FRENCH NEW WAVE
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
À bout de soufflé
(Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960)
Two films may be said to constitute the 'aesthetic manifesto' of the New Wave: Hiroshima mon amour and Godard's first feature, À bout de souffle. Not only did both directors reject traditional cinema - one built on the illusion of reality - far more explicitly and decisively than their cohorts, they also enlarged both the language and the horizons of cinema. Challenging what films might speak about, they captured realities that previously were rarely seen on screen.
In one important respect, of course, the films of Resnais and Godard are in sharp contrast. While it is generally agreed that Hiroshima mon amour had no cinematic precedents, À bout de souffle consistently and deliberately harks back to earlier films, in particular to French film noir and American thrillers. Permeated by what Godard called the 'nostalgia for a cinema that no longer exists' À bout de souffle is, in fact, dedicated to Monogram Studios - maker of the American B melodramas that Godard loved as a young critic. The film's protagonist - a petty conman and thief named Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role that made him a star) - might well be seen as a latter-day version of the doomed outsiders embodied by Jean Gabin and Humphrey Bogart in films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Around the same time he made À bout de souffle, Godard declared unequivocally that 'all great fictional films lean towards documentary just as all great documentaries lean toward fiction'. The combination of what Godard describes as research or documentary and spectacle takes us to the core of À bout de souffle. The 'spectacle' side of the film resides, clearly, in its plot: an existentialist thriller about a conman on the run who is betrayed by the woman he loves, À bout de souffle situates itself in the well-defined tradition of film noir. Indeed, it repeatedly and explicitly evokes aspects of such American productions: not only does Michel make gestures like those of Humphrey Bogart but, as in many gangster films, we learn of Michel's impending doom through changing newspaper headlines. At the same time À bout de souffle has a striking 'documentary' side. If its narrative is clearly the stuff of 'fiction' or 'theatre', its portrayal of people and places suggests, instead, Godard's desire to capture what he called the realities of 'modern' life. 'If I have a dream,' he remarked only half facetiously in 1967, 'it would be to become the director of French news one day'.
Shot on location in the city's streets, the film conveys the noise and confusion, the crowds and rhythms, of the French capital. The sense of raw reality that clings to the city extends, moreover, to the ways in which the characters speak and behave. And while the roles played by Patricia and Michel may be the stuff of fiction - woman as betrayer, doomed gangster fighting for his life as the police close in on him - they themselves are very real individuals. Unlike the stylised, one-dimensional gangsters of many thrillers, Michel is a complex man who enjoys sophisticated puns, corrects people's grammar and loves Mozart's clarinet concerto. Patricia is surely the first gangster's moll who is about to attend the Sorbonne and who worries about the shape of her future career. Moreover, their relationship reflects a very particular social and historical moment - one marked by changing sexual roles and by the collapse of the old morality. While Patricia's betrayal of Michel may suggest a certain timeworn misogyny, her conflicted feelings about Michel, as well as her desire to achieve something on her own, clearly foreshadow the coming explosion of the movement for women's liberation.
Godard frequently analyses personal and social issues in long digressive sequences that fragment the narrative flow. Imbued with the play of ideas, and marked by a plethora of quotes or citations, these digressions help transform his films into what he dubbed cinematic 'essays'. For example, in a sequence that takes place in Patricia's hotel room, the lovers engage in an extended conversation - replete with allusions to works by Faulkner, Shakespeare and Picasso - about the problems and issues they are facing. They wonder about the different ways in which men and women think and behave, and speculate about the gap between a long romantic tradition of idealised love and the modern tug-of-war between the two sexes.
À bout de souffle is above all a film about cinema itself. This brings us back, of course, to the intertwined layers of 'fiction' and 'reality' at the core of the film. For if Godard dreamed of being the 'director of the French news' one day, he also had another dream: that of 'remaking' cinema. In À bout de souffle, the process of' remaking' cinema begins, in a sense, with acts of destruction. For the film leaves no doubt about Godard's desire to do away with a certain kind of cinema - one built on the illusion of reality - along with the rules that hold it in place.
To this end, the director deliberately, defiantly, breaks with preceding conventions even as he insistently calls attention to the very process of making a film. For example: he has characters address the audience directly, shoots into the light so that their faces are obscured, makes use of jump-cuts, disregards narrative coherence, ignores continuity shots and renders dialogue inaudible, through the use of ambient noise. 'Right from the beginning', writes Michel Marie, '[the film] ruthlessly violates the moribund codes of spatial and graphic continuity editing which were so scrupulously observed by professional editors in 1959'.
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
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