A Short History of Film, Third Edition by Wheeler Winston Dixon Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Author:Wheeler Winston Dixon,Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Beyond the New Wave

In 1968, Jean Renoir appeared in and directed a short film, shot in half a day, La Direction d’acteur par Jean Renoir (The Direction of the Actor by Jean Renoir). In it, he directs the actress Gisèle Braunberger (to whom the directing credit is sometimes given) in a scene from a Rumer Godden novel, Breakfast with Nicolaides. The following year, Renoir directed his final feature, Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (The Little Theater of Jean Renoir), released in 1971, with Jeanne Moreau in four sketches that Renoir wrote, directed, and narrated for French television. It was warmly received in the United States, though it was far from the director’s most accomplished work. Renoir accepted an honorary Oscar in 1975 for his lifetime achievement in the cinema and in 1977 was inducted into the French Legion of Honor; he died in 1979. His career, stretching from silents to television movies, had encompassed every genre. Along with Jean Cocteau, he remained one of the touchstones of the New Wave filmmakers.

Although not considered a New Wave director, Jean-Pierre Melville had a considerable impact on the filmmakers of the period. His independent films were shot on shoestring budgets, on actual locations, with skeleton crews, and Melville often served as his own cameraman and art director. Melville’s noirish policier Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler, 1955), a gritty film about a thief, is alluded to in Godard’s Breathless. Godard also took note of the economic editing and the stylized violence of Bob the Gambler. He admired the seediness of Melville’s mise-en-scène, which includes deserted streets, grimy gambling halls, and a dark, urban atmosphere that was both moody and sophisticated. Melville even makes a brief appearance in Breathless as a novelist being interviewed by Jean Seberg. Like Breathless, Bob the Gambler omits the action sequences that audiences were accustomed to seeing. Off-screen gunshots cleverly suggest a shootout, for example, while careful editing often cuts out violent gunplay. Bob the Gambler is a rather flat, cool, and precise policier that clearly had a major impact.

Melville’s first feature films were about the period of the French Resistance, of which he had been an active member. Made entirely independently, Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea, 1949) is an adaptation of a novel about the Resistance. Léon Morin prêtre (Leon Morin, Priest, 1961) deals with the story of a priest during the Occupation. In 1969, Melville returned to the same territory with L’Armée des ombres (The Shadow Army). Regarded by some as one of the most historically accurate screen versions of the Resistance, The Shadow Army was not screened commercially in the United States until 2006. Inspired by Joseph Kessel’s 1943 novel, the film exposes the mixture of courage, tragedy, and often inhumane choices that the members of the Resistance made in order to survive the war. Celebrated for avoiding clichés of the war film, The Shadow Army is in many ways Melville’s personal story. At the time of its release, however, some critics declared that his actors lacked emotion, and the film was generally panned.

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