The Birth of French New Wave Cinema

The French New Wave responded to a crisis in French artistic and intellectual life. The Cahiers du Cinema critics who became the first New Wave directors felt cheated by the French film industry, which offered stagy dramas and literary adaptations.

François Truffaut, in his manifesto "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," denounced what he called the "Tradition of Quality," those heavy-handed, overly symbolic films which dominated the French film industry. The New Wave critics disliked any filmmakers who did not use the medium.

Thus, they objected to the French and Hollywood filmmakers who merely "illustrated" scripts. Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut also reacted against the stereotyped characters that dominated Hollywood and "Cinema of Quality" productions. Truffaut's characters, such as Antoine in The 400 Blows, are much more ambiguous than Hollywood "types." Godard appropriated Hollywood characters, but re-directed them.

He used the Hollywood gangster type for Belmondo's role in Breathless and exaggerated it into a cartoon. He put the character into a documentary setting (modern Paris), raised existential issues that would appear out of place in a Hollywood gangster picture, and rapidly oscillated between comedy and tragedy.

The most important fact about the French New Wave directors is that they were all critics before becoming filmmakers. Indeed, they never stopped being critics, even when they were making films instead of writing. Their tastes, values, passions, and ideas about films, and their relation to modern life, infuse their films and their writing. Their criticism, therefore, is as good a place as any to learn about their sentiments and methods of working through problems of the cinema in terms of the problems of modern life.