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The vague nouvelle and the Nouvelle Vague: TheCritical Construction of le jeune cinéma françaisJoe HardwickPublished online: 24 Oct 2008.
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The vague nouvelle and the NouvelleVague: The Critical Constructionof le jeune cinema francaisJoe Hardwick
One of the commonplaces in critical writing on the 1990s movement known as le jeunecinema francais is the idea that it constituted a new ‘New Wave’. At the same time, thecritical reception of the 1990s and 1960s ‘new waves’ could not be more different, with le
jeune cinema francais being seen invariably as aesthetically inferior to its 1960s‘antecedent’. This article examines the two key discursive mechanisms used to link le jeune
cinema francais to the Nouvelle Vague, those of political commitment and ‘auteur’cinema. It is argued that the mechanisms used to construct le jeune cinema francais as a
distinct cinematic category become increasingly divorced from the kinds of films actuallybeing made and that it is this discursive disjuncture which is, in part, responsible for its
negative critical reception.
In the introduction to his 1997 book entitled La Nouvelle Vague: une ecole artistique,
French film historian Michel Marie stated that:
Presque tous les ans, a l’occasion d’un festival ou du bilan de la production del’annee, les chroniqueurs se demandent s’il est apparu une nouvelle ‘Nouvelle Vague’.Des que deux jeunes cineastes presentent un lien de connivence, on y voit le noyaud’un groupe qui va engendrer un mouvement de renouvellement thematique ouesthetique sur le modele fige de cette mythique et vieille Nouvelle Vague. (Marie1997, p. 5)
Just one year later, Marie would coordinate a collection of articles entitled Le Jeune
Cinema francais dedicated to the most recent grouping of filmmakers who have beenalternatively referred to as ‘la nouvelle Nouvelle Vague’ (Grassin & Medioni 1995) or as
‘la vague nouvelle’ (Tremois 1997, p. 11). Marie’s book, in fact, was the second of three
ISSN 0963-9489 (print)/ISSN 1469-9869 (online)/08/010051-15
q 2008 Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France
DOI: 10.1080/09639480701802666
Correspondence to: School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, Qld 4072,
Australia. Email: [email protected]
Modern & Contemporary France
Vol. 16, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 51–65
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major studies on le jeune cinema published between 1997 and 2002, the other titlesbeing Claude-Marie Tremois’ 1997 publication Les Enfants de la liberte: le jeune cinema
francais des annees 90 and Rene Predal’s study also entitled Le Jeune cinema francaispublished in 2002. This would suggest at least that, notwithstanding the regular tide of
‘new waves’ declared by French film critics, this latest one would appear to have somevalidity, or at least some kind of staying power in the French critical imagination.
Indeed, given the fondness of French film historians for associating decades withparticular movements, it is highly probable that le jeune cinema francais will be seen as
the grouping representative of French film production in the 1990s, just as the 1980shave become synonymous with the cinema du look, the 1970s with documentaryrealism, and the 1960s with the French New Wave.
However, nearly ten years after the publication of the first major study on le jeunecinema francais, this cinematic category remains relatively undefined and its exact
contribution to the history of twentieth century French cinema somewhat unclear. AsJean-Pierre Jeancolas wrote in 1999, le jeune cinema ‘n’est pas une ecole, pas un bloc,
mais un mouvement aux contours flous, dont la definition, les criteres de definition,varient d’un commentateur a l’autre’ (Jeancolas 1999, p. 15). Nonetheless, precisely
one of the commonplaces in writing on le jeune cinema is this idea that it constituted anew ‘New Wave’, not simply in the sense that it represented a break from precedingcinematic trends, but that its arrival was in some respects a repetition of the classic
French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. At the same time, however, theoverall critical reception of the vague nouvelle of the 1990s and the Nouvelle Vague of
the 1960s could not be more different. As Rene Predal has written: ‘Un des paradoxesde la reception du jeune cinema francais est que l’addition de nombreuses critiques
favorables aboutit a un jugement negatif, les syntheses severes sur l’ensemble faisant eneffet oublier les analyses souvent positives accueillant les premiers longs metrages !’
This prompts him to ask the question: ‘Comment donc avec tant de films peut-onavoir un si mauvais cinema?’ (Predal 2002, p. 33).
This article will aim to provide, at least in part, an answer to this question byanalysing the two kinds of distinguishing acts used to construct le jeune cinema as aseparate cinematic category and the importance of references to the French New Wave
of the 1960s in this process. Like many cinematic groupings, le jeune cinema is one thathas come to be constituted by critics rather than the filmmakers themselves and that
has come into being retrospectively. This article will begin by looking at the broadercontextual level, this involving the narratives which shape film history and the
strategies used to posit lines of continuity and/or points of discontinuity with previouscinematic movements. We will then turn to the second act of critical distinction
involving the more detailed textual work of discerning recurrent patterns among thefilms of le jeune cinema in order to give the category some vague sort of coherence.At both levels, two discourses in particular are used to link the two ‘new waves’: those
relating to political commitment and to auteur cinema. However, it will be argued thatthe very discursive mechanisms used by some French critics to separate out le jeune
cinema as a distinct category of films while simultaneously maintaining that link to the
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Nouvelle Vague become increasing divorced from the kinds of films actually beingmade by new French filmmakers in the 1990s. Moreover, it is precisely this kind of
discursive disjuncture which is, in part, responsible for some of the criticism directedat this cinematic grouping, even by those who otherwise laud its arrival, with the risk
being that what is genuinely new and original in le jeune cinema is in danger of beingoverlooked.
