From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article needs additional citations for . Please help
by . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2010) ()
New Wave (: La Nouvelle Vague) is a
coined by critics for a group of
of the late 1950s and 1960s.
Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of the literary period pieces being made in France and written by novelists, their spirit of youthful , the desire to shoot more current social issues on location, and their intention of experimenting with the film form. "New Wave" is an example of . Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.
Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set up time, the New Wave way of filmmaking presented a documentary style. The films exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming techniques included fragmented, discontinuous editing, and long takes. The combination of objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions that arise in a film are not answered in the end.
's manifesto "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo", published in L'?cran on 30 March 1948, outlined some of the ideas that were later expanded upon by
and the . It argues that "cinema was in the process of becoming a new means of expression on the same level as painting and the novel ... a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of the caméra-stylo."
Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including , , , , and , began as critics for the famous film magazine . Cahiers co-founder and theorist
was a prominent source of influence for the movement. By means of criticism and editorialization, they laid the groundwork for a set of concepts, revolutionary at the time, which the American film critic Andrew Sarris called . (The original French La politique des auteurs, translated literally as "The policy of authors".) Cahiers du cinéma writers critiqued the classic "Tradition of Quality" style of . Notable among these was Fran?ois Truffaut in his manifesto-like article "Une Certaine tendance du cinéma fran?ais". Bazin and , founder and curator of the , were the dual father figures of the movement. These men of cinema valued the expression of the director's personal vision in both the film's style and script.
Truffaut also credits the American director
and his film
(1953) with helping to start the French New Wave, when he said "Our French New Wave would never have come into being, if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel who showed us the way to independent production with (this) fine movie."
The auteur theory holds that the director is the "author" of his movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film. They praised movies by
and , and made then-radical cases for the artistic distinction and greatness of Hollywood studio directors such as , ,
and . The beginning of the New Wave was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying this philosophy to the world by directing movies themselves.
Apart from the role that films by
have played in the movement, Chabrol's
(1958) is traditionally (but debatably) credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with
(1959) and Godard, with
(1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish. Part of their technique was to portray characters not readily labeled as protagonists in the classic sense of audience identification.
The auteurs of this era owe their popularity to the support they received with their youthful audience. Most of these directors were born in the 1930s and grew up in Paris, relating to how their viewers might be experiencing life. With high concentration in fashion, urban professional life, and all-night parties, the life of France's youth was being exquisitely captured.
The French New Wave was popular roughly between 1958 and 1964, although New Wave work existed as late as 1973. The
forces at play shortly after World War II strongly influenced the movement. Politically and financially drained, France tended to fall back on the old popular pre-war traditions. One such tradition was straight , specifically classical French film. The movement has its roots in rebellion against the reliance on past forms (often adapted from traditional novelistic structures), criticizing in particular the way these forms could force the
to submit to a dictatorial . They were especially against the French "cinema of quality", the type of high-minded, literary period films held in esteem at French film festivals, often regarded as "untouchable" by criticism.
New Wave critics and directors studied the work of western classics and applied new avant garde stylistic direction. The
approach helped filmmakers get at the essential art form and find what was, to them, a much more comfortable and contemporary form of production. , , , , , and many other forward-thinking
were held up in admiration while standard
bound by traditional narrative flow were strongly criticized.[] French New Wave is influenced by
In a 1961 interview, Truffaut said that "the 'New Wave' is neither a movement, nor a school, nor a group, it's a quality" and in December 1962 published a list of 162 film directors who had made their feature film debut since 1959. Many of these directors, such as Edmond Agabra and Henri Zaphiratos, were not as successful or enduring at the well-known members of the New Wave and today would not be considered part of it. Shortly after Truffaut's published list appeared, Godard publicly declared that the New Wave was more exclusive and included only Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer and himself, stating that "Cahiers was the nucleus" of the movement. Godard also acknowledged filmmakers such as Resnais, Astruc, Varda and Demy as esteemed contemporaries, but said that they represented "their own fund of culture" and were separate from the New Wave.
Many of the directors associated with the New Wave continued to make films into the 21st century.
This section needs additional citations for . Please help
by . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2010) ()
The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as long
(like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film ). Also, these movies featured
themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of the
of human existence. Filled with irony and sarcasm, the films also tend to reference other films.
Many of the French New Wave films were produ often shot in a friend's apartment or yard, using the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots.) The cost of film was
thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations. For example, in 's
(? bout de souffle), after being told the film was too long and he must cut it down to one hour and a half he decided (on the suggestion of ) to remove several scenes from the feature using , as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that did not work were simply cut from the middle of the take, a practical decision and also a purposeful stylistic one.
