Influences and Techniques in French New Wave

FRENCH NEW WAVE

- Late 1950s and 1960s - 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 New Wave stimulated discussion about the cinema and helped demonstrate that films could achieve both commercial and artistic success. - Influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema - Never a formally organized movement - "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 - 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 - Many of the French New Wave films were produced on tight budgets; often shot in a friend's apartment or yard, using the director's friends as the cast and crew - The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations - The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that go beyond the common 180° axis - New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer's disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images - Films by New Wave directors were often characterized by a fresh brilliance of technique that was thought to have overshadowed their subject matter. An example occurs in Godard’s Breathless (1960), in which scenes change in rapid sequence (“jump cuts”) to create a jerky and disconnected effect - "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. "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo", published in L'Ecran, March 1948 - High concentration in fashion, urban professional life, and all-night parties, the life of France's youth was being exquisitely captured - The low-budget approach helped filmmakers get at the essential art form and find what was, to them, a much more comfortable and contemporary 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.