French New Wave

The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) is a blanket term coined by critics for a group
of French filmmakersof the late 1950s and 1960s.
Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their
self-conscious rejection of the literary period pieces being made in France and written by
novelists, along with their spirit of youthful iconoclasm, the desire to shoot more current social
issues on location, and their intention of experimenting with the film form. "New Wave" is an
example of European art cinema.[2] Many also engaged in their work with the social and
political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and
narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm. Using portable equipment and
requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of filmmaking presented a documentary
style. The films exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming techniques
included fragmented, discontinuous editing, and long takes. The combination of objective
realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense
that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end
Alexandre Astruc's manifesto, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo", published
in L'Écran on 30 March 1948, outlined some of the ideas that were later expanded upon
by François Truffaut and the Cahiers du cinéma. It argues that "cinema was in the process of
becoming a new means of expression on the same level as painting and the novel:" "a form in
which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his
obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to
call this new age of cinema the age of the 'camera-stylo.
Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc
Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the famous film
magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Cahiers co-founder and theorist André Bazin was a prominent
source of influence for the movement. By means of criticism and editorialization, they laid the
groundwork for a set of concepts, revolutionary at the time, which the American film critic
Andrew Sarris called auteur theory.The auteur theory holds that the director is the "author" of his
movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film.
Characteristics
The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long tracking shots . Also,
these movies featured existential themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of
the absurdity of human existence. Filled with irony and sarcasm, the films also tend to reference
other films.
Many of the French New Wave films were produced on tight budgets; often shot in a friend's
apartment or yard, using the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to
improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots). The cost of
film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations. For
example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless , after being told the film was too long and he must cut
it down to one hour and a half he decided to remove several scenes from the feature using jump
cuts, as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that did not work were simply cut from the
middle of the take, a practical decision and also a purposeful stylistic one.
The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised
dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that broke the common 180° axis of camera
movement. In many films of the French New Wave, the camera was used not to mesmerize the
audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but rather to play with audience
expectations. Godard was arguably the movement's most influential figure; his method of filmmaking,
often used to shock and awe audiences out of passivity, was abnormally bold and direct.
As a result of his techniques, he is an early example of a director who was accused of having
contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the
mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer's supposed naivety. Either
way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects
that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as a character stepping out of their role in order
to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time.
Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard
described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers
made no attempts to suspend the viewer's disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind
the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the
use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes without attempt at unity; or an actor whose character changes from one scene to the next; or sets in which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.At the heart of New Wave technique is the issue of money and production value. Finally, the French New Wave, as the European modern Cinema, is focused on the technique as style itself. A French New Wave film-maker is first of all an author who shows in its film his own eye on the world.] On the other hand the film as the object of knowledge challenges the usual transitivity on which all the other cinema was based, "undoing its cornerstones: space and time continuity, narrative and grammatical logics, the self-evidence of the represented worlds." In this way the film-maker passes "the essay attitude, thinking – in a novelist way – on his own way to do essays.