by Mark Cousins
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Brigitte Bardot as a desirous eighteen-year-old woman who moves into the home of three young men in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman. Bardot’s open sexuality and everyday clothes challenged the norm of chic middle-class women in French cinema. France, 1956.
In the following year, France’s complex film culture witnessed the arrival of the twenty-two-year-old ballet dancer and model, Brigitte Bardot, in Et Dieu crée la femme/And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, France, 1956) (195). She sexualized youth cinema and was rumoured to have become, with her haystack hair and refusal to dress like a middle-class Parisian woman, more commercially important to France than the Renault motorcar. That year, an innovative lens called “pan-cinor”, which had the ability to zoom between 38mm and 150mm, appeared in France and almost at once, changed the look of location filming in this country. Two years earlier and within a few months of Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency” article, an eighty-nine minute film, La Point Courte/The Short End, was released by a Belgian, Sorbonne-educated, ex-stills photographer, Agnès Varda. Although she had seen few films, Varda structured La Pointe Courte around two stories based in the Mediterranean port where she grew up. One was a neo-realist tale about a fisherman and the other about a mismatched couple. Her editor, Alain Resnais, dexterously intercut between the two stories. Both director and editor were influenced in this by American novelist William Faulkner’s book The Wild Palms. Their film was one of the first ripples of what would constitute the “New Wave”, or Nouvelle Vague, a movement that would flood French and then world cinema in a matter of years.14
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Agnes Varda (on one knee) shooting scenes of Mediterranean fishing life in La Pointe Courte. Her use of minimal crew and equipment both foresaw the revolution in filmmaking which is the subject of the next chapter. France, 1956
It is not difficult to see how the period between 1952 and 1958 heralded this New Wave, as Western culture became sexualized and fragmented and the non-Western world de-colonized itself. In a distinct echo of another post-war period – the 1920s – 1950s mainstream cinema was challenged by a whole series of dissidents, intellectuals and artists with personal visions. In the 1920s, these were made up of the German expressionists, the French impressionists, the Soviet montage directors, the naturalists from many countries and the French, German and Spanish avant-gardists. In the 1950s, the dissidents were Bresson, Bergman, Ray, Fellini, Wajda, Trnka and Anderson. Remarkably, three filmmakers, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau from the 1920s and early 1930s still continued to needle the mainstream thirty years later.
However, the main difference between 1920s and 1950s cinema was the nature of the mainstream. Across the world, it was trying to accommodate social change and the strain was starting to show. The 1950s films of Nicholas Ray, Mehboob, Sirk, Dutt and Minnelli were swollen melodramas commenting on issues beyond their immediate stories. Actors such as Nargis, Brando, Dean and Steiger established complex psychological layers at the core of widescreen entertainment films, the best example of which was in Fred Zinnemann’s glossy musical Oklahoma! (USA, 1955), where Steiger plays a suicidal, masturbatory hired hand in an otherwise light love story about a cowboy and his girl.
Entertainment and forgetting mixed uneasily with analysis, awareness and despair in cinema around the world. The language of the movies was straining at its seams and something had to give.
1. At the end of the latter’s Musashino fujin/The Lady from Musachino (Japan, 1951), for example, a posthumous letter from the woman he loves, tells a young soldier who has returned from the war that the idealized countryside he dreams about no longer exists and that he should look with hope to the future and the industrialized landscape of the new Tokyo suburbs.
2. As director Kazan had by this stage testified at the HUAC – which tarnished his reputation amongst some of his colleagues until the very end of his life – some have interpreted On the Waterfront as a justification for standing up against the aggressions of the hard Left.
3. Billy Wilder quoted in Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. Andrew Robinson. André Deutsch. 1989.
4. Wajda, Andrzej. Double Vision: My Life in Film. Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 63.
5. Ibid. p. 64.
6. Bergman’s Smultronstallet/Wild Strawberries, made the same year, saw the director exploring his existential concerns through the character of an ageing academic — played by Victor Sjöström — who, en route to collect an award, undergoes a series of brilliantly realized, symbolic day-dreams and encounters.
