Educational Media Reviews Online

This is a 1964 documentary about the French New Wave (la Nouvelle Vague), reproduced for French television in 1995, and now released in VHS format, in French with English subtitles. The film is part of the documentary series Cinema, of Our Time (Cinéastes de Notre Temps), originally produced in the 1960s and 70s to showcase some of the most important filmmakers of those years. Robert Valey directed the original 1964 documentary; André S. Labarthe shares the directorial credit with Valey on the 1995 reproduction.

By 1964, the New Wave had already peaked and was beginning its fast descent. The New Wave by Itselflooks at both the artistic successes and failures of the New Wave, seeking to explain how this short-lived movement in French filmmaking came about and why it was destined not to last. The core of the film comprises ten interviews with some of the most important figures in the New Wave, namely Claude Chabrol, Jacques Démy, Jean Rouch, Agnès Varda, Georges Franju, Jacques Rozier, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Daniel Pollet. Although the film is not organized into discrete sections, the first two-thirds of the film (pretty much up to the interview with Pollet) focus on the New Wave’s early years, exploring the backgrounds, motivations, techniques, successes, and occasional collaborations of its filmmakers. The remaining twenty minutes look to the present (1964) and the future of the New Wave, beginning with Pollet and returning to earlier interviewees for their thoughts on this film movement’s cloudy future.

The interviews are lucid and helpful, giving a good picture of the early days of the New Wave (the unending financial problems, the scramble to acquire filmmaking skills, the shooting on location, the inexpensive equipment that produced a raw visual style and sometimes necessitated dubbing) and elaborating on the ideas that typified the movement. The filmmakers return several times to the notions of inventiveness, amateurism, improvisation, serendipity, realism, the documentary impulse, and rule-breaking that informed so much of their work. Most of the interviewees refer to their own films for examples, and Valey and Labarthe cut away to clips from those films as needed. When talk turns to the failures of the New Wave, the interviewees are, again, objective and well-spoken, pointing to the technical incompetence, pretension, and unrelenting pessimism that sometimes dogged the movement.

The visual quality of The New Wave by Itself is fine, except for the first half of an interview with Henri Langlois, which is a bit jumpy. The visual style is, well, a bit New Wave, with lots of jump cuts during the interviews. The choppy editing doesn’t make the interviews difficult to follow, and the style suits the content.

The New Wave by Itself does not give a complete picture of the French New Wave. It overemphasizes the camaraderie among New Wave filmmakers, who were not really a cohesive group. It ignores some of the important figures in the movement, such as Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Eric Rohmer. It does not explain the different branches of the New Wave (e.g., the Cahiers group and the “Left Bank” group), choosing instead to lump all of the interviewed filmmakers together, framed by comments from Henri Langlois and clips of Godard on the set of Band of Outsiders. But the film does provide a solid introduction to the impulses behind the New Wave, the themes and film styles that typified it, and several of the important figures within it. In short, The New Wave by Itself is a well-made and useful documentary.

See another EMRO review of the same title.