Analysis of three directors - Essay Example

Their work represents a gradual development of storytelling, starting with the deliberately shocking cut scenes of Rohmer’s new wave, which refuses to construct neat plot development from scene to scene, and moving on to a complex interplay of images in Antonioni and finally leading to a new kind of realism with Kieslowski. It would be wrong to see a direct linear relationship between these three directors, but each of them in their own way absorbed developments from the past in their own particular development of cinema.

Eric Rohmer’s set of six films known as his Contes Moraux (Moral Tales), based on a set of short stories grouped together into novel form, mark a distinct point in the history of the cinema because they begin to assert a particular approach which is designed and delivered purely with cinema in mind. It departs from earlier theatrical types of presentation, in which directors used techniques borrowed from the stage, and from the literary tradition, based on the narrative and characterization techniques of novels, which aimed to turn famous literature into films.

Theatre is a relatively artificial and static art form, bound by artificial unities of time and place, while film has the potential to explore more natural rhythms of real life. Techniques such as voice-overs to give underpin and fill out action were already well developed in film, but Rohmer used juxtaposition of different characters, for example the rather odd relationship between Adrien, Haydee and Daniel in la Collectionneuse, along with ironic commentary by the lead character to explore how the voiceover can introduce tension and irony into the film.

Rohmer ventures into a mature and truly cinematic treatment of major moral issues through the lives of very ordinary middle class men and women. James Monaco notes that the first two films in the series, La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne are shorter, of poorer technical quality than the