French New Wave Film Techniques

The elements the filmmakers choose to use in the film, i.e. the music, location, editing techniques and special effects, help tell the story. Zeffirelli uses his elements to ease the viewer from scene to scene, he is employing the Classical Hollywood Filmmaking technique. A smooth flowing pace, where the viewer does not notice the cuts, plus the music assists in the movements within the cuts. Nothing daring is done in his film, he stays true to the historical appearance of the film, uses ideas that have already been exhibited, such as period piece music and historical costumes. The world famous balcony scene (Act II, scene II) is an example, Zeffirelli employs the same blocking that Shakespeare probably intended. This is one of the few times, Zeffirelli interacts with the locations, and his locations is a town within walls, perceived to be a small town, the location is bare and not crowded.

The long take begins with an alarm clock waking up a couple, sleeping out on their balcony. As the camera moves from window to window around the courtyard, we see a few brief snippets of characters’ lives. And finally, the audience sees inside the apartment that has been its point of view all along. Mise-en-scene, framing, and cinematography

The way Godard uses camerawork and editing in the film is another way that he uses forms and standards of cinema in order to purposefully draw the audience’s attention to the filmmaking process. In classic Hollywood cinema, spatial and graphic continuity editing is extremely important, and often worked to perfection. Editing in Breathless is not used to advance the storyline or show continuity between scenes, but to echo the rhythms of everyday life. There are many jump cuts throughout the movie, which is considered a sin in classic cinema. The interesting thing about the jump cuts is that the dialogue continues uninterrupted despite these choppy cuts.

This essay is about the movie Inglourious Basterds (2009) written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The significant elements of mise-en-scene in the film will be discussed, along with the film’s elements of cinematography in the opening scene. Film often uses editing techniques in its storytelling that infer meaning, subtle though they may be. These techniques will be identified and discussed, and the meanings explained. Set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, the film follows a group of Jewish US soldiers as they plan to assassinate the leaders of the Third Reich in a movie theater. Led by Allied officer Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, the “Basterds’” plan coincides with the theater owner’s vengeful plans for the same thing.

Film and realism are connected to one another; it gives the audience an opportunity to interpret the film in their own perspective, in relation to the real world. As someone with a firm opposition to editing and montage, Bazin stated that the mise en scène truly represents “true continuity” in film, reproducing the real world more realistically. (Cardullo, 7) There are two editing systems: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Neorealist Cinema. From their similarities and differences, it can be said that Neorealist Cinema portrays the real world more realistically and effectively than CHC… In order to produce Bazin’s “true continuity” and reproduce situations more realistically, the filmmaker must choose an effective editing system, refrain from interrupting the flow of images, and use minimal editing, proven through the two films Bicycle Thieves (Neorealist Cinema) and Stagecoach (CHC).

In this movie, different filmic techniques are used, however, in my opinion, they are not very effective and thus it fails to improve or contribute to the success of the movie, which I believe it should. The filming techniques used in

When it comes to the editing, Figgis mainly used cutting to continuity to preserve the fluidity of most events without the necessity to show them all. The director also uses flash-forwards a few times to give you an idea about the destiny of Sera, which is shown when she reflects about her encounter with Ben to an invisible therapist. Figgis also shot the movie using Super 16mm film to give it a tense, documentary feel. The music is also very unique because the jazzy soundtrack isn't the

Additionally, in several night scenes, Lachman used long shot to shoot the whole windows in the eye-level only with the lighting from the rooms. This technique produced a circumstance that audiences are standing outside of the building seeing peeking what these people are doing. The window frames look like interval between characters. Dividing them visualizes the inner difference of characters. They are in the same genre of people. In the party of Harge’s parents, Carol smokes outsides and Jeanette steps in. The window frames separated Carol and Jeanette generating a boundary between them. Also in the scene that Therese and Danny are at the office of Time magazine, Lachman used the same cinematography method creating distances between two characters.

The directors chosen camera technique, a simple two composition that progresses the scene a steady pace, forces the audience to feel a part of the awkward exchange; obviously, a quality of film that could not be as profoundly achieved through the narrative in the novel.

Roger Ebert once said, "Every great film should seem new every time you see it.” And when directors can incorporate cinematic elements to further the plot of the story it enables you to see the film from different viewpoints. The cinematic language and filmmaking techniques used in a movie help in enhancing and bringing out the different themes within a movie. The filmmaking techniques a director chooses to use in their movie helps in better showing the wider themes portrayed within the movie. This can evidently be seen within the movie Juno (Jason Rietman, 2007).

The opening sequence of Spaghetti Western film, Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), showcases how director, Sergio Leone, utilises the formal properties of the medium of cinema to produce meaning for the audience and foreshadow later events and themes which arise throughout the development of the plot. The film opens with a single scene of a mysterious, harmonica-playing gunman (Charles Bronson), embroiled in a showdown with three men that have been drafted to kill him (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, Al Mulock). The sequence culminates with the gunman binding up his wounded arm and collecting his belongings, abandoning the other three men dead by a railway line. This essay will endeavour to explore how each creative and technical element of the production creates a sense of ambiguity and tension to the scene, grasping the audience’s engagement with the film. To do this, the mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound and performance of the text will each be subject to detailed analysis.

“The French New wave was a coherent movement, which existed for a limited period of time, and whose emergence was favored by series of simultaneous factors intervening at the close of the 1950s, and especially during 1958-9” (pg. 2). Matilda applied urban settings to the film to give it a more urban feel to its story, which was something the French New Wave movement heavily influenced in the film industry. Matilda (1996) was also influenced by the New Hollywood movement because its use of linear narrative. Matilda (1996) followed the guidelines of introduction, rising action, and solution throughout the film. Matilda (1996) focused on the realism of the characters, and this was an idea that the New Hollywood was mainly focused on. Matilda (1996)

The term ‘Auteur Theory’, coined by Andrew Sarris in 1962, was originally developed from a group of film critics who wrote for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Critics who would then later become the directors of the French New Wave. Auteur Theory was the idea that help encouraged cinema to be considered as an art from, at the same level as literature, rather than just mass culture entertainment. It brought the director to attention by saying that he was the sole author and creative force of a film, whereas before films were mainly identified by their stars or studios that produced them. Many film critics including Sarris, consider Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Howard Hawks to be auteurs due to the recurring themes and personal stylistic choices within their films.

Tom Gunning writes that prior to 1906, film was most prominently embraced as vehicle for exhibition and illusion, with narrative an accompanying element that simply gave a means for the spectacle to take place . Hugo can be read as a continuation of this “cinema of attractions” due to its utilisation of digital technology, 3D cinema and surround sound. The film, especially the opening sequence short of the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris in the 1930s, is an exhibition of what cinema can achieve in the twenty-first century; a visual spectacle that elicits excite from the spectator.

Most commonly questioned temporal shots are smoothed together using continuous diegetic sound creating a logical linear timeframe that is an auditory reminder for the audience. Other related techniques, such as the flashback and montage, are also commonly utilized in continuity editing within Classical Hollywood cinema. A flashback is the jump in the story from a point in the present to a point in the past; an internal analepsis is a flashback