy:u1tl
include the comedies L'Argent de poche (Small Change, cheaply. His films are therefore not as careflllly cnúted
1976) and L'Homme qui amait lesfemmes (The Man Who as those of Truffaut and his other pe e rs, ~md the Íl't'-
Loved Women, 1977); La Chambre verte (The Green quently appear to be less finished films than unwrnisl wd
Room, 1978), based on severa! short stories by Henry joumals about the making of a film , full of techniciJ blun -
James; and Le Demier métro (The Last Metro, 1980), a ders and undigested facts . And , unlik e his peers, Godnnl
fascinating account of life in a srnall Paris theater under is still in the business of breaking eve ry lmown •inen111t k
the Nazi Occupation-inspired by the autobiography of convention-even the more recent conventionsesti1b -
the stage and film actor Jean Marais (1913-1998)-which lished by the New Wave itself-in a ce as less utt mptto
became his biggest box-office success. In 1979, Truffaut expand the medium's form and pursu its potentitJfür
was honored with an extraordinary twenty-year retro- artistic, intellectual, and political self-exp r ssion. .
spective by the American Film lnstitute and the Los s al
ever of Godard' s early fil ms w -r chamct es ri t11·
Angeles County Museum of Art; but many critics feared N u1. ' l 111 t Ir
ew vvave tributes to the American cin mu. A ~ 1
h e was becoming the kind of mainstream establishment
director he had begun his career by attacking . His last
two films, however, marked a modest retum to the famil-
iar terrain of obsessive romance (La Femme d'a cóté [The 5. For the scores of t h'1sfilm and his next tlu'tle, Trufl1111t
, uS .t,el t]lll1011
slr
1~
111
of the great F h fil · \1)40
,11)( ).
Woman Next Door, 1981]) and the Hitchcockian com1c · .d _ rene m composer Maurlce Jnubert (1i'J\ • ,~r
ha contnbuted 11111
). so mue h to the success of poetl · rellllsrn(•.,i•,1
· Ll
thrill~r Vivement. dimanche! (Finally Sunday!, 19B3 ; 9
Amencan release title ConfidentiallyYours).6On October 6. Vivement 11 ,+r. . . , ' tu 1r11 ff,11
JI
21, 1984, Fran~ois Truffaut died of a brain tumo h . bl Tll.;;autis the title ol a documcntiu·y tnhut~ . ,1¡"iJ ,
r; e was assem ed b Cl d ¡"I \'I'~
fifty-two years old. Finall Y au e de Givray for th , 1985 C,11111 es ' 1 111 k 111 1111 1

. dy Truffaut is a film-by-film guide to the Jh'twtnr·~ 11 JI'

fnen Don All (N
en ew York: Beaufort , 1985).

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 .lfl (Breathless, 1960) was modeled th Ma1·or New wave Figures
·
451
0~~ oo eBfil
s t r thriller. Une Femme est une fem ( - m
aogs e ) d ºb d
g ,r'oman,1961 , escn e by Godard as " me A Woma
n
l5 a.vri . . . a neoreali t
al-that 1s, a contradiction in terms ,, s
Jllusic . , was a studio-
d ced tnbute to the American musical
~u oo~~
P d in franscope and color. Le Petit soldat (,.,,h . '
J11ªe b '-· e Little
So td1·er' 1960), made etween these two films, was b an-
the French govemment for three year b
oed by . s ecause
. mrnentedon the Algenan War. Llke Breathles ·t h
itco fil s, i as
c0 rrn of a gangster m and tums on the th f
~~ eme o
betrayal; but its p~otagonist belongs to a fascist terrorist
organiZationfighting the ~gerian liberation front in
eeneva,and the film graphically depicts the use of tor-
tureby both sides. Both Le Petit soldat and Une Femme
estuneJemme starred Godard' s sensuously beautiful first
wile,Anna Karina, and his fourth film seemed intended
asa kindof portrait of her. Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1
l962),a study of a woman who chooses to be a prostitute,
is constructed in the form of a twelve-part sociological
tracton the problem of prostitution, complete with sta-
tisticsand pseudo-clinical jargon.
With Les Carabiniers (The Soldiers!The Rifiemen,
1963),an adaptation of Beniamino Joppolo's play I car-
abinieri, cowritten by Roberto Rossellini, Godard created
a fableabout the nature of war in a style that is both a
parody of and an hommage to the early documentary style
13.18 and 13.19 An hommage to Lumiere (top) and image and
ofLumiere. The film, whose narrative line is often frag- reality merge (bottom) in Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963).
mentedto the point of breaking clown, achieves an almost

Brechtian detachment from its subject and is clearly

among Godard 's most important works. It is the first of
his "critica! essays," for, as one critic has said, Les Cara-
biniers is less a war movie than "a series of propositions
about war." Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), based upon
Alberto Moravia's novel A Ghost at Noon, was Godard's
sixth feature . It was an intemational coproduction star-
ring Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot shot in widescreen
and color, and like Truffauf s Day f or Night it concems
the making of a movie. This film within the film is a v~r-
sion of Homer 's Odyssey being shot in Rome by Fntz
Lang, who plays himself . The narra~ve portion of .Le
, · which concems the dissolution of the scnpt-
Mepns, , f
. •
wnters m am·age , is less important than Godard s use o
13.17u oda d 1961): Anna
~-, neFemme estunefemme(Jean-Luc
G r ' the self-reffexive conceit.
~r111aJ
' ean-Paul
Belmondo.

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 Natíve Context
and lts
452 The French New W ave

-
13.20 Le Mépris ( Jean-LucGodard,1963): imagesof image
making.JackPalance, BrigitteBardot,Michel Piccoli.

Godard had disputes wíth the producers of Le Mépris

over the editing and scoring of the film, and for hís sev-
enth feature he formed hís own production company,
Anouchka Film s. Bande apart (Band of Outsiders, 1964)
is based upon an American pulp thriller and constitutes
Godard's first return to the gangster genre sínce Breath-
less. It deals with a burglary attempt by three Parisian
students-two men and a woman-that ends in tragic
farce when one of the would-be criminals is killed. The
13.21 Allusion(to Ju/eset Jim) and to pulp violence in Gocbrd's
narrative is filmed straightforwardly, but our experience Bandea part (1964)-a film, the credits tell us, by.,JeaMUC/
of it is strangely distanced through a runníng commentary Cinema/Godard":Sami Frey, Anna Karina,Claude Brasseur.
spoken by Godard in whích he summarizes the plot for
latecomers, tells us what the characters are thinking,
makes observations upon the drab suburban setting, or
simply reads newspaper headlines. In Une Femme mariée
(A Married Woman, 1964) , ironically subtitled "Frag- effects of technology. At some time in the future. pm1lte
ments of a Film Shot in 1964," Godard mixed a wide eye Lemmy Caution (pla) ed b_ the pop-thrillerstM E~
range of narrative and documentary styles to create a Constantine [1917-1993] tra,els throu<th inte~
socíological study of woman' s role in modero culture. The space from the Outer Cmmtries to the city of Alpha, ille.
film portrays twenty-four hours in the life of a married where his mission is to destrm Dr. von Bnuu1.VonBni un
woman who is having an affair, and its visual texture is is the inventor and opern.tor ·of Alpha-60,the co~nputt'í
tl~at nms the desensitized lobotomized societyol~
quite complex: straightforward narration is broken up by
three highly stylized scenes of lovemaking, seven cinéma
ville. Caution succeeds in destroving boththe doctOI'
vérité-type interviews with the people around the pro- .
his mvention, . and he escapes the. cnnn bli11.~' ',\}.Jw'
t"~·
tagonist, a typicalJy Godardian dissertation on advertising 1
for women's underwear, anda clip frorn Resnais's Nuit et witl1 von Brnt~n·s _daughte~. Origirn~ly entitl~ ~:: ¡
lBM , Alplw ,lle 1s one of Gocfards most sustai
brouillard(1955), which two of the characters watch ¡11 a
· t·me d penonmmces.
discip ,... He mnk s brilt·1~u,t useoft.
theater.
In Alphaville (1965) Godard used the fonn of the sci- tempon1ry Pmis to ernke the future, "~lid, St'1' :
ence-fiction thriller to create a parnble about the alienating remind us that the world of Alphaville i · aire-~·111
In Pierrot le fáu Crr~.y Ptt,, 196.5, ;omud ft'(\11

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 ·siointed and self-reflexive nar ti Major Ne W
the d1-; ra ve style O f
w ave Figures 1 •••
10 b' ,·ers and to the generic model Les
1
11 ,.n o f th e cinéma vérit' [ h.
Ct1 nan (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and gangster is belied b eth:s ion. Godard shows that their idealism
c¡1r1 a 1 f a woman (A surrounds yh ~od d of cynical sex and violence that
JJ .' ) ron away rom a Parisian gang t li nna
(/',¡¡1nil . . o vean id u· have b t e~. Smce Masculinlféminin, Godard's films
"' 1·sJandlikeexistence m the south of F Y ic, mcrea stn. g1YI'd eologic
de.5ert- of betrayals causes their horribly viol
rance u t'l1
·r n ª stru t ecome
,U
. al and, in sorne cases,
c ura y rando A h
5ertes d th 7 •
tl accidental, ea s. Scnptless and virtuall I
ent, i appar
-
ita}· . . m. s e wrote in 1966: "Cinema is cap-
ism m its pu t f,
ell Y ¡ t a1· . YP otless and th . res orm. · · · There is only one solution,
e¡n comes e ose o re 1zmg the Godardi .d ' Th . at .is to tum one ·s back on the American cinema."
tbei1 ' an i eal of
,, fi]rJJwhere there has been no writing, no editi ;:oruc result of this logic was Made in U. S.A. ( 1966).
ll . . ,, J,,< z· /!+.'
und moong. 1v1.ascu mJeminin (196S)
ng, and
k
f . . ough it is loosely based on a detective thriller Made
110so . mar s a mUSAh .
de6ruºtJ'veturnmg away rom narrative. Like v·
., . . ivre sa Vie · · · as no narrative thread at ali and is a film' intent
U ne Femme manee, it 1s a film of sociolocrical . . upan destroying virtually every illusion of which cin-
an d o· mqwry
upon a slender plot, but here the plot · al ema-especially traditional American cinema-is capa-
bung . . 1s most
.-reJevantto the mqwry. The film is concerned Wl'th 1·uus- bl_e.Ostensibly a remake of Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946)
11 with Kanna · m · t he Bogart role, the film is so self-reRexive
~ tI
·ngfifteen distinct problems of the younge r~~~
. the "children of Marx and Coca-Cola,,, m em b ers as to have no content: characters speak to the audience,
tl00 , explaining their behavior and commenting on the trivi-
ofwhichare interviewed and interview one another in
ality of the plot, the dialogue is nonsensical and sorne-
times deliberately rendered inaudible on the sound track.
Dziga Verton--> He did "films essays" The film's meaning lies at its periphery, in its comment
upon political violence, the viciousness and stupidity of
the Right, the sentimentality and fecklessness of the Left .
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three
Things I Know about Her, 1966) is a collage of images
and interviews centering around a Parisian housewife
who has tumed to casual prostitution in order to keep
herself in middle-class luxury. The film is a radical indict-
ment of capitalist technocracy in the West, which, Godard
holds, makes prostitutes of us all through its system of
economic constraints. So, too, is La Chinoise (1967), sub-
titled A Film in the Making, which depicts five students
who set up a Maoist cell and fail, each in his or her sep-
arate way, to achieve cultural revolution. Godard also con-
tributed a long, single-take monologue to the collective
polemic Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) produced
by SLON in 1967.
But Godard's most savage attack upon the values of
Western capitalist society is Weekend (1967), a film that
begins as a recognizable, if violent, narra~~~ an_de~ds as
an apocalyptic vision of the collapse of c1vilization m the

'd e p·e....ot lefiou was almost certainly implanted by David

7 The 1 ea 1or t " , .
· d R bert Benton's screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde(Arthur
Newman an o . . cr-
. h had been submitted for cons1deration to Tnmaut
Penn 1 967) h
• w ic all d
' d to Godard in mid-1965. Godard actu y wante to
d then passe on . . .
an th A · an script but only if he could begmshooting 1mme-
direct e mene ,
13.22ly · . . . . ondition unacceptable to the producers.
~ r,c,smin Pierrot le fou (Jean-LucGOdard' 1965): diate 1y-a e
nakarina.

