ODE TO THE NEW WAVE

By K B Venu

If the year 1959 was the annus mirabilis for the French New Wave, as film historian David A Cook puts it, the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) this year is celebrating the golden jubilee of the most influential iconoclastic movement in the history of cinema. In this year of wonders three prominent filmmakers of the era came up with their most important works: Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), Francois Truffaut (400 Blows) and Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour).
The New Wave (nouvelle vague) was not just an offshoot of the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinema. The journal, established in the beginning of the fifties by New Wave guru Andre Bazin had a group of young film critics around it. These writers, including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and so on, were trained theoretically in the art of filmmaking as they devoured films exhibited in Paris’ Cinematheque Francaise on a regular basis. The far-sighted Henri Langlois, one of the founders of Cinematheque, preserved classics of Griffith and other masters for the post-war generation of French film enthusiasts. Naturally, these cinephiles craved to try their hands on filmmaking; but the French film industry was too hefty for the youngsters to approach. This inaccessibility made them venture into amateur productions.
Unmindful of the conventional and dogmatic principles of filmmaking, pioneers of the nouvelle vague devoted themselves to self-expression. In an earnest effort to create a new language for the cinematic medium, they improvised or rather chanced upon novel ideas. The ‘jump cut’ introduced by Jean-Luc Godard in his first feature length film Breathless (1959) is an example. The film “was at one and the same time a Gangster story and an essay about Gangster films,” observes James Monaco. The protagonist of the movie, Michael Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a great fan of Hollywood cinema. He goes on imitating his matinee idol Humphrey Bogart and lives in a fool’s paradise. Godard pooh-poohs his generation’s craze for Hollywood as his anti-hero is cheated in the end of the movie by his American girlfriend, Patricia. “There was a clear political vision behind all these filmmakers. Their sole aim was to torpedo the conventional thoughts of the old school in filmmaking,” says eminent filmmaker K G George who is an alumni of the FTII in Pune. “The New Wave was in fact a battle between the old and the new in cinema,” says George who believes that the slightly westernized mindset his generation of filmmakers possess owes much to the French New Wave.
Godard’s iconoclastic attitude went on to reflect in his later films, some of which were highly political in nature. His concept of political film was quite different from that of Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein. Godard does not believe in making political films. He believed in making films politically. Thus, he disagrees with Sergei Eisenstein’s belief that “the juxtaposition of opposing forces would create a metaphor for political action.” Godard’s unconventional methods of movie making and utter disregard for the old had irritated his contemporaries including the late Ingmar Bergman. “I've never got anything out of (his) movies,” said the legendary director once. “They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Godard is a f**ing bore.” May be this statement is enough proof for how conventional Bergman was in narrating his movies. Godard, on the other hand, earnestly sticks on to his nouvelle vague slogan that “a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.” The IFFK package of French New Wave has two Godard movies, Pierrot Goes Wild and Alphaville, both made in 1965.
Francois Truffaut who inaugurated the New Wave theoretically in his 1954 Cahiers du Cinema article, A Certain Tendency in French Cinema, continued to remain a towering genius of the movement until his unexpected death in 1984 of brain tumor at the age of 52. The Cahiers du Cinema intellectuals argued against almost all the postulates of the existing schools of thought in filmmaking. They realized the importance of structuring and composition of the movie prior to the process of editing (mise-en-scene). May be that is the reason why many of the New Wave directors went for lengthy shots in their movies. Remember the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard’s 1967 movie Week End.
Truffaut in his Cahiers article argued that the director must be as independent as possible. He should not depend much on the screenplay writer or the editor. He is the author of his film. The director is in fact writing a novel or a story using the movie camera. The auteur theory (director as auteur or author) propounded by Truffaut thus influenced filmmakers all over the world and defined cinema essentially as a medium of personal expression. Truffaut could successfully combine his theoretic knowledge and cinematic sense in his works. The annus mirabilis of New Wave saw the debut of Truffaut as a filmmaker, with his monumental The 400 Blows. American film critic Vincent Canby, in an obituary, described Truffaut as “a quiet revolutionary who worked in conventional modes to make the most unconventional films.” Truffaut’s cinematic expression rose to its zenith when he made Day for Night (1973) a movie about the travails of a filmmaker (played by Truffaut himself) towards the end of which he asks the question: “Is the cinema more important than life?”
“The New Wave was a loosely held assembly of talents with revolutionary ideas. Each director had a distinct cinematic and personal profile,” asserts eminent novelist and scenarist C V Balakrishnan. Almost all movies made in the period are still brand new. The New Wave has not influenced the Indian cinema or Malayalam cinema in particular. We couldn’t venture beyond the limits of Socialist Realism and Neo Realism, observes Balakrishnan. The nouvelle vague was the result of the insatiable love for cinema of a generation of intellectuals who had to struggle against the bigwigs of mainstream cinema. Still they could succeed and become legends. While hosting the nouvelle vague package at IFFK the cinephiles in Kerala too think of the active possibility of another New Wave in Indian cinema. “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”