French New Wave and Modern

French New Wave and Modern American Cinema

Just as France had been the site for extensive evolution in the medium in the earliest part of the twentieth century, it was also an ignition point for the New Wave of film craftsmanship which began in the late 1950's. This movement was predisposed to an intermingling of neo-realistic proclivities with a seemingly antithetical suspension of conventions within the world of film in order to propose the notion that film was of unparalleled importance in the formulation of reality. This ambition underscores the comment by French New Wave director Francois Truffaut, who reportedly commented once, "I still ask myself the question that has tormented me since I was thirty years old: Is cinema more important than life?" (Douchet & Bononno, p. 7) The sentiment may seem somewhat hyperbolic to our perspective, but for those of the French New Wave who viewed their work as altering the very way in which individuals perceived the real vs. The illusory; the objectively observed and the subjectively perceived; the culturally imposed and the individualistic. To their way of thinking, this moment in history presented a great opportunity to challenge accepted notions by which reality is structured, both on the world of their films and the world experienced by their audiences. These imperatives strike us as being demonstrably present in the more compelling works of American cinema drawn from the modern movie theatre. Today, a number of innovative directors may be said to reflect these same values, to the extent that we might argue the groundbreaking work of directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Charlie Kauffman were made possible by the French New Wave in filmmaking which persisted during the 1950s and 1960s.

The driving force in filmmaking is the interest to deliver a presentation which is at once audio, video and narrative, with the intent to provide audiences with a context into which personal escape, intellectual stimulation or emotional response might be elicited. In order to accomplish this feat, the filmmaker will rely heavily and inevitably on the creation of illusion. But a more fundamental question is presented to us in this discussion which concerns the very nature of film itself. Indeed, the premise that 'all film is illusion,' is a compelling one which essentially applies a basic theoretical understanding of that which film is to a philosophical conception of its ambition. Namely, as film aspires to present a reality -- whether ludicrous and abstract or perfectly grounded and rather pedestrian -- it is nonetheless concerned with the interest of creating the impression of its reality through simulation. Real human beings act parts, real environments are constructed on sound stages, sun is produced by fluorescent lighting and the hustle and bustle of background players is a cued rush of extras. As with a magic trick, the audience recognizes that some illusion has been manifested in order to create the attendant visual experience or interpretation and yet, the audience accepts this with the interest of being entertained.

This is a theoretical presumption that underlies the work of such major figures of the French New Wave movement as Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Francois Truffaut, all of whom helped to reinvent the medium of cinema in way that may now be evidenced through the work of modern cinema's most innovative filmmakers. First, we consider Godard, who was perhaps the leading directorial figure in the French Nouvelle Vague movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. Presiding over a remarkable body of deeply influential and experimental work, continuing up to the present day, Godard is a touchstone for many of the conventions of independent and experimental filmmaking today. His influence can be felt in the disjointed chronology of Quentin Tarantino's works, the dreamlike absurdity of Wes Anderson and even the freewheeling faux-documentary stylings of humorist Christopher Guest.

In the early 1960s, at the height of the French New Wave era, Godard entered the most fertile and important phase of his career, directing in 1961, Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), in 1962, Vivre sa vie (To Live One's Life) -- a.k.a. My Life to Live and in 1964, Bande a part (Band of Outsiders). Each of these films approaches the construction of reaity from Godard's unique perspective, which grappled with the idea of indulging a gritty realism while simultaneously promoting the distortion of preconceptions relating to time, space, dream-state and consciousness.

An important reference to this discussion would be Brody's (2008) overview of the life and work of the half-Swiss, half-French filmmaker. Brody's thesis on Godard is essentially that his art was a manifestation of the deeply left-leaning Parisian counter-culture which served as a cultural lightning rod to socialist movements throughout the world. The radical movements of the 1960s would find effective and even popular advocacy in Godard's work, which explored the themes of French materialism through an array of alienated or detached characters enduring various existential crises. In this quest, Brody denotes that Godard spared no expense with regard to the way that he captured the world, which was concerned with the establishment of what might be considered an uber-reality. One example of this that causes us to consider Tarantino and Anderson at the foremost is the way that Godard would use sound to toy with this notion of reality. Brody recalls the effort to which Godard went in the composition of the early documentary work which preceded the feature films in discussion here at capturing the sonic implications of his narrative. Accordingly, Brody tells that "exhibiting as great a devotion to the reality of the sounds as of the views, Godard rented a hefty professional sound truck, the heavy synchronized-sound equipment that was the film industry standard, to record location sound -- an unusual procedure for documentaries at the time." (Brody, 33) This would be a first foray into Godard's approach to the illusory issue of sound as it might have tended to compromise the realism of his depictions. By creating a hyper-aware reinforcement of real sounds, often patched to his films with a dominating and enveloping hugeness, Godard would effectively use the illusive elements of cinematic sound to create a theretofore unseen proximity to real aural experiences. Due to these efforts, Godard "captures with striking clarity the overwhelming sonic energy of the thunderously cascading water, the rush of the wind, and the percussion of industrial noise." (Brody, 33) These are the types of effects which would mark Godard's first works, defined as they would be largely by the effectiveness with which the author channeled a self-conscious manifestation of existential realism.

