'Photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times a second' - The little Solder, 1963, Jean Luc Goddard.
Nouvelle vague, or the French new wave first emerged in the 1950s and 60s and is said to be one of the moist influencial movements in the cinema history. As that was also the time when France emerged from World War II, and was undergoing economic crisis, it was time of rebuilding the country not only physically but also its national identity. The new wave was born through the dissatisfaction of the filmmakers and critics at the time who felt as traditional cinema lacked something and it wasn’t truly representative nor reflective of the chanages happening in France at the time. In an interwiew Truffaut states “I liked cinema as it was, but felt it lacked sincerity. I just wanted to improve it”. They wanted to break the rules, of what was considered acceptable in fillmaking, critisising the work of their French forefathers and praising the work of american directors such as Alfred Hitchcok, Orson welles, etc. The New Wave filmmakers rejected the practise of studio production and can be defined for their use of jump cuts, handheld cameras, filming in real locations with an improvised script, characters speaking directly to the camera often wearing their own clothes and a small crew on a very small/tight budget. The focus, for the filmmakers, was on the way in which the story is told rather than the importance of the story itself; they wanted to redefine film form. Therefore, capturing a sense of realism in capturing off guard moments and throwing the audience out of the film with the adaption of these experimental features allows them to question what they are seeing rather then getting emerged in the film.
The importing of American films was banned by the Nazi, and just after the liberation, in 1945 the culturaly starved France got a backlog of American cinema starting to hit the screens. That was the first exposure to hollywood films and the first influence on the still young critics. For them the American cinema was more varied and more exciting than the postwar productions of the French films. The american economic dominance created an ideological dominance in the minds of the dominated.
A revolution had begun; after years and years of rationing, shortages, tension and political outrage, France was finally getting back up on its feet. Technological innovation brought around enormous change in societyy, making consumer goods such cars, televisions and the like more affordable for the general public. Black and White films were a thing of the past, and wide screen formatting was in use - it was a new Golden age for France and for French Cinema.
Francois Truffaut was born in Paris in the 1930's, and developed an early interest in cinema from a young age. He used cinema as a means to escape from his normal life. Truffaut became one of the most famous French film critics from the new wave period. He was first published by Cahiers Du Cinema in 1954, with his article 'A Certain Tendency in French Cinema'. This article was a huge hit and became the basis of Truffaut's career. The article was aimed at the most famous directors and screenwriters of the present day, he condemned them as sarcastic, profanatory and deceiving. He was the director that opened the doors to the new wave style with his film The 400 blows. After being banned from the Cannes film festival in 1958 to start with, for his offencive remarks regarding french cinema in his film criticism for Cahiers, to then win the directors Prize at the next years festival with Les Quatre Centc Coups. The 400 blows is a semi-autobiographical movie about life, the life of a misunderstood boy. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. The film begins with a series of tracking shots interpreted as the point of view of a child starring out of the car window. That’s important as the only other significant scene where we do see a child's perspective of Paris seen through a car window is at the end where Antoine is in the police car. With the frequent use of fades, jump cuts, mash cuts and numerous long takes as Truffaut shows his vision as an auteur- the dominant creative force behind a project, and use the camera stylo (the camera as a pen). The film is also stylistically told in a series of small episodes, all linking together in a chain of cause and effect- Antoine runs away from home because he lied, he lied because he skipped school, he skipped school because he was unfairly punished in class, he was punished in class because of his classmate passing him a poster.
Another film directed by Truffaut, which represents the era of the New Wave cinema is Jules et Jim based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund. One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles. A good example of his vision as an auteur showing his cinematography and editing is during the Jules and Jim's bridge race, wherein Jules, Jim, and Catherine race across a bridge. Catherine, hiding her femininity by dressing as a man to see if she could get away with it, shows her character as a cheater during this race -she takes off before the men start running, and ends up crossing the finish first. Truffaut’s edit of the scene shows Catherine running while the other two remain still, then cuts to a portion of the way down the bridge. “You cheated,” they say. “Yes, but I won.” The scene also foreshadows how the film will evolve as the two friends will spend their lives chasing after her, despite her constant attempt to cheat.
Jean-Luc Godard, born in the 1930s and began his career in film-making when he co-founded Gazette du Cinema in 1950, which was a short-lived film journal. He later joined Cahiers Du Cinema, where he would find himself writing film critiques alongside the likes of Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol; all of which would become vital figures in the beginning of the French New Wave movement, , forming the nucleus of what we now call “French New Wave directors” or cahiers du cinéma. He dabbled in documentaries and short films before finally making his most successful and iconic feature film: Á bout de souffle./breathless . co-written by Truffaut, and released in 1960. It was praised for its uniqueness and innovation; never before has a director used the jump cut so prolifically. He uses back-to-basics filmmaking, abandoning sets in favour of real locations. He rarely uses anything but natural lighting and handheld cameras and intentionally breaks the 4th wall. An investigation into the french filming identity in the shadow of Hollywood dominance He has no problem with revealing cinematic artifice; at one point, our hero, Michel Poiccard is humming a tune while the shot cuts several times despite tune remaining intact. Poiccard also uses direct address. Here Godard uses abstract realism. His themes reflect the existential boredom suffered by the youth of the time, explored through his non-motivated dialogue and fragmented narrative.
Godard’s documentary style of filming reinforces a sense of realism, he often fed actors lines from behind the camera or told them to improvise speech was often dubbed due to the camera being too loud or unwanted background noise.
Contempt was the film that Bardot used to return back to screen as she had previously taken a break from acting to escape the medias attention. As we can see in the film Goddard exploits her looks, finding multiple opportunities for her to bathe or lie around naked, he also takes the advanatge and draws out a theme of sexual objectification in the process . The most obvious example being at the start of the film in Bardot’s first appearance. She lies, again, nude on the bed, while talking to her onscreen husband- she asks him about different parts of her of her body, verbalising the fetishistic, cataloguing of body parts that the camera performs as it glides, in an unbroken take, up then down her back. The scene was added as Joseph e. levine insisted on a certain amount of Bardot nude scenes. Goddards response was a scene that resists easy eroticisation: instead of allowing the viewer unalloyed voyeuristic pleasure, Bardot’s commentary on her own attributes reminds us that she knows she’s being looked over, and that our inspecting gaze is not innocent, invisible or unnoticed. This sequence is a good example of Godard allowing form to speak over, or through the content: The colour filter on the shot begins red, changes to white, then turns blue.
Throughout his film-making career, Godard was fascinated with exploring the ways in which women interact with relationships as femme fatales. In Breathless, he looks at how women betray, in Pierrot Le Fou he looks at how women run away and in Contempt, he looks at the way in which women become faithless. However, what makes Contempt different is how Godard emphasises the fact that a man may be at fault for the loss of a woman's love. (Philip Loptate 1997)
Overall looking back, their work clearly illustrates how they are not afraid to fail or be judged for not only breaking the conventions of the mainstream cinema but also establishing their own creative style of filmmaking I think its easy to say -They transformed the world, one film at a time.
Bibliography
The little Solder, 1963, Jean Luc Goddard.
The 400 blows, (1959) François TruffautContempt (1963) Jean-Luc Godard
Jules et Jim, (1962), François Truffaut
Chris wiegan (2001) French New Wave. Pocket essentials film. Herts
Nowell-Smith. (2013). Making waves. New cinemas of the 1960s. Rev. ed. London: Continuum Publishing Co.
Introduction to Film Studies, Nelmes, Jill., 2011. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.
No comments:
Post a Comment