Agnès Varda
Bresson was above all an individualist who created his own form of the cinema for himself rather than for audiences. He thus belonged not to the past, but to the present and future of cinema. The key New Wave figures – Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and others-revered him and would use his model of independence, along with their own theoretical writings for Cahiers du Cinéma, as the springboard for their films, creating a new cinematic language that would drastically modify conventional rules of film grammar and syntax.
One of the first New Wave directors was Agnès Varda. Still active as a filmmaker today, and now part of the twentieth-century digital vanguard starting with her film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), Varda was born in Belgium in 1928. She initially intended to become a museum curator, but due to her interest in photography she became the official photographer for the Theater Festival of Avignon, France,
Indeed, future New Wave director Alain Resnais served as Varda’s editor on La Pointe Courte, and when advised of her editorial strategy for the film he almost walked off the project: perhaps he was unhappy that her “parallel” editing style of pursuing two imagistic or narrative strands simultaneously so closely anticipated techniques that he himself would use in his debut feature Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima, My Love 1959).
Jean Rouch was the foremost French documentary filmmaker of the era, most notably with Les Magiciens de Wanzerbé (The Magicians of Wanzerbé, 1948, co-directed with Marcel Griaule) and Les Maîtres fous (The Mad Masters, 1955), which
Alain Resnais also made his initial reputation as a documentarian with the searing short film Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), one of the most effective examinations of the Holocaust ever made. Mixing black-and-white atrocity footage of the concentration camps taken by the Nazis themselves with color images of the death camps standing idle and overgrown with grass and weeds, Resnais weaves a haunting tapestry of memory and disaster, seamlessly moving back and forth in time to show the Nazis’ mechanism of genocide in its full horror.
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