The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that broke the common 180° axis of camera movement. In many films of the French New Wave, the camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but rather to play with audience expectations. Godard was arguably the movement's mos his method of film-making, often used to shock and awe audiences out of passivity, was abnormally bold and direct. As a result of his techniques, he is an early example of a director who was accused of having contempt for his audience (something experimental filmmakers in the decades ahead, like
and , would also be charged with). His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer's supposed naivety. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as , were radically innovative at the time.
Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer' in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes with or an actor whose character changes from o or sets in which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.
At the heart of New Wave technique is the issue of money and production value. In the context of social and economic troubles of a post-World War II France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods, and were inspired by the generation of Italian Neorealists before them. Half necessity and half vision, New Wave directors used all that they had available to channel their artistic visions directly to the theatre.
Finally, the French New Wave, as the , is focused on the technique as style itself. A French New Wave film-maker is first of all an author who shows in its film his own eye on the world. On the other hand, the film as the object of knowledge challenges the usual transitivity on which all the other cinema was based, "undoing its cornerstones: space and time continuity, narrative and grammatical logics, the self-evidence of the represented worlds." In this way the film-maker passes "the essay attitude, thinking – in a novelist way – on his own way to do essays."
The Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, group is a contingent of filmmakers associated with the French New Wave, first identified as such by . The corresponding "right bank" group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with
(, , and ). Unlike the Cahiers these directors were older and less movie-crazed. They tended to see cinema akin to other arts, such as literature. However they were similar to the New Wave directors in that they practiced cinematic modernism. Their emergence also came in the 1950s and they also benefited from the youthful audience. The two groups, however, we Cahiers du cinéma advocated Left Bank cinema.
Left Bank directors include , , and . Roud described a distinctive "fondness for a kind of
life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the , and a consequent interest in ", as well as an identification with the political . The filmmakers tended to collaborate with one another. , , and
are also associated with the group. The
movement in literature was also a strong element of the Left Bank style, with authors contributing to many of the films. Left Bank films include , , , , and .
– cinematographer
– cinematographer
– composer
– screenwriter
– composer
- photographer, screenwriter
– screenwriter
(Mowje Now)
(Nuberu bagu)
(Brazilian New Wave)
(Portuguese New Wave)
(German New Wave)
(American New Wave)
(Indian New Wave)
(Jugoslovenski crni talas)
Marie, Michel. The French New Wave : An Artistic School. Trans. Richard Neupert. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2002.
11 May 2008 at the .
Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.407–408.
. from "The French New Wave", edited by
and Peter Graham. March 30, .
Marie, Michel (2008). . John Wiley & Sons. p. 31.  .
. . Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.407
. . TCM.com.
Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.409
Brody, Richard (2008). Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. pp. 122–123.  .
Scott, A. O. (June 25, 2009). . The New York Times.
street scene in Godard's . Girdner, Ashlee (March 11, 2013). . Bonjour Paris 2016. The solution for this was to hide Coutard inside of a three wheeled mail cart, which was fitted with a hole just big enough for the camera lens to stick out, and he then would be pushed alongside the chatting stars.
– via www.imdb.com.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (). . New Academia Publishing. p. 187 of the Italian Edition published by Garzanti in 1972.  .  .
Sainati, Augusto (1998). Supporto, soggetto, oggetto: forme di costruzione del sapere dal cinema ai nuovi media, in Costruzione e appropriazione del sapere nei nuovi scenari tecnologici (in Italian). Napoli: CUEN. pp. 154–155.
"The Left Bank Revisited: Marker, Resnais, Varda", Harvard Film Archive,
Access date: 16 August 2008.
Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill. 2010, p.412
Jill Nelmes, An Introduction to Film Studies, p. 44. Routledge.
Donato Totaro, Offscreen, Hiroshima Mon Amour review, 31 August 2003.
Access date: 16 August 2008.
, "Where to Start Guide", section outlining directors. Accessed 30 Apr 2009.
New Wave in cinema
: Hidden categories:From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nouvelle Vague is a French band led by musicians
and . Their name means "new wave" in French, and refers simultaneously to the
cinema movement of the 1960s, to the
movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which provides many of the songs that the band cover, and to
(Portuguese for "new wave"), a musical style that the band frequently uses in its arrangements.
The group's recordings and live performances have featured a large rotating cast of mostly female vocalists. Several of the artists who have performed with the band have also had successful solo careers, including , , , and .
The group's first album, the self-titled , was released in 2004. Explaining how the project came about, Libaux later said: "Marc Collin and I were both musicians and producers in the French music industry when, in 2002, Marc called me with this very strange idea of covering
in a bossa nova version. I thought this idea was absolutely crazy but very exciting. So we decided to get into the studio and try it out as soon as possible. Then we did
and . We put the album together in just eight months. And after that we called ourselves Nouvelle Vague ... and that's the story!"
The songs on the first album were recorded with female vocalists who reportedly had not previously heard the songs they would be singing. Eight singers feature on the album in total, including , , who performs four songs, and , who sings on two tracks. The album features remakes of songs by , , , , , , , , and . The album was a commercial success, peaking at number 69 in the French album charts and spending a total of 39 weeks in the top 200. In 2006 it was reported that the album had sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide.