7. Bresson quoted in Armes, Roy, French Cinema since 1946, volume 1, p. 130.
8. Bresson, Robert. Notes on Cinematography. Urizen, 1977, p. 1.
9. Ibid. p. 32.
10. Interview with Robert Bresson, Arts, June 1959.
11. Francois Truffaut. The Films of My Life, op. cit.
12. The work of Lean’s near contemporary, Michelangelo Antonioni — which is considered in a later chapter — reveals that a depopulated image does not necessarily lead to the blandness of travelogue. Whilst space and landscape was important for the Italian and for the Englishman, Antonioni’s images reflected much more complexly the mental lives of his characters. By contrast, there are frequent sequences in Lean’s work which seem intended simply to show the attractiveness of a certain location. This is fine in itself, of course, but raises question marks about Lean’s status as a serious artist.
13. Francois Truffaut. The Films of My Life, op. cit.
14. As with any significant artist change, the roots of the French Nouvelle Vague spread widely and include the work of short and feature length documentarist Georges Rouquier and documentary and drama director Georges Franju.
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The arrival of Harmonica (Charles Bronson, background) at a frontier train station in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s mythic Western Once Upon a Time in the West. Italy, 1968.
THE EXPLODED STORY (1959–69)
The breakdown of romantic cinema and the coming of modernism
7
If film producers around the world found the 1950s a difficult decade, they had a shock coming to them in the 1960s, when the apparent cracks in Western social consensus turned into chasms, the sexualization of culture gathered pace, and a decade of consumerism and affluence engendered, strong distaste. Alienated youth, as portrayed in the 1950s by James Dean in America and Zbigniew Cybulski in Poland, was radicalized in colleges and universities with students demonstrating against government policy, war and conformism.
Where American students took their country’s disastrous war in Vietnam as their focus, the communist world provided a broader range of targets. In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev, who had taken over from Stalin, was forced to retire and replaced by the hard-line Leonid Brezhnev. Two years later, in 1966, Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution targeted artists and intellectuals who had traditional, Western or democratic ideas. In Chechoslovakia in 1968 there was a short-lived thaw in state control of public life, known as the “Prague Spring”, just as there had briefly been in Hungary in the previous decade, which coincided with a blossoming of film creativity.
This decade saw the politics of racial equality become more heated. The next chapter, covering 1969–79, will be the first to chart black filmmakers around the world stepping up to the camera in large numbers, but for the moment what is clear is how much black politicians and activists of the 1960s in America and Africa paved the way for them. As well as monitoring the continuing careers of some of the important filmmakers we have already encountered, no less than thirty-eight major new names, from every continent in the world except Australasia, enter our story in this chapter. Thirteen new film movements were born, in France, America, Italy, Japan, Britain, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Brazil, India, Czechoslovakia, Iran and Algeria. Together these filmmakers forged a new language for cinema, selectively rejecting, as we will see, much of what went before. Collectively these movements became known as the New Wave, though their appr
oaches were far from unified. In Western Europe and the US, for example, directors concentrated on challenging old stylistic norms, while in totalitarian countries and those emerging from colonialism, questions of content, such as political freedom, were more pressing. Despite these differences, one thing was true: no other decade in the story of film attempted so completely to consign to the dustbin the schema of closed romantic realism, mainstream cinema’s utopian parallel universe.
Audiences too continued to change. Older people were going to the cinema proportionally much less in 1959 than at any period since the earliest days of the movies. The “tradition of quality” films aimed at them were still produced using the large, slow, heavy filming and lighting kits evolved by studio systems around the world. Hundreds of technicians and craftspeople were needed to use this equipment and the division of labour was long established.
Filming on the streets, which had been undertaken sporadically in the 1920s and 1940s, was challenging this cumbersome studio aesthetic. New lenses, film stocks and lighting equipment had gradually freed up crews and allowed them more mobility. The best of them did not even wait for the technological changes to work their way through the system. Rather, they challenged the equipment, modified the kit and played with the film stock. When a director with a modern vision of what he or she wanted came together with a cinematographer as restless, as eager to innovate with the tools of the trade as pioneers like Edwin S. Porter, explosive new results were possible. This combustion had occured between Welles and Toland in 1939–40. Exactly twenty years later, it happened again.
