The History and Development of French New Wave movement in Cinema.

The development of French New Wave movement.

Retrieved from http://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-french-new-wave-revolutionising-cinema/

In the 1950s, there was a documentary movement that happened in France and many filmmakers were making documentaries of Nazi death camps, cinema verite and sane man in lunatic asylum. (Bordwell, 2013, p.486) In the mid-1950s, a group of younger generation or young filmmakers who wrote for the Paris journal Cahiers du Cinéma had become the most artistically respected French filmmakers of the day. The younger generation of critics who are really began to make waves, including Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. They are finding the truth. Cahiers du Cinéma is the most important and popular film journal that first appeared in 1951 which set up by Andre Bazin and Jacques Donial Valcroze. (Hitchman, 2008)

Bazin is the father figure of these critics. In 1953, Francois Truffaut wrote an essay for Cahiers du Cinéma entitled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”. He blames this tradition of adapting safe literary works, and filming them in the studio in an old fashioned and unimaginative way. (Hitchman, 2008) Truffaut had argued that, this style of cinema does not have visual enough and he had relied too much on the screenwriter. He and the others labeled it “cinema de papa”. However, these film lovers and cinephiles watched many previously unreleased movies at the Cinematheque Franchise which is a film archive and public theater in Paris during the postwar years and the first opened its doors in 1948. Those filmmakers wanted to break up the filmic experience in order to make it fresh and exciting. Cinematheque actually was a place for learning but not just for watching. They wanted their audience really understand and interpret what they were seeing.

They regularly praised the films they loved and tore apart those films they hated in print. Through the process of judging the art of cinema, they began to think about what it was that might make the medium special. Those young men love film and wanted to be filmmakers but were unable to get into the French commercial cinema. Instead they turned to theory and criticism, and becoming critics and theorists. Most important is that they were gradually inspired to begin making film themselves, but each director had a slightly different agenda.

There are two principles held at Cahiers du Cinéma. The first one is they feel that real cinema should rejects montage aesthetics, and favoring mise-en-scene. It explained that the ideology of the films should not just to be intellectual or rational experience but should include emotional and psychological experiences. They want their audience to think and feel it. Unlike commercial film that contains a lot of continuity to makes them into the film world, they let the audiences feel the reality. 

The second principle is personal authorship which explained an ideology of “Policy of Authors” or the Auteur Theory states that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression, bearing the filmmaker’s signature which is personality controlling obsession and cardinal themes. This is about the personality of a director. At the time auteur theory was considered a radical new approach to cinema. An auteur usually did not literally write scripts but managed nonetheless to stamp his or her personality on studio products, transcending the constraints of Hollywood’s standardized system. (Bordwell, 2013, p.486) Before that, it had been the screenwriter, producer, Hollywood studio, who was seen as the principle creator of a picture. The Cahiers critics applied the theory to directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, and Nicholas Ray who had previously been seen as merely excellent craftsmen, but had never been taken seriously as artists. (Hitchman, 2008) Many of the Hollywood directors these critics and filmmakers championed have become recognized as great artists. After that, the young writers broke new ground, not only in the way a film was understood, but in how cinema itself was perceived. The works of the auteur should grow proficiently and mature in vision with each successive film. The cinematography of the film must have more growth in the next film because they want to find out the true directors. They believe that true director will make a film that has their own true character. For example, Wong Kar Wai’s films mostly are about memory as that represents his personality. Godard tends to express his political view through his films. An example for modern director is Christopher Nolans. In his films, the main characters are primarily driven by obsessions and his antagonist are often motivated by philosophical believes rather than money. The storyline in his films usually involved a determined character seeking vengeance over the death of a loved one. His film usually revolved around characters that are afflicted with some kind of psychological disorder. It's all about his way of defining human obsessions. Also, he often uses the same collaborators film to film.

