The French New Wave

The French 'New Wave' was perhaps the biggest - and briefest - explosion in the history of world cinema, with over 100 French directors shooting debut features between 1958 and 1964. This book explores the social and cultural backdrop which influenced the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave. In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.

Examining connections between the cinematic and literary avant-gardes, this book locates France's filmmaking revolution as a part of a wider re-evaluation of the mid-20th century.

The French New Wave is one of the most important movements in the history of film. Its fresh energy and vision changed the cinematic landscape and it has had a seminal impact on pop culture. The poster artists tasked with selling these Nouvelle Vague films to the masses were at the forefront of a revolution in art, graphic design and photography. This volume is a visual celebration of their explosive and ground-breaking poster art.

On the new wave movement in French cinema.

The directors of the French New Wave were the original film geeks - a collection of celluloid-crazed cinéphiles with a background in film criticism and a love for American auteurs. Having spent countless hours slumped in Parisian cinémathèques, they armed themselves with handheld cameras, rejected conventions, and successfully moved movies out of the studios and on to the streets at the end of the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol had changed the rules of filmmaking forever, but the movement as such was over. During these key years, the New Wave directors employed experimental techniques to achieve a fresh and invigorating new style of cinema. Borrowing liberally from the varied traditions of film noir, musicals and science fiction, they released a string of innovative and influential pictures, including the classics Le Beau Serge, Jules et Jim and A Bout de Souffle. This Guide reviews and analyses all of the major films in the movement and offers profiles of its principal stars, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina and Brigitte Bardot. An introductory essay, Making Waves, examines the social context of the movement in France as well as the directors' considerable influence on later generations of filmmakers across the globe. A handy multi-media reference guide at the end of the book points the way towards further New Wave resources.

Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.

The French New Wave: An Artistic School is a lively introduction to this critical moment in film history by one of the world's leading scholars on the New Wave. Provides a concise account of the French New Wave by one of the world's leading film scholars. Outlines the essential traits of the New Wave and defines it as a school that changed international film history forever. Includes a chronology of major political and cultural events of the New Wave, black-and-white images, and an extensive bibliography.