After the Wave: Exploring French cinema in the… | Little White Lies

After the Wave: Explor­ing French cin­e­ma in the 1970s

06 Jun 2019

Words by Adam Scovell

Two individuals with long, reddish-brown hair standing against a concrete wall.
Two individuals with long, reddish-brown hair standing against a concrete wall.
The decade fol­low­ing the Nou­velle Vague saw the emer­gence of pro­gres­sive film­mak­ers like Chan­tal Aker­man and Mau­rice Pialat.

The prob­lem with waves is that they break. Yet it is easy to under­stand why wave’ is used as a descrip­tion for film move­ments. His­tor­i­cal­ly it has tak­en groups of direc­tors, writ­ers and per­form­ers work­ing togeth­er to change the land­scape of the medi­um rather than an indi­vid­ual. But a wave implic­it­ly denotes hier­ar­chy; those at the head of this trans­for­ma­tive force attract the most atten­tion. But what hap­pens after it recedes? What are the films that explored the medi­um in sub­tler less mon­u­men­tal shifts?

The most well-known and wide­ly-dis­cussed wave of all is the Nou­velle Vague. Its explic­it links with Cahiers du Ciné­ma is part of the rea­son for this, but also that its direc­tors ush­ered in a gen­uine­ly rad­i­cal post-mod­ern cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage. Such was their dom­i­nance in the 1960s that dis­cus­sion of French cin­e­ma, in the UK at least, is equal­ly dom­i­nat­ed by those film­mak­ers, whether it be Jean-Luc Godard, François Truf­faut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer or Jacques Riv­ette. Yet by the fol­low­ing decade oth­er inno­va­tions and exper­i­ments were under­way; unusu­al changes which allowed a body of French lan­guage film to most­ly slip by.

Per­haps the best entry point into this tough but fas­ci­nat­ing era of Euro­pean art­house cin­e­ma is Mau­rice Pialat’s Loulou from 1980, which marked an end­point of a par­tic­u­lar­ly fruit­ful peri­od of inno­va­tion in French cin­e­ma that includ­ed Pialat’s own in We Won’t Grow Old Togeth­er and The Mouth Agape. Star­ring Isabelle Hup­pert and Gérard Depar­dieu, Loulou is a vibrant exam­i­na­tion of class that cen­tres around a young woman who runs off with a pet­ty crim­i­nal. It’s an amal­ga­ma­tion of var­i­ous themes and visu­al styles that were devel­oped in the pre­ced­ing decade, many of which can be seen by trac­ing back the careers of the film’s two stars.

Two individuals, a woman with curly hair and a man wearing sunglasses, walking together in a rural setting with fields in the background.

Con­sid­er the range and styles of Huppert’s run of films in the 1970s: she played the lead in Claude Gorreta’s sub­tle, beau­ti­ful dra­ma The Lace­mak­er; Anne Bron­të in André Téchiné’s The Bron­të Sis­ters; the vic­tim in Yves Boisset’s hard-hit­ting race dra­ma The Com­mon Man; and a slew of roles in provoca­tive cult films. Although most of these films were shot using con­ven­tion­al film lan­guage, they unques­tion­ably expand­ed on the themes and tech­niques estab­lished under the Nou­velle Vague. These films aren’t con­cerned with the pre­vi­ous decade’s end­less bal­anc­ing acts, between the poet­ic and the struc­tural­ist, the avant-garde and the pulp. They sim­ply were, of them­selves so to speak, far from the (albeit rev­o­lu­tion­ary) post­mod­ern ref­er­enc­ing and footnoting.

Depar­dieu too found reg­u­lar work in a bizarre and bril­liant array of dra­mas dur­ing the decade, play­ing small­er roles in a num­ber of Mar­guerite Duras films before land­ing the lead in 1977’s The Lor­ry. He appeared in a num­ber of con­tro­ver­sial sex dra­mas, as well as sev­er­al crimes films, start­ing out along­side Jean Gabin in Denys De La Patellière’s Killer, José Giovanni’s Two Men in Town and Claude Bernard-Aubert’s The Domini­ci Affair. Lat­er he grad­u­at­ed to lead at the end of the decade in the Bertrand Blier’s sur­re­al crime fea­ture, Buf­fet Froid.

Of course, the decade was full of unusu­al film exper­i­ments: the writer Georges Perec worked with Bernard Queysanne on a beau­ti­ful adap­ta­tion of his sto­ry The Man Who Sleeps’; René Allio adapt­ed Michael Foucault’s edit­ed book, I, Pierre Riv­ière, hav­ing slaugh­tered my moth­er, my sis­ter and my broth­er…’, stay­ing true to its bru­tal, Zola-esque ori­gins; and social philoso­pher and the­o­rist Guy Debord returned to the poten­tial of the cin­e­mat­ic essay in adapt­ing his own piv­otal work, The Soci­ety of the Spectacle’.

