French New Wave Essay

Introduction

The French New Wave was an artistic movement in the film making industry, that lasted between the years 1959-1964 The French New Wave was a self-aware movements based around a rejection against the trends of traditionally Hollywood-styled film. In its own sense, the French New Wave movement was an innovative project, who's influence on worldwide film over the past decades has been profound. The French New Wave has been credited for birthing 'auteur' and saw the rise of 'camera style', an explosion of young and vibrant film makers, and has been admired as a 'cinematic revoltution'.

Origin

The French New Wave movement's origin seem to stem from Alexandre Astruc's 1948 publication from L'Écran Français; titled 'The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo'. Alexandre Astruc; a French film director and critic, was fundamental to the movement's progress, it was his ideologies and beliefs that would be later be expanded by fellow film maker/critic 'François Truffaut' and the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine.

“the cinema is becoming a means of expression like the other arts before it, especially painting and the novel. It is no longer a spectacle, a diversion equivalent to the old boulevard theater...it is becoming, little by little, a visual language, i.e. a medium in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, be they abstract or whatever, or in which he can communicate his obsessions as accurately as he can today in essay or novel”.
- Alexandre Astruc

By declaring this, Astruc was implying that, cinema had now developed into an expression of the 'artist's' imagination. The same way painting is personal to its artist, film; as an industry, had now become just as much of an artistic life-form as other forms of emotional imagination.

"Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with this fine movie."
- François Truffaut
In 2008, Truffaut claimed that he took inspiration for his film 'The 400 Blows' from young American film maker; Morris Engel's 'Little Fugitive', showing his appreciation expecially in the film's spontaneous production style. By this quotation, Truffaut connotes that much of the French New Wave movement built its foundation on the Little Fugitive. Also signifying that the film provided the 'guidelines' on independent production.