Who
were the new wave?
Period
of many “new waves”:
•Britain
•French
movement most influential – focus on Paris
Group
of French Filmmakers:
•Jean-Luc
Goddard
•François
Truffaut
•Claude
Chabrol
•Jacques
Rivette
•Eric
Rohmer
-All
once film critics, background in film theory.
–All
wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma
• Jean-Luc
Godard, Breathless
(1960)
• The French New Wave: Godard and
François Truffaut
• Italy in the 1960s: Federico Fellini,
Michaelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo
Pasolini
• Other countries: Ingmar Bergman
(Sweden), Luis Buñuel (return to France
and Spain)
• Henri
Langlois and the Paris Cinematèque
• André Bazin and the realist tradition
• Cahiers du Cinema
• From Critics to Auteurs
• Against the “Cinema of Quality”
• Discovery of American genre films
• Cinematic, rather than literary, values
• Importance of personal expression
• Spontaneity and digression
•French
New Wave: the “look”
•Shot
on Location.
•Used
lightweight, hand-held cameras.
•Lightweight
sound & lighting equipment.
•Faster
film stocks, less light.
•Films
shot quickly and cheaply.
•Encouraged:
–experimentation
–improvisation.
•Casual,
natural look;
•Available
light;
•Available
sound;
•Mise-en-scene
– French landscape,
cafés;
•Mobile
camera – improvised &
innovative.
•Against films shot in
a studio
•Against films that
were set in the past
•Against films that
were contrived and over- dramatised
•Against films that
used trickery and special effects
•Against la tradition
de qualité
Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard (1930- )
• 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
–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
–
the overall goal
•To
make the audience remember that they are WATCHING A MOVIE….
Breathless.
Cléo still contained the essential features of the New Wave
films
•shot
in the day,
•
black and white
•35 mm
•using real locations
•naturalistic light
• Its particular
feature is its use of real time.
TILES
Other New Wave Film
• 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
