CINEMA REBORN - JANUARY NEWSLETTER - Truffaut, Antenna, Melbourne Cinematheque, Charitable Donations

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The February newsletter will have a first early program announcement.

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT AT EUROPA EUROPA FILM FESTIVAL EEFF presents a spotlight on the French New Wave icon François Truffaut (pictured above) - both an exceptional primer on the iconoclastic director and a testament to his stature as one of the greatest filmmakers in French cinema history. Featuring four all-new 4K restorations, Europa! Europa will cover Truffaut's forays into genre, with Shoot the Piano Player, The Soft Skin, Two English Girls, and Finally, Sunday! https://www.europafilmfestival.com.au/theme/four-by-truffaut RESURFACE - CLASSIC DOCUMENTARIES AT ANTENNA  CURATED BY PENNY LANE Unearthed and brought back to light, Resurface presents a handpicked collection of cinematic gems from the past. Each year, Antenna invites a documentary filmmaker to curate films that have profoundly shaped how they view and interpret the world. This year, we join award-winning director Penny Lane as she shares the films that have inspired her creative journey. Known for her humour and unconventional approach to the documentary form, Penny has directed critically acclaimed documentaries such as Our Nixon (2013), Nuts! (2016), HailSatan? (2019), Listening to Kenny G (2021), and Confessions of a Good Samaritan(2023). Penny Lane is a special guest of the festival and will introduce all sessions in person. Details,titles and links to bookings https://antennafestival.org/resurface-curated-by-penny-lane/ MELBOURNE CINEMATHEQUE 2025 PROGRAM The 2025 screening program, featuring 17 seasons includes spotlights on King Hu, Roberto Rossellini, Michael Haneke, Barbara Steele,Víctor Erice, Dirk de Bruyn, Seijun Suzuki, Elia Suleiman, František Vláčil and more. The hard copy calendar will be out in acouple of weeks. It all starts on Feb 5 with a double bill of the new restoration of the very rarely screened FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER (Bresson) & a 35mm print of Akerman's A COUCH IN NEW YORK Full 2025 program and memberships: acmi.net.au/cteq CHARITABLE DONATIONS Once again Cinema Reborn has established a page to enable our supporters to make tax-deductible donations to support our work. Our organisation is run by a group of film industry professionals, working critics, curators and film conservation specialists. All work in an entirely voluntary capacity. Nevertheless there are significant costs, most notably our screening fees, which have to be met each year and we are always grateful for the financial support we receive that defrays these costs and charges. If you would like to make a donation you may do so via via the attached link established by the Australian Cultural Fund which enables small unincorporated organisations like ours to use a service which would otherwise not be easily accessible. To make a donation any time between now and the end of Cinema Reborn 2025 click on this link https://artists.australianculturalfund.org.au/s/project/a2EMn00000FDsl8MAD/cinema-reborn-2025

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (24) Interregnum: Director/Auteur/Autoren

Andrew Sarris

Debates about authorship in the cinema have occupied a central place in film studies since the late 1950s when Cahiers du Cinema proposed the politique des auteurs, basically a political strategy in the form of a polemic for a new cinema to replace what mainstream French cinema was seen by a new generation of critics to have become a moribund “tradition of quality” epitomised by stylistically formulaic versions of French literary classics dismissed as ‘bourgeois cinema for the bourgeoisie’.

Prior to this, traditional film criticism assumed the industrial nature of film production with its division of labour prevented a single authorial voice from being heard or seen in mainstream cinema. This led some critics to claim that cinema, except in exceptional circumstances, could not be regarded as an art, being commodified entertainment serving the ideology of the capitalist economy. The exceptions were films in which the director - a Renoir, Murnau or Dreyer - assumed the marked unifying presence of the author-artist.  As the organising force of a film or group of films so, as Bordwell has argued, the author becomes a kind of protagonist in the drama, a point of identification for the knowledgeable viewer. It is then possible to argue that traditional film criticism has responded to art cinema on its own terms by supporting a complicit relationship between artist-director and critic then forming a link with the receptive viewer. 

 

The long debated canon of classics formed the basis, as already noted, of an art cinema only critically defined as a mode of film practice in the late 70s. Ironically it was films of the French New Wave and the New German Cinema along with classics of Italian neorealism and Russian montage that led the way in this retrospective reformulation of cinema art and its attendant institutionalisation. Ironic because the debate around indigenous cinemas was primarily directed at how to counter American cinematic imperialism. It was the work of latterly recognised auteurs in the Hollywood studios, as much as those in European cinemas, that provided inspiration for the critics-filmmakers-to-be, writing in ‘Cahiers’ in the 50s.                                                          

 

I well remember, as a would-be cinephile in the throes of linking sub-titles with art, taking in Andrew Sarris’s yet to be tested polemical erudition inspired by ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ headed “American Directors,” 68 pages in the 28th (Spring 1963) issue, of Film Culture. 

