The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema

Douglas Morrey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501311918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In this study of the impact and influence of the New Wave in French cinema, Douglas Morrey looks at both the subsequent careers of New Wave filmmakers and the work of later film directors and film movements in France. This book is organized around a series of key moments from the past 50 years of French cinema in order to show how the meaning and legacy of the New Wave have shifted over time and how the priorities, approaches and discourses of filmmakers and film critics have changed over the years. Morrey tackles key concepts such as the auteur, the relationship of form and content, gender and sexuality, intertextuality and rhythm. Filmmakers discussed include Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol and Rohmer plus Philippe Garrel, Luc Besson, Leos Carax, Bruno Dumont, the Dardenne brothers, Christophe Honoré, François Ozon and Jacques Audiard.

1

The Post-New Wave of the 1970s: Eustache, Doillon, Garrel

It has been widely acknowledged, by filmmakers and critics alike, that the generation of auteur directors that immediately followed the New Wave (principally Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel and Jacques Doillon, but also others including Chantal Akerman and Benoît Jacquot) were overwhelmingly influenced by two factors: first, by the ideals and aesthetics of the Nouvelle Vague itself; and second, by the revolutionary turmoil, utopian aspirations and subsequent disappointments surrounding the events of May 1968 in France. It is worth asking, therefore, what the nature of the relationship is between the French New Wave and May 1968. There is regrettably not room in this book to explore this question in the detail that it merits, but a few key points are important to establish at the outset of this chapter. As we saw in the Introduction to this book, most historians now regard the majority of the New Wave as apolitical at best and, in some cases, tainted by its associations with charismatic figures on the political right. It is therefore not realistic to see any meaningful influence of the New Wave over the more explicitly political strikes and demonstrations of May 1968 organized by Marxist trade unions. On the other hand, if the events of May are understood primarily as a spontaneous movement of self-expression begun by young people (the students of Parisian universities) and aimed at a general decalcification of French social life, then the model of New Wave cinema, in which young people test the boundaries of their newfound freedoms, can indeed be taken as an important precursor to the spirit of May.

In the world of French cinema specifically, two events are particularly associated with the spring of 1968, both of them involving a leading role for New Wave filmmakers. Firstly, a precursor to the insurrections of May occurred with the ‘Affaire Langlois’ that took place between February and April 1968 around the Cinémathèque Française. Although the Cinémathèque was largely state-funded, the Ministry of Culture grew increasingly impatient with its chaotic organization and account-keeping under the idiosyncratic leadership of Henri Langlois and eventually imposed a new director.¹ For the New Wave directors, Langlois’s Cinémathèque was the sacrosanct space in which they had learned their craft and they took a central role in opposing the state-sanctioned changes, particularly as the plan involved discontinuing the screenings where so many of these young cinephiles had first met and shared their ideas. Alain Resnais presided over a Comité de Défense de la Cinémathèque while Truffaut orchestrated a campaign to persuade international directors to boycott the institution. Godard and Chabrol organized pickets outside the Cinémathèque, the rough police dispersal of which helped to turn public opinion against the patrician state, thus contributing to prepare the ground for the unrest of May.² It was during that turbulent month that the Cannes Film Festival was scheduled, as it is every year. It opened on 10 May 1968, a date that came to be known as the ‘Night of the Barricades’ in Paris, because of the makeshift blockades erected by rioting students. Under such circumstances, many felt that a glamorous festival on the Riviera was incongruous and inappropriate, and it was François Truffaut who travelled to Cannes to deliver an official communiqué calling for the closure of the festival in solidarity with the striking workers and students.³ Although many jury members resigned immediately, a skeleton festival continued for over a week during which Truffaut, Godard and Jean-Pierre Léaud were involved in physical scuffles in an attempt to prevent the projection of Peppermint Frappé, a film that director Carlos Saura had withdrawn from competition in support of the protestors.⁴

While these may be relatively minor footnotes in the wider history of the May 1968 movement in France, for committed young cinephiles they demonstrated that the generation of the New Wave was, at worst, in sympathy with the ideals of May and, at best, could be seen as its standard bearers. Indeed, several New Wave directors made significant changes to their own filmmaking practice following the national soul-searching of that spring, changes that lasted for most of the subsequent decade. Most famously, Godard abandoned ‘bourgeois’ commercial filmmaking altogether, working with the collective Dziga Vertov Group to produce films with an explicitly revolutionary message for distribution to factories and universities. Jacques Rivette made some of his most challenging film experiments, full of improvised performance and narrative deconstruction. Agnès Varda made political documentaries in the United States and Cuba before returning to France to make a film about the women’s movement, L’une chante, l’autre pas (1977). More generally, it might be argued that the young people who took to the streets in France in May 1968 were ‘the children of the New Wave and of Jean-Luc Godard’.⁵ Antoine de Baecque argues that given its youthfulness and rapidity for much of the 1960s, the cinema in France may have played an important role in shaping the imaginary worlds of young people, somewhat as rock and pop music did for the youth of Britain and America. ‘Jean-Luc Godard offered young people images of revolt, fragments of film with which to envisage a different world and attempt a revolution in black and white or vivid colour.’⁶

