Video essay script:
Introduction
La Nouvelle Vague or the new
wave was a relatively short part of film history in France that started in 1959
and lasted until 1963. Charles De Gaulle was the president of France from 1958
until 1969. Due to the end of the 2nd World War Parisian cinemas had
an influx of foreign films, particularly American ones. Influential films that
were previously banned in France were released, two of the most important films
were Jean Vigo’s 1933 Zero de conduite' and Jean Renoir’s 1939 'La Regle du jeu' These two films inspired and showed French filmmakers that they could
make films just as well as the Americans could.
A group of young French men, who wanted to be
filmmakers but lacked the budget and the equipment necessary to do so, wrote
for Andre Bazin’s film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema where they reviewed the films
that were being shown at the cinematique. These men were Jean-Luc Godard,
Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. . They met to argue about film and critique
some of the most prominent directors at the times work such as Alfred
Hitchcock, Orson Welles and John Ford. Whilst they admired some of these
directors’ works they felt that American films lacked personal feeling and that
the directors had no emotional attachment to their films. This led them to
agree with Andre Bazin’s belief that films should contain personal feelings and
the ideologies of the director. This is known as the auteur theory. I have
focused on the works of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut due to them and
their works being some of the most well known of the French New Wave. The films
I have looked at are Godard’s 1960 “Breathless” and the 1963 film “Contempt”
and Truffaut’s 1959 “The 400 Blows”. “ The 400 Blows” is autobiographical and is considered a "psychologically
acute portrait of the artist as a young man".
The film is considered of
historical importance due to its instant critical and commercial success. Due
to this success other young French filmmakers were inspired to make their own
films, giving birth to the French New Wave movement. Some common conventions of
French New Wave films were: Jump cuts, colour overlays, breaking the 4th
wall, handheld cameras, unknown actors and shooting on location.
They
disagreed with the formulaic structure of Hollywood films at the time and felt
that the film audiences did not need to see everything that happened in the
characters lives. To reduce irrelevant parts of the narrative, during editing
they would create jump cuts.
The French New Wave
was about documentary style films, which gave a sense of verisimilitude. One
way that this happened was that the actor would break the fourth wall by
talking directly to the audience. Here is an example of this in Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1960 film “Breathless”. In this clip there is a close up of the actor,
Jean- Paul Belmondo, he is placed in the centre of the frame so that the
audience’s eyes are naturally drawn to him. In one continuous take Belmondo turns
to look at the camera three times and tells the audience “ You don’t like the
sea.” “ You don’t like the mountains.” “What if you didn’t like towns?” Addressing
the audience and asking them a question adds to the sense of verisimilitude and
documentary style as the audience feel like they are a part of the narrative. This
also fits in with the young filmmakers belief in the auteur theory. Godard also
included the use of breaking the 4th wall in ‘Contempt’. However
this time the audience were not addressed by the actor directly, instead the
audience are shown what they are going to see but from a different angle
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