Thanks for this Stephen. I’ve posted your observations on La fille coupée en deux as a main entry. I’m intrigued to see what your final conclusions on Chabrol will be.

On leaving the cinema,I felt stunned,but I didn’t know why.It wasn’t because of its “New wave” traits of location shooting in Paris,its sexy young cast of Jean-Claude Brialy,Gerard Blain and Juliette Mayniel,or its referencing of other film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock(the constant presence of the gun,which we the audience,know in the final scene is loaded)and Luis Bunuel(the parties,with Paul and his bourgeoisie friends,where the rules of civilised society are stripped away).

After some thinking,I realised it was the perverseness of the story and the way in which the film portrays it,that affected me.Firstly,we have Charles,the naive,hardworking country cousin,who sacrifices everything,even love,to pass his exams and fails.Whilst his “Faustian” city cousin pays his friend,the “Mephistophelean” Clovis for his pleasures and success.Infact,Claude Chabrol at the time of “Les Cousins” release,said that the theme of the film was “the suffocation of purity in the modern world”.

Chabrol visually portrays Pauls dominance over his cousin,in scenes such as Charles arrival at Pauls flat,to see his cousin looking down at him,from the top of a pair of ladders.Later,after Charles has been stood up by Florence,he returns to the flat to find both Paul and Florence,in the upper storey of the flat,whilst he is in the lower.This latter point also visualizes Florences “unattainableness” to Charles,a fact which is further re-inforced by Chabrol,when he places Florence above Charles,sunbathing in a window behind railings.

Infact,as the film progress’s,Charles becomes more and more isolated in his room and seperated from Paul and Florence,the parties going on outside his door and the world in general.By the end of the film,Charles has lost all of his illusions about his life in Paris and his future(significantly a friendly bookstore owner offers him a free copy of Balzac’s “Lost Illusions”).He even fails to kill Paul with a gun,the consequences of which are tragic to Charles himself.

“Les Cousins” was an inverted version of Chabrols first film “Le Beau Serge”(1958) and he would again return to the same theme in “Les Biches”(1967).In the latter film there is a lesbian element to the story and indeed there have been suggestions that in “Les Cousins”,Paul has a love for Charles,which is expressed through the choice of music,especially in the final scene,where Wagner’s “Liebestod” from “Tristan Und Isolde” is played.

Finally,I think that the pervereseness of Chabrol’s “Les Cousins” had an important effect on the cinema of the 1960’s,especially in Britain.Firstly ,in a satirical way,in films like Richard Lester’s “The Knack …And How To Get It”(1965) and Stanley Donen’s “Bedazzled”(1967).Secondly,in a much darker form,in films like Joseph Losey’s “The Servant”(1963) and ultimately,as the sixties soured,in Donald Cammell’s and Nicholas Roeg’s “Performance”(1970).Interestingly,as a young artist,Cammell had spent some time in Paris on the Left Bank,mixing with fellow artists,intellectuals and filmakers.

Indeed, we will be looking at the ‘Left Bank’ group in our celebration. Certainly, the films by Varda and Resnais are more like the arthouse films of the 1950s that Godard and co. wrote about in Cahiers and others in Positif. There always was an art cinema audience in Europe and definitely in the 1950s when Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Wajda etc. as well as the Ray, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi were major attractions. What the New Wave did was to attract younger audiences into the arthouses and expand the market.

I think the real question to ask is how the Left bank group were ‘connected’ to the others?Since the main feature of New Wave directors was their relative youth and the fact that they were more or less first time filmmakers, it does seem odd to include Resnais (first documentary shorts in the 1940s) and Varda (first feature in 1954) alongside the Cahiers group. New Waves are often about being in the right place at the right time. I’m interested in seeing what kinds of idelogical/sociological connections I can find. My knowledge of Resnais and Varda is limited, partly because the films (Varda’s especially) are difficult to see. My initial thought is that the thematic of Cleo 5 to 7 is similar to some other New Wave films in its interest in youth and popular culture, but that it looks very different – because Varda was a skilled documentarist.

I think it is undoubtedly true that the impact of the Cahiers group as critics turned filmmakers was important for the foundation of what we now think of as film studies. As with many other critical/creative ‘movements’ Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette were in the right place at the right time – picked up by critics/scholars in the UK and the US just when they were looking for something like the auteurist approach to cinema – and by filmmakers in Japan, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, Italy etc.

They also found a receptive audience in cinemas because the early 1960s marked the coming of age of a new generation of young people, well-educated in the relative affluence of the 1960s in Western Europe and North America.

On the other hand, the ‘seriousness’ of the New Wave was perhaps not really noticeable until the ‘second New Wave’ of 1966-8. I suspect that in 1960-2, certainly in the UK and the US, it was the sex appeal and the ‘cool’ qualities of Belmondo, Brialy, Anna Karina and Jeanne Moreau that sold the tickets.