by Ashlee Lanier
One of the first great leaps forward for the ingenuity of film began in 1959 with the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague). Classic Hollywood directors such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Orson Welles directly influenced French New Wave directors. Perhaps most influential was the work of Italian Neo-Realism directors such as Rossellini and Fellini. French auteurs who were mainly associated with the movement include: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Louis Malle to name a few.
(From left to right: Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Roman Polanski)
French New Wave directly borrowed from the rebellious direction and humanistic themes present in post-WWII Italian films. The main point of the New Wave was to rebel against classic French film’s strict narrative format and to focus on the bourgeoisie (usually in the form of stiff period dramas). Films belonging to the movement were almost exclusively set in working class urban areas (usually Paris); they were often filmed with a minimal budget and nonprofessional actors (much like previous Italian films of the ’40s), and often broke the fourth wall (with characters directly engaging with the audience). New Wave films embraced new themes often left untouched in other films such as sexuality, the struggles of the working class, and Marxist politics. The discontinuity of narrative was perhaps the most important aspect of French New Wave cinema. This discontinuity is excessively evident in Jean-Luc Godard’s debut 1960 feature Breathless (À bout de soufflé) where he extensively employed jump-cuts with an anarchic editing style. Jump-cuts cause a sharp break in narrative by instantly changing from one scene to another without any explanation and in Godard’s case present the audience with a nonlinear ruptured storyline. An example of jump-cuts in Breathless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ov4mQJIHhc
(Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, & Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Breathless)
François Truffaut’s 1959 semi-autobiographical Les quatres cents coups (The 400 Blows) is usually regarded as the first film of the movement. With its unique camerawork, focus on the working class, and bleak story it effectively helped to transform cinema into a new art form for French directors. The movement lasted well into the 1960s with its influence on fashion being most notable in the British working class mod subculture. British 1960s modernism borrowed heavily from the movement but soon became a global phenomenon with its own unique identity. The French New Wave’s influence on film has persisted since its inception, thanks to directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Sidney Lumet, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Terrence Malick among countless others who all borrow from French New Wave’s basic themes and chaotic structure.
The French movement went on to ignite the American, Hong Kong, and German New Wave movements of the 1970s and ’80s. Direct influence is also heavily evident in the emergence of the independent film movement of the 1990s. Modern cinema still shows traces of the French movement every now and then. Noah Baumbach’s 2012 film Frances Ha has a soundtrack littered with pieces from classic Nouvelle Vague films as well as a simplistic filming style directly related to the 1960s French movement.
(still from Baumbach’s Frances Ha)
The importance of the French New Wave movement in regards to film history would be difficult to overlook. It brought art-house films to mainstream international audiences, helped launch the careers of countless well-known directors and actors, aided in the legitimization of film as a form of art by ridding itself of strict dictatorial narratives, and ultimately gave film a wider audience because of its unique focus upon the everyman.
~Super brief author bio~
Ashlee is a Historic Preservation grad student who did her undergrad at NC State in osteoarchaeology & history, but besides studying old bones, she likes to watch art-house film & listen to ’60s British mod music. Her favorite films are City Lights, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather Part II, & The Royal Tenenbaums; she also watches too much TV & enjoys complaining about everything.
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