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New European
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Richard Linklater and the new wave of new wave
This isn't a documentary, but a drama that recreates the Paris of 1959, the streets and the cars and the cafes and the clothes, all shot in black and white, just like the masterpiece of iconoclastic indie film-making itself, the one that defined the new wave of this film's title. Sometimes, it's like they make the movies just for you. Who else would possibly enjoy this? I wondered, as I sat there in Cannes' main temple of cinema, the Grand Theatre Lumiere, dedicated to those founding brothers of the movies, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, watching a film all about the making of another film, the one that practically reinvented cinema: Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle. Directed by American indie stalwart Richard Linklater and shot entirely in French, Nouvelle Vague could come across as indulgent and niche. I hope so. The more indulgent, the nichier the better, say I. But if you love French cinema and love Paris and love À bout de souffle (and let's face it, if you do the two former, it's probably due to the brilliance of the latter), then you'll love Nouvelle Vague. I settled into my seat and realised I was in the sweet spot of my happy place. If you don't know the many stories behind À bout de souffle, Linklater's effortlessly amiable film will fill you in. He describes it as: 'The story of Godard making À bout de souffle, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made À bout de souffle.' So there must be some licence taken even if I think everything here is true, or at least it feels that way – which, as Godard himself might say, is all you need for a movie. Using mostly unknown French actors, Linklater introduces us to the main instigators of this zeitgeisty mid-century moment, including François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin) and JLG himself (a superbly accurate Guillaume Marbeck, swathed in cigarette smoke and dark glasses) as well as actors Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch, fabulous). Then there are what one might term the lesser-known creatives such as cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and stills photographer Raymond Cauchetier (Franck Cicurel), whose images were equally instrumental in defining the era. So, yes, it's a sort of faux documentary at times: whenever the characters are introduced on screen, they pause for a couple of seconds and stare at the camera in a composed tableau, as if posing for an old-fashioned still photograph, while their names come up on the screen. There's a whiff of Wes Anderson whimsy here, but the film is nothing like Anderson's archly American The French Dispatch. Linklater is immersed in the moment, in the spirit of '59, the better to make us feel the fun of it all, the breezy joie de vivre that's still instantly conjured up whenever you think of À bout de souffle. So the film takes us through the agonies of Godard's jealousy watching his fellow film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma make their film debuts, and his conversations with producer Georges de Beauregard before he launches into the 20-day shoot of À bout de souffle, writing by hand the day's pages in a cafe every morning (there was never a script), ending the day's filming when he's run out of ideas, making it up on the spot, smoking, smoking, smoking, and cutting, cutting, cutting. But, under Linklater's worshipful gaze, it all feels like the biggest, boldest adventure, illuminated by the playful machismo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the stylish beauty of Jean Seberg's gamine star quality. Linklater re-creates famous lines and scenes from the film, but shoots them from a reverse angle, from Godard and the camera's point of view, thus throwing new light on images we might have seen many times before, now appearing as fresh as they day they were printed. There are oodles of cinephilic in-jokes, too, including cameos from contemporary luminaries Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre), Robert Bresson (Aurelien Lorgnier), who was making Pickpocket at the time, Jean Cocteau (Jean-Jacques Le Messier) and Juliette Gréco (Alix Benezech). There are quips and quotes, there are delicious movie-making moments capturing how Godard directed his actors and how they moved to his strict instructions. You don't have to be an expert in French cinema to love this, though it probably helps. I am, unashamedly, so I don't know or care, which is why I say I felt like they were making it just for me. Maybe that (Cannes-do?) spirit of self-starting and rule-breaking appealed to me because, as some of you might know, I'm about to make my first movie as a producer (A Waiter in Paris, based on the memoir by Edward Chisholm), due to be shot partly on the streets of Paris, on a film partly inspired by all this nouvelle vague coolness. The first night I arrived in Paris to live for a year, as a language assistant in 1991, I went to watch À bout de souffle, for the