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French New Wave, New American, and Art Cinema and their Relations to Classical Film Theory

François Truffaut

Here's the second of my four film theories essays. It may help to read the first one... first. This one is a more challenging read than the first, especially the stuff about Deleuze's writings. Still, my goal was to make it more accessible than the original sources I culled material from.

During World War II, much of Europe was destroyed and in the following decade America performed the “economic miracle” which restored European infrastructure. Yet, many Europeans didn’t appreciate that Americans led the recuperation efforts because a side effect of U.S. assistance was an inundation of--and for many, an obsession with--American culture and a void of local or national culture (after all, the European cultural institutions were still in shambles). In this cultural climate emerged a group of cinephiles who, although thoroughly appreciative of American cinematic values, were searching for a uniquely European postwar cinematic voice--to renew national culture and pride and promote a viable alternative to Hollywood cinema.

This movement began with the film critics and scholars in France who wrote for magazines such as Cahiers du cinéma. In scholar-filmmaker François Truffaut’s Cahiers essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” he laments that postwar French cinema up to the time of his writing not only mimicked American cinema, but more problematically focused on literary adaptations to screen that did not take advantage of the cinematic medium. Truffaut was frustrated that most French screenwriters’ innovations were strictly limited to plots and events (which he felt ought to be restricted to literature), as opposed to innovating by using the Formal and aesthetic qualities unique to cinema, like manipulation of the mise-en-scéne (elements placed before the camera). And yet these screenwriters were lauded for their cinematic adaptations in which they wrote about “lowly” people in a condescending manner (since these writers all came from upper-class literary backgrounds) and chose films that discussed social issues only because they easily garnered acclaim (a film type which Truffaut pejoratively refers to as “the Tradition of Quality”). Most importantly, Truffaut provides a solution to these problems when he insists that cinema scholar-filmmakers, such as himself, are the most qualified people to make films and goes on to say that these filmmakers sometimes even write their own original films, as opposed to adapting existing works, as excerpted below:

“Talent, to be sure, is not a function of fidelity, but I consider an adaptation of value only when written by a man of the cinema... I know a handful of men in France who would be INCAPABLE of conceiving [such condescending ‘quality’ films], several cinéastes whose world-view is at least as valuable as that of Aurenche and Bost, Sigurd and Jeanson [the “quality” screenwriters]... French cinéastes and it happens--curious coincidence--that they are auteurs who often write their dialogue and some of them themselves invent the stories they direct” (Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” Movies and Methods I, 229 & 233).

It is in this passage that auteur theory, an essential component of the imminent French New Wave, is first kindled. The New Wave movement was a mobilization of these young, enthusiastic scholar-filmmakers, who strove to play with the multitude of Formal film techniques at their fingertips and portray cinema in a fun, self-redeeming light. Many of the New Wave filmmakers would go on to participate in the broader art cinema movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, which utilized similar techniques as the New Wave, but achieved a less optimistic tone.

These new theoretical schools marked the completion of the classical period of cinematic theories. All preexisting theories sought to claim cinema as a tool for promoting varying ideologies (such as the reality-redeeming simplicity of Realism or the aesthetically fragmented externalization of man’s psychology in some types of Formalism), whereas these new concepts claimed cinema as a tool for promoting itself; cinema was no longer a slave to any ideology but its own. To better understand the self-redeeming qualities of New Wave and art films, we must more thoroughly explore these film discourses. The following paragraphs achieve this goal and also include a comparison to another artistic cinematic movement, the New American Cinema.

Auteur theory states that it is the duty of the filmmaker, as an artist, to explore the possibilities of cinema, to foreground cinematic language in subservience of nothing other than itself. In addition to this theory, four other essential tenets of New Wave cinema are as follows:

Cinema is a medium of self expression, an expression of the filmmaker his or herself, not of an overbearing ideology. Therefore, in the eyes of New Wave proponents, the distinction between Realism and Formalism is moot--it is all cinema.

Cinema has become our experience and our reference for reality. As frequent spectators of film, mankind has made it hegemonic to consider moments in our lives in relation to “this movie” or “that movie” to the point that cinema is our reality. It acts as a framing device for everything we encounter.

Film no longer exists to mimic other art forms, but instead modifies and builds on its own one, so the medium and its creators must be respected as professionals. These professionals are also credible on the basis that film has existed for long enough to possess a history of its own.