Depar­dieu wasn’t the only male lead mak­ing inno­v­a­tive films. Anoth­er of the decade’s real break­throughs was Patrick Dewaere. In a hyper­ac­tive peri­od of work before the actor’s sui­cide in 1982, Dewaere took 1970s cin­e­ma by the throat – in Alain Corneau’s Série noire, one of the most accom­plished crime films ever made, he pos­i­tive­ly fizzes as the out-of-con­trol sleaze­bag try­ing to steal an old broth­el owner’s stashed cash. Dewaere dis­plays that same mag­net­ic volatil­i­ty in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Hot­head, Yves Boisset’s Le Sher­iff, and in Claude Miller’s The Best Way To Walk.

With the eas­ing of cen­sor­ship in the 70s, the sub­ject of sex became han­dled with far more vigour; often play­ing with the ideas of voyeurism, prob­lem­at­ic con­sent and crit­i­cal assess­ments of gen­der norms. Alain Robbe-Gril­let con­tin­ued trans­gress­ing in exper­i­men­tal erot­ic dra­mas such as Eden and After and Suc­ces­sive Slid­ings of Plea­sure, while Bar­bet Schroeder’s Maîtresse turns an S&M dra­ma into a bit­ing cri­tique of exploita­tion and own­er­ship of bod­ies. On the oth­er hand, some direc­tors were hap­py to make the most of those exploit­ed bod­ies, as evi­denced in Bertrand Blier’s beau­ti­ful­ly shot yet ran­cid Les Valseuses, or Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus. Apt­ly, Depar­dieu, Hup­pert and Dewaere fea­tured in a num­ber of these films.

Men weren’t the only ones address­ing these issues behind the cam­era. The 70s saw a wealth of pio­neer­ing, inno­v­a­tive women pick up the torch from their Nou­velle Vague fore­bears: Cather­ine Briel­lat start­ed her steady stream of cin­e­mat­ic provo­ca­tions with A Real Young Girl and Noc­tur­nal Uproar; Nadine Trintig­nant con­tin­ued pro­duc­ing effec­tive main­stream dra­mas with It Only Hap­pens to Oth­ers and Défense de savoir; Diane Kurys broke the mould of the com­ing-of-age film with the rich­ly detailed Pep­per­mint Soda; and Mar­guerite Duras deliv­ered the mas­ter­pieces Nathalie Granger and India Song.

A young woman sitting on a stone bench, reading a book. The image is in black and white, capturing a contemplative moment.

Most star­tling were the inno­va­tions of Chan­tal Aker­man, a direc­tor who took apart cin­e­mat­ic norms with bliss­ful non­cha­lance. Whether in the frag­ment­ed, cold­ly hyper-sex­u­al Je Tu Il Elle, the canon-break­ing fem­i­nist odyssey of domes­tic sta­sis Jeanne Diel­man, 23 Quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles, or the melan­choly trav­el­ling dra­ma The Meet­ings of Anna, Aker­man took the new free­doms of the decade and matched them with a icy visu­al style and dar­ing dis­re­gard for the sta­tus quo.

This can only be a short overview of a body of work still capa­ble of throw­ing up sur­pris­es. There are films from the decade with per­for­mances from Lino Ven­tu­ra, Del­phine Seyrig and Alain Delon, those script­ed by Fran­cis Veber and with late career dia­logue by Michel Audi­ard, or those films not men­tioned direct­ed by Pierre Granier-Deferre and Alain Corneau to name but a few. The list is seem­ing­ly endless.

On oth­er occa­sions, I’ve labelled this cin­e­ma The Sun­day of French Cin­e­ma’ in ref­er­ence to Ray­mond Queneau’s nov­el Le Dimanche de la vie’; cin­e­ma basi­cal­ly treat­ed as being after the main event. Yet real­ly, it’s only the tail end in regards to its appre­ci­a­tion rather than its qual­i­ties. In real­i­ty many of these films are bit­ing, tack­ling tough issues, some­times dis­turbing­ly, but nev­er less than inter­est­ing­ly. The visu­als may not always be as defined or as stylised as those films that still dom­i­nate the dis­course of French lan­guage cin­e­ma today, but they’re cer­tain­ly more than worth the time to dis­cuss and, most impor­tant­ly, to watch.

Dis­cov­er many of the films men­tioned above at Barbican’s After the Wave sea­son, which runs 6 June to 25 July.

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