French new wave research

The French New Wave was a group of trailblazing directors who exploded onto the film scene in the late 1950s; revolutionising cinematic conventions by marrying the rapid cuts of Hollywood with philosophical trends. Lindsay Parnell explores how this group of young directors reshaped cinema. With an emphasis on invigorating cinematic narrative, French New Wave Cinema rejected traditional linear tropes of storytelling and created a new language of film. Inspired by both depictions of the common, lower class workers of Italian Neorealism and Hollywood’s beloved ‘Golden Age’, the French New Wave became a vibrant influence on international cinema which is still being felt today.
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-french-new-wave-revolutionising-cinema/

Originating from the artistic philosophy of ‘auteur theory’; a concept that acknowledges film as a product of the director’s absolute imaginative and inspired aesthetic vision, New Wave filmmakers inspired the cult of the director as artistic icon on a par with writers and painters.

The philosophical importance of the French New Wave, and their role in the development of a theory of film, was in large part due to one of the movement’s most influential and pivotal creators, André Bazin. Bazin, a theorist of cinema and renowned film critic, was the founding father of the French movie magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

Cahiers Du Cinema

Its initial publication in 1951 marked a crucial moment in the lives of many acclaimed French screenwriters and directors. In his belief in film as a highly intellectual art, Bazin was a meticulous academic of film who believed that cinema was far more than popular entertainment. Bazin’s emphasis on the crucial role of a director, the artistic creator who implements his or her own aesthetic and narrative vision to the screen was debated, interrogated and explored in various articles of Cahiers du Cinéma, specifically in an essay published in 1954 by François Truffaut titled, A Certain Tendency in French Cinema.

A major inspiration for the New Wave critics-turned-filmmakers came from the writings of the French film critic Alexandre Astruc, who pub- lished an influential article in 1948 called “Camera Stylo” (Camera-Pen). Astruc argued that cinema was potentially a means of expression as sub- tle and complex as written language. He argued that cinema too was a language, “a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions ex- actly as he does in a contemporary essay or novel.”2 Influenced by As- truc, New Wave directors embraced what was then a revolutionary new way of understanding and interpreting films. They promoted in their crit- ical writings what Truffaut called “les politiques des auteurs” (the au- thor policy), which the American film critic Andrew Sarris referred to as “auteur theory.”3

An underlying assumption of auteur theory was Astruc’s idea that, despite film’s status as primarily a commercial entertainment medium, it could potentially be an art form as powerful in its means of expres- sion as literature or poetry. In order to propose filmmaking as an art, however, there had to be an artist, a central consciousness whose vision is inscribed in the work. How was this possible in a medium that is ba- sically collaborative, a combination of the efforts of producers, direc- tors, scriptwriters, set designers, editors, cameramen, actors, and oth- ers? For the French New Wave theorists, the author of the film (the auteur) was the director.
Traditionally the “author” of the film was thought to be the screen- writer, the author of the script upon which the film was based. The French New Wave theorists disagreed. They believed that the written script of a film is only a blueprint, raw material that achieves meaning or significance only when the words are embodied in images on the screen. As they saw it, since the director is responsible for the images, he over- sees the set designs, cinematography, editing, and performances of the actors, and also, in many cases, reworks the screenplay or script. Thus, according to the New Wave critics, it is the director and not the screen- writer whose artistic vision is inscribed onto the film.
Certain directors, to be sure, had long been understood as artists, but only in the noncommercial art cinema of Europe and Japan: filmmakers such as Bergman, Bresson, Ozu, and Murnau, who had a great deal of creative freedom in the making of their works. But the French New Wave  theorists believed that even in that most commercial realm—the Holly- wood film factory, where directors were under contract to the studios and thus assigned the works they were to direct—the works of certain filmmakers were always marked by the director’s individual themes, psy- chological preoccupations, and stylistic practices. They singled out and praised such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Orson Welles, calling them auteurs, film artists of the highest order.

Proponents of the French New Wave differentiated auteurs from met- teurs en scène, directors who faithfully adapted the work of others and did not inscribe their individual personalities or styles onto their films. In Truffaut’s most famous attack on classic French film, an article enti- tled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” he especially criticizes the writing team of Jean Aurench and Pierre Bost for being merely liter- ary men and thus disdainfully underestimating the unique power of cin- ematic language. He praised French directors like Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, and Max Ophuls (who had emigrated from Germany to France), for making visually innovative films in their own distinct styles and for creating their films from their own stories.4 These directors were true auteurs.