A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE CINEMA
By Richard Neupert
The University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright © 2007
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-21704-4
Contents
Illustrations..............................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................xiii
Introduction...............................................................................................................xv
1 Cultural Contexts: Where Did the Wave Begin?.............................................................................3
2 Testing the Water: Alexandre Astruc, Agnès Varda, and Jean-Pierre Melville...............................................45
3 New Stories, New Sex: Roger Vadim and Louis Malle........................................................................73
4 Claude Chabrol: Launching a Wave.........................................................................................125
5 François Truffaut: The New Wave's Ringleader.............................................................................161
6 Jean-Luc Godard: Le Petit Soldat.........................................................................................207
7 The Cahiers du cinéma Cohort: Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast.....................247
8 On the New Wave's Left Bank: Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda...............................................................299
Conclusion: A Network of Carrier Waves.....................................................................................355
Notes......................................................................................................................367
Bibliography...............................................................................................................383
Index......................................................................................................................395
Chapter One
Cultural Contexts:
Where Did the Wave Begin?
In 1958 and 1959, my buddies at Cahiers and I, having moved into
directing, were promoted like a new brand of soap. We were "the nouvelle
vague." ... But if the popular press spoke so much of us it was because
they wanted to impose a formula: De Gaulle equals renewal, in the cinema
like everywhere else. The general arrives, the Republic changes, France is
reborn!
-CLAUDE CHABROL, Et pourtant je tourne
A number of guys arriving from very different places ended up finding one
another at Cahiers du Cinéma, like metal shavings attracted to and then
organized around a magnet.
-PIERRE KAST, in La nouvelle vague 25 ans après
The French New Wave was much more than a tally of titles or an
encyclopedic list of directors. The New Wave was first and foremost a cultural
phenomenon, resulting from economic, political, aesthetic, and social
trends that developed in the 1950s. Changes in the other arts, including
literature and theater, anticipated some of the shifts in cinema, and
the role and even domain of art criticism shifted during this time as well.
The New Wave cinema was shaped by forces as abstract as the growth
of film criticism that stressed mise-en-scène over thematics and as concrete
as technological innovations in motion-picture cameras and sound
recorders. This chapter investigates some of the most profound mechanisms
that influenced the rise of the New Wave. For instance, the excited
reception of movies like Louis Malle's Les amants (The Lovers, 1958)
or Claude Chabrol's Le beau Serge (Handsome Serge, 1958) can only be
fully understood in relation to the conditions that fostered and rewarded
these unusual productions. France was undergoing unprecedented industrial
growth and self-evaluation, both of which put new pressures on the
cinema and its place in the larger national sphere. Moreover, the average
moviegoers of 1960 were already quite different from those of 1950. Political
conservatism, consumerism, television, ciné-clubs, popular film journals,
and a new generation of movie producers all affected the stories and
styles that would mark this daring movement. To understand what it meant
to "be" nouvelle vague, it is essential to consider the social, critical, economic,
and technological backgrounds that helped determine the films
and their significance. Thus, rather than starting with the cinema, one
must begin with the social realm; by getting a clear sense of what French
life and culture were like in the 1950s, one can comprehend better why
this unique event in world cinema took place when and where it did, while
the rest of international cinema could only look on in curious awe at the revival
of French cinema.
A New Society, a New Audience
France had changed dramatically in the late 1940s, and these far-reaching
transformations continued into the 1960s. Obviously, every nation involved
in World War II was deeply affected by it for some time afterward,
and France, in particular, came out of the war afflicted with widespread
war damage and debt. But the French also shared a strange mixture of national
shame for France's military loss and Vichy collaboration and an exaggerated
national pride in their country's role in the resistance and
ultimate victory over Germany. Further, all the conflicting views of France
held by the international community at the war's end-France as a helpless
victim, a lazy and ineffective military force, a valued ally, a crippled
industrial power-were also felt within its own borders. For historians of
this era, it is often tempting to fall into simple personifications of France
as a unified, biological entity; it is easy to find articles and books devoted
to postwar reconstruction that refer to France "standing up," "awaking
from its slumber," or "shaking off its recent past." These sorts of
metaphors were common in popular history texts, but they also came directly
from the political and cultural discourse of the days. Most political
parties struggled quickly after the war to prove that they, more than all the
other competitors for power and national respect, had fought for and
helped regain France's liberty. The political discourse of the day was built
on themes of reviving past glories and moving France triumphantly forward
with purpose, unity, and pride. Every politician and newspaper
seemed to want to speak to and for a unified France, and the French people
were often addressed as a single team that now had to get back to basics in
order to simultaneously make up for lost time and join the modernizing
world.
