TCF112/French New Wave
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Revision as of 23:05, 17 April 2013 by Screenpedia>TCFadmin (→Three godfathers of the Auteur Theory & the New Wave)
Three godfathers of the Auteur Theory & the New Wave
- Henri Langlois -- Cinématheque Française
- André Bazin -- Cahiers du Cinéma
- Alexandre Astruc -- caméra stylo
1959-60 New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) breaks
- Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
- François Truffaut, The 400 Blows (1959)Author of "A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema" (Cahiers, 1954)
- Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless (shot in '59, released January '60)
Jean-Luc Godard
- b. 1930
- 1946-55 odd jobs at studios, beginnings of film criticism
- Gazette du Cinéma (1950, only 5 issues)
- Cahiers (1952 on)
- Characteristics of Godard's Criticism
- Attacked "Tradition of Quality"
- Auteurist re-evaluation of US Film
- Emphasis on visual style
- Eclectic points of reference
- 1st Feature film
- Breathless, directed in '59, released in January 1960
- 1960-'68 one-two films per year
- Reinvented "language" of the cinema, rejects classical cinema
- Hand-held camera
- Location shooting
- Jump cuts
- Direct looks at the camera
- Graphics (text and images)
- References to other films
- Bertolt Brecht -- Epic Theatre
- Playwright/theorist
- German, trans. into French in early 60s
- Cahiers issue on Brecht in '62
- Against Aristotle, against Dramatic Theater
- Alienation effect -- Verfremdungseffekt
- Rejects strong identification
- Distanciation
- Marxist revolution
- Russian Formalists in ‘20s
- Ostranenie
- Defamiliarization--making the familiar strange
- Vivre Sa Vie (1962) = Brechtian film?
- Godard sees:
- Dramatic theater = classical cinema
- Epic theater = counter cinema
- Narrative
- Breaks story into 12 sections (narrative segmentation)
- Digressions
- Quotations
- E.g., Edgar Allen Poe's The Oval Portrait
- Aperture (not closed)
- Visual Style
- Cinematography
- Unconventional framing
- Extremely long takes
- Jump cut
- Opposite of the match cut
- Direct looks at the camera
- Cinematography
- Godard sees:
- Reinvented "language" of the cinema, rejects classical cinema
- May 1968 France nears socialist Revolution
- Strongly affects Godard and other New Wave filmmakers