The Birth of French New Wave Cinema

The French New Wave responded to a crisis in French artistic and intellectual life. The Cahiers du Cinema critics who became the first New Wave directors felt cheated by the French film industry, which offered stagy dramas and literary adaptations.

François Truffaut, in his manifesto "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," denounced what he called the "Tradition of Quality," those heavy-handed, overly symbolic films which dominated the French film industry. The New Wave critics disliked any filmmakers who did not use the medium.

Thus, they objected to the French and Hollywood filmmakers who merely "illustrated" scripts. Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut also reacted against the stereotyped characters that dominated Hollywood and "Cinema of Quality" productions. Truffaut's characters, such as Antoine in The 400 Blows, are much more ambiguous than Hollywood "types." Godard appropriated Hollywood characters, but re-directed them.

He used the Hollywood gangster type for Belmondo's role in Breathless and exaggerated it into a cartoon. He put the character into a documentary setting (modern Paris), raised existential issues that would appear out of place in a Hollywood gangster picture, and rapidly oscillated between comedy and tragedy.

The most important fact about the French New Wave directors is that they were all critics before becoming filmmakers. Indeed, they never stopped being critics, even when they were making films instead of writing. Their tastes, values, passions, and ideas about films, and their relation to modern life, infuse their films and their writing. Their criticism, therefore, is as good a place as any to learn about their sentiments and methods of working through problems of the cinema in terms of the problems of modern life.

According to these critics, the cinema changes the ways we experience reality. They perceived two traditions in film - Lumiere's realism and Méliès's illusionism - which they would combine into a hybrid filmmaking; Godard said he wanted to "do research in the form of a spectacle." He and the other New Wave critics thus wrote criticism with an eye to filmmaking, continually debating issues of practice rather than ones of pure theory.

The New Wave critics/filmmakers shared the experience of seeing the history of the medium at Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque. Langlois had a passion for odd programs, producing surprising juxtapositions that no one else had thought to combine. The New Wave directors intuited patterns in these unusual juxtapositions and made them into critical positions, such as the politiques des auteurs, which identified common stylistic and thematic features in films of different genres by the same director.

The historical perspectives the New Wave critics acquired at the Cinémathèque led them to challenge traditional forms. Godard said of his first feature film, "What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything that cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of filmmaking had just been discovered for the first time."

The New Wave directors practiced a relentlessly intertextual cinema, openly crediting the sources of their inspiration. Their fascination with the forms and structures of cinema, and their willingness to cite and mix these forms, led to a new kind of filmmaking. Godard extended Langlois' notion of the Cinémathèque as archive to film itself as archive.

Many of Godard's film are archives of the films he has seen, combined with his views of the world around him, and his own experiences. Perhaps an appropriate question for evaluating a New Wave film would be to ask whether we could use it to reconstruct a model of daily life and culture from four decades ago.