New Year: Nouvelle Vague

The phrase “nouvelle vague” might not mean much to most readers. Even the phrase New Wave might conjure images of the Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Blondie, rather than Truffaut, Rivette, and Rohmer. The film released last summer under the name Nouvelle Vague refers to the second group, introducing us to a number of very young French film critics, most of them writing for Cahier du Cinema, who turned to making their own films in the late 1950s. It focuses on the making of a single film, Breathless, which was released in 1960 and became a classic.

Breathless wasn’t the first Nouvelle Vague film, nor is it the best of the lot. Director Richard Linklater chose it, no doubt, because it’s among the breeziest and best-known. Of equal importance, it gave him the opportunity to place Jean-Luc Godard, the most eccentric but also the most revolutionary and absurd director in the cohort, front and center in the narrative.

The casting department did a wonderful job of finding actors who actually look like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Paul Bemondo, Agnes Varda, Jean Seaberg, Eric Rohmer, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Pierre Melville, Juliet Greco, and Godard himself.

Each character is identified by caption on first appearance. I’d never heard of many of the minor characters. It doesn’t matter. The film is a lark, shot in French (of course), in black-and-white, and in an old-fashioned, squarish aspect ratio. It’s a lighthearted and cheeky romp that zips along even as the cast and crew grow tired of Godard’s cranky philosophizing and unorthodox shooting schedule, which is based entirely on his own whims and the desire to capture fleeting and unexpected moments of “authenticity.”

Among the masterworks of the genre, three films by Truffaut stand out: Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, and Shoot the Piano Player. I saw them all at the Bell Museum in the early 70s, and was indelibly struck by their charm. Truffaut made other films worth seeing—Bed and Board, Stolen Kisses, Small Change, Day for Night—but never entirely recaptured the poetic intensity of that early work.

Eric Rohmer made a long string of films with far more conversation that action. The scripts for the first set were translated into English and published under the title Six Moral Tales. The names might be familiar: My Night at Maud's, Chloe in the Afternoon, Claire's Knee. Many more films followed, grouped in other ways. Never especially dramatic, they were always worth seeing. 

The two films by Agnes Varda that I can recall are The Gleaners and Me, a documentary about gleaning, and Chloe from 5 to 7, a collection of zany and romantic Parisian events in the best Nouvelle Vague manner, 

Godard started out with a more cerebral approach, and reached a peak of narrative film-making with Pierrot le Fou, perhaps. It’s an outrageous blend of Hollywood tropes and existential mystification. In time his distrust of scripts led him almost inevitably toward documentaries. 

The documentary of his that I remember best is In Praise of Love, which was released in 2002. You can watch it for free on YouTube here:

The themes are the same as his early "dramas"—the natural inability of the sexes to understand one another, the evils of capitalism, anti-Americanism, the rooted glories of classical European (i.e. French) culture, and the enduring expressive power of cinema cliché. The "story" is fragmentary at best, hence impossible to summarize. 

Much of the film is shot in Paris, in black and white, and we’re reminded repeatedly of the crude and romantic beauty of Breathless, The 400 Blows, and other films of the early Novelle Vague. The tones here are more saturated, however, like an Atget print, and the contrasts more dramatic, while at the same time the ebb and flow of motion and conversation is more comfortably elegiac. Old men look at famous paintings in an office, while discussing a film project based on the idea that middle age, unlike youth and old age, is a region of doubtful substance and character. Young and old women audition for the film, while the film’s producer scours Paris for a particular actress that he’d met before in Brittany. She works scrubbing out train cars at night.

Rehearsals involve episodes in the lives of Parsival and Eglantine. Charles Peguy and Simone Weil are quoted from time to time. Well into the film, the scene suddenly shifts to a vividly unreal digital color, and we find ourselves in a flashback involving American film agents who’ve just purchased the rights to a World War II Resistance story from the grandparents of our mysterious actress. (In Godard’s view, America has no history: it buys history from others.)

These elements never coalesce, but the images build in the mind, layer upon layer, like a Breton novel or a long Desnos poem, and the elements involved—courtly love, Catholicism, the authenticity of honest work, the corrupting power of capitalism, the beauty of Paris, and the ineluctable movement of time, which obliterates almost everything in its path—form an attractive ensemble, full of sadness and mist, history and romance, heroism and self-doubt.

On the night I saw the film, twenty-odd years ago, the auditorium at the Bell Museum was half full. That’s not bad! Young bohemians, many of them perhaps students from university French classes, sat beside old bohemians--film buffs who had seen Masculin-Feminine or Band of Outsiders at that same auditorium 30 years earlier. 

The film ends with the narrator ( Godard himself?) reflecting on all the people going down into a subway station, all the lives, the possibilities. Suddenly the film cracks and the screen goes white. Someone (young) in the audience yells “Credits!” but an older guy wearing tennis shoes and a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, who was just getting up to leave, says, “That’s the way the film ends. I saw it last night. That’s Godard ...”