L’amour a la mer (1964). Courtesy of Lobster Films.
There is a strange paradox in the popular consciousness of the French New Wave. On the one hand, the nouvelle vague is renowned as an explosion of new filmmaking talent in France. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, as so many histories of cinema tell us, masses of young directors debuted their work on the screens of France and then the world. After a decade and a half of sclerosis in the film industry, with rigid hierarchies and guild rules that prevented the emergence of directors who had not slowly made their way through the career rungs of the studios, a new generation burst onto the scene, upending the rules of filmmaking and forming a template for so many future new waves in the rest of the world. In many accounts, it is presented as something of a mass movement. The December 1962 issue of Cahiers du cinéma—a film journal whose history is intimately linked with that of the nouvelle vague— provided a dictionary of French directors who had completed their first feature-length work since 1959 (as well as a few “spiritual fathers”), and arrived at a provisional list of 162 entries.
On the other hand, the French New Wave is frequently reduced to a handful of prominent names which end up metonymically substituting themselves for the movement as a whole. Indeed, Jean-Luc Godard himself was moved to remark that the new wave was simply what happened when “three or four friends start talking to each other.” He, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol—the so-called “right bank” filmmakers who wrote for Cahiers, tended to live north of the Seine, idolized American cinema and, at least in the early days, were usually associated with the political right—have often been counterposed to the “left bank” of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy, who, aligned with progressive politics, were reputed to be more engaged in social issues and often more overtly essayistic in their filmmaking. All these directors had long, productive careers, and as a result garnered lasting, international recognition as auteurs—a notion they themselves had helped to disseminate. But together, their reputation has tended to obfuscate the output of lesser lights, many of whom have fallen to obscurity after their initial forays. In the annals of film history, the mass movement involving more than a hundred metteurs-en-scène of the French New Wave’s initial outburst has been winnowed down to the output of nine or so individuals.
The retrospective program “Forgotten Filmmakers of the New Wave,” screening at the Museum of Modern Art, serves to redress this situation, and bring renewed attention to those nouvelle vague figures who are less straightforwardly slotted into the right-bank/left-bank binary, and whose fortunes may not have been as globally glorious as those of Truffaut, Resnais, and company. With the goal of highlighting the breadth and aesthetic diversity of the movement, the slate of films offered across the retrospective’s 29 screenings showcases the work of more than forty directors.
This said, exception might be taken to the idea of some of the filmmakers on view at MoMA as “forgotten” figures in film history. Can this status really be ascribed to the likes of Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, and the filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet? All have had established careers in France, their names will probably be familiar to even the more casual cinephile, and their work has screened at various New York venues in recent years. Their presence in the program probably owes more to their reputation as post-New Wave filmmakers, belonging primarily to the generation after the great explosion of the late 1950s/early 1960s. The emphasis here, however, is on their early short films, which often slipped under the radar at the time but that invariably anticipated their future body of work. Pialat is actually older than many of his nouvelle vague peers but did not make his breakthrough in features until 1968’s L’enfance nue, when he was 43. But with its setting in the red-light district of the Rue Saint-Denis, its bending of fictional and documentary elements, and its tilting of the narrative focus away from the ostensible pair of male protagonists towards the prostitute of the film’s title, Janine (1962) presages later Pialat films such as Loulou (1980) and À nos amours (1983). Gifted with the electrifying screen presence of the new wave talisman Jean-Pierre Léaud, who here plays a stand-in for the filmmaker’s own adolescence in provincial France, Eustache’s moyen-métrage from 1966, Le père Noël a les yeux bleus (Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes), likewise foreshadows his later collaboration with the actor in The Mother and the Whore (1973), while the sparse lyricism and sexual psychodrama of Garrel’s wider œuvre is already evident in Les enfants désaccordés (1964), made at the impossibly precocious age of 16. Straub/Huillet’s Machorka-Muff is another standout work: an adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s satirical anti-war short-story Hauptstädtisches Journal, the film not only points to the continuities between the Nazi regime and its post-war successor in West Germany, but its exploration of long-takes and moments of cinematic “dead time” brought praise from composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and heralded the filmmakers’ later more radical experiments with these forms.
