the french new wave: authenticity and performance

Perceived as a revolutionary break from the so-called ‘Tradition of Quality’ which ruled post-war French cinema, the New Wave is viewed as one of the most important and exciting cinematic movements of the twentieth century. Populated by filmmakers from varied backgrounds representing differing political and aesthetic values, it cannot be considered a cohesively unified movement. Yet it contains significant threads which connect disparate films under the umbrella of the nouvelle vague. As reflected in director Jean Douchet’s quote (Greene 2007: 10), one such thread is the conveyance of truth and authenticity via cinematic apparatus — notions which ran counter to the perceived artifice of ‘sophisticated cinema’ (Truffaut, quoted in Greene 2007: 9). Contextualising the New Wave within its socio-cultural moment, this essay will explore the conception of ‘truth’ at its core: how is authenticity achieved through both ideological and technological means, and for what purpose? In order to narrow down the field of inquiry, particular focus is placed on the actors and performances of the New Wave: specifically, the protagonists of its two most widely known entries. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in Les quatre cents coups (Truffaut, 1959), and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard of À bout de soufflé (1960) are the two most iconic male figures of the New Wave, whilst reflecting opposing poles of the movement. Their performances, as scripted and directed by Truffaut and Godard, are juxtaposed with the theatricality of actors associated with the Tradition of Quality, and thus provide a fascinating entry into this exploration.

Emerging in the 1950s, the French New Wave has amassed innumerate academic studies, often seeking to ascribe paradigms to selected films, filmmakers, techniques, and influences. Whilst many studies have provided a wider overview (Neupert 2007; Greene 2007), focused on individual directors (Sterritt 1999; de Baecque 2000; Gillain 2013; Monaco 1976) or taken a nuts-and-bolts approach to the act of filmmaking (Marie 1997), at the fortieth anniversary Neupert noted a lack of recognition of the films’ cultural context, leaving readers ‘without a clear understanding of just what made the New Wave so exciting and challenging’ at the time (2007: xvi). Research by Genevieve Sellier (2008; 2010), Elizabeth Ezra (2010) and Ginette Vincendeau (2000) have sought to redress this imbalance, whilst an upcoming reissue of 1968’s The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Peter Graham) adds a number of writings ‘by and about women critics and film-makers… addressing issues of gender and representation, as well as considering New Wave films in the context of contemporary political events’ including the Algerian war (Bloomsbury). Rather than reaching oversaturation, the subject therefore continues to inspire new studies in tandem with shifting cultural concerns. This particular study connects both the technical aspect of filmmaking and direction with the cultural contexts which precipitated these changes.

Some definitions restrict the movement to the output of the directors associated with the Cahiers du cinema journal, namely, Godard, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer; although more commonly the directors of the ‘Left Bank’ school — Agnes Varda, Alan Resnais, and Jacques Demy are included. Antoine de Baecque widens the definition to include cinéma vérité filmmakers Jean Rouch and Pierre Schendoerffer (Greene 2007: 3). The core filmmakers themselves are cynical of this grouping: Chabrol recalls the Cahiers group being commodified and ‘promoted like a new brand of soup’ (Neupert 2007: xviii), whilst, upon being asked to discuss their similarities, Truffaut answers: ‘as a rule, [we] played pinball machines, in contrast to the older directors who prefer cards and whiskey!’ (Gillain 2017: 22). For the purposes of this essay, Richard Neupert’s summary of the New Wave provides a succinct definition, describing it as:

a complex network of historical forces, including all films made by young directors exploiting new modes of production as well as unusual story and style options. The New Wave per se lasts from 1958 through 1964. The New Wave era is just that, a time period during which social, technological, economic, and cinematic factors helped generate one of the most intensely creative movements in film history. The New Wave involves more than directors and movie titles; it comprises a whole new interpretation of the cinema and its narrative strategies. (2007: xviii)