The auteur’s central cause is to make visible the techniques of cinema for the audience and to infuse his or her unique voice into this advertisement of cinematic manipulation. Each New Wave filmmaker had signature techniques they used on every film and some of them would also reference their previous films or even other people’s films in an effort to constantly remind the spectators that they were watching a movie. This foregrounding of the playful potential of film form and of the auteur who does the playing is at the heart of the reason the French New Wave especially signals the completion of the classical theories. To play with cinema as if one were in a sandbox with no rules is to close the book on the necessity of ideological film specificity.

As mentioned earlier, most New Wave filmmakers were once critics and spent much time at the French Cinematheque learning about film’s history. A noble gesture on their part was to not only claim themselves as auteurs, but to reassess past filmmakers’ bodies of work as the product of authorship. The French New Wave wrote a revisionist history in which individual voices in the Hollywood studio system manifested themselves in such filmmakers as Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, and Hawks and in French cinema as Renoir and Ophuls. As theorist Leo Braudy notes, “In auteur theory, genre directors with large popular audiences become transformed into embattled Romantic artists trying to establish their personal visions in the face of an assembly-line commercialism” (Braudy, “Genre: The Conventions of Connection,” Film Theory and Criticism, 537).

In technical terms, New Wave films were often shot on location, with non-professional actors and available lighting (i.e. sunlight). As an act of defiance against the narrative formula, the actors were urged to improvise and the scripts themselves were very loosely conceived. In the films, causality and linearity are fragmented and characters are bizarrely motivated so that the spectator cannot depend on these people to have goals. Because there are no character goals, no goals are achieved in the end, and therefore New Wave films have no closure. It is important to note that while many of these techniques are shared with the ideology of Realism, their function here is not to find immanence. Instead, it is simply essential to the New Wave filmmakers to escape the clutches of the studio system.

Another major technique of the New Wave was to homage past films and to explore the worlds of film using genre. Although this essay’s function doesn’t allow for a full discussion of genre’s function in cinema, the following excerpt will help us to briefly define it:

“As a popular film audience, our shared needs and expectations draw us into the movie theater. If we are drawn there by a genre film, we are familiar with the ritual. In its animation and resolution of basic cultural conflicts, the genre film celebrates our collective sensibilities, providing an array of ideological strategies for negotiating social conflicts” (Schatz, “Film Genre and the Genre Film,” Film Theory and Criticism, 572).

An example of the New Wave manipulation of genre can be found in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders, which is essentially a film about how to inhabit a world that is cinematic. The film takes on the genres of the crime thriller and screwball comedy, with a love triangle of wannabe burglars. At times the characters act in such an exaggerated way that they seem to know they are in a movie and that they have a duty to fulfill generic archetypes. This supports the New Wave thesis that the way we live is dictated by cinema in general, and here specifically by genres. Yet this take on life injected with cinematic values is tinged with a kind of melancholy that would grow in the ensuing years of the art film. When one of the protagonists dies at the end of Band of Outsiders, we don’t really care because he (and the others) are so isolated from the world, living in their mental cine-reality. Godard, who fancied himself a filmic essayist, asserts in this film that once we say that cinema no longer has allegiance to any other cause than itself, we can detach ourselves from all other ideologies to an extent that we don’t really matter. If we exist only for cinema, then we exist in a dream world and may forget our own identities and indeed the meaningful things in the world beyond cinema.

Before we further discuss the ways in which 1960s art films pushed New Wave techniques in new and dark directions, let us examine the cutting edge of American film at the same moment, as well as its origins. In Classical Hollywood the methods of filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition were standardized by the vertical monopolies of the studios. Regarding authorship of Classical Hollywood films, Thomas Schatz has this to say:

“The quality and artistry of all these films are the product not simply of individual human expression, but of a melding of institutional forces. In each case the ‘style’ of a writer, director, star--or even a cinematographer, art director, or costume designer--fused with the studio's production operations and management structure, its resources and talent pool, its narrative traditions and market strategy. And ultimately any individual's style was no more than an inflection on an established studio style” (Schatz, “The Whole Equation of Pictures,” Film Theory and Criticism, 525).

Schatz proceeds to suggest that if any one individual was responsible for the voice of a film, it was the head studio executive, who not only “coordinated the operations of the entire plant” and “conducted contract negotiations,” but also “developed stories and scripts, screened ‘dailies’ as pictures were being shot, and supervised editing until a picture was ready for shipment to New York for release” (Schatz, “The Whole Equation of Pictures,” Film Theory and Criticism, 526). Yet Schatz describes the consistency of a studio’s films’ “voice” as a business-like quality control. The executives were driven to exploit proven success and to avoid risk, so they utilized tried-and-true formulas, such as, genres, sequels, and stars to ensure the attendance of the audience. Therefore the similarities in a studio’s “body of work” were achieved due to purely economic motivation, not by some sort of progenitor to the auteur or creatively individualistic studio head.