very first time. My life changed that night, or at least shifted into a different gear. I fell in love, with Paris and with movies. So now, watching Godard, his crew and his contemporaries take to the streets in their various contraptions – shopping carts and wheelchairs adapted to get their handheld shots and sense of movement – it rang out again, pushing me into another new gear with what felt like a challenge and a validation, that every now and then cinema can and must be reinvented, injected with fresh visions and personality, the prevailing order given a right run for its money until it is literally out of breath. And that I can do this, go from critic to film-maker. I'm not directing my movies and, somewhat worryingly, the only guy that looks a bit exasperated in Nouvelle Vague, is the producer character, George de Beauregard, forever fretting that no one's shooting, or that there's no script, to the point that he and Godard come to blows and a full-on grapple match on a cafe floor. Is that what I'm signing up for? Worth it for the creation of a classic, I'd say – plus Beauregard went on to produce Cléo de 5 à 7, Une femme est une femme, Le Mépris, Pierrot le fou… I'd take that, if it means I have to roll with the punches. Then there's all the music Linklater uses, not just some of the famous Martial Solal soundtrack to Breathless, but also other jazz and French sounds of the time, such as Sacha Distel, Dalida and I'm sure I heard Michel Legrand's work with Miles Davis from Legrand Jazz, which came out in 1958… then again, I always hear Miles Davis's trumpet when I see Paris on screen, whether it's there or not. And a word, too, for Deutch, the only American actor here (she previously starred in Linklater's campus film Everybody Wants Some from 2016), playing Jean Seberg and capturing all her American-accented French so perfectly, as well as her haircut and her walk, that jaunt up the Champs-Élysées shouting 'New York Herald Tribune,' all her style, dressed in Chanel and exuding the magical, diva quality that made producer Beauregard fork out half the budget on hiring her (see, producer's instincts are everything). I don't usually focus on one film from Cannes, but Nouvelle Vague, playing in Competition, struck me as something special, something new. I didn't catch them all, this year. For the last 25 years or so, I've seen all the Competition films, fearful that I might miss the Palme d'Or winner, but with producing duties taking over this year, I had to do meetings with financiers, listen to co-production and tax credit panels and sit down with sales agents, very important people at Cannes, no doubt. But as Nouvelle Vague shows, when the history of cinema is told, when they recount the legends of making movies to pass on the baton to a new generation, such as Linklater does here, on screen there are critics, costumiers, cinematographers, actors, writers, script editors, the assistant director. There's a producer and, briefly, the marketing guy. But there are no sales agents or financiers. One might wonder where all this ancestor worship fits in Linklater's own ever-growing and mutating oeuvre. Now 64, he's always been a flag bearer for indie film, since his loose-limbed breakthrough Slacker helped define the golden era of '90s American movie making, compounded by Dazed and Confused and the rather brilliant Before trilogy, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy across the years, with my favourite being the achingly romantic Before Sunset, taking place in Paris. But he's also had the big hit of School of Rock, as well experimental animation work, and the mighty yet subtle achievement of Boyhood, spanning decades. He ticks off the styles and the stats with a Godardian appetite, reflecting on the passing of time (his films can take place in a day, or over long periods), ambition (or lack of it) among young people, and the act of artistic creation. His films are often about just hanging out with a bunch of characters, so Nouvelle Vague is right up his boulevard I'd say, as if he's actually totally disappeared into À bout de souffle while showing it at one of his famous Austin Film Society nights, like the characters in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. (Allen himself recently fulfilled a dream of making a film entirely in French, Coup de Chance, though it may prove his last). Nouvelle Vague is a 'hang out' movie, a chance to transport yourself to a Cahiers editorial meeting, or to the Cinematheque, to a new wave film set, and to the cafes and streets of 1959 Paris, to smoke and drink coffee, to be reminded of youthful arrogance, even if these tweedy French intellos do look a bit like university professors than punk-like rebels. Let's remember that film critics can become great film-makers, because we all love movies after all. Let's keep cinema sexy and daring, it says, let's aim high to match the best. Let's remember what Godard said: 'You don't make a film, the film makes you.' And let's ride that wave.
Euronews
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
What is Dogma 25 - the new cinematic movement unveiled in Cannes?