Noting the movement’s anticipation by shifts in avant-garde theatre and literature, Neupert further adds that the cinema ‘was shaped by forces as abstract as the growth of film criticism that stressed mise-en-scéne over thematics and as concrete as technological innovations in motion-picture camera and sound recorders’ (ibid: 3). Most commonly, the New Wave is associated with the ‘auteur theory’. Film critic Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay, ‘The birth of a new avant-garde: La caméra-stylo’, had argued that direction should be a deeply personal act: ‘Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen’ (2014: 606). This notion had a profound influence on the Cahiers directors, developing into the politique des auteurs as advocated within Truffaut’s 1954 attack on the ‘cinéma de papa’ of the Tradition of Quality, ‘A certain tendency of French cinema’. Phil Powrie writes:

At its origins, it was an attempt to make films respectable artistically, first, by privileging the impact of the director in their mise-en-scene, that is, the strictly cinematographic side of the film (camerawork, lighting, colour and so on) and, second, by emphasising the director’s work as part of a specific worldview, with a set of ‘themes’, for example, much like the very traditional literary-critical approach to ‘great novelists’. (2002: 60)

James Monaco notes that this approach enabled directors to ‘capture the quality of life’ rather than its ‘historical details’, and thus ‘increase the quotient of honest and clarity in film and thereby decrease the distance between author and observer’ (1976: 23). Truffaut would later remark: ‘one reaches a profound truth by a superficial one and sophisticated cinema had lost even superficial truth’ (Greene 2007: 9). An earlier essay by another critic and co-founder of Cahiers, André Bazin, further influenced the development of auterism. Advocating the work of Italian neo-realists such as Fellini and Antonioni, he believed that cinema represented ‘a new stage in artistic “realism”’: whereas earlier mediums such as paintings were inherently subjective, film’s reliance on ‘mechanical reproduction’ of reality could be considered truly objective (Bazin 1960: 7). ‘For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a non-living agent’ (ibid). By utilising depth-of-field and wide shots whilst eschewing montage editing, Bazin’s 1945 essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ suggested that mise-en-scene could evoke a more objective reality. Although the disruptive editing representative of Godard, for example, is at odds with Bazin’s desire for ‘essential wholeness’ on film, New Wave directors shared his ‘conviction that cinema had a moral vocation to embrace the “real”’ (Greene 2007: 22). Thus, the cinema of the New Wave came to represent an increasingly porous relationship between fiction, reality, and documentary in response to an industry growing increasingly detached from everyday French life. This notion is repeated in both the essays, reviews, and films of many New Wave directors: in Le petit soldat (1963), Godard’s onscreen persona Bruno Forestier would famously declare: ‘Photography is truth, and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second’.

The term ‘New Wave’ is itself derived from a growing national interest in the new generation coming of age following the war, a tumultuous period in which ‘consumerism and newfound affluence advanced hand-in-hand with a weakening of traditional mores and longstanding social structures’ (Greene 2007: 10). In 1957, L’Express coined the phrase in an article entitled: ‘The New Wave: A Portrait of Youth’, which sought to understand the interests and aspirations of a generation determined to distance itself from its staid forebears (de Baecque 2000: 135). Old cultural codes no longer seemed appropriate to describe the alienation of youth: overseas, this disillusionment was reflected in the ground-breaking films of Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan, along with iconic performances by Marlon Brando and James Dean. The ‘safe, big-budget adaptations of historical novels’, (Neupert 2007: xxii) which populated the French film industry alongside repetitive melodramas and thrillers, were not resonating with the overwhelmingly youthful audience. Throughout the decade, 43% of the Parisian audience was made up of the 16–24 demographic (Greene 2007: 13), and it is this pronounced cinéphilia which came to define the young filmmakers who emerged from the ‘New Wave’ generation. Writing for Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s, Godard, Truffaut, and company felt that their work as critics constituted a more suitable education in filmmaking than the industry-approved apprenticeships under established directors.

Despite respectable profits, both the industry and the popular press felt that ‘French film was losing its direction,’ becoming ‘further and further isolated from contemporary life during a time when ciné-clubs and new film journals were looking for an exciting modern cinema’ (Neupert 2007: xvii), one which would reflect the lived realities of the new generation. Truffaut’s ‘A certain tendency…’, aggressively attacks the inauthenticity of mainstream French cinema:

That school of film-making, which aims for realism, always destroys it at the very moment when it finally captures it, because it is more interested in imprisoning human beings in a closed world hemmed in by formulas, puns and maxims than allowing them to reveal themselves as they are, before our eyes. (2014: 141)

This was an era of ‘safe big-budget adaptations of historical novels, in lukewarm compromises between 1940s French style and uninspired, run-of-the-mill Hollywood productions (Neupert 2007: xxii), a cinema ‘directed by men in their fifties and sometimes in their seventies, and it did not know how to renew the “human cattle” represented in their work, to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous expression for actors’ (Marie 1997: 109). French actors were highly theatrical and glamorous, bolstered by expensive sets and costumes with highly-polished scripts. Whilst Simone Signoret, Martine Carol, and Gérard Philipe still drew audiences with polished performances, they represented a gulf between generations, particularly when contrasted to the raw performances offered by James Dean under Kazan’s direction. Ginette Vincendeau’s major work on French stars claims that the New Wave was defined by ‘actors with a fresh look and performance style who crystallised its ideological and cinematic project’ (2000: 111), converging the youthful auteur-directors’ search for authenticity with the increasingly dominant youth culture. In 1956, inspiration would come via Brigitte Bardot’s role as Juliette in Et dieu… créa la femme, the directorial debut of Roger Vadim. Controversial for its frank depiction of sexuality, the narrative is otherwise conventional, and is not considered part of the New Wave. However, Bardot is cited as a precursor for the values it espoused — Truffaut defended the film against negative reviews, lauding the actor’s informal manner: ‘everyday gestures, anodyne ones such as playing with her sandal’ or playing with her hair (Vincendeau 2000: 115). Vadim declared, ‘She doesn’t act, she exists’ (ibid: 100). However, Bardot’s sudden stardom, eroticism and commodification quickly put her outside of the early New Wave’s modest budgets, whilst clashing with their ideological imperative. Later performances in Vie privée (Malle, 1962) and Le Mepris (Godard, 1963) were self-reflexive works: Sellier has discussed how her roles in these films are at the expense of Bardot’s star image, using her body as ‘the arena wherein elite, high culture and mass culture compete for primacy’ (2001: 135). Her sudden success in 1956, however, reflected audience’s desire for fresh, youthful new stars. The New Wave was populated by a crop of new faces, including Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Anna Karina, and Alain Delon, along with countless others featured within the 120 feature film debuts between 1958 and 1964 (Neupert 2007: xv). Of the new style, actress Françoise Brio would later remark:

The New Wave was a freedom of expression, a new fashion of acting, and even a great reform on the level of makeup. I was part of a new generation that refused to wear the two inches of pancake base paint and hair pieces that were still standard equipment for actors. Suddenly, you saw actors who looked natural, like they had just gotten out of bed. (Neupert 2007: xv)

Thus, the perceived break from tradition, or the cinéma de papa, encompassed everything from performance to appearance, and would have a profound effect on both cinema and society going forward.

In a statement reflecting the auteur-director need for control, Truffaut once stated his refusal to work with certain major stars:

These artists are too dangerous; they impose a script or change it if they don’t like it. They do not hesitate to dictate the cast or refuse to work with certain actors. They influence mise-en-scene and demand close-ups; they sacrifice the best interest of a film to their status and they are, in my opinion, to blame for many failures. (Vincendeau 2000: 110)

For auteurs, writes Vincendeau, there was no room for another ego on set, ‘except for one willing to be his alter-ego or mouthpiece’ (ibid: 114). Truffaut would indeed come to be known as the archetypal example of a director utilising an actor as his own mirror image. Over twenty years, a number of films chronicled the life of protagonist Antoine Doinel, played throughout by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Initially a semi-autobiographical account of Truffaut’s childhood, Doinel grew to be a symbiotic amalgamation of both director and actor. The first entry, Les quatre cents coups, depicts Doinel as a troubled fourteen-year-old in a series of ‘seemingly insignificant’ moments of the boy’s life which ‘ultimately contribute not to the film’s narrative but, rather, to its dense emotional texture’ (Greene 2007: 76). Premiering at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival alongside Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais), Truffaut’s film was not the first New Wave feature. However, its success at Cannes would bring international renown to the movement, whilst solidifying its emphasis on fresh, youthful performance. Elle magazine commented: ‘Never has [Cannes] been so youthful, so happy to live for the glory of an art which youth loves. The twelfth film festival has the honour of announcing to you the rebirth of French cinema’ (de Baecque 2000: 134).

