Here is my first full entry in my long-gestating French New Wave project. I am not a film history expert, so I am learning as I write. But I do know some things, having completed a cinema studies minor in college while I worked as a 35mm projectionist in a downtown arthouse cinema ~20 years ago. I really hope this is a useful introduction to French cinema before the 1950s and Andre Bazin’s film theory ideas about realism.

In this entry I’m laying the groundwork for discussing the most immediately influential French films of the 1950s on New Wave and trying to turn attention away from the sort of Hawkes/Hitchcock —> Truffaut/Godard —->New American Cinema/Tarantino U.S. centered story of New Wave we often get.

The Myth of New Wave and The Left Bank

As I immerse myself in French New Wave, I find myself drawn to understand better what came before the New Wave. What was new about it, and what was merely adapting or consolidating pre-existing film aesthetics and production trends? Because the core group of French New Wave directors—Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer—were all film critics who became directors, they had extensively written about what they did and did not like about what came before them before they made their first shorts. Most entry-level reading on film history will acquaint you with this self-mythology and I’ve written some about the purpose of the infamous but often misunderstood “auteur theory” in building such a mythology here. But for those who need a refresher, here is a summary (my own paraphrase).

In the late 1950s, a group of film critics who had written for Andre Bazin’s famous journal Cahiers du Cinema began making their own films and wound up transforming global film culture with the massive international success of movies like Le Quatre-Cent Coups (The 400 Blows), A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). This was the first generation of film directors who were themselves film enthusiasts, part of modern consumer culture, and coming to film production from outside of national studio systems and training academies. They had access to new, high-speed, cameras and were able to come out of the studio and film in the streets of Paris to offer stories of young people’s alienation from the growing consumer society of the 60s through the invention of new techniques like the “jump-cut.” They were rebellious against the French Studio system, which Truffaut had derisively termed “The Tradition of Quality” and excited by Hollywood directors like Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and especially Alfred Hitchcock. They brought a new enthusiastic amateur energy to filmmaking, helped enthrone the idea that the director was the primary artistic voice in a film product, and inspired independent filmmakers the world over to pick up a camera and make a movie, regardless of their access to studios and professional film crews and actors.

That is a summary of a standard textbook or dictionary description of French New Wave, but it is largely drawn from the self-mythology of the movement (never before had directors had such a hand in shaping their reception), and like all self-mythologies, it is a just-so story. This is something Richard Neuport’s History of French New Wave Cinema has helped me see. To begin, two of the four films listed above most commonly associated with New Wave were not made by Cahiers critics turned filmmakers. Hiroshima, Mon Amour was a collaboration between the documentarian Alain Resnais and the novelist Marguerite Duras. Alain Resnais made his first film as early as 1948 (a short documentary on Vincent Van Gogh) and was already internationally famous for his essential early Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1956) by the time Hiroshima premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 alongside Truffaut’s 400 Blows—an event sometimes understood as the arrival of New Wave on the world stage. It is also, aesthetically, very different, far more formal and abstract, than the rough-and-ready street shooting associated with the New Wave.

Cleo from 5 to 7 is one of the absolute best films of the core phase of the New Wave and one of the most important films in the history of feminist cinema. It was directed by Agnes Varda. She was close friends with New Wave directors, and the film, examining two hours in the life of a pop singer as she awaits cancer diagnosis, is much closer to New Wave style than Hiroshima. It even features a short silent film pastiche starring Jean-Luc Godard and his then-wife and major star/New Wave artist in her own right, Anna Karina, whose wedding Varda had photographed. But like Resnais, Varda’s career pre-dates the New Wave. She began as a photographer, not a film critic. She made her first feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1956 (which Resnais had edited) and a series of documentaries before Cleo associated her with the New Wave.

Resnais and Varda, alongside the documentarian Chris Marker, and Varda’s husband Jacques Demy (director of colorful musicals) are often described as belonging to a subgroup called the Left Bank Group. They were not film critics, nor film enthusiasts, they were leftist artists who emerged from the avant-garde plastic arts and literary cultures of post-war Paris alongside existentialism, structuralism, the cinema verité movement, and the New Novel. They pursued independent filmmaking outside both the structures of the French studio system and its aesthetic norms, but they do not fit the story of French New Wave that gets told most frequently. They made some of the most experimentally daring and aesthetically powerful art films of the 1960s, but that energy came from a different cultural place than the Cahiers boys, and, with the exception of Demy, shared little of their enthusiasms for Hollywood imports. One of the great joys of my current rewatching of French New Wave is discovering just how fantastic the films of this group are beyond the more-known classics of Hiroshima and Cleo. There’s a whole world of aesthetic possibilities to explore here and I expect to dive into these films quite a bit in this series.