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 lts Native Context
454 l The Freneh Ne w Wave an d
b images o m1
f ·ndless slaug hter an d mayhem f
.. . rorn".1..
Y . neer of civihzation has been strip . "•11 ~1¡
the thin ve \)ed
couple reach the mother' s house a,.,,,.
ay.
When t h e and
money they hack her to pieces and are
refuse d t h e ' stea1.
tu rn to Paris, they are overtaken by b 11.1
Mteyreh . a~
. t enegades armed with submachine 1111 of
Ma01s r . . . o-.ns,wh
rned to canrubalism-the m1rror image f ~
h ave t u h o c::i"1·
for Godard-to smvive . T e husband is 1¿"1'•
:: :, o ~ t alism, . . h· lllller1
SUPERCARBURANT and his wife joins the group m eating im. Weekend is,..,
d brutal film that uses vivid color phot a
h arsh an . . ograpl
SS .
an d ti g
ht dramatic construction
. .
to
l r
dnve home th _"Y
e point
that Western civilizat10n is mere y a iac;adeelaborated by
technology concealing a hard core of bestiality.
After Weekend and the political turmoil of Mayl96si
13.23 Godard'sLaChinoise (1967): AnneWiazemskyabout to Godard attempted to abandon narrative altogether,co~.
be napalmedby the Esso(now Exxon)tiger.
sidering it a bourgeois forro. Le Gai savoir (1968)isa
rambling cinematic essay on language as an instru.
ment of social conditioning and control, based on the
philosophical assumptions of structural linguistics.Allof
West. A young bourgeois couple set out to visit the Godard 's films between 1968 and 1973 were produced
woman 's mother in Normandy in order to borrow sorne
by the Dziga-Vertov Group (actually an uneasy creati ve
money from her . They become trapped in a monumental
partnership between Godard and the ideologistJean-
weekend traffic jam, which Godard renders in a single
Pierre Gorin), and Godard carne to malee increasinguse
slow lateral tracking shot lasting fully 4 minutes on the
of the arsenal of agitational techniques employedbythe
screen. Gradually , we pass from a real landscape into a
Soviet revolutionary cinema of 1924-28. Un Filmcomme
symbolic one in which the highway is littered with bum-
ing automobiles and the bloodied , mutilated bodies of
crash victims . From this point on, the film is dominated 8. Godard remarked to interviewers that his films after Pierrot might
seem to have a lot of blood in them, but it was reallya lot of"red.'
During this period, Cahiers du cinéma became politicizedalongMan ·
ist-Leninist lines-alien ating all members of its foundinggroupbut
Godard , who was militantly committed to this political position . Tbe
journal also fell deeply under the influence of Bertolt Brecht'sradical
theories of theater .

9. French society was thrown into an unexpected politicalcrisisin Ma y

1968. Early in the month a series of rallies by student radicals00 uru ·
versity campuses in Paris mushroomed into civil disorder. Theim~
di.at e catalyst 1or
e
t h e d emonstrations was the firing of Hen~· .Langlo1.1
as
ofcul·
director of the Cinématheque Francaise by the Gaullist miruster
t ure A ndré Malraux, but the rallies were also relate d to the recent sur-
litic-
J
cess of the North Vietnamese Tet offensive in Vietnam andtbePor!d.
upheavals it had produced in the United States and allover~ewo ·.
By the middle of May, the disturbance had spread beyondPan~~~ f
10
versities in other cities and to unionized workers , sorne lO rn ()u
whom participated in a series of strikes that paralyzed the ~::~
May 30, however , President Charles de Gaulle (1890-- 197) Jordel
to tu~ the workers against the students by appealing fo~Jaw~behe~
on national television and calling for new national electiOOS t ·Jeo1
thepres1
on June 23. On that day, faced with a choice between what h rorin er:
13.24 Capitalistapocalypse: Godard's Weekend(1967), called "de Gaulle and anarchy" the French people cbose t e_ dou bt
alternately subtitled "AFilm Lost in the Cosmos''and "A Film but th e "events of May" 1968 l~ft many thoughtful Frenchrnenlfltth~
Foundon the Scrap Heap." Jean Yanne,Mireille Darc. about th ¡ · · . to ha00
e egitimacy of their govemment and continue
who lived through them .

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 Major Neww ave Figures
·es (A Fibn Like Any Other, 1968 ) r 1 455
,· a11/1 f I , 1or exam I .
/1~ .
1
record o an e ementary política} di P e, IS
11
1611111 scussio h
place among several people Iying in tall n t at
takeslofllis clearly distinguishable. Godard gkrass,none
f \\11 ma es a p ·
o . randomness by suggesting that a coin b oint
ofits .1 f. e tossed to
...ninewh1c1 one o 1ts several reels is
dete1 ,.. screened first
p{usQn.e(Sympathy far the Devil 1968) . fil ·
QflC d f ' lS a m of
see1n1
·nglyunrelate ragments: a Bolivian r .
evo1utionary
·dig out in a London men's room, the Rolli S
h1 n " ng tones
earsing the song Sympathy for the Devil,, bl k
re1 1 . , ac -
er inilitants p 1otting revo 1ution in a J·unkya d
Po"' . ·h 1 . r , a te 1e-
. .
\1s10
n ínterview wit a obotom12ed fairy godmo th er
calledEve Democracy, a man reading Mein Kampf in a
Sohoporno shop, etc. J

At one point in One Plus One a character remarks:
"Thereis only one way to be an intellectual revolution-
ary,and that is to give up being an intellectual." Sorne
critiCS believe that Godard followed the logic of this state-
mentto the point of nihilism. All of his films for the
nowdefunct Dziga-Vertov Group-British Sounds (See
Yo!Iat Mao, 1969), Pravda (1969), Le Vent d'est (Wind
fromtheEast, 1969), Luttes en Italie (Struggles in Italy,
1969), Vladimir et Rosa (1970), Tout va bien (1972), 1 and
LettertoJane (1972)-show Godard concemed with the
natureand function of ideology, regardless of its medium.
Although his later work demonstrates a renewed interest
in narrative, it has been suggested that Godard's cine-
matic"essays" are not films in the conventional sense at
ali,buta formof narrative embattled with discourse. Nev-
ert:heless, Godard's impact on contemporarycinemagen-
erally, as distinct from his importan ce to the French New
Wave, has been immense. His most discernible influence
inthe 1970s and 1980s was upon the materialist cinema
ofJean-MarieStraub and Daniele Huillet, the omnibus
films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (for both, see Chapter
15), and the award-winning mirúmalist work of Belgian
filmmaker Chantal Akerman (h. 1950), creator of Jeanne
Dielrnan, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080 Broxelles(1977 ),
LesRendez-vous d'Anna (1978), Toute une nuit (AllNight
~ng,l982), Les Années 80 (The Golden Eighties, 1983 ),
andNuit et jour (Night and Day, 1991). But Godard
~adeª whole generation question the accepted conven-
~ons offilmmaking remaining ali the while a solitary and
1nd ' and Dialectics," Film Quarterly 26, 1 (Fall 1972): 30--43.
ependent figure.
1973
l\fter ending his association with Gorin in
nd
~d experimented with a combinatíon of film ª
eotapethat permitted him to superimpase two or
13.25 Combining video and film inNuméro deux ( Jean-Luc
Godard, 1975).
more images on the screen simultaneously. In film/tapes
like Numéro deux (Numher Tu;o, 1975), Comment ~a va?
(How Goes It?, 1975), La Communication (1976), leí et
ailleurs (Here and There, 1970; 1976), and Six fois deux
(Six Times Tu;o, 1976),2 he pioneered a new means of
interrogating the cinematic image by offering two con-
tradictory perspectives on "reality" at once . In 1980,
Godard produced his first theatrical feature in nearly
eight years. Technically evocative of his films of the late
1960s, Sauve qui peut (la me) (Every Man far Himself!
Slow Motion) is an essay on the metaphysics of survival
shot on location in Switzerland, that paradigm of Western
capitalist survivorship, that characteristically constructs a
sustained analogy between sexual degradation and eco-
nomic exploitation. Godard, who now lives in Switzerland
himself, has continued to malee features, renewing his
extraordinary collaboration with Raoul Coutard in Pas-
sion (1982), Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen, 1983),
and the controversial Je vous salue Mane (Hail, MartJ,
l. The uncharacteristic two-year hiatus in Godard ' s nonnall y breaknec_k
roduction schedule was occasioned by a nearly fatal motorcycle acc1-
~ent in June 1971. Although Godard intended. the title Tout v~ bien
(All's Well) as an ironic comment on bourgems complacen~ , '.t~so
si ified his literal well-being in having fully recovered from htS tnJunes .
gnJ R MacBean · "Godarcl and the Dziga-Vertov Group : Film
See ames oy
·1 1 t two were made in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville.
• 2. T 1e as . .
. ., d x Godard said he was remaking Breathless,so the title
of Nunucro eu , • . .. ..
husthe ironicfore,-ein French ol Breathless11.

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 nd lts Native 1....u•
"~"·
456 1 The French New Wave ª

1984) a modem retelling of the immacu1ate conception 7

,
that affronted much of the Catho1·1c worId· In 198 fil ,
Godard-who once said that "one could make ª good ·airn
. ,, di . . comrnerc1 s
m twenty seconds -began recting Jeans G)
for the designers Marithé and Fran~oisGirbaud (M.F. ·
. . . of his French tel-
in exchange for the foreign distnbution de
efilm Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce
cinéma (1986)-confirming for himself, no doubt, his
1967 declaration that "cinema is capitalisrn in its pure 5t
forro." Sorne of Godard's more recent features are Détec-
tive (1985), King Lear (1987)-a remarkable contempo-
rary "approach" to the play with Burgess Meredith in the
title role and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia (and Peter Sel-
lars as Shakespeare)-Soigne ta droite (K.eepUp Your
Right, 1987), Nouvelle vague (1990),Allemagne neuf zéro
(Gennany Year Nin.e 'Zero, 1991, in which Eddie Con-
stantine reprises the role of Lemmy Caution from Alpha-
ville), Hélas pour moi (Woe Is Me, 1993), and JLG/JLG
(1994). His feature-length video program Histoire(s) du
cinéma (1989-98), which first toured the United States
in 1993, creates a montage of images from painting, pho-
tography, film, and video to "present sorne possible stories
in the history of cinema" in a characteristicallyflamboyant
way. Far Ever Mozart (1996), in which a French theater
troupe attempts to stage a play during the siege of Sara-
jevo, received widespread critica! acclaim for its medita-
tion on the possibility of art in time of war, as did the
atypically elegiac Éloge de l'amour (In Praise of Lave,
2001), which was shot entirely on digital video and trans-
ferred to 35mm.
ALAIN RESNAIS
Alain Resnais (b. 1922) is identified with the New Wave
because his first majar successes, Hiroshima,mon amour
(1959) and L'Année demiere a Marienbad (Last Year at
Marienbad, 1961), both appeared during its height. But
Resnais is a generation older than the Cahiers group, and
he began his film career not as a critic but as an editor
and director of short films in the scenarist tradition.
Unlike severa! of his New Wave counterparts, he prefers
t~ work from an original script, usually one written espe-
c1allyfor_the screen by.ª major novelist like Jean Cayrol,
Marguente Duras, Alam Robbe-Grillet, or Jorge Sem-
pnín. He also works slowly and plans his films meticu-
lously in advance of production, in close collaboration
with his writers and technicians, believing that film is
_ L'Annéederniere a Marienbad (Alain Resnais,1961):
13 26
humangeometry·
basically a collective art . Yet Resnais is an avant-gard
intellectual who has been strongly influenced bythe
3
philosophy of Henri Bergson. And because his majo:
theme is the effect of time on human memory andthe
relationship between memory and politics, he com.
municates by exploding the conventional boundaries of
narrative form. His almost Proustian fascinationwithtime
and memory leads Resnais to create remarkablestruc -
tures for his films, in which past, present, and future
are perceived upon the same spatial and temporalplane ,
and in which objectivity and subjectivity are neverclearfy
'distinguishable.
In L'Année demiere a Marienbad (1961),writtenby
French experimental novelist AlainRobbe-Grillet,aman ,
X, meets a woman, A, at a baroque chateau that seems
to be a resort for the very rich and that may or maynot
be Marienbad (a spa in Czechoslovakia). He claimsto
have met her, or a woman like her with a man, M,who
was perhaps her husband, "last ye~ at Marienbad." She
denies this, and their debate which is a debate abouttbe
nature of reality itself, recu;s endlessly throughthe6.1m
as labyrinthine images of past present and futurefrained
· . ' ' to
m Dyal~scope by cinematographer Sacha Vi~rnyse~e:PII
merge m the same visual continuum of highly srylJJ"
·
~
trae king shots (a Resnais trademark) and frozengeo
·esof
~- Bergson (l859-1941) was a French philosopher whosetheo~,"'11-
time and " . etun0n
I"'.
ti th creative evolution" have had considerable impa r·
e -century thought.

