“Quel est votre plus grande ambition dans la vie? Devenir immortel et puis, mourir.”
“What is your life’s ambition? To become immortal and then die.”
-Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard
Breathless is not in the program for the upcoming Passport Series: Scenes From the French New Wave, but it is integral to the origin story of this program. The above quote from Breathless is pasted on the side of the Ragtag Box Office. When I returned to my hometown cinema as its programmer, it was one of the first things that I noticed. The quote on the Box Office is unattributed but it is recognizable for those like myself who have gone through a French New Wave phase. I thought of this quote’s placement in Ragtag as I considered the structure of a French New Wave series.
The quote is in a scene where Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student in Paris, asks a famous filmmaker (French director Jean-Pierre Melville) about his ambitions at a press conference. Patricia is one of the few women at the press conference. She has to ask her question twice before receiving an answer. The filmmaker (Melville) instead answers trite questions about the differences between men and women, eroticism, and music. Finally, after a jumpcut, one of the New Wave’s cinematic innovations where a continuous shot is broken into two creating a “jump” in the image, he answers the question. This scene and the entirety of the film remains as an exemplar example of the French New Wave style. It features on-location shooting, natural lighting, jump-cut editing, and references to the art and act of filmmaking.
Breathless was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film and one of the films that launched what would become the French New Wave movement. Godard began his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, a French film magazine co-founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. Godard was part of the younger generation of critics at the magazine, the so-called “Young Turks,” who broke with Bazin after the publication of François Truffaut’s 1954 article that derided the “Tradition of Quality” of post-war French cinema. Truffaut argued that French cinema was languished by unimaginative and overly simplistic filmmaking that too often made adaptations of literary works. (Truffaut would later go on to direct The 400 Blows, another iconoclastic film of the French New Wave.) Godard, like Truffaut and the other young critics at the magazine, desired a new cinema, one that derived from the auteur, the author/director, who controlled all elements of the film creating a unique, unquestionable style. By the end of the 1950s, these young critics who extolled the films of Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, tired of writing and turned their attention to directing the cinema they wanted to see themselves. It is in this place that a film like Breathless emerged and that a whole movement followed.
This is one side of the story of the French New Wave. And arguably, the story of the French New Wave that has become canonized. This series is influenced by this canonical story, but veers away from it to present other scenes that contributed to this wide-ranging, 10+ years long movement. By seeing all four programs, you will have an opportunity to see the wealth of artistic innovation that created the many scenes of the French New Wave.
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG: A NEW WAVE GENRE FILM
Jacques Demy revived the operatic artform and introduced the world to French film star Catherine Denueve in his tour-de-force musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Geneviève (Catherine Denueve), the teenage daughter of a widowed umbrella shop owner, and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a handsome mechanic, fall in love in late 1950s France. When Guy is drafted to serve for two years in the Algerian War, he and Geneviève’s relationship is drastically cut short forcing them to make an irreversible decision. Told in three parts, Demy’s vision of young love is filled with a wondrous, candy-colored palette rendering each frame bittersweet.
In contrast to other New Wave filmmakers, Jacques Demy’s film career did not begin in criticism. Demy trained as a filmmaker and had interests in animation and documentary filmmaking. By the time he made his first feature film, Lola (1961), it was clear that Demy’s cinematic obsession was the American musical and the fantasies that emerge from it. Though Lola does not contain the standard elements of a musical, it is often considered a “musical without music” as the score by Michel Legrand often created moments that feel like the actors have broken out in song. This unique approach to the musical extended to Demy’s third feature film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) where all the dialogue is sung, creating a cinematic opera.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg follows many New Wave conventions, such as being referential to Demy’s own previous work (the character Roland Cassard is in both Lola and Cherbourg), but it often stands out due to its lush color and highly stylized production and costume design. In contrast to a naturalistic approach that calls attention to the art of filmmaking through shooting on location, using natural light, or a hand-held camera, Cherbourg insteads lets the audience notice the art of filmmaking through its artifice. As you watch the film, you’ll find yourself color matching costumes to wallpaper, tracking the changing hairstyles of Geneviève (Catherine Denueve), and listening intently to the sung-dialogue set against Michel Legrand’s score. All of these elements point to the artifice of filmmaking but do not distract from what is an emotional and bittersweet love story. Demy’s directorial oeuvre is marked by an understanding that fantasy and artifice are the ciphers through which genuine emotionality emerges.
CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7: WOMEN AND THE NEW WAVE
Agnès Varda’s first New Wave feature, Cléo from 5 to 7, blends documentary techniques and narrative experimentation to depict a real-time portrait of a woman set adrift in Paris. Pampered pop singer Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) spends two hours considering her mortality as she awaits news of a possible cancer diagnosis. Fearful of losing her beauty, Cléo must consider what womanhood is without the adoring gazes of others. Cléo from 5 to 7 marked the start of Varda’s career-long commitment of deconstructing how the camera can come to define the image of a woman.
Agnès Varda was one of the few female filmmakers in the French New Wave. Varda studied art history and photography, and became a still photographer. She became interested in moving images and made her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. La Pointe Courte is often considered to be a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave due to its mix of fiction and documentary realism. When Varda made Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1962, the French New Wave was in full swing, and Varda was a member of the Left Bank. The Left Bank represented the group of filmmakers who lived and worked on the left side of the Seine River, whereas the Cahiers du cinéma directors were on the right side of the Seine River. The two groups were not in opposition to each other. However, their origins and relationship to filmmaking differed. The Cahiers group, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, were critics who “trained” by obsessively watching cinema and viewed cinema as the preeminent art form. The Left Bank group, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy (Demy is often associated with this group because he and Varda were married), trained in other art mediums and viewed cinema as one of many art forms available. Perhaps it was this less fervent commitment to the auteur (the French language masculine form) that made the Left Bank group a place where a female director was an integral member.