Jean Eustache: La Maman et la Putain

The cinema of Jean Eustache and in particular his magnum opus La Maman et la Putain (1973) have been frequently interpreted as a reaction to the legacy of May 1968 in French social and cultural life. Indeed, Jean Douchet has gone so far as to call La Maman et la Putain ‘undeniably the only “May-’68” film in French cinema’.⁷ The events of May 1968 caused such upheaval in France that they remained an essential point of reference for many years. For those artists, intellectuals and activists who were invested in the movement, whether ideologically or emotionally or both, the aftermath of ’68 was often experienced as a disappointing comedown, a retreat from radical utopian ideals and a retrenchment in more traditional values and modes of social organization. May 1968 is referred to in this spirit in certain key dialogues (or, more properly, monologues) of La Maman et la Putain. At one point, the protagonist Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) recalls being in a crowded cafe one day in May when everyone began to cry because a tear gas canister had exploded nearby. At that moment, he says, ‘Before my eyes, a hole opened up in reality’ (‘Sous mes yeux, une brèche s’était ouverte dans la réalité’). Since we learn nothing, in the film, about Alexandre’s life prior to 1968, his experience of May can be taken as crucially formative. Seemingly disappointed by life in France post-’68, he does not work, refusing any active economic contribution to society and expressing contempt for those who do work, arguing that they are merely ‘pretending’. Alexandre’s break-up with his ex-girlfriend Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten) is couched in similar terms. At the beginning of the film, Gilberte announces that she is planning to marry another man, who happens to be bourgeois, wealthy and respectable. Alexandre accuses her of betraying herself as well as him, suggesting that she is seeking to erase the memory of the past ‘like France after the Liberation, like France after May ’68’. The significance of his words is heightened by a cut from a two-shot to a close-up of Alexandre’s face and he intones, ‘You are picking yourself up like France after May ’68, my love.’⁸

Elsewhere in the film, Alexandre says that he feels as though everything that has happened in the world in the last few years (so we might understand since 1968) is somehow ‘directed against him’. He is dismissive of contemporary trends in music (Alexandre only listens to classical music and pre-war French chansons) and cinema (at one point he reads sardonically from a review of current political film release, Elio Petri’s La classe operaia va in paradiso [1971]). Alexandre is out of time. As Alain Philippon puts it, he inhabits a kind of ‘“no man’s time” between the ghosts of a past generation and the uncertain shadows of a future that is hard to imagine’.⁹ His disdain for contemporary arts is accompanied by a sense that a certain cultural levelling has rendered it difficult to assess the value of any phenomenon. When Alexandre tells a friend (Jacques Renard) about a young woman he has briefly met, the friend insists that it is impossible to assume anything about her social background on the basis of her appearance. These days, he opines wistfully, everything is the same (‘Tout est pareil’). This lament for the lack of distinction in the cultural life of the 1970s goes hand in hand with what various commentators have identified as a certain dandyism displayed by Alexandre and that reflects the behaviour of Eustache himself. Like Eustache, Alexandre dresses with a degree of ostentation, wearing his hair long and often accessorizing with dark glasses and more than one neck scarf. In addition, although basically without income, Alexandre enjoys demonstrating his financial largesse, for instance borrowing money in order to take Véronika (Françoise Lebrun) to an expensive restaurant, with the memorable line, ‘Not having any money is no reason to eat poorly.’¹⁰ One of the clearest manifestations of this dandyism is Alexandre’s insistence on using the formal mode of address ‘Vous’ with his two lovers, Véronika and Marie (Bernadette Lafont), even though he uses the informal ‘Tu’ with everyone else, and the two women address each other as ‘Tu’.

The use of ‘Vous’ appears as a deliberate rejection of the spirit of egalitarian solidarity established by May 1968 in favour of an almost aristocratic discourse. Faced with the indistinction that has become the cultural legacy of 1968, this return to an almost archaic mode of address appears as the only way to underline the uniqueness of the relation to the loved one.¹¹ Critics have wondered, however, whether this rather mannered behaviour may not signal a hypocritical abandonment of the values of May 1968, what Keith Reader calls ‘an exhausted retreat into the style of reactionary nostalgia’.¹² Elsewhere, evoking the Liberation, Alexandre regrets that he never knew an era in which young women swooned before men in uniform. Today they are more likely to be impressed by sports cars and men in suits. But, as Susan Weiner points out, this can be seen as a typical strategy of reactionary politics: evoking an older (and more authoritarian) era as a defence against one’s diminishing importance in the present. Alexandre’s nostalgia is ‘transparently a commentary on his own invisibility in late capitalist culture’: in a context in which authority is conferred by education, employment and wealth, Alexandre, for all his rhetoric, is effectively worthless in the eyes of society.¹³

Jean Eustache’s relationship to May 1968 is, therefore, a complex and ambiguous one: on the one hand, the events of May remain a vital point of reference in La Maman et la Putain, implying a turning point in French cultural life; on the other hand, the insidious sense of failure, cynicism and surrender that pervades La Maman, and other films by Eustache, suggests regret at the way in which the radical possibilities of May became corrupted and co-opted by the mechanisms of consumerism whereby the aspiration to egalitarianism gave way to a reality of homogenization. Eustache’s reaction to this turn of events combines a potentially progressive critique of social confo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Post-New Wave of the 1970s: Eustache, Doillon, Garrel
• 2. The cinéma du look
• 3. The jeune cinéma français of the 1990s
• 4. The Old New Wave
• 5. Contemporary Auteur Directors in France
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint