New Wave

Associated realizers

In 1958 or 1959, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, Pierre Kast, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze carries out their first feature-length films. They all are resulting from the Cahiers of the Cinema. Other scenario writers share the same values, even if they do not result from criticism like Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Rouch, Roger Vadim, Jacques Rozier, Claude Berri. Louis Malle will never be defined as pertaining to the movement (or rather it will be estimated rejected by the figures of the movement). Maurice Pialat is him also too individualistic to recognize in any movement and Alain Resnais, which has patience since 10 years in the short film carries out its astonishing “Hiroshima my love”. Claude Lelouch will always regret being put at the variation of the movement.

Without being at the origin of the movement, new realizers recognize themselves then in the line of the New wave. They are mainly Jean Eustace, Jacques Doillon, Andre Techine and a little later Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Sautet, Michel Deville, Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand, Yves Caumon, Philippe Ramos, Jean-Paul Civeyrac…

Formal and esthetic characteristics

One sees appearing a new way of producing, of making, of manufacturing films which is opposed to the traditions and the corporations. The invention of the Nagra, tape recorder portable, that of the camera 16mm Flash 16 by Andre Costing, light and autosilencieuse, the taste of turnings in outside imposes a new esthetics closer to reality. This rupture between cinema of studio and external cinema is in particular illustrated in the American Night of François Truffaut (1973): in a Put in abyme, the film shows us the realization of a film with camera on crane and shifts (turning of a scene of winter in full summer, turning of a scene of night in full day, famous “the American night”); Ferrand, the realizer (incarnated by Truffaut itself), admits that this film is undoubtedly the last with being turned in this manner, left will of the “old” cinema and proclamation of the “New wave”.

In addition, the realizers break certain conventions, in particular conventions of continuity. Thus in Breathless , Godard cuts the white in a dialog. Or in the Pier (short film having inspired the Army of the 12 monkeys of Terry Gilliam), Chris Marker presents a kind of diaporama, a succession of still images with a single narrator and a light background music. Only it is not a question to break with a tradition by provocation, but to make well feel something with the spectator again, or to represent a face of “reality”: the memories which one has one moment of his life partial, are truncated, and when a photo album is looked at, the memories come in the disorder with “jumps in time”. This will be taken again in particular by Abel Ferrara in films like Black Out and New Pink Hotel , which one could describe as “films brain” (the images are assembled as come the thoughts, in the disorder).

In short

The new wave appeared in the years according to war whereas young film enthusiasts such as Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Valcroze, aspired to a free life and without convention. Whereas the cinema of this time was deprived of creativity and was satisfied to be a simple support with the novel, these young film enthusiasts re-established the cinema of author by re-examining all the base of the cinema. Thus, the rule of continuity is not complied with sometimes any more, the point of view of the spectator is sometimes taken into account in film by the means of glances camera and interpellation of the spectator, of the plays of Mise in abyme on the cinema question the various cinematographic points of view, of many plays of freeze frame, idles, jerked style are also created… All these characteristics meet so that the film recalls unceasingly that it is a film, that it is cinema. An effect of realism is established: the realizer does not seek any more to mislead the spectator with false truth but to show the reality of the cinema as it is, in particular, with his plans which are not continuous in time as could to forget it believe or it the spectator, with his actors who are there to only be an actor of a film and not actor of a history or a scenario and with his decorations which exists only because they have a capacity symbolic system that because he resembles reality. Thus, this movement does not seek to reproduce reality as it should be but to show the reality of the cinema as it is.

Actors and actresses

The arrival of a new generation of actors (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Brigitte Bardot, Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Bernadette Lafont, Alexandra Stewart, Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jeanne Moreau, Andre Dussollier, Henri Tightens…) and technicians like Raoul Coutard or Andre Weinfeld, the support of a handle of producer-patrons (Georges de Beauregard, Pierre Braunberger, Anatole Dauman) were also crucial factors. The French cinema had not known to renew its actors since the interval war, and the appearance of new faces in particular made it possible to touch the young public.

Jean-Paul Belmondo incarnates, thanks to the direction of Godard, the male face of the New wave. He is the standard actor of this movement from his physique which does not answer the criteria of young the first traditional one and by a play which wants to be very spontaneous and a diction which are closer to the reality of the spectator of 1960. Its important role is that of Breathless which offers the statute of actor high-speed motorboat to him.
Jean-Pierre Léaud incarnates to him also the requirements of the new directors, with an often shifted play, which appears constrained. It is him which will incarnate the large character truffaldien of Antoine Doinel. At Godard, it incarnates the discomfort of the youth of before 1968, as déboussolée as revolted, in the search of a revolutionary ideal and a true relation with always imperceptible and incomprehensible young women.
Bernadette Lafont, revealed by Truffaut in Mistons , one finds it at once in films of Chabrol and she plays in the Mom and the Whore of Jean Eustace. Compared to the actresses of the Fifties, it brings a more modern image of the young woman southernmost at ease in her roundnesses physical, natural, spontaneous and popular.
Jean Seberg, Anna Karina and their relation with Godard: Jean Seberg is the heroin of Breathless ; contrary to the traditional actresses, it rather seems a “antifemme”, or a Real tomboy, with his short hair and its pace androgyne. But it is especially with Anna Karina that Godard will enrich its pallet by feminine roles. Its first great role is that of the Petit soldier . It turns in 7 major films of Godard and even when this last directs Brigitte Bardot in the Contempt , this one carries, during a famous film sequence, a brown wig which is not without pointing out the pace of Anna Karina. Moreover, like Jean Seberg, Anna Karina contributes to prolong the tempting attraction of French pronounced with a foreign accent.

See too

References

initial Source of the page: http://nezumi.dumousseau.free.fr/resntruf.htm

Internal bonds

New Hollywood (the Sixties to 80)

External bonds

the New wave

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