All the French New Wave on the Criterion Channel, 1958-64

tl;dr: The shorts are pretty good too

Just as “Impressionism” now refers to the works of a list of eight to ten painters more than a coherent artistic movement, “French New Wave” is defined as the nine directors below. The time period chosen is that of peak creativity, in which they were churning out all-time masterpieces at a better-than-Ty Cobb average. An asterisk denotes something especially recommended, but they’re all recommended except Muriel.

Jean-Luc Godard

*Vivre sa vie (1962)

*Band of Outsiders (1964)

Breathless (1960)

A Woman Is a Woman (1961)

A Married Woman (1964)

Le petit soldat (1963)

Contempt (1963)

Shorts: Une histoire d’eau (with Truffaut), Charlotte et son Jules

Just about all of these could get an asterisk, except maybe Contempt, and even that’s good softcore. The early short Charlotte et son Jules, in which Jean-Paul Belmondo goes on a misogynistic tirade against his ex, who ignores him until the punchline, lays the thematic problems Godard would spend the next decade working out. While his eventual solution—misanthropy—was relatively uninteresting, the process he went through to get there remains one of cinema’s great bodies of work. Of course he had plenty of help—note that Contempt is the movie in which he constrains Raoul Coutard, the Nouvelle Vague’s still undersung secret weapon, to be most conventional. The other crucial contributors are the actresses who are able to push back against Godard’s conceptions (or to make JLG push back against JLG, inasmuch as that’s different): famously Jean Seberg and Anna Karina, but also the relatively meek Macha Méril, who complicates A Married Woman’s critique of advertising’s flattening the sculptural to 2D by making two dimensions seem as many as one can reasonably deal with. It all comes together best in Vivre sa vie, with Godard and Coutard throwing their entire bag of tricks—mirror compositions, carefully planned shots to show interiors and exteriors to their full extent, naturalistic yet uncannily high-contrast lighting—into giving Karina the opportunity to be the most interesting person in the world, which she takes up as well as Falconetti did. (Some of these rotate off Criterion at the end of the month, so watch those first if you’re following along at home.)

François Truffaut

*Jules and Jim (1962)

*The 400 Blows (1959)

Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

The Soft Skin (1964)

Shorts: Une histoire d’eau (with Godard), Antoine and Colette

I thought I’d seen The 400 Blows because who hasn’t seen The 400 Blows and it took me about half an hour to work out I hadn’t. Not sure if there’s a word for discovering a great movie one thought one had already discovered, but it’s a joy. Still, Jules and Jim is greater still, in very large part due to Jeanne Moreau, who deconstructs the manie non-pixie dream girl archetype as soon as she invents it, and did I mention Raoul Coutard? And Shoot the Piano Player is probably directed with more assurance, and is certainly funnier, if less personal. By the time of The Soft Skin Truffaut had almost become just a (very good) mainstream filmmaker. Antoine and Colette is worthwhile enough, but Une histoire d’eau is of deeper interest: Godard remixes some of Truffaut’s early footage without voiceovering its charm to death (maybe because the female character gets the voiceover.) Still, The 400 Blows was my major discovery during this project, and while it would’ve been nice to come out for something more hidden, don’t look a gift horse etc.

Jacques Demy

*The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

*Bay of Angels (1963)

Lola (1961)

Shorts: Ars, La luxure

Demy is the outlier on this list, not least because of his lack of interest in Paris, even as an absence. His case for inclusion here depends less on his marriage and more on his deployment of the Nouvelle Vague’s other secret weapon, Michel Legrand. Not only do his scores for Demy keep getting better—the main theme of Umbrellas remained burned into my brain despite my not hearing it since I watched The Best of Youth fifteen years ago—their movieness helps to emphasize that the director’s unabashed Romanticism is quite aware that the twentieth century exists, no matter how Balzacian his scenarios might be. It’s just that the modern doesn’t always win: sometimes your faith in a prodigal love is rewarded; sometimes losing to the laws of probability doesn’t matter if you’re Jeanne Moreau. And sometimes you just lose, in which case you might as well lose beautifully. The shorts show greater range and aren’t as good.

