When Truffaut railed against the moral and aesthetic complacency of French traditionalist filmmaking in his landmark essay, “Une certaine tendance du cinema francais” (1954), he excoriated the scenario-focused “literary” cinema of directors like Claude Autant-Lara and Jean Delannoy for relying too much on the artifices of time-worn adaptations and less on the cinematic potential of the auteur’s powers of personal expression. For one thing, as Drazin points out, the increased accessibility and affordability of film technology in the 1950s — most importantly in the introduction of the Kodak Tri-X film, which made it possible to shoot almost anywhere cheaply and with minimal light — promoted a culture of self-initiative that allowed critics like Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer to produce and direct their own films. These films functioned as critiques-on-celluloid which demonstrated the manner in which a revolution in film aesthetics could occur and the historiographic material on which they could base a simultaneously retrospective and forward-thinking renovation of French cinema. Truffaut et al found themselves directly quoting the movies they meant to praise or satirize within the rhetoric of their own work, enthralled as they were by a spirit of cinematic bricolage that strove to assemble a transnational canon in the name of a politique des auteurs. One had to build up a tower of assorted histories and counter-histories, as it were, in order to raze (or reform) it from inside its walls.

Drazin makes the claim that a lot of the revolutionary pursuits undertaken by “the children of Tri-X” carried an ideological bias which blinded them to the exemplary value of classical réalisateurs like Duvivier and Carné. Precisely because these Golden Age directors were able to thrive in a collaboration-dependent studio system similar to the mogul-led closed networks of Hollywood, they were essentially no different from the American and British “auteurs” (like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock) who were unanimously championed by the New Wave theorists. While the inception of the French New Wave momentarily helped reinvigorate international interest in French cinema… the movement paradoxically stifled the long term reach of its own commercial interests, while at the same time inspiring a cinematic renaissance in the American film market of the late 1960s and 1970s…Drazin writes, “The new style of criticism [in the Cahiers du cinema] would in practice require film-makers — whether writers, directors or even actors — to be judged not only what they had actually done but by the degree to which they lived up to the preferred model of exclusive authorship. There was a touch of zealotry about this new approach” (p. 280). While the inception of the French New Wave momentarily helped reinvigorate international interest in French cinema as a whole (after a post-war period of diminished returns), the movement paradoxically stifled the long term reach of its own commercial interests, while at the same time inspiring a cinematic renaissance in the American film market of the late 1960s and 1970s (such as was witnessed in the critical and/or fiscal success of the films of Coppola, Scorsese, and Cassavetes). For the average movie goer, the idea of the French cinema came to languish yet again, only this time invoking either the abstruse meta-critical constructions of a theorist like Godard or the muted moral inquiries of a thinker like Rohmer. French cinema could not kick its reputation of being a cinema defined by the permanent quality of différence: “A means of achieving differentiation from the Hollywood product, the New Wave was a powerful brand that established the cinéma d’auteur as the standard for the way in which French cinema was perceived outside France. But built as it was around an elitist film-making that was of minority appeal even within France, the movement served to encourage the French cinema’s marginalisation” (p. 354).

Poil de Carotte, 1932
DIRECTED BY Julien Duviver

Though Drazin’s French Cinema, as the title suggests, serves as a general introduction to the labyrinthine corridors of the medium’s other great parent, part of its implicit design is to restore the prestige of the under-watched Golden Age of French cinema by reexamining how the Nouvelle Vague — which by our time has become synonymous with the contemporary notion of “French cinema” by virtue of its recalcitrant self-reflexivity — owes a great deal to the past masters it ignored or never bothered to salute. Along with the singular examples of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Robert Bresson (all of whom were proto-New Wave models who received their share of recognition), less appreciated directors like Sacha Guitry, Julien Duvivier, and Marcel Carné, and screenwriters like Charles Spaak, Jacques Prévert, Pierre Bost, and Jean Aurenche, are given deeper consideration by Drazin. One noteworthy example of Drazin’s ability to unveil the subconscious influence which the Golden Age still wielded on the New Wave is in his analysis of how the iconic final scene of Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups — in which the boy-hero Antoine Doinel runs away at full pace from a reformatory until he reaches the sea, a scene which ends with an archetypal final freeze-frame — uncannily resembles the ending of Duvivier’s Poil de Carotte, in which the titular character, also a boy who endures a hard childhood, runs furiously away from a party at which he suffers humiliation, as a way of escaping the emotional burden which drives him past open fields and country roads in a velocity of images that undoubtedly had been imprinted in Truffaut’s mind.