French New Wave, a film movement that started in 1959 with the movie Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. It was another film type that the French produced besides French Impressionism films. The film did not last long as it ended 10 years after the film, Weekend also by Jean-Luc Godard.
This film type started from a documentary movement that happened in France; many filmmakers were making documentaries of Nazi death camps, cinema verite and sane man in lunatic asylum. These film lovers watched many previously unreleased movies at the Cinematheque Francaise ( a film archive and a public theater ) in Paris during the postwar years. They were unable to get into the French commercial cinema so they turned to theory and criticism, becoming critics and theorists.
There are 2 principles at Cahiers du Cinema. The first one, it rejects montage aesthetics, favoring mise-en-scene. The ideology for it is the film should not just be intellectual/rational experiences but should include emotional and psychological experiences. The second one, Personal Authorship. The ideology for it is the “Policy of Authors” or the Auteur Theory states that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression, bearing the filmmaker’s signature such as personality, controlling obsession and cardinal themes.
French New Wave breaks film tradition. It rejects heavy emphasis on plot and dialogue, preferring visual aesthetics and mise-en-scene. In economic terms, the films are usually independent project and kept in a low budget. In aesthetics terms, there are elliptical / jump cuts shot, location shooting, direct sound and available light, hand held cameras, long takes and improvised plot or dialogue.
This film type character’s are often marginalized, young-antiheroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. Women were given strong parts that didn’t conform to archetypal roles seen in Hollywood.
This week’s goal is to achieve the evidence of the French New Wave’s elements from the movie produced in the year 1960, Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard.
The theory that being applied in this week’s movie is called the genre and semantic/syntactic approach by Rick Altman. In semantic/syntactic approach, semantic represents the visual aspects and syntactic represents the thematic aspects of the film. The approach uses both semantic and syntactic complementarily to do a proper genre analysis on a movie. The problem that genre in film encounter is films cannot be imposed by a generic definition as genres are not static but evolutionary as the changing times. Genres evolve according to times and many sub genres or minor sub-genres have been spun out which in turn become hybrids of original genres or a mixture of several genres.
There are 3 condition under Genre. The first condition is that the film must possess universal/general semantics and syntaxes that are particularly found in corresponding genres. For an example, a western must possess the specific costumes and settings along with the cowboy that will display an aural of justice with a theme of good vs. evil. The second condition is that the spectator’s expectation and hypothesis must be present. To cite an example, the act of audience guessing the ending of the film. Thus, genres have to audience based, following the expectations of the industry. The third condition is that the genre exists like a paradox for being conservative and innovative at the same time, as long as they repeat “formulas” to display old conventions while modernizing new ones.
As the clarification for both wave and theory have been discussed, let us find out the elements evidence for French New Wave through the film today.
Breathless, a crime/drama film that starts with a petty thug named Michel considers himself a suave bad guy in the manner of Humphrey Bogart, but panics and impulsively kills a policeman while driving a stolen car. On the lam, he turns to his aspiring journalist girlfriend, Patricia, hiding out in her Paris apartment while he tries to pull together enough money to get the pair to Italy. When Patricia learns that her boyfriend is being investigated for murder, she begins to question her loyalties.
There is elliptical / jump cuts element involved in the film. For an example in Patricia’s apartment at Paris, Patricia took one of her poster and rolled into a cylinder shape to look through the hole to see Michel. The jump cut occurred as soon as the shot of Patricia looking through the poster to see Michel is over and switch to a scene where they both have already planted their lips on to each other.
There is direct sound and available lights element involved in the film. To cite an example also in Patricia’s apartment, when the couple have their conversation on the bed, there is loud siren noise coming from outside, referring to real siren sounds coming from outside of the apartment. When Patricia went to her washroom in the apartment, she turned on the lights to see clearer if there is any place that she can hang or stick her poster to, referring to the availability of lights in the apartment. Another example can be given from the scene during the night where the streets are, the street lamps light on themselves to illuminate the roads for the vehicles as they do not have headlights for the automobiles.
There is long take element involved in the film. One particular scene, where Patricia followed Michel to his friend’s hideout place, she questioned her loyalties and her feelings for Michel while walking around in circles. The shot was taken facing on Patricia’s face while she walks around in circles. Another scene of a long take can be seen is when Michel escaped from the police’s grasp but was shot in the back. Michel kept on running for his life even he was shot at the back, not willing to give up any chances of escaping to survive but ultimately fall due to the loss of blood and exhaustion. The shot was Michel running towards a direction of the road while being injured for consecutively for 1 or 2 minutes long.
In conclusion, this film type challenges the tradition of any film type of focusing on mise-en-scene rather than the plot of the film. Generally, I do not like this type of film style as it lacks of a proper flow for a story even though everything that they shoot is using real settings, audio or even lighting. I do find one thing amusing from the film is they show the puppy love kind of feeling between two individuals of different gender where “playing hard to get” is more fun than ordinary loving for any couple.
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