This is part four of my French New Wave Series.

Part 1: French Cinema and the Aesthetic Problem of the 1950s before New Wave: What Was Realism? Here.

Part 2: Post-War Realism Part 1: Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau here.

Part 3: Post-War Realism Part 2: Robert Bresson and the Birth of Verite. here

There is a primal scene for the Rive Gauche movement of French New Wave. Agnès Varda, who had studied as a photographer, shot a strange film in the coastal town of Sète, where she had spent WWII and the occupation. Half a narrative about a couple visiting from Paris going through a potential breakup, half a docudrama about the local fishermen community refusing to abide by the ruling of the local health board that the bay was too contaminated with bacteria for them to practice their trade, it is unlike any French film before it, having no obvious connection between the two plots. Varda, who lived in Paris on the Left Bank, asked her friend Alain Resnais to help her edit the film, since she had never made one before and had no training. Resnais was, at the time, making documentary shorts for French TV about artists and their works. He would film paintings in close-up up tracking the camera slowly over various details, carefully edit the pieces together to create a rhythmic representation of the artist’s brushstrokes and techniques and then narrate over the finished product their biography. This was unconventional at the time, but helped invent the documentary language familiar to us in the works of someone like Ken Burns—it was a new way to use the techniques and technology of film to express something about a different medium.

When Varda asked Resnais to edit her film, he said no. He thought the parallel structure of two lovers interspersed with a larger social backdrop was too close to a film idea he had been working on after being asked to make a documentary about the nuclear bomb and he struggled to find an approach—what would become, with the help of novelist Maguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Eventually, he relented and edited Varda’s film, which she would call La Pointe Courte after the name of the neighborhood in Sète. The resulting film is wonderfully idiosyncratic, anticipating many of the innovations of the New Wave in its disregard of the rules of film, hybridization of documentary and narrative, location shooting, and extensive use of non-professional actors alongside more recognizable stars. But it does not come from a cinephile immersed in auteur theory and Hollywood genre. In her account, Varda was a complete novice to film at the time. It’s a work of inspired amateurism, entirely on its wavelength, following a poetic logic and not a set of cinematic rules Varda had never known. It was also barely seen and had been forgotten in histories of New Wave until last decade, when Varda herself worked to remaster and rerelease all her films and brought them new attention in Criterion Box Sets.

Released in 1955, La Pointe Courte was, according to Richard Neuport, made without a production company, on one-fourth of the budget of the more famous guerrilla first films of Truffaut and Godard (The 400 Blows and Breathless) at about 14,000 dollars. Varda could not pay the cast and crew and instead offered them co-op ownership of the final product with shares of any profits, while she maintained distribution rights and ownership. The film was quite literally ahead of its time, released three years before the banner year of 1958 that announced the New Wave to the world with the premiere of The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour at Cannes. And as such, it did not yet have audiences in France or elsewhere for its radical hybrid take on film form.

This is not to say it was completely sui generis. The location shooting and non-professional actors in a borderline docudrama about the survival of working communities is strongly reminiscent of the major European post-war art film movement before the New Wave, Italian Neorealism. What was more unique was the juxtaposition of that material with the scenes of the Parisian couple, which were filmed in an entirely different aesthetic mode. While these scenes take place in the same locations as the material about the fishermen and their families, they are highly stylized. The man and woman have no names; they do not interact naturally but move in such a way that the camera can create artful compositions. They speak in dreamy monologues, like they are talking to themselves, and they are not part of any drama or plot. It is an abstract representation of a couple going through a rough patch and coming back together against the backdrop of working-class life in the provinces. Varda gives no attention to realistically staging their scenes and movements. She abides by no rules of portraying action or coherent diegetic space. She simply shoots the shots she wants us to see, projection of realism be damned. It is as revolutionary as the cubist deconstructive editing in Godard or Resnais’s later films, born entirely of aesthetic intuition rather than programmatic explorations of form.

Similarly, Resnais’ editing is wildly unconventional. Even in the “realist” scenes of the film, he lets shots linger a bit longer on things like laundry hanging to dry. Early on, Varda shoots a slow-moving tracking shot through fields of hanging sheets between two buildings that Resnais edits into the film with a mysterious rhythm that makes it feel simultaneously like a dream, a memory, and a haunt. Who is witnessing this scene? What does the view of the camera represent? Why do we need to see this? These questions are unanswered, and what we are left with is a supremely evocative, mysterious image made from the most quotidian of materials.

La Point Courte exemplifies so much that I love about New Wave, and why I still find these very old films so exciting to watch. Varda was 27 when she made this film. She had no idea what she was doing or how she would pull it off. She just did it, and in the process fell in love with filmmaking and decided to devote her life to it. I listened to a podcast of her being interviewed before her death in 2019, where she talked about how she takes a print of the film to Sete every five years or so to screen it for the community there. For them, it is a historical document of their grandparents of their childhood, see so many recognizable locations. It’s a testament to the power and value of simply making a film, getting something on camera, and giving it some formal dimensions, letting the world and your subject reveal itself to you through the process of filming and editing.