 Truffaut rejects heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue; he prefers visual aesthetics and mise-en-scene. It is to emphasize that we are watching films but not reading books. The novelty and youthful vigor of these directors led journalists to nickname them la nouvelle vague – the New Wave. The five central directors made 32 feature films between 1959 and 1966; Godard and Chabrol made 11 apiece. It was enough similarities for us to identify a broadly dinstinctive New Wave approach to style and form.

New Wave films are always independent and low budget. They are itched to make movies. They borrow money from friends to build a film. The innovation of the aesthetics in New Wave are rejects film traditions, elliptical or jump cuts, location shooting, direct sound and available light, use handheld cameras, long takes and improvised plot and dialogue and self-reflexivity. They try to introduce jump cuts, crazy jump cuts, long takes, and also try to shoot on location. The direct sound like the rack sounds that around the objects and the natural lighting. The filmmakers weren’t as concerned about establishing spatial and contextual relationships as they were about the mise-en-scene. The self-reflexivity is to constantly remind or draw attention to itself by telling audience that they are watching a film, unlike the escapist nature of Hollywood films. Therefore, they do a lot of long takes, jump cut, cinematography, actor’s monolog to show that this is not real. This is the artificially-created nature and reality of the filmic world. It wants audience to be actively to rethink, question or interpret the films. The New Wave directors could not afford to employ the professional actors, therefore non-professional actors are used to interpret the characters. The acting of the actors are departs from traditions which encouraged to improvised dialogue and talk over each other’s lines to reflect real-life conversations. They have no script and no dialogue for the actors; they develop the dialogue on the spot. They encouraged the actors talking one another, like crashing talking.

 The characters are often marginalized, young anti-heroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. Women were given strong parts that didn’t conform the archetypal roles seen in Hollywood.  It always did not comfort to typical roles. Also, there is a general cynicism concerning politics that often expressed as disillusionment with foreign policy in Algeria or Indo-China. It is an approach to oppose staged conversations like traditional American.

In 1958, with the constitution of the Fifth Republic, subsidies were brought by the government to support homegrown cinema which resulted in more funding for first time filmmakers. It encouraged distributors to lend its support to new directors. Also, rapid technological advancement during that time allowed filmmaking equipment to be more readily available. (Hitchman, 2008). films.

During the period 1959-60, sixty-seven filmmakers made their first feature film, only 55 per cent came from backgrounds not directly from the field of film-making, and the remaining 45 per cent was made up of short-film directors like Alain Resnais or Agnes Varda and film assistants. Most of the New Wave directors spent a great deal of time in their early years writing or thinking about it. Some were film critics; some were simply lovers of film. Their cinematic sensibilities are sharpened through long hours spent in the various Parisian cinematheques and film clubs. Everything from movies by realist Italian directors like Roberto Rosselini to hard-boiled noir and B movies from America, as well as early silent classics and even the latest technicolour Hollywood musicals had deeply influenced the filmmakers. (Hitchman, 2008)

The New Wave directors had admired the Neorealists, especially Rossellini, in opposition to studio filmmaking, took as their actual locales in and around Paris. Shooting on location had become the norm. Besides, cinematography changed. The New Wave camera moves a great deal, panning and tracking to follow characters or to explore a locale. Éclair had developed a lightweight camera that could be handheld. The directors are intoxicated with the new freedom offered by the handheld camera. Other than that, one of the most silent features of New Wave films is their casual humor. They along with humor came esoteric references to other films like Hollywood or European.

            In the late of 1969, French New Wave is ended. After a decade of radical filmmaking, this form of cinema has embedded into the mainstream. New wave directors have hired by production house and they started to involve themselves in film industry. At first they did not want to involve themselves in the production but later it turned into commercialized. Godard was the only one that continued to develop his radical and political filmmaking, moving to Sweden and opening and academy for experimental filmmaking. Godard’s films can said to be the only film which can internationally recognized socially and politically. Why is that so? This is because when they entered the film’s production, they did not have a chance to make decision on how the film should look like.