The French New Wave

The French New Wave was a term created for a group of French Filmmakers who spurred out of the late 1950’s-1960’s French Film scene. What most people are unaware of is that the French New wave was highly influenced by Italian Neo Realism and Classical Hollywood cinema. The movement was never organized, never formed to a specific palate that’s what made it so unique. It was for the most part a generally young group of aspiring Film Directors this is the only factor that caused it to be classed under European Cinematic Art category. What also set it apart from many of the other kinds of films being made at the same time period or before is that it was a risk most of the time. The main concepts of the films were mirrored after the social and political upheavals of the era something that set them far aside from any other kind of film experiment around. This shattered everything that was then this conservative paradigm. They’re radical sense of being allowed them to make exceptional risk taking experiments with editing, visual style and narrative parts.

Now how it all started, the first establishing figures in the French New Wave were names that are echoed in the halls of cinema still today. Names like Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Godard who began their careers as critics of the famous magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Andre Bazin found and theorist of Chiers du Cinema was one of the main sources of influence for the movement. Criticism and editorilization laid the groundwork for a set of concepts revolutionary at the time which American film critic Andrew Sarris coined “auteur theory.” Bazin and Henri Langlois so established a dual father like role of the movement based on their founder and curator position of the Cinemathique Francaise. The auteur theory means that the filmmaker holds credit to being the author of the film that is something apparent from film to film. Movies like the 400 Blows by Truffaut and Breathless by Godard had extreme international success, which caused people to recognize the new wave. This is one of the factors that cause the movement to flourish. An important thing to acknowledge is one of the techniques that were prominent in French New Wave filmmaking that was to portray characters not readily labeled as protagonists in the classic sense of audience identification.

The French New Wave films were on very tight budgets so most things were improvised such as actors and crewmembers, which were, recruited friends of the directors. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment and use things as odd as shopping carts to work as a device to use for tracking shots. Just like any other art film movement it had lasting effects, the innovations discovered by the French New Wave artists seeped into American cinema. Lots of contemporary filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino claimed influence from the French New Wave. The French New Wave is one of the most prominent film movements in cinematic history, in a sense it was a portal that created a swarm of young film directors, it impelled others to feel comfortable in experimenting with film that which opened the doors for a lot of independent films.