 

Howard Hawks

My first concern was finding Howard Hawks listed in the “Pantheon” then recognising in the “Second Line” list of ten auteurs only the names of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Buster Keaton, and doing a mild double take on David Lean appearing with other “Fallen Idols” having recently seen Lawrence of Arabia, here being summarily deflated along with The Bridge on the River Kwai by Sarris as “hot air […] lacking a point of view.” Very soon to be discovered were the films of ‘unknown’ “Third Liners” like Sam Fuller  (Underworld USA)  and Nicholas Ray (Johnny Guitar), and in “Esoterica” Don Siegel (The Killers ). Further down the track to enlightenment, waiting for discovery was the “dark humour” in melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk  (not only in Magnificent Obsession and Written on the Wind but also it was suggested less persuasively, in the likes of All That Heaven Allows), and the “naive sophistication” in the comic creations of Jerry Lewis  (The Patsy, The Nutty Professor) and of his mentor Frank Tashlin (Artists and Models, The Disorderly Orderly)..

 

It should be noted that when auteurism first emerged in the 50s, directing was, as Sarris noted, almost exclusively a male domain, no more so than in Hollywood, a situation seemingly confirmed, by “that actress of actresses,” Lillian Gish who, after once directing a film in 1921, declared that directing was no job for a lady. Amidst Sarris’s select lists of hundreds of directors in the American cinema there was only one woman, Ida Lupino. He curiously chose to exclude the notable career of Dorothy Arzner as a director in Hollywood from the late 20s to the early 40s, leaving that task to his wife and fellow critic, Molly Haskell, then working towards her pathbreaking book ‘From Reverence to Rape’ subtitled ‘The Treatment of Women in the Movies’ (1973). Sarris commented that only two women - Leni Riefenstahl and Agnes Varda - had then risen above the “Oddities and One shot” classification accorded Lupino by him as an ‘oddity’ along with 14 male directors including ‘one shot’ directors Charles Laughton, Gene Kelly and John (The Alamo) Wayne.

Barry Humphries, Barry Crocker
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie 

 

The new waves in France and West Germany with their director- focussed auteurism and autorenkino - embryonic notions of ‘writing with the camera’ (mise en scene) - formed the basis of a new, more open, modern aesthetic.  This played little evident formative role in the initial audience acceptance of a home-grown genre, 1971-6, in Australia’s film revival (Stork, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Alvin Purple, Petersen and Don’s Party, et al). In 1979 when the subsequent Australian period genre was at a low ebb, film critic John Hinde dissented from the earlier chorus of disapproval of ocker comedy by the critics which likely came, he contended, symptomatically from “an ancient unconscious streak of wowserism embedded in the Australian psyche.”  Audience approval of ocker or sexploitation comedies was reflected in their box office performance indicating “that they were in touch with some half-conscious self-recognition wandering in the impoverished sexual limbo of our culture.” The films in question, Hinde suggested, “offered, in effect, crude sketchy maps which might have enabled later films to make more detailed exploration of this terrain,” in the then more relaxed censorship environment (Dermody & Jacka vol 2 p.79). In the path-breaking American-Australian coproduction, Wake in Fright (1971), repression had been given disturbing expression to “a horror at the heart of Australia that is about the conditions of sexuality, as Meaghan Morris [said], by being about repression, violence and male segregation” (ibid 81).   

 

The financial viability established by the box office success of Alvin Purple (1973), made on a very low budget, freed the Australian Film Development Corporation from the already politically uncomfortable position of continuing to fund ocker comedies. It is hardly surprising that the recently re-established funding body, the Australian Film Commission, followed through by seizing upon the local and international success of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The institutional agenda shifted to national image (re)building in accord with the varied critical and commercial successes of a relative flood of diverse period dramas in Picnic’s wake (‘the AFC genre’),  eg, Sunday Too Far Away, Caddie and The Getting of Wisdom  through to The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Newsfront, My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant, marking the second half, 1975-80, of the first decade of the Australian film revival which had also, arguably, been a decade late in arriving

 

Picnic at Hanging Rock

While both the Australian and New German cinemas shared the basic search for a new audience starting from point zero: in both cases what was actually showing on each nation’s screens was controlled by overseas based distribution and exhibition interests. The major difference was that in Germany the production of ‘denazified’ genre films for domestic consumption resumed after the war (although there was a strong continuity in Germany between popular 30s and post-war film genres) while in Australia there was, at this time, “a complete vacuum of feeling as to what might constitute an Australian feature film”  (D & J ibid). In contrast, political protest was given strong voice at Oberhausen and was strategically taken up politically by the group’s only effective spokesman and ideologue, Alexander Kluge. He had varying success in directly addressing the vacuum created by the absence, both domestically and internationally, of an ‘autorenkino’ (authors’ cinema). In Australia on the revival of production, other than the establishment of a loosely integrated national film and TV school and an experimental film fund, there was, at least initially, no culturally coherent direction spoken or taken. There was little recent knowledge or history of audience responses beyond the variable barometer of critical and box office success. This meant that when success came on all fronts with Picnic at Hanging Rock, it was acclaimed as a breakthrough that, by the end of the 70s, looked more like a lone intrusion of Europeanness into the Australian landscape.

