2.3: Nouvelle Vague

Cahiers du Cinéma

Founded in 1951, the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma sought to intellectualize the discussion of the movies, treating the medium as other intellectuals treated literature or fine art. From this magazine emerged a group of young critics who chose to become filmmakers. Between 1958 and 1961, the clique had a series of critical and commercial successes that established a new generation had arrived with a new aesthetic to match. In general, the French New Wave was iconoclastic and sought to distance itself from previous generations of French film by being at once more realistic and more subjective. On-location shooting was preferred to studio filmmaking, yet it was also understood that the director should add their personal touch to the film. Cahiers du Cinéma argued that great Hollywood directors like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock could be regarded as authors with a distinctive style and intentionally developed their own distinct styles and themes. The primary filmmakers in the clique include François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette.

        

Figure \(\PageIndex{i}\): Early successes of the French New Wave include Le Beau Serge (1958, left), the first success of the movement that deals with a young man who returns to his hometown to discover his childhood friend has become a deadbeat; The 400 Blows (1959, center), a semi-autobiographical movie about a misunderstood teenager; and Breathless (1960, right), the most avant-garde film of the bunch that used unusual techniques like jump cuts to complicate a doomed romance between a Humphrey Bogart-wannabe gangster and a French-American woman.

The Left Bank

While Cahiers du Cinéma was highly influential in the development of the French New Wave, they were not the sole force behind the movement. Another group became known as the "Left Bank" of the New Wave. Besides being separate from the magazine, this group also had a distinct aesthetic. While the Cahiers du Cinéma crew was movie-crazy (understandable for employees of a film journal), the Left Bank was tapped into artistic movements in other media. Screenwriters like Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet were also novelists, for instance. Politically the Left Bank, appropriately for their name, were more consistently of a leftist persuasion and had a more Bohemian sensibility removed from the iconoclasm and theorizing of the Right Bank. The luminaries of this group included Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Jacques Demy, and Chris Marker.

    

Figure \(\PageIndex{i}\): The Left Bank's literary influence can be seen in films like Last Year at Marienbad (1961, left), an opaque story of a man who tries to seduce a woman he believes he met at a resort the previous year, bearing the creative signatures of its modernist novelist screenwriter. Even when literary connections aren't present, it is typically easier to read philosophy in the films of the Left Bank. Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, right) is at the surface the account of a woman awaiting the results of a very important medical test, but it can be understood also as a tale of hope, mortality, and a woman evolving from passive object of history to an active subject.