Toronto tobacconists can expect a spike in the sale of Gauloises as the city readies for a summer of French film. Olivier Assayas's elegant provocation Summer Hours just opened. Cinematheque Ontario is in the midst of a nine-film homage to Jean-Pierre Melville, and it is just beginning a 38-film series titled Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave, Then and Now.
The latter, running today until Aug. 22, jump cuts from the prime years of the French film renaissance (1958-64) to the latest North American releases by Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Along the way, Cinematheque showcases familiar favourites – Jules et Jim (1962), Breathless (1960) and Ma nuit chez Maud (1969). But there are little-seen pleasures as well, including Chabrol's Le beau serge (1958), Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine (1962), and Rivette's Paris nous appartient (1960).
Like all movements, the New Wave is a product of a time and place. Under the Nazis, France went without American films. Filmmakers grew up in an occupied country, absorbing existentialism and rebellion in their mother's milk. So when they finally saw examples of Hollywood's amoral, war-era film noir a decade later, they were ready for revolution.
Even their names are tributes to gall and gumption. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, Melville took his pseudonym to honour Herman Melville, renegade genius and author of Moby-Dick . Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer grabbed his name from obstreperous Hollywood director Eric von Stroheim and mystery writer Sax Rohmer.
There was an inspired slapdash quality to the New Wave. Godard placed cameras in wheelchairs whirled through Paris. He also encouraged actors to improvise, and he employed jump cuts that turned scenes into flip cards. His contemporaries were prone to mischief: In Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), a character says, “May my mother drop dead if I'm not telling the truth.” The film then cuts to an old lady keeling over.
Film critic Nigel Andrews asserted, “The New Wave was a crime: that was its beauty. It was an outrage against law, order and aesthetic decency.”
All true. Still, these outrages were quickly validated by Hollywood, which soon employed French morality and film grammar. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid reworked Jules et Jim 's love triangle, copping the French film's bike scene as well. Warren Beatty asked Truffaut and Godard to direct Bonnie and Clyde before settling for Arthur Penn, the most European of American directors.
Watching the latest from Rivette, Rohmer, Godard and Chabrol, we are reminded that New Wave filmmakers began as Cahiers du Cinéma critics. Their recent works are film essays as well as films. Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais , Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two , and Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon , all 2007 films, are meditations on love and honour.
Chabrol's is the darkest of the bunch – the story of a TV weather girl (Ludivine Sagnier) torn between an aging writer and a playboy dressed like a Batman villain. The film displays all of Chabrol's themes: bullying, seduction and murder. Rivette's story, a 19th-century tale of a professional soldier who is undone by his obsession with a courtesan, is typically well observed; the least appreciated of the great French directors combines a love of actors with the relentless gaze of a portrait artist. Only Rohmer's film, his last, represents an evident slackening of talent.
Still, it is Godard, with his 2001 In Praise of Love , who provides a contemporary film that recalls the audacity and panache of classic Nouvelle Vague. An engrossing lecture that skips from film history to contemporary politics and from shimmering black and silver to oversaturated colour, it tells the story of a Paris filmmaker looking to make a movie about the stages of love – meeting, physical passion, heartache and reconciliation.
But this is really another of Uncle Jean-Luc's Rubik's Cubes – a puzzle meant to provoke, but not to be solved. Every puzzle piece comes with a fortune-cookie message, such as:
“Most people have the guts to live life, but not the imagination.”
“Isn't it strange how history has been taken over by technology? But why politics by gospel?”
Godard's most stinging aside is meant for his parents' generation, or perhaps the young protesters who staged the Paris 1968 uprising: “Resistance had its youth, and had its old age, but never went through adulthood.”
The latter, running today until Aug. 22, jump cuts from the prime years of the French film renaissance (1958-64) to the latest North American releases by Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Along the way, Cinematheque showcases familiar favourites – Jules et Jim (1962), Breathless (1960) and Ma nuit chez Maud (1969). But there are little-seen pleasures as well, including Chabrol's Le beau serge (1958), Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine (1962), and Rivette's Paris nous appartient (1960).
Like all movements, the New Wave is a product of a time and place. Under the Nazis, France went without American films. Filmmakers grew up in an occupied country, absorbing existentialism and rebellion in their mother's milk. So when they finally saw examples of Hollywood's amoral, war-era film noir a decade later, they were ready for revolution.
Even their names are tributes to gall and gumption. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, Melville took his pseudonym to honour Herman Melville, renegade genius and author of Moby-Dick . Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer grabbed his name from obstreperous Hollywood director Eric von Stroheim and mystery writer Sax Rohmer.
There was an inspired slapdash quality to the New Wave. Godard placed cameras in wheelchairs whirled through Paris. He also encouraged actors to improvise, and he employed jump cuts that turned scenes into flip cards. His contemporaries were prone to mischief: In Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), a character says, “May my mother drop dead if I'm not telling the truth.” The film then cuts to an old lady keeling over.
Film critic Nigel Andrews asserted, “The New Wave was a crime: that was its beauty. It was an outrage against law, order and aesthetic decency.”
All true. Still, these outrages were quickly validated by Hollywood, which soon employed French morality and film grammar. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid reworked Jules et Jim 's love triangle, copping the French film's bike scene as well. Warren Beatty asked Truffaut and Godard to direct Bonnie and Clyde before settling for Arthur Penn, the most European of American directors.
Watching the latest from Rivette, Rohmer, Godard and Chabrol, we are reminded that New Wave filmmakers began as Cahiers du Cinéma critics. Their recent works are film essays as well as films. Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais , Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two , and Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon , all 2007 films, are meditations on love and honour.
Chabrol's is the darkest of the bunch – the story of a TV weather girl (Ludivine Sagnier) torn between an aging writer and a playboy dressed like a Batman villain. The film displays all of Chabrol's themes: bullying, seduction and murder. Rivette's story, a 19th-century tale of a professional soldier who is undone by his obsession with a courtesan, is typically well observed; the least appreciated of the great French directors combines a love of actors with the relentless gaze of a portrait artist. Only Rohmer's film, his last, represents an evident slackening of talent.
Still, it is Godard, with his 2001 In Praise of Love , who provides a contemporary film that recalls the audacity and panache of classic Nouvelle Vague. An engrossing lecture that skips from film history to contemporary politics and from shimmering black and silver to oversaturated colour, it tells the story of a Paris filmmaker looking to make a movie about the stages of love – meeting, physical passion, heartache and reconciliation.
But this is really another of Uncle Jean-Luc's Rubik's Cubes – a puzzle meant to provoke, but not to be solved. Every puzzle piece comes with a fortune-cookie message, such as:
“Most people have the guts to live life, but not the imagination.”
“Isn't it strange how history has been taken over by technology? But why politics by gospel?”
Godard's most stinging aside is meant for his parents' generation, or perhaps the young protesters who staged the Paris 1968 uprising: “Resistance had its youth, and had its old age, but never went through adulthood.”
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