A short
appreciation for
The French New Wave
BY KATE GLAD, STATEMENT DESIGNER
Wednesday, January 30, 2019 // The Statement
3B
F
ilms are meant to, among other
things, transport their audience.
It is an art form with the ability
to invite viewers to spend a night in the
humid Hong Kong air, heavy with stolen
glances and stolen spouses. Or hold
the audience’s hand through the many
dialects of the Chinese language as the
director escorts viewers through the
subtleties of a character’s sadness, as in
“In the Mood for Love.” A film is also
a window into a French dairy country
cabin in World War II with pipe smoke
snaking around, as in the opening
scene of 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds.”
Or perhaps they prefer to stay in their
Greenwich Village apartment — the one
with the “Rear Window.”
But the movement I want to talk
about exists in a different place and
time entirely — The French New Wave.
It disturbed the streets of Paris and
wreaked havoc on the paradigms of
cinema. The French New Wave didn’t
just transport the audience — it also
facilitated and created a transition in
the way filmmakers think about the art
form.
Starting in 1958 and continuing into the
late ’60s, The French New Wave, known
in French as the “La Nouvelle Vague,”
sought to make films in a different style
than the hyper-continuous aesthetic
that had originated in Hollywood.
Directors like François Roland Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy
created a new language for film that
gave the audience more credit. They
believed their viewers would not only
enjoy the narrative stories they told,
but would also understand the artistic,
formal choices having to do with time.
According to the title of Andrei
Tarkovsky’s legendary book, cinema
is “Sculpting in Time.” Until the New
Wave, time on film was replicated as
close to reality as possible: Days or
weeks were sometimes compressed
with a dissolve transition technique if
a story had to be told over a long time,
but still allowed the narrative beats to
unfold minute by minute. New Wave
directors abstracted time in two main
ways: jump cuts and real time sequences.
Both equally revolutionary and equally
upsetting to the establishment, these
techniques allowed for more complex
stories to be created and began to really
expand cinematic artistry beyond the
page.
Courtesy of Kate Glad