IV.

French Cinema after World War II

In the 1940s the most important newcomers were Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. The former’s stories of redemption, from Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) through Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (1951; Diary of a Country Priest), Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé (1956; A Man Escaped), and Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966; Balthazar) to L’Argent (1983; Money), had a stylistic austerity and rigour which, for more than three decades, would distinguish his work from that of other film-makers. Jour de Fête (1949) was Tati’s debut feature, followed by Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953; Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday), which introduced the gangling, pipe-sucking character, played by Tati himself, who was to appear regularly in subsequent films. Gesture, movement, and the use of sound (not dialogue) were the cornerstones of Tati’s art, and led, in Playtime (1967), to an unusually innovative use of 70-mm film.

Renoir and Max Ophuls returned from Hollywood in the early 1950s, having left to escape the Nazis. The former, initially in The Golden Coach (France/Italy, 1952) with his cameraman nephew, Claude Renoir Junior, was a pioneer of the use of Technicolor in major French productions. The latter, a German Jew, had originally come to France as a refugee from Nazism. His last four films, La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de... (1953; The Earrings of Madame de...), and Lola Montès (1955), a CinemaScope masterpiece, sadly cut before its release, are perhaps his greatest. With him came his son Marcel, now a major figure in documentary. The latter’s Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1971; The Sorrow and the Pity), made for French television (which refused to show it), and Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), produced without any French finance, offer a trenchant analysis of France under German occupation. More recently, in The Troubles We’ve Seen: A History of Journalism in Time of War (1994), he has taken the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, and media coverage of the siege, as the context for an exploration of a question posed early in the film by actor Philippe Noiret: “Would it have changed anything if people had been able to see Auschwitz on television?”.

The success of the films of Roger Vadim starring Brigitte Bardot, of which Et Dieu Créa la Femme (1956; And God Created Woman) was the first, showed that there was a market for films aimed at the new, more affluent, youth audience, and some French producers began to back other young film-makers who were willing to work quickly, or with minimal resources. The most prominent of these were Chabrol, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, and Truffaut , a group of young critics. While learning their trade at the screenings of the Cinémathèque Française they had, together with André Bazin, their critical father figure, made Cahiers du Cinéma the most important film magazine in the world.

The work of these directors broke the conventions of standard film style in various ways: by not respecting standard script structure and smooth transitions of mood; by making easily noticeable camera movements; by using jump-cuts; and by not using the full polish of studio lighting. Godard, Truffaut, and their cameraman Raoul Coutard spearheaded a return to location shooting, even of interior scenes. This matched the spontaneity of new performers such as Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, as well as Brigitte Bardot, a star from the old system. They were aided in this by their extensive use of the small, light 35-mm Cameflex camera, which had been made by the Éclair company since 1948. Experiments by Chris Marker and ethnologist Jean Rouch with the noiseless, lightweight 16-mm cameras introduced by Éclair in 1960 similarly revitalized documentary (see Cinéma Vérité). Pierre Braunberger supported many of these developments. In addition, he had previously produced several important short films by Alain Resnais, who made the move to fiction in 1959, as did another older film-maker, Georges Franju, co-founder with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque and its archive collection in 1936. Franju had established himself with major documentaries, including Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) and Hôtel des Invalides (1952). Other important figures of the New Wave were Agnès Varda, who came to directing from photojournalism, and her husband Jacques Demy.

The 1960s also brought the final film by Jean Cocteau (Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960) and major works by Jean-Pierre Melville, originally a precursor of the New Wave. Particularly noteworthy is L’Armée des Ombres (1969; Shadow Army), about the French Resistance, in which Melville had been active.

Nevertheless, it was Godard’s output that attracted most critical attention, remains the most memorable, and was historically and aesthetically the most important. From À Bout de Souffle (1960; Breathless) to Weekend (1968)—15 features and several shorts—this resembled a voyage of discovery, charting new potentials for narrative cinema. At first it seemed that the conventions of filmic construction had been overturned, but as mainstream production came to terms with the New Wave in the mid-1960s, it became difficult to detect any generic difference between the best work of, say, Truffaut and Louis Malle, a talented but more conventional director who had arrived on the scene at about the same time. Consequently, for over a decade, some of the most exciting French films were directed by the veteran Spanish exile Luis Buñuel, though Bresson continued to produce major films.

From the mid-1960s, most of the projects realized by major directors in France and other European countries have, in strict financial terms, been international co-productions. After 1968, only Godard and Rivette persisted with experiment, followed in the 1970s by Marguerite Duras, who, in films such as Nathalie Granger (1972), India Song (1975), Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert (1976), and Le Camion (1977), continued to explore the relationships between sound and image, narrative and memory, the past and the imagination, that had characterized both the early New Wave and the nouveau roman (New Novel).

The richness and diversity of French production over this whole period, which lasted approximately a quarter of a century, cannot be over-emphasized, even in the context of what was a remarkable era for European film-making in general. Cinema has traditionally been held in high esteem in French artistic and intellectual life. This has meant that the barriers between commercial, art, and avant-garde cinema have, in the past, tended to be less rigid than in other cultures. Nevertheless, the structure of the French industry and the methods by which production has been financed have provided the economic foundation for artistic achievements which, in this era as in the 1930s, clearly merited the worldwide acclaim they received.