June 23, 2022 41A Camera Light as a Pen
James QuandtForgotten Filmmakers
of the French New Wave
a film series at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York City, May 4–June 2,
2022; and the Harvard Film Archive,
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
May 6–June 19, 2022The Legacy of the New Wave
in French Cinema
by Douglas Morrey.
Bloomsbury, 263 pp.,
$135.00; $36.95 (paper)French New Wave:
A Revolution in Design
by Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh,
and Christopher Frayling.
Reel Art, 302 pp., $59.95The curators of the series “Forgotten
Filmmakers of the French New Wave”
have set more than one trap for them-
selves with their provocative theme.
As cinema studies have increasingly
moved to expand the canon by incor-
porating works that were once treated
as minor or marginal, if not altogether
ignored, the criteria for evaluating a
film’s aesthetic worth or a director’s
historical importance have greatly
changed. Revisionism reigns in the
field, but to characterize, as “Forgotten
Filmmakers” does, a vast number of
auteurs from perhaps the best- known
and most chronicled movement in film
history as disregarded or unremem-
bered certainly courts dispute—for-
gotten by whom?—and not just among
the many connoisseurs of arcana who
populate the precincts of cinephilia.
The series includes several directors
who will be familiar to anyone who
frequents repertory or art house cin-
emas and film museums—Georges
Franju, Alain Cavalier, Jean Eustache,
Maurice Pialat, and Jean Rouch, for
example—and some whose careers
largely came after the period usually
identified with the New Wave. The
redoubtable film critic Jean- Michel
Frodon, lead curator for the series,
seems almost recklessly generous in
his determination to expand the stan-
dard parameters of the movement by
invoking an early definition: “A n y o n e
who made his or her first film between
1957 and 1963 [in France] was de facto
part of [it].”
A more crucial snare lies in defin-
ing the French New Wave, a term that
can become as vague and capacious as
“film noir,” especially when its purview
gets radically expanded, as it does in
“Forgotten Filmmakers.” Frodon in-
cludes Machorka- Muff (1963), a caus-
tic anti- Adenauer satire shot in Bonn
in German and based on a text by
Heinrich Böll that was the first film by
Jean- Marie Straub and Danièle Huil-
let, figures more associated with Ger-
man cinema, as well as Claude- Jean
Bonnardot’s anomalous Moranbong,
une aventure coréenne (Moranbong, a
Korean Adventure, 1960), a sentimen-
tal war epic filmed in North Korea and
mostly in Korean, which suggests just
how heterodox the remit of “Forgot-
ten Filmmakers” is. (Again, one cavils
at that rubric, since Straub- Huillet’s
films have long been revered among
cinephiles and accorded countless
retrospectives.)Scholars continue to disagree about
which filmmakers fit under the New
Wave designation, what the salient
characteristics of its films are, and how
long it lasted. James Monaco’s classic
study The New Wave (1976) estab-
lished both the roster of directors who
have traditionally been considered the
movement’s progenitors—five critics
from the journal Cahiers du cinéma
who were intent upon becoming film-
makers: Jean- Luc Godard, Jacques
Rivette, François Truffaut, Claude
Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer—and the
year of its inception as 1959, which
Monaco calls its annus mirabilis, when
most of his subjects made their first fea-
tures. Though he gives no precise end
date, Monaco infers the considerable
influence of the New Wave directors in
the protests during the winter of 1968
against the French government’s dis-
missal of Henri Langlois as the head
of the Cinémathèque française, which
prefigured the violent political demon-
strations of the following summer.Two recent books indicate the degree
to which many film historians depart
from Monaco’s conventional out-
line (and Frodon’s unorthodox one).
