Vive la France! Five essential French New Wave films
October 18, 2013
The French New Wave (or La Nouvelle Vague) stands as one of the most productive movements in French cinema history. Characterized by focused, human stories that reveled in innovative film techniques and a narrative that placed emphasis on dialogue and the seeming “little things” in life, the movement was driven by young French directors who embodied a type of rebellion against established rules of film making and societal standards of accepted conduct. As you can imagine, the movement was not embraced by big studios.
Though it flourished in the ’50s and ’60s, the influence of French New Wave cinema remains a touchstone in the contemporary film world, especially with independent filmmakers. In the ’70s, some of America’s most influential filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola cited people like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard as major influences during their early education in cinema. The movement would consistently appear as a reference in many independent film movements in America, from Quentin Tarantino in the early 1990s to Noah Baumbach and his most recent film, Frances Ha (Film Review: ‘Frances Ha’ reveals Noah Baumbach’s luminous lighter touch).
Most significantly, from the viewer’s perspective, French New Wave cinema invites the audience to grasp and experience the underlying principles of an era where social change was coming. We feel the revolution in the doorstep of most of these films.
The list herein represents some of the most influential films of that movement— although it is not meant to be exhaustive— and reflects some of our personal favorites.
The 400 Blows
Personally, this the 400 Blows (1959) stands as one of my all time favorite films. The black and white aesthetics add a layer of grittiness to the already harsh coming-of-age story. Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) grows up in a poor neighborhood of Paris. His parents don’t pay much attention to him, other than to make his life difficult, and at school his situation only seems worse. He gets pushed around and comes up with a plan (that backfires) to escape to the sea.
Antoine’s difficulty with his parents mirrors the situation of young Parisians coming up against the establishment that no longer makes sense for the social reality. The many blows to Doinel endures would make for an incredibly sad movie, instead Truffaut offers many moments of light humor to reveal the blows to Doinel’s spirit as a naive adolescent. In one scene, he devises a plan to raise money by stealing a typewriter to sell on the black market. The montage makes for a funny sequence where he and an accomplice break into his father’s office. They then struggle to carry off the monstrous typewriter that shrinks them further in this world. The adventure also showcases the kids’ mentality and the difficulty with which Doinel has been thrown into a grown-up world.
It all culminates with an off-focus look straight at the camera where we understand Antoine has nowhere else to run, but at the same time has freed himself. The gaze is not that of a troubled child anymore but has more resolute quality behind him and the freedom of looking for his own path.
Last Year at Marienband
For many, Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienband (1961) is a difficult film to explain. But, actually rarely do films achieve so pure a level of cinema. Legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman famously equated films not to reality but to dreams. “No other art medium, neither painting nor poetry, can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can,” he once said. Dreams do not follow rules of time and space, just as film never does. From cuts in film splices to a warped sense of the passage of time, dreams and films, in their nature, have unmistakable clues that defy reality. Just as waking from dreams alters our sense of awareness, walking out of a movie theater becomes a reality check.
The character of Last Year at Marienband has gone in to inspire lots of art film mockery due to its obtuse narrative and stagey acting with shocking cuts and scenes that practically melt into one another only to crop up and repeat again. The film follows a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) during various encounters at a palatial château. He insists he has met her before, she cannot recall. A brilliant series of varied interactions that question reality, memory and identity unfold. This is a film not about people but about the elliptical nature of memories and their slippery, elusive quality. It’s one of the French New Wave’s most decadent films but also one of its purest.
Breathless
With Breathless (1960), Goddard captured the essence of buoyant youth in revolutionary Paris. With a defiant attitude, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) bursts onto the scene with a devil-may-care attitude that portended the summer of 1968. The brilliance of this film lies in how it called attention to cinematic techniques, most especially a rather obtuse editing style, to express itself beyond traditional moving images. Stylistic choices beyond abrupt cuts and extreme close-ups served as part of the film’s discombobulating narrative. The audience is challenged to see something more than what is presented and by doing so engages with the film and its characters on a deeper level.