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 sitions. X and A seern to hav h Major Neww
ave Figures
1 457
0·
11¡> e ad
,,;ec to desire to have an affair· the
01 . d . or to be
,, . ic1 oi . ' en is A'
¡ 11~1i, ds of her husband. Whether th fil s death
11 h<1
11 • e mre
t th6 t re-create the process of
to presents
11 ttei1 P1 memory 10 ·
11H f X,a long interior monologue on th
11 the
O
11i
11d -cisein sheer visual abstractionism .e. part of A,
1 exei , 1s1mpo 'bl
or¡¡ll ]3ut, like Bergson's philosophy, the film is ssi e
tosaY.d with mental process rather than . clearly
cerfl6 narrative
c0 11 with redefining mental process as . -or
J'haps . b narrative. As
pe . reinarked, Manen ad represents "
aesflal5 . • . an attempt
1• de and pnm1tive, to approach the e l . '
tillcfU h . ,, omp exity of
s ¡ t andits mee amsms. The film wo th
u1ot1g 1 . . Il e presti-
GoldenL10n at the Vemce Film Festi al .
@oUS V lil 1961
an 1s
. one of the few authentically modem· 1st wor ks m .
d
ciJ1eJDª·
In Muriel,ou le temps d'un retour (English titl .
M11riel,1963),written by Jean Cayrol, author of the co;~
nie!ltaryfor Nuít et brouillard (1955), Resnais retumed
totliematerialworld for a film about a mother and her to plan strategy and see his mistress, but he also has a
stepson haunted by the past. The mother must confront chance affair there with a radical young student. His
her]overof twenty-two years past, who arrives for a visit sense of identity is called into question by her revolution-
accompanied by his most recent mistress, and the stepson ary friends, who challenge Diego's methods and his com-
~ tormented by the memory of M uriel, a young Algerian mitment to the struggles of the past. As he recrosses the
grrlwhomhe and a friend tortured and killed during the border into Spain at the end of the film, he imagines his
recently concluded French-Algerian War. In terms of arrest by Spanish secret police, but through a slow dis-
content, Muriel is a brilliant political film and, although solve we see that his mistress is on her way to save him,
govemment censors did not recognize it at the time, per- suggesting the possibility of a new beginning.
haps tlie most damning of all films about the Algerian After contributing to the 1967 anthology Loin de Viet-
nam, Resnais producedJe t'aime,je t'aime (I Love You, I
situationas it affected France. But in its remarkably com-
Lave You, 1968), a science-fiction film, written by Jacques
plexmontageof nearly a thousand shots, Sacha Viemy's
Stemberg and with a score by Krzysztof Penderecki ,
luminous color cinematography, the innovative sound
about a man, projected into the past after an unsuccessful
recording of Antoine Bonfanti, and a score featuring the suicide attempt, who becomes lost within the structure
music of avant-garde composer Hans Wemer Henze, of time itself. With Chris Marker's short La Jetée (1962)
Mune · · an d 15
· ¡ approaches the cinema of pure association ·
and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)-
clearly
Resnais's greatest work. which also included sorne music composed by Pender-
_With La Guerre est .finie (The War Is Over, 1966), ecki-Je t'aime,je t'aime was one of the most provocative
Wntten bYthe Spamsh . novelist Jorge Sempron, ' Resnru.·s science-fiction films of the decade . However, its elliptical
~~th e arena of political commitment. More con- narrative structure and densely poetic dialogue prevented
ventional
nis
·
lll narrative structure and more re alistic
· than it from reaching a large audience, and its commercial fail-
ºther features, this film still manages to sugge 5t tbe ure was at least partially responsible for a six-year hiatus
0verlap ·
ti pmg of memory and imacrination, and
th 1-
e re ª in Resnais' s career. , . ,
0ns}u h · di ·¿ al's
0
- During the 196Os, Resnais s films, like Godar~ s, be-
p P t at necessarily exists between an m VI u
astandp . . . La Guerre est . ·ngly unfashionable and unconventional as
finie resent and h1s or her 1dent1ty. came mcreas1 . .
the lo<Ticof his own artistic development at
olutiCOncerns three days in the life of a middle-aged rev- he pursue d ·· l
0nary d) ho sorne
ancial
i:,-
gain.If Godard , s films b ecame cntica
thirty named Diego (Yves Montan w ' f fi
the cost o ·¿n lo<Ticalpraxis, Resnais . ,s had always b een
"· Yearsafter th S . h C. ·1W:arstill works for the essays on 1 eo o·
vverth e pams IVl , p .
row0 f h l me to aris
t e Franco regime. Diego 1as co

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 d lts Native Context
... 1 The French New Wave an
. . . . . h kings of the
philosoplucal mvestigations mto t e wor di
human mind and this meant the loss of popular au -
' . h' rrwn
ences after his initial success with Hiros ima, fi
amour. As a result, Resnais was una ble t O direct for ve
1975
years after 1968 for lack of financial backing. But ~n d
his Stavisky was released to both critical acclaim an
commercial success. Written by Jorge Semprún and stªr-
ring Jean-Paul Belmondo in the paradoxical title ro~e,
Stavisky is a political period film about a colossal financia!
scandal that toppled the French govemment in 1934.
With a melodic score by Stephen Sondheim , it was shot
by Sacha Viemy to evoke the two-color Technicolor pro-
cess of the early 1930s, and it became Resnais's most
popular film to date. Providence (1977), scripted by
David Mercer , which takes place entirely within the mind
of a dying novelist, won a New York Film Critics Award
for John Gielgud as Best Actor. Resnais himself won a
unanimous Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1980 for Mon
ancle d 'Amérique (My American Uncle), a narrative of
interpersonal relationships poisoned by ambition, based
upon the behaviorist theories of the French biologist
Henri Laborit, who appears in his laboratory at several
points during the film to offer short discourses on the
science of "aggressiology." In the 1980s, Resnais sus-
tained this metaphor of sociological observation in La Vie
est un roman (Life Is a Novel; British title: Life Is a Bed
of Roses, 1983), which superimposes three historically
distinct stories-each narrated according to contempo-
raneous cinematic styles-on the quotidian proceedings
of an educational conference; L'Amour a rrwrt (1984), a
film about the archaeology of knowledge set in the south-
em French Protestant town of Uzes and structured
around the avant-garde compositions of Hans Werner
Henze; and Mélo (1986), an extraordinary real-time adap-
tation of a 1929 boulevard melodrama by the forgotten
playwright Henry Berstein, which had already been
filmed five times before. Like Mon ancle d'Amérique , all
of these last three films were scripted by Jean Gruault,
who had worked extensively with Truffaut; none has
yet been distributed in the United States, nor has the
~ve-h~ur Srrw~íng!No Srrwking (1993), a deliberately
mcredible vers1on of Alan Ayckboum's series of plays on
indeterminancy, Intimate Exchanges, adapted by Resnais
as two contiguous films. In 1997 the director scored a
pop~ar hit with On connait la chanson (Same Old Song),
a tribute to TV writer Dennis Potter (1935-1994), in
which the actors deliver their dialogue as lip-synched
I of Potter's "Pennlc1,fmm fi
songs in the sty e . " ~
"The Singing Detective. . . ,
tly accused of coldne ss and al ~¡., Á{.
Frequen . - ~
Resnais. is
. a serious , comm1tt
. ed filmm aker ~ '""'
,-,'"
. al mastery of hís medium has e nahlcd h1m tt, :r.
me . aJ be
handful of films of great vtsu· aoty and , -~.,..,....
~.
depth that rank am_ong th~ m~~terw;rb oí f'rend,
ema. When asked, m a rec ent mtervi cw, ahout d,e
makers who had most infl~enced _him,Relnais,~
Griffith, Pudovkin , and Eisenstem . ~e aü< ) ~ oí
Czech-bom Britísh director Karel Rel.8z(see Char,tt_..,
14
as his "reaJ teacher" through Reisz's ~le TheTed,,¡¡¡/lt
of Film Editing.4 In other wor~,. Re sruu.s~ ~ ..
work as growing out of the tradition of classícal~ -
And in his fascinatíon with the manipulation ofthelpal,t.
time continuum, Resnais serves to remírul tu that .._
_.
tage aesthetícs are stíll alive and well in a film c.'liliur
edt,¡
Iooks to mise-en-scene as a kind of cinematíc god.
CLAUDE CHABROL
Claude Chabrol (b. 1930), who had been forced to 8*
a series of commercial thrillers after the 6nancial failm
of Les Bonnes femmes in 1960, returned to the topoflis
form with Les Biches (The Does, 1968), a subtle, ,~ ·
exquisite study of lesbian sexual obsession and domim-
tion set in St. Tropez in winter. Les Bichesmarmithe
beginning of his long collaboration with the cine~
rapher Jean Rabier (b. 1927), formerly the camera~
ator for Henri Decae, who had shot Chabrol's earlit'5t
films. Like Resnais, Chabrol believes that filmmaking ~
a collective enterprise, and since Les Biches he has~
a team of collaborators who work with him on every fibn.
These include, in addition to Rabier his coscenarist, ¡>aul
Gé~auff; his art director, Cuy Litta;e; bis editor, Jacques
Gaillard; and his leading actress (and wife), Stéptaant'
Audran.
Chabrol achieved absolute mastery of his ntediUJll
witb La Femme infidele (The Unfaithfal Wife,1968 ~
inve 5tigation into the violent consequences of adult
er)'
;
1111
ª typical French bourgeois family-whích owes . b
te~hnically to Hitchcock. Like Truffaut, Chabrol ~:.
Ene Rohmer) wrote a book on Hitchcock; in fact.
4. Appropri t l th . ·ve,11¡11,
1)111.
COwritten -~e Y, . e s~cond edition of Reisz's authontatt ) it1'~Jro
111
a length : ~avm Millar (London : The Focal Press. l~ ·
y alysis of L'Année demiere a Marlenbad .
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 Majar New Wave Figures 1 459

. Que la héte meur e (K.iller/The Beast Must Die, 1969)

is an iron·te revenge tragedy about a man who relentlessl y
tracks down th e d nver
. of an automobile that has killed his
young son in a hit-and -run accident and comes to !ove the
murderer ' s son m
· th e process . Chabrol continued to pro be
th e violence and bestiality that lie just beneath the surface
of everyday life in Le Boucher (The Butch er, 1969), which
one Pans·1an en'tie hail e d as t h e best Fr ench film since
the Liberation and which is clearly among the best two
or three works to emerge from the immediat e post-N ew
Wa~e period. Told with a remarkable economy and purity
of cmematic style, Le Boucher is essentially a love story
set in a small French village in which one of the lovers is
a sexual psychopath given to murdering young women
and mutilating their bodies. This "butcher ," however, is
made the most sympathetic character in th e entire film,
and the compassionate psychological study of his rela-
tionship with a young schoolteacher, who loves him even
as she becomes increasingly convinced of his guilt , rep-
resents a high point in contemporary French cinema .
Since Le Boucher, Chabrol has directed approximatel y
one film ayear. La Rupture (The Break-Up , 1970) ; Just e
avant la nuit (Just befare Nightfall, 1971); La Décade pro-
13.28 LesBiches(Claude Chabrol, 1968): Stéphane Audran,
Jacqueline
Sassard. digieuse (Ten Days' Wonder , 1972); Les Naces ·rouges
(Blood Wedding , 1973); La Banc de la désolation/De
Grey, two hour-long telefilms based on Henry James sto-
brol has been stylistically influenced by the American ries (1973); Nada (English title: The Nada Gang) and Une
director more than any other figure of the N ew Wave Partí de plaisir (A Piece of Pleasure, both 1974) and Les
generation. One critic sees the whole body of Chabrol's Innocents aux mains sales (English title: Dirty Hands,
workas an extended hommage to Hitchcock. But while 1974); Les Magiciens (The Magicians) and Folies bou r-
Chabrolfrequently employs Hitchcockian structures and
metaphors (such as the simultaneous tracking out and
1.00mingin that occurs near the end of Vertigo [1958]
and in the final shot of La Femme in.fidele) , he has ª
theme that is very much his own-the impact of a crime
ofpassion on a small but intima te network of human rela-
tionships, such as those that exist within a middle-class
family,a lave triangle, or even a small community . Cha-
~roldissects the psychological complexities of these rela-
tionships with clinical precision ; yet in his mature films
this ironic detachment from his material never seems
iutlifferent or cold and at its best can evoke feelings of
·t · Fritz
compassion devoid of sentimentality. Per h aps 1 15
Lan
g and his deterministically plotte d cmem · a of des-
th
tiny (M, 1931·Fury 1936- The Bíg Heat, 1953), ra ~r . 9 Chabrol'sLe Boucher(1969): StéphaneAudran,Jean
than Hitchcock, ' whom' Chabrol
' bl
most resem es m
· th1s 13 2
Yanne.
respect.

