The French New Wave - Essay Example

The marvelous five directors that made the French New Wave were Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Romer, Jacques Rivette and Jean- Luc Godard. Directors like Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Louis Malle and Chris Marker are also considered as belonging to the movement. But the above mentioned five formed a group of film critics who turned into film making later. The total energetic ambience for the new film movement was set by two great institutions in the history of French cinema ----Cahiers du cinema and The Cinematheque Francaise .Cahiers du Cinema is a militant journal for new film movement founded by the film theorist and critic Andre Bazin in 1950. He edited the journal until his death at the age of forty in 1958.All the five New wave film makers, including Godard and Truffaut were film critics who wrote regularly in this journal. “He taught me to write about cinema, corrected and published my first articles, and helped me to become a director. He died only a few hours after I had finished my first days shooting.” (Francois Truffaut, in his forward to What Is Cinema, by Andre Bazin) Cinematheque Francaise was an institution started by the legendary film collector Henry Langlois along with his friend Georges Franju in 1935.It was and still is a meeting space for movie buffs to watch classical cinema and discuss them... Cinematheque was the den of the New wave film makers where they saw the classics, argued about them; and got schooled. Breathless, The beginning: In an oft-quoted interview in Cahiers, Godard describes his works thus: “Today I still think myself as a critic and in a sense I am., more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them.” (Cahiers du Cinema, December 1962) Goddard’s concept of cinema as an essay is reflected in this quote. He artistically expresses this concept through his first feature film, A bout de soufflé or Breathless which was released in 1960. This film becomes the beginning of the career of a modern film genius and also happens to be the manifesto of the new film movement, The French New Wave. As many critics points out, “ Breathless is still probably the most often cited film when the topic shifts to French New Wave and for good reason: It’s a kinetic joy, full of jump cuts, lavish Paris location shooting, with cool Jazz on the sound track, a nourish mood, and lovely literate romance, all adding up to one for ages.” (Craig Philips, French New Wave, www.greencine.com ) Breathless is about almost forty eight hours of the life of a petty criminal called Michel ( Jean Paul Belmondo ) and his romance with an American girl named Patricia (Jean seberg).The film starts with Michel stealing a car at Marseilles and driving to Paris where he is to meet Patricia. They have met three weeks earlier, according to the back story revealed through dialogues and have slept a few nights together. On his way to Paris he is caught for over speeding and shoots at and kills the police man. This makes him an object of man hunt. In Paris he plans to collect some money he is owed by a friend and to leave to Italy with Patricia. But Patricia is confused .She wants to be a professional writer and gets her first assignment too. She doesn’t want to skip that opportunity by going after Michel the criminal. On the other hand she sees Michel exciting. But finally she decides to quit him. Michel accepts his fate, but by then the cops come hunting him. They shoot him dead on the street. While dying Michel calls Patricia a scumbag. “What does that mean?” --- Staring at the camera she asks, and turns away. New Wave manifesto? How can a film with such a seemingly silly plot be called the manifesto of French New Wave? It can be and still is because this film brings in a paradigm shift as far as the plot and linear narrative of the Hollywood inspired mainstream French cinema or even of the commercial cinema world over, are concerned. These main stream Hollywood influenced films, were telling stories through smooth flow of images based on literary text supported by “quality” production. Breathless subverts all these ideals of film making as well as film structure. The most interesting aspect of this film is that Godard has chosen a Hollywood genre, that of the gangster film or film noir to subvert its own traditional structure. And he ends up creating a parody of a gangster film! “The unseizable fluctuation between imitation and parody of the American gagster mode” as Peter Harcourt calls it (Six European Directors pp217) The change of attitude towards the film structure is evident from the very opening of the film. The film opens on the last page of the news paper- a Paris-flirt pin up -which carries an advertisement showing a woman in lingerie. This opening shot is so different from the opening of an American gangster film, which will usually open with an establishing shot of a place or location where the investigative story is going to unfold. Our attention here is never caught up with any plot suggestion. But in the subsequent shots we get a glimpse of the signs of a gangster film. The news paper falls and a man smoking a cigarette is seen. He is a typical image of a gangster film tough. His stance and dress all tell us. If the viewer misses the point, Godard in his own way makes him mimic the historical Holly movie tough represented by Humphrey Bogart in the forties. Mimicking Bogart, Godard makes his hero remove the cigarette from his mouth and rub his lips with his thumb; a parody in details! (Bogart had a trade mark scar on his lips; and here is Bogart ventriloquism by Belmondo!) The here later steals a car from the road side and drives away. But he is stopped by a police man for speeding. He shoots the police man. Shooting is shown not continuously, but in bits. The hero’s arm; pan from the arm to the gun. The barrel of the gun. The police man falling as we hear the gun shot. The hero runs away across a field. This is the opening sequence of Breathless. Five important images are introduced in this opening sequence – The gangster, the girl, the car, the gun and the police. But these images were not cut in a pattern usual to the main stream cinema. Even the expected establishing shot was missing. The hero at certain point looks into the camera and tells the audience to go to hell if they can’t understand him! The Hollywood cinema runs on the screen pretending not to be conscious of the audience. It also makes the audience