Critical and Cinematic engagement
Le jeune cinema is a blanket term that has somehow been used to bring together thesignificant number of films released since the early 1990s directed by new and, in
particular, ‘young’ French filmmakers.1 In the 1970s and 1980s, the proportion ofFrench film production made up by first time film-makers was around 25% but, by theearly 1990s, this figure dramatically increases, reaching 42% of overall film production
in 1992 (Predal 2002, p. 1). Le jeune cinema, however, is really about only a smallpercentage of these films with critics using different mechanisms of exclusion and
inclusion to designate who exactly should belong to the group. These variable criteriainclude the age of the filmmakers and their protagonists, the relationship between the
filmmakers and the stories they film, the particular approach of the filmmakers to theirsubject-matter and the quality of films made.2 In general terms, the category has
become synonymous with relatively low-budget, director-driven and character-centred films which have been read as bringing to French cinema a new kind of realism
in the very personal stories they recount, which are often set against the backdrop ofthe fracture sociale of late twentieth century French society. The banner filmsattributed to the grouping include such critical successes as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La
Haine (1995), Erick Zonca’s La Vie revee des anges (1998), Bruno Dumont’s La Vie deJesus (1997) and Manuel Poirier’s Western (1997).
Often, a pre-condition of a new cinematic movement of any sort being discerned bycritics is that it be preceded by a lull, a period of apparent non-activity. Keith Reader,
in an article reviewing the state of the French film industry in 1994 published inModern and Contemporary France, noted a tendency towards stagnation in French
films at the end of the Mitterrand era, though he qualified this by saying that such astatement echoes that of French journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponte who declaredfamously that France was bored just weeks before the eruption of the May ’68 riots
(Reader 1995, p. 454). This critical desire precisely for something to happen in Frenchcinema would appear to be partially satisfied the following year at the Cannes film
festival. In an overview of the 1995 festival in the news magazine L’Express, SophieGrassin and Gilles Medioni heralded the arrival of a new cinematic generation in
France. The article entitled ‘La nouvelle Nouvelle Vague’ designated from the outsetthat the explicit point of comparison for this new group of film-makers would be the
French New Wave of the 1960s. The specific points of connection were made clear inthe sub-heading: ‘Ils ont la trentaine ou la quarantaine. Ils s’estiment, travaillent
souvent ensemble. Et filment sans demagogie la realite d’aujourd’hui: les banlieues,
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le sida, les guerres, le desespoir. Ils font une entree fracassante au festival de Cannes1995’ (Grassin & Medioni 1995).
In this article, the authors emphasise the importance of youth in this new set offilms, both in terms of the age of the film-makers and the protagonists in their movies,
this being the first point of cross-over with the French New Wave of the 1960s. AsPredal reminds us, the term la nouvelle vague referred initially not to a new wave of
French film-makers but more broadly to the arrival of a new youth generation inFrance at the end of the 1950s (Marie 1997, p. 8). Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) appears
as the standard bearer for this era of renewed hope for French filmmaking, togetherwith Xavier Beauvois’s N’Oublie pas que tu vas mourir (1995) and La Cite des enfantsperdus (1995) by Jeunet and Caro whom critics later would argue were to be
deliberately excluded from this nouvelle nouvelle vague.3 Several other points ofcomparison between the 1960s and the 1990s ‘new waves’ converge in the article: these
new film-makers are ‘[d]es auteurs qui se frequentent, collaborent, resistent, des clans’(Grassin & Medioni 1995). Just like the early Godard and Truffaut, these 1990s young
French filmmakers work together and also seem to exhibit a form or resistance to oldercinematic traditions. They are not content to ‘photographier une societe aimable sur
papier glace’ (Grassin & Medioni 1995) in the same way that the 1960s French NewWave had explicitly rejected the cinema de qualite which had dominated criticalinterest in French cinema in the 1950s. Of course, the most important consideration in
the rejection of that cinema de qualite, as made explicit in Truffaut’s celebrated essayentitled ‘Une certaine tendance du cinema francais’ was that it was essentially a cinema
of screenwriters, not directors, where the director’s role was simply to add images tothe words (see Truffaut 1954). The French New Wave of the 1990s, like its 1960s
antecedent, is first and foremost a cinema d’auteur in the sense that the director is verymuch at the centre of the film as artistic enterprise: ‘A cette nouvelle generation de
cineastes repond une generation de producteurs dont la priorite s’eloigne des “coups”pour privilegier les auteurs’ (Grassin & Medioni 1995).
Importantly, though, points of differentiation are also noted. The coordinator of thedirectors’ fortnight at the 1995 Cannes festival is quoted as saying that ‘“[c]es cineastesont surgi dans le desordre, sans la tribune dont la Nouvelle Vague disposait avec les
Cahiers du cinema”’ (Grassin & Medioni 1995). But this is in no way meant to be acriticism. The journalists indicate that this ‘nouvelle Nouvelle Vague’ rejects classicism,
emphasising the freedom of the films being made: ‘le jeune cinema francais saitprendre des risques pour ne pas mourir. Il palpite. Mouvant, libre, varie’ (Grassin &
Medioni 1995). The article then quotes Christophe Rossignon, producer of La Haine,who offers an interesting variation on this idea: ‘“Si on le photographierait, on
distinguerait des parentes, des chapelles, et des electrons autonomes qui, a eux seuls,forment une ecole”’ (Grassin & Medioni 1995).
