This is the second part of my series about French New Wave Cinema.

You can read part 1 here.

These first couple of essays try to set up the French cinema background of French New Wave, in contrast to more common approaches that focus on the Hollywood “Auteurs” French New Wave directors celebrated in their film criticism like Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and Alfred Hitchcock. Last week I discussed French Film before WW2, the dominant influence of Jean Renoir, and the ideas of Andre Bazin about realism in film. This week I discuss the post-war films of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau in terms of realist aesthetics and techniques.

Having introduced the aesthetic ideas defining cinematic realism in the 1950s, roughly contextualizing it in the cultural atmosphere of 1950s existentialism and the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France, there is a temptation to explore a commitment to the problem of realism as a key anti-fascist aesthetic practice. Particularly as the unreality of the Trump/AI era becomes obvious to all of us. What is film and photographic realism in the age of digital images, deepfakes, and AI? Is there any connection between the expressionist cinema of Weimar Germany and our Weimar era of MCU digital cinema? How might we recover the aesthetic question of realism and testimony in 2025 as a way to fight the global rightward turn?

There’s a naivete to realism on the surface, how can we believe that the photographic image has any stable “referent” in the world anymore? But it is wrong to suggest that the filmmakers and critics of the 1950s dealing with these questions, and the resultant interrogations of realism in Cinema Verite and New Wave were not naive about it. Throughout these aesthetic cultures, there is a deep questioning of what is real and what isn’t about cinema. It is that interrogation of realism that I think maybe a valuable guide to us in our moment, not a naive supposition that takes Bazin’s realist ontology for granted. I don’t want to assert that realism itself is an aesthetic response to fascism, but rather that some questing exploration of the question of reality as a referent and a poetics of images might be a necessary precondition to finding productive aesthetic responses. We simply can’t let go of the problem and accept algorithmically generated irrealities as the inevitable (given the algorithms are directed and owned by post-liberal tech authoritarians), even if we also can’t maintain a naive supposition of the reality of the image.

So how was post-war realism a response to fascism? Well first of all, it was quite literally a response to fascism since some of the most important French realist films of the period immediately before the New Wave were about the occupation experience: Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Silence of the Sea and Leon Morin, Priest and Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped.

I’ve recently watched Max Ophul’s 1969 documentary on the occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity. That film is a pretty thorough debunking of the post-war De Gaulle-era myth of widespread French participation in the Resistance. Ophuls’ film shattered French self-conception by showing the extent of collaboration and enthusiasm in French society with fascism and antisemitism. The Resistance was a minority movement of communists and DeGaullists, not a widespread phenomenon. So there is an extent to which these films of the 1950s served that myth, and simply fundamentally fail at their realist aspirations. However, they remain worth examining for their aesthetic strategies, for how they navigate the contradictions of French collaboration and resistance, and their power as art.

Jean-Pierre Melville was himself a heroic figure of the resistance. He was Jewish, so when France fell to the Nazis, he evacuated at Dunkirk and joined DeGaul’s Free French army. He spent time underground in occupied France and Vichy. His birth name was Grumbach, but adopted Melville to disguise his identity after Herman Melville, a favorite author. He escaped France again in 1942 after the Nazis dissolved the Vichy government in response to the loss of French North Africa to the Allies so they could defend Southern France from invasion across the Mediterranean. Melville then fought as an artilleryman during the Allied invasion of Italy.

So when he kept his adopted name when he began raising money to make his first film after the war, he did so in the persona of a national hero. The subject matter was natural: an adaptation of a Resistance propaganda novel that circulated in secret during the occupation about the quiet resistance of the normal French people who could not openly fight. The result is a powerful but flawed film, released in some urgency during the post-war reconstruction of France (1949!) The Silence of the Sea.

It’s a stark film for 1849. Mostly takes place in a single room and only with one major speaking role. We can see here, alongside Bresson (and those neorealists in Italy), that the first move of post-war realism in film is minimalism. Minimal sets, minimal lighting, minimal cast. Some of this stripping away is economic. Melville was working outside the studios, renting equipment, shooting in whatever village house he could find. The film is the story of the billeting of a Wehrmacht Officer in a country village house inhabited by an older man and his adult daughter in the northern occupied zone. As in the novel, the old man narrates the film (in VO) but within the diegesis, he does not say a word. In VO he remarks that he and his daughter came to a silent accord that they would allow the billeted officer into their home, show him to an unoccupied room, but never say a word to him. This silent treatment is the film’s depiction of the silent resistance of the common French people who could not openly fight.