Despite my love of the Left Bank directors, I’m not that interested in merely debunking the self-mythology we’ve inherited of the Cahiers group. Sometimes people treat these as opposing camps and use Varda or Resnais’s films to put down Truffaut and Godard (especially Godard, he is deeply hated by some film fans for reasons I’ll discuss). There’s some authorization of this in culture of 1960s France: the leftist film journal Positif was sharply critical of New Wave directors but celebrated the left bank figures. But in truth, they all worked together and shared producers, cameras, social worlds, and aesthetic preoccupations even if they got their start differently. I have always loved Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer. And exploring Chabrol and Rivette (new to me) has been a delight. These were all powerful artists with unique visions, and they all made major contributions to cinema aesthetics—even Chabrol, who often gets written off as a second-rate Hitchcock prankster.

Nonetheless, another area where the myth falls flat is in the supposed dominant Hollywood influence and in the “newness” of their independent methods. This is something most of them freely admit in their writing and films once you get past the headlines. This is a bit of a case of Americans flattering their own culture industry with a bit of false memory. While they had a bone to pick with the studio system in France, they loved and celebrated many French films and are dialoguing with French traditions as well as American ones in their work. Thus, this essay is about the French film traditions that influenced New Wave and the Left Bank, as well as the question of realism in that tradition.

French Traditions

As Neuport points out, there was strong tradition of independent self-produced director-driven Cinema in France before 1959. Today, the most celebrated French directors between the end of the Nazi occupation and the emergence of New Wave were all operating outside of the French Studio “Tradition of Quality” that Truffaut derided. This included the great surrealist renaissance man, Jean Cocteau; the minimalist realist Robert Bresson; the comedian Jacques Tati; and, in my opinion, the greatest genre film director between Hitchcock and Scorsese, Jean-Pierre Melville (and he’s possibly better than both). Part of why they are so remembered and celebrated today is because the New Wave helped canonize them as core models of what they wanted to achieve, and there are references to their films throughout major New Wave works, including an appearance by Melville himself in Godard’s Breathless. Cocteau had also been a mentor figure for Truffaut and Truffaut helped him get the financing for his final film, The Testament of Orpheus (1960).

But this tradition goes back further. Cocteau and Tati both started their careers as filmmakers before the occupation. Jean Cocteau was a major French surrealist. Part of the modernist avant-garde in 1920s Paris, he experimented with film with his Blood of a Poet (1932) but was most famous for novels and plays (which he would then adapt into films in the 50s). Tati had written and stared in shorts before the war modeled after American slapstick comedy. The ones I’ve seen are all delightful, but his true artistry did not emerge until he began directing on his own after the war.

Surrealism itself was one of the great art film traditions of the silent cinema, alongside German Expressionism and Soviet Montage, and it was wholly independent and based in the circles of Parisien high modernism . While Cocteau only made one surrealist film, Blood of the Poet, which is wonderfully queer (he was openly bisexual) but also quite obtuse and associative, there are many great films from the movement, including Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s epoch-defining Un Chien Andalou (1929), one of the most beloved avant-garde films of all time (the Pixies even wrote a song about it!). I’m not going to go deep into Surrealism, it has been some time since I watched many of these films. I wrote a term paper about Man Ray for my silent cinema course in college 20 years ago, and I can’t remember anything from Man Ray’s films. But I do think both the deep French history of a completely independent avant-garde cinema and certain editing techniques had a huge influence on French New Wave, particularly Godard and Resnais—both of whom experimented extensively with editing cuts and montage to interrupt our sense that film offered a stable “realist” reality within the frame.

There was also a commercial French silent cinema, but I have even less exposure to these films. The major figures were people like Abel Gance and Louis Feuillade, who made extremely long serialized films. Abel Gance’s most famous film, La Roue (1923), is nearly seven hours long. Feuillade made the serials Fantomas (1913) and Les Vampires (1915) both of which are also seven hours in total. New Wave seemed to have loved and celebrated these films, as well, but I have not seen them. Sometime when I’m feeling ambitious, I’d love to give them a watch. Oliver Assayas classic 90s film, Irma Vep (1996) is about a modern attempt to remake Les Vampires starring Maggie Cheung as herself. It’s a wonderful, funny satire of the 90s French film industry, but it’s my only exposure to Feuillade, so I can’t say what New Wave may or may not have gotten from these films.