This all changed in the late 1940s, with the dissolution of the studio system and the rise of new technologies to help cinema compete with television. From this point on, filmmakers, technicians, and actors were no longer under studio contracts, and were essentially freelancers who had the ability to form their own production companies and make the films they wanted (although they still looked to the studios to distribute and possibly co-finance their projects). Thus Classical Hollywood gave way to the New American Cinema and for the first time in America, there were individual filmmakers who were able to enforce their own vision and not the studios’, in a sort of American interpretation of film authorship.

The most prominent quality of the New American Cinema is that it investigates the “greatness” of past studio films. The New American auteur does this by creating new films that not only strive to accurately fit within or homage established genres, but also to critique and demythologize the standards of these genres at the same time. Although New Wave cinema used genre to simply make its viewers aware of its presence, the New American genre film is also (perhaps more so) a self-reflexive act in that is used to reverse engineer an analysis of its own genre’s history. Braudy notes the power of the genre film to instill in an audience a sense of security, which at any moment can be stripped away:

“The genre film lures its audience into a seemingly familiar world, filled with reassuring stereotypes of character, action, and plot. But the world may actually not be so lulling, and, in some cases, acquiescence in convention will turn out to be bad judgement or even a moral flaw... The very relaxing of the critical intelligence of the audience... allows the genre film to use our expectations against themselves, and, in the process, reveal to us expectations and assumptions that we may never have thought we had” (Braudy, “Genre,” Film Theory and Criticism, 539).

Increasingly, the New American generic self-analysis was applied to current political or social issues, such as the Vietnam War, the scars of McCarthyism, and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement.

Hal Ashby’s Shampoo perfectly epitomizes the genre-bending, issue-minded nature of the New American Cinema. The film is a contemporary screwball comedy in which Warren Beatty plays a Beverly Hills hairdresser who sleeps around with several women and who is in love with two of them. Though Shampoo seems to proceed as a sheer comedy, it is riddled with ideological holes left for us to fill in. In the standard screwball comedy a male and female strive for individuality while also seeking romantic union, a conflict of desires from which the humor stems, and which usually is resolved in a contrived way that the audience must suspend its disbelief to accept. Contrastingly, in Shampoo, although the audience is partially rooting for Beatty’s character, we cannot help but harbor an internal conflict: does he really deserve to succeed in his conquest of romantic union in consideration of his loose sexual morals? By the end of the film, our question is answered: no. Both of Beatty’s loves sever their ties with him and he is left alone in an America that, just a day earlier, elected Nixon as president (this film takes place seven years before it was released). The melancholy of Beatty’s character not only mirrors that which is forthcoming in 1968 America, but also a similar feeling that permeated general cinematic discourse at the time of the film’s release. Now even in American cinema, the hope for resolution and closure was being whittled away. New American Cinema dismantled genres and unveiled their limitations, which Classical Hollywood was so desperate to keep hidden.

And so, with both the French New Wave and the New American Cinema arriving at a tilting point towards pessimism and bitterness, we come to the art cinema. Art cinema can briefly be described as a “domestication” of New Wave exuberance, an exhaustion from previous excitement, and a lack of experimental energy (there were experiments going on but they were no longer eagerly pursued or foregrounded). The author of the art film, unlike the New Wave’s playful promoter of cinema, is a wholly selfish creature who seeks to make films in his or her own vision and not to advance either a classical theory or even the ideology of cinema itself. If anything, art cinema defines an ideology in which the auteur is the supreme organizer and his or her existence is enough to justify the images in his or her films. As David Bordwell confirms:

“...the art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the film's system... the author becomes a formal component, the overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension... Within this frame of reference, the author is the textual force ‘who’ communicates (what is the film saying?) and ‘who’ expresses (what is the artist's personal vision?). Lacking identifiable stars and familiar genres, the art cinema uses a concept of authorship to unify the text” (Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” Film Theory and Criticism, 652-653).

In turn, as Bordwell goes on to say, the signature techniques of each individual auteur are the only things the audience seeks out to generate coherence in these otherwise incoherent narratives (although the incoherence of these films can itself gain meaning through various interpretations by the audience). Ironically, the force that unifies the film through technique, the auteur, is also the one who makes the work narratively incoherent in the first place. With this description it becomes clear that the art cinema is not for everyone; one must hone the ability to stand the art film and read it. Theorist Gilles Deleuze supports the notion that art cinema viewership is a skill:

“The soul of the cinema demands increasing thought, even if thought begins by undoing the system of actions, perceptions and affections on which the cinema had fed up to that point” (Deleuze, “The Origin of the Crisis: Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave,” Film Theory and Criticism, 219).

