Realism or Formalism? - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Realism or Formalism?

Overall documentary feel of

nouvelle vague

films

Location shooting, natural light, direct sound recording, grainy photography, casual composition

Long takes Slide2

Nouvelle Vague

Realism or Formalism?Slide3

Table of Contents

1)

Nouvelle Vague

(French Film Style)

2)

Individualism and Innovation in Filmmaking

3) Realist or Formalist?Slide4

Nouvelle Vague

The style of a number of highly individualistic French film directors of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Slide5

Nouvelle Vague

Young filmmakers in their 20s and 30s and

Cineastes

.

Cinemateque

Français

(1936 - )Slide6

Nouvelle Vague

Their works were made under the influence of off-the-mainstream films – foreign language films, non-Western films, and American B movies.Slide7

Nouvelle Vague

Their works were made as a reaction to the carefully scripted and carefully filmed products of the French film industry.Slide8

Nouvelle Vague

With low budgets -- location shooting instead of building elaborate sets; contemporary drama instead of the historical one requiring period costumes; fresh young performers instead of stars.Slide9

Nouvelle Vague

Impact of

Alexandre

Astruc

, André

Bazin

and

Cahiers du cinema

.

Camera-

Stylo (Camera-Pen) – Cinema must ‘to become a means of expression as supple and subtle as that of written language’ Astruc

Filmmakers gain the status of authors. Break away from the tyranny of narrative and develop a new form of audiovisual language.Slide10

Nouvelle Vague

Cahiers du

cinéma

founded in 1951 by Andr

é

Bazin

and Jacques

Doniol-Valcroze

Personal authorship – filmmaker is the author responsible for the entire product, which reflects his personal thought and is made of his personal audiovisual style. Slide11

Nouvelle Vague

Film should ideally be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are therefore those that most clearly bear their maker’s ‘signature’ – the stamp of his or her individual personality, controlling obsessions, and cardinal themes. François Truffaut, ‘

Une

Certain

tendance

du

cinéma

français

’ Slide12

Nouvelle Vague

Attack against the postwar ‘tradition of quality’ – ‘literary/theatrical cinema, the commercial scenarist tradition with heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue.

‘Cinema

d’auteurs

’

against

‘Cinema de papa’ Slide13

Nouvelle Vague

Common characteristics

Contemporary drama

‘Non-narrative’ cinema with no or little plot

Experiments with visual style (portable hand-held 16 mm camera shots, and casual or no elaborate composition), and editing (fragmented and discontinuous montage or long take)

Combination of objective and subjective realism and authorial formalism.Slide14

Nouvelle Vague

: First Films

1959 the landmark year

François Truffaut’s

Quatre

cents coups

(400 Blows)

Alain

Resnais

’

Hiroshima, Mon amour

Jean-Luc Godard A Bout de

souffle (Breathless) Slide15

Nouvelle Vague:

First

Films

Quatre

cents coups

made by the

27-year-old Truffaut

with $75,000,

the loan from his father in law, is a lyrical but unsentimental account of a juvenile delinquent.

Refreshingly casual, artless (no artificial lighting and synchronous recording of sound)Slide16

Nouvelle Vague: First Films

Hiroshima, Mon amour

is about the relationship between time and memory in the context of a terrible tragedy.

Resnais

keeps the counterpoint between present and past by continually juxtaposing them and shifting between the objective and subjective narrative modeSlide17

Nouvelle Vague: First Films

Shot in four weeks fro $90,000 by Godard,

A bout de

souffle

was in many ways the most characteristic and influential film of

nouvelle vague

It contains every major technical characteristics of

nouvelle vague. Slide18

Nouvelle Vague: First Films

Scenes shot by a shaky hand-held camera

Location shooting with natural light and direct recording on location

Improvised plot and dialogueSlide19

Nouvelle Vague: First Films

Elliptical style of editing

In sequences (a series of scenes that are connected by the unity of place or time) actions are shown in a few brief shots rather than fully depicted.

From the opening scene in which Michel steals a car and the scene in which he kills a cop and runs away.

A section of a single continuous shot is eliminated and then what remains is spliced together – jagged jump cut. Slide20

Nouvelle Vague: First Films

Jules et Jim

(1961) – Truffaut’s third feature film and about two close friends falling in love with the same woman and trying to live together in

ménage

à

trois

after WWI.

Exquisite emotional lyricism achieved through the unconventional use of zoom lens, slow motion, fast motion, freeze frame, and anamorphic distortion. Slide21

Realism or Formalism?

Some of the

Nouvelle Vague

films showed, for example, Paris streets and its inhabitants at the time many American films were still formulaic and studio bound.

Paris nou

s

appartient

(Paris Belongs to Us, 1961)

GodardSlide22

Realism or Formalism?

Les Cousins

(The Cousins, 1959) –

tells the story of two cousins, the decadent Paul and the naïve Charles who newly arrives at Paris. Charles falls in love with Florence, one of Paul’s many girl friends.

People, places and institutions and their ways of life in Paris.Slide23

Realism or Formalism?

Avoiding to become literary or theatrical cinema,

nouvelle vague

filmmakers based their work on original scripts rather than novels or plays, and resort to improvisation.

Eric Rohmer,

La

Boulangère

de

Monceau

(1962) tells the story of a man who hesitates between two women. Slide24

Realism or Formalism?

Self-conscious use of filming techniques unconventional style or stylistic innovation

Quotations from other films

Self-reference –

nouvelle vague

films are films about film, or films about filmmaking.