Organizing my French New Wave Writing Project. What was French New Wave? What was Auteur theory?

My French New Wave project is developing as I watch more films and begin to dive into reading. I’ve decided to, once again, use my notetaking in Letterboxd reviews as a drafting space for this newsletter. I’ve now watched about 45 features and shorts, and I’ve begun reading a book-length historical analysis of the movement. I am coming up with a plan for how to adapt that into more regular writing here.

Why Am I Doing This?

I don’t know; I love film, I enjoy watching movies and taking notes, and exploring a specific period gives some structure to how I’m using my free time that makes it more rewarding and easier to just pick something to watch rather than scrolling through options forever.

I also want to write more, but not for academic presses, so building a project seems like the best way.

What is the French New Wave?

First of all, a definition. French New Wave is a period in French filmmaking that is understood as a hugely influential upheaval in film techniques, production methods, thematic material, and some of the core concepts we use to talk about film. There are, of course, arguments about how we should periodize the French New Wave and how significant it was, but most agree it begins in the late 50s and stretches at least to 1964. 1958-1964 is the period given in the study I’m reading (Richard Neuport’s A History of the French New Wave Cinema, although I am more convinced that the period should extend to 1968 and the immediate aftermath of the uprisings or even the early 70s to include the major New Wave directors’ post-mortems on the 60s—films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien, Jean Eustache’s My Mother and the Whore, and Jacques Rivette’s experimental epics L’Amour Fou and Out 1 (a 14 hour film).

The directors called New Wave included a core group of film critics who moved from writing for Andre Bazin’s journal Cahiers du Cinema to making their own films: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Francios Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. Beyond that, there are debates about who “counts” as New Wave. A group of intellectual/artist turned filmmakers referred to as “The Rive Gauche” group (i.e., the Left Bank, home of Sartre, De Bouvier, Beckett, Ionesco, and new novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet) includes Agnes Varda, her husband Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker. Louis Malle is often affiliated with New Wave, although he got his start as a filmmaker far more conventionally, coming through the French Film Academy, codirecting an award-winning documentary with Jacques Costeau in the mid-50s and coming into filmmaking with a great deal of personal wealth that allowed him to use more professional production methods. Nonetheless, he adopted new methods and ideas, shot on location, disrupted continuity and characterizations, and frequently cast Jeanne Moreau, a major star of the New Wave. The emergence of the Cinema Verite documentary movement is closely associated with New Wave, and Jean Roch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer is commonly cited as an important New Wave documentary. But there are also 100 plus other first-time filmmakers listed in an issue of Cahiers as belonging to the New Wave.

French New Wave was enormously influential. Inspired by post-war Italian neo-realism, these filmmakers employed new high-speed cameras that allowed for documentary-like on-location filming on a much smaller budget and in much wider varieties of light than had been previously possible. Common film vocabulary, like camera shake, emerged from these lower-budget street-level shoots. It combined genre film and art film into new hybrid self-aware styles that would have an enormous influence on the American filmmakers of the 70s (Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg), the 80s (De Palma), and the 90s (Tarantino, the Coen Brothers). It did not invent the famous “jump-cut” entirely, but it did popularize it and use it to great effect. (A jump-cut is an editing cut where the scene doesn’t significantly change, but it usually signifies a lapse in time). And most importantly, it developed the idea of the auteur as the primary creative author of films.

Auteur Theory

For contemporary film audiences, French New Wave is probably best known for having established auteur theory as a primary lens for understanding, marketing, and even producing film. Simply put, Auteur means “author,” and auteur theory is most widely understood as the idea that the director is the primary creative force and voice behind a film, like an author of a novel. But I think, lacking the context of the 1950s, the common understanding of this theory often misses key nuances of what was being argued and why.

