Ride The French New Wave

French New Wave is a film movement that shows more like a corresponded title, or a comprehensive list of the director. French New wave also known as (La Nouvelle Vague) that came about in the late 1950s and early 1960s, resulting from economic, politic, aesthetic, and social trend. It is formed by a group of French young filmmakers who have low budget and against the prevailing trends in the 1950s cinema of literacy adoption, costume dramas and massive co-productions. French film were mainly literacy adaptions such as fictional tales published in books and adapted to cinema. These are filmed within the studio system or on big budget spectacles and international co-productions. Besides, the term of Nouvelle Vague was not in the first instance associated with film making. It is created by Francoise Giroud who is the editor of the then Centre-left weekly L’Express which is to refer the new socially active youth class.

During the German occupation, the Nazis had banned the import of American films. As a result, after the war, when the ban was lifted by the 1946 Blum-Byrnes agreement, nearly a decade worth of missing films arrived in French cinemas in the space of a single year. It was a time for film lovers watched all these previously unreleased movies at the Cinematheque Francaise which is a film archive and public theater in Paris during postwar years. 

Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer were the young directors who associated with French New Wave and they were film critics for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Magazine Cahiers du Cinéma was founded by Andre Bazin and Jacques Donial Valcroze. The writers for this magazine  are Francois Trauffault and Jean-Luc Godard. Till then, making criticism did not satisfy these young men and they planned to make movies. They started to try borrowing money from friends and also filming on location to shoot for their short films. Trauffaut rejects heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue but prefer visual aesthetics and mise-en-scene. 

In 1959, Jacques Rivette filmed Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), Godard made A Bout de soufflé (Breathless), Chabrol made his second feature, Les Cousins. While in April. Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows) won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Festival. The journalist named the young directors as La Nouvelle Vague which is the origin of French New Wave. Later on, the five central young directors have total made 32 feature films in 1959 to 1966. Godard and Chabrol have made 11 each. All the films must be different but the similarities are enough for us to identify the New wave approach to style and film. In 1957, the cinema attendance has fall a lot. This is because television has become more widespread. Then in 1959 the industry is in crisis. The only solution was to encourage the independent financing of low-budget projects. The New Wave directors shot films much cheaply and more quickly. They help one another out to reduce the financial risk. In 1964, each of them had their own production company and their group had become involved into film industry.

In the year of 1966-1968, the earlier New Wave had become more politicized and there was no positive reflection of the dominant ideology. This cinema was changed about the process of film making. First New Wave and second New Wave are putting in counter-cinema to the standardization effects of American technology such as hand-held camera, no studio and so forth. The first New Wave was not politicized but it was anti-bourgeois in emotion as well as it was encouraged to present the point of view of the individual in society. Whereby the second new wave was appeared in the late of late of 1960s, where the cinema had become politicized and questioning society. By the 1970s and 1980s, women, Blacks and Beurs were entering into film making.

Francois Truffaut

Jean-Luc Godard

Claude Chabrol

Jacques Rivette

Eric Rohmer