THE FRENCH NEW WAVE
Perhaps it is no surprise that fractured times led to fractured imagery. A cinematic explosion took place in the back of a car driving through the streets of Paris. An American actress, Jean Seberg, who had fashionably cropped hair and sunglasses, was in the passenger seat. A French cameraman, Raoul Coutard, filmed the back of her head with a new, smaller 35mm camera. He had made his own rolls of film out of 18m lengths sold for stills cameras and had it developed in a way that gave it a speed of 800ASA, ten to twenty times faster than studio colour film. His director, Jean-Luc Godard, did not want to use artificial lights during the whole film, so the effects of sunlight registered on Seberg’s head more naturally than ever before in cinema. Even in interiors, thanks to the new super-fast film, Godard used only natural light, bouncing it off ceilings to create soft shadows. In the car, as a voice-over said, “I love a girl with a lovely neck”, the shot cut to a moment later – same angle, same girl, same hair, same speed. Then it cut again, and again. Nine times in total. From Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman (USA, 1903) onwards, when a cut happened in a film it was almost always to show something else – that was the language of film – but in this one, the cuts were there to show the same thing but with the sunlight from a slightly different direction, the background moving in a slightly different way.
This ground-breaking film was A bout de souffle/Breathless (1959), about a car thief who has an American girlfriend and kills a policeman. It was derived from American gangster pictures and was more influenced by Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (USA, 1955) than by anything in French cinema. The director, Jean-Luc Godard, would become one of the most significant in world cinema and this was his first feature. The critic François Truffaut said “there is cinema before Godard and after Godard”.1 It was he and Coutard – the most influential cinematographer of the period – who had planted an aesthetic bomb in the back of that car.
There had been jump cuts in movies before. At the end of the silent period, Alexander Dovzhenko used them in Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1930). A factory owner discovers that his workers have begun a strike. In close-up, the owner looks left and it cuts, then right and another cut, then into the camera, cut, closer into the face of the actor, cut closer still, cut. Nine jump cuts in all, the same number as in A bout de souffle. Although the effect jars, the idea of visual conflict was central to Soviet montage cinema of that time. More importantly, the fragmentation captured his indecision (which way should he turn?) and confusion. In the intervening three decades, Michael Powell had used jump cuts in some of his British films and Godard himself criticized Spanish films for their occasional use of them. Still, they were very rare because filmmakers felt that they disrupted the flow of their films, broke the atmosphere.
The shock attached to seeing jump cuts in A bout de souffle arose because they were not there for any special psychological purpose, as they had been in Arsenal, nor were they wedded to quite traditional stories, as in the Spanish films. The reason for cutting the sequence in this way was because the cuts were beautiful in themselves, because they emphasized that what we were watching was cinema, just as painters had turned to cubism many years earlier because it emphasized the flatness of the canvas. Godard had been part of the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma’s “think tank”. So immersed in cinema were he, Truffaut and others that they saw it not as something that captures real life, a mere medium, but as a part of life, like money or unemployment. So, when they became filmmakers themselves, movies were not just vehicles to carry stories and information or to portray feeling; they were also what those stories carried, part of the sensory experience of, say, sitting in a café watching the world go by. In the twentieth century, all the great art forms became self-aware in the same way. Truffaut once asked “Is life as important as the movies?”2 and while the obvious answer is “no”, the question clearly shows how passionate these young men were. Another of their number, Serge Daney, once said he was in cinema like a fish is in water. An Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci, later added, “In the sixties I was prepared to die for a shot of Jean-Luc Godard.” Life and death feelings about shots and cuts.
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A publicity poster for A Bout de souffle, which starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. France, 1959.
Looking back it is clear that while Godard’s explosive sequence was a revelation, it did not begin to explore the full implications of the new language of film. If a shot no longer had to be about getting a fireman into a burning building or getting a woman into or out of a car, then what was it? An expression of the filmmaker’s attraction to his actress? Well, in part, yes. Indeed, most of the so-called “New Wave” films that followed on the heels of Godard’s were in some way about men looking at women’s faces. These younger filmmakers were bored with the high moral stance of neo-realism and the endless raking over the ashes of the Second World War. By taking their new lighter cameras loaded with faster film on to the streets, they could photograph everyday life, women of their own age, without make-up or fussy studio lighting. The subjects of their films were themselves, their erotic imagination, their fragility and alienation.
Godard and other New Wave directors began to explore further. If a shot is not just a slave to action, if once someone leaves the frame you do not have to cut, then a shot is a unit of time as much as action. It no longer said, “Here is a scene of a woman sitting in a car which is relevant to the chain of events which make up our story”, but “I think this moment in time in the back of this car is beautiful in and of itself.” In other words the shot said, “I think”. The fact that a shot is a thought was buried in Godard’s innovation. In the explosive decade dealt with in this chapter, John Cassavetes in America, Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura in Japan, Ritwik Ghatak in India, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy, Roman Polanski in Poland, Ousmane Sembene in Senegal and Dennis Hopper in America in their very different ways cut cinema loose from its fifty years of accumulated style and methods. They thought with the camera. Intellectual and dissident filmmakers of the 1920s had paved the way in taking cinema seriously as an art form, 1950s filmmakers took this further. Never before had shots and cuts been so nakedly worshipped for themselves.
The impact of Godard’s and Coutard’s new liberating schema was first felt in France, before rapidly spreading elsewhere. In 1959 alone, eighteen new directors debuted; an astonishing 160 by 1962.
Truffaut himself made his first feature film in 1959. Les Quatres cents coups/The 400 Blows did not use jump cuts like Godard’s A bout de souffle but was startlingly fresh and worshipped cinema just as much. The story of a twelve-year-old boy who escapes from a children’s home, falls in love with film and goes on the run, was based on elements of the director’s own life. Like Godard, Truffaut had his film shot with only natural light on real Parisian streets. His story was loosely constructed, in a similar way to the work of neo-realists. However, unlike them, he was not using these techniques to describe post-war problems or sociological trends. Truffaut was interested in the fleeting aspects of experience, life seen from the point of view of a passionate boy who was searching, like many of the New Wave characters, for something indefinable, a certain meaning or exhilaration or transcendence). His models were the humane naturalism of Jean Renoir and the poetic films of Jean Vigo. He even used the screen test of his young actor Jean Pierre Léaud in the final version of The 400 Blows because he preferred its spontaneity.
The 400 Blows was a success internationally and encouraged the French film industry to take risks with many other new directors. Louis Malle, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and many more started directing in the late 1950s or early 1960s and, although their work diverged substantially in style, the contemporary search for meaning was central to them all. The question Truffaut, Godard and cinematographer Coutard were asking, in these first years of what became known as the New Wave in culture in general and film in particular, was a complex version of this simple one: How can we cut through the sobriety of cinema? When one asks this, anything can happen and new, disruptive, comic schema are discovered. In Truffaut’s second film, Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Pianist (1960), a character says, “May my mother drop dead if I tell a lie” and we cut to the mother falling dead. In his next film, Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (France 1961), he freeze-frames on the face of actress Jeanne Moreau as she laughs, simply to extend the pleasure of looking at her (199). In the opening sequence in Godard’s fourth feature Vivre sa Vie/My Life to Live (1964), a conversation takes place between a woman and a man in a bar. They talk about love, and the camera takes close-ups of each character. So far everything is normal, except for one crucial detail: the camera is behind their heads throughout, as it was with Seberg in the car in A bout de souffle. The actors are never shot from the front, so the audience never sees their faces. This is as radical a refusal of the most basic, apparently common-sense aspects of cinema and photography as Bresson’s work had been. It is also absurd in the way that Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Age d’Or (France, 1930) was. In Vivre sa Vie the woman, a prostitute played by Anna Karina, goes to the cinema. She watches Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928). Alone in the dark she looks up at the huge silent close-ups of Falconetti as Joan, and cries. Godard reveals to us how human this woman is, not through showing her reaction to a real-life event, but by showing how moved she is by one of the most delicate moments in the art of silent cinema. In yet another scene in the film, the character’s joy is expressed in a spontaneous dance routine around a pool table, which is reminiscent of the lighter-than-air musical numbers in Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, USA, 1952).