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 d lts Native Context
The French New Wave an du mensonge (English title· Th
In Au Coeur . e Lyt
geoises (Bourgeois Madness), both 1975; Alice, OU la cross. 9) Chabrol retumed to the subject rnatt ti~
Hearl , l9h9 ~or an examination of the impact of a ehrof
demiere fugue (Alice, or the Last Escapade) and Les 1,eBoucMu c~
Liens de sang (Blood Relatives) , both 1977; and Violette as investigated by a female police insper,.
mur d e r,. ) . ty o f a sma ll town "l0r
the insu lar soc1e
Nozíere (English title: Violette, 1978), a macabre film of O h
(Bonnaire , 00 h l nt e
parricide based on the true story of an eighteen-year-ol~ ·ttany. Merci pour le e oco at (Thankyr.
coast of Bn . h ·n ;or tfie
girl (brilliantly portrayed by Isabelle Huppert) who poi-
ehocolat e, 2000) is another cnme t n er, set in the cor.
soned her parents in 1933, e.g., were his contributions of of a large Swiss chocolate company
porate wor Id con.
the 1970s. trolled by a female CEO (Huppert).
Like Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais, Chabrol is a major
figure in contemporary French cinema, although his films The left Bank
of the 1980s have been uneven. Le Cheval d'orgueil LOUIS MALLE
(Horse of Pride, 1980), for example, was a successful
Louis Malle (1932-1995), a former assistant to Bresson
exposition of pre-World War I French country life, but
and the celebrated underwater filmmaker Jacques-Yves
Les Fantómes du Chapelier (The Hatter's Ghosts, 1982)
Cousteau (with whom he co-directedLe Mondedusilence
was a clumsy version of a Georges Simenon novel. Le
[The Silent World, 1955]), began his career as a director
Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, 1984), a Simone
two years before the debuts of Godard and Truffautwith
de Beauvoir adaptation set in occupied París, was well
received but two subsequent film noirs-Poulet au vinai- the taut suspense thriller Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
gre (1985) and its sequel, Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)- (Frantic!Elevator to the Gallows, 1957), and eamedan
were not. In 1987, however, Chabrol retumed to form by intemational reputation the following year with Le.~
all measures with the psychological thrillers Masques Amants (The Lovers, 1958) . This lyrical filmabout a brief
(Masks) and Le Cri du hibou (The Cry of the Owl), while lave affair between a bored socialite and a young student
Une Affaire des femmes (Women's Affair, 1988) won for whom she leaves her husband was beautifully pho-
intemational acclaim far its serious treatment of the last tographed by Henri Decae and produced with Malle's
woman to receive capital punishment in France-a pro- own funds. Zazie da.ns le métro (1960) was an anarchic
vincial housewife tried as an abortionist and sent to the adaptation of Raymond Queneau' s novel about a foul-
guillotine by the Vichy govemment in 1943, which gov- mouthed ten-year-old girl who comes to visit her uncle
emment fell under his documentary lens several years in París and wreaks havoc everywhere she goes.Thefilm
later in L' Oeil de Vichy (The Eye ofVichy [1993]). More is a technically exciting attempt to find visual equivalents
recently, Dr. M (aka Club Extinction, 1990) was an updat-
ing of Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse" series, based on Norbert
Jacques's original novel; Madame Bovary (1991) was a
reverential adaptation of Flaubert' s classic, with Isabelle
Huppert in the title role; and L'Enfer (Hell, 1993),
adapted from an unrealized script by Henri-Georges
Clouzot (see p. 433), was a retum to the Hitchcockian
thriller of sexual obsession. For the rest of the decade
Chabrol continued to produce socially insightful thrillers:
most of them, starring Huppert and/or Sandrine Bon-
naire . La Cérémonie (1995) featured them both (the
shared the Best Actress award at Venice for their enseU:...
ble performance as housemaid and local postal eler k,
respectively) and was widely admired for its observant
analysis of class conflict in the provinces, while Ríen ne
va plus (English title: The Swindle, 1997)-Chabrol's fif-
tieth film-starred Huppert as a small-time con artist
who becomes involved in a big-time caper and double
13.30 JeanneM
oreau in LesAmants(LouisMalle,·19SS),

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 Majar New Wave Figures 1 461
. . Queneau's neo-Joycean puns through th
/0 1
superimpos1"ti on , variable cam · k
e use of t ne
51iots , era speeds ·
and multiple allusions to other b k ' JUmp
cuts, ., . oo s and fil
· cially Resnais s Hiroshima mon amou F ms
(espe , ' r, ellini's La
J l e vita, and Malle s own Les Amants). Mall .
ull ·c . . e continued
. xperiments m narrative form in Vie p . , (
Juse nvee Private
:f. l961), a film about a young provincial . , .
I,lje, I gtr 1s nse to
dombased loose y on the experience of 1·t
star d s own star,
BrigítteBar ot.
But Le Feu follet (The Fire Within/Will 0 , the Wisp
"i:ti) adapted by the director from a novel b D . '
l :1\JV ' • Y neu La
J{ochelle , with ~ piano score by Erik Satie, is regarded as
Malle's mast~rp1ece ~f the 1960s. It depicts the last forty-
eight hours 1~ the life -º~ an alcoholic playboy who is
relentlesslydriven to SU1c1deby his disgust at the world
13 .31 Mother and son in Malle's Le Souffle au coeur (1971):
around him. Many critics feel that the film's mood of Benoit Ferreux, Lea Massari.
psychologicalintensity and Malle's sureness of touch in
sustainingit bring Le Feu follet close to the best work of
Bresson.As a change of pace from the brooding atmo- Bien Phu, Vietnam . Scripted by Malle and sumptuously
sphereof Le Feufollet, Malle attempted a romantic spec- photographed by Decae, this film offers an amiable , intel-
taclein Viva Maria (1965), set at the tum of the century ligent, and perversely humorous portrait of middle-class
andshot in Panavision by Henri Decae , in which Jeanne French family life in the postwar era, as well as a sensitive
Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, as traveling entertainers, study of the sexual and social agonies of adolescence.
inventthe striptease and foment a revolution in the imag- Malle's next film, Lacomhe, Lucien (1974), received
inary South American republic of San Miguel. In Le international acclaim for its subtle portrayal of a seven-
Voleur(The Thief, 1967) , Malle used a period setting to teen-year-old peasant hoy who joins the French Gestapo
createa portrait of a wealthy young bourgeois driven to during the Occupation for no particular reason and is sub-
burglaryby his hatred of society. His 'William Wilson " sequently torn between destroying and protecting a Jew-
episode(based on a Poe story) in the anthology film His- ish family with whose daughter he has fallen in love. With
toires extraordinaires(Spirits of the Dead, 1968) haunt- Black Moon (1975), photographed by the Swedish cine-
inglyexamines the phenomenon of the doppelganger,or matographer Sven Nykvist (a frequent collaborator of
"double." Ingmar Bergman; see Chapter 15), Malle moved from
After contributing to the 1967 collective film Loin du realism to symbolism in a film that the Paris newspaper
Vietnam , Malle joumeyed to the East to film the feature- L'Express described as existing "at the crossroads of
fantasy and science fiction." In 1978, Malle directed
length Calcutta (1969), part of his brilliant six-hour
Pretty Baby in the United States. Shot entirely on loca-
documentary essay Phantom India (1970), for Frene~
tion in New Orleans by Nykvist, this controversial film
television.This film, which has also been shown theatn-
deals with a love affair between an eccentric photogra-
, offers a marvelously complex vision of the para-
cally
pher and a child prostitute in a tum-of-the-century Story-
doxicalsubcontinent that has always so fascinated and
ville brothel. In 1980 Malle tumed northward to direct
puzzled the West. Using his own consciousness as ª
Atlantic City, an ironic drama of small-time hoods that
soundingboard, Malle ultimately fails to penetrate th ~ shared the Venice Golden Lion that year with John Cas-
fudian mystery, ostensibly by refusing to m -~rp~rt
savetes' s Gloria. Malle's subsequent American films
through Western eyes. In 1971 , Malle produced ª mas-
include the brilliant tour-de-force conversation piece My
terpieceequal to Le Feuf ollet in the remarkable Le Soufd- Dinner with Andre (1981) and the documentary pano-
fle
. au coeur (Murmur of the Heart) , ª delicate b an rama of recent immigrant experience And the Pursuitof
1rr · .b
esisti ly funny tale of casual incest amon
g the our-
. Happiness (1986), as well as the less successful Cracke-rs
geo .. O
f h f:allof D1en
isie of Dijon in 1954-the time t e

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 ative L-01 ,,.,~-
W and lts N al .
462 1 The French New ave t'ty and sexu· temptahon, or beh,
·d
en I al I fh •wee
1 · person d . sional sides o u man nature 5 nthe
(1984) a remake of Mario Monicelli's 1956 caper c ~sic
1985 ' ª
spiritual anz P~~e de Monceau (The Baker M of
Bíg D~al on Madonna Street, and Alamo Bay ( La Bou ange d S (S Oflce
V'etnainese and La Garriere e uzanne uzanne'sVoc ll1i,
fictionalized account of confüct betwehenG~f coast of 1962) b th shorts shot in 16mm and prod atio~.
immigrants and American fishermen on t e 1963) were O d d h Uced~
Texas. In 1987, Malle retumed triump h antlY to France B bet 5eh ro eder ' 6 who pro uce t e entire senes , ,
1
to make the quasiautobiographic al Au revoir · [es enfants
. ar
Nuit e ez h Maud (My Night at Maud's, 1967) La
• Co/~· 'l'la
(Go od-bye, Children), a chronicle of a frie _shi_alP
nd e (The Collector, 1968 ), Le Genoude c1- c.
tionneus d , l' L<lit
between a Catholic anda Jewish hoy set in a provmci . , K.nee 1969) an L Amour, apres tnidi(E e
d W: II (Claire s ' , 972) h nglish
boarding school during the last months of Worl ar_ ' ·t1 Chl e in the Aftemoon, 1 are t e 35mmt
t ti e: o . eatures
and Milou en mai (May Fools, 1990), which counterpom _s th plete the Contes moraux, proVIding four
s at com h lllore
the May 1968 student rebellion in Paris with a b ourgem . . on Rohmer's single t eme and inauguraij h
) vanations . . ng is
family gathering in the countryside. Damage (1992 ' t collaboration with the cmematographer N ,
, I· a 1ong- erm estor
adapted by David Hare from Josephine Hart s nove, is Almendros. Ahstract, intellectual, supremelyironic,these
film of ruinous erotic obsession set in the context of Brit-
ish politics; its depiction of psychological unravelment
within a ricridly class-bound system stands as one of
e,-
.
:::::a
. .es into the nature of human passion areco
with all the precis_ion of Cartesian logic,and
have been hailed intemation
all
y as components ofaphil.
·1
th:
Malle's finest achievements. With Vanya on 42nd Street b 1 R0 h
(1994), Malle returned to the subject of My Dinnerwith osophical maSt erpiece. S~ seque~t Y'. mer made a
beautiful, ambiguous vers1on of Hemnch von Kleist'sDie
Andre, filming New York theater director Andre Greg-
ory's experimental production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya Marquis von O. (The Marquise of O., 1975 ) whichcon.
in the then-derelict New Amsterdam Theater. He died tinues his metaphysical probing ofhuman sexualityinthe
of cancer in November 1995. story of a young noblewoman who awakes one daytofind
1

Malle, unquestionably an important filmmaker, is fre-
quently accused of eclecticism because of his wide range
of subjects and styles. Pauline Kael has pointed out that
had he chosen a single theme and stuck with it-as Cha-
brol has done, say, since 1968-Malle would have been
acclaimed as a major figure long ago. But Malle's intel-
lectual restlessness and his remarkable ability to present
material from simultaneously opposing points of view
have led sorne critics to dismiss him as an elegant stylist
with little substance at the core . Le Feu follet, Phantom
India, Le Soujfie au coeur; Lacomhe, Lucien, Atlantic
City, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants
offer ample proof that only the first part of this proposi-
tion is true.
herself inexplicably pregnant . With Perceval le Gallois
(English title: Perceval, 1978), he successfully attempted
to evoke the consciousness of the Middle Ages in hisown
adaptation of a twelfth-century poem by Chrétien de
Troyes set in the time of King Arthur. In its stylizedsets,
artificial scenery, and deliberately foreshortened perspec·
tive, Perceval captures the mimetic sensibility ofboth
medieval literature and painting; it demands ofitsviewers
a quite extraordinary revision of narrative expectations.
Perhaps beca use of his late start, Rohmer is one ofthe
few original New Wave figures sti.ll consistentlyproducing
major work. During the 1980s he contributed yet another
extraordinary contemporary cycle entitled "Comediesan~
Proverbs," achieving in La Femme de l'aviateur(TheAvi·
ator's Wife, 1981), Le Beau ma:rriage (The Pe,fectMar·

5 1~
ERIC ROHMER ANO JACOUES RIVETTE · Rohmer_wrote the "Contes moraux" as short stories in the 1ª'.e
before filmmg them. They have heen published in EnglishasSuM
The former Cahiers critic Eric Rohmer (b. Jean-Marie Tales,trans . Sabine d'Estrée (New York: Viking, 1980). b
Maurice Schérer, 1920) began to blossom as a director in ·gt
6. Schroede (b 194 ) b · }¡js oWD n
. r · 1 ecame an important director m ¡972): '
the late 1960s. His first feature, Le Signe du lion (The ~~ tbe 197oswith More (1969); The Valley Obscuredby cloud5 ( ,Maí·
Sign of Leo, 1959), received virtually no notice in the year e feature documentary ldi Amin Dada (GeneralIdi Amín, 197~~/ki'~
of its release, but between 1962 and 1963 Rohmer made 2,s~;l (Mistress, 1976); and Koko le gorilla qui parle (J(okothehroe<itr
the first two of his six "Moral Tales," or "Contes nwrau X," n ª· 1978). Mter a final Fren;h proiect (Tricheurs, 1983),Sc.1naiP ·
carne to Hollywood h J f usu111 '
stream fil ' w ere he has directed a series o un99())5¡ng/t
whose basic theme is the antagonism that exists between
White Fe:l-e.g., Barjly (1987), Reversal of Forlune(l '
e (1992 ), and Kiss of Death (1995).