From the outset, then, the age of the film-makers, their collaborative efforts, their
rejection of preceding forms of cinema all place them firmly in a lineage that takesthem back to the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. One could even
argue that, in the talk of a spontaneous coming together of young directors in
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conditions of disorder, of an emphasis on movement and liberty, and of individualsbanding together to form a loose collectivity, there are faint overtones of a mythical
revolutionary rhetoric, though ones at this stage which are associated with aestheticrejuvenation, in particular through a new form of realism. The link therefore is to the
youth generation of the late 1950s and early 1960s to which the directors of theNouvelle Vague belonged and who were seen as revolutionary mainly in terms of their
cinematic practice.By 1997, however, the way that the jeune in le jeune cinema is deployed undergoes an
important discursive shift, and with it, the nature of the association with the 1960sNew Wave as a point of reference. This comes with the publication of the Appel des 59,a statement co-signed by a group of filmmakers calling for civil disobedience in
solidarity with illegal immigrants in France being threatened with expulsion. In itself,the signing and publication of a political statement by those from the cultural sphere
in France is not unusual, consistent with a tradition of manifestos, declarations orappeals penned or at least signed by various participants in the arts as a form of either
political or artistic intervention. French film directors and actors and actresses hadsigned various declarations in the 1960s and 1970s. What is different with the Appel des
59, as Tremois notes, is that the majority of signatories were largely young French filmdirectors (Tremois 1997, p. 9). It is only after the publication of the declaration thatthe three major studies on le jeune cinema by Tremois, Marie and Predal are published
which all refer to greater or lesser degree to the Appel even though this declarationmade no reference whatsoever to the cinematic activities of its signatories and, in fact,
would have little effect on how many would go about making their subsequent films.Michel Marie, in La Nouvelle Vague: une ecole artistique sets out a list of criteria required
in order for a cinematic movement to be considered a school, these including, amongothers: the presence of some sort of critical doctrine, however minimal, explained either
by the film-makers themselves or by journalists; the publication of a manifestoexplaining this doctrine; and a body of works that might be interpreted according to this
(Marie 1997, p. 27). What is interesting in terms of the Appel des 59 is that it allowed criticsto write about le jeune cinema as if it were something that functioned in some ways a littlelike a cinematic school, even though the document makes no reference to their work as
film-makers nor to the signatories themselves as constituting a specific group with aparticular doctrine. Importantly, the Appel des 59 acted as a kind of discursive nexus,
consolidating for critics those questions of generation, auteur cinema and socialawareness already set in place at the 1995 Cannes film festival but transforming them. This
is particularly evident in the opening paragraph of Tremois’ 1997 book Les Enfants de laliberte which begins by citing the declaration:
‘Nous, realisateurs francais, demandons a etre mis en examen et juges nous aussi’.Pas une petition. Pas un manifeste. Une mise en cause personnelle. ‘Nous sommestous des juifs allemands’, disaient les soixante-huitards, solidaire de Daniel Cohn-Bendit. ‘Nous avons tous heberges des sans-papiers, nous devons tous etrecondamnes, comme Madame Deltombe l’a ete’, disent en substance les Enfants de laLiberte’. (Tremois 1997, p. 9)
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From the opening lines of Tremois’ book, a kind of discursive slippage takes place. It isnot the youth generation of the late 1950s that stands as the initial point of comparison
for le jeune cinema but that of the late 1960s, making Reader’s 1994 reference to the lullbefore May 1968 strangely prophetic. The effect of Tremois’ opening paragraph is to
politicise immediately le jeune cinema, but to do so in a way that appears perhaps alittle contradictory. The Appel des 59 might look like a manifesto but, in fact, it isn’t
one. Rather, it’s a mise en cause personnelle. Within the opening sentences, we alreadyhave a certain oscillation of personal and political concerns which will be characteristic
of the way le jeune cinema comes to be represented. This, however, does not mean thatthe comparison with 1960s New Wave disappears. Rather, it is the New Wave as it wasconstituted in the late 1960s, rather than its inception in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
that becomes the reference point. Tremois underlines the role of New Wave filmdirectors in signing manifestoes and in closing down the 1968 Cannes film festival. She
states that: ‘Pour une fois, ce n’est pas l’esthetique qui se plie au politique (ce quidonne toujours des resultats deplorables, tel le realisme socialiste) mais le politique qui
rejoint l’esthetique’ (Tremois 1997, p. 9).Thus, a cinema that was described as libre at Cannes 1995 is now transformed into a
cinema de liberte, a term whose political overtones in French discourse allow Tremoisto rescue le jeune cinema from accusations of nombrilisme—navel gazing—that hadpreviously been levelled at it by critics. This move to politicise what Tremois calls la
vague nouvelle is particularly significant in terms of those narratives used to structurefilmic histories, enabling her to posit le jeune cinema as a point of rupture with French
cinema in the 1980s. Le jeune cinema can now be made to stand in contrast to thecinema du look of directors such as Besson and Beineix, a cinema which Tremois sees as
largely apolitical and excessively formalist (Tremois 1997, pp. 16–17), a point echoedby Predal who condemns ‘l’isolation autarcique de la creation cinematographique des
annees quatre-vingt’ (Predal 2002, p. 9).This emphasis on aesthetics and the importance of the liberty of the films
protagonists’ as the central driving force of their narratives means that the groupingalso avoids accusations of didacticism levelled at the filmmakers of a cinema engage,or indeed contemporary older filmmakers such as Bertrand Tavernier or Robert
Guediguian. Nonetheless, it is still the discourse of engagement which is used toposition le jeune cinema immediately after the publication of the declaration.
