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A 52' documentaryWritten by FRÉDÉRIC BONNAUD
Directed by FLORENCE PLATARETS Produced by MURIEL MEYNARD
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The French New Wave is a rare case in the history of cinema. Other arts have known such collective adventures (we think of Impressionism, Surrealism, the Nouveau Roman), but cinema hardly ever has. In barely 10 years, a handful of filmmakers, all united through critical writing, elective affinities (the great Hollywood masters, Hitchcock and Hawks in the lead, Rossellini, and a handful of French elite figures: Renoir, Becker, Melville, Bresson and Cocteau) and a shared detestation (for all the rest of French cinema!), has irrevocably made a difference. There is indeed a before and an after to the French New Wave. Quickly self-dissolved, it would not survive 1968. Nevertheless, its most illustrious representatives were in the limelight until the very moment each one of them passed (Godard and Rozier being the only survivors). Sixty years after its sensational debut, the French New Wave continues to exercise an unparalleled fascination and still provokes discussion, contestation and controversy. This film is an immersion in the most audacious part of French cinema.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
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The French New Wave is the last legendary period of French cinema, its last great adventure, its last great moment of breakthrough. Therefore, it is only natural that we continue to evoke it over and over again, but without trying too hard to define what really happened.
The French New Wave has its myths and its icons, its heralds and its assailants, its heroes and its traitors, its disputes and its misunderstandings. It neither destroyed nor replaced the cinema that preceded it: first misunderstanding. It quickly ran out of steam as a collective or manifesto (which it never was, by the way!): second misunderstanding. Its most prominent filmmakers (the 5 founders of the Cahiers du Cinéma + Malle, Resnais, Varda, Marker, Rozier and Demy) were able to reinvent themselves for almost half a century while dozens of young filmmakers known as " French New Wave " filmmakers were falling into oblivion. Third misunderstanding.
The French New Wave gave birth to a new generation of filmmakers, of course, but also to new types of actors, a technical and aesthetic revolution, and a completely different way of making films. But above all, it is a new vision of cinema, closer to the novel or modern art than to ordinary cinema, which is expressed in films that have become timeless "classics", that no one questions anymore : Le beau Serge, The 400 Blows, Hiroshima mon amour, Breathless,
Les Cousins, Lola, Cléo from 5 to 7, Les Bonnes femmes, Paris Belongs to Us, Jules and Jim, Contempt, Le Signe du Lion… Critical writings come and go, as do declarations of intent, but the films either survive or don't, and these ones are remarkably resilient! This is therefore proof that something did happen in French cinema at the turn of the 1960s.
It is precisely this "new vision of cinema" that this film will try to explore by constantly comparing it to the one (or its absence) that prevailed until then. For there is indeed a before and an after to the French New Wave. This does not mean that the French New Wave completely wiped out the previous cinema, nor does it mean that all the films that emerged from it were identical. But the new principles that it expressed and applied in its films, we are still relying on them 60 years later! Without the French New Wave, a film such as Les Misérables would never have been made.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
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FILM MAKING PRINCIPLES
Much has been written or said about the French New Wave. To tell the story of this artistic revolution, we have made a radical choice: we have chosen to tell the story entirely through archives and without the use of a voice-over narration. Beyond the common attraction we have for the "all-archive", we wish to avoid the need to rely on the words of experts, on retrospective analysis, on the "overhanging" perspective of the voice-over narration, and to leave all the space to the works and the artists themselves. Starting with the sole material of the archives and films, we want to follow the French New Wave revolution in its own time frame, to look at it from the viewpoint of its main protagonists. To make it possible to see and hear about 'The French New Wave as seen and experienced by the French New Wave'. This writing seems to us to be particularly relevant to the French New Wave. Except for Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rozier, the filmmakers of the French New Wave are all gone today. And few actors can still testify to this cinematographic shift. But they leave behind hundreds of hours of archives. Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and the others spent their lives writing, but they also talked a lot! They are all intellectuals who have long matured and theorized their conception of cinema. When these veterans explain themselves, they do so brilliantly, lightly, didactically and generously. To let them run the show seems to us relevant and much more enjoyable than delegating the narrative to a voice-over.
