A senseless prologue on cinema dying of cinema... never have so many films been produced as in the last thirty years and the history of cinema has been filled with rubbish, often awarded Oscars, Lions, Bears, Palmes, Davids and Burlamacchis in substitute festivals... everything that is necessarily superficial or mediocre has to do with enthusiasm, which is the highest form of the imbecile who has achieved success in cinema, in music, in sport, in politics or in the slaughter of the human race... I would give all the films of the third millennium for a frame by Luis Buñuel, Jean Vigo or Pier Paolo Pasolini... these heretics of heresy said that we cannot know Man except in rebellion, in the collapse of the simulacra of God, Country and Family... and they were right.
As even the university donkeys, the secret service janissaries, and the supermarket geeks know... the Nouvelle Vague was literally a "new wave" of filmmakers who, between 1958 and 1964 (and beyond), revolutionized the conventions of "daddy's cinema" in France and around the world. The young people who stepped behind the camera and burst onto the screen like a storm of truth and ethical/aesthetic beauty were the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma: Claude Chabrol, Le Beau Serge (1958); François Truffaut, The 400 Blows (1959); Éric Rohmer, The Sign of the Lion (1959); Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, 1960; Jacques Rivette, Paris Belongs to Us (1961) and the intellectuals of the Left Bank: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, My Love (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961); Agnès Varda, La Pointe Courte (1955, the true precursor of the Nouvelle Vague); Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962), Jacques Rozier, Desires in the Sun (1962, the most libertarian and "unknown" poet of the Nouvelle Vague)... have "reinvented" the language of cinema and conceived the director as a Captain Ahab who stops looking at reality through the eyes of the bourgeoisie and overturns it until he reaches (certainly for Jean-Luc Godard) the barricades of the joyful revolution of '68.
There are also directors not entirely external to the Nouvelle Vague who have made films of great auteurist scope that represent a veritable sabotage of cinematic fiction and incite a reversal of perspective in an upside-down world... they invite us to deliberately create moments of real life and shatter the dogmatic cages of the society of the spectacle... because spectacle does not mean cinema, television, or theater, but is, as Guy Debord writes, a social relationship between people mediated by images... it is never too late to attend the funeral of the spectacle. The Nouvelle Vague meant having a "style"... location shooting, natural light, handheld camera, moving edits, fragmented narration, improvisation, looking into the camera, discrepant dialogue and soundtracks... it was about capturing life in the act with that anarchic gaiety that turns a king into a fool and a fool into the king's swindler. At the roots of the Nouvelle Vague are the "fireworks" that link the anarchy of Luis Buñuel in L'âge d'or (1930) and the irreverent satire of Groucho Marx in Leo McCarey's The Blitzkrieg of the Marx Brothers (1933), to the desperate libertarian vitality of Godard in Breathless... these are films that deny social, political, and religious concordance and reveal the absurdity of the bourgeois, military, and authoritarian world... they insinuate the deconstruction of every institutional logic (diplomacy, justice, ethics, category, work) to ignite in the imagination (of those who want it) the pure and clear destruction of the established order... that's all.
Nouvelle Vague. Richard Linklater's film is a metacinematographic work dedicated to the discovery of a street cinema that broke away from the cinema of the big studio productions... more specifically, it follows the story-driven adventure of Breathless and the breaking with Jean-Luc Godard's cinematic grammar. Linklater had already made the trilogy Before Sunrise (1995-2013) and Boyhood (2014)... where he demonstrated his close connection with young French activists, especially with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows....
In Nouvelle Vague, Linklater films the young Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) as he tries to shoot his first feature film... without permission, with a screenplay he writes day by day in bars and steals fragments of Paris with the inspiration of an impressionist painter... the physical resemblance of the main actors is striking... Zoey Deutch is Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin is Jean-Paul Belmondo, Victor Belmondo is François Truffaut, Jérôme Robart is Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Jacques Le Vessier is André Bazin (the critic and "spiritual father" of Cahiers du Cinéma), Agathe Bonitzer is Suzanne Schiffman (the script supervisor and creative collaborator of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer)... it is she who holds together Godard's chaotic set and underlines that behind the genius of the masters there are always extraordinary women who make their revolution possible. He also revisits the myth of the drifter Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Godard's Breathless, Humphrey Bogart... star of American film noir of the 1940s... Poiccard repeatedly runs his thumb across his lips in the manner of "Bogie"... when he stops in front of the poster of Mark Robson's The Clay Colossus (1956) (Bogart's last film before his death), he stares at it and imitates the tough expression and charisma of an anti-hero... he is shot dead from behind and falls like a suburban angel on the cobblestones of Paris.
For Nouvelle Vague, Linklater uses filming techniques from the 1960s... blending historical philology and digital innovation... handheld cameras, improvised tracking shots, leaps in the construction of the plot... the cut within the frame (those who speak well call it a jump cut), the 1.37:1 format (reminiscent of classic cinema of the time), the synchronous sound between the actors' words and the street noises that give that sense of "dirty truth" (almost documentary) typical of films shot outside of studios. David Chambille's black-and-white photography is exceptional, imitating the grain and contrast of 1959 Eastman Plus-X film and is a tribute to Raoul Coutard (Godard and Truffaut's director of photography), whom Chambille considers a master. Linklater and Chambille manage to integrate live shots and the Paris reconstructed with digital technology and maintain a visual presence between the actors in the foreground and the period background. Sandra Adair's syncopated editing subverts temporal continuity, ties in with errors in composition and acting punctuation (which for Godard becomes a "style")... and gives the sensation of a cinema that is invented on the spot.
Graham Reynolds's soundtrack is a refined work of quotations... it reworks the original jazz themes composed by Martial Solal in 1960, intertwined with pieces by Miles Davis (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958, by Louis Malle) and music by Georges Delerue (Truffaut's favorite composer, especially for Shoot the Pianist, 1960, Jules and Jim, 1962, The Last Metro, 1980)... together with Adair's editing, they compose a visual symphony where Paris and the protagonists of the Nouvelle Vague transport the viewer into an emotional flow of light, shadows, and dynamic shifts in the action. Cinema is cinema, no longer just a commodity.
In the Nouvelle Vague, acting is pure poetry... Linklater frames his characters in vibrant, spare, austere shots, shots, and angles... he puts into practice the concept theorized by Alexandre Astruc in the article "Naissance d'une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo," which appeared in the magazine L'Écran Français (no. 144, 1948): The director must use the camera with the same freedom with which a writer uses the pen. This is the birth of the Nouvelle Vague. Cinema became a means of expression unseated from Sunday consensus and capable of tackling any philosophical or psychological, poetic or political theme, just like an essay, a diary, or a novel... the camera becomes a "physical writing," and the film is the extension of the author's thought... cinema is considered an art and not a commodity, and this means placing the director's vision before the producer's profit.
Nouvelle Vague describes Godard's subversive, deeply political romanticism in Breathless... not so much for its explicit dialogue, but for how it shatters the power structures of cinema and society in 1960... little money and a lot of cinema, and to this he will remain faithful throughout his life. Linklater's film confirms that Breathless is a manifesto in anarchy... Godard challenges the academic and colonial authority not only of French cinema but of the entire Hollywood system that catechizes the spectators' gazes in the idolatries of acclaim... the people are destined to the lies of politics, faith, economics, knowledge... and all forms of communication are megaphones of compulsory optimism... judging by the fools it has produced, our era will have been anything but intelligent... only the completely disillusioned man (the Anarch)
takes his fists out of his pockets and begins to set fire to the history of infamy.
Pino Bertelli
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/maggio-2026_compressed.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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