French New Wave: Here’s What You Need to Know

Few film movements in history have been as influential—or as fondly remembered—as the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s. This cinematic game-changer gave the world such renowned directors as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, and Agnes Varda. What was this New Wave, and what kind of impact did it have on international cinema? Read on to learn more about the French New Wave!

First, a quick rewind back to post-World War II France. Few U.S. movies could be shown in German-occupied France during that epic conflict. But when they finally did return, they arrived in a flood, both new and old titles. This did not augur well for the native film industry which was largely in ruins, but it was heaven for both casual filmgoers and cinephiles alike. Among the latter group glued to their seats was a mélange of young film aficionados, most in their late teens or early twenties, who fancied themselves future directors. When they weren’t obsessively watching old movies at the legendary Cinémathèque Française, they gathered at the various amateur ciné-clubs around town to watch, talk and argue about them.

If you could return to those days and pay a visit to the petite, 50-seat Cinémathèque on the Right Bank’s Avenue de Messine, on a typical night you’d likely find its most avid fans sprawled out on the floor in front of the screen. Among them: the Swiss-reared Godard, studying ethnology at the Sorbonne; the pudgy, small-town Claude Chabrol, groomed to be a pharmacist; Eric Rohmer, a teacher and journalist ten years older than his comrades; Jacques Rivette, transplanted from Rouen; and Truffaut, the youngest, only true Parisian, and perhaps the most cine-crazed of them all.

Critical Mass

These were the formative years of the group, all determined to shake up and revolutionize what they largely saw as a dull, stodgy, literary-bound French cinema Truffaut would sneeringly call the Cinema de Papa, meaning “Daddy’s movies.” By the early 1950s, these cheeky upstarts would be critiquing films and filmmakers in print, most indelibly in the now-legendary Paris film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, co-founded and edited by one of the two inspirational fathers of the New Wave, André Bazin.

The other great father figure, at least for the Cahiers cadre, was Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque Française’s Socratic guiding light, who began both collecting and exhibiting films as his lifelong passion back in the 1930s. While future film director Georges Franju also co-founded the Cinémathèque, it was Langlois who was dubbed the dragon who guards our treasures by the likes of Godard, Truffaut, and company. While today the world can boast dozens of important cinema archives—among them the Museum of Modern in New York and the British Film Institute—the Cinémathèque Française arguably remains its most significant. Surviving both Langlois’ 1976 death and a fraught, politicized history, in 2005 the Cinémathèque and its museum relocated to a large new facility in the 12th arrondissement in Paris.

Like other influential film movements (for instance, the 1920s German expressionism) the French New Wave had multiple sources and cross-currents, and didn’t spring from Cahiers alone. Sometimes known as the Left Bank group, another cadre of Parisian filmmakers made a big splash too. They weren’t critics but came from the fields of literature, photography, and art, and generally were more politically-minded (fittingly, left of center) than their Cahiers counterparts. While they sometimes ran in the same circles, these cineastes made their directing debuts early, in the mid-‘50s, and never looked back. In fact, the first New Wave feature film might very well be credited to the Belgian-born Agnès Varda, who in 1955 directed, wrote, and produced her low-budget La Pointe Courte, which daringly combined naturalistic coastal settings with an abstract story of a splintering marriage.

Varda’s editor on the film was none other than Alain Resnais, who would go on to make such celebrated and challenging art-house features as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). At the time, however, Resnais was focused on making uniquely stylized, short documentaries that began to get wide attention, most especially the great Night and Fog (1955), one of the earliest and most poetic French films on the Holocaust. Lesser known today, Chris Marker was also firmly moored with Varda and Resnais on the avant-garde Left Bank. Despite a long career making eccentric, highly personal documentary travelogues, Marker’s most famous film might be La Jetée (1964), a visionary science-fiction short that became the basis of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys in 1995.

By 1959, the waters of French film were churning, and not simply because of Cahiers’ growing critical influence or watershed breakthroughs like Hiroshima Mon Amour, which daringly dropped a romance between a French woman and a Japanese man—both married—within the backdrop of a post-war Hiroshima living with the horrific physical and psychical fallout of the atomic bomb. While oceans apart in commercial intent, Roger Vadim’s scandalous 1956 And God Created Woman made a worldwide bombshell sensation out of his heavenly young wife Brigitte Bardot and also showed the global film industry that the French could create hip, home-grown modern hits sans old Hollywood’s help.