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 Major New Wave Figures 463
. ge 1982), Pauline a la plage (P z·
,,o , . de la pleine lune au
3), Les Nuits
me at the B
(F ll M each,
198 u aan in p ·
4) Le Rayan vert (Summer 1986 ) d an.s,
198 ' . . , ' , an L'Ami de
amie (My Girlfnend s Boyfriend, 1987) a formal b man
a
nd classical precision unequaled even m. h·1s preeauty
·
work.Like his Quatre aventures de Rein tt . VIous
. e e et Mirabell
(FourAdventures oif Remette
. and Mirabel[ 1987)
e, , severa!
e
of these were sh ot m 16mm and blown u r
· al xh'b'ti' · P ior 35mm
theatnc e 1 , 1 on,I as m the earliest days of th e New
Wave.Rohmer s cyc e of four seasonal films de a1·mgwith
the power of myth-Conte de príntemps ( 1990) C
d'hiver (1992), Cante d'été (1996) and C t d' ' ante
' an e autamne
(1998)-was followed by L'Anglaise et ze duc (Enghsh .
title:TheLa d d h
. 1Jan t e Duke, 2001) ' based on th ememmrs .
of a Scottish gentlewoman stranded in p ans· dunng . the
GreatTerror of 1792, whose precincts are simulated dig-
itally from contemporary-looking painti ngs and pano-
ramas.
Jacques_Rivette (b. 1928), another Cahiers critic, and
formerass1stantto both Renoir and Becker, also directed
a handful of important films in the 1960s that show a
13.32 Le Religieuse (Jacques Rivette, 1965): Anna Karina as the
markedpredilection for literature and the theater. París
novice Suzanne Simonin.
nousappartient (París Belongs to Us, 1960) concems the
members of a Parisian acting troupe who are rehearsing
a version of Shakespeare's Perícles, and who, through a
seriesof coincidences and insinuations, come to believe tury novel about a woman driven to prostitution and sui-
themselvesenmeshed in a Fascist conspiracy to destroy cide through the hypocrisy of religious orders. This bleak
the world. At the end of the film, this "conspiracy" tums film acquired something of a sensational reputation due
out to be the invention of a paranoid American novelist, to its suppression in France, but its saber camera style
but the confusion has caused two deaths and wrecked the and rather conventional narrative structure lend it a seri-
livesof everyone involved. Rivette shot París nous appar- ousness that no amount of scandal can belie. Rivette's
tient on a day-to-day basis between 1957 and 1959 with third film is his greatest to date, and it, too, reveals his
money for film stock borrowed from Truffaut and a literary tastes. L'Amour fou (Crazy Love, 1968) is a four-
camera borrowed from Chabrol. (Appropriately, the hour study of the slow disintegration of a marriage set
"film"that the Doinel family goes to see at the Gaumont- against the filming of a television production of Racine's
Palacein Les Quatre cents coups is París nous appartient, tragedy Andromaque, in which the protagonist of the film
althoughit was in fact still in the process of production.) plays the lead. Cold, austere, and agonizingly slow,
L'Amour fou provides Rivette with a laboratory in which
None of the cast or crew was paid until after the film's
to explore questions about the nature of film and stage
release, at which time the Cahiers group issued a joint
illusion, as Renoir did in Le Carrosse d'or (1952). During
statement conceming its crucial importance to la poli-
the 1970s, Rivette made six features-Out One (1971),
tique des auteurs. Rivette's film, they wrote, was "pri-
which exists only as a thirteen-hour workprint; Out One:
marilythe fruit of an astonishing persistence over severa!
Spectre (1972), a four-and-one-half-hour abridgment , or
years to bring to the screen a personal vision of the world
"spectre ," of Out One; Céline et ]ulíe vont en bateau
as rich and diverse as if expressed by any other means"
(Celine and ]ulie Go Boating, 1974); Duelle (1976);
(italicsadded). Noroit (1977); and Me·rry Go Round (1978)-but only
Rivette's second feature, La Religieuse (The Nun, Céline et Julie and IJuelle have been distributed outside
1965), was based upon Denis Diderot's eighteenth-cen-

Scanned by CamScanner
 Native Context
464 1 The French New Wave ªnd lts
of France. 7 The 1980s saw Rivette continuing to elaborate
the mysteries of identity in such vaguely surrealistic fihns
as Le Pont du nord (North Bridge, 1981) and L 'A~r
parterre (Lave on Earth, 1984), culminating, oddly, m
his most accessible film so far Hurlevent (Wuthering
Heíghts, 1985), a straightforward adaptation of the Emily
Bronte novel that shifts the setting from nineteenth-
century Yorkshire to the early 1930s in Brittany, and La
Belle noíseuse (1991), a four-hour adaptation from Balzac
that became a commercial hit in France. Because of his
obscurity and artistic integrity, Rivette had little com-
mercial success with his films befare the 1990s, but in
that decade his work took a more popular tum. Following
his six-hour life of Joan of Arc,Jeanne la Pucelle (Joan the
Maid, 1994), Rivette made the epic musical Haut has
fragüe (Up Down Fragile, 1995), the psychological mur-
der mystery Secret déjense (English title: Top Secret,
1998), and Va savoir (Who Knows?), a romantic comedy
about a theater troupe staging a Pirandello play in con-
temporary Paris.
AGNES YARDA, JACQUES DEMY,
AND OTHERS
Agnes Varda (b. 1928), whose La Poínte-Courte (1955)
had been something of a N ew Wave landmark, continued
to write and direct fine films in the 1960s. Her second
feature, Cléo de cinq a sept (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962),
photographed by Jean Rabier, depicts exactly 90 minutes
(the running time of the film) in the life of a young pop
singer who is waiting for a lab report that will tell her
13.33 Cléode cinq asept (AgnesVarda, 1962): Corinne
Marchand.
-
13.34 Varda
"'/ .
.
's Le Bonheur (1965): Fran~ois(Jean-Claude
.
and his mistressEmilie (Marie-France Boyer).
DroUo
t)
whether or not she has cancer. Le Bonheur (Happiness,
1965) is a strangely detached film about a happilymarned
family man whose affair with another woman causeshis
wife to commit suicide and who proceeds to lead a happy
existence with his mistress after his wife's death. The film
is highly decorative but ambiguous in tenns of psycho-
logical and moral considerations. In Les Créatures (The
Animals, 1966), Varda examined the relationship between
fantasy and reality in the mind of a writer who talksto
animals and cannot distinguish real people from the char-
acters in his novels. Varda also contributed to the collec-
tive Loin du Vietnam (1967), and in 1969 she carneto
America to make the improvisational feature LionsLove .
During the 1970s Varda directed the semidocumen-
tary Daguerréotypes (1976; French release, 1979), a fea-
ture-length study of the rue Daguerre in Pruis, whereshe
had lived for many years, and L'Une chante, l'autrepas
(One Sings, the Other Doesn't, 1977), a fifteen-year
~hronicle of two women friends pursuing totally different
lifestyles. In the United States once more Varda madeª
pair of films that commented on each oth:r-Murs murs
(Walls Walls, 1981), a documentary study of Los Angeles
wall murals, and Documenteur: An Emotion Picttsre
7, Duelle and 1·t . e("Cise
in . , s companion piece , Sérial (1976), a deliberate ex .
my;.hficahon directed by Rivette's scenarist Eduardo de Gregooo ,
eclaturedtogether at the 1976 New York Film Festival and1ii1
wreelere ert
ase comme .all . ,\'811
on to better thi;c1 ' . y on the east and west coasts. De Grego~~)afld
Célíne et Juliewft
'
La Mémoire courte (Short Mem~ry, 1 ,
9
ic was released in the United States m 1982·
Scanned by CamScanner
 mm rnood piece about a secretary w k· After the Wave 465
1) a 16 . or ing
1¡98 e' roduction of Murs murs while taking care of her Glaneurs et ler, la
011th ;on (Varda's own). In S~ns :oít ni loí (Wíthout a
which . · g '1etue.8' (The Glearien and. [_ - J_
. examines the social cultural d ......J;.,.;~ 1 -
1
,01ng d beyondthe Law; Enghsh title: Vagabond 1 ) cations of s . . " an ~
. J 011 • fil ' 985 ' cavengmg even as it contPTin->lates her
ROºJ duced a Bressoman m about an aimles I mortality. - ·~t'
da pro sy
V,lf. t enage girl and the people she meets befare her
rifttng
e Demy h~mself 0931-1990 ) became a specialist~
d hed death from exposure. More recently, Yarda the 1960s m colorfu] b'tt 1 ersweet melodramas reminis-
-
,
,,,rete diptych of features on the British actress Jane cent of poetic alis
iadea . h di re m and the work of :\fax Ophüls. Bis
n . who since marrymg t e rector Jacques Doillon Lola (1961)' which is dedicated to Ophüls and owes mnch
s·rlón
1 ' '
b ' orne a French moví.estar-Jane B. par Agnes V to the fluid camera work of Raoul Coutard, is a ga~-- light-
¡as ec ·
_1d [(u.ng Fu Master (the title of a particularly obsessive hearted film about love, set in Nantes and similar in snie
::eo game), both in ~987. Throughout 1:90, Yarda col- to La Ronde. It has been called"a musk-al ,nthout so~~
~r dances," and it earned Dem y an internation al rep¿
laborated with her dymg. husband, . the director Jacques
to produce a film1c autob1ography/biography of his tion. Les Parapluies de CherbourP The l..foib,-Pllas
Dem, Y Cherbourg, 1964) is an actual mU:caI about a roman~
youtll· The resulting Jacquot de Nantes. . (1991) covers between a shop girl and a senice-station attendant in
Demy's )jfe through 1949, at which pomt his lifelong
which the dialogue is sung, as in an opera: it is also nota-
¡nfatuation with cinema began to fulfillitself as a career .
ble for the vivid decor of designer Bemard fü-ein b.
Asa pendant, Yarda directed Les Demoiselles ont eu
1929) and the riotous color cinematwraph~ - oí Jem
dngt -cinqans (The Young Girls Tum 25, 1992) a witty
Rabier . Les Demoisellesde Rochejort The lorm g Girl.~ if
documentary tribute to Demy' s Les Demoiselles de Roche-
Rochefort, 1966) is a lively lwmma ge to the Hollywood
fort (1996).After another documentary about her late musical directed in collaboration wi.th Gene Kelh·. After
husband (L'Universe de Jacques Demy, 1995) and an the Arnerican-made Model Slwp (1968 _ Demy's work
affectionateArabian Nights-style parable about film his- declined into such frivolity as L 'Événement 1 plus impor-
tory(Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinema, 1995), tant depuis que l'hmnme a marché sur la Irme 1'ht• Most
\lardamade the self-reflexive documentary feature Les Important Event since Man Walked<>11the Moou. l9 73 -
a film about a pregnant man-and the Japi.mese- Fren ch
coproduction Lady Osear (1979), a petiod rotfülll('e set
during the French Revolution and based on n populm·
comic strip. In 1982, Demy retum ed successfully to his
all-singing formula wi.tllUne Chambre II vil/e A Room
in Town), his first French-languag e fihn in ov r eight
years , but Parking (1985) , a pop-musicRl remake <~ f_Co<.'-
teau's 1950 Orphée, was genera.Bythought to be a hulme.
as were his final features , Lo Table tounumt e ( 198i m1d
Trois places pour le 26 (1988).

