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Louis Malle & the New Wave Film

Louis Malle was one of the leading film directors in France when he died in 1995 after a 40-year career. Malle was one of the young directors in the 1950s who came to be seen as representing a new force in filmmaking, under the name nouvelle vague or New Wave. Malle made films not only in France but in America, fitting as easily into the mold of American independent filmmaker as he did into that of French auteur. He made a variety of types of film, and in some ways this may have made him seem more a chameleon than the more personal style of director like Truffaut. However, Malle's body of work shows a strong intelligence, a concern for human beings, the ability to elicit strong performances, and a sensible if not overtly expressive use of the camera. Malle achieved a high status in each decade of his career, rising to the fore with his first film, L'Ascenseur pour l'Tchafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)(1957), branching out as an international filmmaker, and recreating himself in the 1970s and 1980s as an American and French independent filmmaker.

Malle was associated with the French movement known as the New Wave. Most of the filmmakers of this movement came from the magazine Cahiers du CinTma, but Malle never wrote for the publication. Indeed, the magazine never had a high regard for Malle's works. Still, Malle stood at the center of the New Wave and was important in its subsequent impact on French commercial cinema:

Malle's early fiction films helped launch the new era by their commercial and critical success; his work in the 1960s and early 1970s reflected divided loyalties, alternating between innovation and personal expression in some works and a willingness, in others, to resort to familiar formulas and commercial strategies (Williams 340).

Williams also finds that there may have been a social reason for the distance between Malle and his contemporaries form Cahiers du CinTma in that while they came form the mi...

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Louis Malle & the New Wave Film. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:40, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691512.html