If Sorrow and the Pity casts some doubt on this myth of common quiet resistance, The Silence of the Sea nonetheless remains a powerful realist film. As I suggested in the previous essay, we can understand realism as a set of aesthetic techniques aside from its claims to verisimilitude. While those claims matter and will be powerfully interrogated by French New Wave and Cinema Verite directors, this essay aims to try to lay the groundwork of realist poetics engaged by post-war French film.

Most of the film consists of the Nazi officer’s monologue at the two silent French people in their living rooms. He describes to them how he loves France, how the Nazi occupation is about a new dream for Europe and will be better for both countries. Unsaid is the ideology behind such reasoning and what fueled collaborationism; the Nazis and collaborationists alike were ultras who saw Fascism as the only way to protect Europe from the Bolshevism that had taken root in France. Interestingly, the film omits the actual political questions, allowing the Nazi officer to obscure them with vague gestures of idealism and metaphysics of history. But, released as it was in 1949, there is a safe enough assumption that viewers knew what the Nazis and Vichy stood for ideologically, the anti-leftism of fascism, so the officers obscuring of that violent repressive motivation adds to the ironic effects that are a cornerstone of realist poetics.

The Nazi is, perhaps surprisingly for Americans used to Major Strasser types, at least partially sympathetic. He is kind, respectful, polite, displays education and tact, and has a clear idealism. But his monologues are deeply blind to the situation he is in. He claims to respect their silence, to be glad to finally encounter some resistance, but committed to showing them the Nazis will rescue the French from themselves. The film creates tension between what he says and the visuals, which show how profoundly uncomfortable everyone is, how blank and resentful his unwilling audience is, and his growing distrust of his own words. Very little happens in the film so far as dramatic action. The Nazi talks, the French people sit in silence. We occasionally get VO of the general progress of the occupation and the habits of the Nazi (what time he gets “home” at night, his sheepish exits through the back door in the morning to avoid his hosts). Then the Nazi tells the French “I’m going to Paris but I will be back.” He is openly excited about this visit, speaking about how he’s always loved French culture and literature and is excited to see the sights. The brutal irony of all this is left to sit with the audience, with little extra commentary.

This is the only major break from the single setting of the film, as the officer discusses the fate of Paris with other Nazis and he learns that they are ruthless barbarians who think he’s naive in his protective attitudes towards French culture and history. They tell him openly that, of course, they are planning on burning the city of Paris to the ground, and that they need to eradicate or steal the history of their enemies. He returns to the village house in shock and shame, his noble-minded gloss on the occupation being exposed as hollow words. But he is trapped. He tells the French father and daughter that he has requested a transfer to the front and offers a final “Adieu.” At that moment, the daughter breaks the silence and responds “Adieu.” Finally, the father leaves out a quotation, “It is a fine thing when a soldier disobeys a criminal order.” The Nazi reads it without comment and obediently goes off to fight and perhaps die for an occupation he seems no longer to believe in.

This ending offers a lot open for the audience and demonstrates a key aspect of realist aesthetics, from Jane Austen’s free-indirect discourse to the class-conscious dramas of Renoir. While a subjective point of view (here the Nazis) is ironized and exposed as hollow, the truth of the story is left ambiguous, and much is left to the audience. Is the daughter's only word to the officer a kindness or her triumph at having “won” the battle of wills? Is the officer lacking in courage to desert or has he been won over to the violence of the Nazis? Is he going off to die in shame or is he simply done justifying the war, done with words, accepting barbarism? The focus on the single setting, the long takes of the soldier monologuing that are ironized by the refusal of the French to speak, and the ambiguity of the ending are all realist techniques for producing an open film—one that lets the audience observe and judge rather than overtly moralizing about its contents. The Nazi’s illusions are dispelled, his monologuing at his conquests hollowed of meaning, he has come to stare reality in the face. But what is that reality, how does film give us access to it, and what is the significance of finally seeing it?

Melville’s next film was an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s novel and play Les Enfants Terrible. This is much more of a Cocteau film than a Melville film. Cocteau was heavily involved in the production, writing the adapted screenplay and himself providing VO narration. There is a coolness to the camera that feels Melvillian, but it still depicts a hot-house dream world more typical of Cocteau’s films of the late 40s and 50s. Melville’s third film was his first masterpiece crime drama, Bob le Flambeau (Bob the Gambler). I love this movie, the story of an old gambler ex-con who gets wrapped up in one last score and an ode to the Montparnasse and Pigalle neighborhoods of Paris. Like Silence of the Sea, it simply offers us Bob with some irony but little clarity as to what we should think of him: a bank robber who has gone straight, who takes care of everyone in his neighborhood, but who gets drawn back into crime via a plan to rob a casino’s vault. And then gets distracted from the heist when he goes on a hot streak, winning thousands. The film ends with the Police having been tipped off starting a gun battle with Bob’s conspirators, and Bob unluckily exits the Casino with his legal winnings in the middle of the showdown. He is shot, and his winnings are confiscated. Bob is sympathetic and charismatic throughout the film, but Melville layers irony upon irony here about how he sees and conducts himself, blind to the truism that even a supremely cool, moral (in his way), and talented player can never beat the house.