However, a problem emerges almost immediately since the idea of engagement is notparticularly prominent in a lot of the films themselves. While critics such as Myrto
Konstantarakos and Martin O’Shaughnessy still see revolt as a major factor in thefilms of a least some directors of le jeune cinema, the engagement of even these
directors takes a very different form from that of the cinema engage of previousgenerations. Konstantarakos divides le jeune cinema into those whose main politicalact is in signing the manifesto and those whose political commitment translates, to
some extent, to their cinematic practice (Konstantarakos 1998, p. 2), whileO’Shaughnessy writes that the post-1995 return to the social in French cinema
was the result of the dynamic interaction between film-makers with the real,
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a ‘pre-political realism . . . which scouts around amongst the wreckage not for ready-made politics, but for the elementary solidarities and instinctive refusals that are the
preconditions for a renewal of the political’ (O’Shaugnessy 2003, p. 195). PhilPowrie, in his summing up of 1990s French cinema in Modern and Contemporary
France, comments that, although these films seem to present a new kind of realism,their relation to engagement is somewhat elliptical (Powrie 1998, p. 486). For Powrie,
what links these younger film-makers together is their rejection of standard party-political forms of protest. He points to the term used by Robert Guediguian who
talks of the need for a militantisme de proximite. For his part, Jean-Pierre Jeancolashas written more recently that what initially seemed like the return of the political inthe films of le jeune cinema really only applies to the year of political activity in 1997.
Indeed, Jeancolas now re-reads the Appel des 59 as less a political intervention than ahumanitarian one (Jeancolas 2005, p. 157).
By the 1998 Cannes film festival, the presumed engagement of le jeune cinema is putin question. In another article in L’Express entitled ‘Avoir 20 ans dans la deche’, Gilles
Medioni notes a variation within le jeune cinema seen to arrive in competition with acinema engage represented by directors such as Robert Guediguian, Jean-Francois
Richet and Manuel Poirier. This new group of films, which include Erick Zonca’s LaVie revee des anges (1998), Louise (Take 2) (1998) by Siegfried, Les Corps ouverts (1998)by Sebastien Lifshitz and Chacun pour soi (1998) by Bruno Bontzolakis, is seen as proof
of an emerging group of film-makers whose key characteristic is precisely theirdistance from any formalised kind of political commitment: ‘Miroir de la societe, le
cinema ne deroule aucune protestation, aucun contrepoint a la faillite des institutions,au devoilement de la politique, au regne de la desensibilisation’ (Medioni 1998).
Nonetheless, the rules of disengagement are such that, even as youth films divorcethemselves from any standardised form of commitment, they must be defined in terms
of some kind of proximity to the concept of engagement.Thus, the need to read the films of le jeune cinema in terms of rebellion and revolt
stands as one of the principal discourses which allows points of linkage to bemaintained with the New Wave of the 1960s. However, the form that this connectiontakes changes quite markedly in the course of the decade, appearing first as a youthful
rebellion against existing cinematic trends at the 1995 Cannes film festival, beingtransformed dramatically into a form of social and political engagement after the
publication of the Appel des 59, followed by a distancing from any form of direct,standardised political commitment at the end of the millennium. At the same time, the
links between la vague nouvelle of the 1990s and the Nouvelle Vague of the 1960srequire quite a deal of discursive footwork to maintain. Discourses concerning
youth and generation have become very blurred, now seeming to embrace twogenerations, those of the late 1950s, as well as a more openly politicised youthgeneration nearly ten years later. And this discursive slippage seems ultimately to be
one that, in fact, is not actually borne out through textual analysis of the filmsthemselves, which fail to reflect the kind of politicisation required to maintain the
discourse of engagement.
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Le jeune cinema francais and the Ambiguity of the Auteur
Similarly, the more properly aesthetic link between the 1990s and the 1960s ‘NewWaves’, that of auteur cinema, also shows evidence of a disjuncture between the
discourses used to constitute the category and the actual cinematic practices of itsdirectors. All three major studies of le jeune cinema insist on the auteur approach to
varying extents. Marie’s collection of edited articles, for example, contains a marginfeaturing, in alphabetical order, the biographical details of those considered to be themajor directors of le jeune cinema. The specific criterion for their selection is that
they are all born after 1959–1960, the date of the arrival of the Nouvelle Vague(Marie 1998, p. 3). Predal, in underlining the great leap forward constituted by le jeune
cinema in relation to 1980s French cinema, insists that ‘(l)’art cinematographique . . .se traduit dans la creation de ses auteurs, certes jeunes et vieux, mais il se trouve qu’au
tournant 2000 comme a l’oree des sixties, la pression des jeunes est plus forte et imposel’existence d’un nouveau cinema’ (Predal 2002, p. 4).