Eric Rohmer
After the Wave Truffaut: Antoine Doinel

French fümmakers since the New

Other notewo rthy ·1· d B .
h dist inct ties with it are Plu ippe e roc_·n
h
Wíªve w o ave . ,·t·· nt to Chabrol and Tru fl'aut. w110
1933 ) a former ass1s ,l
(h. ' . kill d director of sophisti cated comedy
h as b e come a s ·he · · [ 'h M
1961, L'Homm e de Rio 1 at an
d tire (Cartouc e, ' . 1º66J
an sa . ]- Le Roíde coeur [King of Hemts, " . ;
1964
from Rio, let [Dear ' D etec"'•ve
,u '
1977]·, On a volé fo míss_o
IJ.35
r. 1 les O , 1966): Tendre pou Has Stolenjuptt er's rhigh. 1980];
"*he,¡11 emo,se//esde Rochefort (JacquesOemy, de Jupiter [Someone
e Derieuve,
Gene Kelly, Fran~oiseOorléac.

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 d lts Native Context
466 1 The French New Wave an b t the mental process of construct¡
atives a ou . . . b ng n,_
r d h makes no distinction etween the ""'la.
tives, an e . , (fil lll andt.
alling both cine roma.ns m novels) l 111s
novels, et he (1938-1981) contributed perhap. nthl973 ,
Jean Eus. allyac s e 1•..
New Wave film in La Maman et la "ISt
authenttc h ) hi Puta¡
r and the W. ore . T s provocati ~
(The M othe ve 22()_
. ault on the intellect and senses focuse
mmute ass s 011th
. ill . ment of the generation that produced th e
dis us10n . e pout
. al h aval of May 1968, and 1t won the Specia} ·
1c up e . Ju"'
. t Cannes in the year of 1ts release. Unfo...,,_-,
Pnze a . . • •u.uatel
y
E mK t h e was unable to sustam his success throughq1, •
·t a~r,.,reuses (My Little Sweethearts 1976)
peti es rnv.,. . . . ' and
several later works, and he comm1tted smc1dein theWake
of a disabling accident in 1981.
Alain Jessua (b. 1932) produced severa} important
13.36 L'Homme de Rio (Philippede Broca, 1964): Jean-Paul films during the 1960s, including the rernarkableLaV~
BelmondospoofsJamesBond.
al'envers (Lije Upside Down, 1964), a subjectiveportra¡¡
of the inception of madness, and Jeu de massacre(T~
L'Africain [The African, 1983]; La Gitane [The Gypsy, Killing Carne, 1967), in which the protagonist becomes
1986]; Chouans! [1988]; and Les Clés du Paradis [The so obsessed with the heroes of his favorite comicstrip
Keys to Paradise, 1991]).8 During the 1990s, de Broca that he can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality .
did most of his work for French television. Also Pierre Later, Jessua directed Traitement de choc (ShockTreat-
Étaix (b . 1928), a former circus clown and gag writer for ment, 1974), a horror film by genre but thematically a
Jacques Tati, directed a number of excellent comic films parable of capitalist exploitation of the underdeveloped
(Le Soupirant [The Suitor, 1962] and Yoyo [1965]) in the nations (Portuguese workers are murdered so thattheir
tradition of Max Linder and Buster Keaton; Étaix starred blood may be given to a rich Frenchman undergoingan
in ali of his own films but stopped directing features in exotic medical treatment). Les Chiens (The Dogs,1979 )
1971. The former actor Jean-Pierre Mocky (b. 1929) is a parable of the violence of modern life, focusingon
became a fine and prolific director of iconoclastic comedy the increased use of guard dogs for self-protectionby
in films like Les Snobs (1961), Les Vierges (The Virgins, citizens of contemporary France. Jessua continuedinthis
1963), and, more recently, Litan (1982), Á Mort ['arbitre vein with the medical science-6.ction film Parad.ispour
(Kill the Referee, 1984), Le Pactole (The Boodle, 1985), taus (Paradisefor All, 1982); Frankenstein 90 (1984), ª
La Machine a découdre (The Unsewing Machine, 1986),
cornic version of the classic with a cybemetics geniUS
Agent Trouble (Trouble Agent, 1987), and Les Saisons du
replacing the doctor; and the noir thriller En touteinno-
plaisir (The Seasons of Pleasure, 1988). His later films-
cence (No Harm lntended, 1988). He has only madeone
e.g., Il gele en Enfer (A Day in Hell, 1989), Ville avendre
(City for Sale, 1992), and Noir comme le souvenir (Black
for Rememhrance , 1996)-are notable for their edgy
8
black humor. Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922), the major · ~n 1984, de Broca directed the dual cinema/televisionsuperp;i
~ction Louisiane (Louisiana), distributed as both a three-hour!hea
practitioner of the French nouveau roman 9 and the reature andas lX-
· h our Vlºdeo miniseries.
scriptwriter for Resnais's L'Année demiere aMarienbad 9 Lit ali arelfic(iOP
tumed to directing in the 1960s and 1970s with L'Hom~ · . er ~· lhe "new novel"-an influential form of avant-g e!lobht
r~~ticed m France in the 1950s and 1960s by such writers_ ~afOlute-
qui ment (He Who Líes, 1968), followed by Le Jeu avec an~ ~ -Marguerite Duras (now a filmmaker herself), NathalienQ!J~
lefeu (Playing with Fire, 1975) and La Belle captive (The ro ichel Butor. Fonnally influenced by the cinema, the udiJ l·
Beautiful Prisoner, 1983). His last film was Un Bruit ui
rend fou (English title: The Blue Villa, 1995), set
brothel on an isolated Greek island. His films are ali
a¡: manwas antihum . . .
ical des . .
bº tive,eve 1
arust m its concentration on the o Jec
mo~vaticnptm; of material phenomena at the expense ~ ctionl¡,,
that it on, and plot. The nouveau roman was often "met, e ",.;t
create narr ti
h~-te·

f I·ts owO
il4
nar- (see Robbe-G ·u .ª ve metaphors for the process o g.5gl)
n et s Dans le labyrinth [In the !Ahyrinth, 1

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 r.¡ sincc- t .es coleur s du Diabl e (Dev il's Color. 1 After the Wave 1 467
11 ,11
.
. •t<'llingof t·he Faust .lege nd in th f' s, 997)-
:1 1t · e orm of a between crime and media coverage, and Amen (2001)
,¡c·il thrillc r. The singl e New Wave t· psycho-
1og ' e . . . eature by Jac u w~ an intense and deeply serious film examining Pope
Ho,.ier (b. J 926), Adi eu. Philippine (1962) h· . ~ es Pms XII's complicitous silence during the Holocaust.
. f' . ' as acquued
the rep11tat1on
.
o a mrnor mast erpiece a]th
h . '
h. .
oug 1t1srea]] Much interesting work whose origins are traceable to
inethmg less t an that: an engaD"ingly1. . Y the New Wave appeared during the 1970s in the French-
so _ . . o· mproV1sed nar-
rative about a Pansian youth in the 1960 fil . speaking Swiss cinema. The director Alain Tanner' s first
Cl
·,iérnavénte . f'ash 10n,' w h'
. 1ch contains a h'l s. med m feature, Charles mort ou vif (Charles Dead or Alive,
. . . , 1 anous parad
ofFrench teleVIs1on. Roz1er s only other si 'fi Y 1969), was a characteristic product of the 1960s in wbich
e d'O .. ( 19 gm cant fea- a middle-aged businessman drops out of bourgeois soci-
ali
A ,

ture' Du ote . roet

.
73) is a hyp
' erre stic film
aboutthe expenence of three girls on holid . B .
. ay m nttany ·
but his confusmg comeback film , Maine-O cean
OceanExpress, 1986), seemed to confirm th d d
. e eca ence
ofNew Wave-style .
auteunsm. Against all odd R . .
next feature, Fí.fi Martingale (2001) struck
. . . ,
nerve m 1ts sabre on the pretensions and paranoia of a
Parisiantheater director. The Creek-born director Con-
stantine Costa-Cavras (b. 1933) , formerly associated with
conventional thrillers, developed into a masterful director
ofpolitical films in the 1970s with Z (1969) and L'Aveu
(The Confession, 1970), both shot by Raoul Coutard; État
desiege (State of Siege, 1973), Section spéciale (Special
Section, 1975), Clair de femme (Womanlight, 1979), ali
starring Yves Montand; and, for the American producers
Edward and Mildred Lewis (Universal), Míssing (1981).
Sorne of Costa-Cavras's later films, such as Hanna K
(1983)and Conseil de famille (Family Council, 1986), suf-
fered from weak scripts or, like Betrayed (1988) and The
Music Box (1989), from excessive polemics. But Mad City
(1997)was an intelligent thriller about the symbiosis
1337 9) basedon a right-
. · Costa-Gavras'saward-winning Z <196 '
Wing assassination
plot in contemporaryGreece.
ety, goes to live with sorne young intellectuals , and is sub-
(Mame-
. ' sequently committed to an asylum by bis family. Tanner
,
(b. 1929) had worked at the British Film lnstitute and
for BBC television in London from 1955 to 1958, and he
s, oz1er s was deeply influenced by the British Free Cinema move-
a popu 1ar ment (see Chapter 14) and its New Left ideology. His La
Salamandre (The Salamander, 1971) and Le Milieu du
monde (The Middle of the World, 1974), both concemed
with day-to-day existence in modem industrial society,
have been compared to the best work of Rohmer, while
his Le Retour d'Afrique (Return to Africa, 1974) is as
experimental and politically committed as anything
attempted by Godard. With the critical success of Jonas
qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (]onah Who Will Be 25 in
the Year 2000, 1976), Tanner was proclaimed a major
European filmmaker-a status confirrned by bis harrow-
ing dissection of Swiss society in Messidor (1979) and bis
wry portrait oflreland in Light Years Away (1981), which
won the prize for Best Direction at Cannes. In the 1980s
Tanner continued bis exploration of people living on the
social and psychological periphery of the modero urban
wasteland with Dans la ville blanche (In the White City,
1983), set in Lisbon; No Man 's Land (1985), set on the
Franco-Swiss border; and La Vallée fantome (The Ghost
Valley, 1987), set in an Italo-American neighborhood in
Brooklyn. In recent collaborations with the writer/actress
Myriam Mézieres-A Flame in My Heart (1987) and Le
Joumal de Lady M (The Diary of Lady M, 1992)-Tan-
ner has attempted to explore the dynamics of female sex-
ual pleasure, as he puts it, "from inside a woman's head."
Recent Tanner films include Requiem (1998), a drarnatic
tribute to the Portuguese writer Femando Pessoa, and
Jonas et Lila, a demain (]onas and Lila , Till To11Wmn~,
1999), a whimsical sequel to bis landmark 1976 film m
which Jonah has indeed reached the age of twenty-five,
graduated frorn film school, and married bis African girl-
friend.
Other Swiss directors with a marked personal style are

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 d lts Native Context
468 1 The French New Wave an d ·stance by a Jean Valjean-like h
0
fheroisrn an res1 . e aríl<.1
Jean-Louis Roy-Black-Out, 1970; Claude Goretta, (b. N · Occupation. et
during tbe Faz¡ ch director whose films hav
1929)-L'Invitation (The Invitation, 1972), Pas si mec~- Another ren e hee¡
ant que fª (Notas Wicked as That!The Wonderful Croo ' r ted by the N ew Wave but whose 1

