Although the term ‘new wave’ or nouvelle vague was coined in L’express as early as 1957, in cinematic terms it refers to a group of French filmmakers who burst onto the scene fifty years ago at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where the programme included François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour. These films represented two separate branches of the nouvelle vague. Truffaut, like Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer among others, belonged to a group of critics-turned-filmmakers who had affiliations with the film journal Cahiers du cinéma. Alain Resnais was included with figures like Chris Marker and Agnès Varda in what critic Richard Roud dubbed the ‘Left Bank’ group, most of whose members were also involved with left-wing politics and the other arts.
The Cahiers position was characterised by its opposition to the established French cinema of the 1940s and ’50s, which was christened le cinéma de papa and derided for its literariness, impersonality and fake radicalism. Against this conservative approach, the Cahiers critics argued for an alternative cinema that was personal, radical and independent. Their celebration of the director as the key creative force in filmmaking led to the ‘auteur theory’, which not only revolutionised critical approaches to Hollywood cinema but also provided a blueprint for the emerging European art film. It proved to be an enormously influential approach, and today it’s largely taken for granted that films — at least those outside the commercial mainstream — are defined by their director’s thematic and aesthetic preoccupations.
By now the French New Wave is a clearly defined episode in film history, but its effects are still with us today. This 50th anniversary celebration includes most of the key films from the leading directors, many of whom are still active. Appropriately enough, this year’s Cannes Film Festival paid tribute to the nouvelle vague in a series of retrospective screenings. More surprisingly, the festival’s competitive section had a new film by the 87-year-old Alain Resnais, Les herbes folles (Wild Grass), which proved to be every bit as experimental and enigmatic as his old art-house favourite of 1961, L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad). — Peter Walsh.