The film also exemplifies what my friend once called “an open film” (referring to the films of Jacques Rivette). Why juxtapose these two stories? Why juxtapose two different formal approaches? I have theories and interpretations, but I don’t think there is a single answer. Varda had an intuition that there was something poetic and expressive here, but there’s not one thing this film means, not one interpretation. There are also individual scenes that remain somewhat inscrutable. The couple is in town for Carnaval, and one of the events they attend is something that looks like boat jousting. I had never seen or heard of such a thing, and you have to see it to fully understand it. On the one hand, this is a wonderful documentation of a unique local tradition, cinematically exciting, and probably a real film event, rather than staged for the film. On the other hand, it’s an interesting visual metaphor for the couple’s arguments, expressing the precariousness of their positions quite well.

As they sit and watch, the woman suddenly gets up and leaves the frame. We are not told why. The man grows concerned; he is afraid she has decided to simply leave him for good, as she has been threatening. The scene goes on, we see more jousting, and then after some time, she comes back with an ice cream. Ambiguity resolved, right? Not quite. Later in the film, after the couple seems to have resolved some of their difficulties and come back to each other, the man tells her the story of how he worried she had ghosted him at the boat joust and how relieved he was when she returned with ice cream. She laughs. But a pensive look falls on her face. Did she leave and then change her mind? Is she upset that he didn’t trust her to return? We don’t know, but it leaves a shadow over the resolution, a sense that maybe nothing has been resolved, and it’s just the fun and escape of vacation washing them in a glow.

We are back to the ambiguities of Renoir’s realism, in many ways, but far more radical because it’s not just a realist question about why characters have done what they have or what it means for their future. There remains a set of questions about how the formal construction of the film signifies meaning. Did the Parisian couple coming to the provinces help ground them back in the essentials of life, or was it a fantasy they consumed for a time? Are we, the film viewers, ever able to access the worlds documented by the camera, or are they just fantasies for us to consume? Has the couple, like us, just been to the movies, or were they there, living differently? Capitalism, reification, class relations, spectacle, and film as a product are all playing around in the margins of film’s juxtapositions, leaving it unresolved how we should relate to what we’ve seen. It is an open questioning of film form of the type that would be central to all the major New Wave directors.

This is the only narrative feature by a Rive Gauche filmmaker before Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour in 1958. While the Cahiers group was writing reviews of Hollywood genre films and building auteur theory in the 1950s, the Rive Gauche group made short documentaries. The filmmakers themselves would see these documentaries as essential learning exercises, but I regard them as far more substantial works than the handful of short narrative films the Cahiers group put together in the same period (none of which are particularly remarkable in my opinion, although some critics have more affection for them than I do).

Besides the documentaries about great artists made by Resnais (Picasso, Van Gogh, and Gaugin) he made one thoughtful but flawed documentary about West African Art with Chris Marker (“Statues also Die”) and an amazing architectural exploration of La Bibliothèque Nationale (“Toute La Memore Du Monde”) whose long tracking shots of interiors anticipate his mysterious classic Last Year at Marienbad. And finally, Resnais made one of the first major documentary films about the Holocaust, “Night and Fog” (1956), with some of the first post-war footage at the site of Auschwitz in wide circulation. Resnais left documentary work behind once he started making features, but in all these films you can see him working out his precise editing rhythms and the concerns with memory and forgetting that would be the central themes of his whole career.

Varda made several excellent documentary shorts in the 1950s. These remain important and worth watching because Varda was building her cinematic language, and she is as much celebrated today for her documentaries as her features. 1958 saw the release of two tourist board commissions (“Du Cote de la Cote” and “O Saisons, O Chateau”) and a personal diary of her first pregnancy and neighborhood in Paris, “L’Opéra Mouffe.” I love all three, and the two commissions are surprisingly idiosyncratic. The first, about the Riviera, is secretly a tribute to Jean Vigo’s documentary “A Propos de Nice” (1930), and the second, about the Loire Valley, narrates Varda’s own falling in love with the historic sites here after having expected to be put off by the royalist history and the tourists. She is particularly interest in how the modern world inhabits this history, filming groundskeepers and fashion models in the castles. As a personal note, seeing this documentary is part of why my partner and I decided to visit the Loire Valley this summer while we are in France for our Honeymoon. “L’Opéra Mouffe” is much more fully in what would become Varda’s documentary style: personal, playful, and deeply invested in the people around her. It, alongside La Pointe Courte, represents the beginning of one of the most rewarding and personally expressive careers in European filmmaking.

Next up: Claude Chabrol channels Hitchcock’s queer subtext and becomes the first of the Cahiers group to release features. His 1957 diptych, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, launches the career of the first New Wave star, Jean-Claude Brialy.