Nostalgia and the nouvelle vague should not mix

The French new wave—the nouvelle vague in the original—was one of those periodic creative eruptions that changes everything. It was conceived in the screening rooms of 1950s Paris, where a coterie of young film critics absorbed the history of the medium that they loved, and nurtured in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema magazine, where those self-same youngsters evolved their theories of what film should be. Eventually, they were able to put those concepts into practice, crafting a string of what became some of the most influential films ever made.

Like other artistic alliances—the Bloomsbury group, say, or the Pre-Raphaelites—the personalities and individual egos of those who contributed are almost as much a part of the story as the actual work, with intense fraternity followed by equally bitter enmity. This legend is set to be burnished further by the release of Nouvelle Vague, a new film directed by Richard Linklater and set during the production of Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), one of the emblematic films of the new wave.

In publicity for his film, Linklater has said the new wave was cinema’s “punk rock” moment. But that’s too mild: this was cinema’s Reformation, a movement intended to purify the movies, strip them of their bad habits, and emphasise the qualities that new wave figures valued most.

There was François Truffaut, a near-delinquent in his youth, whose education came mostly from movies. And his closest friends, (the thoroughly bourgeois) Jean-Luc Godard from Switzerland and the ascetic Jacques Rivette. The genial Claude Chabrol often joined them at screenings, as did their older acquaintance Maurice Schérer, who’d later adopt the pseudonym Éric Rohmer. This core grouping was sometimes augmented by others, such as the married couple Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, and the intellectual Alain Resnais. Collectively, they loathed modern French cinema, which they found starchy and polite—le cinema du papa, they called it. Their gods were Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini, masters of freedom and (apparent) spontaneity. Moreover, they discerned the art in popular American cinema, especially some usually dismissed as mere entertainments, like the words of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Samuel Fuller.

All of these new wavers were burning to make movies of their own. Rivette began first, although his Paris nous appartient took 3 years to complete, not arriving until 1961. By then, Truffaut had put the movement on the map with The 400 Blows (1959, Les quatre cents coups), a directly autobiographical work that was a sensation, first at Cannes and then worldwide.

Godard caused an even greater stir with Breathless; notionally, it was a crime movie—except its director had absolutely no interest in plot. Nouvelle Vague is very good at showing how Godard behaved more like a jazz musician than a filmmaker, effectively turning his scenario inside out and abandoning almost every custom of “proper” moviemaking. (He even monkeyed around with the editing, using brutal jump cuts to abbreviate his film rather than traditional “continuity” editing.) You can pontificate all you want about what the film means—and many have, sometimes at book length—but audiences responded to the insouciance and mischief, and they still do: its offhand cool makes it a gateway drug for “art cinema”, even all these decades later.

Truffaut and Godard were the most prominent members of the new wave, dominating the discourse (even if other members made greater movies… #TeamRivette), but their careers took wildly different trajectories. Godard became more radical and more political, Truffaut becoming more traditionalist, making the sort of respectable films he once disdained. They fell out (as shown in Nouvelle Vague, Godard could be a difficult fellow—frequently insufferable, in fact). Their schism had not been repaired by the time Truffaut died in 1984.

It is impossible to overstate the influence that they, and their lesser-known peers, had on cinema. Their tastes and preferences shaped the cinematic canon, and still do—a great deal of film scholarship since the mid-1960s has been conducted in territory they essentially staked out, especially the emphasis on Hollywood directors (and, most especially, the Hollywood directors they liked).

Their influence on filmmakers was even greater: suddenly directors weren’t just artisans but artists, and the aspiration should be that they make “personal” films. In America, many aspiring filmmakers took this as gospel: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman—even Steven Spielberg, who went on to cast Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And many, many others have since followed their lead, very much including Richard Linklater himself.

Nouvelle Vague isn’t a bad movie, and Linklater & Co certainly do justice to the story. The look of Paris, late 1959, is recreated in impressive detail; they’ve found the ideal cast to embody these people, and it’s shot in the same black-and-white Academy format (square screen, basically) as Breathless itself. Linklater even puts reel change markers, a legacy of when movies were shown from 35mm prints, in the top right corner.

But it’s hard to think of a film more antithetical to its subject. The new wave itself was utterly anti-nostalgic, intent on creating a new sort of cinema rather than looking backward. Those who know the period will undoubtedly get a kick out of seeing how well the filmmakers have done their research, but how depressing to see the movement reduced to something so… agreeable. Godard took himself to Dignitas in 2022, though it’s a fair bet that he would not have approved of Linklater’s work.

Godard spent his later years experimenting in new formats, using digital tools in the same spirit of exploration with which he made Breathless. If he was starting out now, he’d be shooting and editing on his phone, then uploading the results to YouTube. That’s where modern revolutionaries work. And even if they’ve never heard of Jean-Luc Godard, they’re far closer to him, in spirit, than Nouvelle Vague.