30 years after the original cinematic movement, a group of Danish and Swedish filmmakers have relaunched the avant garde Dogma 95, with a new manifesto that has been updated for the internet age. 'In a world where film is based on algorithms and artificial visual expressions are gaining traction, it's our mission to stand up for the flawed, distinct and human imprint,' said May el-Toukhy, Milad Alami, Annika Berg and Isabella Eklöf and Jesper Just in a statement read at the Cannes Film Festival. 'We champion the uncompromising and unpredictable, and we fight against the forces working to reduce cinematic art to an ultra-processed consumer product.' Described in its manifesto as 'a rescue mission and a cultural uprising', Dogma 25 has been endorsed by the two best-known directors to emerge from the original Dogma movement: Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier – as well as von Trier's production company Zentropa. Both filmmakers said in a statement: 'In '95, we made films in the certainty of peace. And created a revolt against conformity. In '25, new dogmas are created, now in a world of war and uncertainty. We wish you the best of luck on your march toward reconquering Danish film.' For those who need a refresher, Dogma 95 was a manifesto unveiled by von Trier and Vinterberg, which highlighted a set of rules aimed at creating films based on the traditional values of story, acting and theme, while excluding the use of special effects. Both filmmakers wanted to establish a new extreme, saying: 'In a business of extremely high budgets, we figured we should balance the dynamic as much as possible." The manifesto, which mimicked Truffaut's "Une certaine tendance du cinema" – the Cahiers du Cinéma article which kickstarted the French New Wave in 1954 - compiled a 'Vow of Chastity'. These were the terms that would determine whether or not a film could be considered part of the Dogma 95 movement. The 10 rules were: Dogma 95 would develop into a collection of 35 films, but the best known are 1998's Festen and The Idiots – two hugely influential films for contemporary European cinema. In 2002, it was generally accepted that Dogma 95 had ended, especially following the statement made by Vinterberg: 'It was always meant to be a wave, and they don't go on forever." The Dogma 25 manifesto contains 10 new dogmas. The filmmakers said they have taken a 'new vow of chastity' to uphold the rules, which they explained are influenced by three central themes: a return to the physical reality, aesthetic restrain, and economic and geographic accountability. The new manifesto only retains one of the original's self-imposed rules (read on to see which one) and most challenging of the new rules is that Dogma 25 films must be made 'in no more than a year', and the use of the internet 'is off limits in all creative processes'. Here is the full new manifesto: DOGMA 25 is a collective of filmmakers founded in Copenhagen in the spring of 2025. Our stated purpose is to preserve the originality of cinema and the opportunity to create film on its own terms. The role of the director has increasingly been reduced to that of project manager, the film to a commodity, and the audience to consumers. Experimental practice is stifled by fear of risk-taking, which suffocates artistic exploration and silences unique voices. When films are merely executed and not allowed to evolve organically, it puts the art form in danger of becoming functional, obedient and thereby irrelevant. In a world where formulaic films based on algorithms and artificial visual expression are gaining traction, it's our mission to stand up for the flawed, distinct, and human imprint. We champion the uncompromising and unpredictable and we fight the forces working to reduce cinematic art to an ultra-processed consumer good. By scaling down production, we ensure that everyone on the team has an intimate relationship with the film and its message. This will enhance mutual trust and a sense of collective responsibility for the film and for each other. It also allows us to safeguard the flexibility that is vital in making a creative process dynamic and intuitive, rather than purely executive. We celebrate DOGMA 95, all the filmmakers who came before us, and those who will come after. We stand together to defend artistic freedom as a shield against pointlessness and powerlessness. DOGMA 25 is a rescue mission and a cultural uprising. To protect and preserve what we hold dear, we hereby submit to the unflinching and unbreakable set of rules called: THE VOW OF CHASTITY. THE VOW OF CHASTITY: I vow to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 25: 1. The script must be original and handwritten by the director. We compel ourselves to write the script by hand in order to nurture the kind of intuition that flows most freely from the dream, channelled through the hand onto the paper. 2. At least half the film must be without dialogue. We insist on a cinematic approach to filmmaking, because we believe in visual storytelling and have faith in the audience. 3. The internet is off limits in all creative processes. We commit to produce the films relying on real people within our physical reality – rather than in a digital one infused with algorithms. 4. We'll only accept funding with no content altering conditions attached. We assume responsibility for keeping budgets down so the team retains final say in all artistic decisions. 5. No more than 10 people behind the camera. We commit to working in close collaborations to build trust and strengthen our shared vision. 6. The film must be shot where the narrative takes place. Film as an art form becomes artificial and generic when we portray a location in a false light. 