In terms of recent French film history, auteur cinema constitutes a kind of discursivebridge, linking le jeune cinema to the Nouvelle Vague while passing over the troubled
waters of the cinema du look. The emergence of le jeune cinema appears, for Predal, as akind of palimpsest of the emergence of the 1960s French New Wave, having its ownprecursors, just as the New Wave did, in the form of a select group of French directors
from the preceding decade. These are the directors of good films, though not greatones, for Predal, specifically because they do not live up to the promise of the 1960s
New Wave: ‘cinema aspirant a repartir a zero mais arrivant apres une generation quiavait deja tout reinvente; donc cinema incertain, mouvant, conscient de son
aboutissement et dont l’instabilite est pourtant prometteuse’ (Predal 2002, pp. 14–15).For Predal, the discourse of the auteur overrides that of great individual films, and the
only auteur discourse that really counts is that which allows cinema to ‘repartir a zero’,in other words, a cinema that corresponds to the modernist rhetoric of Jean-LucGodard in the 1960s.
Echoes of such radical newness associated with le jeune cinema appear as a kind ofleitmotif throughout Predal’s book. Predal notes that, ‘comme quarante ans plus tot au
debut de la nouvelle vague, les cineastes sont davantage du cote du reel que de celui del’image’ (Predal 2002, p. 95). Moreover, its emphasis on the unpredictability of its
often marginal characters is opposed not only to Hollywood cinema but represents ‘unrenversement notable des dramaturgies litteraires, theatrales et cinematographiques
du passe’ (Predal 2002, p. 97). The connection to the films of the New Wave is evenmore marked in Tremois’ book. The film seen to mark the debut of la vague nouvelle is
Eric Rochant’s 1990 comedy Un monde sans pitie where the protagonist finds himself,in Tremois’s words, as ‘marginal dans un monde qui n’espere plus un nouveau Mai 68’(p. 21). Stylistically, Tremois notes that the fluid camera movements in the film recall
that of Godard’s A bout de souffle (p. 20) while much of the discussion of the films ofOlivier Asseyas rely on the points of comparison with directors of the Nouvelle Vague,
Truffaut in particular (p. 69).
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For Tremois, the directors of le jeune cinema are true auteurs, in the sense that thereal creative force is the director: ‘C’est lui qui impose sa personnalite et qui, avec sa
camera, finit de modeler le scenario, le modifie peut-etre, le paracheve’ (Tremois 1997,p. 38). This definition also allows Tremois to exclude directors who do not fit this
classical usage of the word. For this reason, her book includes chapters on ‘Des jeunesdeja vieux’ and ‘Des vieux toujours jeunes’, indicating that age alone is not a sufficient
criterion for inclusion in the group. She specifically excludes, for example, JacquesAudiard and Jeunet and Caro who, in her opinion, are too manipulative in terms of
their story-telling and mise en scene, refusing the unpredictability and freedom that sheuses to define her vague nouvelle: ‘On l’a compris, ces realisateurs-la sont auxantipodes des Enfants de la Liberte. Leurs ancetres ne s’appellent ni Truffaut, ni
Godard, mais Julien Duvivier et Henri-Georges Clouzot’ (Tremois 1997, p. 241).However, just as the discourse of engagement has changed since the 1960s, so has the
discourse of the auteur. Indeed, the word auteur in writing on le jeune cinema issomewhat ambiguous. Jeancolas, for example, states that the term is simply one set in
opposition to a cinema of producers on the one hand, as with Hollywood films, and togenre cinema on the other (Jeancolas 1999, p. 13). The deployment of the term by
Tremois and Predal, however, connects with its more popular usage, underlining anintimate connection between the lives and the directors and the stories they recount.Hence the titles that Predal gives to certain strands within le jeune cinema of ‘des films
a la premiere personne, un cinema du moi exacerbe’ (Predal 2002, p. 74).It is precisely the kind of intimacy born of a close relationship between the directors’
lives and their films which is one of the distinguishing features of le jeune cinema. Thisis particularly evident if we turn to that second act of critical distinction required for
the construction of the category, this involving the detailed critical work of elaboratingconnections between specific films. Although constituting something less than a genre,
Jean-Pierre Jeancolas sets out a list of ten patterns in the films of le jeune cinema(Jeancolas 1999, pp. 22–25) while Tremois similarly discerns eight recurring
characteristics, these including the close connection between the story andcontemporary social circumstances, the use of improvisation in shooting, the libertyafforded characters in the films as well as a loose, chronicle style narrative structure
(Tremois 1997, pp. 47–55). Predal underlines a similar structural tendency, noting thepreference for a more realist and intimate cinema that prefers tonal nuances over
dramatic action (2002, pp. 96–97). Not surprisingly, the looseness of the narrativestructure is repeated in the spatial trajectory of the characters themselves. This is what
Tremois refers to as deambulation (Tremois 1997, pp. 49–50), and this finds its stylisticequivalent in a camera-baladeuse or what Predal refers to as ‘une insidieuse camera
ultra-mobile’ (Predal 1998, p. 10). Particularly remarkable in le jeune cinema is therecurrence of wanderer figures, or what Ross Chambers refers to as loiterlyprotagonists, whose stories allow for a particularly decentralised vision of late
twentieth century France (see Chambers 1999). Some of the better known examplesinclude the protagonists in Les Nuits fauves (Collard 1992), Les Corps ouverts (Lifshitz
1998), Drole de Felix (Martineau & Ducastel 2000), Western (Poirier 1997), Louise
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(Take 2) (Siegfried 1998) and Elodie Bouchez’s character in La Vie revee des anges(Zonca 1997). Together, such factors emphasise an intimate connection to the real and
the everyday which takes precedence over pre-determined, teleological storylines.However, there is another manner in which the term auteur is used in critical
writing on le jeune cinema, that is in its more technical sense, as films potentiallyreadable in terms of auteur theory. Of course, this traditional understanding of auteur
cinema also derives from the French New Wave of the 1960s, a concept whosebeginnings are closely linked to the critical writings of Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol
in the Cahiers du cinema before they turned from cinematic theory to practice. Indeed,this technical sense of the term corresponds to the distinction made by Truffaut in hisarticles in the 1950s in Cahiers du cinema between the great auteurs and the mere
metteurs en scene.4 In either case, whether auteur cinema is understood in its morepopular or theoretical sense, the auteur approach tends to ensure that the films are
read as extensions of the life experiences of individual directors who have the potentialto later develop into fully-fledged cinematic auteurs, in the style of the Nouvelle Vague.