Other names in the program may be less familiar to an international audience, but their persistent productivity has given them a niche at home, often through an extremely low-budget production model that encapsulates the new wave spirit of independence while enabling their brand of filmmaking to remain financially viable. Luc Moullet made the traditional turn from film critic for Cahiers to director with his debut short Un steack trop cuit (1960), whose anarchic obscenity and sardonic humor are a trademark of both his writing and his cinema, while Alain Cavalier mixes genre elements with a seething assault on the French far-right in France in the political thrillers Le combat dans l’île (Fire and Ice, 1962) and the Alain Delon-starring L’insoumis (The Unvanquished, 1964). Jacques Baratier offers a more deliriously eccentric twist on the New Wave with La poupée (1962), whose surrealist blend of science-fiction and political parody highlights the affinities between the post-war generation and the 1920s avant-garde. Paul Vecchiali would not truly emerge as a filmmaker until the 1970s, but Les roses de la vie (1962) already portends his microbudget methods and unique aesthetics. Like Vecchiali, Jean-Pierre Mocky was quick to see the potential of combining directing and producing duties, which enabled him to parlay early new wave hits like Snobs! (1962) into a singularly prolific (if artistically uneven) career that averaged a film a year until the mid-2010s. If Mocky and Vecchiali were maverick-artisans, Marin Karmitz has become a central figure in the economic establishment, with his ownership of the MK2 chain of cinemas and role as cultural advisor to the Sarkozy administration. Nuit noire, Calcutta (1964), a hauntingly poetic collaboration with novelist Marguérite Duras (also responsible for the screenplay for editor Henri Colpi’s 1961 directorial debut, Une aussi longue absence) shows, however, what was lost when Karmitz decided to relinquish the director’s chair for the mogul’s head office.
The ethnographic documentarist Jean Rouch enjoys a privileged place in the retrospective. Moi, un noir (1958) and La pyramide humaine (The Human Pyramid, 1960) both capture daily life in the Côte d’Ivoire on the cusp of the former French colony’s independence, while La punition (The Punishment, 1962), a companion piece of sorts to his more well-known Chronicle of a Summer (1961) turns the ethnographer’s gaze onto the marginalized youth of Paris. As this strand of the program shows, film-anthropology was a rich vein of French cinema at the time of the new wave, a tendency that belies the movement’s reputation for its aloof detachment from the burning political topics of the era and fixation with the lifestyles of the cosseted middle-class youth. Mamadou Sarr and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine (1955), one of the first films directed by Black Africans, focuses on immigrant African communities in the Parisian region, while Alain Kaminker and Raymond Vogel’s La mer et les jours (1958) gives a poetic view of the quotidian existence of Breton fisherman. François Reichenbach pokes gentle fun at both French stereotypes of the USA and the ethnographic mode of filmmaking itself with L’amérique insolite (America as Seen by a Frenchman, 1960). René Vautier (Algeria in Flames, 1958) and Jacques Panijel (October in Paris, 1962), meanwhile, offer a more militantly anti-colonial perspective in their treatment of the French occupation of Algeria, and in taking a stance in solidarity with the Algerian independence struggle both had to contend with the stifling censorship regime imposed by the Gaullist government: Panijel’s film was not taken off the list of banned films until Vautier intervened with a hunger strike in 1973.