This is a consideration which was seen as primary for Quentin Tarantino, who with works such as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill 1 & 2. The modern noir director has dedicated his work to capturing the organic sonic textures that imbue his scenes with a striking realness. One example is he loud clang of a gunshot and the jarring absence of score to accompany scenes such as the handheld camera-view car accident involving Butch (Bruce Willis) and Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) in Pulp Fiction. This contrasts the aggressive use of encompassing soundtrack pieces -- typically rock or funk-based in Tarantino's work -- to project the emotion or sentiment of any given scene. And like Godard, Tarantino's work boasts moments of evocative sonic simplicity.

And in the consideration of a film such as Tarantino's two-part kung-fu epic, Kill Bill, we can see that the way sonic textures are used can magnify the romantic visual assessment of a moment. In Kill Bill, a most compelling use of sound is in the establishment, at the end of the first film, of the final confrontation between the characters portrayed by Uma Thurman and Lucy Lui. A swordfight between the two is grounded in reality, and yet portrayed from a sweeping distance, with a dense layer of snow and a tilting water pitcher fountain offering a serene remoteness to the anticipated and deadly encounter. Almost dreamlike, there is a wrenching silence which is interrupted only by the sound of the tilting water pitcher's quiet wooden tapping incrementally. The two figures move deftly through the space, making no sound save when their swords would strike one another. It offers the scene a gracefulness that is deceptively comforting. We might suggest that Tarantino borrowed this device from Godard's work, encouraged by the explicit reference to his French New Wave mentor through the name of his production company, A Band Apart.

To this point, perhaps the most palpable example of the way in which Godard manipulated sound to cross breed realism and experimental process can be seen in Bande a Part. Here, one of the most famous sequences in a film about a group of schemers and a would-be heist is one in which the presentation of a sound-experiment is conducted in such a fashion as can only be manifested by film. Indeed, "in Bande a part (The Outsiders, 1964) he represents the idea of a minute's silence not by having the characters fall silent but simply by mixing in no sound for the duration. These and other devices combine to give the sense of a film as a kind of assemblage - different bits of the material world put together in a particular way." (BFI, 1) The moment of silence is famously divergent from the formula of sound presentation. By cutting the soundtrack altogether, Godard boldly pulls back the curtain on the process, making a very clear mechanical maneuver with a poignant emotional impact on the viewer. The moment of silence is oddly deafening, with nothing but the suspended expressions on the characters and the movements around them suggesting nothing in the way of an actual experience, with such silence in a busy cafe being impossible. Instead, the experience is purely emotional, with the tension of this silence weighing heavily on the viewer. Ultimately, the impact is a surprising lack of conscientiousness for the viewer as to the audio device engaged. Instead, the connection between the moment of silence for the characters and the audience becomes something real and moving.

Of course, sound is only a single dimension of the many that the French New Wave moment manipulated in order to change the way that films ware made. Here, we begin to perceive the French New Wave period not just for the films which it produced, but for the directors themselves. Not just in terms of the different ways that they presented individual stories, but moreover for the manner in which they each pursued their body of film work as reflective of some unique identity, the leaders of the New Wave movement would be instrumental in defining the filmmaker as auteur. Just as Godard would exemplify this notion of stylistic continuity across otherwise unrelated films, Truffaut would explicate it. Accordingly, "it became increasingly obvious that a director could be identified not simply the similarity of his own unique style. Truffaut and Chabrol described the concept in terms of embroidered fabric or tapestry." (Douchet & Bononno, p. 98)

For Truffaut in particular, this promoted the idea that the filmmaker should be perpetually exploring both a thematic spectrum and an expressive spectrum that can be used to identify a whole body of work with purpose. Certainly, Tarantino's work is indicative of this. His revolving cast of well-reasoning lowlifes exists in a single but expansive universe that merges Southern California, Hong Kong and the Wild West into a single context in which violence, codes of honor and underworld dalliances are the norm. Similarly, the manner in which Tarantino borrows liberally from drive-in and popcorn movie traditions of pratfall violence, impossibly clever and archetypally cool in order to create a pointedly comic-book like world denotes a personal stamp that permeates all of his films. In this respect, the director's voice is more audible than the vision of any one film.

So is this also demonstrable in the work of Wes Anderson, whose Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tannenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou demonstrate the modern auteur's approach to filmmaking. For Anderson, there is world comprised of absurdly flawed, insecure and dramatic figures whose behavior defies rational order but for which no checks or limitations exist other than their own consciences. The Life Aquatic captures this perhaps at its best, casting one of Anderson's favorite collaborators, Bill Murray, at the title character. The wounded and reckless performance that Anderson culls from Murray is actually a continuation of the numb depressive which the same actor plays in Rushmore and the emotionally stunted therapist that he plays in Tannenbuams. Using a bright, primary color scheme to convey his universe, and filling it with head-cases, Anderson has used his larger body of work as a psychotherapeutic examination of the American family, whether through Murray's fractured marriage in Rushmore, his forced paternal relationship with Ned (Owen Wilson) in Life Aquatic, or, excluding Murray, Luke Wilson's only pertinent relationship as an older brother in Bottle Rocket and the estrangement between brothers around which The Darjeeling Limited would center. Truffaut's notion of the auteur seems significantly to justify Anderson's continued exploration of a theme and style which have rendered his films important to modern viewers.