Stylish, and existentially cool, it announces the talents Melville would bring to his more famous crime pictures of the 60s and 70s like Le Samurai and Le Circle Rouge. He made two more crime movies in the 50s that are less known and not readily available in the U.S. before another occupation drama, Leon Morin, Priest in 1961 starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as the original hot priest toying a love affair with an openly bisexual Emanuelle Riva during the Nazi occupation of the small town. But at this point, we are already well into French New Wave years (both Belmondo and Riva were made into stars by their roles in Breathless and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, respectively). Melville’s influence and relationship with New Wave was largely positive. He was celebrated by these directors and he appears in Godard’s Breathless. Still, it would be improper to call him a New Wave director and his crime films are built from the existentialist coolness and realist ambiguity he developed in the 50s. They achieve stunning visual and editing style that maximizes visual storytelling and suspense while minimizing dialogue to almost nothing, often close to silent for long sequences, making for profoundly minimalist films of exquisite tension and deep ambiguities about the two sides of the law. But they do not interrogate and deconstruct genre in the ways of New Wave genre films. They carry the pleasures of the genres they enact at their most aesthetically refined, sharp as a diamond.

Jean Cocteau is a more complicated figure to examine in a discussion of realism in film, and at first glance, he does not seem to belong at all. His most well-known film, the wonderful adaptation of the classic fairy-tale La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast) is famous for its surreal magic, including astounding special effect trick shots that were far ahead of their time. As mentioned in the previous essay, Cocteau was a renaissance man of modernist Paris, in circles with the great surrealist and modernist artists of the 1920s and 30s and the group of modernist composers known as Le Six. He wrote novels and plays, pursued visual and plastic arts, and made one surrealist film, The Blood of the Poet, before the war. He was also an open bisexual (which put him at odds with the masculinism and homophobia of Andre Breton, author of the Manifestos of Surrealism). He had a somewhat ignominious war. He called himself apolitical and sat out the war in Paris while writing controversial celebrations of Hitler’s chosen sculptor Arnold Brecker. Yet he remained hated by the right for his controversial erotically charged art and plays, and his lover and leading man of many of his films, Jean Marais, was in the resistance.

Yet, read in context, his films are in a unique relationship with post-war realism, even as they offer fantastical dream-like images. La Belle and La Bete was made immediately after the war, his first narrative film (Blood of the Poet is an abstract and surreal piece of high modernism, the films he made after the war you could imagine screening at the Alamo Drafthouse—still art films, but accessible to wider audiences). It is a classic fairy tale, but very far from Disney, where male eroticism, cruelty, and death haunt every image. It also uses a unique double casting, where both The Beast and the Gaston figure are played by the same actor, Jean Marais, Cocteau’s lover, and Belle expresses love for both of them (here Gaston is called Avenant, and he’s less villainous, more a playful scoundrel who has real affection for Belle but gets trapped by the greed of his social set).

There is a historical allegorical reading of the film; The Beast is trapped in a nightmare world of his curse just as France was in the nightmare of occupation that made the nation beastly and it must awake back into its true self and leave the darkness behind. That only goes so far, though, and I don’t think it should be pushed. Cocteau is not interested in politics and history, he’s interested in the poetics of death, dreams, and the erotic. The real achievement of the film is the atmosphere of its visual effects and acting styles, which maintain a dreamlike heavy atmosphere throughout the scenes in the Beast’s castle (although, in contrast, Belle’s family home is quite quotidian rural France and her venal sisters attempt to elevate it through gowns and the pageantry of lords and servants are satirically skewered throughout the film. In much, Cocteau there are real-world spaces and characters in juxtaposition with its dream spaces and fantastical figures. The characters are always moving back and forth between realistic spaces and his underworlds, often through the sudden eruption of magic in real life via mirrors—which could be read as a commentary on the film medium’s reflections of reality.