One of the reasons that art cinema remains a niche taste is because this skill mostly belongs to the cultural elite and intelligentsia.

Deleuze wrote extensively on the innovative technical pursuits of art cinema, in both abstract and concrete terms. He defines the traditional filmic depiction of space-time as the “movement image,” in which cause and effect are important and in which things and characters move through space in a logical and linear fashion. In contrast, he argues that the art film places plot--the articulation and presentation of events--over story elements such as chronology and cause and effect. Deleuze defines this alternative space-time depiction as the “movement image,” as explained below:

“Time ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself and itself gives rise to false movements. Hence the importance of false continuity in modern cinema: the images are no longer linked by rational cuts and continuity, but are relinked by means of false continuity and irrational cuts” (Deleuze, “Preface to the English Edition,” Film Theory and Criticism, 217).

In terms of Deleuze’s definition, we are exposed to the subjective reaction of characters to what is happening around them (expressed not only in the actors’ performances but also through the aesthetic manipulations of the image). And to an even greater degree than in New Wave cinema, the characters in art cinema are totally unmotivated; their reasons for acting go unexplained. This lack of undefined causation lends a novel drifting feeling to these narratives (if one can call them “narratives”):

“...if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer has to be 'justified', for better or for worse” (Deleuze, “Beyond the Movement-Image,” Film Theory and Criticism, 236).

This “thing in itself” is the aimless feeling that causes viewers to seek comfort in their awareness of the auteur’s signature. No longer is the time image synthetic or subservient to the movement image. With art films there is no longer an obedience to logic and ultimately no guarantee that a work will arrive at some kind of message. A final point in the abstract mode of Deleuze’s writing is that the time image is not anchored in something that can be identified strictly as past, present, or future:

“...what we call temporal structure, or direct-time image, clearly goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time--past-present-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can belong to several levels: the sheets of past coexist in a non-chronological order” (Deleuze, “Preface to the English Edition,” Film Theory and Criticism, 217).

To reiterate, Deleuze believes the time image in art cinema instead flows between past, present, and future in a sort of delirious or even confusing déjà vu-like amalgam of the three.

More concretely, Deleuze points to the artist’s voice as the disruptor of all other types of identification. The art cinema auteur feels (as we are also supposed to) that the traditional ways in which filmmakers have maintained the subservience of the plot to the story, such as characters with goals, closure, and genre (which itself provides a whole host of structural elements that ensure the avoidance of the triumph of the time image), are clichés and must be done away with via the isolation of the audience. Indeed, with art cinema, genre is undermined to the extreme (if used at all) due to the lack of narrative cohesion fostered by the filmmaker.

This brings us to art cinema auteur Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which is loosely about a an actress who refuses to speak and her nurse who speaks freely about her troubles. They live in a secluded house and it turns out that the actress has no psychological problems, but just wants to study the nurse for her own selfish purposes. The nurse grows understandably angry. At its core, the film is about the barriers of communication, especially between the elite (the actress) and non-elite (the nurse). Persona can therefore be read as an allegory for the isolation and hatred of elitist art cinema by the general populous (I’m sure you can relate, as you have already read my summary of the dry, elitist Deluzian philosophy on the art film and the time image). In turn, the film concurrently caters to the cultural elite and questions its necessity and its worthiness for love. Throughout the film’s “narrative,” we are sporadically bombarded by random and startling imagery, such as in the opening sequence when the film self-reflexively depicts its own threading, or in the middle when the film’s negative “melts.” These instances forbid us to forget that we are watching a film and punish us for trying to find cohesion within it--Bergman involves us in an aborted attempt to make a connection that parallels a similar failure (and ultimate isolation) on screen.

I apologize about ending this essay on a somber note, but as you can see, the three film theories that constitute the bounds of the article all result in a kind of pessimism. Godard’s mid-60s New Wave films flow directly into the isolating and polarizing art cinema and New American Cinema critiques the negative aspects of American life and cinematic techniques. Still, we have successfully traced the path of the auteur, from being non-existent in Classical Hollywood, to enthusiastically defining itself in the New Wave, to fostering critical reflectiveness in New American Cinema, and finally to existing as the lone unifying aspect of an otherwise incoherent work in art cinema. Along the way we also explained how these film movements, which are purely about cinema and its creators, effectively halted classical theoretical projects such as Realism and Formalism and paved the way for contemporary film theory.

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