Elder statesmen of the New Wave are also present in “Forgotten Filmmakers.” Alexandre Astruc and Roger Leenhardt are primarily known for the influence they exerted as critics on their less experienced colleagues: Astruc for his seminal “caméra-stylo” article and Leenhardt for his avuncular tutelage of the so-called “Young Turks” of Cahiers in the 1950s. Both also harbored aspirations as filmmakers, and works like Le Rideau cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain 1953) and Les dernières vacances (The Last Vacation, 1948) now stand as early manifestos for the cinematic revolution to come. Franju’s 1959 release Head Against the Wall (set in a psychiatric hospital) and his 1963 remake of the Louis Feuillade silent serial Judex were made when the nouvelle vague was at the height of its popularity, but in an earlier guise he had assisted Henri Langlois in founding the Cinémathèque française, and thus, in aiding in the preservation and dissemination of the cinema’s past, played a major role in the obsessive cinephilia that would guide the movement. Paul Gégauff, meanwhile, was a unique figure in new wave circles: a right-wing provocateur and charismatic womanizer, he charmed the likes of Rohmer, Godard, and (above all) Chabrol into casting him in their films—frequently in autobiographical roles—and working together on screenplays. The never-released Le reflux (1965), his only time helming a film, nonetheless suggests that his prodigious talents did not quite extend to direction, and stands now more as a document of its troubled shoot in the South Pacific than as a cinematic masterpiece in its own right.
Gégauff is only one of a number of individuals present in the retrospective who were unable, for various reasons, to gain an enduring foothold in the French film industry, and whose bodies of work have thus remained unduly marginalized and neglected, to the extent that even the more avid student of film history may only dimly be aware of them. It is this part of the program—where “Forgotten Filmmakers” really does live up to its name—that is its real highlight. Guy Gilles is an indicative case: films of his such as L’amour à la mer (1964) are in many ways exemplary of the ethos of the nouvelle vague, with their jubilant inventiveness and reappropriation of pop culture. Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1963) is likewise one of the most incisive depictions of the rapid changes in social mores brought about by the post-war world of consumerism and mass media, but his subsequent career was stuttering and abridged (only seven films completed in the following four decades). Jean-Daniel Pollet’s little-known œuvre follows two distinct tracks, both of which are represented here: oddball comedies, frequently starring Claude Melki (Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse, 1958, and Gala, 1961), and meditative montage-essays with voiceover commentaries composed by literary luminaries such as Philippe Sollers (Méditérranée, 1963). Works by the Greek-Ethiopian Nico Papatakis (Les Abysses, 1963), the Tunisian-born Marcel Hanoun (Une simple histoire, 1959), and the Italian-French Robert Enrico, whose Ambrose Bierce adaptation La rivière du Hibou (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, 1961) ended up screening as an episode of The Twilight Zone, should also prompt a re-evaluation of the nouvelle vague as a truly transnational movement, rather than the Franco-French affair it is often perceived as.
The “Little Gems” screening of short films gives us glimpses into the work of more obscure figures such as Jean-Michel Barjol (Nadia, 1963), Catherine Varlin (Jouer à Paris, 1962) and Édouard Luntz (Les enfants des courants d’air,1959). Similarly overlooked works like La frontière (1961) by Jean Cayrol and L’enclos (Enclosure, 1961) by Armand Gatti were rare forays by authors into filmmaking, and highlight the crossover between cinema and literature that is one of the key features of the nouvelle vague.
All of these films suggest unrealized possibilities within the New Wave. Perhaps the biggest sense of loss, however, is the absent œuvre of Paula Delsol, whose effervescent La dérive (1964) centers on its protagonist Jacquie’s experience of sexual liberation and existential drift in the south of France. Unjustly scorned by critics, Delsol was only able to make one further feature film more than a decade later, and focused her attention on writing and television instead. It may not be excessive to hypothesize that her treatment set the cause of feminist cinema in France back a decade, with Varda long remaining the unique exception in an otherwise exclusively masculine domain.
In the face of curtailed careers such as these, it is tempting to respond to the MoMA showcase in a mournful manner, as a martyrology of promising careers that remained unfulfilled, curtailed by commercial pressures, set back by personal misfortunes or repressed by outright censorship. But this would not be in keeping with the spirit of the nouvelle vague itself. Whether they are enraged or joyous, stylistically pared back or brimming over with energy, its films represent the rejuvenation of a medium, and an ever-present reminder that the cinema is in need of permanent revolution.
Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave runs May 4 - June 3, 2022 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.