French New Wave and Poetic Realism Essay

My initial reaction to the film was of utter shock at the brutally raw reality of the film. Upon reflection and commentary from other sources, the film’s simple yet vastly effective filmmaking techniques of developing the explicit and implicit meaning of the film. The explicit meaning, as

Breathless is in many ways the antithesis of the classical Hollywood cinema; the changes have a direct effect on the relationship the film has with the viewer. Classical Hollywood cinema includes standards such as continuity editing, highly motivated, character-driven stories and a coherent narrative structure. Breathless defies these elements of traditional filmmaking, instead defining what we know as French New Wave.

In 1959- early 1960 five directors released debut feature length films that are widely regarded as heralding the start of the French nouvelle vague or French New Wave. Claude Chabrols Le Beau Serge (The Good Serge, 1959) and Les Cousins (The Cousins, 1959) were released, along with Francois Truffauts Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), Jean-Luc Godards A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and Alain Resnais Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima my love, 1959). These films were the beginning of a revolution in French cinema. In the following years these directors were to follow up their debuts, while other young directors made their first features, in fact between 1959-63 over 170 French directors made their debut

In Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” they put forward the central argument that film is a commercial product in the capitalist system and therefore also the unconscious instrument of the dominant ideology which produces it. In opposition to the classic film theory that applauds camera as an impartial device to reproduce reality, they argue that what the camera reproduces is merely a refraction of the prevailing ideology. Therefore, the primary and political task for filmmakers is to disrupt this replication of the world as self-evident and the function of film criticism is to identify and evaluate that politics. Comolli and Narboni then suggest seven categories of films confronting ideology in different ways, among which the second category resists the prevailing ideology on two levels. Films of this group not only overtly deal with political contents in order to “attack their ideological assimilation” (Comolli and Narboni 483), but also achieve their goal through breaking down the conventional way of depicting reality.

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.

1. Use the words relativity and uncertainty in a paragraph that describes the revolution in modern physics that took place in the early twentieth century.

Filmmakers like Claude Lanzmann (Shoah) negotiate this tension by flatly rejecting the use of "historical images." So, by juxtaposing the visual/critical/rhetorical practices found in these films we can begin to define some of the practical parameters of what a visual-rhetorical critic might investigate.

The paradoxic realism that defines Jacques Demy’s film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is evident even in the title sequence. Pastel umbrellas dance over the cold gray sidewalk, falling in and out of perfect symmetry. People walk to work, to school, no doubt grumbling that they are caught in the rain. Life goes on, but a mundanity of life suddenly becomes worthy of Michael Legrand’s sweeping orchestrations. In contrast, Hollywood musicals made it their job, their purpose to make people forget that the rain was there at all; to provide an idealistic escape from a harsh, weary world. Eventually, these addictive fantasy worlds and conventional narratives about love and the human experience became uninteresting—war, counterculture, and a growing desire for revolutionary art turned audiences away from such fuzzy comforts and towards radical cinema. The genre needed something new to shock it back to life, and this shock came in striking form with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. By subverting classical Hollywood conventions by way of an unresolved ending, sung-through musical style, and taboo subject matter, Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg provided an escape from the never-ending formulaic cycle of musical films threatening to bulldoze the genre into delirious self-obsession, giving life to the form of musicals and restoring them to what they have always had the capacity to do: reveal the most vulnerable, intimate truths of what it is to be a human being, to fall in love, and to fall out

Movies can be dark. They can be devastating. They can be tragically sad, painfully colorful. Bright, burning, scarring. Yet, despite all that a movie can illustrate, movies made for the masses have boundaries on tragedy. They cannot show child rape; they cannot show a girl’s limbs being hacked off by a young boy. These images, while understood as descriptive writing in books, mark the edge of what viewers can subject themselves to in film. Film images can be ingrained in minds forever, while our imagination of similar scenes often remains a hazy, shifting, jumble of movements and face. As director of Beasts of No Nation, Cary Joji Fukunaga chose to make changes to the book through the inclusion of small additional scenes before the war, the added character of a big brother, and an additional final scene, to illustrate a version of Agu unseen in the book and in turn make the story more palatable to the average moviegoer. These changes, while they do not alter the general plot, give the story a more appealing trajectory.

Casablanca, first released on January 23rd, 1943 is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of Classical Hollywood film. Written and released in the midst of World War Two it explores themes such as love, desire and especially sacrifice. Although the love story of the protagonists is the cause and catalyst for most of the narrative, one would not necessarily associate it with the conventional Classical Hollywood love story. Rather as a fabula based on the principle of the importance of sacrifice in order to overcome a common enemy, in this case the Nazis. Casablanca does indeed contain many of the common characteristics identified with the Classical Hollywood film. An example being the the way director, Michael Curtiz used a mainly chronologically ordered narrative structure and the utilisation of a Cause and Effect chain. In this essay I will looking at the various ways I believe this film does fall into the criteria of a Classical Hollywood narrative and also how some could perceive that it does not.

This film analysis will delineate the diverse directorial decisions of The French New Wave cinema movement, and how they have been utilised and developed to challenge and subvert the typical Hollywood filmmaking conventions and techniques of the 1950s and 60s Hollywood cinema, in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Hollywood produced films of the time used a very limited variation in film techniques such as camera, acting, mise-en-scene, editing and sound. This can be mainly attributed to the low innovative thought of creative and expressive camera movements, angles, etc… due to technological hindrances. In particular, this film analysis will de-construct the filmmaking elements of the revelatory French New Wave movement in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows ending scene (01:34:42 – 01:39:32) portraying the main character Antoine Doinel’s escape from juvie and trek to the bespoken beach.

To fully comprehend why and how this cinematic motion took place, it is valuable here to establish the wider social climate of France at the time, and the active forces which heavily shaped New Wave cinema. Between the years of 1945 and 1975, France would undergo “thirty glorious years” of economic growth, urbanization, and a considerable baby boom, all of which came to expand and radically alter the parameters of French culture (Haine 33). Beneath the surface affluence however, France was in a state of deep self-evaluation and consciousness. Following WW11, the

In this essay, I will explain why a documentary is always more realistic than a fiction film. I will show my thesis by exploring elements that influence how realistic a film is: film editing and format, genre, and transparency. I will use the documentary of Armadillo (2010), by Janus Pedersen, and the fiction film of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), by Danièle Huille as examples.

At the turn of the century Paris was one of the capitals of culture and art to the outside world. However, the truth of the matter was that this taboo-ridden society was being run by an aristocracy that was repressing the arts. Naturally, when World War 1 broke out, the suppressed French society finally had a release and a rebellion against order arose. WWI specifically affected the theatre of French and it’s aftermath. From the ashes of war the avant-garde theatre grew and styles such as Dadaism and Surrealism were born. It was both the climate of culture before the war and the devastation of the war that lead to the outbreak of avant-garde theatre in France.

The French are all about preserving their culture and being individualized. They often take great pride in the French products and the French style, and believe in keeping the French culture “pure” so they also limit the amount of foreign goods that are being imported. But during the World Wars the French began to allow foreigners to immigrate into France to take jobs due to an increase in job shortages. The immigration from the World Wars added to the diversity of the French culture. Ever since the 1850’s there has been a steady flow of immigration into France, and now nine percent of the French population is made up of immigrants (Gofen 62). The break down of the cultures in France is eighty-five percent of the French population is Roman