The French New Wave

Jean Luc Godard (Left) and Francois Truffaut (Right)

Everyone who has a vague idea of film history knows the French New Wave, or at least that's how I see it, the French New Wave is a gateway drug to cinephilia. Anyways I want to talk about my favs from the era, and their following careers, and a bit about their peers, a bit of everything if you will.

I'm going to start with a bit of background info, the French New Wave era began with a group of young fresh directors, who often hailed from theorist or critic backgrounds began making films in the 1950s. In France, of course, innovating the medium with new techniques and concepts that came from an almost renegade mentality. The directors of the French New Wave are split into two groups, Right Bank and Left Bank, they are quite similar but the broad strokes are Right Bank was more commercially successful where Left Bank was more artistically focused (not to say Right Bank wasn't, more to do with the audiences they attracted) honestly the distinction is kinda arbitrary, Demy is Left Bank mostly by association with Varda, and it wasn't like they were in total opposition but I'll use it regardless.

In this piece I am going to talk about two filmmakers, one Right Bank and one Left Bank; my Right Bank of choice is of course Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard at some point in his early career

Okay so Godard is like The French New Wave guy, like he's even popular on Tumblr for his aesthetics. He's had an extremely long career, spanning about 60 years till his death. I'm going to try to focus more on his early stuff but I will say my favorite from him is his 1987 film King Lear,

Godard's first film Breathless is one of the foundational texts in current film studies, it brought the jump cut from an amateur mistake to a more mainstream technique.

His next film, Le Petit Soldat, was banned from release for two years due to it concerning the Algerian War of Independence.

He honestly made so many films during the first sevenish years of his career I could not even begin to talk about half of them. Of the ones I've seen, I highly recommend La Chinoise, which is about a New Left student group that turns to terrorism and assassination in hopes of triggering the revolution, amazing stuff.

Chris Marker, and Guillaume, from Marker's own archives

My Left Bank filmmaker of choice is Chris Marker, who is a very old friend I do not know well. I first heard of Marker when I was about 14-15ish at a summer camp that taught filmmaking with the most barebones equipment. I think it was my second or third year where they pulled up La Jetee, Marker's short film that is told almost entirely through still images and narration. Completely blew my mind, honestly kinda also changed my life, I can confidently say this summer camp was my gateway drug to being a filmmaker, and La Jetee is part of that by being something I couldn't quite understand, which lead me to love the medium even more. Marker is a documentary filmmaker, though he wasn't totally concerned with showing "the" truth as much as he was with showing "his" truth. Completely "nontraditional" his film Sans Soleil narrates letters between two friends, one who is traveling the world. It's a fascinating film that I also highly recommend, along with La Jetee of course, did you know they are a bonded pair of Criterion discs?>

There are also so many other amazing French New Wave filmmakers, one day I'll talk about more of them, Varda, Demy, Truffaut, but I have a Lav Diaz essay to write, which you may see a bit of next week if I end up cutting stuff from it so stay tuned!!