les femmes

The French New Wave, one of the most influential movements in film history, first arrived on the scene as a foundational shift in French society. A new generation of young people coming of age after World War II began to shake the established order, reshaping values, morals, roles, and relationships between women and men. Their progressive thinking revolutionized the cinematic landscape, guided by young directors whose philosophy and aesthetic celebrated personal style and authenticity. New images of female characters represented a palpable break with the past. Off screen, women were enjoying more freedom while still caught between the conflicting messages of a society grappling with rapid evolution. These new women, these nouvelles femmes, suddenly saw their complexities reflected on screen: the roles and the actresses who inhabited them were, in a word, modern.

If many New Wave films still depicted women through the lens of male fantasies, they also brought about freer, more independent images of women with individuality and some amount of agency. In Truffaut’s 1957 short Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers), Bernadette Lafont encapsulated the duality of embodying a pinup in the eyes of the young boys (the young “rascals” or “brats” of the title) spying on her (as well as Truffaut’s camera), and, at the same time, a free and free-spirited woman as she rides through town on her bicycle.

The film was adapted from Maurice Pons’s novel of the same name and foreshadows Truffaut’s alter-ego troublemaker Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre cents coups. In the south of France, a group of adolescent boys follows Lafont’s character around, transfixed by her power, fascinated by her body and her relationship with a young French soldier (Gérard Blain) on leave from his military service. Like Bardot min Et Dieu créa la femme, Lafont in Les Mistons reflects the tension of an emerging feminine agency, translated by the bicycle, in the context of a cinematic and societal tradition of objectifying women through the narrator’s gaze, the director’s lens. The film opens with a long tracking shot of Lafont riding her bicycle toward the camera before it pans over to reveal the young boys gazing at her from afar as a literary voice-over narrates the story: “Jouve’s sister was unbearably beautiful. We couldn’t take it. She always rode with her skirt flying, and without a slip. Bernadette led us to discover many of our darkly hidden dreams. She awoke in us the springs of luminous sensuality.”

FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: ACTING AS ESCAPE AND REBELLION

“With the nose you have, you’ll never be able to act in tragedies.” So said a director to Jane Fonda, as she later recount-ed to Delphine Seyrig in Sois belle et tais-toi, implying that she would never be taken seriously because of her appearance. Fonda was advised instead to dye her hair blonde and break her jaw to look more chiseled. Seyrig’s documentary centered on women’s experiences in the film industry, the title playing off Marc Allégret’s 1958 film of the same name. Seyrig provided her fellow actresses a voice that had largely been ignored. Fonda, along with other American and French actresses, went on to describe being scrutinized and judged in ways that were extremely alienating.Too tall, too dark, cheeks too chubby, breasts too small, nose too big—all remarks that women endured, and often internalized, in order to be in the movies. The story of Moreau being deemed unphotogenic by the director of photography in her first film is legendary. These assessments could be seen as a sort of necessary evil in terms of film being an industry, of actors being a commercial product in which investors need to calculate returns as they choose which films or actors to support. However, the mechanisms at work also bleed over into the larger population now just as they did then. In a vicious circle, women are given “role models” in film, literature, and other media that tell them what is valuable, markers that they must hit to feel valuable. Assessing themselves according to what they see on screen, women try to conform to those images, ones that, until recently, were largely imagined by men, and created by a long and complex cultural history.

After their revolutionary cinematic work in the French New Wave, many of the actresses and women associated with the movement furthered their careers on screen and off. Some became authors, directors, or activists—many did all three. Vast in scope and influence, the New Wave also employed countless competent and dedicated women too often unrecognized for their contributions to the success of an enterprise. This chapter is a celebration of some of the endeavors of women who were a part of this exceptional moment in film history, the French New Wave.

Reframing the women of the French New Wave shines a light on these concerns and provides a measuring stick for steps forward as well as steps back. We can appreciate the new voices brought to the screen by Anouk Aimée, BrigitteBardot, Françoise Dorléac, Françoise Fabian, Anna Karina, Macha Méril, Jeanne Moreau, Emmanuelle Riva, Jean Seberg, Haydée Politoff, Delphine Seyrig, and Agnès Varda, as well as others like Bulle Ogier, Jane Birkin, Romy Schneider, and their contemporaries. We remember the actresses’ en-counters with directors who helped create more authentic images of them. Their films changed the ways women could see themselves off screen as well, with the promise of more agency.