Cinema Today: The New Wave 2.0

Dziga Vertov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

In his seminal work “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema” from Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut coined the term “auteur” as he thought it should apply to the art of filmmaking. Cinema, he maintained, should consist of personal autobiographical chronicles, and be the product of one mind and one imagination. At the time, during the initial New Wave movement of the late fifties, in which Truffaut was a major player, “auteur” translated—literally and figuratively—to author, one who wrote and directed a film. Since then, the meaning of the term has broadened to include filmmakers with a range of vision and sensibilities whose work stretches the envelope of what is considered the norms in the art of cinema.

Hitchcock, Tati, Fellini, Renoir, Kubrick, and Ford were considered among the first—the OG—of the auteurs. They were typically filmmakers who had a hand in every aspect of production from writing, directing, casting, cinematography, and even production design. Some, like Ford and Hitchcock, worked from within the studio system, but since their films had garnered enough popularity—and made money besides—they were allowed a greater amount of freedom than an average director. Until he was recognized as a seminal talent, Hitchcock was often criticized for making slickly entertaining commercial thrillers, but—to some degree, nearly every filmmaker has had to work within the confines of some sort of overarching financial management.

Of course, in a collaborative and expensive media like film, there is no such thing as a single sensibility, but many directors have found ways to work around—or through—the financial necessities to make a profitable entertainment product. Steven Spielberg is a master of toeing the line between the commercially successful and artistically relevant movie. Jaws is a perfect case in point. A seminal thriller/horror movie, Jaws has also been recognized as everything from a commentary on the corruption of corporate America to an homage to Moby Dick to a parable of man versus nature. We can also add Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen to this list of commercially viable old-school auteurs.             

There are a significant number of younger—in a relative sense—filmmakers working today whose movies constitute the culmination of a vision, an oeuvre, and who fit the definition of the auteur. In no particular order, Spike Lee, Tim Burton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, Barry Jenkins, and Jane Campion could begin this list.

Their styles and storytelling vary as widely as their backgrounds. Lee, who rose from outside the studio system, created a body of work describing the Black experience in America, covering everything from interracial dating, growing up in Brooklyn, jazz, and the mythic significance of basketball in the African American experience. His style is singular; a trademark move is dolly pulling actors on a moving, creating an impression of motion without movement, almost an ethereal inner motion. 

Wes Anderson’s films are simultaneously whimsical and fatalistic. Using a pastiche of live-action, animation, and even stop-motion photography, his movies offer up a smorgasbord of visual treats. His films have been compared to picture books; many, like The Royal Tenenbaums or Fantastic Mr. Fox are divided into chapters. The French Dispatch is based on and structured like a magazine (a publication very like the New Yorker). 

And so on. Some of these auteurs, over the course of their careers, have become accepted by and somewhat absorbed into bigger studio productions. Tim Burton has subsumed himself into monster productions like the teched-out Alice in Wonderland and the ridiculous Dark Shadows, productions that lack the charm of his earlier quirkily macabre and uniquely designed films like Beetlejuice or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Spike Lee directed the fine star-studded caper film Inside Man with Denzel Washington, and while it was smart and entertaining and very New York, (and did use one of Lee’s signature dolly shots) it didn’t have the unique sensibility of a vintage Spike Lee joint. Lee also recently directed the film version of David Byrne’s American Utopia, another departure from his usual thematic and stylistic content, but not before creating the Vietnam War epic Da 5 Bloods and the tongue-in-cheek crime flick BlacKKKlansman.

Success has given Lee, and Burton, and Quentin Tarantino room to grow, but usually in the direction the money wants them to grow. Money and the replacement of the movie theater with the Laz-y-Boy Barcalounger, and the digitalization and instant accessibility of any sort of streaming media to the eye has threatened to devalue traditional narrative film. The accountants don’t care if it’s an important film about the alienation of marginalized cultures; they want to know what the algorithms look like, where the public will go next. Kardashians, grumpy kitties, or TikTok challenges? Or Nomadland.

The importance of independent new (and the somewhat older) voices in cinema cannot be overstated. Artistic and narrative innovation, complex characterizations, and socially important themes need to be presented to the public for what they are and valued as such and new artists need proper venues and audiences for presenting their week. Over the next few weeks, this blog will describe and analyze the work of some of the more innovative auteurs working today. 

And, by the way, the omission of Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, and Ari Aster, among others, was no accident. A separate series of posts will be dedicated to the resurgence of the modern horror film—the newest sophisticated foray into race, modern psychology, and fate.

Sources

1. http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/a-certain-tendency-of-french-cinema-truffaut.shtml

2. https://www.commentary.org/articles/terry-teachout/the-trouble-with-alfred-hitchcock/