Lecture 5 - Film Theory - New Wave Cinema

1950's -60's

• Period of many new waves
• Britain
• French 

Group of French Film Makers

• The leading french film makers at the time .
  jean- Luc goddard
  Francois Truffaut
  claude chabrol
  Jacques Rivette
  Eric Rohmer
• All of these film makers shared a back ground in film theory  were once film  crtitics

Italy

• Rederico fellini
• Michaelangelo Antonioni
• Pier paolo Pasolini

• New wave was a discovary of american genre films, based on cinematic quality rather than literary value.
  Focusing on the importance of personal exprestion of the director involving spontaneity and digression.
• The new wave wanted certain reactions from it’s audience, stress, the experience of free choice, an absence of rational understanding of  the universe, The sense of absurdity in human life  

Reacting against french film of 1940's (cinema du papa)

• - Against films shot in a studio
• - Against films that were set in the past
• - Against films that were contrived and overdramatised
• - Against films that used trickery and special effects
• - Against la tradition de qualite

 

Visual Themes Found in New wave

• Used light weight hand held cameras
• Light weight sound and lighting equipment.
• Faster film stocks, less light..
• Films short in less time and for less money.
• New wave encouraged, improvisation and experimentation.
• The films often had a casual natural look.

 Breathless (1960)
 

• Reinventing film from the ground up
• Basis in American gangster films, but everything is deglamorized
• Location shooting, natural light, handheld camera
• Use of jump cuts, mismatches, and other violations
  of continuity editing rules
• Self-reflexivity: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Bogart
• Jean Seberg: America/France
• Use of digressions and suspensions of action
• Reality of story/reality of film
• Ambiguities of character, of identification, of ending

French New Wave Editing Style

• Free style
• Did not conform to editing rules
• Discontinuous
• Jump cuts
• Insertion of extraneous material
• Shooting on location: Natural lighting, improvised dialogue, plotting direct, sound recording and long takes.

The overall goal: to make the audience remember that they are watching a movie

 

Mood Shifts

• Infatuation
• Romanticism
• Boredom

Godard’s Influence on French New wave cinema

 

• jump cuts
• Elasticity of time
• relative independence of sound and image
• Focus on both narration and narrated
• Self Reflective cinema
• Reality of Images 

Other New Wave Films

• 1959

• François Truffaut, The 400 Blows

• Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour

• 1960

• Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless

• François Truffaut, Shoot the Piano Player

• 1961

• Jacques Rivette, Paris nous appartient

• Jean-Luc Godard, A Woman Is A Woman

• Alain Resnais, Last Year At Marienbad

• 1962

• François Truffaut, Jules and Jim

• Agnes Varda, Cleo From 5 to 7

• Jean-Luc Godard, My Life To Live