The film is about Michel, who sees himself as a gangster and models his persona after Bogart but really is really nothing more than a petty thief, until a chance encounter with a police officer. His girlfriend, Patricia (Jean Seberg in her famed pixie cut), is an American living in Paris infatuated with Michel’s persona. They are both narcissistic and adolescent, have no regard for authority and little social concern of their behavior. On a meta level, the characters embody the rejection of traditional cinema, which had grown so dull to the filmmakers of the French New Wave. A classic and a must for any cinephile or youngsters who may be too enraptured by their own selfies or any other gratuitously self-involved declaration of look-at-me.”
Cleo from 5 to 7
This film stands out because it was directed by a female filmmaker, Agnès Varda who centered on the character of Cleo Victoire (Corinne Marchand), an up and coming singer. The film develops as Cleo awaits for a test result of a biopsy. The brilliant nature of the film comes in an ability to capture time, as Cleo waits we feel with her the heavy burden of time going slow, the images then speed up as if time was going by faster as well. Not only our relationship with time is a matter of perception, but as Cleo reveals not long before the wait is over, our perceptions of ourselves also vary quite dramatically. While she starts frightened and thinking the test results will show that she is dying, she accepts by the end of the film her own mortality and sheds that fear. The film’s images also comment on the feminine experience. Shots of Cleo removing frilly clothing and revealing herself in the mirror portray the different perceptions of feminine constructs. She sheds the clothing associated with a famous singer and reveals herself in the mirror, two different images in one person. As she walks though the streets of Paris she sees poster of her as the famous singer; it looks like Cleo and it is not Cleo. Later, as she browses through the streets of Paris, she sees mannequins and clothing that both offer a look and a critique on the emphasis is placed on physical appearance and the female experience. Although the movie was filmed in 1962, not much has changed. A lot of emphasis is still placed on women’s physique rather than on the contents of their character. Varda’s take on life rings as true today as it forcefully did in 1962.
My Night at Maude’s
The most infamous comment characterizing the work of Eric Rohmer are that his films are the equivalent of watching paint dry. The sad fact is, the mis-characterization came from one of those early new Hollywood pioneers of the late ’60s/early ’70s, Arthur Penn, who was quite influenced by the French New Wave. It was Gene Hackman’s character Harry Moseby in Night Moves reacting to Rohmer’s 1969 film My Night at Maude’s, and it’s far from an insult as explained here.
Rohmer’s films revealed how entrancing and dynamic it is to watch two people talk. The magic of this film is how true dialogue, conversation can inform action, contrary to so many films that use dialogue as a crutch for exposition. So many of Rohmer’s movies have brilliant moments of dialogue but none as sustained and fascinating as the night-long chat between Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Maude (Françoise Fabian). The man, who has reserved himself to propose to a young woman he has eyes for at church, and the divorcee share an enchanting talk that goes beyond their perspectives of marriage while offering revelations of their past that will have echoes in an understated ending that speaks to the slippery illusions that define our lives.
And one extra, for good measure…
Day For Night
Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) provides a whimsical and entertaining look at the world of filmmaking. A self-referential and self-conscious work that commented on the relationship of filmmakers with art as a process rather than a completed product. Truffaut plays the movie director who can barely keep together the many issues that happen on set. The real-time drama between the different characters begins to emerge as the male lead suffers a nervous breakdown from a romantic liaison during the shoot. Another actress also suffers from emotional instability, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships in this imagined ecosystem boil over. As if that was not enough, technical problems arise, complicating life on set even more. It’s a satirical look and perhaps a symbol of the end of the New Wave time period.
More deeply, Truffaut shows us that films are an imperfect illusion. The director’s control is limited and audience engagement may sometimes not be as directors intended it. Therein lies the magic of a good film.
Of course this short list does not cover the many films encapsulated by the French New Wave (Where’s Chabrol or Rivette or Demy or even Marker!?), but these are some of the favorites of the Independent Ethos. Leave us a comment with your personal favorite of this influential period in cinema history or share your journey of discovery through the French New Wave. It has been an exciting ride for us!
––Ana & Hans Morgenstern
Hans Morgenstern will further delve into the French New Wave when he presents Truffaut’s The Last Metro as part of the Miami Jewish Film Festival’s Masterworks of Jewish Cinema series at the Miami Beach Cinematheque on Oct. 24, at 6:30 p.m.
Beached Miami just published another post I wrote for them. It is focused on what Miami Beach-based composer Gabriel Pulido plans to bring as musical accompaniment to the silent surrealist film classics by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’or (1930). The on-going Great Directors series at the Miami Beach Cinematheque continues with a tribute to the preeminent surrealist filmmaker Buñuel, throughout the month of September.
