The New Wave at 50: The star reborn
The French New Wave famously transformed the role of the film director, inaugurating the age of the auteur. But, Ginette Vincendeau argues, it also transformed the nature of film stardom
Led by a generation of young Turks who made the successful transition from film criticism to film-making, the New Wave was always a movement of directors, and has tended to be seen as such. It also transformed the way people saw and analysed films, establishing the auteur as supreme creative force. Equally important - not least for the audience - but much less discussed was the huge change the New Wave brought to the cinema in terms of actors. New Wave directors vociferously rejected established stars and replaced them with friends, girlfriends and 'real people', as a result of which a generation of new faces erupted onto the screen. To understand this revolution, we need to go back to 1956 and the rise of Brigitte Bardot.
A spectacularly beautiful young ballet dancer and fashion model, Bardot crashed into global consciousness with Roger Vadim's 1956 film And God Created Woman (Et Dieu... créa la femme). Vadim, Bardot's husband for a while, was a journalist who had shrewdly used the emergent mass media to promote her sensational physique - cavorting as a starlet on the beach at Cannes in a bikini, for instance. If she was thus 'created' by Vadim through the media before 1956, Bardot's lasting impact on contemporary culture was entirely due to her unique synthesis of youth, sexiness and rebellious modernity as enshrined in And God Created Woman. Perhaps her greatest novelty was her ability to be both a traditional object of male lust and the subject of her own desire. Combined with her insolent verbal delivery, this delighted and fascinated the young Truffaut, who defended her in the magazine Arts. As Antoine de Baecque put it in his 1998 book on the New Wave, Lumières et liberté, Bardot's arrival on French screens signalled "the raising of a consciousness: the vision of a modern body".
By the time Truffaut and his friends at Cahiers du cinéma started releasing their first feature films, Bardot was off their radar. As a powerful box-office draw she was too expensive, but equally importantly she would have cast too much of a shadow, especially over inexperienced directors. This is why she only appears in their later films, such as Godard's Contempt (Le Mépris)in 1963, by which time the directors were famous and she had passed the peak of her popularity. Bardot was a precursor and a detonator, but as Truffaut and friends embarked on their own film-making careers, they needed different kinds of stars - male and female.
The new woman
Approaching the New Wave through its stars challenges traditional chronologies. It's usually accepted that the first New Wave films, all from 1959, were Chabrol's Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups) and Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. But its first true star emerged in earlier films by Louis Malle (thought tangential to the movement): Jeanne Moreau, in Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, 1958) and The Lovers (Les Amants, 1958).
With Moreau, the 'new woman' of the New Wave had arrived. She was soon followed by a slate of new actresses fit to play the new roles available in the films of Truffaut, Godard et al. Most famous, apart from Moreau, are Jean Seberg, Anna Karina and Stéphane Audran, together with Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Dorléac, Emmanuelle Riva, Anouk Aimée, Delphine Seyrig, Françoise Brion, Marie-France Pisier and Alexandra Stewart - I leave out Catherine Deneuve because she bypassed the New Wave, later emerging as a star in Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964). While the younger, gamine actresses (Karina, Seberg, Lafont, Pisier) were a visual embodiment of the youthful values of the New Wave, the slightly older Moreau, Riva, Aimée, Audran and Seyrig reflected the sophisticated, intellectual mood of the films. All, however, echoed through their looks and performances the ideology of the New Wave: authenticity, modernity and sensuality. Though their characters ran the gamut from child-woman (Karina) to mature intellectual (Riva) via sex bomb (Lafont), it is possible to pinpoint a number of traits that unite them as 'New Wave stars'.
