ddle and lower bourgeoisie, Malle came from one of the wealthiest families in France.
His first work in film was with celebrated oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau as filmmaker on board the ship Calypso, and Malle and Cousteau produced Le Monde du silence (The Silent World, 1956) as the first of a series of travel and ethnographic documentaries which he would make in alternation with his fiction projects. His first fiction film was L'Ascenseur pour l'Tchafaud, conceived as a small-budget project because of fiscal prudence rather than limited resources, since he was using part of his family fortune to finance it:
Generically a film noir in the commercially reliable tradition of Henry-Georges Clouzot, it was innovative in its extensive Paris location shooting and in its music score by the American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (Williams 341).
It won the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc for the year's best French film. While the film was commercially successful, it was Malle's next film, Les Amants (The Lovers, 1958) which established him as a leader of the New Wave. This is a film which "depicts a bourgeois world choking on its own conventions, [with] sex as the only sure remedy for its mindless repression" (Williams 341).
Malle in part imitated the long takes used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Rope in The Lovers, and Malle notes that with these first two films he established a pattern so that "the stylistic approach was almost defined by opposition to the previous film" (French 21). Malle says that he felt more himself when making Les Amants than he had when making L'Ascenseur pour l'Tchafaud, but he alter changed his view and decided that L'Ascenseur pour l'Tchafaud was closer to him than Les Amants:
I wa sincere in the choice of subject an the way I was attacking my own milieu; I fe
...