The Artistic And Technical Aspects Of The 's La Grande Illusion

Through its depictions of the new age of materialism, Realism eventually became a symbol for the bourgeoisie who had, from humbler origins, recently risen to new positions of power within the Parisian government. Nevertheless, Realist works had begun to gain acceptance in salons only reluctantly; some still scorned their work as “monstrously ugly”.

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

Advances in technology and the expansion of trade have, without a doubt, improved the standard of living dramatically for peoples around the world. Globalization brings respect for law and human rights and the democratization of politics, education, and finance to developing societies, but is usually slow in doing so. It is no easy transition or permanent solution to conflict, as some overly zealous proponents would argue. In The Great Illusion, Norman Angell sees globalization as a force which results from and feeds back into the progressive change of human behavior from using physical force toward using rational, peaceful methods in order to achieve economic security and prosperity. He believes that nations will no longer wage war

David Bordwell wrote his article ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film’ in an effort to convey the main idea that “art cinema” can be considered as a distinct mode of film practice, through its definite historical existence alongside other cinematic modes, set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures. Rather than searching for the source of the art, or what drives the art in film, Bordwell compares art cinema to the classical narrative cinema, and highlights the differences in narrative structure. Bordwell makes the assumption that it defined itself against the classical narrative mode; especially with the way it deals with space, time, and the cause and effect link of events.

The renowned film ‘Au revoir les enfants’ directed by Louis Malle shows the lives of boys in a boarding school that is run by priests. Three new students (including Bonnet) arrive whom at first appear to be like Julien (the protagonist) and the rest of the boys. However, it is soon revealed that they are Jewish children who are kept hidden by the staff at the school – especially when there are raids from the German occupiers. The use of character development is prominently used to convey the historic background that is World war two. Julien, who is one the of main protagonists represents the director (Louis Malle) at the Catholic boarding school in France. This choice of character gives the viewers the closest representation of what occurred in the Second world war even though it is depicted through a film that contains fiction.

Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as a prime example of an auteur, a theory that emerged in the 1950s by Truffaut, in the ‘politique des auteurs’ of Cahiers du Cinema (Tudor 121). The auteur theory, as defined by Andrew Tudor, is premised on the assumption that “any director creates his films on the basis of a central structure”(140) and thus, if you consider their films in relation to each other, commonalities can be found within them. These commonalities work to demonstrate the view of the director as “the true creator of the film” (Tudor 122). Evidence of an auteur can be found in examining a director’s creative tendencies, in their distinctive themes and motifs, stylistic choices,

Film noir is the perfect medium to reflect the bleak nihilism of post world war one in

Being one of the world’s most popular art forms, it was inevitable that these archetypes would find their way into film as well. In this essay I will argue that the

Cinema after 1906, according to Gunning, pushed towards the structure of linear narrative, and away from the immediacy of the "spectacular image" (Strauven, 1999: 387).

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

French New Wave was a cinematic movement that was active between the late 1950’s and the late 1960’s though the origins go back to german occupied France from the early 1940’s. Following the liberation of 1944, France saw the end of restrictions of media imposed by german occupation and the cinema became more popular than ever, with a stockpile of banned American films starting to flow in and France ramping up film production once again. Despite this by the early 1950’s it became more popular opinion by both critics and audiences that had become, for a lack of a better word, stale, getting bogged down in an endless cycle of “ generic historical reconstructions and uninspired literary adaptations… French Cinema was said to be in desperate need of a new direction ” (Neupert, 17). During this time the film magazine, Cahiers du Cinema, was founded. Some of its young writers, such as

The romantic idea of the auteur is described by film theoretician, André Bazin, observing the film form as an idealistic phenomenon. Through the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard reference, Bazin primarily refers to an essential literary and romantic conception of the artist as central. He considers the relationship between film aesthetics and reality more important than the director itself and places cinema above paintings. He described paintings as a similar ethical creation to film stating a director ‘can be valued according to its measurements and the celebrity of the signature, the objective quality of the work itself was formerly held in much higher esteem.’ (Bazin, 1967: 250). Bazin contemplates the historical and social aspects that indeed hinder a director’s retribution to their own personalised film, thus en-companying their own ideological judgement upon the world ‘more so in cinema where the sociological and historical cross-currents are countless.’ (Bazin, 1967: 256)

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.