There are two key areas where Cocteau shows a relationship with realism even if he is not producing realist films. First of all, he has a unique for the time, approach to special effects. In early film, the chief mechanism of achieving a special effect, some sort of illusion, to give a sense we have seen the impossible is editing and montage. Think about the incredible trick shots in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Junior.” In that classic of silent cinema, Keaton uses the editing cut to play with cinema’s form. His character falls asleep while working as a projectionist and dreams he is entering the film being projected. Then in a series of wonderful gags, Keaton finds himself in disorientating pratfalls by the image cutting between different scenes. To achieve the shots, Keaton has to match perfectly his position and movement when the film cuts to a new scene, so it looks like one continuous performance with a changing setting, even though in reality he’s just filming in different locations/sets and cutting it together. There is no reality to this, it’s a magic trick achieved by the technology of the montage, an illusion of continuity that never existed.

Contrast that with a Cocteau trick shot. In a famous sequence from La Belle and La Bete, Belle’s father arrives at Beast castle, which itself responds and serves him. Arms reach out of the wall holding candelabras that then suddenly burst into light as he walks slowly down a hallway. Everything here is really there, it’s one continuous shot, with no editing tricks. He achieves the shot by filming in reverse, with the actor, in reality, moving and acting backward as the candles are blown out. He then reverses the film stock so the actor walks forward and the candles seem to burst into light. Throughout the film all the tricks are achieved by reversals and manipulations of film speed, but what happens really happens in front of the camera, just in a slightly different way, mirrored strangely by the technology to become a dream. It is both real and unreal at the same time. We are in both the world of the stage, (where effects must really happen in some form), and Renoir’s careful and complex staging of long takes. But through a mirror that creates fantasy. It is a commentary on the film’s complicated relationship with the real that depends on the real even as it transforms it.

Second, Cocteau opens a great deal of space for audience interpretation. Of course, surrealism itself had this space, but it did so through oblique psychologically charged images. Cocteau’s films have those moments, but there’s also just a more realist ambiguity of character motivation and morality. Cocteau builds this into the double casting of Jean Marais with a startling transformation at the end of the film.

After living at the Beast’s castle for a time and coming to pity him, Belle grows worried about her sick father and asks to visit him. The Beast eventually agrees, but says if she does not return, he will die of the loss. As a sign of his trust in her, he gives her the key to his treasure cursed treasure horde. She is transported home by a magical glove, and her presence brings her father back to health. She then tells her family of the Beast’s tortured kindness and everything she has seen. But her venal sisters, conniving with her scoundrel brother and Avenant plot to steal the Beast’s treasure, which Belle has told them about in her naivete. They convince Belle they need her to stay longer (a betrayal of the Beast), steal the key and the two men head for the castle and treasure. Belle finally grows worried about the Beast, realizes the key is missing, and rushes back using the magical gloves again.

As she arrives, Avenant is sneaking into the treasure room. Within it, a statue of Diana comes to life, takes aim, and shoots at Avenant. Meanwhile, Belle comes across the Beast who is dying, and tries to aid him. Then the film cuts quickly between Avenant being shot and falling to his seeming death, Belle leaning over the Beast when suddenly Avenant becomes the Beast and the Beast becomes Jean Marais. Avenant/Beast is seemingly dead in the treasure room, while the transformed Beast tells Belle all he needed was a look of true love to break the curse. It is a wonderful film moment of careful editing of trick shots and has a truly wonderous effect on the audience. It is a montage trick, of course, unlike most of the effect shots, but it also includes a reverse shot of Jean Marais miraculously coming to stand upright from lying down right when he transforms (what must be a reversal of him falling to his side). Most interestingly though, Belle is ambivalent about the transformation.

“You look like someone I know,” she says. “Did you love him?” asks Beast, and she replies “Yes.” What a happy fairy tale ending, we might think, except, even though Belle loves Avenant, the Beast’s transformation into his visage is a disappointment for her. Although she loved Avenant, she would not marry him because he was a weak scoundrel, a type of lowly beast of a man, whose good qualities were outshown by the bad. She came to love Beast because he was the opposite, ugly (although that ugliness had come to have an erotic charge for her) but kind and caring, much less Beastly than the men she knows with their bad habits and venal search for money, as she put it at one point.

The Beast, in fairy-tale fashion, says he is a Prince of a noble kingdom, and she will now be his queen. Still imbued with magic despite the lifting of the curse, Beast offers to fly them to the kingdom, warning it might be a little scary. Belle is suddenly enthusiastic again, “I love to be scared with you” and we get one last trick shot of them flying away (a reverse of them falling). I love this ending, it casts a distinct and mysterious eroticism over the whole tale and informs us that it is the unique power relationships and heightened emotional world of her life with the Beast that excited Belle, not just the traditional fairy tale messages of pure heartedness. But it’s ambiguous too, what will her future be with the Beast/Prince? Will it be disappointing? Will the magic come back? What does it say about her that the strange power world of terror, entrapment, and death within the Beast’s castle was a source of erotic fascination? Cocteau doesn’t answer, he leaves it open,

Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles and Cocteau’s own Les Parents Terribles, both released in the early 1950s and adapted from works originally written in the 1930s, further explore the surreal worlds generated by intimacy and power, the former in the toxic codependency of a brother and sister, the second between a mother and son. Melville’s is the better film. It has some wonderful tension and intriguingly surreal sets, but nothing of the special effects of La Belle and Le Bete. Both maintain ambiguity about what we should think about the morality, sexuality, and ethics of these characters and both have remarkably soft-masc queer-coded performances from Marais (despite overtly heterosexual love interests). Cocteau’s are all something of hybrid works with theater, but these two feel more like filmed plays than fully realized cinematic works.

Cocteau also made a remarkable film of his play of the Orpheus myth in the mid-50s, which along with Blood of the Poet and Cocteau’s final, personal film, The Testament of Orpheus has been grouped as a loose “Orpheus Trilogy”. But perhaps just as important to the New Wave, he became a mentor to Truffaut, who then used his fame after his early films to help an old and dying Cocteau secure funding for his last Testament.

Truffaut had a famously terrible relationship with his own family (as famously depicted in his partially autobiographical 400 Blows) and spent his late youth and early adulthood searching for surrogate families (as depicted, comically, in the four sequels he made to 400 Blows about the continued adventures of its protagonist, Antoine Dionel). Andre Bazin was his first such mentor, serving as his editor when he wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, but also regularly having him for dinner and giving him inspiration and guidance on his early films. Truffaut was inspired greatly by Bazin and his writings on realism in film. The influence is all over 400 Blows, which is full of long deep-focus takes of social spaces (a classroom, the family apartment, the military boarding school Dionel winds up at) and a famously ambiguous freeze frame ending. The film is dedicated to Bazin, who died just before his release.

But Cocteau was another surrogate father for Truffaut, with him and his lover Jean Marais as another adopted family. And there are nods and homages to Cocteau throughout Truffaut’s films. As a perhaps schematic outline of the influence of French cinema on the New Wave, the set of aesthetic and representational problems they inherited from what came before in France we might stake out Bazin and Cocteau as two vital poles. If Bazin emphasizes that films can stage “the real” through long takes, clear lighting, deep focus, and the representation of characters within social space, Cocteau offers the inevitability that the camera transforms what it captures. No matter how real the activity in front of the camera, the ontological necessity of presence to the photographic image, the camera is nonetheless transformative of the real into dream space, where laws of linear time no longer apply in its capacity for reversal and repetition, for reviving ghosts from the dead and letting them dance and play in front of us. The camera imparts airs of death and desire that hypercharge reality.

French New Wave does not, I think, let go of Bazin’s realism entirely. It remains a question throughout the major films of the movement, even though the realist ontologies of existentialism are being debunked structuralism as the 50s turn to the 60s. But it also knows images are projections of desire, that they reanimate the dead and also stultify the living (through the capitalist reification of the advertisement). Many New Wave films can be productively read as navigating between these two conceptions of the image, and I think Cocteau’s transformations of realist staging into surreal dreams helped lay the groundwork from the dialectics of the image to follow.

It is not quite time to move onto a discussion of the New Wave proper itself. In my next installment, I want to explore the supreme realist minimalist of the 50s (and 60s), Robert Bresson, and also the importance of the controversial early Cinema Verite documentarian, Jean Rouch, whose style is traceable throughout New Wave, particularly in the camerawork of Godard’s cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. Something needs to be said about the pre-new wave films of Left Bank directors, particularly the influence of photography and documentary on Agnes Varda’s first feature, La Pointe Courte.

I had intended to write some more about Jacques Tati, but I realized I don’t have any big insights into his films as an influence in general, although I recognize many specific moments and the use of comedy in certain New Wave films as indebted to his 50s films, Monsieur Hulot’s Holliday and Mon, Oncle. These are wonderfully funny movies of visual slapstick comedy featuring his classic character, Hulot. What makes them unique and a development of Tati’s influence from classic silent comedies of Chaplin and Keaton, is his use of deep focus and extremely packed images, where gags may develop at different places in the frame that an audience may not notice at first watch. They are films that reward rewatches, as you discover the sheer depth of comedy in each scene. This certainly partakes of a huge influence from Renoir and Bazin’s promotion of deep-focus cinema, and I’m sure I will reference Tati’s work in the analysis of comedy in certain Godard and Truffaut films (Truffaut’s Dionel film Bed and Board from 1970 is a prolonged Tati tribute, for instance, including a cameo from a false Hulot). But I will leave my discussion of Tati to this paragraph for now.