New Wave cameos

Vie privée (Louis Malle 1962)

Pierre Kast was an assistant director on René Clément's pre-New Wave film Le Château de verre (1950), and it seems to have been one of Kast's tasks to find extras for crowd scenes. The result is an appearance at the Gare de l'Est, among the passengers behind Michèle Morgan, of Kast's young friend Jacques Rivette and of the even younger Jean-Luc Godard:

The entire appearance can be seen here. At around this time Godard took his glasses off in an Eric Rohmer-directed short called Charlotte et son steack:

Here are some of Godard's later New Wave appearances.

At a party in Rivette's Le Coup du berger (1956):

At the terrace of the Royal Saint Germain, in Rivette's Paris nous appartient (1960):

He has a substantial role in Rohmer's La Sonate à Kreutzer (1956):

He listens to Beethoven at a party in Rohmer's Le Signe du lion (1959):

Reads France Soir in A bout de souffle (1960):

Is at Geneva's Cornavin railway station in Le Petit Soldat (1960):

Is swallowing pills on the Champs Elysées in 'Il nuovo mondo', his sketch for Ro.Go.Pa.G (1963):

Is in Marrakesh, in a fez, in 'Le Grand Escroc', his sketch for Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde (1963):

Here he is with Anna Karina, glimpsed in Chris Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963):

Godard also made cameo appearances in non-New Wave films. Here he is with Anna Karina and Jacques Brel in a short film by Jackie Pierre, Petit jour (1960):

In Pierre Gaspard-Huit's Shéhérazade (1963), starring Anna Karina, he appears doing his party trick, walking on his hands:

You can watch the whole performance here.

In 1966 Godard was in The Defector (see here), directed by Raoul Lévy, who would reciprocate the same year with a more extended cameo in Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, a film that Lévy produced:

The Defector (Raoul Lévy 1966)

Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (Jean-Luc Godard 1966)

Jacques Rivette

Rivette's cameos are rarer and more discrete. In Godard's A bout de souffle he is the man on the scooter who has been knocked down by a Renault 4CV at the junction of the rue Vernet and the avenue George V:

(This is what has been reported, though I don't recognise Rivette from this angle.)

Automobile accidents seem to be a habit for Rivette, since I think he is the man knocked over by a Renault Domaine in Paris nous appartient:

In a party scene earlier we had seen Rivette as a Romanian political exile:

(There is reasonable doubt about the identification of the accident victim with Rivette, and it may just be wishful thinking on my part.)

Rivette appears in the same montage of cameos that saw Godard and Karina in Chris Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963):

Footage from Le Joli Mai was used by its editor Jean Ravel for the short film D'un lointain regard, including this Rivette moment:

I don't know of any other such cameos by Rivette. Much later, he gives himself minor roles in Jeanne la pucelle (1994) and Haut bas fragile (1995):

He plays a small part in Eduardo de Gregorio's La Mémoire courte (1979):

Rivette is involved in an interesting variant on the cameo when, in Le Beau Serge, Chabrol give Rivette's name to Philippe de Broca (second from the left), making a cameo appearance alongside Chabrol himself (far left):

De Broca, incidentally, is often credited as a journalist at Orly in A bout de souffle, but I can't see him in that sequence. Here he is, with Truffaut, in Les 400 coups (1959):

And in his own film Les Jeux de l'amour (1960), he appears at a nightclub carrying a packet of washing powder:

Claude Chabrol

Chabrol is the cameo specialist, appearing in at least nine of his first fifteen films, and in ten films by others during that same period. These are just some samples of his work as a caméiste.

Here he is pouring champagne at the party in Rivette's Le Coup du berger:

Here he is drinking whisky at a party in Rivette's Paris nous appartient:

He seems to like going to parties. Here he is at a reception on the Terrasse Martini, overlooking the Champs Elysées, in Jacques Dupont's Les Distractions (1960):

If he'd looked over the balcony, two years earlier, he might have seen himself sitting on a bench in the Champs Elysées, in Doniol-Valcroze's Les Surmenés (1958):

Here he is in the Cahiers du cinéma offices in Rohmer's La Sonate à Kreutzer (1956):

Here is Chabrol as resident of a run-down caravan next to a modern housing estate, in De Broca's les Jeux de l'amour (1960):

In Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) Chabrol can be seen, still wearing his glasses, in the swimming pool at Puteaux. In a production still we see him in bathcap and bathrobe alongside the heroines of his film:

I think he makes another cameo appearance in Les Bonnes Femmes, carrying a double bass - an imitation of Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train:

Chabrol's appearance in his A double tour (1959) barely counts as a cameo. He can just be recognised, in white trousers and brown shirt, among the bystanders behind Belmondo and Szabo:

Chabrol appears twice in Marcel Moussy's Saint Tropez Blues (1961):

In Les Godelureaux (1961) Chabrol is innocuously reflected in a mirror behind Bernadette Lafont and Jean-Claude Brialy:

He can again be seen in a mirror in L'Oeil du malin (1962), part of a louche crowd ogling the act in a Munich stripclub:

