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The meaning of the old story, as Director Camus sees it, is that love and death and rebirth, with all their decisive importance for the individual, are mere incidents in the larger process of life. Camus' image of life is the tropical carnival—random, unprincipled, delirious. And the spirit of the carnival, the pulse of life, is expressed in the drums. Before the story begins, the drums begin their swift, intoxicating beat, and after it is done, the drums are beating still. Every song of love is sung against the dull indifference of drums; every victory of death is lost in their insistence that the heart of life somewhere is always pounding. Again and again the rhythm of the drums drives the actors off into a dance that is forever forming and dissolving and forming again. Seldom has the dance of life been imagined in such barbaric abandon of rhythm and hue, with such generous and innocent delight and reverence for the moment, whatever it may bring. These emotions pour through the film in a torrent and fill the performers, most of them amateurs, with the fervor of the creator's faith. It is a faith in nature, a worship of the sun and everything it shines on. Director Camus has realized in a passionately pagan work of art the Christian intuition of William Blake: "Everything that lives is holy."
Along with most of the arts in France, the cinema spent a long postwar period in the doldrums. But when De Gaulle came to power, his government announced that it did not intend to send good screen subsidies after the same old bad ideas. Reluctantly, French film producers, who are at least as conservative as their Hollywood cousins, agreed to try for something new and different. But would the public like it?
They loved it. The Cheaters, a fairly daring film about les blousons noirs (the black jackets, as the French call their juvenile delinquents), was made on the cheap by an oldtimer named Marcel Carne (Children of Paradise), and it became one of the biggest hits of 1958. It was followed by another low-cost smash called The Lovers, directed by Louis Malle, 27. Suddenly, the New Wave was rolling, and on the crest of it dozens of ambitious young cinéastes went surfboarding to success. In the past twelve months, according to the French Film Office, at least 30 young men without previous experience in film direction have gone into production with full-length films, and already half a dozen of them have achieved both critical acclaim and the franc approval of the public. Among the leaders François Truffaut, 27 (The Four Hundred Blows), Alain Resnais, 37 (Hiroshima, My Love), Claude Chabrol, 27 (Le Beau Serge, The Cousins), Edouard Molinaro, 31 (Back to the Wall).
The new French pictures are frankly sexy—probably on the average a little more sexy than the old French pictures. They are also Nouvelle Vaguely romantic in love scenes, which they often shoot through peculiar filters in a tricky way. Much of the camera work, in fact, is too clever—it is hard to see the picture for the pictures.