1arg ely una f1ec . rece

1975), La Dentelliere (The Lacemaker, 1977), Les Chem-
ins de l'exil (The Roads of Exile, 1978), La Provin~al~
(The Girl from Lorraine, 1980), La Mort d.eMario RtcC:
(The Death of Mario Ricci, 1983), Si le soleil ne revenait
pas (If the Sun Never Retums, 1987); Michel Soutt:r
(1932-1991)-L'Escapade (The Escapade, 1973), Reper-
ages (English title: Location Hunting, 1978), L 'Amour
des femmes (Wom.en's Love, 1981), Signé Renart (Signed
Renart, 1987); and Yves Yersin (b. 1942)-Les Petites
fugues (The Little Escapes, 1979). Like Tanner, these
four French-speaking directors were part of Groupe
Cinq (Group Five), a band of young cinéastes who carne
together in 1968 in Geneva to make films in coproduc-
tion with Swiss television. At the same time, the coun-
try' s leading Swiss-German director emerged in Daniel
Schmid (Nacht oder Nie [Tonight or Never, 1972]; La
Paloma [1974]; Violanta [1978]; Hécate [1982]; Il Bacio
di Tosca [Tosca's Kiss, l984];Jenatsch [1987]). Bythe late
1980s, Switzerland was producing more than twenty fea-
tures a year, most with sorne form of govemment subsidy.
The work of the French director Claude Lelouch (b.
1937) is more controversial than that of the filmmakers
discussed above because of its blatant appeal to a mass
audience. Lelouch uses ali the modem narrative tech-
niques of his N ew Wave counterparts, and he is an auteur
in the most comprehensive sense of the tenn in that he
produces, directs, writes, photographs, and edits ali ofhis
own films (such as Un Homm.e et une femm.e [A Man and
a Woman, 1966]; Vivre pour vivre [Live for Life, 1967]).
But while these films are visually engaging, they lack
emotional depth and have the quality of extended tele-
vision commercials. There are exceptions in the ingenious
comedy-~riller Cat and Mouse (1978) and the pica-
resque A Nous deux (Us Two/An Adventure for Two,
1979), but the work of Lelouch during the 1980s and
~990s (Les Uns et les autres [The Ins and the Outs, 1981];
Edith et Marcel [1983]; Vive la vie/ [Long Live Life!,
1984]; Partir revenir [Departure, Return, 1985]; Un
Homm.e et une femm.e vingt ans déja [A Man and a
Woman: 20 Years Later, 1986]; Attention bandits! [Warn-
ing, Bandits, 1987]; La Belle histoire [1991] seemed to
confinn his essential vacuity. Yet in 1995, Lelouch pro-
duced a remarkable variation on Víctor Hugo's Les Mis-
erables (1995), which uses the novel as a gloss on a
n act
b me prominent IS Claude Sautet (l nt
work has eco . 924-_
gr aduating from IDHEC m 1950 and
2000). After . \Vork
. tant to both Georges Fran1u and J -
ing as an assis . acques
t t began his career as a director Witha .
Becker, Sau e . senes
f Rifiji-style thrillers (Classe taus nsques [Englishtit]
o Bi. R' k 1960]- L'Arme agauché [English title·c e:
~e~ u' ' . ~
tor 1965]) . During the 1970s, he bega
orteh Dicta nto
ficollaborate '
with the scriptwriter Jean- Loup Dabadieand
tute observer of French bourgeois soc¡ ·
b ecame an as . ety,
famous for his direction of ensemble playmg. SautefsLes
Choses de la vie (The Things of Lije, 1970), Maxet les
ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkme~, 1971), César et Ros-
alíe (Cesar and Rosalie, 1972), Vmcent, Franfois, Paul,
et les autres (Vincent, Franfois, Paul, and the Ot/ien ,
1974), Mado (1976), Une Histoire simple (A SimpleSto"J ,
1978), Un Mauvais .fils (A Bad Son, 1980), Gar¡;on !
(1983), Quelques jours avec moi (A Few Days withMe ,
1988), and Un Coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter, 1991)
all deal with middle-class people trapped at midlifeby
the pattems of their own routines, and the filmshave
been much admired for their sympathetic understanding
of a class that it has become almost obligatory for con-
temporary European directors to malign. After providing
the script for an American remake of Les Chosesdela
vie (Intersection [Mark Rydell, 1994]), Sautet madea
final film before his death from cancer in July2000-
Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995), a moving analysis of
bourgeois repression and failed relationships that encap-
sulated his major themes and won several French Acad-
emy of Cinema Awards (Césars).
Another important French filmmaker not of the New
Wave but decisively influenced by it is Bertrand Tave~er
(b. 194l). Üriginally a film critic and learned cinéphrl e,
Taverni · ,1· tion
er lil many ways represents a reconcuia
between the post-N ew Wave generation of directorsand
the "tr ª diti on of quality" so roundly attacked bYtlie
Cahiers sch 00 I· H'Is f:avorite screenplay collaborator' for d
example, is Jean Aurenche who with Pierre Bost, ha
b~en th e prime target of T~ffau;' s vilification in "ACe~-
tam 't d
en ency in French Cine " · 1954. In fact, .
'fa,·
e . h ma m tor
~mer e ose Aurenche and Bost as the scriptwritersk
h1skflrst feature, L'Horloger de Saint Paul (TheCl(J(' :
rna er 1974)
'
d
' an a aptation of a Simenon mu e ·
rd r 111,
is

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 with a metaphysical twist wh· h . After the Wave 1 469
terY ' le 1s dedi
·ther great screenwriter of "quality,, J cated to
ano . . , acques Prév R~urn of the Musketeers, 1994)-has confinned ít. Since
. ce that time, Tavem1er has produc d fil ert . directing the controversia} police procedural L 627
SJI1 e ms cov ·
extraordinary range of material ali f th enng (l 99 2), which focuses on the everyday life of a drug-
an b. . f , o em characte
. d by a com mation o N ew Wave-styl . r- squad cop, Tavemier has concentrated on films with con-
1ze . . . e cmematic éclat
. 1d class1cally tight narrative constructio Qu l te~porary social themes. For example , L 'Appat (The
¡U n. e a Jete
Co mnumce (Let Joy Reign Supreme 1975) 1 n 1.romc
·s a . Bait: 1995) is about the consequences of economically
. . . ' tale
0 f palace mtngue set m the court of Louis XVI- L
motivated urban crime, while 9a commence aujourd'hui
. (T',_ J d , e ]uge (I~ All ~tarls Today, 1999) offers an uncompromisingly
et ['assassin ne u ge and the Assassin, 1976 )
. tiº . h coolly
dissects tl1e sym b 10 e re 1ations ip between a nmeteenth- . gnm p1cture of provincial life in the north of France.
century jud~e and a serial killer; Des Enf ants gatés Even the World War I epic Capitaine Conan (1996) has
contemporary resonance in its attempt to distinguish
(Spoiled Children, 1977) chronicles a filmm aker ,s May-
between war crimes and the crime of war itself. In this
September ro~ance as well as his various aesthetic and
regard, Laissez-passer (2002) offered a revisionist
political comm1tments; La Mort en direct/Deathwatch
account of filmmaking under the Occupation that dis-
(1979),Tavernier's first film in English, presents an
turbed many French intellectuals. Although Tavenúer' s
Orwellianvision of a future world in which the pomog-
goal was to rehabilitate the postwar "tradition of quality"
raphyof sex has been replaced by that of death; and Une
reviled by the Cahiers critics in the 1950s, to sorne the
Semaine de vacances (A Week's Vacation, 1980) is about film seemed like an apología for collaboration. (Laissez-
a young French schoolmistress' s search for identity; like passer, which means something like "Let it go" or "Lefs
L'Horl.ogerde Saint Paul, it is set in his native city of move on," starred several veterans of the scenarist tra-
Lyons. Tavernier' s two most important films to date are dition-J ean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Charles Spaak (see
clearly Coup de torchon ( Clean Slate/Pop .1280, 1981) and Chapter 9)-playing characters very much like them-
UnDiman.che a la campagne (A Sunday in the Country, selves.) In addition to his work in features, Tavenúer has
1984),tlie former a delicious black comedy of adultery made a number of brilliant documentarles that reflect a
andmurder adapted from a Jim Thompson novel and set similar, inherently conseIVative perspective-e.g ., La
in a French colonial town in West Africa in 1938, and the guerre sans nom (also known as The Undeclared War,
latter,based on a novella by Pierre Bost, a lyrical account 1992) is about the French debacle in Algeria; and De
ofa day in the life of an aging Impressionist painter who l'autre cóté du périphe (On the Other Side of the Tracks,
receives a visit from his grown-up children at his country 1998) provides an insider's view of a Parisian housing
home in the late summer of 1912. Sublimely photo- project , most of whose residents are North Amcanimmi-
graphed in widescreen by his new collaborator Bruno de grants. As a producer, he has also given many younger
Keyzer, Un Dimanche a la campagne won Tavemier tlie
cinéastes their first opportunities to direct , and as presi-
dent of the French directors guild, La Société des Réal-
Best Director prize at Cannes in the year of its release.
isateurs de Films, Tavemier has becorne a major force
These films-together with his documentary . on th e
within the leadership of the domestic industry.
American South Mississippi Blues (codirected with Rob-
Other prominent post-New Wave directors are Mau-
ert Parnsh); Ra:ind Midnight (1986) , a superbly crafted
rice Pialat (1925-2003) , Bertrand Blier (h. 1939), Alain
feature about the friendship that develops be_twee~ ª Comeau (b. 1943), Claude Miller (b. 1942), Diane Kurys
young French jazz devotee and an aging Amencan J~ (b. 1948) and André Téchiné (h. 1943). Pialat was a much
musician in Paris; and La Passion Béatrice (The PasSi~n acclaimed television dire ctor when he started making a
of Beatrice 1987) a dark and violent period piece set m series of powerful , emotionall y confrontational features
, , 'W
tbefourteenth century during the Hundred Years ar- with L'Enfanc e nue in 1969, which concems the prob-
have msured
· Tavernier' s position as e
th most respected
. lems of an unwant ed child; tl1en carne Nous ne vieill-irons
French filmmaker of his generation, and later work,_ m as ensemble (We Wor1't Grow Old Together, 1972), which
mu] ·
tiple genres-like the antiwar
film La vie et nen1 :eals with th e breaking up of a love nffair, and La Gueule
d'autre(Life and Nothing But, 1989), the family mkl~o- ouvert e (The Moutli Agtrpe, 1974), which man y consider
d d th swashbuc mg to be his mast erpi c.-e,about a woman ·s losing bnttle with
rama Daddy Nostalgie (1990), an e . title· The
adventure La filie de d'Artagnan (Enghsh .