forget their own existence. Instead Godard reminds the audience that they are there and that he knows that they are there watching his film. The fictional space and the safe anonymity of the spectator are all broken up here. These provocative techniques right from the opening sequence of the Breathless invited infuriated criticism from conventionalists. Godard was accused of showing disrespect to the film language and even to the spectators. But he is not the one to be shaken. He was intentionally trying to break the traditional language of cinema, a language which made the spectator believe the unreal on the screen as real. He went on breaking the tradition, intentionally, even after Breathless. Godard responds thus: “When I was making Breathless, or my early shorts, a shot of seberg would be made from a purely cinematic point of view, making sure that her head was just at the right cinematic angle and so on. Now I just do things without worrying how they will appear cinematically.” ( Godard, Interview with Tom Milne, Sight and sound, winter 1962-63). Jump Cut: Breathless is synonymous with Jump Cut. Jump cut as an unconventional editing technique is defined like this by Karl Reisz, and Gavin Millar: “Cutting together two discontinuous parts of a continuous action without changing the set up. He cuts abruptly from one scene to another with little warning and no attempt at smoothness.” (Technique of Film Editing, Second Edition, pp 345). The abrupt jumps with in the shot condense the time, while the space remains the same. Editing is invisible in the mainstream cinema. The more invisible the editing is, the more it serves the commercial purpose-- that is keeping the spectator immersed in the action, thus ensuring the presence of an unquestioning, undoubting witness. Gordards jump cut leaves visual gaps for the spectator to fill up mentally. Here the viewer has to assume a more critical role while viewing the film. “Breathless not only gives the feeling of cinematic techniques being invented, but allows the experience of viewing to be rediscovered.” (Robert Philip Kolker, The Substance of Form, Altering Eye, pp177- 178) Jump cuts “embody in the texture of the film itself the uncertainties and fragmentariness that form the basic ingredients of its view of life and the view of life of many Godard films to follow.” (Peter Harcourt, Six European Directors, pp 215) According to Harcourt, jump cuts and restless tracking shots “fills the film with a feeling of persecution, a sense of net closing in” as a part of its film noir atmosphere. He used many other unconventional techniques while making this film, like hand held arriflex camera, real locations out side the studios and realistic lighting. (Italian Neo-realism, the film movement that quit the studios, is the movement that greatly influenced the French New wave) When asked by Gordan Gow about the making of Breathless, Godard replied: That he doesnt hold with rules and he was out to destroy accepted conventions of film-making. Hiroshima, mon amour, he said, was the start of something new, and Breathless was the end of something old. He made it on real locations and in real rooms, having no truck with studios. He employed a hand-camera…..,. And having finished the shooting, he chopped it about as a manifestation of filmic anarchy, technical iconoclasm (Gordon Gow, "Breathless," Films and Filming, pp.25.) Auteurism: Breathless (1960) along with Truffaut’s 400 blows (1959) pose new wave’s first challenge to Hollywood studio system. It was the powerful studio system that ran Hollywood from the late 20s through the 60s. The studio system consisted of companies that owned the studios where films were produced. These companies decided the material to be filmed; the production process was broken down to and organized into various compartments. The producer with a budget was the central figure. Under him were directors, Script writers, actors, technicians, mechanics, costumers, makeup men and people who took care of the publicity materials. It was an entertainment factory with clear division of labor. Under the studio system there was no author for the film. The films were known after the production companies, like a MGM film, with the famous lion roar in the opening logo or a Paramount film or a film by Warner brothers. “An entity called cinema has been betrayed by another entity called Hollywood”, says Andrew Sarris. (Movies and Methods, Vol.1, page 239). It was the group of critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema and some of whom later became the New Wave film makers, who gave the authorship of cinema back to the film director by formulating the auteur theory. Film in spite of being a seemingly collaborative art, is the art of the director. It is his creative product, his baby. Not only that, the whole body of work of a director, meaning his whole films will have a stamp of his authorship, according to the auteur theory. Jims Kitses explains the theory thus : “The term describes a basic principle and a method , no more and no less: the idea of personal authorship in the cinema and –of key importance-the concomitant responsibility to honor all of the directors works by systematic examination in order to trace characteristic themes , structures and formal qualities .” (Horizons West, Jim Kitses, page 7) Breathless, declares the birth of a new auteur in world cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, with a very different French New Wave film ================================= References: 1) Bazin Andre, What Is Cinema, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray ,University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1972 2) Cahiers du Cinema, Paris, December 1962 3) Philips Craig, French New Wave, www.greencine.com 4) Harcourt Peter, Six European Directors, Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex England , 1976 5) Sight and sound, winter 1962-63, Godard, Interview with Tom Milne. 6) Reisz Karl, and Millar Gavin Technique of Film Editing, second Edition, Focal Press June 23, 1989 7) Kolker Philip Robert, Altering Eye, Contemporary International Cinema, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983 8) Gow Gordon, "Breathless," Films and Filming (August 1961) 9) Sarris Andrew, A Theory of Film History , Movies and Methods, Vol.1, Edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California 10) Kitses Jim, Horizons West, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969) Read More