However, these two understandings of auteur cinema—as a cinema intime and as thesignature of a director readable in terms of stylistic evolution across a corpus of films—
are not necessarily compatible, as an auteur cinema of the first kind will not necessarilydevelop—nor should it necessarily be expected to develop—into one of the second. Theimportant difference here has to do with the teleological trajectory of a director’s career
which underwrites the second meaning of auteur as opposed to the question of theintimate link between the life of directors and the stories they recount, consistent with
the first. Yet, in Tremois’ study in particular, the expectation is that the directors of lejeune cinema are, in fact, auteurs-in-the-making who will eventually be written about in
terms of stylistic evolution as their careers progress, precisely like the directors of theNew Wave. It is for this reason that her study is constructed largely in terms of individual
directors. Following an early chapter dedicated to Eric Rochant, a significant proportionof the book is dedicated to ‘les quatorze realisateurs les plus marquants des Enfants de la
Liberte’ (Tremois 1997, p. 69). Her discussions of these directors are peppered withcomparisons to celebrated auteurs, while conversely the failure to follow the trajectoryof an auteur’s career path is a source of criticism. For example, Tremois describes the
evolution of Eric Rochant’s career as sad and strange, since: ‘(l)ui qui a montre la route atant de jeunes realisateurs s’est peu a peu egare sur des chemins de traverse’ (Tremois
1997, p. 22). It seems the non-linear trajectories of the characters of le jeune cinema, sointimately linked to the lives of its directors and so applauded by critics, is something
expected not to extend the career trajectories of the filmmakers themselves.However, one might question the appropriateness of applying the traditional
concept of the auteur to the films of le jeune cinema when the films’ content and thecircumstances under which films came to be made in the 1990s are taken into account.The recurrence of wanderer figures and digressive narratives within young French
cinema is hardly surprising given the kinds of social circumstances specific to Frenchyouth in the 1990s and into the new millennium. Just as the collapse of the standard
marriage or family unit produced new kinds of relations through the construction of
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alternative social arrangements, the ever-present reality of unemployment andunderemployment inhibited attempts to follow a neatly linear career trajectory.
A similar kind of precarite extends to the circumstances of French filmic production inthe 1990s. In Michel Marie’s compilation of essays, Isabelle Giordano insists that the
emergence of the category is really due to the specific financial considerations ratherthan aesthetic ones: ‘S’il y a un tel foisonnement dans son jeune cinema, si tant de
jeunes cineastes sont apparus depuis dix ans, c’est en partie grace a ce systeme definancement unique auquel il faut parfois tout de meme rendre homage’ (Giordano
1998, p. 5). Similarly, Marie, in his introduction to the collection of essays, underlinesthe fact that the subsidies given to filmmakers for their first films obviously facilitate adiversity of new filmmakers but do not necessarily extend to a career in the industry:
‘Il y a donc une prime a la jeunesse et a la “premiere fois” et il n’est certainement pasfacile de devenir vieux dans le cinema francais, ou tout au moins de developper une
carriere au dela du troisieme ou quatrieme film’ (Marie 1998c, p. 3). In short, thesehistorical circumstances—far removed from those of the late 1950s and early 1960s—
are hardly conducive to the growth of an auteur cinema in the traditional sense.A second criticism of le jeune cinema concerns the relationships between the
directors themselves and the difficulties of reading their films collectively. Predal, forexample, is dismayed that le jeune cinema lacks a ‘groupe-moteur’ such as thatconstituted by Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard:
. . . Mais ce cinema (le jeune cinema francais) souffre d’un manque de netteted’image de marque parce qu’il n’a pas de centre fort comparable a la poignee decritiques passant a la realisation autour de 1960. La cause reside sans doute engrande partie dans l’etalement tres large des ‘revelations’ successives qui empechentde placer de maniere evidente certains cineastes en position de chefs de file commede tracer des courants individualises . . . (Predal 2002, p. 10)
Once more, such a criticism seems particularly misplaced when precisely what is
specific to le jeune cinema is taken into account. The adjectives which recur in writingon this cinematic grouping are those of diversity and plurality. In the 1990s, moremarkedly than in any preceding generation of French filmmakers, the cinematic gaze
shifted focus from bourgeois inner-Paris to the banlieue, to provincial regions and tothe lives of those who had been previously marginalised in terms of cinematic
representation, notably women, the unemployed and underemployed, and those frommigrant backgrounds, hence the sometimes considerable cross-over between le jeune
cinema on the one hand and the cinema de banlieue and the contested category ofcinema beur, whose development dates back to the mid-1980s, on the other.
As Konstantarakos has written, le jeune cinema takes as its subject matter ‘une “autre”France, non parisienne, non intellectuelle, une France de “petites gens”, petits
commercants de villes de province sans grand interet, classes sociales defavorisees,exclus, chomeurs, S.D.F., produits de la fameuse “fracture sociale” . . . tout un peoplequi n’avait plus sa place sur les ecrans francais depuis longtemps’ (Konstantarakos
1998, p. 2). Moreover, the diversity of protagonists in front of the camera was matchedby the diversity of directors behind it, with significant contributions being made by
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women directors and the children of first and second generation migrants to France.One might argue, therefore, in a cinema otherwise lauded for its emphasis on
marginality and a plurality of perspectives, that the very idea of a centre is highlyquestionable, and that it is entirely appropriate that this cinematic grouping not be
seen to revolve around the work of a handful of directors.Remarkably, there has been generally little critical interest in how the directors
themselves conceive of their place their within a French cinematic tradition. Here, infact, the point de repere is relatively rarely the French New Wave of the 1960s.
Nicolas Boukhrief, for example, points rather to connections with American cinema,stating that ‘le rapport a l’ancienne “Nouvelle Vague” ne veut plus rien dire’(Marie, 1998a, p. 45). It should be noted that some French critics have, in fact,
lamented this continual need to read 1990s cinema as a distant echo of late 1950s and1960s French cinema. Noel Herpe (1998) points out that: ‘En fait, on assiste ici au
retour (eternel depuis trente ans) d’un discours romantique et qui ressuscite lesepouvantails des annees cinquante, pour mieux gonfler l’etendard d’une pretendue
rebellion [ . . . ]’ (p. 30). Similarly, the critical distance enjoyed by foreign observers ofFrench cinema has meant that the tendency to see le jeune cinema as a nouvelle
Nouvelle Vague has been treated with considerably more suspicion, with Will Higbee,for example, seeing the comparison between 1960s and 1990s French cinema as‘intrinsically linked to the mythologizing that has . . . taken place around the New
Wave’s contemporary significance and legacy’ (Higbee 2005, p. 314).The somewhat forced vertical connection which results in continual comparisons
with the Nouvelle Vague can only result in 1990s French cinema being seen as a paleimitation of the 1960s movement. As Martine Beugnet has written in her book on
marginality in contemporary French cinema, ‘[a]lors que, du point de vue du style, lesfilms recents sont souvent juges inferieurs ou moins inventifs que ceux des illustres
predecesseurs de l’epoque classique ou de la Nouvelle Vague, en ce qui concerne lesmessages et les strategies de representation, le cinema francais de la derniere decennie
est regulierement decrit comme carrement reactionnaire’ (Beugnet 2000, p. 25). Yetthere is little critical recognition that the discourses of both auteur cinema and ofpolitical commitment used to perpetuate the link with the Nouvelle Vague have
radically changed since the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it is increasinglyinappropriate to apply them in ways which fail to take into account the changing social
and industrial circumstances of French filmmaking in the 1990s. The Nouvelle Vaguedid not operate under the same conditions of precarite that directors of le jeune cinema
experienced. Moreover, cinema no longer holds the privileged position it once hadamong the visual arts, with competition from television, video games and pop video
clips representing not only potential competition for the medium of cinema itself, butalternative career opportunities for the directors of le jeune cinema. It is the increasingcrossover between television and cinema which has seen Higbee, for example, question
the appropriateness of the auteur approach in relation to le jeune cinema (Higbee 2005,p. 316), echoing a point made by Vincent Amiel as early as 1997, who wrote that the
strict aesthetic distinction marking off cinematic productions from televisual ones was
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no longer of great relevance (Amiel 1997, p. 96). In the same article entitled ‘Unenouvelle generation dans le cinema francais ?’, Amiel gestures towards an alternative way
of placing le jeune cinema in French film history:
Les jeunes cineastes, contrairement aux critiques et aux commentateurs, font peureference au passe, aux aınes, aux ecoles qui auraient pu les marquer, et biendavantage aux flux contemporains auxquels ils appartiennent; comme si leursreferences, y compris esthetiques—etaient plus horizontales (les imagesd’aujourd’hui, les supports et les distributeurs potentiels) que verticales (lessources, les heritages, les influences historiques. (Amiel 1997, p. 96)
Having gained some critical distance from the 1990s, it is perhaps such ‘horizontal’
connections which contemporary critics now need to explore. Konstantarakos hasnoted, for example, that the films of le jeune cinema have less in common with the
Nouvelle Vague than they do with contemporary British cinema, or with the films ofPasolini (Konstantarakos 1998, pp. 68–69). Moreover, the ‘new realism’ noted by
critics is not restricted to French cinema, with a similar aesthetic trend being noted inAustralian cinema of the 1990s in which a similar distancing from traditional forms of
politicised cinema is also evident (Jorgensen 2005, pp. 147–151). In other words, lejeune cinema might best be seen as less specifically francais than as belonging to a
cinematic generation of new filmmakers in post-industrial societies—from Australia,to Argentina, to American independent cinema—where a plurality of voices has beenable to bring to the screen the lives of peripheral and marginal characters in a socio-
political environment in which local resistances count for more than somewhatoutdated ideological narratives.
