The Nouvelle Vague

Routinely hailed as one of the most important movements in modern cinema, routinely derided as pretentious macho wank.

I've seen tons of Truffaut and Godard, but very little beyond that: out of the "big five", I've only seen one Rohmer, and nothing at all by Chabrol or Rivette.

I've also been getting more and more interested in the people working close to the nouvelle vague that aren't actually part of the movement - I love Jacques Demy, and am really curious about Luc Moullet.

Looking at Truffaut's movies now, it's sort of hard to see what made them so revolutionary at the time: he's very much a traditionalist film-maker, a storyteller. Apart from Tirez Sur Le Pianiste his movies are pretty conventional, storywise; of course, this needn't be a drawback. So he's less immediatley exciting to talk about than Godard, but he's got a pretty big catalogue, and there's some really good movies in there. I actually love the second Doinel movie best out of that series; also big into Jules Et Jim and Les Deux Anglaises Et Le Continent. Out of his latter work, I reccomend Le Dernier Metro, which on paper looks a bit too much like a glamour movie (Truffaut directing Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu in a movie about occupation era France!), but is actually quite powerful and engrossing; and Vivrement Dimanche, a Hitchcock tribute with a beautiful beautiful Fanny Ardant starring.

Godard is a pretty clear case of love it or hate it, I guess. Unlike Truffaut his movies still feel radically different from anything else, though perhaps a bit quaint as well (they're such time capsules.) I suppose I would have less patience for the guy if his personal obsessions (classic Hollywood cinema, leftist politics, pop art, noir fiction) didn't overlap so much with mine, but I love the energy and wild creativity of his 60's stuff. And for all his critical theory, at heart the guy has a fondness for what makes for great genre cinema - guns, explosions, car chases, dudes looking badass and girls looking hot. His movies also tend to be extremley fast-paced, which I enjoy. And though he's mainly considered an intellectual director, Pierrot Le Fou is a film that I find myself very emotionally attuned to.

Anyway, here's the thread to talk about Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette - and Louis Malle and Alain Resnais and Roger Vadim and whoever else can be snuck in, as well as actors like Jean Paul Belmondo, Jean Pierre Leaud, Anna Karina, Chantal Goya, Charles Aznavour, etc.

That's interesting about Truffaut - when I first saw those movies I assumed that what made them revolutionary at the time were the frank representations of sexuality, broken homes, etc. But I've recently read some excerpts of his famous Une Certaine Tendence essay and he rails against what he perceived as formulaic shock value - at one point denouncing movies "made by the bourgeios for the bourgeios to shock the burgeios" or something to that effect.

I think Louis Malle was seen as someone outside the New Wave when it happened, though certainly his movies share a lot with that sensibility. Melville was a father figure - he trained a lot of the nouvelle vague guys and they admired his semi-indie production mentality.

Saw today: Manon 70, directed by Jean Aurel (who did a few scripts for Truffaut) and starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Claude Brialy (who shows up in every other Nouvelle Vague flick), so I say it's close enough. It's about a young journalist who falls in love with a high rent call girl*; she loves him too, but refuses to give up her vocation because, hey, she likes nice clothes and shit. It's a pretty stereotypically french movie (oh, the french and their sexual permissiveness) which struggles to attain some Blow Up type commentary on the shallowness of yoof. But it's pretty gorgeously filmed, the music (by Serge Gainsbourg!) is great, and the whole thing is handled whimsically enough to provide a few laughs and a general positive impression, even though the main characters (including Brialy, who keeps asking his boss at the paper for advance money and ends up not writing any stories) are pretty hard to love. Not a movie to seek out or anything, but worth a rental.

* Well actually this might not be the best term for her: she basically dates rich guys and lets them pamper her. Some are aware of the financial nature of the set-up, some aren't.

Godard is a great director to follow chronologically, because during the 60's he was so full of ideas and working so fast, so even the weakest films from that era end up being entertaining as snapshots of whatever thoughts were floating around his head at the time; he couldn't really get the breathing space to be truly tedious.