(left) and
performing at the , 2006
The group's second album, , released in 2005, was again a commercial success. It charted in several European countries, peaking at number 23 in the French album charts, number 15 in the German charts, number 8 in Portugal, and reaching number 79 in the . The album includes versions of the
song, "", of 's "", "" by , "" by , "" by , and "" by .
In 2008, Collin released an album titled Hollywood, mon amour, consisting of recordings made following the Nouvelle Vague formula, of songs from 1980s film soundtracks. The album includes new versions of
from , and of the song "" from the . 's
performs versions of 's James Bond theme song "", and of 's "" (which features in the 1980 film ). The actress and singer
performs a new arrangement of "" (from the 1985 film ). The album also features performances by the Israeli-French singer , by the Brazilian musician , and by the Australian singer , who toured with Nouvelle Vague for a time. A reviewer wrote of the album, "The results can be more than surprising – who would have thought that
could be transformed from nauseating manufactured rubbish into something sultry, smooth and genuinely romantic?"
performing with Nouvelle Vague at Rockefeller, Oslo, 10 October 2009
sings "" with Nouvelle V
duet with Pain on "All My Colours"; Marina Celeste performs "" and 's "Parade" is sung by
and Nouvelle Vague's Nadeah Miranda. For additional tracks that did not make the final album,
from Australian rockers
performs a duet, likewise
of Belgian new-wavers .
In 2010 the group released an album of French-language remakes, . The album features guest appearances from some well-known musicians, including , , and . It also features an appearance by Camille, who returns to perform a version of the song "Putain putain" by the Belgian band .
In the same year, the group also released a fifteen-track Best of compilation. A special edition version of the compilation features an additional disc of rare and unreleased material.
The band's critical and commercial success peaked with the release of their second album, Bande à Part. With the release of 3 and Couleurs sur Paris, critics gave the band less attention. The band subsequently went into hiatus, releasing no new material and performing few live shows. Collin later explained this hiatus, saying, "I was bored of myself doing covers," and citing diminishing critical acclaim: "With the first and second albums, all the media said: ‘This is a great idea, a great rendition’ – and after the third album it was suddenly, ‘OK, it’s always the same thing, the same concept, we don’t want to talk about it'."
A new album I Could Be Happy was released on 4 November. The title track, a cover of the song by , was made available for download and digital streaming on 29 September.
In 2016 it was announced that the band would be releasing an "anniversary album" and a documentary, to be titled Nouvelle Vague by Nouvelle Vague and Some Friends. The album is expected to feature "four new remixes of existing material, four previously released covers re-recorded on location with traditional musicians in China, India, Mexico and Hungary, four new covers (provisional picks are tracks by The Ramones, Cocteau Twins, The Associates and Richard Hell) and – wait for it – four original songs."
A new EP entitled Athol Brose was released on 2 September 2016.
Several of the vocalists who have performed with Nouvelle Vague have subsequently found success as solo singers. Libaux has attributed this fact to Collin's talent for discovering female singers: "I think he is the best talent scout in the world for female singers. All the female singers we have worked with are just beginning their career. For these girls to be part of Nouvelle Vague for three years - meaning you play 200, 250 gigs - I think it's a very good way to learn about this job." The band's singers have included , , , , , , , , and . In 2010 the band released a compilation featuring solo work by several of their vocalists, under the title Nouvelle Vague: The Singers. This includes 's "", which later became a major international hit when it was remixed by French producer , topping the charts in Germany, Spain, and Austria, and reaching number 3 in France and number 6 in Italy.
(2006, Peacefrog Records)
(2009 Peacefrog Records)
(2010, Kwaidan)
Athol Brose EP (2016, Kwaidan)
I Could Be Happy (2016, Kwaidan)
Algo Familiar EP (2017, Kwaidan)
Live album
(2009, New Sound Dimensions)
Compilation albums
(2007, Azuli) — Nouvelle Vague DJ mix of other artists' tracks
(2010, Peacefrog Records)
The Singers (2010, New Sound Dimensions)
Muggs, Joe (2 August 2004). .
Libaux, Olivier (7 July 2009). .
. lescharts.com (in French) 2016.
Conte, Chritsophe (31 May 2006). .
(in French) 2016.
. lescharts.com (in French) 2016.
Quinn, Michael. .
O'Brien, Jon. .
Horne, Mark (3 November 2008). .
Médoni, Gilles (12 November 2010). .
(in French) 2016.
Garratt, Rob (9 March 2016). .
. odisinthetvzine.co.uk.
Jason Ankeny. . . Retrieved 21 September 2007.
Phares, Heather. . .
. lescharts.com (in French) 2016.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to .
: Hidden categories: