Cinema: New Wave

Black Orpheus (Dispatfilm-Gemma; Lopert) is perhaps the most impressive can of film so far cast up on U.S. shores by the New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) of creation that has swept across the French movie industry. It is an amazing creation. The picture was made by Marcel Camus,* a 47-year-old assistant to some of France’s top directors. In 1957 he found an adaptation of the Orpheus legend by a Brazilian poet and playwright named Vinicius de Moraes (TIME, Nov. 19, 1956), and for the hell of it he used the wildly poetic mountains around Rio de Janeiro, where thousands of Negroes live in conditions of infernal poverty among scenes of paradisal beauty.

In Brazil, Director Camus soon ran out of money. He slept on the beach to save hotel bills, lived from meal to meal, worked from reel to reel. Down to his last $17, he was rescued by Brazil’s President Juscelino Kubitschek, who told the army to get him some electrical equipment. For his Orpheus, Camus hired a handsome Brazilian futebol player named Breno Mello, for his Eurydice an unknown dancer from Pittsburgh with serenely lovely looks and a name that nobody could possibly forget: Marpessa Dawn. “The poverty,” says Camus, “was not such a bad thing in the long run. I spent so much time trailing around on foot, just looking, that in the end I had a deep awareness of Brazil. With money, I would never have made the same film. Everything would have been done too quickly.”

Shown in France, the picture delighted the public, astonished the critics, won the 1959 Grand Prix at Cannes. Part of its appeal, no doubt, derives from the timeless charm of the old legend itself, which Scenarist Jacques Viot has adapted simply and gracefully. Orpheus is a Rio streetcar conductor; Eurydice is a village girl who comes to the big city to visit her cousin and to escape from a sinister stranger who wants to kill her. They fall in love and go down to the city together to celebrate the carnival in the streets. There her enemy, who is Death, seeks her out and carries her away. Orpheus, heartbroken, goes looking for his lost love at the Bureau of Missing Persons, then at a diabolic rite where spirit-rappers summon up her ghost. In the end, he joins her in death.

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.

The French seem to enjoy such youthful excesses, even though many audiences have been disturbed by the curious sense of moral vacuum in many of the pictures. Aside from a general distaste for bourgeois respectability and a slight leaning toward the left, very few of the films express any moral or spiritual convictions whatever. Nevertheless, Les Vaguistes have their principles. They hate commercialism. They prefer to make pictures on subjects of their own choice. They would rather use unknown actors. “They speak of cinema,” says one critic, “as of a religion.” So far, it seems to be a religion in which demons figure more prominently than angels, but so long as the new cult of cinema can create a ritual as richly moving as Black Orpheus, it will claim its converts.

*No kin to Novelist Albert Camus (The Plague, The Fall).