The media presence and aura of the French New Wave filmmakers offer an unprecedented amount of material, both in its volume and diversity and in the richness of its form. The archives alone tell of a paradigm shift: television does not film Anna Karina or Brigitte Bardot as it did with Danielle Darrieux... and it is difficult to imagine Claude Autant-Lara doing a headstand in the middle of an interview as Godard did one day in 1965! The editing of the film will take advantage of these discrepancies to emphasize the before and after and will embrace the formal impertinence of the French New Wave.
The narrative will progress in a thematic way.Instead of a classic chronological structure (state of the art / breakthrough / posterity), we prefer to go back and forth in time, organized around the major fracture lines made by the French New Wave: critical thinking skills, cinephilia, technical revolution, aesthetic changes, etc. The concept of a film 'without a voice-over' may make this structure a little more complex than with a voice-over guiding the subject, but we think, at this stage, that it must be attempted. And it is a writing challenge that we want to take up!
The graphic design will be a decisive support in this undertaking. If necessary, we can consider inserting (sparingly) texts to the video and a chaptering of the film that guides the narrative progression.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
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NOTES ABOUT THE ARCHIVES
The progress confirmed our intuition: the archives are self-sufficient. The INA is full of interviews, making of, reports, portraits, etc. This will be our main archival source. But other funds (BBC, RTS, RAI...) have also revealed rarer documents. They will be an opportunity for us to take a few steps aside and measure how the French New Wave was perceived outside of France.
The radio archives (INA, BBC, RAI...) also confirm our choice. The off-screen sounds will accompany and support the story when the video archives are missing or leave out certain events. The radio provides documents of great richness and delivers testimonies that are often more personal than television. These sounds will bring another tone to the film, another color: more sensitive, more intimate.
Following the same logic, we do not exclude using some readings of texts by actors (critical texts, excerpts from correspondence). As this film will be essentially masculine (we can't help it, the French New Wave is a man's business), why not use a female voice?
LONG SYNOPSIS
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First, on a cold morning, there was the simple and solitary arrival of a little boy with modest luggage, with a slightly frightened face. We were there, however, because this little boy is already a great actor. His name is Jean-Pierre Léaud and he is the star of a film that represents France at the Cannes Film Festival, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows.
A train enters the Cannes station. This May 2, 1959, on the rainy platform, a young boy lifts a heavy suitcase. François Chalais' voice (' Reflets de Cannes ', 1959) tells :
The press is in an uproar: this kid has taken the world by storm!Press clipping: The 400 Blows bursts on the scene at Cannes The 400 Blows, said George Clouzot, completely swept me away. The most sensitive film I've seen since the war. Jean Coteau’s comments, were no less flattering
The 400 Blows stars Jean-Pierre Léaud who shows an amazing talent as the mischievous protagonist.
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François Chalais continues: Jean-Pierre Léaud, 14 years old, has become the star of the festival. Regardless of the disapproval expressed on some faces, regardless of some mistakes, François Truffaut is a man of film. Let's enjoy his films before he turns them into conventions. — François Truffaut, last year you wrote some of the most violent articles ever written. But this year you're coming back to Cannes, and yet it's still the same people who run the festival. What do you think about it? — Well, I think it is a credit to their objectivity! In any case, the reproaches I have always addressed to the festival can be summed up in one, which is to welcome too many films that have nothing to do with cinematographic art.
Two days later, Jean-Pierre Léaud was carried in triumph at the end of the screening of the film, alongside François Truffaut.
The tone is set. In 1959, for the first time, France was not represented by Marcel Carné, René Clair, Henri Clouzot or Jean Delannoy. An impertinent youth had taken French cinema by storm and May 4, 1959 marked the birth of the French New Wave.
