The development of French New Wave movement.
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In the 1950s, there was a documentary movement
that happened in France and many filmmakers were making documentaries of Nazi
death camps, cinema verite and sane man in lunatic asylum. (Bordwell, 2013,
p.486) In the mid-1950s, a group of younger generation or young filmmakers who
wrote for the Paris journal Cahiers du Cinéma had become the most artistically respected French filmmakers of
the day. The younger generation of critics who are really began to make waves,
including Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard and
Francois Truffaut. They are finding the truth. Cahiers du Cinéma
is the most important and popular film journal that first
appeared in 1951 which set up by Andre Bazin and Jacques Donial Valcroze.
(Hitchman, 2008)
Bazin is the father
figure of these critics. In 1953, Francois Truffaut wrote an essay for Cahiers
du Cinéma entitled “A Certain
Tendency of the French Cinema”. He blames this tradition of adapting safe
literary works, and filming them in the studio in an old fashioned and
unimaginative way. (Hitchman, 2008) Truffaut had argued that, this style of
cinema does not have visual enough and he had relied too much on the
screenwriter. He and the others labeled it
“cinema de papa”. However,
these film lovers and cinephiles watched many previously unreleased movies at
the Cinematheque Franchise which is a film archive and public theater in Paris
during the postwar years and the first opened its doors in 1948.
Those filmmakers wanted to break up
the filmic experience in order to make it fresh and exciting. Cinematheque
actually was a place for learning but not just for watching. They wanted their
audience really understand and interpret what they were seeing.
They
regularly praised the films they loved and tore apart those films they hated in
print. Through the process of judging the art of cinema, they began to think
about what it was that might make the medium special. Those young men love film
and wanted to be filmmakers but were unable to get into the French commercial
cinema. Instead they turned to theory and criticism, and becoming critics and
theorists. Most important is that they were gradually inspired to begin making
film themselves, but each director had a slightly different agenda.
There
are two principles held at Cahiers du Cinéma. The first one is they feel that real cinema
should rejects montage aesthetics, and favoring mise-en-scene.
It explained that the ideology of the films should not just to be intellectual
or rational experience but should include emotional and psychological
experiences. They want their audience to think and feel it. Unlike
commercial film that contains a lot of continuity to makes them into the film
world, they let the audiences feel the reality.
The second principle is
personal authorship which explained an ideology of “Policy of Authors” or the
Auteur Theory states that film should be a medium of personal artistic
expression, bearing the filmmaker’s signature which is personality controlling
obsession and cardinal themes. This is about the personality of a director. At
the time auteur theory was considered a radical new approach to cinema. An
auteur usually did not literally write scripts but managed nonetheless to stamp
his or her personality on studio products, transcending the constraints of
Hollywood’s standardized system. (Bordwell, 2013, p.486) Before
that, it had been the screenwriter, producer, Hollywood studio, who was seen as
the principle creator of a picture. The Cahiers critics
applied the theory to directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Otto
Preminger, Samuel Fuller, Vincente Minnelli, and Nicholas Ray who had
previously been seen as merely excellent craftsmen, but had never been taken
seriously as artists. (Hitchman, 2008) Many of the Hollywood
directors these critics and filmmakers championed have become recognized as
great artists. After that, the young writers broke new ground, not only in the
way a film was understood, but in how cinema itself was perceived. The works of the auteur should grow proficiently and mature in vision
with each successive film. The cinematography of the film must have more growth
in the next film because they want to find out the true directors. They believe
that true director will make a film that has their own true character. For
example, Wong Kar Wai’s films mostly are about memory as that represents his
personality. Godard tends to express his political view through his films. An example for modern director is Christopher Nolans. In his films, the main characters are primarily driven by obsessions and his antagonist are often motivated by philosophical believes rather than money. The storyline in his films usually involved a determined character seeking vengeance over the death of a loved one. His film usually revolved around characters that are afflicted with some kind of psychological disorder. It's all about his way of defining human obsessions. Also, he often uses the same collaborators film to film.
