Viewinder Film School

Film School: Lessons from the French New Wave

Shake up your storytelling with techniques from French rule-breakers and their American acolytes.

What is the French New Wave?

The Cinema Cartography examines the rules broken by the French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague, and whose influence can be traced in some of the most well-known American cinema since:

Whenever camera moves were typically used for a scene, they would use editing. And whenever editing was typically used, they used camera movement.

Bond acknowledges that, while New Wave films share no defining characteristics as such – the movement was about breaking rules, inventing new ways of doing things – the techniques they shared tended to swap the roles and functions of film-making:

  • Discontinuous editing – “cutting out the boring bits” was an approach used not merely between scenes, but during. Famously, Jean-Luc Godard utilised jump cuts purely to reduce the runtime of Breathless – the effect, however, both generates a unique energy within the story, and draws the viewer’s attention to the viewing experience itself
  • Camera movement – reframing was often used where cuts otherwise would have been: combining transitions and establishing shots; covering shot / reverse shot in dialogue; hinting at “a world outside of what we see”.

How American cinema influenced the French New Wave

Nerdwriter traces the influence of (and influences on) Godard’s Breathless:

Godard himself on his “pathological or systematic” approach to doing things the way they weren’t supposed to be done:

Preserving movement, but distorting space and time.

How the French New Wave influenced American cinema right back

In Depth Cine looks at How The French New Wave Changed Filmmaking Forever:

Now You See It makes the case for how American cinema can be divided into “the era before Bonnie & Clyde, and the era after Bonnie & Clyde” (CW: contains scenes portraying graphic violence):

Further Viewing

Inventive ways to tell a story without having to cut at all? Every Frame A Painting takes us all to The Spielberg School of Reframing:

How about combining the two? Steven Soderbergh‘s Oceans movies are built on intricate and entertaining cropped-frame montages full of reframing and New Wave-style cutting…

The influence of French as well as Asian rule-breakers get look-ins in this broad-but-inspiring selection (via Cinefix):