CINEMA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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I consider myself an artist whose medium is filmmaking so I answer as an artist who talks about his art. I believe that in filmmaking, there are two kinds of artists. Those who have a world in mind, quite precise. They try to replicate it to show it to the world and to people. It is a very precise work. And then there is another type of filmmaker, of which I am a part, that I would call researchers and that I would compare to mathematicians, philosophers, even poets. It consists in going in a direction that we don't know, that is unexplored, and bringing back unknown images from this world. It is both a philosophy and an exploration.
Before the French New Wave, French cinema was made, produced and commented on by competent people, certainly, with some great filmmakers and many small ones (as in all periods), but overall, it was a trade, a craft, an industry, a livelihood, a hobby and a Saturday night entertainment. But not an art, not a passion, not a matter of life and death.
CINEMA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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André Bazin
After the Liberation of France, with the film club movement, the invention of festivals and organizations like Travail et Culture, Peuple et Culture (for which André Bazin, the best post-war film critic, founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, François Truffaut's adoptive father and mentor of all of the Jeunes Turcs des Cahiers), which are in charge of spreading culture among the masses, things change: the role of cinema is becoming more important in the life of the French. Cinema is taken more and more seriously by more and more people, and the State follows this ambitious movement to raise the level, via the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image (CNC), by inventing a "quality premium", awarded to encourage the making of more ambitious films.
In film clubs (or through magazines), people shouted at each other, insulted each other, even threatened each other physically, and little by little, a large fraction of the "general public" followed along, acquiring certain knowledge and no longer being satisfied with the same old ingredients, the same old routine with the same old "stars". At the end of the 1950s, a sufficiently large part of the public was ready to welcome a renewal with minimal curiosity. The context was ripe for young people who took filmmaking very seriously.
The writer Jacques Laurent, director of the magazine Arts (in which the young Truffaut and Godard wrote), declared in 1956 :
There is an intelligentsia that practices critique in a furious state. It considers itself in a state of belligerency. Any critical onslaught is good for it, for Lord [of filmmaking] knows those who are His. The film clubs and the Cinémathèque have given it a religious state of mind. It is the critique of the catacombs!
CINEMA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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I have not changed my mind about Le Rouge et le Noir. And I wouldsay, like Lubitsch, that with Le Rouge et le Noir, Claude Autant-Laradid to Stendhal what the Nazis did to Poland. Even when I see LeDiable au corps on television again, the same things bother me, thesame lines, the same way of valorizing the main characters andridiculing the secondary ones. These are the criticisms that weremade to this form of cinema. And I am angry, today, for the samereasons, when I see these films again on television.
For the first time in the history of cinema, it is a generation of very enlightened and even fanatical viewers, a generation of specialists, who are challenging the fortress that cinema still is. Making bad films or ruining beloved novels by adapting them for the screen becomes a crime of lèse-cinéma! It is the invention of critical terrorism.
CINEMA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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We have reached a time where cinema is a medium of expression to say something. And the tragedy is that French Cinema has nothing to say, and French Film doesn't tell anything.
In the French film industry of the 1940s and 1950s, films were made according to commercially proven ingredients (literary adaptations, comedies and thrillers) and were built on the fame of its " major stars " (Jean Gabin, Martine Carol, Charles Vanel, Gérard Philipe, Danielle Darrieux). The risk-taking must be as minimal as possible and any originality is proscribed; each film is a routine piece of entertainment.This is of course unfair and untrue: this French cinema of the 50's has its great signatures and still produces great films, such as La Traversée de Paris, whose value even the terrible critic François Truffaut has to recognize... The fact remains that the situation is globally not famous in terms of quality.
CINEMA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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André Labarthe's voice: These jeunes Turcs are unknown : their names are Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol, Godard. Jean-Luc Godard says : "I remember my first article in Les Cahiers, it was like high-school graduation for me." As soon as they started writing, their articles brought a new tone, willingly polemical. Listen to Rivette, for example: "Gervaise [by René Clément] is a negative. A negative is a cowardly film. And I think that the major problem of today's cinema is cowardice.
It is this cinema that the " Jeunes Turcs " from Les Cahiers du Cinéma were to denounce with devastating articles. The first bombshell was signed by François Truffaut in January 1954: with the publication in Les Cahiers of the essay " Une certaine tendance du cinéma français ", battle was on!
