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The neighborhood: affective urbanity

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Films such as The Cousins rely on a senseof urbanism in which conventionalmores and social ties between friends andfamily have disappeared. However, inthe films of the nouvelle vague we also findthat the city, or more precisely theneighborhood, appears as the setting foraffective relationships substituting for conventional family structures: coffee-houses, bars, and the street become hometo young boys, as in Truffauts The 400Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959).

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The city as a whole offers a liberating

education to the young main charactersof the film, and the film celebratesparticularly the neighborhoods Truffautknew as a child. The 400 Blowsdepends on the tension that arisesbetween the human drama in theinterior, domestic space and theexterior context of the city, which

manipulates love.

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Much has been made of the biographicaldimension of The 400 Blows, casting thefigure of Antoine Doisnel as the alter-egoof Truffaut, steeped in the urbanenvironment of Paris. The beginning ofthe film favors the city over the individualin an extended sequence showing Paris;continuous traveling- and tracking-shots

center on the Eiffel Tower and movethrough the area of the CinmathqueFranaise.

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The lightweight camera made these kindsof location shots possible, and theyannounce and celebrate location shootingin contrast to studio filming. The three-minute opening consists of five shotsedited together with the camera tiltedslightly up, moving along faades ofnineteenth- and early twentieth-centurybuildings. According to Andre Bazin, toomany edits in a scene makes a film seemartificial, and this opening shot includesonly a limited number.

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Open windows: permeable interior and

exterior spaces

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Truffaut continued the topic of love in thecity in the short film Antoine and Colette(1962), part of an international episodic filmentitled Love at Twenty. Laud continues toplay Antoine and grows up with him,mimicking the conventions of a long-termdocumentary. Antoine has returned to Parisand lives in a small room in the Htel de laPaix (at the Rue Forest), next to theGaumont Palace movie theater; his windowoverlooks the Boulevard de Clichy.

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He works at Phillips, making records.During a classical concert at the SallePleyel he falls in love with Colette and

subsequently moves into a room in theHtel de lEurope, across the streetfrom her family. He is invited to eat andwatch television with her parents whileshe goes out with other young men.

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Antoine and Colette concludes with asequence of photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the title song Lamour vingt

ans. The black-and-white photos showvarious couples kissing and in love inParis, shifting from the individual narrative

of Antoine to the paradigmaticrepresentation of Paris expressed byCartier-Bresson as a city of young love.

Truffauts portrayal, however, shows us afrustrated love fed nostalgically byaffection for Paris.

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The street: love and detection

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The New Wave, observed ric Rohmer,was born from the desire to show

Paris, to go down into the street, at atime when French cinema was acinema of studios. The nextinstallment of Antoines story, StolenKisses (1968) begins, like The 400Blows, with the conjoining of a personalinscription by Truffaut and the city ofParis.

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The very first shot shows us an unknownstreet with the first credit item, theproduction company, written across it: UneProduction/Les Films Du Carrosse/ LesProductions Artistes Associs. Then thetitle of the film appears, followed byDedicated to Henri Langlois, the Head ofthe Cinmathque Franaise, and aclearly centered shot onto theCinmathque Franaise with ahandwritten sign announcing that the dateof reopening will be announced in thepress.

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At that point Henri Langlois, the Headof the Cinmathque Franaise, whohad built an unrivalled film collection byhiding films from the Nazis during theGerman occupation and had createdan intellectual and artistic center for thenouvelle vague in the Cinmathque,

had been fired, which led to anoutraged protest by the filmmakers andintellectuals associated with it.

The camera zooms back and after the cut

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The camera zooms back and, after the cut,

a traditional establishing shot of Parisshows the Eiffel Tower dominating theskyline. Truffauts name is written across

this image, again aligning his name with thedominant signifier of the city. While thecamera pans to the left and down, the

nostalgic chanson about remembering lovefrom the credit sequence ends, and wehear the real sounds of the city streets. The

camera moves towards a small, barredwindow, and we hear a neutral dialoguebefore a second cut deposits us in the

interior setting, a military jail.

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Reversing the gaze: the female flneur

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The observation just made aboutStolen Kisses is echoed by EmmaWilsons general comment that theParisian landscape of the nouvellevague is a space largely of male

subjectivity and of amorousencounters. In Chabrols andTruffauts films, the city is gendered asmale: men inhabit the city and activelymove through it, while women serve asobjects of their desire.

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At the same time, the status of womenwas changing and female characterswere portrayed as sexually liberatedand thus often as sexualized,sometimes as dominant characters incontrast to earlier representations in

French cinema that emphasizedtraditional feminine qualities.

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Whereas in Benjamins theory of the

flneur and many of the Weimar cityfilms seductive commodity and objectof desire are collapsed in the figure ofthe prostitute, Vardas film pries thatconflation apart and allows us thepleasure of the chance encounter in thecity.