What does the French New Wave mean today?

‘Beautiful women. Suave leading men. Existential angst. Black and white figures in Parisian cafes. Cigarette smoke. Lots of it.’ A dismayed Geoffrey Macnab examines the fading interest in what was once one of cinema’s most influential movements

The famous bridge scene from Truffaut’s 1962 classic ‘Jules et Jim’

It’s the fate of any radical and revolutionary artistic movement that it begins to look frayed and old-fashioned as its main practitioners grow old and die. That morbid thought is hard to avoid when contemplating the French New Wave. It is now 60 years since François Truffaut made Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and almost as long since the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960).

It was instructive to witness the strangely muted response earlier this week to news of the death of Anna Karina, the actor sometimes called the “poster girl” of the New Wave. There were plenty of polite obituaries, but few outside France acknowledged the fact that the Danish-born actor had once been one of the most significant European stars of her era. In the early Sixties, when she was playing the young Parisian woman drifting slowly but inexorably into prostitution in Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live, 1962), or when performing the famous improvised dance scene in Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964), she had what seemed like the absolute epitome of New Wave cool and charm. Reviewers then rhapsodised about her “grace and luminescence”.

“Anna Karina radiated. She magnetised the entire world. French cinema has lost one of its legends,” lamented French culture minister Franck Riester this week, but his estimation of Karina was not widely shared abroad.