than what was to follow. What Western Europe had lost in power and political prestige it was now making up for in the arts. Indeed, the late fifties were something of an Indian summer for the ‘high’ arts in Europe. The circumstances were unusually propitious: ‘European quality’ (the scare quotes had yet to acquire the ironic deprecation of later decades) was being underwritten for the first time by large-scale public funding, but was not yet exposed to populist demands for ‘accessibility’, ‘accountability’ or ‘relevance’.
With the premiere in Paris’s Theatre de Babylone of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, in March 1953, European theatre entered a golden age of modernism. Across the Channel, the English Stage Company at London’s Royal Court Theatre adopted Beckett and East Germany’s Berthold Brecht, as well as performing works by John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, all of whose plays married stylistic minimalism to aesthetic disdain in a technique that was often hard to place on the conventional political spectrum. Even mainstream British theatre became more adventurous. In the late fifties an unparalleled generation of English theatrical knights—Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Redgrave, Guinness—was joined by younger performers fresh from the universities (Cambridge for the most part) and a remarkable pool of innovative directors and producers including Peter Brook, Peter Hall and Jonathan Miller.
First proposed in 1946, Britain’s National Theatre was formally established in 1962 with Lawrence Olivier as its founding director and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as his adviser and assistant, though its permanent home on London’s South Bank was not opened until 1976. Together with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre—which was to become the leading sponsor and venue for new British drama—was a prime beneficiary of Arts Council munificence. That did not mean, it should be noted, that theatre became a more popular form of entertainment. On the contrary: ever since the decline of the music halls, theatre had been the purview of the middling sort—even when the subject matter was ostensibly proletarian. Playwrights might write about working-class life, but it was the middle class that came to watch.
Just as Beckett and his work migrated readily to Britain, so British theatre and its leading figures worked very comfortably abroad; after making his reputation in London productions of Shakespeare (most famously A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Peter Brook would establish himself permanently in Paris, straddling aesthetic and linguistic frontiers with ease. By the early 1960s it was becoming possible to speak of a ‘European’ theatre, or at least a theatre that took as its material controversial, contemporary European themes. Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, first performed in Germany in 1963 and shortly afterwards in Britain, attacked Pope Pius XII for his wartime failure to help the Jews; but in his next work, Soldiers (1967), Hochhuth turned on Winston Churchill for the wartime fire-bombing of German cities, and the play was initially banned in the UK.
It was in the 1950s, too, that the European arts were swept by a ‘new wave’ of writers and film directors whose break with narrative convention and attention to sex, youth, politics and alienation anticipated much of what the generation of the Sixties came to think of as its own achievement. The most influential west European novels of the Fifties—Alberto Moravia’s Il Conformista (1951), Albert Camus’s La Chute (The Fall), published in 1956, or Gunter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959)—were all in various ways more original and certainly more courageous than anything that came later. Even Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1953) or Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956), narcissistic accounts of post-adolescent self-absorption (coloured in Wilson’s case with more than a hint of authoritarian misanthropy), were original in their day. Written when their authors were respectively eighteen and twenty-four years of age, their subject matter—and their success—anticipated the ‘youth revolution’ of the sixties by a full decade.
Notwithstanding the decline in cinema attendance already noted, it was in the course of the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s that European films acquired a lasting reputation for artistry and originality. Indeed, there was probably a connection, as cinema in Western Europe graduated (or declined) from popular entertainment into high culture. Certainly the renaissance of European cinema was not driven by audience demand—had it been left to viewers, French cinema would have remained confined to the ‘quality’ costume dramas of the early fifties, German cinemas would have continued to show romantic ‘Heimat’ films set in the Black Forest, and British audiences would have thrived on a diet of war films and increasingly suggestive light comedy. In any case, European mass audiences continued to show a marked preference for American popular films.
Ironically, it was their own admiration for American films, particularly the sombre, unadorned film noir style of the late 1940s, which stimulated a revolution among a new cohort of French cineastes. Despairing of the thematic cliches and rococo decor of their elders, a group of young Frenchmen—dubbed ‘The New Wave’ in 1958 by the French critic Pierre Billard—set out to re- invent film-making in France: first in theory, then in practice. The theoretical aspect, adumbrated in the new journal Cahiers du Cinema, centred around the notion of the director as ‘auteur’: what these critics admired in Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, for example, or in the work of the Italian neo-realists, was their ‘autonomy’—the way they had managed to ‘sign’ their own films even when working within studios. For the same reason they championed—then neglected—the films of an earlier generation of French directors, notably Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir.
While all this suggested intuitive good taste, the theoretical penumbra in which it was packaged was of little interest—indeed often incomprehensible—beyond a very restricted circle. But the practice, at the hands of Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda and above all Francois Truffaut, changed the face of film. Between 1958 and 1965, French studios turned out an astonishing body of work. Malle directed Ascenseur pour l’echafaud and Les Amants, both in 1958; Zazie dans le metro (1960); La Vie privee (1961) and Le Feu follet (1963). Godard directed A bout de souffle (1960), Une femme est une femme (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande a part (1964) and Alphaville (1965). Chabrol’s oeuvre from the same years includes Le Beau Serge (1958), A double tour (1959), Les bonnes femmes (1960) and L’Oeil du malin (1962).
Rivette’s more interesting work came a little later. Like Varda, best known in these years for Cleo de 5 a 7 (1961) and Le Bonheur (1965), he often lapsed into self-indulgence; but this was never true of Eric Rohmer, the oldest of the group, later to become internationally famous for his elegiac ‘moral tales’, of which the first two, La Boulangere de Monceau and La Carriere de Suzanne, were both made in 1963. But it was the incomparable Francois Truffaut who would come to incarnate the style and impact of the New Wave. Renowned above all for a series of films starring Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel (Truffaut’s autobiographical ‘hero’)—notably Les Quatre cents coups (1959), L’Amour a vingt ans (1962), and Baisers voles (1968)—Truffaut was not only the main theorist behind the revolution in French cinema, he was also by far its most consistently successful practitioner. Many of his individual films—Jules et Jim (1962), La Peau douce (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) or Le dernier Metro (1980)—are classics of the art.
It was one of the strengths of the best New Wave directors that, while they always looked upon their work as intellectual statements rather than diversionary entertainment (contributors to Cahiers du Cinema frequently invoked their debts to what was still referred to as ‘existentialism’), their films entertained all the same (no-one ever said of Truffaut or Malle—as it was whispered of later work by Godard and Rivette—that viewing their films was like watching paint dry). And it was this combination of intellectual seriousness and visual accessibility that was so important for foreign emulators. As the response to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) suggests, French film had become the preferred vehicle for international moral debate.
Thus, when a group of 26 young German film directors gathered at Oberhausen in 1962 to proclaim ‘the collapse of the conventional German film’ and declared their intention to ‘create the new German feature film… free from the conventions of the established industry, from the control of special interest groups’, they openly acknowledged the influence of the French. Just as Jean-Luc Godard had eulogized Ingmar Bergman in a famous 1957 Cahiers du cinema essay entitled “Bergmanorama”, in which he claimed that the Swedish ‘auteur’ was ‘the most original film-maker of the European cinema’, so Edgar Reitz and his colleagues in
