A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #469 - CINEMA. Reality through the eyes of revolution - Nouvelle Vague (2025) by Richard Linklater (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

A senseless prologue on cinema dying of cinema... never have so many 
films been produced as in the last thirty years and the history of 
cinema has been filled with rubbish, often awarded Oscars, Lions, Bears, 
Palmes, Davids and Burlamacchis in substitute festivals... everything 
that is necessarily superficial or mediocre has to do with enthusiasm, 
which is the highest form of the imbecile who has achieved success in 
cinema, in music, in sport, in politics or in the slaughter of the human 
race... I would give all the films of the third millennium for a frame 
by Luis Buñuel, Jean Vigo or Pier Paolo Pasolini... these heretics of 
heresy said that we cannot know Man except in rebellion, in the collapse 
of the simulacra of God, Country and Family... and they were right.

As even the university donkeys, the secret service janissaries, and the 
supermarket geeks know... the Nouvelle Vague was literally a "new wave" 
of filmmakers who, between 1958 and 1964 (and beyond), revolutionized 
the conventions of "daddy's cinema" in France and around the world. The 
young people who stepped behind the camera and burst onto the screen 
like a storm of truth and ethical/aesthetic beauty were the critics of 
Cahiers du Cinéma: Claude Chabrol, Le Beau Serge (1958); François 
Truffaut, The 400 Blows (1959); Éric Rohmer, The Sign of the Lion 
(1959); Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless, 1960; Jacques Rivette, Paris 
Belongs to Us (1961) and the intellectuals of the Left Bank: Alain 
Resnais, Hiroshima, My Love (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961); 
Agnès Varda, La Pointe Courte (1955, the true precursor of the Nouvelle 
Vague); Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962), Jacques Rozier, Desires in the 
Sun (1962, the most libertarian and "unknown" poet of the Nouvelle 
Vague)... have "reinvented" the language of cinema and conceived the 
director as a Captain Ahab who stops looking at reality through the eyes 
of the bourgeoisie and overturns it until he reaches (certainly for 
Jean-Luc Godard) the barricades of the joyful revolution of '68.

There are also directors not entirely external to the Nouvelle Vague who 
have made films of great auteurist scope that represent a veritable 
sabotage of cinematic fiction and incite a reversal of perspective in an 
upside-down world... they invite us to deliberately create moments of 
real life and shatter the dogmatic cages of the society of the 
spectacle... because spectacle does not mean cinema, television, or 
theater, but is, as Guy Debord writes, a social relationship between 
people mediated by images... it is never too late to attend the funeral 
of the spectacle. The Nouvelle Vague meant having a "style"... location 
shooting, natural light, handheld camera, moving edits, fragmented 
narration, improvisation, looking into the camera, discrepant dialogue 
and soundtracks... it was about capturing life in the act with that 
anarchic gaiety that turns a king into a fool and a fool into the king's 
swindler. At the roots of the Nouvelle Vague are the "fireworks" that 
link the anarchy of Luis Buñuel in L'âge d'or (1930) and the irreverent 
satire of Groucho Marx in Leo McCarey's The Blitzkrieg of the Marx 
Brothers (1933), to the desperate libertarian vitality of Godard in 
Breathless... these are films that deny social, political, and religious 
concordance and reveal the absurdity of the bourgeois, military, and 
authoritarian world... they insinuate the deconstruction of every 
institutional logic (diplomacy, justice, ethics, category, work) to 
ignite in the imagination (of those who want it) the pure and clear 
destruction of the established order... that's all.

Nouvelle Vague. Richard Linklater's film is a metacinematographic work 
dedicated to the discovery of a street cinema that broke away from the 
cinema of the big studio productions... more specifically, it follows 
the story-driven adventure of Breathless and the breaking with Jean-Luc 
Godard's cinematic grammar. Linklater had already made the trilogy 
Before Sunrise (1995-2013) and Boyhood (2014)... where he demonstrated 
his close connection with young French activists, especially with 
François Truffaut's The 400 Blows....

