Film Theory 2

Film Theory 2 - Sam Broadhead

French new wave cinema of 1950’s-60’s

Period of many ‘new waves’

-       Britain

-       French movement most influential – focus on Paris

Group of French filmmakers; Jean-Luc Goddard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer – all wrote for Cahiers du Cinema

French new wave and European art cinema post 1960

-       Jean Luc Godard, Breathless

-       The French new wave: Godard and Francois Truffaut

-       Italy in 1960’s: Federico Fellini, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini

-       Other countries: Ingmar Bergman (Sweden) Luis Bunuel (France and Spain)

Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

-       Stressed the individual

-       Experience of free choice

-       Absence of any rational understanding of universe

-       Sense of absurdity in human life

-       In indifferent world, existentialist seeks to: act authentically, use free will, take responsibility for all their actions, avoid playing out roles pre ordained by society

French new wave: the ‘look’, shot on location.

-       used lightweight hand held cameras

-       lightweight sound & lighting equipment

-       faster film stocks, less light

-       films shot quick and cheap

-       casual, natural look

-       available light and sound

-       French landscapes

Reacting against French film of 1940’s

-       against; films shot in studio, films that were set in the past, films that were contrived and over dramatized, films that used trickery and special effects.

The new wave celebrated American film noir because they reflected contemporary urban life

Breathless – Jean-Luc Fodard (1930 -)

-       Reinventing film from the ground up

-       Basis in American gangster films, but everything’s deglamorized

-       Location shooting, natural light, handheld camera

-       Use of jump cuts, mismatches, and other biolations of continuity editing rules

-       Self-reflectivity: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Bogart

-       Jean Seberg: America/France

-       Use of digressions and suspensions of action

-       Realisty of story/ reality of film

-       Ambiguities of character, of identification, of ending

French new wave: the editing style

-       free style

-       did not conform to editing rules

-       discontinuous

-       jump cuts

-       insertion of extraneous material

-       shooting on location natural lighting improvised dialogue and plotting direct sound recording long takes many of these conventions

-       overall goal – to make the audience remember they are watching a movie…!!

French new wave mood shifts

-       Heroes are aimless, stylish, act silly.

-       Yet they are also cowardly, amoral

-       Mood shifts; Infatuation, romanticism, boredom

-       About death and betrayal

Godard: influence

-       jump cuts

-       elasticity of time

-       montage, beyond Einstein

-       relative independence of sound and image

-       focus on both narration and narrated

-       self reflective cinema

-       reality of images, sounds and words

Cleo 5 to 7 Barda (1963)

Shot for $64,000 and financed by the new wave producers Beauregard and Ponti through their Rome-Paris film companies.

Cleo still contained the essential features of the new wave films

-       shot in the day

-       black and white

-       35mm

-       using real locations

-       naturalistic light

-       its particular feature is its use of real time

Cleo is a flaneus, for most of the second part of the film

-       Beaudelaire’s masculine form flaneur

-       Coined the concept which is strongly masculine in its origins – being the idea of the invisible male who walks through the city and observes but does not engage with those about him