Before she made Lift to the Scaffold, Moreau had been classically trained for the stage and was beginning to make her mark on the mainstream cinema of the early 1950s. But her work with Malle was a kind of rebirth; she endeavoured to erase any trace of her previous career. Likewise Audran, Riva, Seyrig and a couple of others had some stage training, but they also quickly left behind their budding mainstream careers. For other New Wave actresses, this was unnecessary as they were drawn from the ranks of friends and girlfriends, or professions such as modelling: Karina had been a model at Pierre Cardin, Stewart was an art student, and Truffaut cast Lafont in his short Les Mistons (1957) after he had written a piece praising her husband, the actor Gérard Blain. Jean Seberg, of course, was chosen by Godard for Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960) because of the way she looked in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour tristesse (1958). Thus to enter New Wave circles, looks and personal connections were paramount. This may sound unexceptional for female stars, but New Wave directors rejected traditional training more than anyone before; indeed the authenticity of their cinema was grounded in a discourse of anti-professionalism that was prominently (though not uniquely) located in their actors. It was important that actors and actresses were seen not to act, especially in contrast to the 'tradition of quality' cinema's polished performances. The drive towards a more realist style of film-making would be matched by modern-looking women and types of performances that would be fresh, alluring, different.
New Wave actresses were undeniably extremely beautiful, as is particularly clear in the films in which one sees them en masse - just watch Lafont, Stewart and Brion in Jacques Doniol-Valcroze's L'Eau à la bouche (1959), or Lafont, Audran and Clotilde Joano in Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes (1960). Sometimes entire films are devoted to the exquisite beauty of a single actress, as with Aimée in Lola (1961) and Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962), in which her face is photographed from every conceivable angle. Iconic pictures of Seberg in Breathless and Moreau in Jules et Jim have become synonymous with the allure of New Wave cinema. Yet there is something in their beauty that is different from traditional film-star glamour. New Wave actresses were young, good-looking and sexy, but not too glamorous, thus distinguishing them both from 'tradition of quality' stars like Michèle Morgan, Danielle Darrieux and Edwige Feuillère, and from Hollywood stars. Against all the norms, Moreau's radical makeover for Lift to the Scaffold saw her wandering the dimly lit streets of Paris without make-up, her hair wet. New Wave stars sported a natural look - little visible make-up, hair usually darkish in a low-key coiffure (Moreau), a bob (Karina) or tousled in a 'just out of bed' look (Lafont). When they did not wear discreet couture clothes (Moreau, Seyrig), actresses tended to downplay their figures with girlish outfits that were often their own - blouses with lace, twin-sets, skirts and petticoats - or sometimes boyish jeans, T-shirts and flat shoes, showcasing the new, younger and more casual fashion.
Similarly, performances matched the nonchalant, semi-improvised style of the films. Following in the footsteps of Bardot, casual elocution and underplaying blurred the distinction between fiction and documentary. Underlining the films' deliberate aesthetics of imperfection, lines were fluffed, movements were charmingly gauche and obvious bits of improvisation were included. This tendency attracted both praise for its freshness and criticism: enemies of New Wave cinema often had a swipe at actors for not acting or talking 'properly'.
New Wave actresses were also, importantly, at the centre of a shift in the representation of female eroticism from the body to the face - as seen in the huge close-up on Moreau's face at the beginning of Lift to the Scaffold and reiterated by Godard's shots of Karina. Even though they clearly had 'perfect' slim bodies, this is not what the camera chose to highlight. (Only Bernadette Lafont, with her fuller figure, played more blatant sex objects who were, not coincidentally, more working class.) Thus the New Wave introduced a new type of glamour - less overtly sexy, more cerebral and supposedly more realistic - and a different regime of the erotic gaze that was still fetishistic but less directly sexual, in thrall to a more romantic vision of femininity.
Jeunes premiers
Actresses are particularly memorable in New Wave cinema, but the film-makers also brought forward a new generation of young male actors who frequently functioned as their alter egos - Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jean-Claude Brialy, Sami Frey, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Gérard Blain, Jacques Charrier and especially Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose face, spectacularly revealed by Godard's Breathless, is now equated with the New Wave on so many book covers. (Alain Delon, brought to the fore in 1960 by Luchino Visconti's Rocco and his Brothers and René Clément's Plein soleil, remained marginal to the New Wave.)
Like their female counterparts, New Wave actors tended either to unlearn their theatrical schooling, as with Trintignant or Belmondo - who in Breathless speaks in a casual argot that appears totally naturalistic - or they were plucked, untrained, from other walks of life. Truffaut turned the 15-year-old Léaud into a New Wave icon by casting him in the Antoine Doinel saga, from The 400 Blows onwards. Although, contrary to popular belief, Léaud had actually appeared in one film before The 400 Blows, he became uniquely associated with the movement.
