‘Nouvelles Femmes' Review: The New Wave's Female Face

Wall Street Journal

22-05-2025

A French actress tries to describe the pain of her first love to her Japanese paramour as they drink themselves into a stupor on a night out in the city of Hiroshima. A mannishly dressed woman races two men across a footbridge, beating them handily. Three hip young people out at a Paris cafe—again, two men and a female friend—get up to dance, and the big-eyed, beautiful woman is the one that you can't stop looking at.
The striking women in these three scenes—Emmanuelle Riva in 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour' (1959), Jeanne Moreau in 'Jules and Jim' (1962) and Anna Karina in 'Band of Outsiders' (1964)—are among the figures explored by Ericka Knudson in 'Nouvelles Femmes,' her study of the women of the French New Wave. This revolutionary movement in cinema was spearheaded by a loosely associated group of filmmakers, including Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, many of whom began making films in the late 1950s and early '60s. They believed the seismic changes of their postwar moment required a fresh visual language for the movies. Their films threw away anything that seemed studio-bound or tastefully literary in favor of open air, real streets and modern characters.
No aspect of mid-20th century French culture, Ms. Knudson argues, was changing more rapidly than the lives of women—in particular their sex lives and their ability to consider topics, such as birth control and abortion, that had only recently been off limits. Though nearly all of the New Wave directors were men, much of the intrigue, warmth and vitality of their films comes through the women they cast. 'While many of the actresses have reached cult status because of their beauty or iconic roles,' Ms. Knudson writes, 'their contributions, on screen and off, have not necessarily taken center stage.' Ms. Knudson, a film scholar who teaches at Northeastern University, aims to remedy this 'imbalance' by looking at the actresses both as artists and as real women living through the changes their movies were depicting.
The French New Wave was a sprawling movement with a vague endpoint that Ms. Knudson doesn't specify, and it had many participants. Thus the book's loose construction feels appropriate, even though the lack of an index is infuriating. Rather than strict chronology, Ms. Knudson uses the actresses themselves as the organizing principle, through chapters that link them to their impact.