The French New Wave is filled with films about women directed and written by men. Cléo from 5 to 7 stands out as a New Wave film about a woman that is also directed and written by a woman. I bring this up not for the sake of gender essentialism but to point out that even in a radical film movement, there were structural imbalances in place that made Varda’s career in part defined by her gender. Varda had a career-long interest with the relationship between womanhood and image. Cléo is rich with scenes where protagonist Cléo looks at herself constantly in mirrors and windows. This is in part due to her worry that illness will ravage her youth and beauty, but it also is a place where Cléo’s gaze is reflected back. For viewers, these scenes are important moments to ask: Why is it important to see Cléo look at herself? What does it mean for the self-image of a woman to exist in an auteuse’s film?
A CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER: DOCUMENTARY AND THE NEW WAVE
Chronicle of a Summer changed the landscape of documentary filmmaking with its original concept of cinéma-vérité, where the presence of the camera is instrumental in revealing truth from the subject. In 1960 Paris, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, with the aid of two young women, traverse the streets asking passersby “Are you happy?” This simple question is the start of a foray into the sociopolitical concerns of the time — the Algerian War, decolonization, legacies of the Holocaust, the rights of workers, and modernization. Rouch and Morin assemble a cast of everyday Parisians to discuss these pressing issues on camera and to watch and reflect on their individual “scenes” collectively. Chronicle of a Summer is a stand-out example of the French New Wave commitment to revealing the structures of filmmaking.
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin were associates of the French New Wave movement who did not fit in the Right Bank or Left Bank designations. Rouch was an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker and Morin was a sociologist and philosopher. While their training and background differed, their interest in the art of cinema fit well into the spirit of the New Wave. Documentary was not an unusual filmmaking mode in the French New Wave and the techniques of documentary realism were used in New Wave narrative cinema. What makes Chronicle of a Summer (1961) exemplary is that it was the first film of Morin’s concept of cinéma-vérité, truth cinema.
Cinéma-vérité is often confused for the North American documentary style of direct cinema. There is a key difference between the two documentary modes, but both share a use of lightweight, portable camera equipment with synchronized sound (this technology was also important to French New Wave filmmakers as it made on-location shooting easier, faster, and mobile) and an interest in the relationship between reality and cinema. Generally speaking, direct cinema understood that reality/truth could emerge in a documentary when the presence of the camera was not felt by the subject or the audience. The camera is a “fly on the wall” that does not intrude upon the events that unfold. In contrast, cinéma-vérité felt that the camera was a necessary tool of provocation in the unfolding of events, and that the truth that emerges is perhaps not “the truth” but a type of truth that only can occur in the process of filmmaking.
These provocations of the camera are what makes Chronicle of a Summer a compelling film. You witness how Rouch and Morin respond to their “experiment” falling apart and how their “cast” responds to these provocations individually and collectively. This film is also a portrait of a period of French history marked by war, decolonization, and modernization. You sense in this film the roots of what will later emerge in the May ‘68 protests that brought about a radical transformation of French society. Chronicle of a Summer is a historical portrait bound in time but its cinematic achievements remain timeless.
FRENCH NEW WAVE SHORTS: INDUSTRY AND THE NEW WAVE
This shorts program presents five films produced by visionary cinephile and producer Pierre Braunberger. Recognizing that he was not suited for directing, he provided creative and financial support to New Wave filmmakers. Some of these filmmakers would become iconoclasts of French cinema such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, while others such as Melvin Van Peebles would become an iconoclast of Black American cinema. Featuring schemes, failed romantic trysts, modern life tribulations, and cameos from other New Wave filmmakers, these films provide a glimpse into the narrative and aesthetic fascinations of the French New Wave. This program is curated from Icarus Films’ 2023 home video release of New Wave short films.
How did French New Wave filmmakers fund their films if they opposed the conventions of post-war French studio cinema? One of the key financial and creative figures of the French New Wave was film producer Pierre Braunberger. Braunberger recognized that he was not suited for directing and instead turned his attention to providing creative and financial support to directors. His producing career began in the 1920s where he worked in both France and the United States. Braunberger was Jewish and was unable to produce a film during the Nazi-occupation of France in World War II. At the end of the war, he transformed a former Gestapo office into a cinema studio and soon after, he was producing the films of the emerging New Wave talents, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, and more. His funding of these films were also supported by the French government who provided subsidies for films to reestablish the French film industry. These subsidies also included funding for short films as shorts were the pathway through which a director would eventually realize a feature-length film. French cinemas also showed shorts along with feature films. Braunberger himself was champion of the short film believing that the form was suited for cinematic experimentation in a way that the feature film cannot do. The New Wave was a ripe era of short-form filmmaking and the re-emergence of these New Wave films points to the confluence of a moment of artistic innovation and the support of industry (and the government). In today’s American theatrical culture, shorts are difficult to program outside of the Academy Awards’ season, so this is a rare opportunity to see a range of short-films and emerging directors play with cinema.
Passport: Scenes From the French New Wave begins on January 10 and runs on Wednesdays until January 31. Tickets are on sale now for each program. Come be transported to New Wave French cinema!