Douglas Morrey, in his important but
frustrating The Legacy of the New
Wave in French Cinema, notes that
“in the strictest definition, [the move-
ment] only lasted from the beginning
of 1959 until the end of 1960,” which
he sensibly finds too confining. The
contributors to the handsome coffee-
table book French New Wave: A Rev-
olution in Design, which convincingly
argues that the cinematic insurgence of
the New Wave inspired an “explosive
and groundbreaking” new movement
in the design of film posters, push the
termination date all the way to 1970 to
include Godard’s Le Vent d’est (Wind
from the East), long after the director
had made his radical transition to Mao-
ism and collective filmmaking with the
Dziga Vertov Group.Both books extend the New Wave
to include Agnès Varda, whose work
unquestionably evokes its spirit and
freewheeling means. In her concept of
cinécriture, or “cinema writing,” Varda
expressed a desire to shoot films with
the unencumbered ease and stylistic
intensity with which an author writes
a novel, making literal the premise of
a 1948 essay frequently cited as the
founding document of the French New
Wave, Alexandre Astruc’s “The Birth
of a New Avant- Garde: La Caméra-
Stylo,” in which he noticedthat something is happening in the
cinema at the moment.... Cin-
ema is in the process of becoming
a new means of expression on the
same level as painting and the nov-
el... a form in which and by which
an artist can express his thoughts,
however abstract they may be, or
translate his obsessions exactly as
he does in the contemporary essay
or novel. This is why I would like to
call this new age of cinema the age
of the caméra- stylo.A movie camera as light and porta-
ble as a pen, able to record conscious-
ness and interiority, was a central New
Wave tenet that Varda ardently shared,
but she diverged from the sometimes
misogynist and often right- wing New
Wave in both her sex and her politics
and can be more comfortably situated
with her husband, Jacques Demy, and
their cerebral confreres Alain Res-
nais and Chris Marker in the progres-
sive Left Bank Group, an important
distinction that goes unremarked by
Morrey.
Morrey’s study, which traces the
movement’s influence on various post–
New Wave French auteurs, from the
generation that immediately followed
in the 1970s to a slate of contempo-
rary directors, relies too heavily on the
opinions of others. Many paragraphs
are clogged with citations, his eight-
page introduction alone requiringeighty endnotes. It is unfortunate that
he seems not to trust his own judg-
ment, because he is keenly perceptive,
especially when he turns to materialist
analysis.
Morrey’s comments about the rar-
ity or availability of certain works are
sometimes uninformed. He notes that
the early films of the morose solip-
sist Philippe Garrel are “rarely seen,”
though a large retrospective that in-
cluded many of those works in new
restorations traveled to North America
and many international cinemas five
years ago, and was also available to
stream in the UK, where Morrey lives.
He rightly claims that Garrel’s legend-
ary documentary Actua I, which Go-
dard pronounced the best film about
the events of May 1968, was lost, but
seems unaware that Garrel found the
negative in 2014, and that the film was
subsequently shown at the Cannes Film
Festival and released on DV D, and is
currently available on YouTube.
Morrey positions Garrel as an in-
heritor of the New Wave, especially of
the director’s idol, Godard, while the
curators of “Forgotten Filmmakers”
include Garrel in the movement itself
with his first film, Les Enfants désac-
cordés (1964). Garrel’s febrile short,
shot when he was only sixteen, about a
teenage couple who flee their parents,
steal a car, and end up playing games in
an abandoned suburban château, pro-
vides a veritable checklist of New Wave
themes and strategies, including its
title, which suggests a winking homage
to Jean Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants
terribles (Cocteau was Garrel’s other
idol). Like Jean Eustache and Maurice
Pialat, who are also featured in “For-
gotten Filmmakers,” Garrel began in
the New Wave, briefly partook of its
ethos, and moved on.The series, co- organized by the MoMA
film curator Joshua Siegel, pays gen-
erous tribute to the New Wave’s chief
inspirations and precursors—Astruc,Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider in Alain Cavalier’s Le Combat dans l’île, 1962Zeitgeist FilmsQuandt 41 43 .indd 41 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 24 PM