The advent of sound cinema brought about the growth of the French film industry and its international reach through movies that are now referred to as the Poetic Realist movement. Many of the directors who started during the 1930s formed the core of the “Tradition of Quality” that were the New Wave’s antagonists in the French Film Industry. The problem with New Wave having rewritten film history so thoroughly in the 1950s is that many audiences are less familiar with Poetic Realism than say, the more celebrated movements of Italian Neorealism, German Expressionism, or American Film Noir. Even the name confuses people. But these were major internationally heralded films at the time that had a huge influence on global film culture (most importantly post-war Italian Neorealism) and produced major recognizable stars like Jean Gabin, Michel Simon, and Arletty.

There is one major 1930s French director who was an exception to this critical erasure: Jean Renoir. But while Jean Renoir worked with many of the biggest stars of Poetic Realism including Jean Gabin and Michel Simon, his films are a stylistic departure from the other major films of the movement. Renoir (son of the impressionist painter) is probably one of the most celebrated directors of all time, and a major part of that reputation rests on a single film, Le Regle du Jeau (The Rule of the Game, 1939). Often topping “Greatest Films of All Time” lists, it is a masterpiece and a must-watch for any cinephile. But it is the only 1930s French film that is well-remembered today (possibly also Renoir’s other 1930s masterpiece, Le Grande Illusion, but its name recognition has declined significantly, I think). And very few people saw this film before 1956. It was a massive commercial failure upon release, and when the Nazis occupied France later that year, they banned the film—in part because Renoir was a known leftist who had made films for the Popular Front in the 30s. Renoir fled the occupation and had a forgettable 40s in Hollywood, with exception of his final Hollywood film made on location in India, The River (1951), a minor masterpiece. During the war, the original print of Rules was burned by Allied bombings. Although a short heavily edited print was recovered and circulated in French cine-clubs, it only became the heralded film it’s now known as when a restoration team was able to rebuild the damaged original for presentation at the 1956 Venice Film Festival.

Renoir was much celebrated by Cahiers in the 1950s, particularly Andre Bazin. But he was exceptional—his deep focus realism was very different from the proto-noir expressionism of other Poetic Realists.1 The question of realism in film was a driving force of criticism in the existentialist-inflected 1950s, and I want to go into that in more detail in a moment, but one reason other Poetic Realists were dismissed by the New Wave critics under the tutelage of Bazin was because of that marked difference between them and Renoir in technique. Renoir was realist and ambiguous, the French film establishment was expressionist and manipulative. They used thick shadows, soft-focus close-ups, and heavy-handed editing to tell the audience what they should feel. Renoir sat back, filmed longer takes in deep focus, and let the audience interpret what they saw with more freedom. That preference for focal ambiguity and audience discretion is a marked feature of the four major precursors of French New Wave of the 1950s I mentioned above (Bresson, Cocteau, Melville, and Tati), and Bazin helped create a narrative of French Film history the New Wavers inherited that saw Renoir as a spiritual forefather, but disowned Duvivier, Gremillion, Carne, and Clair.

However, Aesthetic movements are rarely fair to the pasts they position themselves against, and so I’ve been watching some Poetic Realism. And it’s just great. I will save a reflection on it directly for another essay, after I watch more of the films. but I will just say here that every film lover should watch Jean Vigo’s L’Atlalante (1934). Admittedly Vigo and this, his only feature, was beloved by New Wavers. He died young of tuberculosis, so he never had a chance to become the establishment. Still, I think it’s less known in the U.S. and it’s a completely wonderful film, full of poetic aesthetic invention and a beautiful full-body performance by Michel Simon as a heavily tattooed first mate who spent his life at sea collecting knick-knacks and stories from all over the world. If you like Tom Waits’s aesthetic of misty docks, forlorn lovers, and gruff sailors singing tarantellas, you will find a key aesthetic reference point in this film.

I imagine, despite the disavowal, the standard core directors of Poetic Realism (who formed the basis of the hated “Tradition of Quality”) influenced New Wavers in important ways. But the important question to return to help understand the state of French Film Culture in the 1950s is about what New Wavers valued about French Film before them. I’ve already written some about how they wanted to canonize an indepedent, director-driven cinema. But a big aesthetic question also drove them forward as well, one that is summarized by the famous line of the main character in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat “Cinema is Truth at 24 frames per second.” In other words, we have to deal with the question of realism in film.

Bazin’s Poetics of Realism, The Aesthetic Question of the 1950s after Occupation

As a professor of 19th-century literature, I long ago learned that one of the most abiding categorical mistakes in art criticism is to mistake the aesthetics of “realism” with mere representative verisimilitude. Realism is rather an artistic genre, a certain set of choices that produce very particular types of art that often carry a lot of prestige, but have no greater claim on representing a universal reality outside of art than any other aesthetic or genre. Impressionism is just as real a representation of perception as photo-realistic historical painting is a true representation of its subject. In literature, realism usually signifies a set of aesthetic strategies for representing the social complexity of the middle class and above in a capitalist society. The core technique of free-indirect discourse was invented more or less by Jane Austin and developed throughout the 19th century until naturalism and modernism began to disrupt its assumptions.

