[Photo © 1960 William Klein]
An excerpt from a 2000 profile of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody in The New Yorker:
During our interview, Godard referred to the New Wave not only as "liberating" but also as "conservative." On the one hand, he and his friends saw themselves as a resistance movement against "the occupation of the cinema by people who had no business there." On the other, this movement had been born in a museum, the Cinémathèque: Godard and his peers were steeping themselves in a cinematic tradition -- that of silent films -- that had disappeared almost everywhere else. Thus, from the beginning, Godard saw the cinema as a lost paradise that had to be reclaimed.
If love of the silent cinema doesn't point the way to new, revolutionary work -- as love of ancient Greek art sparked the innovations of the Renaissance -- then it's just hobbyism.
In other words, silent cinema can be alive as a cultural force, as it was for the young French cinéastes of the Fifties, just as ancient Greek art was alive for the artists of the Renaissance.
The parade has not gone by.