tor or the entire collaborative team, including the
director—that makes a movie? Truffaut idolized
directors who made highly personal statements in
their films—including Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau,
and Max Ophüls in France, and Orson Welles, Alfred
Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, John Ford,
Nicholas Ray, and Anthony Mann in Hollywood—so
his answer was clear: the director was the primary
“author” of the work. In another influential Cahiers
essay, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,”
Bazin described mise-en-scène by stressing that
everything we see on the screen has been put there
by the director for a reason.^11
The New Wave directors excelled at demon-
strating that cinematic form is more important
than content; their films were self-reflexive, focus-
ing attention on them asmovies and diverting our
attention away from their narratives. In this, they
manipulate our perceptions and keep an aesthetic
and psychological distance between us and their
movies. The style, substance, and achievements of
the French New Wave directors had an invigorat-
ing effect on world cinema, and their movies
remain very popular. Among their most important
films are Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless(1960),
François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows(1959), Claude
Chabrol’s The Butcher (1970), Jacques Rivette’s
Celine and Julie Go Boating(1974), Eric Rohmer’s
My Night at Maud’s(1969), Chris Marker’s La Jetée
(1962), Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad
(1961), Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7(1962), and
Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart(1971). Although
the movement was finished by 1964, many of these
directors continued to make films.
If one movie symbolizes the fresh, innovative
spirit of the New Wave it is Godard’s Breathless
(1960), for it offers a comprehensive catalog of the
movement’s stylistic traits: rapid action, use of
handheld cameras, unusual camera angles, ellipti-
cal editing, direct address to the camera, acting
that borders on the improvisational, anarchic poli-
tics, and an emphasis on the importance of sound,
especially words. It is not any one of these tech-
niques that defines the filmmaker’s style, but
rather the imagination and energy with which(^11) Among Bazin’s essays, students should know “The Myth of
Total Cinema,” “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” and
“Theater and Cinema,” in André Bazin, What Is Cinema?ed. and
trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967–71), I, pp. 17–22, 23–40, 76–124.
1
2
French New Wave: beginnings Among the first New
Wave movies were François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows(1959)
and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless(1960). Truffaut’s
protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is a boy
in his early teens who, as we see him here [1], has just
escaped from a juvenile detention center; Godard’s Michel
Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a man in his early thirties
who is preparing to steal a car and will shortly murder a
policeman [2]. Antoine is just a boy prankster facing an
unknown future, but Michel is a dangerous criminal whom
the police will soon recognize and shoot in cold blood as he
attempts to flee capture. Noteworthy is that Truffaut wrote
the original treatment of Breathlessand, after his great
success with The 400 Blows, made a gift of it to Godard,
suggesting that he submit it as the idea for his own first film.
A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 459