WWII
During the Nazi Occupation of France in WWII, the idea that the cinema would be the age of the screenwriter took root. It was against this Tradition of Quality that the new wave filmmakers revolted in the late 1950s.
In 1948, French filmmaker and critic Alexandre Astruc, taking issue with producer controlled, screenwriter driven, cinema, wrote:
”Cinema is an audio-visual language where the filmmaker writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen."
In 1951, another influential film critic Andre Bazin, also taking issue with producer-controlled, screenwriter driven, cinema, wrote that:
“the director was the main source of a film's value.”
He argued that the director was the auteur (the author of the film) and that the modern cinema should be a personal one, with cast, crew, and writers all functioning as instruments in the director's creative vision.
The principal New Wave directors began as film critics for Bazin's magazine.
Picking up on the Auteur Theory of Bazin, the Young Turks believed that film should reflect the vision of the director, not only in its script, but in its style.
Truffaut’s 1954 essay “A certain Tendency in French Cinema” called for personal authorship by the director.
“A true film auteur is someone who brings something genuinely personal to his subject instead of producing a tasteful, accurate but lifeless rendering of the original material.”
Perhaps the greatest stylistic influence on the films of the French New Wave were the films of the French Documentary movement in the 1950s, which provided the aesthetic and production techniques the New Wave movement would employ.
Agnes Varda’s 1955 film, La Pointe-Courte was a landmark film on the road to the French New Wave. She undertook the production with her own small company on a budget one tenth the size of the average French film.
And though she had no professional training, her:
In 1956, an independent film by Roger Vadim contributed to the economic development of the New Wave by demonstrating that films by young directors could be profitable.
And God Created Woman, with its story of amoral youth shot in wide-screen color against the luxurious background of San Tropez, was an international hit and opened the door to a new generation of young filmmakers.
5 films announce the arrival of the French New Wave.
First New Wave film to be recognized as a success
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Alain Resnais
Winner Palme d’Or
Explores the relationship between time and memory
Francois Truffaut
The story does not feel as if it is being told by an adult thinking back on their childhood but rather from the point of view of the child himself.
Children shown as if in prison in the adult world.
Our hero finds solace in cinema, as the director did as a child.
Especially the films of Hitchcock, Film Noir and Hollywood B-movies, all of which influenced Truffaut.
In fact, starting as critics and lovers of film, the New Wave directors often reference films of the past in their films.
Like his hero, Alfred Hitchcock, Truffaut has a cameo in his own film.
Jon Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Agnes Varda showed an ability to subtly develop character and emotion, and she does so here with the unique approach of depicting 90 minutes in the life of the protagonist in real time.
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
The film features a running commentary on the soundtrack summarizing the plot and making comments on the motivations of the characters.
Jacques Demy
The critical and commercial success of the New Wave between 1959 and 1962 was so great that over 100 new directors were able to fund their first feature.
However, the commercial failures of the less talented began en masse in 1962 and by 1964 the studios had been so badly injured that funding for first features became more difficult than before the New Wave.
By this time the New Wave was over, and the French film industry was back to its conventional ways.
Truffaut with Best Foreign Language Film Oscar