French New Wave
The French New Wave was a movement that lasted between 1959 to 1964. It all started with the Cinematheque Francois, an underground organization that would regularly show older films from around the world. This beget the cine-club, and by the 1954 there were 100,000 members in 200 clubs. From these clubs several magazines were created, the most famous of these were L'Ecran Francois, La Revue du Cinema, Postif, and the world known Cahiers du Cinema. One of the two most influential people during this time was Alexandre Astruc who declared that, "the cinema is becoming a means of expression like the other arts before it, especially painting and the novel. It is no longer a spectacle, a diversion equivalent to the old boulevard theater...it is becoming, little by little, a visual language, i.e. a medium in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, be they abstract or whatever, or in which he can communicate his obsessions as accurately as he can today in essay or novel". What Astruc was saying , was that the cinema was now as personal as paintings and literature, instead of just a show. The second and most influential of the two was Andre Bazin, who like Astruc believed that the cinema was equal to the novel.
But the most important observation was the director as Auteur. Truffaut would visit this character in three more of his movies and a short film. He finds refuge in the arms of a beautiful young American newspaper salesgirl (Seberg), who steals his heart and eventually turns him into the police. " Bazin also championed the Italian Neorealism movement, for its revolutionary humanism, and it's on location shooting, improvisational style, use of non actors, and for it's long takes. " These critics began seeing style and same thematic consistencies in certain film directors, and held them in the highest light. "Bazin charted the main areas of film studies as we know them, effectively creating the discipline: authorship, which led Bazin's disciples to develop the politique des auteurs. Francois Truffaut incorporated more traditional elements in his films, while Jean-Luc Godard became increasingly political and radical in his film making during the 60s. The acting was also a departure from what had gone before. One of the first scandals in this wave of thought was an article written by Francois Truffaut in 1954, "A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema. Breathless tells the story of "a handsome young criminal (Belmondo), who fancies himself to be a hip gangster, is on the run from police because he stole a car and killed a motorcycle cop who was chasing him for speeding. All this was possible to accomplish with the advent of the lightweight film equipment and handheld action ruled the screen. Cinema Verite was the name applied, meaning Cinema truth. Then in 1959, France called for a "new wave" and it got it.
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Acceptance Essays
