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