CINEMA, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
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The French New Wave is the revenge of the self-taught on the model pupil. It was the film lovers who suddenly emerged from the catacombs! At my home, at the Cinémathèque, these young people discovered that French Cinema of the 1920s was wildly audacious and inventive! It is therefore in the name of this lost ambition that they have criticized today's cinema; they are like people who are in a cemetery but who know that before, instead of this gloomy cemetery, there was a beautiful park, with magnificent trees. So they rolled up their sleeves and started planting trees, making movies! But I never told Truffaut and the others what films they should make! I just showed them everything...
Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française
The Law, Jules Dassin
The enemies of the French New Wave are Claude Autant-Lara, his screenwriters Aurenche and Bost, Jean Delannoy, Julien Duvivier, Denys de La Patelière, Gilles Grangier... And it is in the name of a late splendor, of a glorious past that this cinema should be criticized. This is what Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française, explains very well:
The heart of Les Cahiers du Cinéma is thus "the child of the Liberation of France and of the Museum" (Jean-Luc Godard), that of Langlois, of the Cinémathèque française. For the first time, a generation of cinephiles aware of themselves, of their likings and dislikes, is about to get down to practical work...
THE HOLD-UP
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There came a time when there was a rather intensive resistance to the renewal of directors, and even screenwriters, and even editors and cinematographers, in French Cinema. And this resistance broke down because the films that these people were making no longer seemed sufficient to the public. There were three or four films, which I won't name, that cost a lot of money and didn't make any money, and that was enough for people like Truffaut and me to succeed in making films that didn't cost much and did a little bit of business. So that was enough for all these people to storm in. Claude Chabrol, Radio Télévision Suisse (1960)
At the end of the 1950s, French Cinema was experiencing a crisis and in 1958 its attendance began a downward spiral that nothing could stop: it went from 370 million viewers to 276 million in 1964. During the same period, the number of television sets increased from 1 to 5 million. In this perpetually crisis-ridden cinema, the first quarter of 1959 saw two big, expensive films fail miserably, causing panic among producers and distributors: Jules Dassin's The Law at the end of January and Jean Delannoy's Guinguette at the beginning of March, two core values of "daddy's cinema" with " major stars". At the time, French Cinema was less funded than it is today, and people who were well established in the business were losing a lot of money.
THE HOLD-UP
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It was very difficult because I was trying to find distributors and they would say, "Who are you? ". I would give my name and they would ask me, "What have you made? "I would say that I had studied literature and pharmacology... "Yes, but in the film industry? "Nothing at all. I wrote articles for Les Cahiers and that wasn't enough. They told me: "No, no, we're not going to give you any money". Claude Chabrol, ‹ Parlons cinéma ›
A man by the name of Claude Chabrol, a critical olibrius coming straight out of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, who had never been anyone's assistant but a press attaché for Fox, and who had never made any no short movies, released his first feature film on January 10 1958: Le Beau Serge. Claude Chabrol tells how he financed it by himself, with an inheritance from his wife, for 350,000 francs ("35 grands!") and how he had all the trouble in the world getting it distributed.
Le beau Serge was a minor success and did not attract many viewers, but it was awarded the famous "quality bonus" by the CNC. Chabrol could then continue with Les Cousins. The film was released on March 11, 1959 and against all odds, it was a hit:
500.000 viewers only in Paris.
THE HOLD-UP
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On the set of Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard
Before the French New Wave, no film critic would ever go on to make a film, and especially not with his own money! But the "5 des Cahiers" inaugurated a new way of doing film critique: each article was a manifesto that was about the future films of its author as much as the film it was supposed to be about! Absolute newness, summarized by Jean-Luc Godard: "Writing, for us, already meant making films..."
The pre-French New Wave cinema is the exclusive field of professionals who are firmly attached to their certainties and their ingredients. Many years later, Jean-Luc Godard did not forget to thank "the professionals of the industry" when he was awarded his Honorary César. This is a stroke of irony from a filmmaker who has long been reproached for his "amateurism", even though he is a much better film technician than most of his counterparts, as he would often have the opportunity to prove later, when he became a "laboratory filmmaker", perfectly autonomous with his test tubes, to conceive Histoire(s) du cinéma or The Image Book.