7. We're not allowed to use make-up or manipulate faces and bodies unless it's part of the narrative. Just as we strive to maintain the authenticity of the location, we also want to portray the human body without a filter. We celebrate it – warts and all. 8. Everything relating to the film's production must be rented, borrowed, found, or used. We commit to making films using objects that already exist and renounce the ahistorical and self-destructive culture of consumerism. 9. The film must be made in no more than one year. We abstain from any lengthy processes that stand in the way of creative flow. 10. Create the film as if it were your last. The new initiative has been met with excitement, with Tine Fischer, the Director of The Danish Film Institute, saying: 'Any system, even one that runs impeccably, needs examining. Needs challenging. Needs to cast a courageous look on itself. Throughout the last decades, Danish film has distinguished itself internationally with myriads of Academy and Cannes nominations and a unique position in our own market. We are known globally as a strong nation for film, and Danes here at home love Danish film. But no success has a lifetime guarantee.' She continued: '30 years ago, DOGMA 95 turned the eyes of the world toward Denmark and left a radical imprint on our national self image as a filmmaking nation. The people were few, the number of films limited, but the impact was huge. We need these brave artistic visions now more than ever. Visions befitting a new time – which is exactly what the new DOGMA 25 represents: A strong group of noticeably different filmmakers, who have collectively committed to artistic radicalism. How do we make films, how do we ensure our freedom of expression in a distinctly challenged geopolitical world, and how do we safeguard the singularity of art.' She added: 'As a film institute, we are facing a time where our cultural contributions are tasked with ensuring state of the art Danish films – now and in the future. It's not a simple task, but deep inside the task lies the ability, as a system, to make space for film as a free art form, for innovation and perspectives. This is why we are especially happy and proud to support DOGMA 25 in their early stage, both with concept development and the international launch in Cannes.'
Time Magazine
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Richard Linklater's Breathless Tribute Nouvelle Vague Is an Inside Baseball Movie for Everyone
Some days it seems we live in a horrid world where the majority of humans couldn't give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 66-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for anyone who doesn't speak French, requires the reading of subtitles? Yet here comes a comet: Richard Linklater's sensational Nouvelle Vague, an agile, witty, elegant picture about the making of a movie that possibly only film lovers and bona fide old people care about— Jean-Luc Godard's cannon-shot of a debut, 1959's Breathless —may end up being appreciated by only about 2.6 percent of the general population. Who would make a picture like that? Only someone who cares. Nouvelle Vague, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, is the ultimate inside-baseball making-of movie. But even more than that, it's a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don't fully understand. It's both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It's all about the bold, muscular act of caring. Jean-Luc Godard was just 29 when he made À bout de souffle —the movie that would come to be known among English-speakers as Breathless —and yet he felt he was lagging behind his peers at Cahiers du Cinéma, the movie journal whose critics became, almost magically, some of the era's greatest filmmakers. Critics as filmmakers? Beware: it's a lousy idea. Yet Godard's Cahiers colleague François Truffaut had already made The 400 Blows, a picture Godard loved, and envied. Ambitious, bratty, and brilliant in a playing-behind-the-beat way, Godard wanted to make his own movie. But who would give him the money? Nouvelle Vague tells the story of how the enigmatically charming yet sort-of-a-jerk Godard—played, marvelously, by Guillame Marbeck—wheedled his way into making Breathless, shot in just 20 days, guerrilla-style, largely on the streets of Paris. He already had ideas for several films, and in an early scene, he pitches them excitedly to producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürsft). But Beauregard will hire him only if he shoots a script that Truffaut (played here by Adrien Rouyard) has already written. That script, inspired by a real-life story Truffaut had seen in the newspaper, followed a raffishly alluring French layabout, Jean Paul Belmondo's Michel Poiccard, who steals a car, shoots a cop, and is ultimately betrayed by his American journalist girlfriend, Jean Seberg's gamine femme fatale Patricia Franchini. Godard gets to work finding his cast. He wants his friend Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) to play Michel: he goes to the boxing gym where the amiable, loose-limbed actor is working out, joining him in a jump-rope session as he makes his pitch. Can he get Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutsch), already a star, to play Patricia? Boldly, he makes his move, first approaching her husband, François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noe), who's managing her career. She doesn't like the idea: she doesn't want to work with this newcomer; she thinks the whole thing will come crashing down; and even after shooting begins, she threatens to quit. Somehow, she sticks with it, at times following Godard's capricious lead but just as often challenging him. He finds a DP he likes, the gentle giant Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat). There's a persnickety script girl, Suzon Faye (Pauline Belle), who tries to tell her boss Godard that for continuity's sake, he can't remove a cup from a table in one of the small flats the crew has commandeered as a set. 