Page 152 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

ADAPTATION, S U C C E S S AND SUPERSTARDOM
Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, refers to the group of French filmmakers who rose to prominence
in the late 1950s and includes personalities like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. They were
born under the shadow of rising Nazism and come-of-age in the spoils of World War Two but were
disturbed by a post-war rural exodus and the vast suburban construction programmes splintering
villages, families and a sense of personal identity.
Often anti-authoritarian, they loosely organised around the Cinémathèque Française run bv
Henri Langlois. There they found meaning over the course of days spent watching movies from local
and international sources, sometimes multiple titles a day for days on end. They also refined their
sensitivities and wrote extensively for André Bazin's magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, wherein art and
entertainment broadly reflected the circumstances of their age.
Coincident was an influx of Hollywood titles held in abeyance due to wartime restrictions.
Following VE-Day, when much of Europe reconnected with the West, but especially with the United
States, French movie houses were literally flooded with Hollywood product, to the extent that their
native industry was hurt by the foreign invasion.
Simultaneously the separation between French society's old guard and the younger generation
widened. The Cahiers du Cinéma critics reacted with praise for older filmmakers like Jean Renoir and
his masterwork La Regie du Jeu [The Rules of the Game, 1939) while ignoring more contemporary
figures. They also learned to value aesthetic cues discovered in the Italian Neorealists exemplified by
Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette {The Bicycle Thieves, 1948). In so doing they longed for a new
kind of cinema to remake the world. Not to be overlooked, certain Hollywood figures also rose in
their estimation, such as Howard Hawks, who was largely restricted to genre ghettos in pictures like
The Big Sleep (1946).
Unfurling a call-to-arms, Truffaut wrote his influential essay, A Certain Tendency in the French
Cinema', in 1954. Opposite the traditional attitude towards moviemaking as an anonymous exercise
of collaboration, the Cahiers group, in line with Truffaut, believed films were an extremely personal
medium. Simultaneously a number of technological improvements affirmed their purpose, including
lightweight cameras, faster film stock and portable sound equipment and lighting kits, along with the
continuing collapse of the French studio system.
With Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler, 1955) as a model of experimental
narrative style and inexpensive production craft, the Cahiers group equally valorised sensational story
lines pursued by the likes of Roger Vadim in Et Dieu ... créa la femme (.. .And God Created Woman,
1956). Using government subsidies from DeGaulle, they then became moviemakers, first doing shorts
but later producing feature-length motion pictures.
Available light and ambient sound was preferred. Street scenes were commonplace and camera
work was mobile, editing obvious. Long takes were the rule containing real-time narrative events where
randomness and a general lack of resolution punctuated performances by actors encouraged to improvise
dialogue. At the Cannes Film Festival of 1959 Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) won
the festival's Best Director award and Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) became a European box-
office smash. Importantly, the New Wave was thereafter prolific and consistently experimental with

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