In Nouvelle Vague, Linklater films the young Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume 
Marbeck) as he tries to shoot his first feature film... without 
permission, with a screenplay he writes day by day in bars and steals 
fragments of Paris with the inspiration of an impressionist painter... 
the physical resemblance of the main actors is striking... Zoey Deutch 
is Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin is Jean-Paul Belmondo, Victor Belmondo is 
François Truffaut, Jérôme Robart is Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Jacques Le 
Vessier is André Bazin (the critic and "spiritual father" of Cahiers du 
Cinéma), Agathe Bonitzer is Suzanne Schiffman (the script supervisor and 
creative collaborator of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric 
Rohmer)... it is she who holds together Godard's chaotic set and 
underlines that behind the genius of the masters there are always 
extraordinary women who make their revolution possible. He also revisits 
the myth of the drifter Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Godard's 
Breathless, Humphrey Bogart... star of American film noir of the 
1940s... Poiccard repeatedly runs his thumb across his lips in the 
manner of "Bogie"... when he stops in front of the poster of Mark 
Robson's The Clay Colossus (1956) (Bogart's last film before his death), 
he stares at it and imitates the tough expression and charisma of an 
anti-hero... he is shot dead from behind and falls like a suburban angel 
on the cobblestones of Paris.

For Nouvelle Vague, Linklater uses filming techniques from the 1960s... 
blending historical philology and digital innovation... handheld 
cameras, improvised tracking shots, leaps in the construction of the 
plot... the cut within the frame (those who speak well call it a jump 
cut), the 1.37:1 format (reminiscent of classic cinema of the time), the 
synchronous sound between the actors' words and the street noises that 
give that sense of "dirty truth" (almost documentary) typical of films 
shot outside of studios. David Chambille's black-and-white photography 
is exceptional, imitating the grain and contrast of 1959 Eastman Plus-X 
film and is a tribute to Raoul Coutard (Godard and Truffaut's director 
of photography), whom Chambille considers a master. Linklater and 
Chambille manage to integrate live shots and the Paris reconstructed 
with digital technology and maintain a visual presence between the 
actors in the foreground and the period background. Sandra Adair's 
syncopated editing subverts temporal continuity, ties in with errors in 
composition and acting punctuation (which for Godard becomes a 
"style")... and gives the sensation of a cinema that is invented on the 
spot.

Graham Reynolds's soundtrack is a refined work of quotations... it 
reworks the original jazz themes composed by Martial Solal in 1960, 
intertwined with pieces by Miles Davis (Elevator to the Gallows, 1958, 
by Louis Malle) and music by Georges Delerue (Truffaut's favorite 
composer, especially for Shoot the Pianist, 1960, Jules and Jim, 1962, 
The Last Metro, 1980)... together with Adair's editing, they compose a 
visual symphony where Paris and the protagonists of the Nouvelle Vague 
transport the viewer into an emotional flow of light, shadows, and 
dynamic shifts in the action. Cinema is cinema, no longer just a commodity.

In the Nouvelle Vague, acting is pure poetry... Linklater frames his 
characters in vibrant, spare, austere shots, shots, and angles... he 
puts into practice the concept theorized by Alexandre Astruc in the 
article "Naissance d'une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo," which 
appeared in the magazine L'Écran Français (no. 144, 1948): The director 
must use the camera with the same freedom with which a writer uses the 
pen. This is the birth of the Nouvelle Vague. Cinema became a means of 
expression unseated from Sunday consensus and capable of tackling any 
philosophical or psychological, poetic or political theme, just like an 
essay, a diary, or a novel... the camera becomes a "physical writing," 
and the film is the extension of the author's thought... cinema is 
considered an art and not a commodity, and this means placing the 
director's vision before the producer's profit.

Nouvelle Vague describes Godard's subversive, deeply political 
romanticism in Breathless... not so much for its explicit dialogue, but 
for how it shatters the power structures of cinema and society in 
1960... little money and a lot of cinema, and to this he will remain 
faithful throughout his life. Linklater's film confirms that Breathless 
is a manifesto in anarchy... Godard challenges the academic and colonial 
authority not only of French cinema but of the entire Hollywood system 
that catechizes the spectators' gazes in the idolatries of acclaim... 
the people are destined to the lies of politics, faith, economics, 
knowledge... and all forms of communication are megaphones of compulsory 
optimism... judging by the fools it has produced, our era will have been 
anything but intelligent... only the completely disillusioned man (the 
Anarch)
takes his fists out of his pockets and begins to set fire to the history 
of infamy.

Pino Bertelli

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