Thus, the years after World War II saw a France desperately trying to
assert, or reassert in the eyes of many French citizens, its cultural, political,
and even economic clout in Europe and beyond. From the day the Germans
were pushed out of Paris, on August 19, 1944, the French film
industry literally rushed to reclaim its domain from the collaborators and
to foster a newly reborn cinema that would regain the glory of the 1930s,
the golden years of Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Marcel Carné. With the
liberation, the famed offices of the Vichy government's Comité d'organisation
de l'industrie cinématographique (COIC) were ransacked and
claimed by the cinematic arm of the resistance as the last Nazis were being
chased from the Paris streets. Legend has it that the omnipresent Henri
Langlois, cofounder of the Cinémathèque française, even took over the
desk of the former COIC director and pounded his boot on the desktop,
calling for executions in the name of French cinema. The era of purification
and revitalization of the film industry had begun in earnest.
The tale of the dynamic changes in French cinema, however, cannot begin
without first taking time to understand how the demographics, economics,
and general cultural climate of France developed during this era.
The prospects for the film industry as a whole, as well as for individual filmmakers,
writers, and producers, were motivated and also constrained by the
larger generating mechanisms of the society at large. France was undergoing
a tense era of change with its left-center coalition Fourth Republic,
which gradually took shape from 1944 to 1946. And while political infighting
forced the nation's overall political trajectory to move in often contradictory
fits and starts until Charles De Gaulle's Fifth Republic came to
power in 1958, there was nonetheless a real sense of urgency to rebuild every
facet of French life, from constructing more electric power plants to exporting
more perfume. As Jill Forbes writes, "After the war, Paris was
determined to regain its position as the leading center of fashion worldwide,
and to counter the growing competition from Britain and the U.S." The various
interest groups that desired a stronger cinema fit squarely within this
national sense of destiny. As the 1950s progressed, France underwent fundamental,
far-reaching changes that would eventually help establish a
"New Look" in fashion and, by 1958, favorable conditions for the rise of
new faces and production practices in the French film industry; these
changes occurred at roughly the same time that the nation was getting its
new Fifth Republic-a "coincidence" that was lost on almost no one.
At the close of World War II, France's population was just 39 million
people, or nearly the same as it had been in 1900. The two world wars had
killed and displaced vast numbers of young men and disrupted innumerable
families; the relative drop in the number of children born in France
during the 1930s also decreased the number of potential filmgoers during
the war years and just after. Between 1945 and 1960, however, the population
increased more than it had in France's previous one hundred years.
Thus, while the United States, a nation built on immigration and rapid
population growth, could lay claim to having undergone a post-World
War II baby boom, "le boom" in France was indeed unprecedented. According
to Maurice Larkin, the dramatic population increase was not
simply a result of a predictable, immediate rise in births among traditional
young French families, from new marriages, or from the reunion of young
couples separated by the war. Rather, sample maternity hospital surveys
in the 1950s "revealed that a third of pregnancies were unwanted, and that
without them there would have been no population increase at all."
Larkin argues that throughout the 1950s, birth control in France was minimal
(paralleling shortcomings in many technical, health, and household
commodities), and thus the lack of widely available contraceptives serves
to highlight very real tensions between contemporary women's lives and
the social norms of traditional France. But a much more telling statistic is
that another one-third of the population increase resulted from France's
growing immigrant population. The large numbers of Italians, Portuguese,
and North Africans living and working in France to help fuel its economic
revival accounted for ever higher percentages of the French population. By
1960 an estimated 10 percent of Portugal's entire population was working
in France on a seasonal or full-time basis.
Nonetheless, the political discourse of a France getting back to work
and moving forward was not entirely hollow campaign rhetoric, for a steady
economic boom accompanied "le baby boom." By 1950, France was operating
with a perfectly balanced budget (thanks in large part to a devalued
franc and war debt that was excused by the United States). In 1951,
France's gross national product was only two-thirds that of Great Britain,
and its exports only one-half of Britain's. By 1965 (the end of the New
Wave period), France had surpassed Britain in every category, including
average wages paid. But as Larkin explains, "Contrary to the hopes
of many contemporaries, the economic changes of the postwar decades
saw no particular upswing in social mobility." The foreign labor force remained
at the low end of the pay scale, and France became increasingly
stratified into several distinct social ranks. Even the public education system
continued to enforce two very divergent tracks from the earliest grades
on: some students were channeled toward professional and intellectual
fields, while most were directed toward practical jobs without hope of pursuing
education in specialized lycées, much less universities.
Nonetheless, as many institutions within France struggled to modernize
and rebuild, the standard of living of all classes improved steadily,
thanks in part to strong labor unions and the active roles played by the Socialist
and Communist Parties, even though the gap between upper middle
class and lower middle class widened. As Forbes and Kelly observe, economic
progress brought a new era to France, one borrowed mostly from
American and British business models: "The economic boom of the 1950s
was a remarkable achievement.... Production grew by 41 percent between
1950 and 1958, fulfilling the targets of the [Fourth Republic's] Second
Plan a year ahead of schedule. France entered the consumer age of
detergents, plastics, private cars, washing machines.... The 'jeune cadre
dynamique,' or thrusting young executive, was becoming a familiar figure,
with a commitment to business success, modern (American) managerial
attitudes, and a life-style of personal development and conspicuous consumption."
