Where am I going to find this? Is the article simply against political cinema, or is it right wing?

Truffaut's article UNE CERTAINE TENDANCE.... here

Follow the link on the left...

Sorry, my French is embarrassingly poor! I found a translation here.

The money quote:

[quote]As for the taste for blasphemy, it shows itself constantly, in a manner more or less insidious, according to the subject, the director, indeed even the star. I recall from memory the confessional scene in “Douceâ€

And then there's that 1959 New Wave picture whose inaugural position has gone largely unremarked over the years. --

-- 'Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier' by Jean Renoir.

craig.

That's interesting. Now that you mention it, Roud's is the earliest mention of it that I'd encountered, but I hadn't realised that the distinction originated with him.

Another key difference for me is the strong Left Bank engagement with contemporary philosophy, art and literature versus the Cahiers alliance with American genre cinema. Not a value judgement, but it does lend the films of the two factions quite a different character. And of course, the distinction immediately gets very messy when you start looking at figures like Rivette and Demy.

Slate has 23 great pictures of New Wave directors/actors here.

1968 is the sensible and obvious place to end the New Wave, and a number of key filmmakers conveniently go along with the demarcation: Godard's career takes a radical turn, Resnais goes on
(involuntary) sabbatical, Demy and Varda leave the country, and Truffaut had already entered the commercial mainstream.

I still have a couple of niggles with that demarcation, however. Rohmer is right in the middle of his Six Moral Tales, and it seems rather arbitrary to rule the second half of the series post-New Wave. And although Pialat's feature career is decidedly post-New Wave, and represents a new departure for French filmmaking, he emerged from the movement and his first feature L'Enfance nue still has one foot in that camp (and was produced by Francois Truffaut and Mag Bodard). The biggest asterisk for me has to be The Mother and the Whore, which is a quintessential New Wave film that falls way outside the sensibly demarcated era (1973). Like Pialat, Eustache is a significant New Wave filmmaker who didn't get to release his first feature until after the movement was largely over.

Pialat was included on a supplemental list to Cahiers' cataloging of New Wave filmmakers as a director in the process of securing financing for his first feature... in 1962! I guess the glut of bombs by young directors in this period halted a lot of progress. He was well-known to the journal from his work with Rouch, however. Eustache at least was able to complete Du Côté de Robinson in '63 after La soirée was abandoned two years prior, putting him firmly in the era.

For me the last director to emerge during the New Wave period to be fully part of it is Luc Moullet in 1966 with Brigitte et Brigitte, which feels like it comes six years too late in film history to have the impact it should have. Though its threadbare style and construction are at odds with popular cinema in any era! But it's a total masterpiece and while he naturally gets grandfathered in to movement automatically given his Cahiers standing, Moullet is sorely underrepresented in discussions of the movement, in part because he does come so late within it-- but in many ways it's a last gasp.

I think it's kind of impossible to draw definite lines around the New Wave. Wiki presents Eustache saying that The Mother and the Whore is a "key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema." There's the historical New Wave moment (which some would say ended in '62!) and the New Wave directors who continued long after the movement ended and whose later works retained key characteristics of the NW period?movement?genre?style? even decades on (Rohmer, Godard - I'd also argue that Truffaut's work cannot be neatly divided into pre-commercial and commercial eras.)

This should all probably be relocated to an all-purpose New Wave thread (do we have one?), but I just finished watching Gaumont's Nikos Papatakis box, and he's one of the more interesting New Wave / not-New Wave directors.

It's an exemplary collection: every film he made (including both versions of Gloria Mundi), in all new HD transfers, each one accompanied by contextualising extras, plus a full disc of general extras, all with English subs (plus four CDs of audio interviews between Papatakis and Michel Cinemt - unsubbed, obviously), plus a large bilingual book.

His debut film, Les Abysses from 1963, was the only film I'd previously heard of, and I was intrigued by its obnoxious release history. The film was rejected by Cannes, so Papatakis got a bunch of his famous mates (Genet, Sartre, de Beauvoir et al.) to lobby the government with over-the-top claims ("the greatest film I have ever seen!" etc.) so that Minister of Culture Andre Malraux imposed the film on the festival. Papatakis was relentlessly vocal in his work and interviews about the neccessity for revolutionary struggle, but it doesn't seem that those rules applied to himself!

The film was poorly received, and understandably so. Like the two that followed, Thanos and Despina and Gloria Mundi, it's formally impressive (great black and white photography, somewhat inventive editing, solid, flexible mise-en-scene), conceptually bold (with one and a half feet in the gratuitously provocative camp), and with performances pitched so far into hysteria that it's practically impossible to care about anything that the characters go through (ritual humiliation, torture, rape, murder - whatever, just shut these people up!) They're all interesting films, but they're so tonally overegged that watching them is something of a chore. For the record, the "paroxysmic" performances are absolutely intentional on Papatakis's part, but that doesn't make them any good!

The two later films, The Photograph and Walking a Tightrope, are in general much toned down performance-wise, and much the better for it. The Photograph is probably his best work, and it works even though the storyline is completely ridiculous. It's one of those narratives in which a little white lie snowballs into an all-engulfing tragedy that could have been averted at any moment if somebody had just cleared up the confusion (which might just be my least favourite narrative trope of them all), but playing it straight helps sell it, and it does afford one great visual gag late in the piece. The long closing section forestalls and forestalls the inevitable denouement in an annoying but rather clever way, and comes up with a last-minute switcheroo that's pretty smart and appropriate.