You can read details about how Pulido plans to pull off his ambient augmentation of the existing soundtracks of Un Chien and L’Age by clicking through the logo below:
Though it is a one-night only event, for which Pulido has created a limited run of 50 CDs to be available for purchase at the event, the electronic music composer has experience with re-envisioning film soundtracks. His “re-mixing” of another iconic film, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless was a collaboration with another local artist, this time of the visual realm, simply known as Buzzeye. “We’ve worked with Breathless three times, including at the French Alliance and a special event at New World Symphony,” Pulido told me when we met for drinks at a local coffee house.
The sonic and visual artists filtered the iconic French New Wave film with colorful, trippy, computer-generated visuals and supplemental sounds, including popular tunes as well as electro-synthesized music, turning it into a sort of abstract art installation. You can watch a sample of the work below:
Pulido actually called the work he did with Breathless “less experimental” than what he plans to do with the Buñuel films, at least from the sonic side, as the visuals of Buñuel will in no way be altered at tomorrow’s screening. “With Godard I mixed in other songs … and left some of the direct soundtrack, including dialogue,” he said.
In the near future, during Miami Beach’s next Sleepless Night arts festival, he plans to do a similar work with Buzzeye.
“We’ll be doing a new filmmaker. One of the big ones,” he teased. He said the film will be screened on the outdoor wall of the New World Symphony, off Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue, during the festival that starts Nov. 5, a Saturday night, and continues into Sunday morning.
Pulido actually has his hands in many projects, including his own solo work as Gabó. He completed his solo debut in 2007, entitled Somewhere Between the Beach and the Sea. In early 2010, he released an EP entitled “After the Moonlight” and has a new single with Latin music vocalist Natascha Bessez, which you can stream below:
Then there is Deep-Surface. On the website for the project it is described as a “A concert/multimedia performance in homage to the Sea [featuring] music, dance, video-sculptures and projections.” It debuted during the Miami Beach Sleepless art festival in 2009. Local dancer and choreographer Sandra Portal-Andreu is part of the group, as is an eclectic mix of musicians including Abi Loutou (cello), Ebonee Thomas (flute), Ali Kringel (voice) and Rafael Solano (percussion). It has even been performed by the artists in France. They made some video clips of their Miami Beach performances, and this must be my favorite:
When asked who are his touchstones when it comes to electronic music, Pulido, who has a degree in Music Synthesis from the Berklee College of Music in Boston and a diploma in film scoring from the “Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris Alfred Cortot,” notes some of the true pioneers of electronic music as influences, including the so-called “Father of Electronic Music” Edgar Varèse and Steve Reich, whose pioneering work with tapes holds particular interest. He also cites Eric Satie as the pioneer of ambient music, though he also has a place in his heart for Brian Eno and popular artists like Air.
Pulido will appear for only one night (tomorrow) offering his distinct ambient stylings to back-to-back screenings of Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’or at 8 p.m. The MBC has vintage Buñuel memorabilia on display for the month of September, which will also offer one-night-only screenings of 1961’s Viridiana on Sept. 8, at 8 p.m. and 1962’s the Exterminating Angel on Sept. 22, at 8 p.m. (Read more).
Jean-Luc Godard is one of those rare filmmakers who can exist as a genre unto himself. His oeuvre has helped partially define the French New Wave, and his 1960 feature film, Breathless (Support the Independent Ethos, buy the blu-ray on Amazon.com), will forever exist as a film studies touchstone while continuing to influence and inspire filmmakers working today. One of the last survivors of the French New Wave, last year he directed his first feature film since 2004’s Notre Musique (Support the Independent Ethos, buy the DVD on Amazon.com): Film Socialisme, which has landed in that wonderful middle spot among film critics (see its current 50 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.0 rating on the Internet Movie Database). When critics divide like this over a movie, it more often than not means something exciting and evolutionary is happening in the movie, pushing boundaries of the medium and asking the viewer to put some effort into the viewing experience.
Those who want pat answers to plot conflicts will not enjoy Film Socialisme. Heck, even those who want a plot with their movie will come away from Film Socialisme frustrated and disappointed. To top it off, non-French speaking viewers will find the English subtitles are only ever two to three spaced out words that seem to catch a few words in the speech of the characters, so do not expect to understand everything on a literal level. 
