by Elizabeth Cho and Sarah Jane Huber
click through to watch! (because WordPress won’t let me embed videos…)
Three weeks ago the Swedish electropop band Icona Pop released a music video for their song “Just Another Night.” Several music bloggers around the internet commented that Icona Pop “go Godard” on us in this video and indeed, the video is full of French New Wave iconography, with shots against walls, cafes, and, of course, plenty of cigarette smoking. It’s what you might expect from a “French New Wave inspired” homage. That is, unless you know what the French New Wave was really about.
The music video “Just Another Night” begins by introducing the characters and the location in French with English subtitles, “2 Swedish girls, 1 Italian man, The City of Lights.” Key words flash across the screen, “funny business, love, deceit, passion, regret, desire, intrigue.” These words and the images that accompany them are icons commonly associated with French New Wave, but in this case they are purely placeholders. The young people in the music video are spending “just another night” in Paris lusting after one another. Calling a black and white music video with empty symbols “New Wave” is an insult to the movement that radically changed the course of film history.
Dear Mark Klasfield, BB is not impressed with your shallow French New Wave interpretations.
If we want to relate the French New Wave with a musical and cultural scene, then despite all the ye-ye pop, mod fashion, and primary colors its become associated with, the French New Wave was not the pop art for film at all; it was the punk movement for film. What do we mean, of course, when we say the FNW was punk? Well, to begin, it’s important to note that the New Waves of cinema emerged in a social and political climate that drew parallels in their revolutionary philosophies and ideas.
Thematically, the French New Wave was marked by genuine and impassioned concern for social-political issues. As much as people, like the director of this music video, like to believe that France in the 1960s was all about falling in and out of love, it is crucial to not forgot that issues like prostitution, politics, meaninglessness, and class were larger concerns for New Wave directors. Francois Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows, one of the defining films of the French New Wave, heavily draws from Italian neo-realist themes in its brutal depiction of juvenile delinquency and child neglect.
The FNW broke away from Hollywood on several stylistic levels as well. Their films were shot quickly, with small crews and whatever technological resources on hand. The films embraced alternative visual techniques such as jump cuts and sometimes featured a nonlinear structure. These stylistic innovations demonstrated cinema’s ability to transcend literature.
By defying tradition, French New Wave auteurs successfully revealed another dimension of cinema. Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) embodies the intellectual relevance of French New Wave. The opening scene follows a movie camera as it rolls through the frame, acknowledging the camera to a greater extent than any movement did prior. The self-awareness demonstrates the reality of representation, not just the representation of reality, as Godard himself famously pointed out.
While music videos like Icona Pop’s are playful and fun, the cliched imagery does indeed speak to a larger, unfortunate misinterpretation of 60’s New Wave. The French New Wave in particular needs to be remembered not for its aloof and cool attitude and style, but for the ways in which it shook the foundations of cinema and recognized its own political and social impact on an audience. If filmmakers today want to pay homage to the New Wave, they should veer away from over-romanticizing the 60s and hollowly copying techniques and instead embrace the spirit of the New Wave.