The French New Wave

The French New Wave is a film movement that took place between the 1950s and 1960s and is one of the most influential in the history of cinema. At the end of the 1950s, a group of filmmakers, writing reviews for the magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma, felt that films had lost an ability to capture true human emotion and were insincere. They felt that these films no longer corresponded to the way people really lived. As a result, this new realization gave rise to a new type of cinema that was very progressive and revolutionary for cinema. It was characterised by a rejection of film traditions. However, while the New Wave was never considered a formally organised movement, its filmmakers were bound by their project to reject studio cinema: which is locked into a tradition of craftsmanship and quality that erases the authenticity of the narrative. Moreover, they consider that these films seek to impress rather than to express: they give their directors little freedom or control and they are generally forced to respond to the commercial wishes of the producers.

From then on, the appearance of certain directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy suggests a pattern of thinking that departs from the expected one. They begin to think about what might make cinema special. Indeed, Truffaut said: 'The film of tomorrow will not be made by camera officials, but by artists for whom the making of a film is a wonderful and exciting adventure. Tomorrow's film will look like the person who made it and the number of viewers will be proportional to the number of friends the filmmaker has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love. This statement clearly shows the desire of these directors to make cinema closer to reality, freer and more creative. Finally, the characteristics of the New Wave can be seen in the fact that the films were shot on location, often with natural settings, such as city shots. We also find lighting without artifice, with rarely adjusted light. In terms of sound, we can see that there is generally a direct sound recording. The shots are very long and the cameras are smaller and lighter, which gives the films energy. As far as editing is concerned, it is non-linear and fragmented: the movement sometimes gives the impression that the actors' shots jump from one to another. These were very often low-budget shoots, with actors who were not well known at the time, and the dialogue was usually improvised. The story is simple, often autobiographical and centred on existentialist themes. From then on, the films of the New Wave upset the social and political framework because of their commitment, which was often concealed.

In Varda's films, time is seen as a natural milieu of everyday life, with its gently pulsing rhythm, its impenetrable continuity; and time is also shown as a moment of strong density, suspended by the violent twists of life: time as messenger, death's herald.' Yvette Biro is a Hungarian-American essayist and screenwriter. She has written books on the aesthetics of cinema, and in particular on directors such as Varda who marked the New Wave movement. The question of temporality is very important in the New Wave movement as it represents a reality that the directors want to reproduce in their films. Generally, Agnès Varda's films represent a slow temporality that draws a pulsating and continuous rhythm. Time finds its value in the moments of life and Varda understood this as she offers a second compression to time, that of a "time like a messenger, death's herald." Agnès Varda explores temporality in two of her films, La Pointe Courte and Cléo de 5 à 7, and offers a temporality of everyday, natural life.

Thus, how does Yvette Biro's quote represent the temporal dimension in both of Agnès Varda's films?

At first glance, the film Cléo de 5 à 7 tells the story of a young singing star who is waiting to find out her medical results in real time. In 90 minutes, the film tells the story of Cleo's life between 5pm and 6.30pm. This film perfectly balances between narrative time and story time, and it introduces the question of duration in literary narratology. The audience is not supposed to look at its watch in the dark to become aware of this oscillation between narrative time and narrated time. For example, "Chapter II Angèle from 17h08 to 17h13" constantly sends the viewer back into the movement of these two temporalities. We can see that there is a certain constraint in the shooting and a narrative choice. The unity of time that Varda uses stems, according to her, from a material imperative. Varda, following a substantial budget used for the production of La Pointe Courte, wished to obtain from her producer a more ambitious shoot, but was unfortunately refused. In an interview in 1962, she said the following: "I wanted to shoot in Sète and Venice, in colour and in costume. "All this is too expensive," said Beauregard, to whom Demy had introduced me. "Make a small film in black and white that doesn't cost more than thirty-two million. I immediately thought of shooting in Paris to save on travel, expenses, costumes and avoid complications. And then I said to myself that everything could be done in one day, so there wouldn't be too many sets. And all of a sudden I had the idea of shortening the time: to do it for an hour and a half, 90 minutes, the time of a film. This statement makes a deep connection with Yvette Biro's quote on the dimension of temporality. This double paradox between the time that stops and the acceleration that pushes Varda to make her film in one day responds to what Yvette Biro speaks of: "with its gently pulsing rhythm, its impenetrable continuity; and time is also shown as a moment of strong density, suspended by the violent twists of life. Thus, we find a financial autonomy that recalls what we mentioned earlier: the characteristics of the filmmakers of the New Vague. This quotation corresponds to a desire that arose in the 1950s to break away from exhaustive filming that was more daring in terms of aesthetics than narrative. Varda wanted a cinema that was free and liberated from the dominant codes of French cinema influenced by Hollywood. The setting of the story illustrates a young singer who waits 90 minutes for the result of a medical analysis. Varda is innovative in that she has a plot that is thin and at the time it was “avant-gardiste”. The narrative elements are integrated by a voice-over. The plot unfolds through the support of Angèle, the protective lover and the fatal illness that afflicts Cleo. Varda defies practices of character and plot exposition by inspiring a colour prologue. It is noticeable that the colour gives a focused effect on the

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