With “Nouvelles Femmes,” Northeastern visiting lecturer Ericka Knudson reexamines the contributions of women during the French New Wave of the 1960s.
Jean-Luc Godard. Alain Resnais. François Truffaut.
The names of these film directors are familiar to many cinema fans, and especially to fans of the French New Wave, a movement that began in the late 1950s and continued into the 1970s.
The French New Wave, which prioritized self-expression and “real” life, also gave rise to the concept of the filmic auteur — that a film’s director was equivalent to its author, the sole creative voice behind its creation.
That perspective has been challenged over the past few decades. A film, after all, requires the talents of dozens of individuals. “There’s only one woman [director] in the New Wave, basically,” says Ericka Knudson, visiting lecturer in cultures, societies and global studies at Northeastern University. “It’s Agnès Varda. And I thought, why is that? Cinema’s a collective art.”
Her new book, “Nouvelles Femmes: Modern Women of the French New Wave and Their Enduring Contribution to Cinema,” recenters the women who were so important to the New Wave movement, alongside their representations.
After the international successes of François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” in 1959 and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” the year following, “producers found an opportunity there — because there were a lot of young people going to the movies, and these films didn’t require much money, they were low budget.”
This means that the French film producers of the early 1960s could finance a generation of first-time filmmakers while still appealing to the marketplace. The women Knudson writes about inspired those directors “through their presence, through their ways of being. They were a lot more modern than their parents’ generation.”
That was how Knudson came to the subject, “But now that I see more about their lives — they dared, those actresses. A lot of them really wanted to be [working] in movies or in cinema in some way. But the only way you could do that was by acting.”
“Their stories are fascinating,” she continues, because “ambition like that wasn’t as expected in that day.” Many went on to other careers writing, producing and directing their own films.
“There are countless stories of this,” she says. “They dared, in circumstances that were really difficult.”
In France “at the time, women couldn’t even own a bank account, or write a check, much less work without their husband’s approval,” Knudson notes. “It started explaining why there weren’t more women directors.”
In France, women didn’t receive the right to choose their own profession or open a bank account without permission of their husbands until 1965.
For many of these women, their lives changed as a result of unexpected encounters.
“Jeanne Moreau for example. She was successful on stage, as a stage actress,” Knudson says, but despite starring in some commercial films, her cinema career remained largely unsuccessful.
“For a good 10 years, the cameramen and directors complained about her looks, that she was unphotogenic, that she had dark circles under her eyes,” Knudson says.
That changed after she met Louis Malle, who cast her in his film “Elevator to the Gallows” and “filmed her without makeup. Filmed her outside in the street, in natural light,” Knudson says. “And then Miles Davis just happened to be in town doing a concert, and they got him to improvise on the rushes of Jeanne Moreau in Paris at night.
“You can see how these encounters — when things come together — they can really revolutionize” art movements, Knudson says.
Knudson describes how a twist of fate changed her life, too. “I went to Paris to study French literature,” she says, but frequented movie theaters on the side. When it came time to declare her major, the secretary gave her the wrong application. “‘Oh, sorry, this is for cinema,’” Knudson recalls the secretary saying. “It made my heart beat faster. And I decided to switch from literature to cinema.”
Many of the New Wave directors, Knudson says, had originally wanted to be writers. “There’s a big literary component, and so that was kind of a natural way to get into it.”
“I was attracted to New Wave films like any 20-year-old,” Knudson says with a laugh.
“As I researched the women” in the lives of the famous New Wave directors, Knudson says, “it opened my eyes.”
“That’s basically what the book is about. The New Wave movement from women’s point of view,” she says. “I hope that [the book] sheds a little bit more light on what they contributed to the movement.”
While these women are already revered for their performances, perhaps “Nouvelles Femmes” will help their names be remembered in the same breath as the “auteurs” by whom the French New Wave is known:
Anna Karina. Brigitte Bardot. Emmanuelle Riva. Jean Seberg.