'Reality is not continuity!' he says, just one of the many bossy, spontaneous, maddeningly delightful pronouncements he will make as he and his friends—all of them under 30, most of them with virtually no idea what they're doing—launch into the adventure of making a moving picture. Don't know who any of these real-life characters are, or what they look like? Linklater's got you. He has filled his cast largely with unknowns, seeking actors who closely resemble their real-life counterparts; most of these aren't faces you'll recognize, playing people from the past you may never have heard of. But Linklater introduces each player with his or her name neatly emblazoned at the bottom of the screen, similar to the way characters (and often the actors playing them) used to be identified in silent movies, so audiences could get their bearings quickly. It's easy to follow along, and before you know it, you're surfing this nascent New Wave with the people who helped create it, held aloft by the buoyancy of Godard and his ramshackle—yet perfectly chosen—team of accomplices. Godard would start each day of shooting with fresh ideas. When he ran out of them, sometimes after shooting only one or two scenes, he'd quit for the day. Some days, on a whim, he'd call off shooting altogether, causing Beauregard to materialize seemingly out of nowhere in an understandable huff. To shoot on the street without attracting attention, they obtain a postal cart and put the camera—as well as Coutard—inside. Every five minutes or so, Godard blurts out a favorite aphorism. You may already know some of them, like 'All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.' But so many of them flow from his lips that they become a running gag. He quotes Gaugin ('Art is either plagiarism or revolution'), Duke Ellington ('I don't need time, I need a deadline'), Leonardo Da Vinci ('Art is never finished, only abandoned'). Marbeck, peering out at the world through dark glasses, shaking his pipe at his cast and crew as he spins out his sometimes puzzling directives, captures the impish magnetism of the young Godard. You want to slug him; you also adore him. And to watch him, his cast, and his friends make this thing—a movie we freely call a masterpiece, though that's too snoozy a word for the blast of cool energy that is Breathless —is a particular kind of bliss. Nouvelle Vague is filled with lore: Godard has hired a stuntman to film a somewhat complex scene in which a pedestrian is hit by a car. In the end, he decides to shoot just the aftermath of the accident, getting his friend and fellow filmmaker Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) to lie down in the street and play dead. Deutsch, with her ragamuffin-chic blond pixie cut, is a perfect Seberg. To hear her speak in French, perfectly capturing the way Seberg's dang-flat midwestern vowels insinuated themselves even in that most beautiful of languages, is a delight unto itself. (Seberg was born in Iowa, though she's buried where she belongs, in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.) And as Belmondo, Dulling gives a performance of spectacular physicality, whether he's scrambling in his pocket for chicken feed to buy a small café meal, or, after being shot, staggering and stumbling down a Paris street in a half-tragic, half-funny promenade, with Godard and his camera crew trailing behind. Watching Breathless, we see Belmondo's jagged ballet from behind. In Nouvelle Vague, we see Dullin-as-Belmondo's face as he swerves and zigzags toward his demise. Passers-by look alarmed; he tells them not to worry. 'It's for a movie!' he says cheerfully, channeling the essence of Belmondo's rubbery charm. Nouvelle Vague was filmed in Paris, but required extensive digital-effects work to make it look accurate for the period. This is filmmaking as leap of faith: Nouvelle Vague may seem glowingly modest, but unlike Breathless, it couldn't be made on the cheap. At the same time, its layers of details are gorgeous and priceless. Pascaline Chavanne's costumes, especially Seberg's wardrobe of minute cardigans and jaunty silk scarves, strike every note perfectly. (And I'm dying to know what Derek Guy, the eminently knowledgeable wag behind the social-media account Die Workwear!, will think of Marbeck-as-Godard's gently rumpled jackets and scuffed-just-right loafers.) Cinematographer David Chambille gives the images a lustrous, pearly depth. The soundtrack is a buffet of rapturous period jazz, some of it silky, some of it vibrating with skittery energy, much like Martial Solal's score for Breathless itself. You'll hear songs you maybe don't know, like Zoot Sims' version of 'My Old Flame,' and if this is the first time it reaches your ears, I envy you the discovery. Cannes is obviously the place to premiere a movie like Nouvelle Vague. That 2.6 percent of the population that cares about Breathless? Ninety-eight percent of them are here. But from things he's said about the film, it seems Linklater doesn't think of it as niche. And really, isn't that the only way to go? According to the movie's press notes, when an apprehensive financing executive asked him who he thought this film was for, he said, 'Like all my films, this one is for young people.' It is, after all, about young people making their first movie. He said that if he did his job right, young people would walk out of the theater thinking, 'I can do this too! In fact, I'm going to do it!' But even if you will never in your life pick up a movie camera, Nouvelle Vague is film as invitation—the best kind of film. If you don't know Breathless —what are you waiting for? And if you do know it—even if you've seen it a dozen or a hundred times— Nouvelle Vague will make you see it anew. Is there a difference between loving a movie and being in love with one? Maybe the distinction is subtle. But when a movie that makes you want to weep with joy, you know something is happening. There's no resisting the gangster of love.