He is a pharmacist in 'L'Avarice', his contribution to the sketch film Les Sept péchés capitaux (1962):

He is a gym instructor in Edouard Molinaro's Les Ennemis (1962):

And a psychiatrist in Jacques Pinoteau's Les Durs à cuire (1964):

He is a louche barman in his own Marie Chantal Contre Dr Kha (1965), with Charles Denner:

And a louche doctor in his Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite (1965), with Roger Hanin:

He is even loucher as an uncle in Luc Moullet's Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), with Colette Descombesl:

Post New Wave, here is Chabrol as an Eiffel Tower guard in Jean Valère's La Femme écarlate (1968):

François Truffaut

Truffaut's cameo appearances are rarer. Like Chabrol and Godard he is at Rivette's party in Le Coup du berger:

Like Chabrol he can be seen in the Cahiers du Cinéma offices in Rohmer's La Sonate à Kreutzer (1956):

(That is Charles Bitsch on the left.)

We saw earlier that Truffaut and Philippe de Broca ride a fairground attraction in Les 400 coups:

And we see him lighting a cigarette as he and Jean-Pierre Léaud emerge.

In Claude de Givray's Tire au flanc (1961), he is reading Goethe's Werther:

Eric Rohmer

Rohmer's cameos are rarer still. He is a university professor in Moullet's Brigitte et Brigitte:

An expert on Balzac, consulted by Jean-Pierre Léaud in Rivette's Out 1 (1971):

And a rather nervous looking Russian soldier in his own Die Marquise von O... (1976):

Beyond the appearances of the famous five Cahiers critics-turned-filmmakers, other kinds of cameo turn up in and around the New Wave.

Rohmer's Le Signe du lion (1959) has cameo appearances listed on IMDB for both Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, but I have looked all over and not found either of them. Resnais was recently asked if he was in Rohmer's film and he categorically said no - so that settles it. (Merci François.)

Resnais is easy to recognise by his hairstyle, as here, in Varda's Salut les Cubains (1963):

And here, in Chris Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963):

I haven't found any other cameos from Resnais anywhere in this period, but to compensate here is Hitchcock's appearance in Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961):

And here, dressed as a chef, in Muriel (1963):

As further compensation, here are some cameos from Jean-Pierre Melville.

He had been a hotel manager in Cocteau's Orphée (1950):

He was a police inspector in Pierre Kast's Un amour de poche (1957):

A famous novelist in A bout de souffle:

And the liberal journalist and politician Georges Mandel in Chabrol's Landru (1963):

Samuel Fuller's brief appearance in Pierrot le fou (1965) is famous:

Less so is his cameo the following year in Moullet's Brigitte et Brigitte:

Moullet makes a cameo appearance of his own in his 1960 Un steack trop cuit:

Earlier that year he had appeared on a bicycle, but again with a cigar in his mouth, in A bout de souffle:

New Wave eroticist-cum-pornographer José Benazeraf appeared in A bout de souffle as a man about to have his car stolen - and it is really Benazeraf's own car that Poiccard steals:

Benazeraf makes similarly brief appearances in his own films, as here in Le Concerto de la peur (1962), L'Enfer dans la peau (1964) and L'Enfer sur la plage (1966):

Bénazéraf has a small rôle in a film he produced, Jean-Daniel Daninos's non-New Wave Un Martien à Paris (1961):

I haven't found Jacques Demy in any of his own feature films, but he can be seen in Paris nous appartient, as a man who has just bought some bread and beer:

And in Les 400 coups he is a bored gendarme:

Agnès Varda appears twice in Resnais's Toute la mémoire du monde (1956):

And this opening view of Varda in her own Opéra Mouffe (1958) is much more than just a cameo:

There is a signature-glimpse of Varda near the opening of her Salut les Cubains (1963):

And she is in an audience at the theatre in Marker's Le Joli Mai, where we saw Resnais earlier:

But this, from Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), is the perfect Varda cameo - she plays the third nun from the left:

Here, finally, are Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, in Le Joli Mai:

If you come across any other director cameos in New Wave or related films, please let me know, here.

My thanks to François Thomas for information about Resnais and Varda.

appendix

I'll be adding here the more tangential cameos that I come across, as and when I do.

Edouard Molinaro makes a brief appearance in Pierre Kast's 1961 film La Morte Saison des Amours. I don't have a picture of that cameo, but here is Kast's cameo as a lover in a bar in Molinaro's La Mort de Belle, also 1961:

Molinaro appears as a 'lover in the park' in his own Les Ennemis (1962):

He is 'Monsieur Eduardo', a jealous lover in Kast's Vacances portugaises (1963):

And he is the 'lover on the boat' in his own La Chasse à l'homme (1964):

From Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956), here are director Roger Vadim (with Christian Marquand) and producer Raoul Lévy (with Curd Jurgens):

Here is Vadim (with Monica Vitti) in Jacques Baratier's New Wave parody Dragées au poivre (1963):