What happened in French cinema after French New Wave cinema?

August 5, 2016 12:42 PM

I'm familiar with the influence of the French New Wave on American cinema (the New Hollywood being the primary example) and have seen where many of its members took their respective styles but I was hoping someone could help me understand the direction the whole of French cinema took in the decades following the Nouvelle Vague. Perhaps their radicalism shows in the following years, or maybe French cinema just fizzled, maybe the movement had a broader impact than it did here in the US-- looking for some sort of explanation along those lines.
posted by dr handsome to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Part of the answer: the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:10 PM on August 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don't have an answer to your bigger questions, but New French Extremity is a current (or relatively recent) thing, and it seems to me that it's been pretty influential.

I can't think of a time when French film hasn't been innovative.
posted by ernielundquist at 1:29 PM on August 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

The French New Wave was the result of a group of influential film critics — Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer — who shared an enthusiasm for American films of the pre-war era and the notion that a film's director, alone, was its "auteur", and who successfully turned their hands to making films. But it was not a movement, in the sense that no one ever promulgated a set of rules or a vision for film making, and if you're familiar with the work of those five directors, you'll immediately see how different they were from each other. Truffaut himself said that the New Wave "is neither a movement, nor a school, nor a group, it's a quality", and Godard explicitly declared that the New Wave included only those five directors. French cinema continued to expand and grow after the New Wave, with some directors having more obvious debts to them, and others having less. But one could hardly say French cinema fizzled. French directors like Luc Besson, Roman Polanski and Bertrand Blier are still giving us great films, they just don't have a label to attach to them.
posted by ubiquity at 2:11 PM on August 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Well, some members of the French New Wave like Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda (I guess they're Rive Gauche, whatever), simply left France for a period of time and made films in Los Angeles. Those films were still more in the tradition of the new wave and not as Hollywoodized as you'd think (despite Demy's Model Shop being produced by Columbia Pictures).
posted by modesty.blaise at 2:26 PM on August 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Best answer: You may be interested in "cinéma du look," a French film movement of the 80s.
posted by Corinth at 3:45 PM on August 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Some of these are leading me down some new and interesting paths, so thanks everyone!!

That Cinema Du Look page is a SUPER interesting read! I've seen most of Carax's work but can honestly say I hadn't dug that far into his history. If that's the 80's is there anything to be said about the 70's-- any defining voices, characteristics, tendencies besides, of course, the further works of those original New Wave directors??
posted by dr handsome at 1:53 AM on August 6, 2016

What happened to French cinema is a difficult question to answer because it's so broad. French cinema, like most national film industries contains a number of different facets.

It's main focus is, like elsewhere, commercial, with most films being intended simply to please a general audience. To be sure, commercial in this manner isn't the same as it is in Hollywood where budgets are much larger and the blockbuster billion dollar picture drives the market. In countries with smaller industries the funding mechanisms are much different.

So in France there has been a variety of national and Euro initiatives for maintaining a strong film industry and limiting the reach of Hollywood to stay competitive. Through this you'll find a good number of joint ventures, where French filmmakers or producers work with film industries or personnel from other nations and fund movies jointly. These sorts of mechanisms can also allow for more artistic works of the sort that aren't as commercial since government funding and tax breaks allow for more risk taking on lower budget films.

The techniques of the Nouvelle Vague have been entirely absorbed by subsequent generations of filmmakers, not just in France, but all over the world. There are always new ideas and approaches being tried, but since that time film has become a much more global phenomenon, so techniques can spread rapidly worldwide if they strike a chord with other filmmakers.

As to French films and directors, there have been so many different approaches that trying to put them into a straight narrative of French filmmaking is almost impossible just as it would be in so many other countries with strong film industries.

If the question is more over whether there is still a strong artistic sensibility in French films, then, yes, that never went away with dozens of directors claiming attention over the years for their individual styles and critically, though not always popularly, acclaimed films. And while there have been a few attempts to link some directors or films to certain themes or movements, there really hasn't been any single dominant style to even just the acclaimed films from France during the last 40 years, but a number of French filmmakers remain at the forefront of cinema with a wide variety of approaches.

That's all a little vague (no pun intended) I suppose, so if it's something more specific you're looking for, then feel free to ask for clarification, though just to be clear I'm not an expert on the subject, film history is just something I find interesting.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:55 AM on August 6, 2016 [2 favorites]