Views of the New Wave: Godard and Rohmer’s first features

During the last year or so, forty new and mainly young directors have been able to make films in France. It is difficult to keep up with the fantastic output of a movement which has changed the entire face of the French cinema. Godard and Rohmer, the directors discussed here, are new names: more will be heard from them.

Jean-Luc Godard, who was born of Swiss descent 29 years ago but who is Parisian by adoption, made his first feature film, À bout de souffle, on a modest budget of some £30,000. He was lucky enough to be able to work without any external restraint, in spite of the fact that his star was the fairly important young American actress Jean Seberg, borrowed from Columbia Pictures to whom she is under contract. The male lead, Jean-Paul Belmondo, appeared in Claude Chabrol’s A Double Tour and had earlier played in an extraordinary short feature, Charlotte et son Jules, also made by Godard. The credits of À bout de souffle list François Truffaut as screenwriter and Claude Chabrol as “artistic supervisor”; but this was done for the benefit of the technicians’ union and, in fact, Chabrol had little more to do with the film than to lend it his name, while Truffaut’s contribution was the discovery of a news snippet which became the starting point of the plot. À bout de souffle is therefore a genuine film d’auteur – more so than either Les quatre cents coups or Hiroshima mon amour, to which the screenwriters made powerful contributions. Godard is a lone wolf; he expresses himself with the absolute independence of a novelist, yet with a discipline and style, in the literary sense, which make his film perhaps the most perfectly realised screen novel produced to date.

Many spectators, especially English ones, may not take his film very seriously when they see how much it owes to American techniques, to comedies and gangster movies. (The film is wryly dedicated to Monogram Pictures!) The serious filmgoer in London or Oxford, New York or Boston, may well be shocked by the ingrained vulgarity of the theme and by the characters Godard has chosen to portray. The story deals with the adventures of a car thief, Michel, who kills a highway policeman and goes back to Paris to spend the night making love to his American girl friend Patricia (Jean Seberg). Patricia then gives him away to the police: she doesn’t want to spend all her life with him and hopes that by informing on him she can force him to move on. But Michel refuses to go, and is shot down in the street by the police, while Patricia watches.

The film is wildly cruel and pitilessly anarchic. The social order is violently repudiated; love is impossible; death is imminent… the film takes on a tragic coloration, but this is achieved without embroidery or affectation. Godard, who admires the work both of Nicholas Ray and of Mizoguchi, rejects traditional techniques, sets out to be provocative, plays continually on shock effects. He uses a form of montage which could be irritating if overworked, but which is here held under strict control and achieves miracles: Patricia is talking to Michel; the camera never leaves her face, but by cutting and closing up this single sequence, Godard takes the viewer into a breathless, tumbling daze of a scene.

At the end, Michel is on the ground, dying in front of the policeman who has shot him down. Patricia rushes up to him, and his last words are: “Tu es dégueulasse.” The final shot is a close-up of Jean Seberg frenziedly asking the policeman: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que dégueulasse?”

Vulgar language which may well raise a few pious eyebrows; but it is exactly in keeping with the situation, and this is made many times more effective by the scrupulous care given to photography, acting and direction. We are in the world of the unreal, outside literature, outside sermonising: in a world of total immorality, lived skin-deep. This is the opposite pole, obviously, from the Brechtian concept of committed art; and Godard is himself explicit about this. “For the artist, to know himself too well is to give way, to some extent, to facility. The difficult thing is to advance into unknown territory, to be aware of the danger, to take risks, to be afraid… The cinema is not a trade. It isn’t team-work. One is always alone while shooting, as though facing a blank page.”

Like Les quatre cents coups, À bout de souffle was filmed entirely in Paris, a modern, largely Americanised Paris. One can challenge the irresponsibility of this kind of cinema, but not the talent of a young artist whose revelations are so startling that they demand attention. The dialogue is dense and highly literary, but it does not aim at effects for effects’ sake; and it indicates that Godard, who in his articles as a critic writes a language worthy of Giraudoux, is up to the standard of the uncommitted “Jeune Droite” novelists, writers such as Antoine Blondin, a recent prize-winner for his excellent Un singe en hiver. Instead of writing a novel, Godard writes a film.

Eric Rohmer’s Le signe du lion also cost about £30,000 to make. Both films were made with complete spontaneity, practically without a shooting script, and with improvised creation which might depend on the mood of the day, the circumstances and the settings. But Rohmer, who is ten years older than Godard, is inevitably more thoughtful and stands much further back from his subject. Le signe du lion, sponsored by Claude Chabrol and his first full-length feature, shows that he is a great deal nearer the forefront of modern cinema. Godard is still concerned to create a new kind of literature, to comment lucidly on the confusions of an anarchic generation. Rohmer is doing something different. He is, in my opinion, the first genuine exponent of what might be called “the cinema of pure behaviour”.

His theme is simple: a bohemian musician, half-American, half-European – the part is played by Jess Hahn – learns that he is the heir to an aunt who has just died in Vienna. He borrows money from his friends in Saint-Germain des Prés to tide him over until the inheritance comes through. But the news turns out to be false: the inheritance was a hoax. All his friends are now away on vacation. He is alone, penniless, in a hot, dry, tourist-crammed Paris. The real subject of the film, then, is the gradual decline of an individual living on his wits in an environment from which he is somehow isolated. Our musician becomes a tramp, sleeping on the banks of the Seine. Finally, his friends find him again, bringing the news that the inheritance is now real… The film ends on a roar of laughter, a rather sinister touch when one reflects that the whole business will probably begin all over again.

The film’s framework is fragile, and it should not be judged only on its probability. You can condemn the hero for not being able to find some kind of a job. You can drag up dim memories of Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Renoir’s Boudu sauvé des eaux, both films by directors whom Rohmer admires. But it is in other respects that his film shows its originality: in its ultra-realistic technique, its extreme objectivity in portraying the friction set up between a human being and society, his wearing down, his slow degradation. This is not a descriptive but a rigorously visual art. It calls for the complete participation of the viewer and his submission to what he sees. 

One is reminded of Albert Camus’s novel L’Etranger, because the situation of the main character is equally extreme: he is outside society. In this case he is up against not words but stone, water, the sky; and with him we make an infinite number of discoveries: the walls of Paris, its monuments, the Seine. At certain moments the hidden camera has caught ordinary people passing by, living in their own worlds, knowing nothing of the misery of the man they pass in the street. Jess Hahn rummages in a litter bin; the sole of his shoe flaps; no one takes any notice… A cruel study, but never a sentimental one. Rohmer makes his points objectively: “ne prétendant que montrer, if nous dispense de la fraude de dire,” as he once wrote himself about Buster Keaton. The dialogue is almost negligible; the interest is concentrated on human attitudes. It is a disquieting film; and the contribution of the Cahiers du Cinéma group of new directors (Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard as well as Rohmer himself) has partly been to disquiet, though without really facing the challenge of a corrupt social order.