Not only was this new copycat spirit lampooned by Jacques
Tati in Jour de féte (1949) and Mon oncle (1958), but American and British
cultural influences provided unsettling backdrops for many of the subsequent
New Wave films as France entered into a long era of love-hate obsessions
with American and British culture and lifestyles.
If the dramatic changes resulting from this rapidly growing economy
produced a general trend for 1950s cinema spectatorship in France, it was,
ironically, to create a gradually smaller, more elite audience. This study
will investigate the specific economic and industrial changes in the cinema
itself later in this chapter, but it must confront here the connections
between large changes in French society and the resulting shifts in the
audience. While overall economic conditions were improving throughout
Europe, there was nonetheless a shared crisis in motion-picture attendance
during the 1950s. Immediately after World War II, a boom in
exhibition had occurred when American films and other domestic and international
motion pictures, long banned from French, German, and Italian
screens, came back with a vengeance, allowing Europeans finally to witness
such already famous movies as Gone with the Wind (1939), The
Wizard of Oz (1940), and Casablanca (1943), as well as the recent films
noirs and others. But by the 1950s, as Europe's national industries were
cranking out increasing numbers of high-quality films to compete with
American imports, cinema-going ran head-on into other competitors for
leisure time. With the expanding economies of the mid-1950s, European
film attendance peaked in 1956, a full decade after it did in the United
States. France reached its highest box-office numbers in 1957. From 1956
to 1961 Western Europe's film audience declined by 473 million spectators.
France alone saw a drop from 412 million tickets sold in 1957 to 328
million by 1961, and this during the largest increase in French population
in a century.
Movies were losing nearly one-third of their audience for a variety of
reasons, but the most important competitors were two consumer products:
the automobile and the television. The number of people buying automobiles
in particular was a "marker of changes in lifestyles and spending
habits," according to Jean-Claude Batz. He does not propose that people
who bought a car were simply too busy driving around to stop for a movie,
nor that they were necessarily so broke from buying a Citroën that they
could not afford to see M. Hulot's Holiday. Rather these new purchases indicated
an upwardly mobile family with many more options for leisure
time, beyond watching TV or driving. The potential film audience was able
to go on more frequent and longer vacations, attend more sports events, or
spend more evenings in restaurants and nightclubs. Increased disposable
income and the parallel increase in manufacturing and imports also led to
people spending additional money on new appliances, ranging from radios
for every family member to washers and dryers, or even on a second home
in the country. As Colin Crisp argues, "The period of the fifties saw a dramatic
increase in all forms of consumer spending related to the individual
and to the home and it was those forms of spending related to public or
community activities which showed decreases. This move away from a
population which expects to go out for its services and entertainment, and
toward a population which expects services and entertainment to be delivered
to the home ... was one of the essential factors in the steadily growing
pressure on cinema throughout this period to transform itself." The
trade paper Variety concisely summed up the problems confronting Europe's
film industry in the title of a 1963 article: "Box Office Foes: Cars,
TV, Prosperity."
Studies in both England and the United States in the late 1940s, when
film attendance in these countries began to drop rapidly, showed a perfect
symmetry between the increase in automobile ownership and the decline
in film attendance. American studies suggested that 42 percent of the decline
in attendance was attributable to car purchases, which was almost as
much as for television. Accordingly, Italy, with the smallest percentage of
cars per citizen in Western Europe, saw the smallest decline in film attendance
during the 1950s. France, by contrast, which saw the number of
automobiles and drive-in campgrounds double between 1955 and 1960
(reaching nine people per car in 1961 versus twenty-four in Italy, but only
three in the United States), followed the American example by losing
movie attendance swiftly after 1957. In fact, France's concerned film industry
spent a great deal of time looking over the border at Germany, whose
fascination with the automobile was quickly becoming a national craze.
Germany provided an example of what France was trying to avoid: over two
hundred German theaters closed in 1960, another three hundred in 1961,
and twenty-five hundred more were considered near bankruptcy. A 1960
front-page editorial in Le Film français titled "Autos et 'deux roues' concurrent
no 1 de cinéma" ("Autos and Mopeds Are Cinema's Number 1
Competitor") argued that the French film industry needed new initiatives
to ensure that this newly "motorized public" would remain faithful to the
cinema in winter and summer alike. The authors realized that new affluence,
unfortunately, did not necessarily translate into more money for the
cinema's coffers. The automobile had a dramatic impact on France; in
1963, Roland Barthes wrote that the French were so obsessed with the automobile
that within popular discourse and family relations in France, it
ranked as the second most common topic, trailing only the more traditional
debates concerning food. Barthes even suggested that Oedipal struggles
between father and son were now being played out over selection and control
of the family's automobile purchase!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE CINEMA
by Richard Neupert
Copyright © 2007 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.