Instantly identified with the French New Wave, this word is absent from New Wave, and this absence comes across less as an accident than as a statement by Linklater that is far louder through silence than mere mention. Author is a common French word for “author” and Laptops the quintet used it for characterization directors whose work they liked because what they particularly enjoyed was the personalization and individualization of art, which is inherently collaborative, almost always expensive, and typically subject to tight control by producers. In other words, there is something counterintuitive about this idea, and Laptops The group, while praising directors as artists of the first order, also described their own experiences as moviegoers, taught a lesson on how to watch movies, and cleared the way for understanding the films they themselves would eventually make.
This idea resonates with me because it fits my own experience of watching movies, from the time I first started to really care about them (thanks to Breathless) to this day. But there is a side to the idea of the director as auteur that, because of its aesthetic power, is too easily overlooked: its connection to filmmaking. The most famous critic of this cohort was Truffaut, because his passionate, unrestrained and sharply argued works Laptops hired him for a widely circulated weekly, Artwhere his pace and quantity of writing allowed him spread your opinion deep and detailed. There, with astonishing candor and a sense of purpose, he emphasized that being an auteur meant taking the same personal and practical approach to filmmaking—the money side, the fundamentals of management—as he did to the art of cinema. And it is this aspect that Linklater emphasizes in The New Uncertainty.
Rather than Godard and his cohorts declaiming their beliefs about personal artistry, The New Nebula shows the rigors that make up authorship, detailing how Godard worked—how strange, how original, how daring and, for some, how repulsive. Linklater records how producer Georges de Beauregard (played by Bruno Dreyfurst) found Godard's methods so disappointing that he threatened to abandon the project and cut his losses, and how the film's female lead Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) had to be talked out of leaving halfway through.
Of course, Breathless was indeed filmed and completed, but Linklater only shows one moment from the finished film. In this way, it reaches the entire potential audience: viewers who have seen Breathless know or should know what is revolutionary about it, and for people who haven't seen Breathless there is probably a special pleasure in trying to imagine, based on The New Nebula, what a Godard film would be like. When I first watched Breathless at the age of seventeen, I had no idea how this or any other film was made, but I knew that it was different from any other film I had ever seen because of its jazzy immediacy; I knew intuitively that it was improvised in the way that other films seemed composed. Moreover, nothing in the first features of the other four members Laptops The quintet, as brilliant as these films were, suggests that their production methods were as unusual, original, controversial or baffling as Godard's in Breathless.
What made the French New Wave a world-historical phenomenon was the result of its work; but his special influence on young filmmakers made him something more than the films themselves, something more than the youth of his avant-garde. The New Wave offered future filmmakers a formula for becoming film directors – it showed that you can learn to make films without mastering the technique in film school, but simply by watching films a lot and carefully. It suggested a kind of determined nerd revenge, a brass ring in the hands of fanatical moviegoers, and Godard, whose films contain more and more brazenly explicit references to other films than those of his peers, was a prime example. New Wave is a joyful work because, despite the difficulties of making Breathless and the professional challenges (in light of commercial failures and criticism) that New Wave endured in the years that followed, Linklater writes into the film the long trajectory of the band's historical triumph.
What's easy to forget about this autodidactic vision (and something Linklater emphasizes repeatedly) is that the story of the New Wave proves that you need to have friends. One of the beauties of New Nebula is the way it introduces friends, both famous and those who have remained in the shadows, such as Suzanne Schiffman (played by Jodie Root-Forest). She had been a friend since the group's fanatical moviegoing days in the late forties; worked as script supervisor for Godard and Truffaut in the sixties; and became Truffaut's close collaborator – and with him an Oscar nominee for the screenplay of Day for Night – before she began working as a director herself.