Agnès Varda

*Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Shorts: *L’opéra mouffe, Les fiancés du pont Macdonald, Du côté de la côte

She had the sharpest eye of her generation, maybe because she found anything could be worth looking at, if looked at right. This might be best displayed in the early L’opéra mouffe, in which real and constructed sights of Rue Mouffetard are arranged according to her own quizzical taxonomies (barflies! wet weather gear!), revealing odd correspondences, like that between her pregnant belly and a pumpkin that becomes the first of sevral objects to have their insides end up on the outside. You can even see it in the extremely minor Riviera promo Du côté de la côte, in which it ennobles mass tourism by positing it as a set of circumstances under which one can look at things right. By the time she got to Cléo she had reached the now standard conclusions that there was more than one right way to look at things, and that women’s ways and men’s ways were, on average, different, and that sometimes you just want to wear a new hat on a Tuesday, dammit. Plus in the movie-within-a-movie, she becomes possibly the only person to get away with making fun of Godard.

Éric Rohmer

Shorts: *Nadja in Paris, The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne’s Career, Véronique and Her Dunce

Rohmer’s fetishism was apparent from the beginning: the most notable thing about Véronique and Her Dunce is a shoe removal scene Quentin Tarantino would appreciate. His moralism took a bit longer to mature. The 23-minute Bakery Girl of Monceau unfurls Barbet Schroeder’s caddishness smoothly, leaving viewers to guess at his effect on the eponymous character, while the 55-minute Suzanne’s Career, despite its clear winner, seems somehow under-didactic, becoming just a bunch of stuff that happened to some cool young Parisians. Best of all is Nadja in Paris, which literally is just a bunch of stuff observed by a cool young temporary Parisian, but thanks to the privilege of documentary feels like the fullest picture of non-monumental Paris the Nouvelle Vague produced. Kind of nice to know that Nadja Tesich went on to become a major antiwar activist in the U.S.

Alain Resnais

*Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Muriel (1963)

Short: *Le chant du styrène

As a Kaelite, however gradually lapsing, I had dutifully avoided Resnais, save for Night and Fog and the late Wild Grass, until now. And it turns out Hiroshima mon amour, at least, is pretty good? It feels very much like, well, a structurally-minded French art film, with leads who walk like leads and neon in black-and-white. Most surprisingly to me, Duras’s screenplay doesn’t seem especially excessive. Muriel’s voiceovers overlapping spuriously related footage is excessive, a failed experiment if not an ignoble one, while Le chant du styrène dispenses with people in favor of plastic and might be his most likable work. I’m now very interested to see how I’ll react to Marienbad (not on Criterion) but I think I’ll give it a few years.

Claude Chabrol

*Le beau Serge (1958)

Les cousins (1959)

Chabrol’s relative position has fallen during my lifetime, so it’s worth a reminder that these attempts to merge Renoir with Hitchcock were key to the initial export of the Nouvelle Vague. And Le beau Serge, in which Renoir wins Pyrrhically, holds up: it’s an unsentimental slice of country life in which the educated boy learns, violently, that you can’t go home again. One’s attitude toward the mirror piece Les cousins will depend on how much one thinks the country boy in the city deserves what’s coming to him.

Jacques Rivette

Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

From the beginning, Rivette was willing to take his time—Paris Belongs to Us is the longest movie discussed here, and through its meanderings through Pericles and parties that don’t seem like much fun, he gives us the most thorough depiction of boho life of that time and place. Then around the two-hour mark he abruptly threatens to turn the picture into a completely different movie, then chickens out, and that’s it. Clearly two and a bit hours wasn’t enough for him.

Chris Marker

Short: *La jetée

You may have heard of this one: the second-greatest short and the second-greatest sci-fi movies (losing in both cases to Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century), full of imagery that British people would spend decades ripping off. As ever, I wish more of his work was readily available in better quality than YouTube fan uploads.