French New Wave Cinema: Living through life, how complex can that be?

 

The New Wave of French Cinema 

The Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), is a movement that emerged in French cinema in the late 1950s and followed until the mid 60s. French New Wave is highly regarded as a transformative movement in the history of not just French or European cinema, but worldwide cinema. The movement can be simply discribed as innovative, which comes from the use of new visual and storytelling techniques, bold structures and an overall disagreement with traditional filmmaking features, and as a result, rejection of them in favour of modernized brave choices. The New Wave is a slap in the face to the rigid and conventional approach of the older standardized classic French cinema. The movement’s films were raw, which drastically differentiated them to the polished elegant productions of the past movements. The films always focused on discussing the profound meanings and elements of life through different ideas and techniques, which in return blurred the line between life and art, creating something which was deeply relatable, naked, and effective. Additionally, both, the motifs explored in films, as well as the way in which they were looked at, were also deeply radical and modern, which felt like a breath of fresh air amongst the overly stylized and staged older cinema. 

Scholarly discussions of the French New Wave often focus on the key directors who shaped the spirit of the movement, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Alain Resnais, whose art this blog focuses on in this post. 

This era of film is not just important for its stylistic and visual modernizations, but also for its intellectual dialogue with French society post World War II, which also served as a motivating factor for more honest cinema, pushing the audiences to come face to face with the issues which the war pressed on, such as politics, identity, and social class.

The New Wave’s influence extends far beyond France or Europe, since it to this day keeps serving as the standard which inspires film enthusiasts all over the world to challenge cinematic conventions and explore new narrative possibilities by discussing life topics from new perspectives. 

As Richard Neupert (2002) highlights in his book, the New Wave directors were not just filmmakers but cultural commentators who sought to engage their audience in a deeper dialogue about the nature of cinema and society. 

This blog post explores how Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Alain Resnais open a conversation with the audiences regarding those motifs by creating their films.  

 

The Films

For this blog post, I have selected three iconic French New Wave films in order to illustrate the movement’s diversity and dramatic impact. The films represent different facets of the movement, from narrative experimentation and political subtext to revolutionary cinematic techniques. The three films are:

1.     Breathless (À bout de souffle) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

2.     The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) Directed by François Truffaut (1959)

3.     Hiroshima, Mon Amour – Directed by Alain Resnais (1959)

 

Each of these films has been highlighted by both the critics and the society as incredibly influential and iconic in the French New Wave, seeing how all three strongly carry the spirit of the movement, highlighting different approaches to themes like youth, identity, and existential despair, while also being illustrative of the new non-standard techniques that defined the era.

 

Why These Films?

1. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

Breathless (À bout de souffle) is arguably known as the most famous and influential film of the French New Wave. Godard’s debut feature-length film not only redefined French cinema but also introduced an entirely new style of filmmaking. The film follows a young car thief, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is escaping from the police after panicking and accidentally killing a policeman while driving a stolen car. He is also accompanied by Patricia (Jean Seberg), his American girlfriend who is studying journalism in Paris whom he involves into the whole ordeal while attemping to escape to Italy. 

Breathless can be seen as the embodiment of the New Wave’s love for breaking conventions. Godard’s revolutionary use of jump cuts, handheld camera work, and a fragmented narrative structure challenged traditional continuity editing and linear storytelling. At the time, those devices would have been considered jarring and unprofessional in classical cinema, yet Godard played into it in order to create a true and unmasked portrayal of life. The film feels raw and natural, which marks itself as a strong rejection of the polished, classical French films of the time. 

As Michel Chion (2009) notes, Godard's active, unserious and subversive approach to cinema invites the audience to actively participate in the creation of meaning rather than just monitoring and accepting it. 

Breathless also embodies the themes of existentialism, a prominent philosophical idea of the 1960s. Michel, the antihero, lives a life in which he confronts death and danger, while searching for freedom, but ultimately dies while on his journey. The film’s narrative is fragmented due to jump cuts and broken continuity, and the characters' motivations are left ambiguous, forcing the audience to interpret the story in a subjective way fitting with their own life outlook. This reflects the uncertainty and acknowledgement of reality that marked the era.

2. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) is a deeply honest coming of age film which explores the concepts of early adolescence, loneliness, family, and the complexities of growing up. The film follows Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a young Parisian school boy who struggles with an strict and limiting school system, neglectful parents, and an overall teenage confusion and lack of direction in life. His attempts to escape from his challenging routine lead him to a series of disobedient thoughtless acts that climax in his arrest.

This film is often labelled as a classic coming of age tale, marked by Truffaut’s empathetic and understanding portrayal of youth. It presents the viewer with the misunderstood character of Antoine, in whom many can see themselves, perhaps not in his actions, but certainly in the emotions and phases of life he goes through. As well as that, stylistically, The 400 Blows is notable for its use of location shooting as well as its emphasis on realism and naturalism, in contrast to the stylized melodramas that were popular at the time.

As Neupert (2002) highlights, this film was “a breakthrough in its depiction of youth as an existential struggle, and its focus on the emotional and intellectual life of its protagonist”. The film’s influence also can be seen in following generations of filmmakers, most notably in the way they also relied on the use of childhood as an honesty and unfiltered lens through which to explore broader social issues while also allowing the viewer to look at them from an unbiased perspective.

 

3. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

Hiroshima Mon Amour is an introspective film that explores heavy themes of trauma, memory, and identity in the aftermath of World War II. The film centers on a dynamic between two individuals, a French actress Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) who visits Hiroshima to film an anti-war film and a Japanese architect Lui (Eiji Okada) who lost his family to the atomic bomb. As they go on to share their personal histories, the actress reveals the pain of losing her first love during the war, and the architect shares his own experiences in Hiroshima devastated by nuclear destruction.

This film is a slow, meditative exploration of love, war, and trauma and how they all intersect and weave themselves into our personal lives. The film is fragmented and nonlinear, reflecting the disjointed nature of memory itself, which is a focal point of the film. The repeated motifs of forgetting and remembering, as well as the contrast between the actress’s tragic past and the architect’s present, are reflective of not just the nature of time, but also are showcasing the different human perspectives which rise from seemingly analogous circustances. 

Bordwell, Thompson, & Staiger (2017) are of the opinion that Resnais’ film is a study of the fragmented nature of human experience, mirroring the postwar consciousness of a generation trying to come to terms with the scars of global conflict. As the film suggests, memory is not a clear narrative but a subjective experience that both shapes and reflects our identity and outlook on life.

While Breathless, The 400 Blows, and Hiroshima Mon Amour each explore different plots and themes, they share a common rebellious spirit of protest against the archaic stagnant film conventions. These films all defy conventional storytelling and visual style, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty in ways that were non standard radical for their time. They feature realistic and complex protagonists who are in search of something—whether it is freedom, identity, or meaning, and they portray their journeys in honest and uncensored ways, which was refreshing and sobering for the time.