 

                                                                           ****                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                              

The initial skirmishes following the arrival of auteurism, such as the one recounted below, were confined to what can best be described as the margins of a post-war emergent Oz film culture strengthened by the film revival. What was being sensed here was an encounter with a new way of understanding style as not just the hallmark of a small number of gifted director-auteurs working in special conditions of creative freedom.. 

 

Sarris made no secret of the fact that he was reshaping the Cahiers politique as an instrument for asserting the superiority of American cinema. Robert Stam, in his book Film Theory, acknowledges that Sarris’s work, “at its best,” deployed his broad knowledge of cinema “to convey the genuine achievement of Hollywood cinema.”   Stam further describes Auteurism as “less a theory than a methodological focus” that “clearly represented an improvement over antecedent critical methodologies,” in so doing performing “an invaluable rescue operation for neglected films and genres” while playing “a major role in the academic legitimation of cinema studies”  (89-92).

 

Robert Stam  “The Americanisation of the Auteur Theory in Film Theory An Introduction  2000, 

Albert Moran, Tom O’Regan eds. The Australian Screen,  essays by O’Regan  “The Ocker Film” and Graeme Turner “The Period Film” 1989

Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka  The Screening of Australia  vol 2  1986                                           

John Hinde  Other People’s Pictures  ABC  1981

Tom O’Regan  Australian National Cinema  1996

Barrett Hodsdon The Elusive Auteur  2017

 

 

Addendum:  ‘Word thuggery’ at SUFG

 

In 1966, with Andrew Sarris and 'Movie' fuelled auteurist fervour, Bruce and Barrett Hodsdon, both then having a sizeable hand in the shaping of Sydney University’s Film Group's term programs, usually in consultation with their then mentor, John Flaus, decided that the twice weekly screenings offered the opportunity to immure members in the work of a chosen auteur. This was seen as a way of both focusing upon and redefining in criticism the creative role of the director in the commercial film industry, Hollywood being the paradigm. In this case the clear choice seemed to them to be Nicholas Ray, both having recently caught up with Johnny Guitar at a suburban “ranch night”.

 

Satyajit Ray

With Flaus’s doubtful assent Bruce had programmed, a double bill of films by the two Rays (Satyajit and Nick) on a Monday night during third term 1965, in the Union Theatre, SUFG's main venue. The former had established himself (quite rightly) from his first film Pather Panchali, as something of a film society and art house icon.*

 

Screened in the first half, the only locally available copy of  Satyajit's Devi,  a 16mm print of a b&w film in standard ratio, thrown into relief , wall to wall, by the brash 35mm CinemaScope-Eastmancolor spectacle of  Nick's Party Girl with the accompanying “ Party Girl, Party Girl” theme song behind the credits. Acting as a prologue to the ensuing drama is the sexually choreographed gyrations of  Cyd Charisse which drew an audible reaction, in approval (or otherwise), especially from those sitting in the front section of the theatre where self acknowledged cinephiles tended to sit (and still do), seemingly affirming Mas Generis's much more recent claim in Screening the Past that cinephilia “is a condition of sexual attraction to movies”. 

 

Nicholas Ray

The Hodsdons then programmed four more of Nicholas Ray's features – Bitter Victory, Johnny Guitar, Wind Across the Everglades, and Rebel Without a Cause, to be screened in the course of seven weeks during first term, 1966. The then SUFG President, Brian Murphy, insisted they could only have the four Ray films if the series commenced with a 16mm screening of  Bitter Victory in a rent-free venue,  the large former kitchen of a decaying, soon to be demolished building, in the eyes of the philistines aptly called The Blind Institute. 

 

A surprisingly large number of members crossed City Road to the Institute on a Friday night in March, to view, in those austere surroundings, the lingering death by scorpion bite of a Ray anti-hero played by Richard Burton, the setting being the North African desert during WW11. The President had also resolved to establish a roneoed newsletter in which members could vent their displeasure, or otherwise, at this precocious intrusion on their rights. 

 

It took several weeks for the uniformly hostile response (to the films as much as to the theory) from a small number of motivated members to appear in print in the newsletter which ran six issues. In advocating gradualism in the face of what he saw as overcompensation by the so-called 'new guard', Flaus claimed that it was a violation of a member's right to expect the honouring of a cultural contract for diversity in programming choices when he/she took out a membership. Mike Thornhill responded to Bruce's defence of auteurism in the newsletter with a charge of  'word thuggery'. Both Flaus and Thornhill were concerned with the priority given to the auteurist notion of 'interior meaning' (the equivalent of an authorial sub-text linked in the work of a chosen director) which they felt all but ignored the key literary element ( the role of the screenwriter). John was adamant that 'the concern should be what the work is, not almost exclusively with the artist's (read director's) intentions'. Bruce rebutted that the new pre-eminence given to form (the French term mise-en-scène had not yet been absorbed into the English lexicon) was not to neglect content (what the film is about) but was central to it.  

