The Cahiers critics embraced mise-en-scène aesthetics and borrowed the idea of authorship from Astruc. In proposing la politique des auteurs (“the policy of authors”), christened the auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris, they maintained that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are those imprinted with their makers’ individual signature. As a logical consequence of this premise, the Cahiers critics rejected mainstream French cinema and its “tradition of quality” in favour of the classic mise-en-scène tradition (exemplified in the films of Louis Feuillade, F.W. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, Renoir, Welles, and Ophüls), the films of Hollywood studio directors who had transcended the constraints of the system to make personal films (Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, Hitchcock, and Ford), and the low-budget American B movie in which the director usually had total control over production.
The first films of the New Wave were independently produced dramatic shorts shot in 16-mm by the Cahiers critics in 1956–57, but 1959 was the year that brought the movement to international prominence, when each of its three major figures made their first features. Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, and Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless) were all in their different ways paradigms of a fresh new style based on elliptical editing and location shooting with handheld cameras. This style was both radically destructive of classic Hollywood continuity and pragmatically suited to the New Wave’s need to make its films quickly and cheaply. Its ultimate effect was to deconstruct the narrative language that had evolved over the previous 60 years and to create a reflexive cinema, or meta-cinema, whose techniques provided a continuous comment on its own making.
The critical and commercial success of the first New Wave features produced an unprecedented creative explosion within the French industry. Between 1960 and 1964, literally hundreds of low-budget, stylistically experimental films were made by cinéphiles with little or no experience. Many of these ended in failure, and the New Wave as a collective phenomenon was over by 1965. But the three figures who had initiated the movement, and a small group of sophisticated and talented filmmakers—Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Louis Malle, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy—dominated French cinema until well into the 1970s, and several continued to make significant contributions into the next century.
François Truffaut was the most commercially successful of the original New Wave group, and, through such films as Jules et Jim (1961) and the autobiographical “Antoine Doinel” series, which began with Les Quatre Cents Coups, he acquired a reputation as a romantic ironist. Truffaut’s range also extended to parodies of Hollywood genres (Tirez sur le pianiste [Shoot the Piano Player], 1960), homages to Hitchcock (La Mariée était en noir [The Bride Wore Black], 1967), historical reconstructions (L’Enfant sauvage [The Wild Child], 1970), reflexive narratives (La Nuit américaine [Day for Night], 1973), and literary adaptations (L’Histoire d’Adèle H. [The Story of Adele H.], 1975; Le Dernier Métro [The Last Metro], 1980).
Jean-Luc Godard was the most stylistically and politically radical of the early New Wave directors. Some of his early films were parodies of Hollywood genres (Une Femme est une femme [A Woman Is a Woman], 1961; Alphaville, 1965; Pierrot le fou, 1965), but the majority of them treated political and social themes from a Marxist, and finally Maoist, perspective (Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier], 1960; Vivre sa vie [My Life to Live], 1962; Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen], 1963; Bande à part [Band of Outsiders], 1964; Une Femme mariée [A Married Woman], 1964). With Masculin féminin (1966), Godard turned from narrative to cinema verité-style essay, and his later films became increasingly ideological and structurally random (Made in U.S.A., 1966; Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle [Two or Three Things I Know About Her], 1967; La Chinoise, 1967; Week-end, 1967; One Plus One [also called Sympathy for the Devil], 1968). During the 1970s, Godard made films for the radical Dziga Vertov production collective (Pravda, 1969; Le Vent d’est [Wind from the East], 1969; Letter to Jane, 1972) and experimented with combinations of film and videotape (Numéro deux [Number Two], 1975; La Communication, 1976). In the 1980s Godard returned to theatrical filmmaking, purified of ideology but no less controversial for it, with such provocative features as Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980; Every Man for Himself), Passion (1982), Je vous salue, Marie (1986; Hail Mary), and Éloge de l’amour (2001; In Praise of Love).
Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky in La Chinoise (1967), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.; photograph from a private collection
Alain Resnais was slightly older than the Cahiers group, but he identified with the New Wave through style and theme. His most famous film is the postmodern mystery L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad), which questions the processes of thought and memory—central concerns in Resnais’s work. Muriel (1963), La Guerre est finie (1966; The War Is Over), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), and Mon oncle d’Amérique (1978; My American Uncle) are all in various ways concerned with the effects of time on human memory from both a historical and a personal perspective.
(From far left) Ellen Burstyn, Sir John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, and David Warner in Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais.Cinema 5; photograph from a private collection