The film’s success hinged upon the casting and portrayal of Doinel. During his audition, Truffaut was struck by Léaud’s ‘emotional intensity and his extreme self-consciousness’ (Vacche 2013: 408). He was fascinated with the portrayal of childhood in cinema. His took inspiration from Rossellini: ‘the first to depict children truthfully… He shows them a serious and pensive… not like picturesque little figures or animals’ (Cardullo 2010). The troubled young Doinel reflects this, reacting to his uncaring parents and teachers with often quiet reflection — interspersed with carefree pursuits at the fairground, or the cinema. The role is not autobiographical merely to Truffaut: Léaud’s headmaster had warned the director: ‘Jean-Pierre is more and more “unmanageable”. Indifference, arrogance, permanent defiance, lack of discipline in its all its forms… He is developing more and more into an emotionally disturbed case’ (de Baecque 2000: 129). It is clear that, for Truffaut, Léaud was perfectly suited for this coming-of-age story, showing youth in a brutally honest manner rather than as an age of innocence. Truffaut endeavoured to extract Léaud’s natural self-consciousness within his performance, directing him to use ‘every part of his body, from the way he sits like a pile of dirty clothes at his school desk to his bent neck suggesting guilt when the teacher grabs him by the collar of his jacket’ (Vacche 2013: 408). Léaud acts with neither the theatricality of France’s ‘quality’ performers, nor with the intensity of Hollywood’s new stars. Rather, his performance is subtly defiant, though often vulnerable, inflected with natural gestures caught via the cinema verité style that would become the trademark of the New Wave. Financial constraints necessitated innovation: studios were expensive, yet recent developments in portable camera equipment allowed a small crew to shoot in apartments and on the streets: ‘Sunshine costs less than Klieg lights and generators’ (Truffaut, quoted in Neupert 2007: 161). Whilst crude, this encouraged a lively, modern look. Performance was likewise affected: Truffaut believed ‘our images do not have the glacial perfection usually found in French films’, resulting from the need to complete scenes in only or two takes (Gillain 2017: 26).

Spontaneity and improvisation was strongly encouraged by Truffaut. His first short film, Les mistons (1957), had likewise focused on adolescent boys. However, he was unhappy with the results: ‘I had [the actors] do contrived things to make them appear jealous, and later this annoyed me. I told myself that I’d film with children again, but next time I would have them be truer to life and use as little fiction as possible’ (Cardullo 2010). Inspired by Rossellini, Les quatre cents coups was shot with a highly flexible script: ‘I would not be capable of preparing a film with an exact shooting script, prepared in advance, shot by shot… My imagination interacts with reality… I believe in improvisation’ (Truffaut quoted in Greene 2007: 75). The film is not as heavily improvised as other entries in the New Wave, although Truffaut was keen to extract as much natural dialogue from his young actor as possible. A memorable scene encapsulates the movement’s cinéma vérité approach: having been sent to a youth detention centre, Doinel is interviewed by a psychologist. The scene had originally intended to be recorded in classical narrative style; a simple shot/reverse-shot between the boy and the psychologist. The actress was unavailable, so Doinel’s interview was shot with the intention of inserting her reactions afterwards. However, ultimate decision to remain on the boy’s face with the questions dubbed in leads to a poignant montage of his responses, cut with dissolves. Truffaut encouraged Léaud to improvise his answers: ‘I wanted his vocabulary, his hesitations, his total spontaneity’ (Greene 2007: 75). He fidgets and pauses to think throughout. In response to being asked ‘Have you ever slept with a girl?’, Doinel’s sheepish and embarrassed suggests that the actor was unprepared for the question. Far removed from the ‘inauthentic’ responses of his young actors in Les mistons, Truffaut succeeds in creating an honest portrayal of youth, far removed from the excesses of the Tradition of Quality.