 

John Flaus

So on it went, intensely but briefly with a certain rancour lingering. Thornhill, in a chapter on film culture for the book 'Entertainment Arts in Australia' (1968), quoted 'introspective Sydney film buff, John Flaus and fellow 'member' of the Sydney Push (there was no formal membership),  in his essay. John is quoted defining a film buff as 'a compulsive aesthete of the cinema (who is often a secret romantic) caught in one of the cultural traps' 

                 

His pale ideology ensures that his own life will be a conformist one, but his imagination seeks a symbolic revolt. The Auteur concept of the director makes an ideal sublimate. He is the lone, creative (self-enclosed?) talent striving to impose his vision upon an insensitive world, yet he is  also the masterful leader whose command is law (on the set) (8).

 

John does not now have a strong recollection of this controversy that surrounded the emergent politics of auteurism. He suspects that he was more the soft voice while fellow Push members Mike Thornhill and Ken Quinnell were 'the hard cops'. (Does John now see himself, in retrospect, as something of a local Bazin figure – a reference to the 'Cahiers' critic and father figure of the French New Wave?). A suggestion was made at an informal late night gathering after the screening of  Party Girl ('give the new guys a chance') by ex-MUFS provocateur and aspiring filmmaker Bert Deling (Dalmas, Pure Shit), who was then living and working in Sydney. John opened his response in the newsletter with “the new guard, given a go - albeit restricted - in the first term 1966 programme - have overreached themselves (sic)”. This overreach was the overweighting in film selection by what was being claimed to be the main game in film criticism: the overriding attribution of individual creativity to the authorship of a chosen director especially in the Hollywood studio system. John saw screening five Ray films with the primary purpose of promoting the claimed directorial talents of a director, at times in creative tension with the system, as promoting  'a new orthodoxy' drawing on Andrew Sarris and 'Movie' magazine in the UK “that promoted Hitchcock and Hawks as the great directors”. For 'the new guard' Sarris opened up a new, engaging way of looking at Hollywood films. 

 

Raoul Walsh

In the terrain of classical Hollywood's 'journeyman director' hierarchy Flaus did concede a more singularly discernible directorial personality, for example, in Raoul Walsh's work behind the camera, over that of say Henry Hathaway's. John, from his later vantage point as a working actor in films became an increasingly astute observer, in his criticism, drawing the distinction between the director as the “setter of the scene” (metteur-en-scène) who competently but anonymously directs pretty much according to the set rules and conventions, as in much tv drama, and the director as auteur. In 1992 John wrote that the latter “shapes meaning through mise-en-scène” the what and the how unified through visual style – “the orchestration of meaning through the actors and assignment of dramatic priorities to pictorial factors,” in other words,“ the movie director's province of creativity”.

 

John's lengthy 1992 essay, “Thanks for Your Heart Bart” (9) (now accessible online), goes a long way towards redressing the imbalance of those days of auteur theory-inspired angst, standing as an insightful primer not only for aspiring actors but also for cinephiles. The forthcoming book by Barrett Hodsdon, The Elusive Auteur (2017) has potential to be something close to definitive, if that is possible, in the final laying to rest of a controversy spanning back at least to 1966 and the shock of those five Nicholas Ray films in the SUFG program in six months.

                                                                                     

 The above essay was first published on “Film Alert 101’ in April 2016

* A better option for the double bill (if prints and then been available) would have been the first film of each director : ‘Pather Panchali’ and ‘They Live By Night’, or say ‘Charulata’ and ‘Johnny Guitar’.

*************

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

 6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

                                                                                                                                           

Independent auteurs: Robert Bresson (73) b.07   Jacques Tati (69) b.08    Jean-Pierre Melville (71) b.17 Louis Malle (65) b.32     Cahiers du Cinema Group:  Eric Rohmer (72) b.20   Jacques Rivette (66) b.28   Jean-Luc Godard (74) b.30   Claude Chabrol (70) b.30   François Truffaut (64) b.32     Left Bank School:  Georges Franju (67) b.12   Marguerite Duras* b.14   Chris Marker b.21   Alain Resnais (73) b.22   Alain Robbe-Grillet b.22    Agnès Varda* (09) b.28     Originals:  Jean Rouch b.17   René Allio b.24   Jacques Rozier b.26  Jacques Demy b.31

Part 1 The New Wave: The Cahiers du Cinema Group

The above listing of directors of art films in audience reception, at times crossing into the mainstream, might give a misleading impression: that the French New Wave was an art film movement limited to a small group of filmmakers comparable to Italian neo-realism and German cinematic expressionism. But it was more than a cinema art movement not only because of the industry-wide dimension of the transformation that initially resulted but, as Alan Williams points out, (328) there was also “a wide range of highly diverse temperaments and goals within the ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ group themselves.” , 

Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard in the offices
of Cahiers du Cinema

François Truffaut led the attack, in Cahiers, on mainstream French cinema of the 40s and 50s, “the Tradition of Quality,” labelled in Cahiers as ‘le cinéma de papa’ with its repetitively themed literary scripts based on psychological realism, smoothly photographed and edited star vehicles designed to more than compete with aspiring American product. The stories were either in period with a French emphasis or “focus[ed] predominantly on the lives and loves of young middle class characters. The working class which had been a strong motif in earlier periods of French filmmaking, was largely excluded.” (Temple & Witt 185).  