I made Breathless as a reaction against everything that wasn't being made. You don't do a close-up shot with a small focal length? Well, let's do it! You don't do hand-held tracking shots? Well, let's do it! I wanted to show that everything was allowed since French Cinema was an inquisition, a regime of groups, into which it was difficult to enter before the age of 40 or 50. There were taboos, rules... It was a Freemasonry that you had to enter, that's why I don't regret Breathless, which made it possible to shake all that up in people's minds. It was necessary to show that all that had no more value. It was necessary to take the opposite approach to find the right tone. It was necessary to demolish the false legends so that French Cinema would be reborn. Jean-Luc Godard, ‹ Cinéastes de notre temps ›, 1964
THE HOLD-UP
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It was this worship of cinematographic professionalism that the French New Wave swept away. It was based on a corporatist system that favored two major paths: assistantship and the two major specialized schools, IDHEC and École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière. In the 1950s, there were at most ten first films per year. French cinema is a sclerotic cinema, exclusively made by "old white males".
The surprise success of Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins created a sudden and exaggerated buzz: suddenly, everyone wanted their young filmmaker! This desire for renewal will crystallize with the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, a true birth certificate of the French New Wave.
In the end, the name French New Wave was not so bad because it was above all a generation change. Before 1959, it was very difficult to make a film, to enter the film industry immediately. Moreover, between 1950 and 1960, very few new filmmakers had emerged, even if there were exceptions such as Vadim and Astruc, for whom we had great admiration. To access this closed milieu, you first had to be an assistant and you would never have entrusted the direction of a film to someone who had not proven themselves. And you could never be a screenwriter AND a director at the same time. But suddenly, people showed up with scripts and the ambition to direct them, and it was accepted.Éric RohmerFilm technique, can be learned in four hours… so studies at IDHEC should last half a day !— But haven’t you ever wanted to be a director's assistant?— I don't think it's of any use.— Why not ?— It's another job. It's mostly doing recounts and getting cigarettes. No, it's a terrible job, being an assistant!Claude Chabrol, ‹ Cinépanorama ›, 1959
THE FRENCH NEW WAVE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE FRENCH NEW WAVE !
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The French New Wave demonstrated, and the creation of art and essai cinema is a direct result of this, that another cinema, more personal, more audacious and also more demanding, is possible, in more or less peaceful coexistence with pure marketing. From this point of view, the breach opened by the French New Wave never closed and the cinema still lives on its assets, constantly denounced (cf. the book (Très) cher cinéma français written by Éric Neuhoff), which would be rather a sign of vitality...
But the essential is elsewhere, everywhere else: the French New Wave has been a tremendous wake-up call, inspiring young filmmakers throughout the world since the mid-1960s and pushing them to take action: financial independence outside of traditional production structures, low budgets, unknown actors, innovative writing in the first person, a dose of autobiography, disrespect for the usual rules of narration, naturalness of dialogue, a provocative edge... Throughout the world, we are witnessing a true rebirth of the young national cinemas.
Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio in Italy, with films as personal as Before the Revolution and Fists in the Pocket; Skolimowski in Poland; Forman, Passer, Chytilova in Czechoslovakia; Tanner, Soutter and Goretta in Switzerland; the whole " New German Cinema "; the "Cinema Novo " in Brazil; the revival of the Quebecois Cinema; and even the highest figures of the " New Hollywood ", Coppola, Friedkin or Scorsese: all have repeatedly expressed their gratitude to the "French New Wave".
THE FRENCH NEW WAVE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE FRENCH NEW WAVE !
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The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci (2003)
Faces Places, Agnès Varda (2017)
60 years later, French Cinema as seen from abroad still means Michel and Patricia on the Champs-Elysées, Antoine Doisnel's piece-to-camera captured on a beach. Or a crazy race in the corridors of the Louvre...
Bande à part, Jean-Luc Godard (1964)
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