The French New Wave directors took advantage of the new technology that was available to them in the late 1950s, which enabled them to work on location rather than in the studio. They used lightweight hand-held cameras, developed by the Éclair Company for use in the documentaries, faster film stocks, which required less light and lightweight sound and lighting equipment. Their films could be shot quickly and cheaply with the portable and flexible equipment, which encouraged experimentation and improvisation, and generally gave the directors more artistic freedom over their work.
The films had a casual and natural look due to location filming. Available light was preferred to studio-style lighting and available sound was preferred to extensive studio dubbing. The mis-en-scene of Parisian streets and coffee bars became a defining feature of the films. The camera was often very mobile, with a great deal of fluid panning and tracking. Often only one camera was used, in highly inventive ways; following characters down streets, into cafes and bars, or looking over their shoulders to watch life go by. Eric Rohmer’s La Boulangere Du Monceau (1959), the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who worked on many of the French New Wave films, was pushed around in a wheelchair - following the characters down the street and into buildings. Innovative use of the new hand-held cameras is evident, for example, In Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959), where a boy is filmed on a fairground carousel.
French New Wave cinema was a personal cinema. The film-makers were writers who were skilful at examining relationships and telling humane stories. Truffaut's films were particularly autobiographical. His first full-length films Les Quarte Cents Coups drew upon his early life, and the life story of the main character Antoine Dionael was developed through three subsequent films: Antoine ET Colette (1962), Baisers Voles (1968) and Domicile Conjugal (1970).
The French New Wave directors were prolific film-makers. The five Cahiers directors (Truffaut, Godard, Charbol, Rivette and Rohmer) made 32 films between 1959 and 1966. Although the films represented a radical departure from traditional cinema, and where aimed at a young intellectual audience, many of them achieved a measure of critical and financial success, gaining a broad audience both in France and abroad. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups, for example, won the Grand Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, while A Bout de Soufflé was a big European box office hit. This contributed to the growing influence of these directors. After 1964 the experimentation elements of the French New Wave were already starting to become assimilated into mainstream cinema. The directors meanwhile diverged in style and developed their own distinct cinematic voices.
The way the films were made reflected an interest in questioning cinema itself, by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making. In this manner, the French New Wave directors strove to present and alternative to Hollywood, by consciously breaking its conventions, while at the same time paying homage to what they regarded as good in Hollywood cinema. Godard's A Bout de Soufflé set the tone for La Nouvelle Vague, by telling a simple story about a relationship in a convention-challenging style with numerous references to previous cinema.
French New Wave films had a free editing style and did not conform to the editing rules of Hollywood films. The editing often drew attention to itself by being discontinuous, reminding the audience that they were watching a film, for example by using jumps cuts or the insertion of material extraneous by using jump cuts or the insertion of material extraneous to the story (non-digenetic material). Godard, in particular, favored the use of the jump cut, where two shots of the same subject are cut together with a noticeable jump on the screen. In a Hollywood film this would be avoided by either using a shot/reverse shot edit or cutting to a shot from a camera in a position over 30 degrees from the preceding shot. In Godard's first full-length film A Bout de Soufflé jump cuts are used during lengthy conversation in a room and in a scene in a car driving around Paris. Irrelevant shots were sometimes inserted for ironic or comical effect, for example, in Truffaut's Tirez le Pianiste when one character says "May my mother drop dead if I’m not telling the truth", the shot is cut to one of an old lady falling over dead. The latter is also typical of the casual, sometimes anarchic, humor found in many Nouvelle Vague films.
Long takes were common, for example, the street scene in A Bout de Soufflé. Long takes have become particularly associated with the films of Jacques Rivette. The use of real-time was also common, for example, in Varda's Cleo de 5 a 7, in which the screen duration and the plot duration both extend two hours, and in the slice-of-life scenes in Godard's Vivre SA Vie (1962). These two films are also both firmly shot in the present tense, a common feature of French New Wave films generally. The films tended to have loosely constructed scenarios, with many unpredictable elements and sudden shifts in tone, often giving the audience the impression that anything might happen next. They were also distinctive for having open endings, with situations being left unresolved. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups is typical in ending ambiguously, with the protagonist Antoine on a beach caught in freeze-frame looking at the camera.
Bibliography
Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1958. Film dir François Truffaut France: Fox Lorber.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_New_Wave- French - The French New Wave: Visited on the 11th of October
Thompson David. May 09. Sight & Sound: The international film magazine: The New Wave at 50. Volume 19 Issue 5. Pages 16-22.
Greene Naomi. The French new wave the new look. Published 2007.