So, first of all, the idea that a director *could* play a major artistic role in shaping film production was not at all *new* in the 1950s when auteur emerged in French cinema journals. It was well known, for instance, that Charlie Chaplin, as star, writer, composer, and director, was the primary creative force of major films like City Lights and Modern Times. There are numerous other filmmakers from before the 50s that everyone understood to be primary creative forces in the films they made, like Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and D.W. Griffith, to name a few who worked in the United States. It was even more clear in Europe with the films of, say, Bergman or Dreyer. Everyone knew they were the artists whose visions they were seeing on screen well before auteur theory emerged. These were all directors. However, it was not always the director who was understood to be the creative force. Many films based on plays were understood as more the work of the playwright. Comedians like the Marx Brothers didn’t direct their films but were the motivating creative forces. Within your average Hollywood studio system production, the director was understood as merely a role for hire, with the product understood as close to factory production with a division of labor orchestrated by the producer (who ultimately was responsible for putting together the package of star, script, director, genre, and advertising that would make or break the film—why the Oscars to this day award producers with “Best Picture” trophies.

All this is to say, before auteur theory, independent-minded directors who motivated projects and served as the primary creative “author” of a film did exist and were understood to be significant artists. But that was not the only way films were made, and many times, the director was a workman for hire within a larger studio production line or on someone else’s project.

Early auteur theory writings made two more nuanced arguments than simply saying directors could be the creative visionaries of film, and both were attempts at canon creation. The first was to valorize a set of independent directors, specifically in French filmmaking, who were working outside of normal French production methods, which the Cahiers writers saw as stale. Francois Truffaut’s infamous and scathing essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” published in Cahiers in 1954, decried the “tradition of quality” in the post-war French studio system that staged adaptations of classic French literature in elaborate costume productions with little attention to using the tools of cinema (montage, mise-en-scene, sound editing) to adapt the material, instead simply filming characters acting it out in boring staged shots. Instead of trying to create cinematic methods for the interiority and ironies of the French realist novel, it just filmed a set of rooms. Image Madame Bovary without Flaubert’s style, just a succession of drawing rooms filmed in standard coverage.

The New Wave critics, before making their first films at the end of the 1950s, tried to build a canon of past and current French directors who had bucked the French production system to produce personal and idiosyncratic works that utilized the richer possibilities of Cinema. The names are pretty well-known today, in part because the New Wavers canon-making has been extremely influential: Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jean Cocteau, Jacque Tati, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Pierre Melville. Thus, auteur theory was an attempt to valorize films where directors had been the main creative force to help authorize the future they wanted to see in French films and the films they wanted to make themselves.

The second argument of auteur theory was to create a canon of directors who worked in the U.S. studio system on the production line, who they felt nonetheless exhibited distinctive traits in their films such that their body of work could be isolated and understood as having the style of a single artist. This was a more complicated argument because, in many instances, these directors were not motivating forces in their films, making instead scripts that were chosen for them with studio crews and the studio’s stars. When you study a literary author, it’s easy enough to identify a set of themes, concerns, and types of characters the author employs and think about their body of work under those lenses. You don’t even have to mention style, but if you do, it’s usually pretty identifiable because sentences seem to come directly from the author’s rhythms of thought.

But studio film production is enormously regularized by genre; the director does not always choose the material, the words are not her/his, and camera operators are working on multiple productions and are trained as technicians, not artists. Themes, styles, and characterization types are much harder to “find” in a single director’s body of work. In some cases, individual directors were understood to be good at certain genres, so they tended to get picked for those films (John Ford with Westerns, Hitchcock with suspense thrillers, Howard Hawks with noir and screwball), but they all had to follow the trends in production and audience, and most people couldn’t tell a Hawks noir from a Raoul Walsh noir. They followed the same rules of genre; they tended to express the same major themes.

But while the Cahiers critics loved and celebrated independent art films, they were also film buffs (like Tarantino, who modeled his whole career and persona on the new wave). They love Hollywood genres. Perhaps out of insecurity about being Europeans who loved the ultimate expression of American capitalism, but certainly with a lot of sincere enthusiasm, they started building languages and vocabulary for how to identify the mark or style of certain directors they loved (Hitchcock and Hawks most of all) who worked in the studio system.

