March 1st: The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
April 13th: Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
May 3rd: Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
May 31st: Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
Our forthcoming season features four French films released about fifty years ago. They form part of a movement that made a major departure in film style, a departure that has had an impact well beyond Paris. The particular films we are showing have stood the test of time, and we are fortunate that each of them has been reissued recently on a digitally remastered DVD by the Criterion company. In addition to their historical importance, these films are moving, funny, romantic and exhilarating. They are also extremely attractive to watch.
The following introduction has been adapted from Bordwell and Thompson (Film Art: An Introduction, 2004), the description of the individual films from Naomi Greene's recent monograph, The French New Wave, A New Look (2007).
 In the mid-1950s a group of young men who wrote for the Paris film journal Cahiers du cinema made a habit of attacking the most artistically respected French filmmakers of the day. "I consider an adaptation of value," wrote François Truffaut, "only when written by a man of the cinema. Aurenche and Bost [the leading scriptwriters of the time] are essentially literary men and I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by underestimating it." Addressing 21 major directors, Jean-Luc Godard asserted, "Your camera movements are ugly because your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless; in a word, you don't know how to create cinema because you no longer even know what it is."
The novelty and youthful vigor of these directors led journalists to nickname them la nouvelle vague - the New Wave. Their output was staggering. All told, the five central directors made 32 feature films between 1959 and 1966; Godard and Chabrol made 11 apiece. So many films must of course be highly disparate, but there are enough similarities for us to identify a broadly distinctive New Wave approach to style and form.
The most obviously quality of the New Wave films was their casual look. The New Wave directors had admired the Italian Neorealists (especially Rossellini) and, in opposition to studio film-making, took as their mise-en-scene actual locales in and around Paris. Shooting on location became the norm. Glossy studio lighting was replaced by available light and simple supplemental sources.
Cinematography changed too. The New Wave camera moves a great deal, panning and tracking to follow characters or trace out relations within a locale. One of the most salient features of New Wave films is their casual humor which often lies in esoteric references to other films, Hollywood or European. Such homages even became in-jokes, as when New Wave actors Jean-Claude Brialy and Jeanne Moreau walk on in The 400 Blows.
New Wave films also pushed further the Neorealist experimentation with plot construction. Causal connections loosened and the films often lacked goal-oriented protagonists. The heroes often drift aimlessly, engage in actions on the spur of the moment, spend their time talking and drinking in a café or going to movies. New Wave narratives often introduce startling shifts in tone, jolting our expectations. Discontinuous editing further disturbs narrative continuity; this tendency reaches its limit in Godard's jump cuts.
Perhaps most important, the New Wave films typically end ambiguously. Antoine in The 400 Blows reaches the sea in the last shot, but as he moves forward, Truffaut zooms in and freezes the frame, closing the film with the question of where Antoine will go from there. Endings remain defiantly open and uncertain.
Continue on to read about the films:
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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