In contrast, heroes of loosely structured New Wave films lacked personal or social integration. The New Wave's resistance to Hollywood's commercial domination coupled with inspiration drawn from the vitality and formal excellence of auteur directors, contrasted with Cinema de Papa's studio-bound creative conservatism which was in financial crisis. This prompted the introduction of government financial incentives favouring independent film production. 

Neither a genre nor a school, the New Wave initially gained strength from its divergency and an imperative to experiment with narrative on low budgets. A hundred new filmmakers made their debut from the mid-fifties to the early 60s, filmmakers often beginning with short films. “The New Wave can be seen as a continued attempt to establish the main codes of classical American cinema and to subvert, undermine, and rework them.” (Flitterman-Lewis 31)

Alexandre Astruc with his essay on “Le Caméra stylo” (‘writing with the camera’), and Roger Leenhardt, were important influences on filmmaking ambitions. Leenhardt’s influential essays on cinema in ‘Esprit’ are seen to have initiated modern film criticism in France. They were responsible for first luring Cahiers’ editor and theorist André Bazin into studying film (Dudley Andrew). In terms of the actual filmmaking, Melville’s Bob le flambeur (1955) and Agnès Varda's Le Pointe-Courte (1956) are the widely considered precursors to the New Wave.  Although Varda's first feature failed to find an audience her experiment in narrative with an audience-distancing dual structure, exemplified the subsequent commitment to low budgets to preserve freedom of expression over the compromises generally required to reach a mass audience. 

Jean-Pierre Melville

Only given its full critical due in retrospect, Bob le flambeur is the first of five personal entries to the gangster genre by Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73), spanning nearly two decades peaking with the masterpiece of the series, Le Samourai (1967). David Thomson describes Bob le flambeur as a “lyrical documentary-thriller...made astringent by the casual humour, the remarkable eye for honour, friendship   and double cross, and the pleasure at a world that Melville made his own.”  Independently produced on low budgets - Melville had set up his own studio in Paris - he achieves a kind of generic purity, a finely understated tough romanticism revivifying as policiers the American gangster film, atmospherically filmed on location with emergent actors of the time.  

The original phrase nouvelle vague was applied by a journalist in the weekly L'Express in October 1957 to a whole generation formed culturally and politically after Liberation in 1944.  In relation to the film industry the term New Wave was adopted to identify a brief period of upheaval and innovation in the French industry. Audiences for the New Wave films peaked during this flood of releases and then in the course of 18 months fell by 50 per cent. The first features of Cahiers critics Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (L’Eau à la bouche/A Game for Six Lovers) were released in 1959. Their approach to the conventions of mainstream cinema was, on the whole, more inventively casual and freewheeling than outright subversive.

Initially the “real new wave auteurs”, relied on enlightened producers, intent as they were on making films in improvisational mode rather than from well prepared scripts required by the state support scheme established for more 'difficult' films (Kovács 306). The period after 1962-3, it is suggested, should be referred to as the post-New Wave. The film industry recovered from its crisis in the late 50s, structurally largely unaffected. The aesthetic impact of the New Wave filmmakers - deployment of Godardian fragmentation and  improvisation in camera technique and performance -  was more permanent, both across Europe and internationally.  

Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) early brought an adventurously spontaneous approach to genre-based narrative. Breathless (1959), Godard admitted, emerged not as the realist narrative he had initially intended to have been more linear like his second feature, Le Petit Soldat, (1960).  In Godard's fourth feature, Vivre sa vie (1962), his interests in female subjectivity and formal manipulation - the radical exploration of film's sound-image relationship - are most apparent. It also soon became clear that Godard was the most political of the core Cahiers group. Initially, however, he showed anarchic disinterest in taking a political position on the Algerian war in Le Petit Soldat, preferring a confused identification with the right-wing militant Michel. The anti-terrorism position taken in Le Petit Soldat transmutes into the detached political didacticism of his fifth feature, Les Carabiniers/The Riflemen (1963), foreshadowing his shift into a radical dialectic of fiction and documentary modes .  More on Godard will follow in 6 (11-13).