Frequently, the most important aesthetic quality of realism has been ambiguity, as opposed to the moralism of the less prestigious but more popular sentimental novels that were the main foil of 19th-century realists. And free-indirect discourse is celebrated by the adherents of realism as the best aesthetic technique for introducing interpretive ambiguity. I don’t want to get sidetracked by a discussion of realist literature, but I do believe the film theory of Andre Bazin in the 1950s is trying to establish a canon of realist technique and directors along the models of the realist novel’s celebration of ambiguity. And this interest in a specific type of aesthetic value is sometimes obscured in how Bazin gets talked about today, as a film theorist whose basic claims have been proven false or no longer applicable.

Bazin’s film theory is derived, his critics claim, from his 1945 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Now it is undoubtedly true that this essay is vitally important to 1950s film theory, that it is an important part of Bazin’s overall understanding of film, and that it has been so thoroughly debunked by changes in the nature of photographic images as to seem to be written on a different planet about a fundamentally different and much more mystical technology. But I am not convinced you can’t detach his theories of realist film technique from the claims of this essay to an extent.

The early essay is focused on the material process by which photographs were generated: by the shining of light on emulsion. This automatic process, “without the creative intervention of man” means for Bazin that photography and cinema by extension contains a trace of the actual, the real. There had to have been those objects in front of the camera for the photograph to exist, and this changes everything about how we relate to photography and cinema compared to painting, as, according to Bazin, “the cinema is objectivity in time.” Theories of photography and cinema have long abandoned such an ontology of the image. First structuralism came along in the 60s and insisted on understanding everything, including photographic images, as signs part of signifying systems. Realism, so far as it meant that a sign, a part of a signifying language, had a meaningful referent in external reality, became theoretically and philosophically moribund. And then technology outpaced structuralism in its destruction of referents. It simply became naive to maintain that anything real had to exist for a photograph to exist with the advent of digital images. Images are infinitely manipulable by computer processes, they contain no guarantee of reality, and animation is probably better understood as the pre-history of the digital image than emulsion photography. Bazin is certainly not a theorist anyone is using as a basis for the study of images today, and it wouldn’t make any sense to recover his ontology in the age of deepfakes and AI images.

But Bazin himself gives us a way out of the necessity of this ontology for his theory of realist film technique, ending the essay ambiguously by saying “Cinema is also a language.” Now this is not fully structuralism. I don’t think Bazin was yet reading Saussure and we should not suppose that him saying Cinema was a language carried any suggestion that a language’s relationship to reality was arbitrary, as structuralists would assert. There was a huge controversy in the early 60s about the editorial direction of Cahiers in the aftermath of Roland Barthes’s popularization of Saussure’s ideas, but Bazin was dead by then. Still his analysis of the languages of film ultimately carries little necessary connection to his ontology of the image, other than in the prestige he gives to realism over expressionism.

The key essay is the famous “Evolution of the Language of Cinema” which the editor of What is Cinema, Vol. 1 describes as something like a Poetics of Aristotle of the first 50 years of film aesthetics. It’s a remarkably helpful essay at organizing for yourself the aesthetics of early cinema. Bazin’s premise is that there are two main tendencies in film aesthetics, expressionism and realism. He understands expressionism to be the more remarked upon and well-understood tendency. By expressionism, he understands any Cinema that takes a heavy hand in guiding the viewer through its themes and ideas, whether that is in the form of lighting, montage, close-ups, and music. For Bazin these are all things added to the image that create meaning not from the images themselves but through various juxtapositions. They express meaning through the artistry of the director, set designer, editor, cinematographer to guide us through important details and their intended interpretation. The murderer’s face is haunted by shadows in a film noir. The soviet film cuts between striking workers being killed and the slaughter of a cow. Hitchcock zooms in the bomb, letting the viewer know what the characters do not to generate suspense. We are always getting image and interpretation at the same time in the films Bazin calls expressionist.

Bazin wants to suggest that although this is what has been celebrated as the key formal techniques in the development of film art in the major heralded genres of Soviet Montage, German Expressionism, and Hollywood Film Noir, there has in fact been an alternate aesthetic tradition since the earliest days of film. This realist tradition, dating to Lumiere’s trains, puts images in front of the audience and lets them determine what is important about it. Its techniques are long takes, elaborate set design, location shooting, natural lighting, and depth-of-field composition. Its heroes are less specific moments or genres, and rather sui generis directors who developed these techniques on their own, often in a departure from the norms of the systems they were in. He lists F.W. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, Theodor Dreyer, and Jean Renoir as chief examples.

Now, you can absolutely connect the prestige he gives the realist tradition to his ontology. He wants a cinema that is less manipulative, that guides its audience less, that rather offers something of the complexity of reality because he believes the highest calling of photography and cinema is how it captures reality. But these still function as descriptions of aesthetic techniques that offer a different aesthetic experience than expressionist film. I would call that experience “open” or, in line with the 19th-century realist novel, rife with ambiguity.

So, for instance, in a film by Renoir that is full of deep-focus photography, long takes, and naturalistic lighting, there is a lot to see in any given image. Renoir was brilliant at representing complex social and workspaces, like the publishing office of The Crime of Monsieur Lange, the prisoner of war camp in The Grand Illusion, or the country estate in Rule of the Game. There is almost always a lot going on in a Renoir shot. There might be a plot-vital scene in the foreground, but people are always moving around and doing stuff, often their job, in the background. You don’t always have to clock all this other activity to follow the film, but it’s there and it brings the space to life, makes it seem more like a real place than a set, and positions its characters within social and work environments rather than abstracts them from them through closeups and studio lighting.

Of course, all that activity is staged. These are actors following cues. Even if we are on location, this is a film shoot, not randomly pointing a camera at people going about their business. Bazin may have valued these techniques because they were more in tune with what he saw as the ontology and mission of photography, but even he would have to admit we are not watching reality, but a construct. That’s not a criticism of realist cinema, its rather an acknowledgment that it’s an aesthetic that takes great artistry, not a transparent window. In fact, creating a film image that seems like a complex work or social space in action, but is also readable by an audience— i.e. well organized into different planes of action and different movements of actors in time all well-lit, composed in frame—takes an enormously complex amount of artistry from a large team of people. Expressionist film is comparatively simpler to stage; just get the shadows right and zoom in on one person. Hollywood saved the big complex set pieces for musicals and battle scenes, not some people in an office, because it’s very hard to stage a busy realist workplace and the pay-off aesthetically is much more subtle.

In other words, realism in film is a constructed poetics. The outcome is a film image that offers the viewer different ways to interpret it, different focal points, an open ambiguity. How much are the characters acting freely and how much are they constrained by the complex energies and class dynamics we see throughout the image? How do we interpret their actions in the context of that environment? An expressionist film tells you what’s important, what determines the action and plot, how to read the images. A realist film is open.

That is all schematic, but Bazin is schematic. Of course, by the 1950s such an opposition between traditions was not entirely tenable. Citizen Kane has extensive depth-of-field photography, complex portraits of social and work spaces (the newspaper office again), and an overt concern with offering the audience interpretive ambiguities. But it is also stylized, heavily expressionistic in its lighting, and full of montage and symbolism that guides interpretation. It doesn’t fit neatly into either category, and Welles subsequent career further develops these expressionist tendancies. Films like Touch of Evil and Mr. Arkadin could hardly be considered realist, even if Citizen Kane announced the arrival of the quintessenial realist technique (depth of field) to Hollywood. Aesthetic history is rarely as simple as theory, but Bazin’s schematism is still helpful at understand the poetics of realism in film and how its adherents differentiated their work from Hollywood expressionism.

In 1950s France realism was an important intellectual concern. This is the decade of post-war Existentialism, when Sartre is leading an intellectual movement insisting that we have to look at the conditions in front of us, stop escaping into metaphysics and spirituality and become engaged with the political and social crises of our moment. Fascist propaganda had associated the manipulation of the image with terror, occupation, and the Gestapo. Expressionism, a tradition that started in Germany and then moved to Hollywood, was stained by totalitarianism, as propagandistic and metaphysical, not real and ethical. And there is an important commitment to the poetics of realism in the films of the four major precursors of French New Wave of the 1950s, Cocteau, Bresson, Tati, and Melville, even if only Bresson might seem to ascribe to realist codes of representation. Cocteau’s films remained surrealist and dreamlike. Tati was working in a tradition of Chaplin and Buster Keaton, of unreal comic coincidences and impossible stunts. And Melville’s most celebrated films were stylized genre pictures.

In the next entry, I will talk more in detail about these four filmmakers, the way their realism contended with the Nazi occupation and how the earliest works of Varda and Resnais, as well as the early Verite documentarian Jean Rouch, were responding to this concern with realism.