A testament to Truffaut’s skills as director, in one scene he paradoxically worked against his usual naturalistic style in order to invoke a more awkwardly real performance on screen. Unable to provide an excuse for his truancy, Doinel panics and falsely informs his teacher that his mother has died. Vacche writes: ‘Instead of informing his performer about his lines at the very last minute to keep the delivery spontaneous… Truffaut told Léaud to think about what he was saying ahead of time. All of a sudden, a child’s self-consciousness about lying was useful to make the verbal exchange between the teacher and the pupil look artificial, awkward, yet appropriate, and, of course, memorable’ (2013: 409–410). His stilted delivery is contrasted with the relaxed nature of the interview scene, culminating in an empathetic, natural, and deeply human performance.

Alongside Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard is another of the most widely-known directors of the French New Wave. Working alongside one another at Cahiers, their relationship was fraught: Truffaut provided the initial story for Godard’s masterpiece, À bout de soufflé, yet in later years expressed distaste at Godard’s use of Léaud in Masculin Féminin (1966). Ultimately, they are seen as the two figureheads of the movement: yet, according to Neupert, their individual work occupies widely differing poles. He writes: ‘their films have the least in common of any two New Wave-era directors… taken together, they denote for many cinema students today the essence of the New Wave while also suggesting its broad spectrum of stories and styles’ (2007: 161). To this end, Bordwell and Thompson write that ‘One proved that the young cinema could rejuvenate mainstream filmmaking; the other that the new generation could be hostile to the comfort and pleasure of ordinary cinema’ (1994: 525). Les quatre cents coups had broken fresh new ground and revitalised a turgid industry, whilst offering accessibility to mainstream audiences. In 1960, À bout de soufflé became the first entry in Godard’s pursuit of a revolutionary cinema; one in which he would ‘push a genre to the moment it would break down to reveal the operations of the cinema’ (MacCabe 1992: 16). Like Truffaut, Godard sought to permeate the boundaries between fiction and reality, stating: ‘all great fictional films lean towards documentary just as all great documentaries lean toward fiction’ (Greene 2007: 83). The protagonist of his debut, however, fulfilled this role in direct opposition to the subtle, youthful defiance of Antoine Doinel.

When Michael Marie describes a number of ‘brand name images’ (1997: 98) which represent the New Wave — intense cinéphilia, self-reflexivity, discontinuity, intrusive editing, jump cuts, improvisational style, and cinema verité-style slice-of-life ‘action’ — the film most emblematic of these motifs is Godard’s À bout de soufflé. With his debut, the director staked his claim as the ‘deliberate destroyer’ of cinema, breaking ‘with preceding conventions even as he insistently calls attention to the very process of making a film’ (Susan Sontag, quoted in Greene 2007: 86). An homage to the gangster genre, the film ‘is about a boy who thinks about death and a girl who doesn’t’ (Truffaut, quoted in Sellier 2008: 113). Played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michel Poiccard is on the run for the murder of a policeman. He spends time chasing various love interests in Paris — most significant of these is Jean Seberg’s Patricia, who ultimately betrays Michel to the authorities, resulting in his anticlimactic death. Shot on location over four weeks with Raoul Coutard as cinematographer, the film reflects the avant-garde experimentation of modern jazz, or the literature of mid-century beat poets. Its lasting critical reception has focused on both its ‘ability to describe youth, and particularly relations between girls and boys, with unprecedented authenticity; and second, the invention of a new cinematic language’ (Sellier 2008: 53). Although not quite as abstract as later films, such as Une femme mariée (1964) or Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), Godard’s debut encapsulates his central thesis that cinema should be an active form of media consumption. Every time an eye-line is deliberately mismatched, or the hand-held camera wobbles, the viewer is reminded that they are watching a constructed reality. Godard’s insistence on drawing attention to the functions of cinema is at odds with Bazin’s earlier call for realism, yet truth is still central to the director’s work, producing deeply honest representations of society. Godard challenged contemporary notions of what could be shown on film, from casual slang to shifting sexual attitudes, using the camera ‘as an instrument of “truth” able to penetrate the veil of appearances’ (Greene 2007: 88). Michel and Patricia pay homage to the archetypes of gangster stories, but they cannot be called two-dimensional figures. Michel is a womaniser and a crook, but with interests spanning Humphrey Bogart to Mozart. Patricia is encoded as the classic femmes-fatale, yet she is shown to be torn between her desire for Michel and her own ambitions as a journalist. The film is by no means a feminist statement, yet it succeeds in reflecting the contradictory standards for young women in 1960s France (Sellier 2008: 145–184), whilst the intrusive editing forces the active viewer to reckon with these social realities. As Bergala summarises: for Godard, ‘the important thing was less to respect reality than to make it disgorge, cinematographically, its fragment of truth’ (quoted in Greene 2007: 87).