François Truffaut 

François Truffaut (1932-84), after the autobiographical Les Quatre Cents Coups/ The 400 Blows (1959), made an ironically playful, inventively contradictory genre picture with Charles Aznavour playing a caricatured gangster in Tirez sur le pianiste /Shoot the Piano Player (1960).  Its failure with audiences prompted Truffaut to mute the clash of tones and authorial markers in his third feature Jules et Jim (1961), uniting the “innocence” of his first feature with the “experience” of the second, as he described it (Monaco 47). He settled into a varied, modified classicism in a more relaxed semi-autobiographical stream with Baisers Volés/Stolen Kisses (1968)  counted among Truffaut’s best films, the second of four features in the Antione Doniel /Jean-Paul Leaud series beginning with The 400 Blows. One of his most underrated films, La Peau Douce/ Soft Skin (1964), is the first of three features made across more than two decades on the theme of frustrated passion, Truffaut in effect establishing his own ‘non-genre’. 

His inheritance from Renoir can be felt in a number of his films. In various on-going collaborations with four writers Truffaut’s more overt attempt to evoke ‘pure’  Hitchcockian cinema fails to overcome their differences in temperament in La Mariée était en noir /The Bride Wore Black (1968) but is better realised in the combining of genres in La Sirène du Mississippi / Mississippi Mermaid (1969).  He also made a succession of exploratory historical - literary adaptations:  L’Enfant sauvage/ The Wild Child (1970) in which Truffaut also played the lead role and narrates, Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent/ Two English Girls on the Continent (1971), an adaptation of a novel by the author of Jules and Jim, Henri Pierre Roché,  L’Histoire d’Adèle H / The Story of Adele H (1975) an account of sexual alienation based on the diaries of Victor Hugo’s daughter, and La Chambre verte/ The Green Room (1978) a  further example of Truffaut’s capacity for self-renewal in an adaptation of a dark short story by Henry James with Truffaut again playing the lead.  Bordwell notes “that Truffaut exemplifies the degree to which the norms of classical and art-cinema narration can peacefully co-exist […the] synthesising of certain Hollywood norms with art-cinema notions of psychological realism” ('Narration' 316). 

Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) played an important part in launching the New Wave when between 1958-60 he financed short films by Rivette and Rohmer, with whom he collaborated on the first serious book length study of Hitchcock’s films. Monaco describes the films of Hitchcock and Fritz Lang as “Chabrol’s paragons.”  He financed Rohmer’s first feature, Le Signe du lion (1959),  Philippe de Broca’s first, Les Jeux de l’amour (1960), and helped finance Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1961) more than two years in the making. Chabrol formed his own company which served as a nucleus for the early cooperative efforts of the ‘Cahiers’ critics-turned filmmakers and Chabrol deserves more credit than he received for the practical intelligence he showed in financing the early New Wave films (Monaco 254).  

His first feature, generally regarded as the first feature of the New Wave, Le Beau Serge/ Handsome Serge,(1959), with autobiographical elements filmed in his town where Chabrol spent his adolescence during the Occupation, was financed with inherited money. It served  as a practical demonstration to aspiring New Wave filmmakers of how a feature could be made on a small budget. Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins (1959) are thematically companion films and the latter was the beginning of a collaboration with writer and friend Paul Gégauff - on-going collaborations both in front of and behind the camera was central to Chabrol’s accomplished craftsmanship and mode of working.  Les Cousins (1959) was the only major commercial success in his first filmmaking phase of 8 features 1958-63 which can be identified as Chabrol’s ‘art film period’. His fourth feature, Les Bonnes Femmes / The Good Girls (1960), which Chabrol nominated as his best film, is centred on four Parisian shopgirls entertaining dreams for a better life, but ending in a murder. Subtle ironies unexpectedly emerge with emotional affect through a complex formal structure.  Chabrol’s achievement in this initial personal phase of his filmmaking career was better understood retrospectively in light of the ironic subtleties in “a distillation of Chabrol’s preoccupations” almost universally praised by the critics in Le Boucher/ The Butcher (1970). 

The survival phase of 6 commercial assignments 1964-8 ended with the breakthrough, critically and commercially, of Les Biches (1968) beginning Chabrol’s fully mature phase in 9 features 1968-73 all variants on the psychological thriller genre pioneered in the French cinema by Henri-Georges Clouzot*, usually centred on triangular relationships. In the films most fully realised in this phase such as La Femme Infidèle/ The Unfaithful Wife (1969), Que la Bete Meure/ This Man Must Die (1969)  and Le Boucher, culminating with Les Noces rouges/ Wedding in Blood (1973), Susan Hayward sees Chabrol as providing “a social document of contemporary France that is far from flattering in its continuous criticism of bourgeois morality.” She further sees, as a constant, Chabrol’s obsession with the very fine line between good and evil, morality and madness, stupidity and frustration, “the way that social/bourgeois hypocrisy papers over that (260-1).” Chabrol is described by Alan Williams as a Left, no longer practicing, Catholic “who associated with Right anarchists” (344), his Catholicism seemingly displaced by the films of Lang and Hitchcock. He and Rohmer have been identified as forming Cahiers’ “Catholic wing.” Hayward describes Rohmer’s films as “more intimist” than Chabrol’s - “his moral fiction does not particularly address the social questions of the time but does paint the social mores of a certain intellectual middle class [and their] practices of self-deception (ibid 262).”  See also René Allio below. 

