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The
Cousins Program Notes
What
is the Nouvelle Vague?
Excerpted
from An Escapist Realism by Eugen Weber
Source:
Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2, (winter, 1959), pp. 9-16 published
by: University of California Press
What
is the Nouvelle Vague? It is the name a Parisian weekly, L’Express,
has given to those young directors who in the last few years
produced, usually with little money and a lot of independence,
films without (or usually with-out) stars, films moreover which
were well received by the public. The list is a varied one;
the newcomers, generally in their thirties, are not as new as
all that (some of them have made documentaries in the past,
some of them came up as cameramen or assistants), and their
films of the last five years run the gamut from detective, adventure
or horror stories (Franju, Malle), through romantic love (Camus,
Malle) and social realism (Chabrol, Truffaut), to the most delicately
brutal essays in a new cinematography (Resnais). The contents
of their films are generally their most negligible part. It
is the construction, the treatment that counts.
…This
new emphasis seems to parallel certain similar tendencies of
the modern novel in which, less and less, the author seeks to
show the logic of an action or an attitude, but leaves the reader
to draw his own conclusions from the surface picture of reality
he presents. To Le Monde (August 12, 1959) Alexandre
Astruc has declared that young directors are moving toward a
certain "de-theatralization." They show characters
but do not explain them, and their films have nothing to do
with any dramatic construction. Thus, the camera, no longer
forced to tell an artificially coherent tale, now becomes an
eye, confused and irrelevant as in real life, confused by the
irrelevant as in real life, ignorant of the real sense of what
it perceives, faced by objects and events whose only coherence,
really, is furnished by the beholder. This is very much the
manner of Claude Chabrol, whose first two films, made on a shoestring,
help to illustrate the strength and the weakness of this approach.
...In
his second film, Les Cousins, Chabrol has, however,
done much better, and his greater measure of success is due
in large part to a 37-year-old script writer, Paul G6gauff,
who bids fair to become the Paddy Chayefsky of Paris. Before
working with Chabrol on Les Cousins, Gegauff had written
a play and four books that nobody noticed. Now he is suddenly
in great demand: he has just finished a script for Rene Clement,
prepares one with Chabrol and an-other with Vadim, and envisages
- again with Chabrol - the screen adaptation of an Ellery Queen
mystery. The story which has brought him public notice concerns
two cousins who live together while studying in Paris . One
is a wild, smooth, madly social aficionado of wine, women and
sports cars; the other is square, solid and a swot, a dull but
decent lad just up from the country who writes long letters
home to mother, works hard and, instead of tumbling the girl
he likes, writes her a poem and clumsily declares his love.
As we expect, the girl ends up in dissolute cousin's bed while
solid one plods grimly on to show his worth in the finals.
…A
morality tale in reverse, but one too intelligent to qualify
mere inclination as either virtue or vice. People do what they
do because they are what they are: we get no more indication
why they are as they are than we would in real life, far less
than in Hollywood psychologicals where the development of murderous
rapists logically follows from the failure of a nurse to respond
to their infant advances; the frigidity of a lovely woman dissolves
on the revelation that she was frightened by a bidet at the
age of three. People are a mess, and the tricks life regularly
plays on them and to which they as regularly succumb are an
even bigger mess. Though this does not leave us with a particularly
illuminating view of life, it seems less confusing than the
explanations of more serious and long-winded theorists. Less
confusing but, of course, no less confused.
...Do
the films of the Nouvelle Vague have anything in common? If
their highest common factor is the excellence of their photography,
the lowest common denominator so far has been the thinness of
their scripts. Camerawork becomes more than ever the keystone
of production, and its predominance explains much else: the
insistence on detail, the artistic sensitiveness, the sketchiness
of scripts which leave many situations hanging or unexplained,
the relative lack of dialogue
(Les
Amants, for instance, hardly say a word in fifteen minutes
or more), and the heavy use of interior monologue and expressive
music. The use of young or unknown actors reflects not principle
or prejudice, but the economic conditions under which these
beginners began their work some years ago and under which cheap
actors were all they could afford But most of these once cheap
actors are pretty good and, just as Vadim has made Bardot the
only real star in France, so the films of the new directors
have revealed new faces destined for success. Most striking
among them are G6rard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, who act
in both of Chabrol's films, and Emanuele Riva, who plays Resnais'
heroine with sensitiveness, passion, and a voice that penetrates
from mind to marrow.
…The
films of the Nouvelle Vague keep away from what has become forbidden
ground, and in this they reflect a society which has abandoned
its decisions to others. Life is incomprehensible, and politics
even more so. We concentrate on the immediate, the private,
the local, and even there we call chance "fate" and
face it with the fascinated acquiescence of a bird dominated
by a snake. Man is too small and stupid to do more than look
on at what, if it is not his own destruction, must be a sort
of pathetic farce. In the end, there are always defeat and death.
In adopting this point of view, the new directors, as I said,
unwittingly reflect an attitude which, for being more advanced
in France, is no less noticeable elsewhere. Indeed, it is hard
to say whether the popular simplicity of certain Anglo-Saxon
"explanations" is not more dreadful than the abdication
of any right to explanation at all. It may be that the concentration
on action and technique, at the cost of explanation and motivation
in the work of French directors, is itself a sort of avoidance
of content, a begging the question even, and that on this plane
they meet their less advanced brethren elsewhere.
But
it is characteristic that, of all of them, the one who had most
to say about forbidden things like war and peace, atom bombs
and human suffering, is also the one who has, in effect, said
most, and most interestingly, in (and about) the cinematic idiom
itself. Perhaps what Resnais understood (consciously or not)
is that the problem today rests in the synthesis of man's personal
and social concerns. Social criticism is good for a book, and
so is adultery, and so is first love. But in life they go together,
mixed as the elements of a cake; for those who live them are
men and women, complex and complicated, hungry and happy and
apprehensive at the same time, working and loving and buying
a newspaper and shooting a glance at a passing blonde all at
the same time. A slice of reality - since that is all the artist
can hope to cope with - a slice of reality is a slice of a mixture,
not the artificial isolation of one of its many components.
The
Cousins Discussion Questions:
Although
Chabrol’s narrative gives no back stories to his characters,
Charles alone speaks often of his mother and the influences
she has on him. What do these frequent references tell of his
personality, especially in comparison to the others who seem
to exist for and of the moment?
The
elderly book store proprietor shows a particular regard for
Charles when he finds that the young man is interested in Balzac
and not the mystery and pornography novels that the other students
read. What does the man represent in the social scheme that
Chabrol depicts and how does his advice impact on Charles?
Chabrol
has said “At the time, people didn’t believe that there were
Fascists in France . It was as stupid as that. So they thought
that I was a Fascist, because they didn’t want to think that
the characters on the screen were.” What actions on the screen
would lend Chabrol’s left wing critics and colleagues to accuse
him of being a Fascist?
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