France's 'New Wave'; A Free, Bold Spirit

Now that the New Wave in the French cinema has finally run its course, critics both in Europe and this country are coming to the conclusion that the movement has produced the most significant advances in the history of film so far. France could boast of few first-rate directors in 1957-58, but today there remains little doubt that Paris is the capital of the film-world with Rome a very distant second. Although it is too early to ascribe definite trends to the New Wave, its history of intense experimentation has undoubtedly altered our concept of film.

The spark came in 1956 when Roger Vadim, then a lowly assistant director, somehow wrangled his producer into backing a low-budget effort entitled And God Created Women starting Vadim's own wife, who happened to be Brigitte Bardot. The film's success encouraged normally conservative French producers to exploit the appeal of both unknown stars and directors, and France at that time harbored a huge backlog of just such talent.

By 1963, over two hundred young directors had made their first feature films, and the total number of films shot in France each year had nearly doubled. Many of these films justification ended their director's careers, but several brilliant film-makers also emerged, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy. In the space of seven years, an unprecedented number of masterpieces were produced, among them Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and The Soft Skin, Godard's Contempt and The Married Woman, and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, all of which will, incidentally, be shown at the Brattle this month.

Two Key Films

Two films set the style for the New Wave: Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows and Godard's Breathless, both shot in 1959. Both were the first feature films of established film critics, and both provided their directors with the opportunity of realizing ideas about film which for years had been confined to expression on paper.

The Truffaut film gave us an objective picture of a young boy alienated from society at age 12, without any attempt to ascribe cause or blame. The Four Hundred Blows presents an isolated slice of its hero's life, and the film comes to no set conclusions, contrary to the then-conventional practice of "packaging" the plot. Instead, Truffaut develops the poetic possibilities of his subject, calling on a wide range of visual metaphors to convey his subjective message. In addition, the scene in which the hero is interviewed by a prison psychologist introduced the so-called cinema-verite technique of prolonged interviews which populates many New Wave films.

Breathless also featured an alienated hero treated without sentimentality. But unlike Truffaut, Godard created an entire revolution in technique. Godard and his superb cameraman, Raoul Coutard, used a hand-held camera for the entire film, giving the director an unheard-of flexibility. Instead of planning the shooting meticulously as convention dictated, Godard created the film through the viewfinder and often used candid shots. Most of all, through both the camera-work and the editing, Godard insisted upon a constant impression of energy which was to infuse the enthusiasms of an entire generation of film-makers.

Godard made Breathless on a budget of only $100,000, but soon producers were willing to gamble much larger sums on nascent directors. By 1961, Georges de Beauregard, who had produced Breathless, endowed Godard with a cinemascope camera and with color film for A Woman is a Woman. Godard, contemptuous as ever of artifice, created a film with no meaning, a huge in-joke designed for dedicated cinema buffs. The director constantly used his worst shots to insure that slickness would not prevail over the natural effect he sought. The result at once delighted his friend Truffaut and antagonized Stanley Kauffmann.

Color and B.B.

In 1964, Joseph E. Levine approached Godard with an offer of one million dollars on the condition that the again shoot in cinemascope and color and that he include Brigitte Bardot. Godard accepted the offer and made Contempt, probably the most important artistic statement of our time, by turning all the devices and conventions of the modern cinema upon themselves in a devastating critique of social decay.

After Contempt, Godard achieved yet another masterpiece in The Married Woman, a film, according to Godard, "in black and white." In this film, Godard attempted to portray the dilemma of modern women, forced to make "black and white" decisions in a masculine-dominated society, yet incapable of doing so. Godard insist on exploring every tiny aspect of the art of film; even the use of black and white film, normally taken for granted, is done with a purpose. Godard continues to make two or three films a year, and his latest efforts, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou, while not quite up to his standards of 1964, are still superb cinema.

Truffaut, meanwhile, has chosen to experiment with content rather than technique. His Shoot the Piano Player of 1960 and The Soft Skin of 1964 both maintain a tenuous balance between seriousness and self-parody, providing several layers of possible interpretation. Truffaut toys with the reactions of his audience, leading them by the nose into deeper involvement with his characters and then rebuffing them by suddenly turning the plot into a cliche. If you can maintain both distance and involvement simultaneously, Truffaut's films will lead to new perceptions about reality and illusion, about freshness and staleness. His other major film, Jules and Jim, shot in 1961, failed because of the magnetism of Jeanne Morean, which polarized Truffaut's pet duality out of existence.

The third dominatic figure in the New Wave, Alain Resnais, has explored the possibility of entirely plotless films. His Hiroshima Mon Amour treated time and memory in the same evocative manner with which Faulkner treats them. Hiroshima included a large amount of newsreel footage, a technique also favored by Truffaut, to give yet another impression of time--that between the shooting of the film and an actual event.

Into Abstraction

Last Yar at Marienbad, made in 1961, corrected many of the technical faults of Hiroshima and allowed Resnais to push further into the realm of abstraction. By 1963, when he made Muriel, Resnais was in unquestionable control of his medium, rendering the slightest impressions subject to his intent. At this juncture, Resnais seems far closer to the Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni than to his New Wave counterparts; but then, anything is permissible in the New Wave.

Chris Marker, for example, has extended Godard's use of natural settings to its logical extreme, the poetic documentary. Marker's The Kimono Mystery and Jetee, both only sixty minutes along, use real people rather than actors and employ the cinema-verise technique of interviews rather than dialogue. Jacques Demy, on the other hand, painted his settings every conceivable color in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to create a fairy-tale world. In contrast to Marker's candid sound-tracks, every word in Demy's film was sung to the tunes of Michel Legrand.

Clearly, the only concensus in the New Wave movement is the emphasis which all New Wave directors place on originality and experimentation. These directors are also quite young; hence their tendency to celebrate youth and spontaneity, And whether they are conscious of the fact or not, a concern with honesty runs throughout their films. They will always rent an apartment in preference to shooting a fake studio interior, and their departures into fiction will always be shown as patently nonsensical rather than strain your credibility.

The New Wave his employed every technique of the art of film to enhance our perception of our workaday world, Although the initial intensity of the movement has subsided, the experimentation which it introduced has become deeply entrenched in the modern cinema and may lead to even fuller expression and perception in the future