Again a desire for authenticity dictated the choice of actors who looked good, but not too good. Delon's exclusion from the New Wave can be related in part to his handsomeness - it's no accident that he and Deneuve, the era's two most traditionally glamorous beauties, were not New Wave stars. By contrast, in Italy Belmondo was called il brutto, 'the ugly one', on account of his irregular face and broken nose. If Belmondo's looks and performance had macho sex appeal, compounded by the cigarettes he stuck aggressively in his mouth, most male New Wave actors shared a different kind of persona: they were slight, dark-haired young men - strikingly similar, in this respect, to most of the directors. (Léaud, in particular, came to resemble Truffaut uncannily.) These jeunes premiers ushered in a new masculine image - softer, younger, more vulnerable - which contrasted strongly with the rugged, comic or patriarchal figures of mainstream French cinema (think of Fernandel and Jean Gabin), or dashing matinée idols like Jean Marais.
Epitomised by Blain in Les Cousins and Charles Aznavour in Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960), the jeunes premiers were both the visual embodiment of and the mouthpiece for the director's artistic sensitivity, while their vulnerability made them attractive to female characters (and no doubt spectators). At times their characters also illustrated the new hedonism, as seen in their fashionable clothes and penchant for glamorous locations, whether Paris in most New Wave films or the Côte d'Azur (as in Godard's Pierrot le fou). More often, though, their role was to promote a new, bookish and sensitive kind of masculinity, in line with the new intellectual middle class from which the New Wave directors - and the audience they were targeting - arose.
The cinephile star
The New Wave stars inaugurated a different kind of relationship between actors and directors, on both a personal and professional level. Many female stars were romantically linked to their directors: Moreau with Malle (and then Truffaut), Karina with Godard, Audran with Chabrol, Brion with Doniol-Valcroze. Again, one could argue this is common in film. But the New Wave promoted closer and more informal ties between actors and directors, relationships that were sometimes the topic of the films (as in Vivre sa vie). At the same time, because there was only room for the major creative force (and ego) of the director, the new stars had to be compliant to the directors' aesthetic agendas. Bernadette Lafont has spoken of being a 'puppet', adding, "I had no training. I was malleable terrain." As many of the actors, female and male, were initially little known, they had little clout; in the case of Léaud, the young actor literally grew up with and in Truffaut's films.
New Wave actors and actresses were also an important channel for the directors' cinephilia, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly - for instance Karina's Louise Brooks haircut in Vivre sa vie. The gauche gestures, the inclusion of mistakes, the foreign accents of Seberg and Danish-born Karina, actors looking at the camera: these introduced a distance, a self-consciousness, as did the frequent inclusion of 'real people' such as philosophers or film-makers, especially in Godard's films. This produced an ironic slippage, a gap between performance and character which paralleled the film-makers' paradoxical twin drive towards realism and personal expression.
While many actors who emerged in New Wave films have sustained long careers (notably Lafont, Audran, Trintignant and Brialy), only two became truly major stars - Moreau and Belmondo. Yet the lasting impact of New Wave stardom can be measured in the enduring model it created: the 'cinephile star'. These are the stars of French auteur cinema who tend to win the prizes and get exported, compared to popular stars with much bigger box-office power. In encyclopedias, especially outside France, there are always entries on Audran, Aimée, Karina and Seyrig, while major box-office stars such as Louis de Funès, Bourvil or Pierre Richard remain little examined.
Born of a rejection of mainstream French cinema, the New Wave created an alternative model of stardom that is still with us today - think of actresses like Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Balibar in France, Hanna Schygulla in Germany or Liv Ullmann in Sweden. At the turn of the 1960s, New Wave stars not only complemented and illustrated the auteurs' projects, they were a crucial component of the success of the whole movement - new faces, bodies and gestures that incarnated the movement's seductive allure, intellectual power and trailblazing modernity.