The French New Wave was a film movement that emerged in France in the late 1950s and 1960s. Inspired by young film critics writing for Cahiers du Cinema, it emphasized auteur theory and featured unconventional stylistic techniques like jump cuts, handheld camerawork, and location shooting. Directors like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer made personal, politically-minded films that broke conventions and influenced global cinema.

1. The French New Wave
AM 75180-5
2012-13

2. Aims of Today’s Lecture
• What is a New Wave in Cinema?
• What were the origins of the French New
Wave?
• What were the ideological principles behind
the nouvelle vague?
• What were the defining features of nouvelle
vague film?

3. What is a New Wave in Cinema?
A New Wave is a movement in cinema
which seeks to stylistically and narratively
differentiate itself from the dominant
paradigm of mainstream film production.
Usually, the people driving the movement
are young and are driven by an
ideological/political imperative.

4. Origins of the French nouvelle
vague
• Due to the Nazi occupation of France, American
cinema had been banned during World War II.
After the war, restrictions were lifted and
Hollywood product flooded the French market.
• Fearing that there was little exhibition space for
alternatives to Hollywood, Andre Bazin
established a number of cineclubs in which he
would screen non-Hollywood, non-commercial
films. Other like-minded people began to do the
same, and an underground movement was born.
• The screenings were organised and attended by
people like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois
Truffaut who would go on to be leading figures in
the French New Wave movement.

5. Cahiers du Cinéma
In April 1951, the first issue of Cahiers du Cinéma
(Notes on Cinema) was published. CDC was headed
by Bazin, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze and Joseph Marie
Lo-Duca.
The magazine aimed to restore French cinema to
prominence, as well as to discuss all film with the
same kind of intellectual context which other art forms
were treated with.
CDC would only write about new films, and favoured
looking at independent films over studio productions.
From its inception, future and current filmmakers were
heavily involved in the magazine. Eric Rohmer serves
as CDC’s initial editor, and Truffaut, Godard and
Jacques Rivette were amongst those who wrote for it.

7. The Director’s Cinema
Andre Bazin firmly believed in evaluating a
film through the prism of the director. As
such, CDC constantly interviewed
filmmakers, and established a canon of
directors who they believed to be above the
corporate machinations of studio filmmaking.
These names included Jean Renoir
(France), Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan) and Alfred
Hitchcock (America).

8. Alexandre Astruc - Camera stylo
(1948)
• ‘The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of
expression, just as all the arts have been before it,
and in particular painting and the novel.’
• ‘After having been a successful fairground attraction,
an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a
means of preserving the images of an era, it is
gradually becoming a language.’
• ‘By language I mean a form in which and by which an
artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they
may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does
in a contemporary essay or novel.’
• ‘That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema
the age of caméra-stylo.’

9. The Auteur Theory
Astruc’s writing was picked up on by Francois Truffaut, who in a
1954 article attacked the perception of French studio cinema as
being a ‘quality’ cinema. Truffaut believed that too much of a
premium had previously been placed on the screenwriter, rather
than the filmmaker. He proposed la politique des Auteurs, which
valued a director’s personal stylistic and narrative contributions
to a film over all else. Filmmakers who achieved this were
auteurs, and those who adhered to generic conventions were
labelled as metteur un scene – literally, a stage setter.
This was a hugely influential mode of thought, and many other
CDC writers followed Truffaut’s lead in looking at cinema from
this perspective. Bazin, on the other hand, surprisingly attacked
Truffaut for ignoring the historical, social and industrial factors
involved in film production and for simplistically assuming that a
director alone was responsible for a film.

10. Truffaut on Cinema
• "For some critics, there are good and bad
films, whereas my idea was that there are no
good or bad films, but good or bad directors.
A bad director may give the impression of
being good for having had the luck of
counting on a good script, or talented
actors… however, this ‘good’ film would have
no value for the critic, for it is the result of
chance, something originated by
circumstances. On the other hand, a good
filmmaker can make a ‘bad’ film due to
adverse circumstances, and nevertheless this
film would be more interesting to the critic’s
eye than a ‘good’ film made by a bad director.
Furthermore, in a similar way – and since the
concept of success or failure has no
importance whatsoever – what matters in a
good filmmaker’s career is that it reflects his
thought, from the beginning of his career to
his maturity. Each one of his films marks a
stage of his thoughts, and it does not matter
at all if the film is a success or a failure.”

11. The Auteur Theory and The
nouvelle vague
When Truffaut turned to filmmaking, he naturally tried to
make his films as personal/auterist as possible. Other
contemporaries followed suit, and this loose movement
become what is now known as the nouvelle vague. These
films were shot by groups of friends on a low-budget using
newly available, cheaper cameras.
Truffaut defined the members as sharing nothing in
common but their rejection of the excess of mainstream
cinema.

12. Key Directors
Francois Truffaut Claude Chabrol Jean-Luc Godard
Jacques Rivette Eric Rohmer

13. Stylistic Tendencies
A general disregard for many (but not all) of
the principles of continuity editing. The films
featured techniques such as:
• Jump cuts rather than eyeline matches
• Breaking the 180 degree rule
• A heavy reliance on lighter, handheld
cameras rather than staged, static shots
• Extremely long takes, as opposed to the
quick cuts of Classical Hollywood
• Filmed on location rather than studio.

14. Stylistic Tendencies
All of this amounts to a film style which does
not attempt to conceal that the viewer is
watching a film. In fact, it often seeks to
actively remind them of this fact.
Narrative is subservient to personal style
rather than vice versa.

15. http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/og
aycken/clips/breathless-jump-cuts.mp4/view
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXbmBJ
WnV0w&noredirect=1

16. Narrative
• More personal, autobiographical plots. For example, Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959) was mostly
based on his early childhood. As such, narrative themes
tended to be broad – love, desire, friendship, questioning of
one’s place in the world – rather than generic.
• A concern with the situation of the common man – born out of
the left-wing politics of most of the filmmakers.
• Sometimes overtly political – Godard’s The Little Soldier (Le
Petit Soldad, 1961) was banned in France for two years
because of its attitude to the Algerian resistance movement.
• Unresolved endings – often no narrative closure, or resolution
to the ‘problem’ – if there even is one at all.
• Sometimes there would be no script, only a loose set of ideas,
and certainly written dialogue was not adhered as strictly as
mainstream film productions.

17. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnyRK
RGHwZE

18. Why was the nouvelle vague
important?
• Presented a clear alternative to Hollywood,
establishing that not all films needed to be
made in a uniform fashion.
• Influenced other New Waves (Japanese,
Czech, Thai, British) and continues to be a
reference point for left wing and art cinema
today.
• Had a theoretical underpinning which
remains influential in Film Studies to this day
– auteur theory, intellectual discussion of film
as a legitimate art form.