Truffaut rejects heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue;
he prefers visual aesthetics and mise-en-scene. It is to emphasize that we are
watching films but not reading books. The novelty and youthful vigor of these
directors led journalists to nickname them la
nouvelle vague – the New Wave.
The five central directors made 32 feature films between 1959 and 1966; Godard
and Chabrol made 11 apiece. It was enough similarities for us to identify a
broadly dinstinctive New Wave approach to style and form.
New Wave films are always independent
and low budget. They are itched to make movies. They borrow money from friends
to build a film. The innovation of the aesthetics in New Wave are rejects film
traditions, elliptical or jump cuts, location shooting, direct sound and
available light, use handheld cameras, long takes and improvised plot and
dialogue and self-reflexivity. They try to introduce jump cuts, crazy jump
cuts, long takes, and also try to shoot on location. The direct sound like the
rack sounds that around the objects and the natural lighting. The filmmakers weren’t as concerned about establishing
spatial and contextual relationships as they were about the mise-en-scene. The self-reflexivity is to constantly remind
or draw attention to itself by telling audience that they are watching a film,
unlike the escapist nature of Hollywood films. Therefore, they do a lot of long
takes, jump cut, cinematography, actor’s monolog to show that this is not real.
This is the artificially-created nature and reality of the filmic world. It
wants audience to be actively to rethink, question or interpret the films. The
New Wave directors could not afford to employ the professional actors,
therefore non-professional actors are used to interpret the characters. The
acting of the actors are departs from traditions which encouraged to improvised
dialogue and talk over each other’s lines to reflect real-life conversations.
They have no script and no dialogue for the actors; they develop the dialogue
on the spot. They encouraged the actors talking one another, like crashing
talking.
The characters are often marginalized, young
anti-heroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often
act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. Women were given
strong parts that didn’t conform the archetypal roles seen in Hollywood. It always did not comfort to typical roles. Also,
there is a general cynicism concerning politics that often expressed as
disillusionment with foreign policy in Algeria or Indo-China. It is an approach to oppose staged conversations
like traditional American.
In 1958, with the constitution of the Fifth
Republic, subsidies were brought by the government to support homegrown cinema
which resulted in more funding for first time filmmakers. It encouraged
distributors to lend its support to new directors. Also, rapid technological
advancement during that time allowed filmmaking equipment to be more readily
available. (Hitchman, 2008). films.
During the period 1959-60, sixty-seven filmmakers
made their first feature film, only 55 per cent came from backgrounds not
directly from the field of film-making, and the remaining 45 per cent was made
up of short-film directors like Alain Resnais or Agnes Varda and film
assistants. Most of the New Wave directors spent a great deal of time in
their early years writing or thinking about it. Some were film critics; some
were simply lovers of film. Their cinematic sensibilities are sharpened through
long hours spent in the various Parisian cinematheques and film clubs.
Everything from movies by realist Italian directors like Roberto Rosselini to
hard-boiled noir and B movies from America, as well as early silent classics
and even the latest technicolour Hollywood musicals had deeply influenced the
filmmakers. (Hitchman, 2008)
The New Wave directors had admired the
Neorealists, especially Rossellini, in opposition to studio filmmaking, took as
their actual locales in and around Paris. Shooting on location had become the
norm. Besides, cinematography changed. The New Wave camera moves a great deal,
panning and tracking to follow characters or to explore a locale. Éclair had
developed a lightweight camera that could be handheld. The directors are
intoxicated with the new freedom offered by the handheld camera. Other than
that, one of the most silent features of New Wave films is their casual
humor. They along with humor came esoteric references to other films
like Hollywood or European.
In the late of 1969, French New Wave
is ended. After a decade of radical filmmaking, this form of cinema has
embedded into the mainstream. New wave directors have hired by production house and they
started to involve themselves in film industry. At first they did not want to
involve themselves in the production but later it turned into commercialized. Godard was the only one that continued to develop
his radical and political filmmaking, moving to Sweden and opening and academy
for experimental filmmaking. Godard’s films can said to be the only film
which can internationally recognized socially and politically. Why is that so?
This is because when they entered the film’s production, they did not have a
chance to make decision on how the film should look like.
