Nouvelle Vague cinema - talk in UCC

The 55th Cork International Film Festival took place recently, well in early March actually! As well as cinema screenings there was a talk on in UCC about the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema by Pierre-Henri Deleau. It was really very interesting. It clarified so much about that era and cleared up all I thought I knew about that time in history.

The term 'Nouvelle Vague' was coined by Françoise Giroud, who wrote for the magazine L'Express. She wanted to describe the 30 or so new film makers that came on the scene in the period 1958-1959.

'Les Cahiers du cinéma' was the focal point from which this new type of cinema came about. The late 50's in France was a pretty good time, de Gaulle was back in power so there was political stability and the economy was flourishing. But young people, especially artistically minded young people saw loads of problems. At that time about 100 films were made each year. The directors were all mostly old. They were not really looking at real life and most of the filming was done in studios, not in the open air.

So young people decided to start making their own films. They didn't have much money so they employed their friends as the actors in the film. They couldn't afford to rent a studio, so they filmed on the street. Suddenly everyone says: we can do that too. So it catches on and loads of people are making their own films.

The sound they used in their films was revolutionary. It was direct sound, so if someone turned away from the microphone you could not hear what they were saying. But apparently, you didn't need to hear everything to understand what they were saying. The French language is organised like this - in a sentence you have a subject (eg. I), a verb (eg. go) and an object (home) in that order. So when an actor spoke, to understand them, you only really needed to hear the start of their sentence and the missing parts were not required.

The era known as Nouvelle Vague really only lasted for three years, from 1959-1962. After that there was a return to traditional cinema. But they did make a big impact on cinema in general. Maybe as big as Rossellini in 1945 with his neorealist films.

The directors of the NV brought up new subjects that the older directors would not deal with such as politics (Algerian war) and rural France (not just Paris, as usual). NV influenced similar movements all over the world, places like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Canada, Italy, USA, Germany and Chili made their own type of NV films.

As I said, this talk really clarified the basics of the subject for me. I hope it helped you too.