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The Wave Hits. Stimulated by Bergman and encouraged by a charming American feature, The Little Fugitive, that had cost only $100,000, Truffaut got a loan from his father-in-law and one fine day in 1958 got cracking on a film called The 400 Blows. About the same time Claude Chabrol, who worked with Truffaut as a reviewer for Cahiers du Cinéma, blew his wife's inheritance on a picture called Le Beau Serge. Meanwhile Marcel Camus, an assistant to some top French directors, popped off to Brazil to make a film in color called Black Orpheus. And Alain Resnais, an obscure documentarist, buttonholed some businessmen for money and flew off to Japan to shoot a picture called Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
Suddenly all the films arrived in Paris. Suddenly the press and the public were buzzing about them. Suddenly they carried off the top prizes at Cannes. Suddenly there was a New Wave.
Four years and several shoals later, the New Wave is still rolling strong. It has thrown up a dozen films of first quality and new actors of international note (Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Cassel). It has also produced two dozen talented young directors. Philippe de Broca has created two of the funniest films (The Love Game, The Five-Day Lover) made in France since René Clair was clicking. Jean-Luc Godard has done an astonishing cubistic melodrama (Breathless). Pierre Etaix, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Henri Colpi, and Agnes Varda have all done exciting work. But the world fame of the new French cinema derives largely from the labors of two men.
Cold One, Warm One. Alain Resnais, 41, the more famous of the two, is the supreme theorist and technician, the Schoenberg of the new cinema. Hiroshima startled the critics with its methodic modulations and harmonic structures. Last Year at Marienbad made Hiroshima look like casual noodling. In it four kinds of time, five points of view and innumerable frames of symbolic reference were assembled in an infinitely intricate structure that seemed more like a puzzle than a picture, that might more suitably have been fed to an electronic computer than shown to a human being. And when the puzzle at last was solved, what did it signify? Everything—and nothing.
Resnais, in short, has the skill to say whatever he wants to say on the screen. Unhappily he has nothing, or almost nothing, to say. As an artist he lacks humanity, lacks blood. He is out of this world, a man of air. Nevertheless, his work is important. He has shattered the public image of what a film is. He has freed all film creators to remold the cinema nearer to their art's desire.
François Truffaut, 31, perhaps the most richly talented of the new French directors, is as warm as Resnais is cold. His films are about real people with real feelings: a boy who runs away from home, a husband whose wife runs away with his best friend. His films are heavy because real life is heavy, but at the same time they are gay and somehow lucky. They are natural things, and like natural things they are full of false starts and irrelevant twists. But they grow and go on growing in the mind long after the film says fin. Truffaut goes on growing too. Shoot the Piano Player is much more skillful than The 400 Blows, and Jules and Jim in its bittersweet worldly wisdom makes the other two seem like child's play.