The French New Wave was one of the most influential and celebrated movements in world cinema. Practically a mainstream movement due to its popularity, it featured a host of emerging young French talent. The movement is traditionally epitomized by the Right Bank filmmakers, the
Cahiers du cinema cinephiles that saturated their supposed personal narratives with a masculine fervor that served to marginalize and deteriorate the feminine voice in film. This new, celebrated movement was immortalized by its two most famous directors, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who, although both formally groundbreaking in their cinematic writing, in their presentations of Parisian modern life exacerbated the female condition in France at a time nearing great strides for the Feminist movement in Europe. Their sometimes referred to as misogynistic representations of women, in an artistic circle that was extraordinarily influential, provided a dire contrast when juxtaposed with the freedoms being pursued by women. The French feminist movement, inferior to the
American one, occurred at a time when not just Europeans but
American women where rising to claim their rights thus it is quite interesting that such directors felt the need to express their machismo and psychological troubles with
women so overtly as to denounce the intercontinental
battles of these women. What is perhaps even more fascinating is that, in the midst of Right Bank sexism there existed a unique female director that was considered part of the New Wave and yet championed the subjectivity of women. Not as popularized to the extent of Truffaut and Godard, and not as symbolical of the New Wave as these and other gentlemen of the Right Bank, Agnes Varda's feminist voice (defined as being
present by the employment of a feminine subject) , exemplified in
Cleo de 5 a 7(1961), rivaled the sexism (defined as being
present by the employment of the feminine object) of the Right Bank directors, as signified by Truffaut and Godard's works
Les Quatre cents coups (1959)and
Vivre sa vie (1962), respectively.