Two other important figures riding the New Wave, if at a distance, were directors Louis Malle and Jacques Demy. Malle began his cinematic apprenticeship in the 1950s, assisting the pioneering underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau on his award-winning documentaries such as The Silent World (1957). He then made an exciting debut the same year in Elevator to the Gallows, a fresh, audacious story of doomed amour fou shot on the streets of Paris (with a noteworthy, improvised jazz soundtrack by Miles Davis) that helped lift a relatively unknown Jeanne Moreau into the top floors of European film stardom.

A son of Nantes, Demy was another film-obsessed Cahiers contemporary, and, in fact, with Lola (1960) made what Eric Rohmer called the most original film of the New Wave. Full of loving references to his favorite movies—a New Wave auteur trademark—Lola wistfully conjures up a dreamy romance between a Nantes nightclub dancer and her long-lost American beau. In 1964, Demy would triumph, critically and creatively, with the pop-operatic, all-singing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, not only the first French musical in color, with a lush score by Michel Legrand, but featuring the radiant breakthrough of another screen legend, a 19-year-old Catherine Deneuve.

Before the French New Wave crashed cinemas around the globe, the term Nouvelle Vague itself was applied much more broadly, first in the Paris magazine l’Express, referring to the country’s new generation coming of age in the late 1950s, their hopes and aspirations, especially as contrasted with the generation(s) that survived World War II. Soon enough, nearly any first-time filmmaker surfacing during the period was doused and tagged with the New Wave moniker, much to the dismay of most of them. As a convenient critical shorthand, the term has value, but it also serves to wash out distinctions rather than recognize and appreciate them.

It also bears noting that, like most Western countries in the 1950s, France was undergoing not only tumultuous social changes but political ones too. In 1958, the Fourth Republic fell following an attempted military coup precipitated by the Algerian war for independence and was replaced by the Fifth, headed by a returning, unretired General De Gaulle.

French New Wave’s DIY Filmmaking

Granted that film critics and historians have over-generalized the New Wave, even today it’s possible to describe the films of the Cahiers group especially as exhibiting common characteristics in both style and subject matter, most of which had a profound influence on modern filmmaking since the 1960s. A summary of key elements would include:

• Low production budgets, typically independently financed, without studio assistance. This invariably meant small casts and frequent use of non-professional actors.
• Small crews and location shooting, for both interiors and exteriors (e.g., using a real Paris apartment rather than an artificial studio-made set), which often meant utilizing available natural lighting rather than artificial sources.
• More portable, lightweight production equipment, such as the Nagra tape recorder and 16mm film stock, as well as Do It Yourself improvisations (a wheelchair used for moving camera shots, not a standard dolly).
• Related to the above, film sound was recorded during production whenever possible, not dubbed in later.
• While scripted for the most part, the films often included moments or scenes of improvisation on the part of the actors (and directors).
• In the realms of shooting and editing, a deliberate attempt to create new cinematic languages, especially spontaneous, freewheeling visual styles, whether a disdain for Hollywood editing continuity or eschewing the practice of shooting scenes from multiple angles for safe editing coverage.

In terms of content, New Wave films varied greatly, but they invariably contrasted with commercial French (and U.S.) fare produced for wide audiences. They would instead focus on more personal and immediate subject matter, even to the point of incorporating documentary-like techniques into fiction. Anticipating the seismic changes in lifestyles that would erupt in the West during the 1960s, these films didn’t shy away from sexual themes/situations. Overall, their narrative styles leaned toward the unconventional and challenging, at least initially, above all avoiding the neat, formulaic Hollywood ending.

New Wave filmmakers, most of all the Cahiers crew, are often described as the first generation of modern cine-literate artists. That isn’t to say that previous directors didn’t know and study other movies, but consider the serendipitous advantages of this loose association of ambitious proto-filmmakers: 1) collecting around the same time in the great culture capital of Paris; 2) the Cinémathèque Française as boundless learning archive; 3) new film journals like Cahiers, with stellar mentors like Bazin; 4) the postwar flood of U.S. films—e.g., the revelatory masterpiece of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane; 5) and, by the late 1950s, a low ebb of Hollywood films aimed at younger, more sophisticated audiences, opening a beachhead for fresh cinematic styles.

This cine-literate quality leads to the last element typical to New Wave films, especially those of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and Demy. Should you watch Godard’s Breathless, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or Demy’s Lola, sharp eyes and ears will notice they are punctuated with allusions to other films, usually affectionately. If sometimes gratuitous in their homages, these were reflexive, modernist (or meta) filmmakers decades before it became fashionable with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and the Coen brothers.