The New Wave (French: La Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism[1] and classical Hollywood cinema.[1]
Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers
were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic
form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. "New Wave" is an example of European art cinema. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals
of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style
and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.
Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set up time, the New
Wave way of filmmaking presented a documentary type style. The films
exhibited direct sounds on film stock that required less light. Filming
techniques included fragmented, discontinuous editing, and long takes.
The combination of objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial
commentary created a narrative ambiguity in the sense that questions
that arise in a film are not answered in the end.
'Breathless'
Alexandre Astruc's manifesto, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The
Camera-Stylo." This article appeared in L'Ecran, on 30 March 1948. This
is one of thirty essays devoted to the cinema during this period, and
this article specfically outlines some of the ideas that are later
expanded upon by François Truffaut and the Cahiers du cinéma.
It begins to argue that 'cinema was in the process of becoming a new
mean of expression on the same level as painting and the novel:' "a form
in which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may
be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary
essay or novel. This is why I would like to call this new age of cinema
the age of the "camera-stylo."[4]
Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Cahiers co-founder and theorist André Bazin
was a prominent source of influence for the movement. By means of
criticism and editorialization, they laid the groundwork for a set of
concepts, revolutionary at the time, which the American film critic
Andrew Sarris called auteur theory. (The original French "La politique des auteurs", translated literally, as "The policy of authors".) Cahiers du cinéma writers critiqued the classic "Tradition of Quality" style of French Cinema. Notable among these was François Truffaut in his manifesto-like article "Une Certaine tendance du cinéma français". Bazin and Henri Langlois, founder and curator of the Cinémathèque Française,
were the dual father figures of the movement. These men of cinema
valued the expression of the director's personal vision in both the
film's style and script.[5]
Truffaut also credits the American director, Morris Engel and his film "Little Fugitive"
with helping to start the French New Wave, when he said "Our French New
Wave would never have come into being, if it hadn't been for the young
American Morris Engel who showed us the way to independent production
with (this) fine movie."
The auteur theory holds that the director is the "author" of his
movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film. They
praised movies by Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, and made then-radical cases for the artistic distinction and greatness of Hollywood studio directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The beginning of the New Wave was to some extent an exercise by the Cahiers writers in applying this philosophy to the world by directing movies themselves.
Apart from the role that films by Jean Rouch have played in the movement, Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is traditionally (but debatably) credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard, with Breathless
(1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and
financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the
New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish. Part of their technique
was to portray characters not readily labeled as protagonists in the
classic sense of audience identification.
À bout de souffle (Champs-Élysées), 1959
The auteurs of this era owe their popularity to the support they
received with their youthful audience. Most of these directors were born
in the 1930s and grew up in Paris; relating much to how their viewers
were experiencing life. With high concentration in fashion, urban
professional life, and all-night parties, the life of France's youth was
being exquisitely captured.
French New Wave was popular roughly between 1958 and 1964, although New Wave work existed as late as 1973. The socio-economic
forces at play shortly after World War II strongly influenced the
movement. Politically and financially drained, France tended to fall
back on the old popular pre-war traditions. One such tradition was
straight narrative cinema,
specifically classical French film. The movement has its roots in
rebellion against the reliance on past forms (often adapted from
traditional novellic structures), criticizing in particular the way
these forms could force the audience to submit to a dictatorial plot-line.
They were especially against the French "cinema of quality", the type
of high-minded, literary period films held in esteem at French film
festivals, often regarded as "untouchable" by criticism.
New Wave critics and directors studied the work of western classics and applied new avant garde stylistic direction. The low-budget
approach helped filmmakers get at the essential art form and find what
was, to them, a much more comfortable and honest form of production. Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and many other forward-thinking film directors were held up in admiration while standard Hollywood films bound by traditional narrative flow were strongly criticized.
Many of the directors associated with the new wave continued to make films into the 21st century.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_New_Wave
No comments:
Post a Comment