* On genre Monaco writes :  “There are seldom identifiable protagonist/antagonist relationships in Chabrol films…His world is internal and global rather than dialectical. It is not ratiocination [conscious reasoning] that fascinates Chabrol, but guilt, psychopathy, and violent passion. His films, then, are much closer structurally to the Films Noirs of the late forties, and early fifties.”  Monaco suggests they be called ‘Films Noirs en coleurs’ (256).

Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette (1928-2016) in some ways closer in his filmmaking to the Left Bank group especially Resnais, Rivette was initially the least prolific of the core Cahiers group in terms of individual films but not in screen time. The original Out One (1971), screened publicly only once, ran 760 minutes edited with the intention of it screening as a serial on television but rejected by O.R.T.F.  Rivette then recut the film to 255 mins as Out One Spectre (1974) with a different narrative, from the more than 25 hours of film he had shot for Out One.  These two films are more closely related to the traditions of Louis Feuillade and the silent film serial which Feuillade pioneered, the story not following a straight line. Two unresolved story lines largely improvised - one a mystery story involving 13 conspirators, two theatre groups and two crazed outsiders, the other a realistic story involving the same people that makes no sense.   

La Religieuse/The Nun  (1965 ) is a classical literary adaptation starring Anna Karina based on a story by Diderot and also a play which Rivette had directed in the theatre. It was originally banned on the grounds of blasphemy (the banning apparently initiated by Madame de Gaulle), to become Rivette’s only financial success after the ban was lifted years later. Céline et Julie vont en Bateau/ Céline et Julie Go Boating (1975) more accurately translates as the less active ‘Celine and Julie Taken for a Ride’ running 3 hours. The pleasurable, innovative narrative play on fictive mystery in the House of Fiction - a concern with fiction as an end in itself- is linked also to Rivette’s love of cinema showing that, relaxed and assured in his direction, Rivette could make a potentially successful art film deploying a similar framework of split narratives to that of Out One Spectre*.  

In an experimental narrative such as the 256 minute L'Amour  Fou /Mad Love (1968) Rivette combines 35 and 16mm filming, merging fiction and documentary elements. The initial element of the film is actors rehearsing a play by Racine. Then follows the psychodrama of the breakdown of a marriage and the descent into madness filmed on 35mm. The third element is the rehearsals for the psychodrama of the couple filmed on 16mm by a “documentary crew.” James Monaco describes it as “like La Religieuse  - an essay on the psychological aspects of individual freedom ” (318).  The psychology is simpler and more direct “without the fictive mystery” of Out One Spectre and Celine and Julie. “ The result is that the dialectical tensions between the various combinations of cinema, stage and television in L’Amour fou  are vividly clear, whereas the comparable oppositions in [his first film] Paris nous appartient/ Paris is Ours (1960) are “muddy and indistinct,” and those in La Religieuse were only implied” (ibid). Monaco notes that by this time Rivette has completely rejected the concept of filmmaking conventionally divided it into three distinct motions - script writing, production and shooting, and montage -  the stages in Rivette’s words “should be be totally interactive.“

Eric Rohmer (as he appears in Jacques Rivette's 
Out One)

A fellow ‘Cahiers’ critic and close friend of Rivette’s, Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) began to more clearly focus on a neo-classical style in building up a personal universe on the screen filmed with a love of natural light, a series of elegant, deceptively simple explorations of his characters' emotions, sexual urges, hesitations and moral dilemmas. In the six ‘contes moraux’ through the sixties, 1962-72, each “a story,” as he explained “which deals less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it.” The moral tales come to full fruition with third and fifth of the series, Ma nuit chez Maud/ My Night at Maud’s (1969)  and Le Genou de Claire/Claire’s Knee (1970) which Molly Haskell aptly sums up as “breathtakingly subtle and brilliantly cast and enacted amorous skirmishes” (Cinema vol 2 ed. R.Roud). In characterising Rohmer’s breakthrough with the international arthouse audience Rohmer additionally gives us time, through his film series, David Thomson concludes, “to consider how people are beautiful.” (Biographical Dictionary 898).

Certain 'Catholic tendencies' in the politics of the Cahiers group reflected critical thinking based in the realist film theory of its founding editor and spiritual father, André Bazin. Their filmmaking was an extension of their criticism – a politique des auteurs  inspired by the talent of many directors working in Hollywood genres. The main rival, Positif, also auteurist but with an anti-clerical left-wing stance, attacked Godard's and Bresson's films while supporting the Left Bank filmmakers' literary-based modernism and leftist politics as well as the work of others ignored by Cahiers in the early part of their careers such as Cavalier, Sautet, and Pialat (Nowell-Smith ed. 578).                                                                                                        

Jacques Rozier

One of the neglected films of The New Wave Jacques Rozier's  Adieu Philippine (1961), has affinity with the gracefully lyrical, humane cinema of Jacques Demy (1931-90) in, for example, Lola (1960), Les Baie des Anges/The Bay of Angels (1962) and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/ The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Rozier’s film exemplifies some of the more memorable qualities of New Wave cinema: street shooting with non-professional actors, emphatic visual devices capturing something of the post-war Americanisation of French culture and the forced hedonism of mass tourism, yet in the shadow of the Algerian conflict as we are reminded in the opening credits. Adieu Philippine failed at the time, not helped by money problems which delayed its completion for two years. For Rozier's subsequent work including five feature films 1973-2007 see Wikipeda. Adieu Philippine was acknowledged in Cahiers du Cinema for its pioneering application of cinema-vérité techniques to a fictional subject - the loss of teen-age innocence - with rare lyrical sensibility. The title derives from a French kid's wishing game in which “philippine” means “sweetheart.” 

Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch (1917-2004) was one of the pioneers of ethnographic filmmaking which, as Brian Winston points out, came from “a French tradition which concentrates on cosmologies with a kinship to surrealism, rather than a scientific study of kinship patterns.” His documentary practice, like that of Chris Marker, came from a French style of personal film that moves beyond using the camera for other than documenting objectively observed processes and behaviour. Rouch was an avid filmgoer who attended a film club, Cercle du Cinéma, founded in 1934 by Georges Franju and Henri Langlois which led eventually to the founding of the Cinémathèque Francaise. Rouch's consuming enthusiasm for cinema was closely connected to his interest in the Surrealism of Buñuel and Dali. Peter Wollen notes that these interests, “mixed with the solvent of ethnography,”  Rouch began film-making after the war having worked as an engineer in Niger. He bought a 16mm Bell & Howell camera and returned to Africa where he made films concerning cosmology – magic, possession and children's games – topics with a strong surrealist resonance in addition to their ethnographic interest. He liked the way Robert Flaherty mixed documentary and fiction in Nanook of the North (1922) and Rouch followed Flaherty's practice of screening his films to those who appeared in them. He also had them contribute to the post synched soundtrack. Improvisation became central to Rouch's practice as he discarded altogether the rhetoric of scientific objectivity using new sound technology to foster interactivity. His interest became the exploration of film's double nature in a form of ethno-fiction erasing what he saw as the false line between fiction and documentary (Wollen).

Rouch's pioneering work in ethnography shading into ethno-fiction has not been without its African critics for wrongful portrayals of Africa and Africans who see his films as perpetuating the exoticism and exploitation initiated by colonialism, most notably by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike who has called into question a whole tradition of ethnographic filmmaking as Rouch and others practised it. At the same time Rouch worked with black actors with whom he jointly produced scripts and who later acknowledged his role in them becoming filmmakers themselves.  Both Oumarou Ganda (in Moi un noir) and Safi Faye (in Petit à petit) said they disliked some of the falsifications made by Rouch in these films. Strongest criticism by Africans has been directed at Rouch's most controversial film, Les maîtres fous, in what is claimed to be his falsification for subversive effect of the significance of the images of religious ritual and possession among the Huaka sect in Ghana. Teshome Gabriel charged that Rouch's “obsession with penetrating the African mind” reached its climax in Les maître fous and in “the growing tendency to personalise and fictionalise” in Rouch's later films” (Ukadike 51).

Rouch influenced, and in turn was influenced by the New Wave. Kovács notes “that right from the beginning Godard's style was strongly influenced by Jean Rouch's self-reflective direct style of La Pyramid Humaine (1959),  a form of psychodrama made with students in Abidjan applied to Paris in Chronique d'un Été/Chronicle of a Summer (1960) co-directed with Edgar Morin.” Godard was attracted by “the way visual segments from real life, can be loosely put side by side and organised by a subjective voice-over or onscreen narrative.” Rather than representing reality socially, as in neorealism, in cinema-vérité “subjective views are expressed through images that give the impression of a direct relationship with reality.”  Kovács further notes that after 1967 such cinema-vérité style  disappears from Godard's films as he entered a new political phase in his filmmaking (170).

Not the poster used in Australia

* Myself and Film Alert editor Geoff Gardner can both attest to the existence of a substantial ‘found’ art house audience for Celine and Julie in Australia.  As a cinephiles’ investment and as regard for the film we jointly bought the Australian theatrical rights after its screenings at the Sydney and Melbourne Festivals 1975 failed to attract local distributor interest. We recovered more than several times over what, by today’s standards, was a fairly modest outlay for rights advance and the 35mm print (we later also acquired a 16mm print courtesy of the French Embassy) then paying the producers a further 25% of rentals and gross receipts after recovery of our initial outlay. The growing local cult following was apparently not exceeded internationally, even in France. This seemed to us a mysterious if welcome windfall given that we had almost no promotional material, mainly depending on positive reviews and word of mouth from festival, other single screenings and short seasons in independent cinemas. The 3 hour running time may offer part explanation for lack of distributor-exhibitor interest.  Celine and Julie is best seen to weave its magic, I think, without an interval break for which there was no provision on the release prints. In the decennial world poll just published it was voted by the critics at 78th position, from 127 in 2012. BH

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills