Cauchetier's New wave

The New Wave Raymond Cauchetier

When Jean-Luc Godard began shooting À Bout de Souffle, few could have realised that his debut feature film would revolutionise world cinema.

Similarly, I had little idea that in time my photographs of the film would themselves become iconic, emblematic of the French New Wave.

on those terms. Naturally, Beauregard tried to impose a subject taken from Loti, but Godard had the courage to resist. He actually had no idea what he did want to do, but that was just a trivial detail. He consulted his friends, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, and they finally landed on a recent news item about the misadventures of a young hoodlum being hunted by the police. They drew up a one-page synopsis and showed it to Beauregard, who accepted it for want of anything better. Little did he realise that he had just made the most important decision of his career – the modest synopsis was the birth certificate of À Bout de Souffle.

Godard’s film had rather humble beginnings. In 1959, the producer Georges de Beauregard thought he was ruined after the commercial failure of the films Ramuntcho and Pêcheur d’Islande. A great admirer of the French writer Pierre Loti (author of both Ramuntcho and Pêcheur d’Islande), Beauregard had imposed these subjects on the director Pierre Schoendorffer, who had taken them They had to work quickly. When shooting started on with no great enthusiasm. The public were in August 1959 the film’s screenplay still hadn’t equally unenthused when the film was released. been written. The worksheets contained nothing but the locations, and Godard improvised the Beauregard had one life raft to cling to: French culture minister André Malraux had recently made scenes on a day-to-day basis. In the mornings he would sit on his own in a café, writing out dialogue financial aid available to the cinema industry in a on scraps of paper that he would pass to the bid to stimulate the production of new films. actors just before shooting began.

Filmmakers could apply for a loan of 30 million francs – not enough in itself to produce a typical Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of À Bout de Souffle, was feature film, but a valuable subsidy for a philosophical about Godard’s approach and production budget. Beauregard’s big idea was to adapted to the situation readily, but Jean Seberg, find a director who could deliver a complete film his co-star, who was used to big-budget on a budget of 30 million francs. The serious Hollywood productions, was driven crazy by it. On directors were hardly falling over each other – at that time no one thought it was possible to make the first day of shooting, on the Champs-Elysées, she got into a shouting match with Godard, which a film for less than 100 million.

I photographed as it developed. Jean wanted to quit the film and return to America. Eventually, However, Jean-Luc Godard, who happened to be around, said he was perfectly happy to direct a film Godard managed to convince her to continue for

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a few days more, just to see how it went; in the end she stayed for the rest of the film, and she did well out of it – À Bout de Souffle made her worldfamous and gave her career a huge lift.

Beauregard, however, was perturbed to see Godard sometimes send his crew home before they had completed a full day’s shooting; when the director ran out of inspiration, he would call a halt and arrange a time to meet up the following day. It was intolerable. Beauregard fired off a furious memo threatening to cancel the film and lay off all the crew. He turned up at the shoot and had a violent altercation with Godard; they had to be dragged apart. Of course, they quickly came to an arrangement; it was in everyone’s interest.

To stay within the agreed budget, Godard got rid of everything he regarded as inessential: no studio shooting – instead he used rooms rented by the day, and exteriors whenever possible; no live sound recording – the soundtrack was dubbed later; the ultra-fast Ilford HPS film stock enabled him to use photo-roman style lighting; and he paid rock-bottom salaries to the actors and the skeleton film crew. The largest fee, seven million francs, went to Jean Seberg, who was to be the draw for the American film-going public. The film came in on budget and À Bout de Souffle became the stuff of legend.

(25ASA) was sold in 300-metre reels, allowing for ten minutes of continuous shooting. The great innovation came from the excellent cameraman Raoul Coutard: he loaded a portable Cameflex with 30-metre reels of Ilford, even though the camera was designed to carry the classical 120-metre film reels. The speed of the Ilford film, which was used by all the press photographers of the time, allowed filming in reduced light and gave the images a strikingly realistic look.

Before we began working in cinema, Coutard and I regularly used this film for the photo-romans (photo novels) produced by Hubert Serra, a friend of Georges de Beauregard. With a little experimentation, we worked out how to use two flashes, directed at a white wall and the ceiling to give the photos a striking relief. It was an excellent education in lighting that Coutard was able to draw on when filming for Godard, who, luckily, and for reasons of economy, wasn’t searching for the ‘beautiful image’, but rather a slice of life. Coutard replaced the flashes with floodlights, and that’s how they filmed the now immortal room scenes in À Bout de Souffle, among others, combining daylight and a few floodlights (see below). This was achieved thanks to the speed of the Ilford film and the techniques of photo-romans. It would have been impossible otherwise.

It is difficult for me to sum up in a few lines what I think about the New Wave. Countless books have been written on the subject. I’ll content myself with expressing an opinion, to do with the camera, an opinion I consider both important and original: The thing that more than anything enabled the New Wave to come into existence was the ready availability of 35mm Ilford 400 ASA black-and-white negative film.

Originally, the film was created purely for photographers and was sold in 30-metre reels, while the slower film stock designed for the cinema

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At 25 frames a second, the 30-metre reels of Ilford film allowed only a minute’s worth of filming, obliging Godard to employ the choppy form of montage that so enraptured the critics.

Few people appreciate how much the New Wave owes to Ilford film.

Generally speaking, the on-set photographer tries to be as unobtrusive as possible. Even actors who are totally at ease in front of the camera can freeze when they realise they are being photographed. The best photos are taken on the move; I learned that in Indo-China by watching war photographers, who were reporters rather than artists. They were the eyewitnesses of their times and had no right to compose their photographs in the way that fashion photographers do in their studios. An artist, even a photographer, is a creator, who imposes his own personality, his vision, on the subjects that are offered to him. This is exactly what the reporter must avoid doing.

Maybe I could have become an artist too, but I never felt the need. Each to their own.

interest in still photos; the only exception was Jean-Pierre Melville, who liked to pore over contact sheets. It’s understandable – cinema is about movement, action, speech and often music, all things that are missing from traditional studio stills.Yet, over the course of time, it is the photograph that constitutes the principal memory of a film and, in some cases, gives the work an extended lease of life. It has taken producers a long time to realise this.

When I first set out, Georges de Beauregard criticised me for taking too many photos: ‘One photo per scene is enough. If you take more, you’re wasting film and you slow the production down. And time is money!’ In the end he fired me.

But that was mainly because my shots were different from those of the head cameraman, which was unforgivable.

Fortunately, François Truffaut welcomed me with open arms, and I was able to illustrate unforgettable films such as Jules et Jim and La Peau Douce, although I always regretted not being able In reportage, what counts, as Henri Cartier-Bresson to take the photographs for Le Mépris, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpieces. emphasised, is the search for the decisive moment, the hundredth of a second that captures and Off camera, I would try to capture the key amplifies an action. It’s not something you learn in moments without being noticed. There always photographic school, it’s something you feel. comes a moment when everyone forgets that the photographer is there, and that’s just great.

Cartier-Bresson, as it happens, detested the Rolleiflex; he had a pronounced preference for the Leica, maybe because Leica sponsored the Magnum At the time the New Wave films were being made, my style received no critical attention at all; it was agency. But I started my career with a Rolleiflex, completely ignored. Similarly, it should not be the camera that all the war correspondents in Indo-China used, because it was built to withstand forgotten that my photos, which are now sought after by press and collectors alike, languished in everything. I dropped mine in the Mekong on dusty cardboard boxes for 40 years. It wasn’t the several occasions and was able to use it again fashion to show behind the scenes of a shoot. immediately, or at least once it had dried out. I Georges de Beauregard told me that the audience continued to use the Rolleiflex for my cinema needs to dream, to believe that what they are photos, even though the fixed 80mm lens was not seeing on the screen is a true story, that very suitable for portraits. I didn’t regret it.

Belmondo really is laying out his adversaries with Film directors, at least the ones I knew, took little just one punch. We mustn’t reveal that everything

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is planned to the nearest centimetre, or that every scene is shot several times. The audience should be unaware of the camera. Today, there’s a different mentality. The audience has grown up and now has a genuine interest in the making of the film. They have become connoisseurs.

Despite the prevailing tastes of the New Wave period, it is not traditional film stills – the ones my colleagues and I were paid to produce – that have written the history of cinema, but the ‘non-film’ photos, those that show the methods and characters of the directors and the hidden face of cinema. These non-film photos, for which I took much flak, are now the only ones that remain.

I’m always surprised when one of my photographs is seen as emblematic, symbolising not just the New Wave but also a whole era, and even sometimes France itself. Why is it that certain images unexpectedly take on this mantle? It’s not for me to say; I merely register my surprise.

One of the most famous photographs is ‘the walk down the Champs-Elysées’ from À Bout de Souffle.

It should never have existed. Godard had a lot of trouble filming this scene, where Belmondo meets Jean Seberg, an unauthorised street seller of the New York Herald Tribune. Godard had the idea of concealing the cameraman in a postman’s trolley with a hole cut out of the front. This allowed him to film the actors and to call out directions as discreetly as possible. But the device was soon rumbled, and a crowd began to gather round the trolley. The camera may have had enough time to capture the essential action, but I was unable to get an accurate photo of the scene. So I asked Belmondo and Seberg to walk to the bottom end of the Champs-Elysées, where the pavement was still deserted, and to replay the scene, just for me.

They very kindly agreed. My experience directing photo-romans, the trade from which I still earned a living between film shoots, helped ensure that their looks were properly aligned and their walks

satisfactorily in sync. And this simple photo achieved a completely unexpected worldwide fame.

Another photo became almost as famous, the one known as ‘the kiss on the Champs-Elysées’. It’s the image on the cover of this book (see above), although, paradoxically, there is no corresponding close-up in the film. That day, Jean-Luc Godard had wanted to shoot the actors walking down the Champs-Elysées once again, but to avoid attracting a crowd, the camera was set up on the roof of a building. It was a wide shot, where Seberg leaves Belmondo, planting a kiss on his cheek. Filmed from the sixth floor, the scene played out almost unnoticed, and I thought that was a shame. So I asked Seberg and Belmondo to replay it for me. It only took a few seconds.

Like many of the photographs I took in the New Wave period, the close-up of Seberg and Belmondo on the Champs-Elysées spent much of the next half century in a box, all but forgotten. Only recently, and to my great surprise, has it found an appreciative, global audience. In common with all the photographs in this book – of Truffaut, Godard, Moreau et al – it recalls a decisive moment, documenting a remarkable chapter in the story of cinema.

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THE SCREENPLAY The producer was indignant when he saw Godard writing dialogues in a café and sending the film crew home because he didn’t have any ideas that morning.

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Les Quatre Cent Coups, François Truffaut, 1959

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À Bout de Souffle, Jean-Luc Godard, 1959

ISBN: 978-1-85149-791-1

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