In conclusion, teasing out the discursive strategies used to constitute le jeunecinema as a grouping is in not meant necessarily to question the validity of the
grouping as such. On the contrary, existing writing on le jeune cinema suggests acertain amount of thematic and stylistic consistency within certain strands of the
films, despite their incredible diversity of theme, style and subject matter. Moreover,such diversity should not be the source of criticism on the basis that it renders thework of film historians more difficult; it should, rather, be something to be
celebrated, for this decentralisation of perspective may well be where the trueoriginality of le jeune cinema lies. To appreciate fully the contribution of le jeune
cinema, what is required is not just a militantisme de proximite but a critique deproximite, one that begins not with tenuous connections being drawn with a Golden
Age of French cinema but with the specific circumstances under which the films aremade, the kinds of issues tackled in the films themselves, and their points of
crossover with films by a contemporaneous generation of directors in other nationalcinemas.
A further source of its originality, in fact—and one consistent with this emphasis onmarginality, plurality and diversity—may well be a rejection of the traditional notionof the auteur. If there is a link between la vague nouvelle of the 1990s and the Nouvelle
Vague of the 1960s, perhaps this should be seen as less filial than œdipal. This is
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suggested by Claire Vasse when referring to a series of telemovies directed largely byvarious directors associated with le jeune cinema:
. . . contre toute attente, l’une des lignes d’horizons est la production televisuellequi, avec le principe de la serie—notamment ‘Tous les garcons et les filles de leurage’—met au second plan la sacro-sainte identite d’Auteur, au profit d’uneassimilation a un projet collectif, sur un support moins valorisant. Cette mise ensourdine des revendications d’auteur est coherente avec le souci d’emancipation del’autorite parentale. (Vasse 1998, pp. 73–74)
Another way of putting this would be to say that the new cinema de papa is actually oneconstituted by the Nouvelle Vague itself. The continued nostalgia for a cinema and a time
that no longer exist can only result in the conclusion that everything new is old again.However, to fully appreciate what is nouvelle in this supposed nouvelle Nouvelle Vague
requires a letting go of the old and an embracing of those characteristics which actuallydistinguish it from the filmic movements of preceding generations, notably the plurality
and diversity of perspectives it offers and its personal rather than overtly political interestin the marginal, the peripheral and the everyday, filmed with an intimate proximity to the
characters it frames. Only then might we be able to consider it a true cinema de liberte.
Notes
[1] Young, in the critical imagination at least, would seem to indicate directors from their mid-
twenties to their early forties. Although Jean-Pierre Jeancolas argues that ‘(l)e critere de l’agen’est en aucun cas operatoire’ (Jeancolas 1999, p. 12), he notes nonetheless in the same articlethat one of the ten distinguishing characteristics of the category is the use of the same actors whoare of similar age to their directors and that this emphasises ‘le caractere generationnel de cecinema’ (Jeancolas 1999, p. 22).
[2] Tremois, for example, sees a certain attitude to the material and the liberty accorded the films’
protagonists as important criteria (Tremois 1997, pp. 241–268). Predal insists in particular onthe criteria of quality, saying that his book could not have been written in the 1970s or 1980ssince there would not have been enough ‘nouveaux cineastes de qualite reveles’ to have justifiedits publication (Predal 2002, p. 3).
[3] Tremois excludes Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax as true auteurs because oftheir art for art’s sake approach (Tremois 1997, pp. 16–17) although Predal cites Carax as aprecursor to le jeune cinema francais (Predal 2002, p. 12).
[4] It should be noted here that Jeancolas disagrees that this traditional sense of the term auteur is
applicable to le jeune cinema francais, stating that ‘(l’) “auteur” contemporain n’a rien a voir aveccelui que tentaient d’imposer les tenants de la ‘politique des auteurs’ dans les tenants quidechiraient la planete cinephile autour de 1955’ (1999, p. 13).
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Chambers, R. (1999) Loiterature, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London.
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Nathan, Paris, pp. 38–47.Marie, M. (ed.) (1998b) Le Jeune Cinema francais, Nathan, Paris.Marie, M. (1998c) ‘Vous n’avez rien contre la jeunesse’, in Le Jeune Cinema francais, ed. M. Marie,
Nathan, Paris, pp. 3–4.Marie, M. (1997) La Nouvelle Vague: une ecole artistique, Nathan, Paris.Medioni, G. (1998) ‘Avoir 20 ans dans la deche’, L’Express, 21 May, vol. 2446, pp. 74–75.O’Shaugnessy, M. (2003) ‘Post-1995 French cinema: return of the social, return of the political?’,
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Contemporary France, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 479–492.Predal, R. (1998) ‘La Deferlante’ in Le Jeune Cinema francais, ed. M. Marie, Nathan, Paris, pp. 8–21.Predal, R. (2002) Le Jeune Cinema francais, Nathan/VUEF, Paris.Reader, K. (1995) ‘French cinema review of the year 1994’, Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 3,
no. 4, pp. 453–454.Tremois, C.-M. (1997) Les Enfants de la liberte: le jeune cinema francais des annees 90, Seuil, Paris.Truffaut, F. (1954) ‘Une certaine tendance du cinema francais’, Cahiers du cinema, vol. 31, pp. 15–28.Vasse, C. (1998) ‘Transgressions des liens du sang’, in Le Jeune Cinema francais, ed. M. Marie, Nathan,
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