Plus, more often than not, line to line, the connections between the words seem incongruous. Adding another layer of obscurity to the narrative, Godard cuts from one left-field-leaning scene to another. The film jumps time and even splices in other films. One of the more famously spliced-in works is Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, the movie often credited by film academics for taking film editing to another level in the silent era. The quality of the image in Film Socialisme also varies from one cut to anther, which can be sharp or out of focus or pixilated. The color palate is also contrasted in extremes. This is one of those avant-garde films more comfortable in a room at an art museum than a movie theater. If it had a musical equivalent, this movie feels like listening to a record from Sun Ra, Faust or Melt Banana (all greats in the varied genre of “noise”).
The “music” of Film Socialisme is one of the wonderful things about Godard’s obscuring of narrative in the movie that seems to bring out a rhythm inherent to the medium of cinema. It is as if JLG is exploring cinema in its purist form. As such, it seems to have more in common with a symphony rather than a book, as movies are so often compared or associated with. Film Socialisme begins with a frantic pace, cutting between a variety of characters on a cruise ship. At times the sound is terribly distorted with the ocean wind banging on a microphone or the throb of music at a discotheque overwhelming the recording process with distortion. 
Occasionally, a symphonic piece of music creeps up ominously, but mismatched with the scene, of course. Toward the end of the film’s focus on the cruise ship’s denizens, two people are shown in a library, and the movie seems to malfunction as if the DVD is skipping, but this is apparently not the case, as a subtitle appears smoothly while the movie seems to skip. It reminded me of Tortoise’s epic 20-minute-plus instrumental piece “Djed,” from their career-defining post rock album Millions Now Living Will Never Die, and how it incorporated the sound of a skipping CD into its jazz-inspired music (I recently acquired a copy of that album on vinyl and wrote this review of it: Albums that have stood the test of time: Tortoise – ‘Millions Now Living Will Never Die’).
The film continues on land in three more distinct “movements.” The second involving a media crew in an around a gas station. The third is the mundane life of a family inside their home. Both of these “sections” progressively slow down the pace of the movie in their own ways. However, the fourth, brief but expansive part of Film Socialisme seems to offer a sort of history lesson with voice overs, offering a return to the kinetic energy of the first part of the film.
As with all great art, be it paintings, poetry, sculpture or music, you will get as much out of Film Socialisme as you put into it. It begs for a knowledge of world history, art, literature and philosophy, as it makes lots of sly references to the past, but still can be enjoyed without encyclopedic knowledge. Some subtitles appear as important dates from history. For instance, “1789, August 4”, marks a particular date of the French Revolution, as the title of this book points out.
But far be it for Godard not to interject commentary into his movie. Though it is still obscure, one heavy-handed line is delivered by Constance, (Nadège Beausson-Diagne) when she recites something that is translated in the subtitles as: “Poor Europe/Corrupted by suffering/Humiliated by Liberty.” Between Godard’s references to France’s colonial efforts is his inclusion of a woman joining meowing to a YouTube video of cats “talking” with each other…
… make of Constance’s “speech” what you will, but I, for one, do not think Godard shows an contentment with today’s culture and where it has gone from the 20th century and into the 21st. But then, I would never be so bold as to attempt to decipher a specific message from Godard via this opaque movie. As lose as it is in its associative construction, this is one of those magic movies where the “medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would have said. As little as the film seems to communicate, it is also about a desire to communicate. Film Socialisme is a movie made of associations, no matter how random the images and words may seem.
At one point, a girl tells her father something that is subtitled, “no talk/about invisible/show it.” This bit of dialogue is highly open to interpretation, and again, like all great works or art, Film Socialisme will invite a variation of interpretation from one viewer to the next. The girl actually “says” this during the film’s slowest section, a part of the movie where I felt myself lulled into a hypnotic trance. At the same time, it also began to make “sense” to me, as it seemed to tap into my subconscious, allowing me to read into the subtitles a semblance of a story, which I know I projected into the film from a very personal place, almost like experiencing a waking dream. Can your regular Hollywood movie do that?
Film Socialisme opens 9 p.m. Friday night (June 10) and plays through June 15 exclusively at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, who loaned me a preview screener for the purposes of this review.
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