Walking a Tightrope is a bracingly nasty film a clef about Jean Genet (played by Michel Piccoli) and his extremely unpleasant exploitation of various proteges. It's Papatakis' plainest looking film, and apart from one scene his most underplayed, but it's good.

Papatakis was an Ethiopian, and his films are fascinating in the ways they confront head-on issues generally shunned by mainstream French cinema: race, class, immigration, imperialism, terrorism. They're not exactly subtle in the way they couple tragedy and melodrama with Marxism (or in the way in which complex narratives tend to be resolved with explosions!), but they're sincerely engaged.

Nikos Papatakis disdained the New Wave (he found their films offensively trivial) and he really came out of an earlier, more literary tradition. I'm sure he would have been appalled that the Cahiers crew had co-opted them to their movement!

Sadly we do and it's this one where I make a lot of green posts I surely regret now in my present infinite wisdom ~10 years later. I won't delete my comments, but needless to say I've taken in more information and evidence in the intervening years

Don't we all.

This conversation has made me feel really ignorant so does anyone have any recommendations on books that really get into the nitty gritty beyond the surface players that are always talked about? Thanks.

Well, if you can wait, I'm working on what I believe will be the most comprehensive resource to this effect. But for now, assuming you're restricted to English-language works, Durgnat's New Wave book from '63 casts the widest net. Neupert's book does get into some of the overshadowed New Wave figures like Valcroze, Kast, and Astruc in depth, so that's probably your best bet for now for exploring a couple new faces (and even he admits blindspots in his study that others need to take up, like the superb Michel Deville)

If you're so sure I can certainly wait.

By the way, totally off topic, but does can anyone rate the quality of George Sadoul's Cinema in Arab Counties?

I admit I'm intrigued by your reaction to his early works. I'm only familiar with his eighties films Death in a French Garden and La Lectrice, which I found (at the time, when I should have been much more easily impressed) rather ordinary, with a strain of back-patting 'erotic' edginess. It seems he kept making films steadily right up until last decade, but he doesn't seem to have had much of an international profile since La Lectrice.

Don't feel bad about almost missing the boat, my first taste of Deville was On a volé la Joconde, an unexceptional international caper flick from the mid 60s (of which there were far, far too many already!). However, turns out Devillle is a better filmmaker during this period than 80% of the more well-known names (including at least half of the Young Turks). It is utter insanity that there are no English-friendly releases for his early 60s run (I mean, he's not alone, as there's still no Rozier in R1, and hardly any Rouch, and so on all down the line). Marketed right they would be a license to print money and would bring about a significant shift in what are generally considered the best works from the movement. With proper distribution I guarantee Adorable menteuse and Ce soir ou jamais at the least would have been considered among the most obvious go-to highlights of the New Wave... had they ever even been issued on subbed DVDs (or VHSes?) here. Thank God we have all these boutique labels popping up and releasing Z-level soft porn and horror flicks while countless forgotten French masterpieces remain sleeping in film vaults...

Sorry to go off topic but I found La lectrice amusing mostly for the idea that a confident sexy woman would continually be surprised over and over again that all of her clients, from precocious teenage boys to aging judges, were hiring her for something more than her reading skills! I don't think that poor lady got to read so much as a paragraph throughout the entire film!

Glad to hear there are some less known interesting films worth discovering from the era, looking forward to Michel Deville now. A while back I was going through most of the major figures, and exploring a few of the side alleys, but Jean-Pierre Mocky's **Les Dragueurs** and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze's **L'Eau à la bouche** didn't make me too enthusiastic that it was going to be a bunch of hidden masterpieces. I've got a pile of unread books on Godard and some other new wave people, and films I hope to get to before and during the upcoming list project.

Is there a cheaper place than Amazon to get the Paptakis set? 130 euros seems a bit steep for a bunch of films everyone has treated as only a historical curiosity.

Also thanks Dom for the suggestion of the Neupert book. I'm down to the last chapter and it has delivered a lot of great context even if it is structured around the usual suspects in large (seemingly to Neupert's own chagrin).

It's 91E at the moment from fnac, but you'll need to check how their shipping stacks up against amazon's, and whether or not they remove VAT. (I got my set from amazon for under 100E once VAT was removed.)

Even if they don't that's cheaper. Thanks.

Our forum's French New Wave mini-list project has started. Join us here and please contribute a list and/or add to the discussion! (For those who read the forum without logging in, you will need to log in or register to access the thread)

This is well outside of the New Wave period which is why, I suppose ironically, I am posting this here. I saw Michel Deville's penultimate film, Almost Peaceful, because of the discussion he's garnered in the list thread and have to admit I liked it a lot in a way that fortunately keeps me befuddled at some of the bad reputation he has here. This is a pretty good film fulfilling Wilder's dictum of three great scenes and no bad ones. In particular the scene of lighting the shabbat candles is amazingly effective for a movie that admittedly has a fairly flat emotional register. Also Simone Abkarian, who I have mostly seen in jerk roles up to now, is fabulous as the nice if hard tailor master just trying to get by. In a lot of ways this is a perfect film without incident that none the less is completely memorable for the people (and some of the images) within.