Similarly to Léaud’s Doinel, Belmondo’s Michel represents the alter ego of his director — a symbiotic relationship of protagonist and auteur which formed part of a wider New Wave trend (Sellier 2001: 126). Whilst it was common for New Wave directors to cast stars with no professional background, Belmondo had some theatrical training. However, his unique look, coupled with a virile nonchalance, came to typify a new style of leading man. Having unlearned his stage background for the more spontaneous direction of Godard, Belmondo shot to immediate stardom upon the film’s release. Between 1960 and 1964, he became a top box-office draw, successfully leading both arthouse and mainstream cinema until finally dwindling in the 1980s (Vincendeau 2000: 159). More than anyone else, Belmondo came to represent a new generation of stardom in France, one based ‘on the rhetoric of youth, authenticity and modernity’, all of which is exhibited within the ‘infectious energy’ of Michel Poiccard as he hustles his way through Paris (ibid: 165). Constantly on the move, the hand-held camera follows him across the bustling Champs-Elysses: both actor and cameraman are forced to step out of the way of bemused pedestrians, adding to the film’s dynamic yet casual energy. Cinematographer Coutard had been instructed to imagine he was a reporter following Michel, so ‘I had to be light, mobile, and ready to hide’ (Marie 1997: 89). Each of Michel’s gestures was caught, however trivial, creating further depth. Coutard continues, ‘little by little by little we discovered a need to escape from convention and ever run counter to the rules of “cinematographic grammar”. The shooting plan was devised as we went along, as was the dialogue’ (Neupert 2007: 210). Whereas Truffaut had roughly followed a more traditional ‘program-script’ with a fixed structure and some room for improvisation, Godard’s was a ‘plan-of-action script’, open to ‘chance encounters’ and flashes of inspiration (Marie 1997: 77). The film was not entirely improvised: Godard had rough notes and would cue Belmondo’s lines as he shot, a process enabled by shooting without sound and dubbing in dialogue afterwards to save money (Sterritt 1999: 47). However, faced with the director’s experimentation, Belmondo and Seberg both expressed discouragement during filming. Writing to a friend, Seberg explained: ‘I’m in the middle of this French film and it’s a long, absolutely insane experience — no lights, no makeup, no sound! Only one good thing — it’s so un-Hollywood I’ve become completely unselfconscious’ (New Wave Film). However, these ‘unselfconscious’ performances, coupled with Belmondo’s casual delivery of contemporary vernacular, is the lifeblood of À bout de soufflé, providing a sense of urgency and vitality. The France-Observateur’s review declared that Godard’s ‘master stroke was to make the characters’ behaviour, their relationship, the very essence of the film, and to subordinate to that everything that actually makes up a film: screenplay, photography, framing, montage, dialogues’ (Sellier 2008: 54). Sixty years later, the film is remembered as much for Belmondo’s exciting portrayal of a womanising criminal as it is lauded for its technological innovations, ushering in a new era for stardom in French cinema.

Due to its financial limitations, many leading roles consisted of models, students, and friends of the auteur-directors, often cast based on their looks, or an ability to convey a youthful intensity. The most successful of these were able to capture the ‘bewildering alienation’ felt by young audiences in ‘a world in which traditional moral codes and political aspirations no longer held sway’ (Greene 2007: 11), juxtaposed with traditional cinema modes which increasingly failed to cater to this need for representation. The New Wave’s sense of authenticity prompted keen responses in its early years: ‘We have achieved a greater sense of realism, the reality of the streets, the reality of acting and the actor, and this kind of scene has touched the viewers’ (Truffaut, quoted in Gillain 2017: 27). Jean-Pierre Léaud had some acting experience, although he too was cast for his intense demeanour rather than his credentials. Stage-trained actors such as Belmondo or Jeanne Moreau were forced to ‘unlearn’ sophisticated methods, although it is worth noting that these two exceptions to the rule would ultimately find the greatest level of success outside of the New Wave. However, the level of success attained by this unorthodox mode of casting suggests that the very notion of ‘stardom’ is inherently in conflict with the contemporary ideals of the movement. As noted earlier, Brigitte Bardot’s starring roles were filmic essays on her own cultural cache, and could not exist without the audience’s prior knowledge of her role as a sex symbol. David Shipman writes:

It did look at first as though the nouvelle vague might destroy the conception of the star and his image, especially as a whole crop of new actors, some of them shining versatility, rode in on it to stardom. But as success came to both them and the directors, the lines blurred and compromises were made… The new stars found their “image”. (Quoted in Vincendeau 2000: 110)

Further study would benefit from exploring how the growing cult of celebrity around New Wave icons ultimately impacted its output. Michel’s role benefitted greatly from Belmondo’s anonymity at the time of the film’s release: utilising Richard Dyer’s star theory, a comparison between his role in À bout de soufflé and his later turn in Pierrot le Fou (Godard, 1965) would be an interesting starting point for this. Meanwhile, this essay has only touched upon a very small area: there has been little consideration of female performances, and nothing related to the Left Bank directors: Alain Resnais, for instance, successfully drew from the theatre when casting Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima Mon Amour, showing an intriguing contrast between differing subsets of the movement. Whilst the French New Wave appears to have been analysed from every conceivable angle, it is surprising to note that one of its most celebrated elements is currently restricted to single chapters within wider texts. Future study in this field would highly enrich the current critical output.

Works Cited

À bout de soufflé (1960) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [Film]. France: Société nouvelle de cinématographie.

Astruc, Alexandre (2014) ‘The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo’, in Mackenzie, Scott (ed.) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press, pp. 603–606.

Bazin, Andre (1960) ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Translated by Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly, 13(4), pp. 4–9).

Bloomsbury (2022). The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/french-new-wave-9781839022296/ (Accessed: 16 May 2022).

Cardullo, Bert (2010) ‘Alter Ego, Autobiography, and Auterism: François Truffaut’s Last Interview’, The New Yorker, July 29. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/truffauts-last-interview (Accessed: 16 May 2022).

De Baecque, Antoine (2000) Truffaut: A Biography. Translated by Catherine Temerson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dudley, Andrew, and Anne Gillain (2013) A Companion to François Truffaut. London: Blackwell.

Et dieu… créa la femme (1956) Directed by Roger Vadim [Film]. France: Cocinor.

Ezra, Elizabeth (2010) ‘Cléo’s Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave’, Yale French Studies, 118, pp. 177–190.

Gillain, Anne (2013) François Truffaut: The Lost Secret. Translated by Alistair Fox. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Gillain, Anne (2017) Truffaut on Cinema. Translated by Alistair Fox. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Graham, Peter (2022) The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. 3rd edn. London: Bloomsbury.

Greene, Naomi (2007) The French New Wave: A New Look. London: Wallflower Press.

Le petit soldat (1963) Directed by Jean-Luc Picard [Film]. France.

Les quatre cents coups (1959) Directed by François Truffaut [Film]. France: Les Films du Carrosse.

Les Mistons (1957) Directed by François Truffaut [Short Film]. France.

MacCabe, Colin (1992) ‘A life in seven episodes (to date)’, in Bellour, Raymond and Mary Lea Bandy (eds.) Jean-Luc Godard: Son & Image. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Marie, Michel (1997) The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Translated by Richard Neupert. London: Blackwell.

Monaco, James (1976) The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sellier, Genevieve (2010) ‘French New Wave Cinema and the Legacy of Male Libertinage’, Cinema Journal, 49(4), pp. 152–158.

Sterritt, David (1999) The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell (1994) Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Truffaut, François (2014) ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’, in Mackenzie, Scott (ed.) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press, pp. 133–143.

Vacche, Angela Dalle (2013) ‘Directing Children: The Double Meaning of Self-Consciousness’, in Andrew, Dudley and Anne Gillain (eds.), A Companion to François Truffaut. London: Blackwell, pp. 403–419.

Vincendeau, Ginette (2000) Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum.