New Waves and the Blockbuster

After the Second World War, Italian cinema had very little to work with. The great studio at Cinecittà had been damaged and was being used to house refugees, money was short, and film stock was scarce. Out of that scarcity came a style.

Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) was shot in a city just out of German occupation, on real streets, with a mix of professional and non-professional actors, and it looked like news. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), written with Cesare Zavattini, told the simplest possible story: a poor man in Rome gets a job that requires a bicycle, the bicycle is stolen, and he and his young son spend a day searching for it. The lead, Lamberto Maggiorani, was a factory worker. His face, tired and proud and increasingly frightened, does what a famous actor's might not have done, because there is nothing behind it but the situation. Neorealism, as the critics named it, suggested that the camera could find drama in ordinary life without inventing any.

In Paris, the argument was conducted in print first. Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951 with André Bazin as its guiding spirit, gathered a group of young critics, among them François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. In 1954 Truffaut published a ferocious attack on the polished, literary French films of the day, and the Cahiers critics championed instead the director as author: a filmmaker whose personal vision could be traced from film to film, even, provocatively, inside Hollywood genre pictures by Hitchcock or Howard Hawks. They called it the politique des auteurs. The American critic Andrew Sarris later turned it into the auteur theory in English.

Then they made films. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), about a neglected Paris boy drifting towards reform school, won him the directing prize at Cannes and ended with Jean-Pierre Léaud running to the sea and turning to the camera in a freeze frame. Godard's Breathless (1960), with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a small-time crook and Jean Seberg as the American girl selling newspapers on the Champs-Élysées, was shot cheaply and fast with a handheld camera, and cut with jump cuts that made time stutter. Whether the cuts began as an aesthetic or as a way of shortening an overlong film depends on who is telling the story, and the participants have told it more than one way. Either way, the mistake became a grammar.

The French wave washed back over the Atlantic. In the late 1960s a weakened studio system, an audience of young people, and the end of the Production Code opened the door to what came to be called New Hollywood. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) borrowed the New Wave's tonal swerves and its violence. Easy Rider (1969), made for very little money, made a great deal of it. Directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman were given a kind of authority the Cahiers critics would have recognised, and The Godfather (1972) showed that an auteur's film could also be a colossal hit.

That combination produced its own successor. When Universal released Steven Spielberg's Jaws in June 1975, it opened at several hundred cinemas at once and was backed by a national television advertising campaign, at a time when a big film usually opened in a few cities and spread. Jaws became an event, then the highest-grossing film yet. Two years later George Lucas's Star Wars did the same, and added merchandise. The blockbuster had arrived: the summer release, the opening weekend, the franchise.

What followed was faster change in the machinery than in the logic. Digital effects, digital cameras and digital projection replaced most of what had been done on film, and streaming moved much of the audience out of the cinema altogether. Yet the questions the waves asked are still the ones worth asking of any new film: who is its author, what does it show of ordinary life, and is it made for us or for the opening weekend.

The best films have usually managed more than one answer at once.