Time Out
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Nouvelle Vague
If being locked in the Criterion Closet for a couple of hours sounds like heaven, Richard Linklater has made the perfect film for you. It's a playful, black-and-white making-of story for Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave classic Breathless – 'À Bout de Souffle' to the cinephile crowd – that captures a revolutionary moment in cinema history with reverence and a touch of cheek. You'll probably know movies that backdrop the story: Godard's 1960 crime drama Breathless is the key text, of course, but Truffaut's Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows is also recreated with a wink to contemporary Cannes-goers, and Linklater offers access-all-areas visits to the sets of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville's classic noir Bob le Flambeur too. But chronology is king here. When he's introduced, coolly intellectual behind his ever-present shades, Godard (played with distracted charisma by Parisian photographer Guillaume Marbeck) has yet to put someone else's money where his sizeable mouth is. The French New Wave has begun and his fellow critics at film mag Cahiers du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and his best pal François Truffaut, have begun to establish themselves as filmmakers. Godard is in danger of being left behind, a kind of chic troll snarking from the sidelines. But as Godard famously said, all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl. His opportunity comes via the sponsorship of his soon-to-be long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Breathless, of course, features both gun and girl: newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo's hard-bitten but boyish outlaw has the former; pixie-cropped Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg is the effervescent American newspaper vendor he sweeps up in his wake. It'll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll Linklater cleverly homages Godard's style with handheld cameras, unsynced sound, choppy editing and scratchy celluloid, all framed in the same boxy 1:37 aspect ratio as Breathless. His cast of first-timers is impressive, too. Aubry Dullin is fabulous as Belmondo, the angelic ex-boxer whose guilelessness lends his bandit a disarming quality. And like Godard, Linklater casts a more established actor, Zoey Deutch (Everybody Wants Some!!), in the Seberg role. It may be a facsimile of the original stars' on-screen chemistry, but there's real spark as the pair try to cope with their director's abstractions and loathing of scripted dialogue. There is, of course, a script behind all this – a warm and witty one by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo – as well as filming permits and financing and all the things that Godard was railing against when he made Breathless. Maybe that's why Nouveau Vague lacks the same anarchic urgency as the film it's homaging, and why in Linklater's filmography, Boyhood might be the film with more 'Godard' in it. But for devoted filmlovers, Nouvelle Vague is a must-see – a joyful homage to the art of cinema that'll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll.
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How did Hitler's film-maker hide her complicity from the world?
Leni Riefenstahl had several successes at the Venice film festival. In 1932, the festival's inaugural year, the German film-maker's mystical mountain drama The Blue Light made the official selection. In 1934, she picked up a gold medal for Triumph of the Will, her chronicle of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg. In 1938, 10 weeks before Kristallnacht, she won best foreign film with Olympia, a two-part documentary of the summer Olympics in Berlin that was commissioned and financed by the Nazi government, overseen by the Reich ministry of propaganda and enlightenment, and released on Adolf Hitler's birthday. After the war, and until the day she died, aged 101, in 2003, Riefenstahl insisted that her films were only ever about award-winning art. Through the postwar decades, and over the course of four denazification proceedings, the film-maker presented herself as an apolitical aesthete. She had no interest in 'real-world issues'. She was motivated only by beauty, creative opportunity and the perfection of her craft. Although she never disavowed her personal fascination with Hitler, she vehemently denied complicity with the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Olympia and Triumph of the Will were in no way tendentious, she told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1965. They were 'history – pure history'. Last August, the film-maker made a return of sorts to Venice, but this time as the subject of Andres Veiel's Riefenstahl, a new documentary that reveals just how doctored history could be in her hands. Made with exclusive access to her private estate, the film explores how Riefenstahl's great talent for staging and image-making extended not only to a cinematic glorification of nazism, but also to a personal exculpation campaign so persuasive that Mick Jagger, Madonna and Quentin Tarantino all gladly endorsed Riefenstahl's art. Alongside his producer, the journalist Sandra Maischberger, Veiel was galvanised by the possibility that the material Riefenstahl left for posterity might disclose truths she had skilfully obscured in her lifetime. The first challenge was the sheer volume of her estate, which comprised more than 700 boxes, containing film reels, news clippings, letters, diaries, home videos, several drafts of Riefenstahl's memoirs, hundreds of hours of recorded phone conversations, and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Over six years, Veiel, Maischberger and a team of researchers combed through the material for anything that might contradict Riefenstahl's public story. For the first six months, there were no breakthroughs. The experience felt 'like a sermon', Veiel recalls. 'It was just interview after interview – always the same questions, always the same answers: 'I was just an artist, I was not interested in politics.' It was suffocating.' It appeared Riefenstahl, a consummate editor, had perfected her posthumous presentation. Then, slowly, fissures began to appear among the folders and files. There was a scribbled note in a calendar to 'Vote NPD', a reference to the postwar neo-Nazi party. Recordings of private telephone conversations conveyed shared nostalgia for the 'decency and virtue' of the Nazi years. There was a missing section of a 1934 interview Riefenstahl gave to the Daily Express which, when located in the newspaper's own archives, described the 'tremendous impression' made on her by Mein Kampf, the first page of which had made her 'a confirmed National Socialist'. There were also private letters that proffered previously unseen, and compromising, accounts of Riefenstahl's stint as a war correspondent in Poland and her witnessing of one of the earliest massacres of Jews, in Końskie in September 1939. While Riefenstahl first claimed she did not see the shooting, and later that she did but had been horrified, the estate letters hint at a more complicated story. Indeed, one letter, referring to an army report of the massacre, suggests that Riefenstahl's directorial instructions to remove the Jews from a market square where she was filming may even have been a catalyst for the shooting. Her request was relayed roughly by a member of the Nazi military as 'get rid of the Jews', the letter says. 'Prompted by this remark … some of the Polish Jews attempted to flee and the shots were fired.' 'In the beginning, I was the detective, looking for her guilt,' recalls Veiel of his discoveries. 'Later on I realised she does the job herself.' Making Riefenstahl, Veiel and Maischberger observed in parallel a renaissance of the film-maker's imagery and its attendant ideology. From Donald Trump's raised fist to the organised bodies of Moscow military parades, the mediascape was increasingly occupied by the choreography, motifs and perspectives that characterise Triumph of the Will. To those in the film community – and beyond – who defend Riefenstahl as a 'pure artist' or foreground the formal appreciation of her imagery, the documentary insists, as Maischberger puts it, that 'there is no innocence in the use of these aesthetics'. The film works with minimal commentary, but makes deft use of cuts to expose the inconsistencies in its subject's storytelling. Her claim, in a 1993 documentary, that Triumph of the Will has 'no other political goal or motive' beyond 'peace and work' and 'no mention of racial theory' is swiftly followed by her low-angle shots of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher thundering that 'a people that does not hold dear its racial purity will perish'. The more archival interviews with Riefenstahl the team reviewed, the more the film-maker also revealed her strategies of postwar rehabilitation. An actor before she was a director, she deployed all her 'tools as an artist', Veiel says, to deflect from her ideological affinity with nazism. Over the course of the documentary, we encounter the film-maker as beguiling and flirtatious – all secretive smiles and 'oh, do have another cup of coffee'. We see her furious and intimidating, abruptly shutting down interviews with a high-volume tirade. We see her insist on her own victimhood and on how 'terribly difficult' it is not to be believed. And in English-language interviews in particular, we see her play guileless ingenue. 'What does it mean, 'disappear'?' she asks one interviewer, when asked about her knowledge of deportations. Throughout Riefenstahl, Veiel makes frequent use of slow-motion and zoom to bring the viewer uneasily close to his subject's gaze, gestures and mouth. Early on in the film, he cuts between photos of her at different ages, her piercing eyes steadfast centre of the frame. The effect is one of powerful beauty ('as pretty as a swastika', as American columnist Walter Winchell memorably put it), and of even more potent image control. 'We show her ability to stage herself,' he says. 'Different means and methods, always knowing there is some sort of impact.' Did Veiel, a posthumous interviewer of sorts, feel manipulated by what Riefenstahl had left behind? 'There was this deep suspicion. I asked myself how do I go beyond the performance?' In particular, the director, who studied psychology, grappled with documentation of the film-maker's childhood. In memoir drafts found in the archive, Riefenstahl described a harsh upbringing, punctuated by 'terrible beating' and often being told it was a pity she was not born a boy. She recalled a formative episode as a five-year-old, when she was thrown into a lake and left to figure out how to swim. Since these anecdotes did not make it into the published version of her memoirs, Veiel is inclined to consider them uncomfortable truths – determinative traumas, even – that might contextualise Riefenstahl's relationship to nazism. 'It's this very brutal Prussian education,' Veiel says, a childhood imbued with ideas of 'toughness, strength, the contempt for weakness, the question of supremacy'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion These leitmotifs would carry over to Riefenstahl's early acting career of the 1920s, in which she starred in several so-called mountain films, directed by Arnold Fanck. In these Alpine epics – The Holy Mountain and The White Hell of Pitz Palu are two of the best known – Riefenstahl was determined to do all her own stunts. Often the only woman on set, she scaled glaciers without safety ropes, ascended sheer rocks barefoot, was immersed in freezing water, and nearly suffocated under a staged avalanche. Veiel sees a through-line from these childhood experiences and early acting roles to Riefenstahl's work for the Third Reich. 'It was some sort of long-prepared affinity,' he says. 'It was not by chance that Hitler was asking her to make these films. She had this divided idea of mankind – celebrating the strong, condemning the so-called dirty, sick or frail. We considered her at a certain stage as a prototype of fascism.' In assessing the impact of education, history and policy on Riefenstahl's outlook, Veiel described a tightrope between understanding and exculpation: 'For me it was important that she is not just a nasty Nazi. She is a human being. That makes her even more dangerous, because she comes out of the middle of our society. I wanted to understand her, but not to exonerate her responsibility.' At times, Veiel seems to come close to a psychological study of his subject. 'This ideal of purity and beauty was, of course, to repress the violent part of her experience,' he says. He acknowledges, however, that this is conjecture, rather than conclusion, around the film-maker's formative years, and that the unpublished drafts of Riefenstahl's memoirs have no more claim to factuality than the different versions of her experience in Końskie, Poland. In this, the documentary is on more unstable ground, contending with the unreliability, as much as the revelations, of its source material. 'It is open. I'm not the one who can judge what is fabricated or not,' says Veiel. To counter the doubt, Veiel insisted on total fidelity to the archival material. 'If you make a film on someone who is manipulating their whole life, it was a total no-go for us to use AI,' he says. He also developed a visual style rooted in the materiality of the estate. Spliced between the archival footage and recordings are several shots of the archive's physical presence: the file dividers, the labelled cassettes, the glued-in pictures in albums. The means and matter of analogue record-taking lends Riefenstahl a solidity its slippery protagonist cannot. Ultimately, however, Riefenstahl impresses most in attesting to the seductiveness of evasion. Veiel hopes that the film will above all foster a deeper understanding of 'the structure and necessity of legends' and the breeding ground of untruths. Even when the gaps and inconsistencies in her storytelling seem flagrant, she still finds her advocates and supporters. 'It doesn't matter that she is obviously lying,' Veiel says. 'People want the lie. That's the crucial point.' Riefenstahl is in cinemas from 9 May.