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 . Context
d lts Nat1ve
470 1
The French New Wave an ne rnelodrama set at Versaillesa d
al costui n t
unusu . f Louis XIV's court musicians (C0 O<:\l si¡
cancer. The uncompromising nature O 1 ª
f p·al t's material
kept on
the hves O . . rne 1g
.. ally a jazz rnus1c1an). After this b· a\l\lia_i
·th actors himself ongin k d ig-b
and his contentious methods of working W1 . films like . film Comeau wor e on a smaller sea! . lldg et
the quantity of his output relatively low, but m J·fe hentage , ( h C . l einc.
· I of teenage 1 cousin T e ousm, 997) untij h fl11i
e
h
Passe ton bac d'abord (1979), a e romc e k filrns like Le h p . e ni
. I t tale of wor - . d Paciifique (T e nnce of the Pa ;~ ade
in a provincial town, Loulou (19~0), a vio en rs ( ), a Le Pnnce u . . . 2ÍVI,.
Cl_¡,c,
1983 . ·ff on colomalist ep1cs set on the island ~ )
ing-class sexual passions, and A nous amou_ i1 life, a corn1cn . oft~1. •
disturbing film on the dissolution ofbourgeois fam. Y th . Claude Miller, a former ass1stantto bothT "'qti
914
Pialat achieved an intensity of vision unrivaled m . ~ m dl G ·d rd has produced a small body of hi hl'\Jffa111
French cinema. Since then, he has made a metaphysic
an ° ª ' ·
t have won him an mtemational Critica!r 1~
g ·qua1 ·
filrns tha ·zz ioU
detective thriller, Police (1985), an extraordinary adapta- . . Miller's best works-La Mei eure fa~on de O\\i ,
tion of Georges Bemanos's 1926 novel Sous le soleil de mgh,B t Way to Walk, 1976), Dites-lui que ~
(T e es
:c~r
Je 1a¡
Satan (Under the Sun of Satan, 1987), and the thoughtful (U.S. title: This Sweet Sickness, 1977), Cardeavue(ll~
biopic Van Gogh (1991). Pialat continued his wry dissec- ·t1 . The Grilling, 1981-remade by Stephen HopL· ·
tion of the family in Le Gar01 (1995), in which a four- ti e. [[ l\lllSa¡
Under Suspicion [2000]), M~rte e randonnée (Deadl,
year-old hoy is passed around among several families as Circuit, 1983), and L'Effrontee (The ~ussy, 1985)-de~
a result of his parents' separation. persuasively with the theme of o~sess1on and areclear~
After several false starts in the 1960s (e.g., Hitler, con-
influenced by the style of Amencan film noir. In 1989
nais pas, 1963), Bertrand Blier found his metier in anar-
Miller directed La Petite voleuse (The Little Thiej)'
chic sexual comedy, often featuring the seduction of 'a
lively homage to Truffaut based on a script by himand
adults by children (Les Valseuses [English title: Going
Places, 1974] and Préparez vos rrwuchoirs [Get Out Your longtime collaborator Claude de Givray, which wasfol-
Handkerchiefs, 1977]); incest (Beau-pére, 1981); and, of lowed by L'Accompagnatrice (The Accompanist, 1992),a
course, the classical ménage a trois (La Femme de man grim drama of "making it'' in Vichy France. More
póte [My Best Friend's Girl, 1983] and Tenue de soirée recently, Miller directed the surreal comedy La Chamber
[Evening Dress, 1986]). Blier's other vein is the Buñue- des magiciennes (U.S. title: OfWomen and Magic,2000 )
lian allegory of Buffet froid (Cold Cuts, 1979) and Notre and several relatively dark psychological studiesinu
histoire (Our Ston_¡!Separate Rooms, 1984). Blier's later Sourire (The Smile, 1994), La Classe de neige (U.S.title :
films are the intricately structured comedies of adultery Class Tri.p, 1998), and Betty Fisher et autres histories
Trop belle pour toi (Too Beautiful far You, 1989), Merci (Betty Fisher and Other Stories, 2001)-the latterbased
la vie (Thanks to Lije, 1991), and Un deux trois soleil on Ruth Rendell's novel The Tree of Hands. The filmsof
(1993). Several of Blier's more recent films focus on the Diane Kurys, on the other hand, have ali been vaguel y
film industry itself-e.g., Les Acteurs (The Actors, autobiographical and yet charmingly eclectic-Diabolo
2000)-but Man homme (My Man, 1998) retumed menthe [Peppennint Soda, 1979] is about the quotidian
French sexual mores to center stage in its treatment of a
lives of teenage sisters, 1963--64,following their parents'
successful prostitute who, unaccountably, decides she
divorce; Cocktail Molotov (1980) concerns herownpar·
needsa pimp. Deeply influenced by American cinema, 1
ticipation in the "events of May" 1968;Coupdef~idre
especially the crime thriller, Alain Comeau appropriated
e ever popular "policier" genre (see below) as a vehicle
(~so known as Entre nous, 1983) deals with the fne~d~
s P of two young women in the period 1952-5 3, an
for social criticism in such sober and deliberately paced
lilmsas France société anonyme (France, S.A., 1974) modeled on the experience of her parents; and50 on ,
leading fin allY to h er much acclaimed Eng lish·1ancn1age
1:,· d
'OlicePython 357 (1976)' La Menace (1977), S'ene· naire . '
979), and Les Choix des armes (Choice oif l:rT film Un Homme amoureux (A Man in Love, 1987
) aJ1
. . vveapons,
81), tummg bnefly to the colonial epic Fort s aganne
984-reputedly the most expensive film mad · F
em rance lAI #
date) before resuming his engagement with the b · · ways. popular WJ.'th French audiences and filmma
kers aJ¡ke
.retll(11!
ican moVJes li b d ffice1
derworld in Le Móme (The Kid, 1986).Less typ~;~n between 1976e m e from 27 to 37 percent of total box-0 .¡:Ifor
d · rt ¡11:lf~
meau directed Tous les matins du monde ( ) y, the u S fil _an 1986, makingFrance the largestexp<> hu" er~
1991 , an · · m indu t r. 1a.
y thev
around 50 s ry arter Canada and Japan. Toui, ·
percent,

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13.38 Diabolomenthe (Diane Kurys, 1979): how it feels to be a
teenager.
C'estla vie ( 1990), which backtracks to the era of Diabolo
menthe and the mom~nt of the parents' separation; in
1994,Kurys directed A la folie (also known as 6 days, 6
Nights),about a ménage a trois in which two sisters share
the same man, and in 1999 Les Enfants du siecle (Chil-
drenof the Century) concentrating on the troubled rela-
tionshipbetween protofeminist novelist George Sand and
the romantic poet Alfred de Musset in the early 1830s.
Originallya Cahiers critic, André Téchiné directed sorne
of the French cinema's greatest actresses in award-
winningperformances once he entered the industry with
Souvenirsd'en France (also known as French Provincial,
1974),which starred Jeanne Moreau as a social-climbing
laundress, and Barocco (1976), a stylized crime drama
starringIsabelle Adjani. Téchiné's breakthrough film was
LesSoeurs Bronte (1979), a psychobiographyof the three
famousVictorian sisters-creative, repressed, and ulti-
mately dysfunctional-played by Marie-France Pisier
(Charlotte), Isabelle Adjani (Emily), and lsabelle Hup-
pert(Anne). Many of Téchiné's later films inv~lved col-
laborations with Catherine Deneuve-Hotel des
Arnériques(1981), Le Lieu du crime (Scene of the Crime,
1986), Ma Saison préférée (My Favorite Season, 1993 ),
andLes Voleurs (1996)-and Juliette Binoche-Re nd e.z-
vous (1985) and Alice et Martín (1998)-and te nd ed to
dealWithdark romantic themes often spiked by violence.
l'échniné's gr~atest film may be Les Roseaux sauvages
(WildReeds (1994) a coming-of-age drama set in Pro;-
, ' I · l dO mestic
enceduringthe Algerian War that won mu ttp e f'
and llltemational
· d ed as part O ª
awards; it was pro uc
After the Wave 471
histonc collaboration between French film and televisíon
th at has since become a model for the entire industry.2
In the field of documentary cinema, Chris Marker (h.
Christian Franc;:oisBouche-Villeneuve, 1921) has pro-
duced a number of brilliant film essays (Cubas(, 1961;
Le ]oli mai, 1963; Le Mystere Koumiko, 196,5)as well as
the Bergsonian science-fiction short La Jetée (1962),
composed almost entirely of still photographs. Marker is
a close associate of Resnais and the chief organizer of
SLON, the film cooperative that produced Loin ele Viet-
nam (1967) and several other political documentarles of
the era. In 1977, Marker made the striking four-hour
compilation film Le Fond de l'air est rouge (literally, The
Essence of the Air Is Red), a documentary on the state of
radical politics in France in the mid-1970s. Later, he pro-
duced Sans soleil (Sunless, 1983), a remarkable medita-
tion on obsession and repetition that won a British Film
lnstitute award, A.K (1985), a documentary portrait of
Akira Kurosawa at work on Ran (see Chapter 18), and Le
Tomheau d'Alexandre (also known as The Last Bol,shevik,
1993), a study of the Soviet filmmaker Alexander Med-
vedkin (1900-1989). Marker also directed Une joumée
d'Andrei Arsenevitch (One Day in the Life of André Arse-
nevitch, 1999), a documentary on the death and art of
another great Russian director, Andrei Tarkovksy ( 1932-
1986). Ever the innovator, Marker has recently experi-
mented with multimedia installations (e.g., Silent Movie,
1995) and the intemet. His feature film Level Fíve (1997)
represents the experience of a computer-game designer
using the intemet to research the Battle of Okinawa in
the latter days of World War 11; the resulting collage of
hyperlinked images causes her to reflect on the relation-
ship between history and memory in her own life. Appro-
priately, Marker has been working for the last decade on
an autobiographical CD-ROM entitled Immemory. The
work of the cinéma vérité documentarist Jean Rouch (b.
1917-Chronique d'un été [Chronícle of a Summer,
2. Téchiné's film was part of a unique collaboration between the French
national arts television channel La Sept/Arte and the film studio IMA
Production in which nine directors were invited to make a feature film
dealing with his or her own adolescence for a series entitled Taus les
gar¡;onset lesfilles de leur ftge. Three of t~es~ autobiographical films
later won awards at Cannes-André Téchmé s Les Roseaux sauvage
(WilclReeds, 1994), Cédric Kahn's Trop de bonheur (Too Much Hap-
tJtriess, 1994), and Olivier Assayas's L'Eau froide (Col~ ~ater, 19_94).
Cofunding urnmgements between French film and televis1onhave smce
become nn industry muinstay.
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 d lts Nat1v~
1
472 The French New Wave an
13.39 Citizensof Parisin Le Joli mai (ChrisMarker, 1963).
1961] and La Punition [Punishment, 1963]) and that of
Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986-Les lnconnus de la terre
[The Unknown of the Earth, 1961]) had wide influence
during the 1960s on both the documentary (in the films
of the Americans D. A. Pennebaker, Albert and David
Maysles, and Frederick Wiseman) and the narrative cin-
ema (in the work of Rozier, Godard, and Tanner, and in
countless individual French, Swiss,Italian, West German,
British, and American films). In the 1970s, Rouch con-
tinued to produce distinguished ethnographic films,
focusing mainly on black African culture (Funérailles a
Bongo: Le Vieil Anai; 1849-1971 [Funeral in Bongo: Old
Anai, 1849-1971, 1979]), but later he turned to such
unusual features as Brise-glace (Icebreaker, co-directed
with Titte Tornroth and Raoul Ruiz, 1988), Enigma
(1988), andCantatepourdeuxgénéraux (CantataforTwo
Generals, 1990-about a Haitian voodoo ritual). Rouch
returned in later 6.Ims-Madame L'Eau (Madame Water
1993) and Moi fatigué debout, moi couché (I am Tired 0
Standing, I Líe Down, 1997)-to sub-Saharan Mrica.
The most prominent French documentarist, however,
is Marcel Ophüls (h. 1927), the son of the great postwar
director Max Ophüls. Marcel Ophüls's masterpiece is the
four-and-a-half-hour Le Chagrín et la pitié (The Sorrow
and the Pity, 1971), a shattering documentary that muces
newsreel footage with contemporary interviews in an
attempt to assess the impact of the Nazi Occupation on
the provincial city of Clermont-Ferrand and , by ext en-
sion, on the whole of France. The verdict is that , except
-- ·
----------------...._
-·.
h grin et /a pitié (Marcel Ophüls, 1971): Hitler
13.40 Le C a
. . the E'iffelTower after h'1st roopshave occup1ed
.
París
admmng ·
for the systematic murder of Jews and of those non-Jews
who openly opposed the Nazis, business went on very
much as usual during the Occupation, largely becausethe
Nazis obtained the cooperation of most of the French
bourgeoisie and because the existence of a large, effi-
ciently coordinated Resistance movement was a myth
propagated after the war. Originally made for Swissand
West German television companies, Le Chagrín et lapitié
was not shown on French television (ORTF), a state
monopoly, until 1981, but as a theatrical release in France
and abroad it received much attention. Ophüls's more
recent films are A Sense of Loss (1974), which chronicles
the plight of Northem Ireland, and The Memory ofJus-
tice (1976), a remarkable documentary meditation oncol-
lective guilt that counterposes the question of the Nazi
death camps and the N uremberg war-crimes trialswitb
~at ~f French atrocities in Algeria and American atroC·
j 1
~es ~nVietnam . The difficulties of trying to get the latter
diStnbuted against the wishes of myriad political censors
and _special interest groups led Ophüls to giveup fi]rn·
making for over a decade and to tum to writing ¡nstead .
In 1987, however, he renewed his filmic confrontatioO
wi th hist0 ry in Hotel Tenninus: Klaus Barbíe, HísLife
ªnd Times· Released at 267 minutes in 1988, thisfilmwa5
shot on three continents and concluded with the un;
hentant Nazi's widely publicized trial. Since then, 0phof
E:t made feature-length documentaries on the f~Ith·
Gennany (Novemher Days, 1992) and twentJe
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 . . . French Cin1
tury wartune JOumahsm (Veillées d,
cenT'',..e Troubles We,ve Seen] 1994) tharrnefi
s [alsoknown H·
as ri • ' ' e rst two a
ch focus on the s1ege of Sarajevo. 0 h··¡ , P rts of b,
w hi b P u s s docume
·yinfluence can e seen most clearly in th n- a1
ta1 e work of h· .
. nd Claude Lanzmann (b. 1925) wh Is In
fne ' ose astonishin p
n1·ne-and-a-half-hour meditation on the Holocaust Shoah g
re;
(lg85-from the Hebrew word for annihilatio~), was
0
assernbledfrom 350 hours of interviews and took ten u
yearsto produce. Shoah was actually the second filmof a
a trilogyexploring modem Jewish experience, whose first F
partwas Pourquoi Israel? (Why Israel?, 1972) and whose a
thirdinstallment was Tsahal (1994), dealing with the role
ofthe military in lsraeli society. Lanzmann continued to '\
probethe phenomenon of the death camps in Un Vivant d
quipasse (A Visitar from the Living, 1999), an extended o
interviewwith a Red Cross official who inspected both e
Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and gave them a seal of e
approval,and Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (Sobi- f
bor,Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M., 2001), an account, based on t
survivorinteIViews, of the only successful revolt of camp i:
f
inmatesagainst the SS.
1
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