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Abstract:
Jacques Demy's importance in the French New Wave ironically becomes clearest by way of his least obviously New Wave work of the 1960s, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which represents a curious intersection between the New Wave aesthetic and that of the "Tradition of Quality," against which the movement claimed to rebel.
At first glance, Jacques Demy's best-known work. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), bears little resemblance to his earlier, clearly New Wave features, Lola (1961) and La Baie des anges (Bay of Angels, 1963). To the casual observer, the all-sung, operatic film might even appear as an anomalous blip in French film history, not obviously belonging to any particular tradition or movement. However, in terms of production values and other key characteristics, it would seem to hark back to the "Tradition of Quality," which had dominated French screens in the 1950s and against which the French New Wave purported to rebel. At the same time, despite surface appearances. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg does conform to certain aesthetic and formal norms of the New Wave. A balanced look at what the "Tradition of Quality" actually represents (beyond the well-known caricature offered in Cahiers du cinéma), together with a consideration of eight general qualities of the New Wave offered by Michel Marie, will yield a more nuanced positioning of this celebrated film vis-à-vis both traditions, illuminating Jacques Demy's importance as a figure of intersection between the two.1
The New Wave. Defining New Wave precisely is a rather slippery enterprise. Part of the problem, as Marie points out, is that "the New Wave directors initially and repeatedly denied that they formed a unified movement."2 Still, dieir association with Cahiers enabled François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, et al. to publicize each other's films and to promote the idea of a movement when it suited them. In a 1964 interview, Godard stressed the centrality of the Cahiers group as the nucleus of the New Wave, while also acknowledging the importance of the so-called "Left Bank" group, including Demy, Agnès Varda, and Alain Resnais.3
In fact, there was a good deal of commingling between these two "groups," suggesting more commonality than difference. For example. Demy and Varda (who were married in 1962) knew the...