‘Up to our eyes in it’: theory and practice of widescreen in the French New Wave

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the relationship between widescreen and the New Wave. The new CinemaScope format arrived in France as the Cahiers du cinéma critics were elaborating the theoretical basis of what would become New Wave filmmaking. Many of the Cahiers critics (Bazin, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette) identified widescreen with the cinema of the future, suggesting that the New Wave would be widescreen. In fact, CinemaScope proved to be a relatively short-lived format and few New Wave directors employed it. In technological terms, the New Wave is much more closely identified with the lightweight equipment of location shooting. Nonetheless, the debates around the introduction of widescreen and the subsequent use of the scope format by Truffaut and Godard illuminate some of the crucial tensions within the New Wave and the culture of film criticism and cinephilia from which it developed. The arguments advanced in favour of widescreen in the mid 1950s were often contradictory and at cross-purposes, as were the filmmaking practices of Truffaut and Godard. Ultimately, the New Wave turned out not to be widescreen but the format nonetheless operated as a space offering a provisional resolution for some of the movement’s key contradictions.