Editorial: the first wave

Abstract

The Nouvelle Vague again? As scholars in the field will know, there is probably no era of French cinema, and no set of filmmakers, that have been studied as extensively as the New Wave, probably not even the Golden Age of the 1930s. Academic publishing continues to produce new books on these figures at an alarming rate. In the last five years alone, there has been a major new work on the New Wave as a cinematic phenomenon (Tweedie 2013) and a raft of significant new books on Truffaut (Andrew and Gillain 2013; Gouslan 2016; Solecki 2015), Godard (Conley and Kline 2014; Morgan 2013; Williams 2016; Witt 2013), Rohmer (Anderst 2014; de Baecque and Herpe 2014; Handyside 2013; Leigh 2012) and Varda (Bénézet 2014; Conway 2015; Neroni 2016). In addition, several directors associated with the New Wave have had beautifully produced collectors’ edition box sets of DVDs/Blu-ray Discs of their complete or partial filmographies released: Godard Politique (Gaumont, 2012), Tout(e) Varda (ARTE, 2012), Éric Rohmer Intégrale (Potemkine, 2013) and Planète Chris Marker (ARTE, 2013). And this is not to mention more peripheral figures like the composer Michel Legrand, a complete set of whose work with Jacques Demy was released on CD by Universal in 2013. There are two evident conclusions to be drawn from this proliferation of material: first, that the New Wave proper, of the late 1950s and early 1960s, continues to be a rich seam to mine for scholarship and critical appreciation; and second, that the long, prolific and innovative careers of many of the directors associated with the movement have effectively continued to shape the forms, the agenda and the international reception of French cinema in the half-century since the Nouvelle Vague. It is these presumptions that justify the current special issue. Those of us who teach the French New Wave, however, should not be surprised by this cottage industry of academic and audiovisual production that has grown up around the movement, since, year on year, experience confirms that the films of the early sixties continue to appeal to young people discovering for the first time a more broadly defined cinema, even as films from more recent decades (the 1980s and 1990s) are beginning to look dated. Is this because the New Wave is itself a movement associated with youth and that the preoccupations of young people (sex, alcohol, music, generational conflicts, competing intellectual and consumerist impulses, unformed but urgent revolt) remain more or less unchanged? Is it because the students’ excited discovery of the unsuspected formal possibilities of cinema resonates with a sense of the filmmakers’ own undisguised glee on discovering this for themselves? Or is it (since the marriage of form and content is the most basic lesson of New Wave theory) a combination of the two, a burgeoning sense that no other historical conjuncture in cinema has ever produced such a perfect combination of social renewal and stylistic ferment? It is precisely this combination, of course, together with the many library shelves of relevant secondary literature, that makes the New Wave an ideal object of study for undergraduates. I continue to be astonished by the way that, year in and year out, students are able to produce first-class essays on such hoary topics as ‘Gender in the French New Wave’. Yet my own sense, from watching and discussing these films year after year, is just how much remains to be said about most of them. Aside from a handful of canonical classics – Les Quatre Cents Coups/The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959), À bout de souffle/Breathless (Godard, 1960), Cléo de 5 à 7/Cléo from 5 to 7