So we get a flurry of film-theory terms that are still with us: mise-en-scene, camera-stylo, further development of montage theory (which had originated in the early soviet cinema of Vertov and Eisenstein). These concepts helped critics like Truffuat, Alexandre Astruc, and Andre Bazin “study” the style of directors across very different films and themes, tracing in them expressions of a worldview they could attribute to a singular creative voice breaking through the studio production machine. I will explore these ideas when discussing films directly in future posts, but for now I highlight them because this conceptual vocabulary let these French critics claim some Hollywood directors (but by no means all) as major creative voices of 20th-century film art. Once again, this canon building served as the ground on which they authorized the films they wanted to make, which were to be mixtures of genre and art film.

The second argument they made has proved to be the more controversial one. Pauline Kael wrote a pretty hilarious take-down of auteur theory and its rapid adoption by U.S. film critics like Andrew Sarris in 1963. What might surprise a contemporary reader about Kael’s takedown is that she positions herself as the elitist defending true “art film” (like that of Bergman) from a pseudo-populism that is insecurely trying to claim mass-produced dreck for teenagers as artistic. Auteur theory is now often understood as, at minimum, elitist-coded for film snobs who care about directors instead of movie stars because they think they are better than everyone else. But in the late 50s/early 60s, auteurist celebrations of Hitchcock and Hawks were something of an upstart populism if intellectualized. It allowed Hollywood film directors into a conversation about art that they had been excluded from up until then. But to reiterate, Kael valorized Bergman, a director, as a singular visionary film artist in her rejection of auteur theory. Auteur theory was never as simple as just claiming that directors could be important artists.

Auteur theory has won in film culture. This is clear in marketing, where directors are as often highlighted as stars as a major draw for audiences. While not true of all movies, even superhero movies have their auteurs and recruit auteurs from other genres to spice up long-running series. Directors also face a lot of pressure to develop very readable and appealing visual styles as a way to develop audiences and ensure funding for future projects. Someone like Wes Anderson is trapped in his brand, and while his films are of mixed quality, they are easy to parody and lost a lot of their innovative edge, but there’s an audience for them, and if he abandoned it, he would probably have a difficult time funding a project. Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa were never that stuck in one visual mode. The overwhelming victory of auteur theory can enforce staleness as much as it generates creativity at this point.

The Project.

I plan to develop essays on the films of each major year of the French New Wave from 1958-1964 and publish them weekly. I will begin with a preliminary essay on some films in the mid-to-late 50s that anticipate New Wave (Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte, Roger Vadim’s …and God Created Woman, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows). Then, I will proceed year by year until 1964. After that, I will try to do one essay on 64-68, one essay on the films of the 68 aftermath, and one reflection on the careers of key directors after the New Wave. I’m organizing this by year instead of by director because I think it allows for more interesting juxtapositions (such as the dark mood of many films from 1963, after the French withdrawal from its catastrophic war in Algeria).

For this project, and because of availability issues in U.S. markets, I will largely be watching the work of the directors I named earlier. The core Cahiers group (Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, and Chabrol), the rive gauche group (Marker, Resnais, Varda and Demy) and Louis Malle. Even then, there are significant gaps. Rohmer’s first feature is unavailable in the U.S., access to Chabrol’s first decade is spotty—he became more widely distributed later when he helped launch Isabelle Huppert’s international stardom in the 1980s—and there’s even a couple of early Truffaut and Godard films you can’t access without a French VPN and paying for a French streaming service (not to mention fluency in French).

I’m just trying to have some fun with my passions, and while I will try to fill in some historical context for the films, I’m largely going to focus on my reflections and responses. I’ve seen a number of these films before, but watching them systematically, many are new to me, and even with ones I’ve seen many times (say Godard’s 60s films), watching them in order and context opens up a lot of new reflections. Apologies to anyone who did not think they were subscribing to a film history newsletter! I promise to provide other updates here and there throughout this project.