CHARACTERISATION + FNW RESEARCH

STEPHEN NOTTINGHAM
CHARACTERS
Existentialism stressed the individual, the experience of free choice, the absence of any rational understanding of the universe and a sense of the absurdity in human life. Faced with an indifferent world an existentialist seeks to act authentically, using free will and taking responsibility for all their actions, instead of playing pre-ordained roles dictated by society. The characters in French New Wave films are often marginalized, young anti-heroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. There is a general cynicism concerning politics, often expressed as a disillusionment with foreign policy in Algeria or Indo-China. In Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1959) the protagonist kills and shows no remorse, while in Varda's Cléo de 5 á 7 (1961) the protagonist stops playing the roles others expect of her, when she discovers she has cancer, and starts to live authentically.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Stephen_Nottingham/cintxt2.htm


ACTORS/ACTRESSES
The acting was a marked departure from much that had gone before. The actors were encouraged to improvise their lines, or talk over each others lines as would happens in real-life. In A Bout de Souffle this leads to lengthy scenes of inconsequential dialogue, in opposition to the staged speeches of much traditional film acting. Monologues were also used, for example in Godard's Charlotte and her Bloke (1959); as were voice-overs expressing a character's inner feelings, as in Rohmer's La Boulangère Du Monceau. The actors in these films were not big stars prior to the French New Wave, but a group of stars soon became associated with the films including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jeanne Moreau. Women were often given strong parts, that did not conform to the archetypal roles seen in most Hollywood cinema, for example, Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) and Corinne Marchand in Varda's Cléo de 5 á 7.

PERSONAL CINEMA
French New Wave cinema was a personal cinema. The film-makers were writers who were skilful at examining relationships and telling humane stories. Truffaut's films were particularly autobiographical. His first full-length film Les Quatre Cents Coups drew upon his early life, and the life-story of the main character Antoine Doinel was developed through three subsequent films: Antoine et Colette (1962), Baisers Volés (1968) and Domicile Conjugal (1970).


SENSES OF CINEMA : TRUFFAUT'S 400 BLOWS
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/blows.html


Truffaut, the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, was its most loved representative whose auterist vision as a filmmaker espoused, contra French academic cinema, a cinema of tomorrow that took place in the streets and apartments of one's life and that jettisoned the predictability of a verbally dominated cinema recognisable for its polished literary dialogue, elaborate movie sets, ornate photography and movie stars. A cinema that clearly attests to Alexander Astruc's "camero stylo " view of cinema: "The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen." A cinema that speaks of ordinary experiences and situations, fragile individuals, daily recognisable language and emotions where the director displays a non-superior relationship to his characters.

The 400 Blows, along with Les Mistons (1957), The Wild Child (1969) and Small Change (1969), represent one of the most tender and loving depictions of childhood in cinema. Truffaut's characteristic sensitive and non-sentimental view of his children characters denotes a respect for children living in a difficult world made by adults. It is a lyrical poetic realism that is central to two influential films for The 400 Blows - Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) - and significantly informs Truffaut's hypnotically moving debut feature. The 400 Blows (which could have been tellingly titled The Awkward Age) is one of the rare few films that represents childhood and its turbulent knife-edge ambiguous emotions and situations in a searching, intimate and tender way communicating to us collective emotional truths. Truffaut focusing on his own childhood experiences - forging a "cinema in the first person singular" - is also speaking to us about our own childhood. This double emotional quality of the individual and the collective in the film is one of its more appealing simple qualities. As Rivette informs us in his Cahiers review of the film: "in speaking of himself, he seems to be speaking of us."

Crucially then, the haunting lyricism of The 400 Blows is based on Truffaut's Renoirian focus on the extraordinary features of his own "ordinary" childhood situations and individuals, and, characteristic of Truffaut's oeuvre, he never sacrificed the abstract for the individual. Truffaut (á la Renoir) discovered the superlatively gifted and unpredictable Léaud (whose presence in French New Wave Cinema is one of its numerous mesmerising qualities) for his debut fictional biography - and he became Truffaut's double in the Antoine Doinel films (the Doinel character being a rich synthesis of Truffaut himself and Léaud's own personality). Keeping in Renoir's spirit, Truffaut learned the lesson of valuing the actor over the character in a given film, and consequently, as the Antoine Doinel films progressed, Léaud's own personal characteristics and dialogue took over rather than strictly adhering to the script. Stolen Kisses in this context was the crucial film.


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Bazin, André, What is Cinema?, vols. 1 & 2, essays selected and translated by H Gray (University of California Press, 1967 & 1971)Harvey, Sylvia,May ‘68 and Film Culture (BFI, 1980)Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema (Routledge, 1993)Hillier, Jim (ed), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Routledge and Kegan Paul/BFI, 1980)Hillier, Jim (ed), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood (Routledge and Kegan Paul, BFI, 1986)